Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards of podcasts about the very worst people in all of history. We are talking about Adolph Eichman this week and last week. Last week we got through his childhood and his early rise through the SD, which is the ss' Security Division, to become the in his words, czar of the Jews for Nazi Germany. And today, with our guest Joe Kasabian, we're talking about what happens to Iikman as the war moves towards its final phase.
How you doing, Joe?
Excited to hear about this guy. I think he's gonna finally break good in this last two parts.
I gotta say I'm not super optimistic that he's gonna have a redemption arc. I dressed up for this episode because I I was surprised last time, so now I'm just wearing a shirt. This has all pain.
Yeah, I'm treating this like people were treating like the second half of and Or, where they were hoping their favorite like Monster Imperial characters, like oh, this guy's going to totally turn out good at the end, right, Yeah, this is our moment like that for Iikman.
Yeah, most Nazis are not in fact, the one from the Pianist No No.
Where we left off in part two, he had gone on a fact finding mission to eastern Europe, and the fairly early stages of Operation Barbarossa were the first parts of what we now know as the actual killing stage of the Holocaust began, which was a mix of you know, gas bands showing up outside of various villages and Eindset's
group and units just doing mass shootings. Well, Iikman's watching all that, and he's taking notes, and he's figuring out, how do you actually kill a lot of like a shitload of people, like more people, like as many more people than would have died in a war a generation or two ago. We've got to like figure out to get rid of while we're fighting a war.
How do we do that? Right?
And all of this is preparation for a big old meeting they're going to have called the Vonse Conference in early nineteen forty two. So that's where we are right now, And yeah, that's what we're hurtling towards at the moment. And the problem the Nazis are dealing with as the war in the East starts to turn against them is they've got a logistical hurdle on their hands. They have captured way more Jews than they know how to handle, and they have no real process for dealing with them.
If you think back to the numbers we were talking about in the first parts of this series, they're dealing with a couple one hundred thousand people at a time. As you know, they take over Austria, as they take over Czechoslovakia, and then you know more when they take over Poland. But now they've captured this huge chunk of what had been the Soviet Union. They got millions of people on their hands, right, and these earlier decisions they had to make about what should we do? Do we
deport these people? Do we find a place for them? The decision moves towards like all we can do is annihilate them, right, But we we have a limit in our war material and a limit in how many soldiers we can have actually kill people.
And not to mention, like how many people are willing to drive insane, right and drink themselves to death by turning them into executioners.
That's a major problem for the SS at this stage.
Right.
So many of the sources that you'll find on Eichmann will point out that he never really wrote policy, right, he was just an implementation guy. And this is accurate technically in some ways, but I don't think it is in a way that matters, right.
I think policy wonk.
Yeah, he really kind of was right. He's not the author of a bunch of stuff, but he's like, he's part of the process of authoring a lot of things. And he does help create policies, particularly like where the treatment of people with partial Jewish as history is concerned. And he's got this foundational role in how the Nazi state interacts with captured Jewish communities and deports them.
Right.
And that's he's not literally writing out policies all the time, but he is effectively making policy in all but name. Now, that said, he doesn't give the order to start the Holocaust, right, that's obviously not his call. That happens way above his head, which begs the question, then who does right you would expect in an organization as hierarchical as the Nazis, there's someone we could trace to like and this is the moment the order was given. Right, We don't actually, we
don't directly have that, right. We know Eichmann helps organize and facilitate the von Se conference where it's planned, and this is on orders of his boss, Reinhardt Heidrich, and Heydrich takes his orders, you know, from Himmler and from Hitler. But we don't have any record of Himmler or Hitler saying, Okay, it's time to do the Holocaust now, right, because that's just not the way any of this works, right.
And man man has that led to a lot of problems and then Holocaust denial and Hitler rehabilitation and right, you fucking name it.
Yeah, we have no evidence of Hitler saying we've got to do that, and that kind of feeds into at the time, a lot of people in Nazi Germany who were often annoyed or even horrified by aspects of the regime, by things the s S and the SD did, right, would be like, well, but Hitler clearly doesn't know about this, right, like he's got he can't have any idea this is going on, and this is something Hitler, you know, this
is the smart way to play shit. As a totalitarian dictator, you don't want your name attached to everything the regime is doing, especially shit that's not going to work out or that's more experimental. You need plausible deniability, right, even if you're Hitler.
Yeah, not every tyrant or dictator is going to have a camp called like the Hitler Camp for undesirables.
Right, right, that's that's just bad business. And the Nazi regime again, there's this attitude and this really is something that causes people who even aren't trying to do Nazi apologia to do apologia for regular people under the Nazi system, there's this errand idea that like, well, normal people had no choice but to go along with what the regime has doing. It was so dangerous. Any degree of resistance would have gotten you killed, would have gotten your family
wiped out. At no point in the history of the Nazi regime was that true.
Right.
There were no no, no members of the Nazi state and like were ever executed or punished for just refusing to take part in the Holocaust.
Right, Most of them were out, yes, and people could take it, right, Like the Nazi reserve police battalions had to volunteer, yes, to do the Holocaust by bullets, and they overwhelmingly volunteered.
Yeah, And people who said no didn't have their families killed or themselves killed.
Right, they didn't even get demoted, they just got moved somewhere else.
So much choice was involved and being part of the worst aspects of the regime, and there was in fact internal criticism inside Nazi Germany, and the regime even buckled under that criticism at times. When word of the T four euthanasia program broke out, which was basically the gassing of you know, to say, people by the Nazi state, there was backlash among German civilians, and that backlash was
significant enough that it made Hitler number one. They backed away publicly on the program, and it made Hitler wary in the future of putting further policies of mass murder. In writing, and I want to quote from an article
by Kevin Sweeney in the journal Constructing the Past. Here, between nineteen forty and nineteen forty one, the German people's negative reaction became increasingly vocal and vehement, culminating in Hitler being openly jeered by a crowd watching mentally challenged patients being loaded onto a trade at a rail station in Hoff,
Bavaria in nineteen forty one. Ultimately, this negative public reaction to the T four program in Hitler's sanctioning of it, bolstered by denunciations from Catholic and Protestant church leaders, forced Hitler to publicly cancel the program in August of nineteen forty one, though it continued in secret until nineteen forty five. So again people yelled at Hitler over this and he backed down, right, Like, that's such a critical part of the story of how this regime worked.
Do you also think this is something that is batted around a bit in my field of research, where it's just like, this is the one that was taking average Germans family members away as well. Yes, everybody was connected to it.
Yes, And there were other times where that happened, Right. There was a moment where they started deporting people who had like one Jewish relative but weren't like religiously Jewish and were married into you know, gentile German families. They were protests, and they had to publicly back off of that because Germans were like, well, but these guys aren't really Jewish, right, what are you doing here?
You know?
Yeah, Like, moments like that happened, and the state was always conscious of how far they were pushing people, right, which meant that the state could be pushed now because of all of this, there's not a clear order to like, Okay, Hitler signed this paper saying kill everybody, right, and this has led even within it. And again, these are none
of these people are what you'd call denialists. But there was a debate for a very long time, like half a century between historians who specialized in the Holocaust between what are generally called intentionalists and functionalists. And the intentionalists argue that Hitler personally instigated the final solution. The functionalists argued that it arose naturally as a result of the structure of the Third Reich. Now this debate is mostly done.
We don't really this is like I think people will talk about in terms of the history of how we looked at this. There's not much argument here anymore. A preponderance of evidence that exists today proves that Hitler that basically aspects of both of these are very true.
Right, Yeah, I was actually going to point that out. There's more, there's a third camp, which I generally fall into, yeah, which is like Hitler ordered it. However, a lot of it arose from the structure. It was not the state. Yeah, both of the did it would have happened.
Yeah, Hitler premeditated on the slaughter of European jewelry. And also the functionalists have some very good points. One piece of evidence for the intentionalists that often get cited that is important when we talk about Hitler's premeditation is an interview Hitler gave in nineteen twenty to a journalist where he said, once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews, as soon as they.
Have the power to do so.
Yeah.
Yeah, And he's like, I.
Will have the gallows built in rows and the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately until all of Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews. That's pretty hard. That's like not you know, we can state that is pretty clear evidence of intent, right, Yeah.
And mine Komf also kind of really lays it out there.
Yeah, Yeah, there's not a lot, there's there's a it's hard to argue he didn't say regularly what he planned to do, right.
It's what he's known for, it's his bit.
It's his whole thing. And obviously the fact that he said all this doesn't mean Hitler wrote out the plan for Auschwitz or ever. Like, he's not the guy. He didn't tell everyone, Okay, we're gonna do an Auschwitz and here's how it's gonna work. Right, He was like, we got to kill these guys. Figure it out. I'm Hitler, I got Hitler stuff to do, right, Like, there's a
lot of a lot of tasks on my hand. You guys locked down how we're going to handle this, right, And there were always other possibility up until you know, things start to turn for them in the East. It's not a guarantee that mass slaughter is the only thing that we've done for all of these captured people. I think there was a point in which something like the Madagascar plan, if that itself was never really feasible, could have been done for some amount of people, right.
But at a.
Certain point, the only thing they were going to do was was genocide. And Hitler had repeatedly countenanced that and urged that throughout his career. In nineteen thirty nine, he told the Czech Ford and Minister, we are going to destroy the Jews. They are not going to get away with what they did. On November ninth, nineteen eighteen, the
Day of Reckoning has come. Eichmann himself would later claim under interrogation that Reinhard Heidrich had told him about plans for the Holocaust as early as August nineteen forty one. And this is Heydrich talking to an interrogator. The war with the Soviet Union began in June nineteen forty one. I believe it was two months later that Heydrich sent for me. I reported he began with a little speech, and then the fearer has ordered physical extermination of the Jews.
Then Heydrich said, go and see ss ober group and fuer otto Globotschnik. The fur has already given him instructions. And you know that doesn't mean that's exactly what happened, because Eichman lies under interrogation. But there's a good amount of evidence to suggest that's pretty much what happened. Right, we haven't talked. We'll talk about Globoschnik one of these days. He's a really interesting Nazi, And from what we know of Hydrich and of him, this is pretty feasible, right,
that something like this is basically what went down. There's a lot of outside kind of evidence that this is pretty close to what happened.
Those ideas definitely would have flowed through hydrich.
Yes yes, through hydric and probably through globotschnik too, in a similar way to how it's described here. And Bettina Stangneth basically argues that Eichman was given the job of planning the vonse conference, nothing to coordinate all the different government branches. He'd played a role in the genocide because he'd made himself the Reich's gopher in anything related to
the Jewish question. He's just the guy you reach for when you're like, well, we need someone to pull all of these things we've been doing together and plan the execution of the Holocaust. You've got Eikman, right. You already know he knows how to do this kind of shit, so you pull for him. Stengneth writes when others were at a loss, he was the man they called on.
For example, a professor at Strasburg University was adamant he wanted the schools of Jewish Bolshevik commissars to add to a collection of skeletons, despite the fact that they were still alive. And Eikman's the guy who gets pulled in to do that. He's just already been the kind of we need someone to handle this unpleasant implementation that's going to involve killing a lot of people, right, Well, iikmans, who does that?
You know? Of course that's a collection that existed at a German univers That's a German university's collection, right, I mean recently a German university I forget which one, maybe it was Salzburg discovered Oh we still have all these boxes of human skulls right from the Herrero and Nama jediside just like oops, oops, yeah, oops skulls.
Look, you don't want to go too deep into the into the archive section of any German or British university or any American university than a certain age.
Honestly, I should, I should point out due to my family's land deeds. Or Turkish university, yeah, or Turkish universites.
Very few old universities do you want. And honestly, the Vatican sub basements, we don't really want to get into those too deep either.
Those stay locked. Yeah, those.
Us, Yeah, there's some there's some fucking first Indiana Jones movie. Shit if you go deep enough in that. So as the death camps spun up to full operation in the years following Von Say Eichmann was set to the task of organizing the registration, collection, and eventual deportation or evacuation
of captive Jewish populations to the camps. By this point, he was highly placed enough and the job was big enough that he often sent out trusted subordinates to handle the on the groundwork for him, involving himself directly if he felt their progress was too slow, and acting as a wrecking ball whenever his people encountered resistance from local government officials. And this resistance is usually not we have
a moral issue with what's happening. Sometimes it's actually later in the war it's a mix of that, or they're just worried that they'll get blamed for it because they could see where things are coming. But a lot of the times it's more, well, we need supplies for other things, right Like, we have issues that are a bigger priority to us in the general government of Poland or whatever than the annihilation of these people, And why are we focusing on this? And Eichman will come in and say,
fuck off, this is the priority, right Like. That's kind of part of his job, and one of his personal obsessions is ensuring that no individual Jews are exempted from the final solution. This is more of an issue than you might expect. It was often said that every Nazi had their good Jew, or even recognized a handful of
good Jews that ought to be spared. And in fact this extends to Hitler, as I bring up on this show every now and then, he interviewed personally to save his childhood doctor, a Jewish man who he viewed as a decent person.
Right, and his personal driver, Emil Maurice.
Yeah right, there were guys, right and ladies right that every even a lot of the worst of the Nazis had, they would be like, well, this, this person should be spared.
Eichmann.
One of the things that makes him noteworthy is he doesn't have these people, right, and he actually sees it as his personal job to make sure none of the like every even the worst of the ss are soft towards a Jew here and there. I have to make sure those people don't escape the drag net as much as possible.
Right, that's supposed to be more evil than the most evil men.
Hitler, Yeah, that's part of his job here. I've got to be harder even than the boss. You know, Hitler's you know he's too soft. He could be soft on this issue, take up the slack. Yeah, you know, Hitler real soft of the Jewish issue. Yeah, yeah, at least softer than he's willing to be. And this is a thing that comes down from Hydrich to Heydrick's very much similar in this attitude, right, So, and again it's kind
of when we talk about his complicity. He doesn't order any of this, but his job is to make sure it's as total a victory for the Nazis as he can manage. And while his role here is important, we shouldn't neglect a highlight other major figures behind the final solution, including Aikman's childhood friend Ernst Kaltenbrunner, as well as Heinrich Mueller, Theodore Daniker, Dieter Weslinsky, Franz Novak, and a bunch of
other young men in Hitler's SSNSD. And it's really worth emphasizing how young a lot of the people doing this are. That the Holocaust is committed primarily from an implementation stage by very young, ambitious men. An article for the National World War II Museum by doctor Jason Dawesy notes of Eikman's peers quote. None of them had reached the age of thirty five when World War two ended. They exhibited a terrifying combination of attention to detail and steadfast commitment
to the core ideas of Nazism. Reynhard Heidrich himself, Eikman's boss, was thirty eight when he was killed by Czech partisans in June of nineteen forty two, just a few months after the Vonse Conference. We've already covered Hydrich in other episodes, and there's not enough time in these ones to discuss all of Eikman's subordinates and colleagues, the guys at his level.
But we should talk about one of his men in order to kind of tell the story of several others, right, because I don't want it to look like I never wanted to be like a great man thing where Eikman's the only one kind of at this level of importance. There are other guys who are at similar levels, and one of them is his subordinate, Theodore Daniker. Right, And we'll talk a little bit about Daneker, both because he's a monster worth knowing and because his story tells us
something important about how Eikman operated. Daniker was born in March of nineteen thirteen in Tubingen, southwest Germany. His father was a member of the comfortable middle class, as a lot of these guys are, and was a businessman until he died in nineteen eighteen fighting for the Kaiser. Theodore was raised by his mom and he grows up number one angry about the war, believing in the stabbed in the back myth like all of these guys do. And
other than that, he's kind of mediocre, right. His family was used to being more comfortable than they are after the war. He wants to do better. He feels like he's owed it, but he's not very good at anything, like eichmansocre student, right, he makes no real impact on his professors, and there's no signs that he's going to go on to have a really significant career. He's just
kind of mid. Right. These are all very young, very mid guys who are given in their only chance to be excellent is with the Nazi Party.
Man, that is unfortunate. We need some kind of jobs program for dudes who are solidly mid.
It's this thing I come up with with, like guys like Ben Shapiro, like all of these dudes in the right wing media who try to make it in the Hollywood and can't because they're mediocre. We need like a fake Hollywood where we like, we give these guys fake fans and let them pretend like they've got a TV. This is what we can use AI for, just generate their shitty scripts.
Robert, this already exists. It's the Hallmark Channel. It's the Hallmark Channel. Thank god.
We'd be in so much worse shape if it weren't for the Hallmark Channel.
Yeah, like Ben Shapiro could be cranking out or like the Dannekers of today, big balls who works at Dose. Yeah, Yeah, to just be just be cranking out the world's worst Christmas movies year round for a Hallmark.
Yeah, and we use AI to give a bunch of fake fans so they feel like they're really making it. And yeah, I mean on a serious level, it is important, you understand. People always a lot of people get this wrong when they act like, oh, well, the Nazis were this.
They came out of the middle class, or they came out of like the poor in the working class, these people who had endured privation and that was you know, there's there were these real legitimate you know fear and anger of this this group of people who were really suffering that fed into Nazism. Some of those guys existed and part of this guy Hitler was that kind of guy. Hitler really did suffer. He had a terrible early life, right.
He had a shitty fucking life. Dog shit, that's very few Nazis, right. Unfortunately, that shitty life did not kill him. Yeah, Hitler was that guy. But like his inner circle, his the people at surroundam absolutely. Word, there's like, now, a lot of these guys were young, like you said, and a lot of them were mid.
Fucking Gary was like famous and kind of well off, right, Like a lot of guys were like that.
Yeah, a lot of these dudes are doctors, yes, doctors, lawyers, you know, PhDs, Yeah, fucking engineers, lawyers. He's surrounded himself by Germany's elite.
Eichmann comes from oil and gas, like his dad was comfortable from oil and.
Gas money, right.
Daniker comes from like a comfortable, middle class business owning background.
Right.
These are not guys who are poor, but they are guys who are not doing as well as they think they ought to be doing. And they blame that on whoever's convenient, which turns out to be the Jews and the communists, right, So that's Danni.
They would own a like they would own like a Mitchibhi dealership today, right right, not a great MITSUBC dealership, but like.
An education dealership, but not a great great right, Like.
They don't own a Ford. They don't own like a Chevy dealership. They're like, we have to look family, we have to settle for selling. I don't know, evil lancers or fucking whatever.
Yeah, they're they're spokesman is like a fucking amateur baseball star. Like it's just not that good. So speaking of amateur baseball, don't watch amateur baseball listen to the rest of this podcast.
Or watch amateur baseball while listening to this podcast.
No, absolutely don't do that. You'll turn into a fascist. Now these ads from Mitchubishi.
We're back. So Theodore Danaker comes up kind of mitted everything. When he's a young adult, he starts working as a textile dealer, and like Eikman, he goes to a trade school because his grades aren't good enough for him to do anything else, and he feels pulled to far right politics from a young age, like Eikman for a similar motivation. The Nazi Party offers him a chance to remake himself in a new regime that he wouldn't have been able to earn a place of similar kind of importance in
the wat Weimar Republic. In nineteen thirty two, he joins the Nazi Party at age nineteen. At age twenty one, in nineteen thirty four, Daniker joins the SS, initially serving in the VT or the SS dispositional Corps. These were essentially political soldiers at the direct command of Adolf Hitler, except in times of war, in which case they'd be integrated into the army. This is the unit that eventually becomes the waffen SS. Right, it isn't that yet, but
he's in the proto WAFFENSS. That's Daniker. Like Eichman, Daniker's first real job for the regime is helping to guard an early concentration camp. In his case, it's Columbia House in Berlin. Now, this was the only official SS camp in Berlin, and it was built out of an empty prison in nineteen thirty three, and like most wild concentration camps, which is kind of what the first camps are called, where They're like, we've got this empty government building or
school or whatever. We'll just throw some political prisoners in there. We'll torture them.
Right. Columbia House is noteworthy for being where lawyer Hans Litten dies. Right.
We've talked about him in the past. He's the guy who puts Hitler on trial. So it's that kind of place, and it is. Columbia House has been described by one historian and camp survivor as an agony house and the side of quote perhaps the ghastliest atrocities imaginable. It acted as an SS testing ground for promising young officers. As historian Reinhard Burbeck noted, quote, this was not just a place where people were terrorized and tortured, but a school
of torture. The people who had been commanders after Columbia later turned to commanders of other concentration camps at Bukenwald, at Saxonhausen, at Majdenek, and Auschwitz. So once you had gone through concentration camp Columbia, apparently this was the perverse career step in order to stay in the SS and become a commander elsewhere.
Right, oh god, it was a concentration camp trade school yes, And this is also important.
We talk about how this is like less on the intentionalist side of things, right, and more on the other side of things, where you're like, well, they started building this system where you would train people up in how a concentration camp is to work. And once you've committed the kind of crimes you're committing at Columbia House, you don't go back. You only do worse and worse stuff, and you don't always have to be ordered to do that worse stuff.
Right.
You are, naturally, when you get put in charge somewhere, going to be even more extreme than you were at Columbia House, because that's just how this kind of thing works, right.
Your humanity is sanded away. Even if even if the people who started off as like, you know, prison guards say what you will about them and their ethics and morality, by the time they leave this place they're just dead eyed psychos.
There's nothing left of humanity in them. Right, And that's important too. No one necessarily orders that I want you to do twenty percent worse than Columbia House. You just are that person by this point, right, And so that happens naturally.
Nobody's tracking fingernail metrics.
Right, right, Yeah, it's like how many fingernails did you pull out this week?
Right?
You don't have to do that anymore. So eventually Daniker gets transferred over to the SS Security Office or the SD where Eikman works, and he winds up working under Eichman at the Department of Jewish Affairs in nineteen thirty seven. That same year, he writes the report urging the complete removal of Jews from political life and the Reich in order to bring Germany's Jewish question closer to its final solution.
In this paper, he attacks the Gestapo for being too mild in their application of force and insufficiently committed to anti Semitism. So like, he's this guy where he's like, wow, the Gestapo really soft on the Jews. Got we gotta, we gotta get these people under control.
You know, I'm really sick of our local Gestapo being so soft and gunnly, the woke Gestapo. These de I policies have ruined the Gestapo.
He is that guy, though, right, And that's you know, that's why he's the kind of guy who becomes Aikman's you know, second effectively fuck. In nineteen thirty eight, after the anschlus Daniker goes with Iikman to Vienna to help expel thousands of Jews from their homes and confiscate their possessions for the state, and he brings this new expertise
with him to Poland. He goes to Paris in nineteen forty after the German victory and he helps oversee the French police in their roundup of the Jewish population of Paris. Now it's not widely known or discussed that some of the most important early perpetrators of the Holocaust were local police.
All over Europe. And these are not German police. These are by and large these.
Are French police, right, some of whom had been part of French far right parties right.
And Dutch police. Don't forget my local.
Police police, right, But they're local cops, and most of them hadn't been super involved in the far right, you know. They were cops before anything else. And like basically one hundred percent of cops and basically every society, their identity as police matters more to them than the morality of whatever actions they are asked to take. Right, So you can find arguments that French police helped to shield and this is true. There are individual French police who helped
to shield and hide hundreds of Jews from the Nazis. Right, there are individual French cops who act heroically to protect people targeted by the SS. But modern historiography has made it very clear, and I would say unarguable that as an institution, French law enforcement was overwhelmingly a willing tool of the Nazi genocide in late Yeah. Yeah, there's just
no real argument against that. In late twenty eighteen, historian Laurent Joli published The State against the Jews, which compiled previously unknown documents about French police and government collaboration and the rounding up of tens of thousands of Jews. Per an article in France twenty four quote, Jolie told AFP that Paris police had one of the most sophisticated systems
in the world to classify foreigners. Some one hundred and twenty five thousand Jews were recorded in a role based on the census the Nazis demanded in nineteen forty one, which Jolie has said curiously remained unknown until my research because it got buried, right, of course it did. In VC France, the authorities were so eager to curry favor with their new Nazi masters that they began rounding up
and handing over Jews without being asked. Per Joli, the Germans were not asking for the Jews who lived in the VC controlled part of France to be handed to them. V she was always trying to demonstrate this goodwill towards the Germans. In other words, the French police in VC France create a problem for the Nazis because they're handing over more Jews than the Nazis can process. And they're like, guys, Jesus, like, we're the Nazis, but.
Come on call me out here. I mean, that reminds me of early on in the Holocaust, when the Gestapo will put out effectively it was like a hotline to regular Germans to rat out people who were hiding Jews or people they thought were Jews. And so many people were ratting out their neighbors that the Gestapo had to kindly ask them to fucking stop because they couldn't handle it all. God.
And now, thankfully there's no SS analog in the US today that would put out a request for regular Americans to report their neighbors, you know, sequestering undocumented foreigners. Right, yeah, weird, how that's always what it is, right, weird, how that's what it is in Paris.
You know, Remember, folks, Tiranny doesn't work without the assistance of your friendly neighbors.
Yeah, and yeah, the cops and local government officials and yeah, there's the guy who lives next to you. Dan Aker's job in Paris was to push French authorities to arrest and deport ever greater numbers of Jews, both foreign reds us whod fled other areas the Nazis had advanced on
or native French people. Some were told that these deportees would be taken to a new Jewish state being established by the Nazis, essentially a variation of the Reservation Plan, although this was known to be false by with half a brain. There had been ample reporting before the German invasion about the early stages of the kz Or concentration camp system. The first major arrest and deportation of French Jews in World War II was the Green Ticket roundup.
Eikman and Daneker both helped to organize this scheme, by which almost seven thousand foreign born Jews living in France were sent a summons by mail ordering them to visit a local immigration office for review of their visas. Anyone who showed up, as around thirty seven hundred men did,
was arrested and deported immediately. Now, again, you'd never see anything like this whereby people who are attempting to maintain their legal status even though they their foreign born people who have immigrated would be asked to show up at the immigration office and then arrested as soon as they show up trying to comply with the law. That would never happen here, right, you.
Know, thankfully not. I can't think of any anything that's happening totally differently or before.
Yeah, it would be like, really really wrong of me to just suggest that the Department of Homeland Security is the American SS based on something like this, because they've never done anything like this, right, you know, ICE hasn't, right.
Yeah, And ICE is certainly not the Gestapo. They would do things that are Gestapo. S. No, they're not the Department of Jewish Affairs, right, There's.
Not no similarity between these organizations, right, right, exactly because we haven't started death camps yet, just like the Nazis had it in nineteen forty, right.
I feel like Robert, we can really trust a guy who wears a mask and snatches people into an unmarked van.
Yes, if I'm remembering properly from my Disney movies as a kid, the child catcher is a good guy.
Oh Man.
So despite this success and the success of Operation Green Ticket, France lags behind the arbitrary deportation quota that Eikman's office had set for them. It was Daniker's office to motivate
French authorities. Eichmann came to consider Daniker almost as his right arm, someone he could drop into a new territory and trust to centralize the system by which Jews were rounded up and deported and leave it in such a way that whoever followed would be able to continue operating the system with these because it runs on its own right.
That's a huge part of it. You leave as little up to chance as possible, You leave as little up to the mercy of individual members of the government as possible, all of whom are soft to some groups of people you want to get rid of. That's why you build a system that has no softness left inside it. Right that right up for the National World War Two Museum notes Danniker was a completely modern form of perpetrator, really unknown before the twentieth century. The deportation specialist.
Right, Oh, he's Tom Holman.
He's Tom Holman. Right, this is how modern genocide is done. The primary perpetrators are not the guys who just shoot a bunch of people, right, they're the deportation specialists. That's who does a modern genocide. Is a deportation specialist.
Right. Not to keep linking these two things together, but when like, one of the things that sticks out to me is in the book Ordinary Men, Yeah, one of the things that sticks out is the gerbid Reserve police officers were just normal guys who took this job because they they wanted a pension and benefits. And then again, they were voluntarily doing this that they were told multiple times they could back out whenever they wanted, but they're
there pulling the trigger. Yeah, And then you got this fucking guy.
And there's this this argument you get it around ordinary men too, about like, well, it's wrong to look at these as like the banality of evil, because these guys weren't banal. The things they did weren't banal, the kinds of crimes they committed, No But that's that's the point, is that that kind of hideous, mask off nightmare evil is lurking behind your neighbor's eyes. If he gets the opportunity, if it'll benefit him enough, right, if it'll get him
that Mitsubishi dealership. You never know, quite just like you never know which what motherfucking guy who like seems kind of lame and boring right now could be a hero when actually called upon to shelter people from RZI. I'm thinking about that judge husband and wife cop couple in New Mexico who were like destroying evidence to protect these
undocumented friends of theirs who are now being tried. Where it's like you would never guess that these people would have been a heroes in a time like this, but goddamn it, you can't look at them anyway else. Right, And in the same manner, some guy who would you would never guess is anything but the dude who lives next to you could become an absolute monster if he was given the opportunity, if it would advance him personally enough. And you don't know until the chips are down, who's
going to be what? Right, There's hints sometimes, but you can't know perfectly cool stuff.
Just to be safe, I say, if you've ever seen them shooting a video in the cab of their pickup truck at that upward angle, probably on the bad side of things, Yeah, you just stay the funk away from there, right. Man Danaker would have loved filming himself drunk in his car ranting about movies. God, they would love that so much. Yeah, yelly, like my wife left me.
So.
Historian Robert Gerwath describes Daniker as one of the quote young, educated, self confident, and ideologically committed men Heydrich actively courted for the Jewish desk. These men would develop the actual methodology by which Hitler's dream of a jew free Europe might be made a reality. To continue with another quote from that article, Daniker utilized in an array of weapons, the pen,
the telephone, and the typewriter. Besides researching and working behind a desk, Daniker negotiated, cajoled and berated officials, coordinated with the Reich Transportation Ministry to secure rolling stock, and worked at the SSSD, Gestapo and German armed forces to ensure the efficient and orderly removal of massive numbers of Jewish men, women, and children in the spring of nineteen forty two, Daniker
visited the camp at Auschwitz Berkanau. This was the same month that it transferred from being primarily a labor camp to being a straight up death camp, and Daniker is one of the very first people to see Auschwitz in full operation. He reports back to his boss about it and he immediately sets to work feeding a group of eleven hundred French Jews into the factory of death. This
annihilation acts as a proof of concept. Right, this is the desth star test firing of Auschwitz, right where you're like, yep, okay, we can, we can get rid of people at the speed we need to. Here, Daniker reports back to Iikman about how Auschwitz is working, and Iikman could not have been happier. So he and Daniker spend several weeks planning a more ambitious operation to wipe out a substantial chunk of the French Jewish population. They call this Operation spring Wind.
It had been initially scheduled for July fourteenth, but that was the Steel Day, and the French collaborators insisted it would be bad form to commit genocide on a holiday, So the operation is ultimately executed by friend right, we'll do this, but not on but still day. Right, we can't do a holocaust on b Steel Day.
That's like the most fucking French way of like, no, you don't understand.
We have the steel work, everyone's got the day off work. Look, we'll do a holocaust, but not on our day off.
Right. If you if you make all the cops go in and do the genocide on the holiday, they're gonna riot and they're gonna rights. It's something that happens here. They can't do this.
So the operation is ultimately executed by French police in July sixteenth and seventeenth. They break into houses and they rip whole families out of their beds, arresting thirteen thousand Parisian Jews for deportation. The police insisted in public facing communications that these people were mostly quote foreign and stateless, so they're verrely people. Course of course, of course, suck yeah. Operation spring Wind was the brainchild of a French VCH
collaborator named Luis d'arkier. He had fought in World War One and become a radical far right activist in the thirties, actively participating in the nineteen thirty four far right riot that was seen by some at the time as an attempted coup deetas he had become a journalist largely to write articles drumming up anti Semitic hate among his fellow Frenchmen. When the Nazis took over, they made him Commissar General
for Jewish Affairs, basically the vch counterpart to Eikman. D'arkier had suggested to denaturalize all Jews who'd acquired French citizenship since nineteen twenty seven, and he also suggested the mass arrest of stateless Jews, largely because it provided a legal coding for the general expulsion of Jews. This worked. Danniker himself noted that once this shoddy justification was in place,
the cops were happy to help the SS. The French police, despite a few considerations of pure form, have only to carry out orders, right as long as it's like surprising, Yeah, that's just how these guys work.
That's how cops are, right, and that's how cops are and France was wildly anti Semitic. Yeah, for people who don't know. One of my co hosts and producers on my show did he speaks French and did research on like French Officers magazines in the French military a little bit after this time in Algeria. Yeah, and like half half of the titles are like Lee anti Semitism, Yeah, like shit like that, Like yeah, you know, oh, I'm just subscribed to Anti Semitism Weekly. Yeah.
But by the way, folks watched The Battle of Algiers. Great movie. Yeah, that's all I'll say about it for now. So Daniker's role in France came to an end shortly after Operation spring Wind, which is better known as the veldiev roundup Right, his direct supervisor in the SD, a guy named Helmut Knockin, caught Daniker abusing his authority, by which I mean he was stealing shit from deported Jews that the SS wanted to steal for Germany, right, and
so he was transferred back to Berlin. Right, Like, look, but steal from them, Yeah, we're stealing from them. You're stealing from us when you steal too much from them, right.
Come on, man, Jesus. Yeah.
Now, the system Daniker had built with Aikman's guidance continued to operate for the remainder of v France's lifespan. Ultimately some seventy seven thousand French Jews and Jews on French soil were deported and murdered by the Nazis under the direction of Aikman and Daniker and with the enthusiastic aid of French collaborators in law enforcement and the VC government. After the war, Charles de Gaulle and the French government that replaced the VC regime refused to apologize for the
role the police played in these genocidal crimes. Their argument, all right, Their argument was that VCH France wasn't the French Republic, and the re established republic shouldn't have to apologize for the crimes of another government, right now.
Never mind, all those dudes kept their fucking job, right. Isn't the case that these cops are still cops? A lot of times? Yes? But why is that our responsibility? Right? Slipping off the armband.
You can't blame law enforcement as a whole for the fact that everyone in it did this, right, Oh, it's cool stuff.
So you do not understand, I was not throwing a pizza of salute. I was just ashing my cigarettes very awkwardly. Oh man.
It was not until nineteen ninety five that French President Jacques Scharack finally admitted blame on behalf of French law enforcement and the state.
Right, so you know, it's so bad that had to be Sharrock that did it, because he's like cartoonishly corrupt.
He's otherwise. Yeah, but he's like a jeez, this is wow, we really fucked up here.
I will steal from everybody's pension and I will get France locked soldly into the Afghan War, but I will not cover for Nazi cops.
I'm not going to cover for the Nazi cops. I got too much other shit I gotta do after Paris. Daniker doesn't remain in Berlin long. He sent and he's forgiven for his misdeeds.
He's sent to.
Bulgaria in nineteen forty three to arrange the deportation of some eleven thousand and four Jews to farious death camps. He follows the Eichman playbook in this interfacing with a newly created Bulgarian Commissar for Jewish Affairs to arrange the deportations. In just two months, all eleven thousand people had been shipped by train to Trablinka or Auschwitz, where nearly half
of them died. The dead included some two thousand children. Yeah, I mean these guys the level of mass murderer the least of the ss men in Iikman's office commit is pretty outrageous.
I mean, I can't imagine a more cursed title that we've spoken other than a Bulgarian Jewish commissar.
So yeah, oh boy, like, oh your war crimes did war crimes?
Yeah.
This deportation met with little local resistance, as the Jews marked for expulsion were mainly from Thrace and Macedonia and thus not Bulgarian citizens. But Daniker's next move was to evacuate nearly fifty thousand Bulgarian Jews from Sophia, the capital. This was done and some forty eight thousand Jews were stripped of their property and forced into a camp outside the city. However, this sparked resistance because again, these aren't foreigners, right,
these are Bulgarian, you know. Jason Dossi writes, quote outrage from Dimatarbashev, the deputy speaker of the parliament, clergy from the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, and representatives of communities where these Jews resided pushed King Boris the Third to intervene Bashev, who was forced to resign his position, still appealed to the honor of Bulgaria, wanting that our nation's reputation would be stained forever and its moral and political standing forever
compromised if deportations ensued. Boris acquiesced and prevented the removal
of Bulgaria's Jewish populace. And we can see this as both there's legitimate heroism here which saves a lot of lives, right, right, of course, but also any pride in this has to be tempered by the fact that all these guys are only moved to act against the Nazis because now citizens were being deported, right, these Macedonian Jews and whatever, it's if they get exterminated, no one's going to speak up, right, But now you're going after Bulgarian Jews, and we've got to say something, right.
Of course, they shouldn't even be here. They're like they you know, they broke the law just crossing them.
I mean, Christ, you can't just break the law, right, that's fucked up.
Look, I wouldn't have voted for Hitler if he was gonna start going after the good ones, right right, right, these are the good ones. You know. He was only supposed to go after the criminals.
You know, and had the Nazi regime lasted, Iichman and his colleagues would have taken another stab at this group that King Boris helps to protect. As it was, things were going pretty badly for the Nazis by the summer of forty three, and the work of extermination was taking on an air of dire urgency. By this point, Danniker's qualities had been recognized outside the SD and Eichman's protege was sent by the Gestapo chief to Rome, which had
just been occupied by the Nazis after Mussolini's overthrow. Eichman by this point was the most prestigious name in the genocide business. His obsessive need to stamp his name on every part of the Holocaust, even in actions at which he had little to know known involvement, insured him steady promotions and regular direct contact with Himmler. It also got him the attention of the international press. He and his friend Calton Brunner would brag to each other about their
respective war criminal ranks during social events. Iichman later recalled, Yeah, that's how they frame it. They're like looking at for impressed and be like, ah, man, I'm a higher ranking war criminal than you now, Calton Brunner.
Ha ha, Right. You know what's impressive is that I don't really think that there's like a lot of competition because nobody else wanted to put their fucking name on it.
Right, everyone else is too smart to like stamp their fucking last, first and last name on this shit. Eichman later recalled quote I found the war criminals in a press review once. I was number nine, and I had a bit of a laugh about it, all right, and he will, he'll go back and forth between I was fourteen, I was nine, I was number one, right, depending on who he's talking to.
After that, Oh, bro, you were never number one. Called down you were like, I'll give credit, you were easy top ten. But you know, whatever considered you number one, I'll believe nine nine is credible. Right, Yeah, you're making the playoffs. Good for you? Sure, Yeah, you're in the war crime playoffs. Yeah, you and Calton Brunner.
In nineteen forty four, as the war neared its end, Adolf Eichmann was about to do something that would skyrocket him to the top of that list. In November of nineteen forty Germany had signed the Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan, officially creating the Axis Powers, and they considered it a priority to sign on as many new allies as possible, given out things had gone the last time
Germany was isolated in an international war. Hungary's regent was a guy named Admiral Niklos Horthy, and he was offered the honor of becoming the fourth member of the club, but German diplomat Joaquem von Ribbentrop tacitly threatened that Romania might be allowed to join first if Hungary dithered. Ultimately, Horthy signed up, and this would prove to be a
catastrophic mistake. Horthy, who had served the Old Empire in World War One, had seen World War Two as a chance to regain lost Hungarian territory and make his country great again.
Right, we did some good last time, boys War one?
Was I mean, if it could have worked better if we just did a couple of things different, right?
I love that the Nazis are so fucking stupid, righty, Like, Look, it didn't work out for us last night, but what if we allied with brought what I've got the band back together? Yeah? Oh, man.
God, you know now as you think about it, Italy really is the Pete Best of World War One, right.
Or reverse Pete Best. I guess I don't know the Patrick Stump of World War one.
Hungarian troops. This seemed to work at first right. World War two initially is go is kind of working like Orthy at hope. Hungarian troops get to invade the Balkans alongside the Wehrmacht, and by the spring of nineteen forty one, Hungary was nearly tripled the size of where it had stood in nineteen thirty eight. Then came Operation Barbarossa and the invasion of the USSR. Hungry again sins troops, but
this time there's no swift victory. Within months, thirty percent of the Hungarian army is killed or wounded too badly to fight.
As tradition demands when Hungry goes to war.
And by the way, if you're looking, if you're thinking from like a military planning standpoint, if you have lost thirty percent of your forces killed or injured, you no longer have an effective army. It sounds like seventy percent is a lot. It's not enough. You've lost too much of your command and control too much. You have to reorganize at that point before you can continue fighting effectively.
Yeah. From a military historian's perspective, I must say it is not good if you're planning a war at home today. Don't lose thirty percent of your forces at a year and a half.
Yeah, it's a catastrophe. In early nineteen forty three, the entire Hungarian second Army was smashed trying to anchor the German northern flank during the Battle of Stalingrad. Only twenty percent of the army survives the retreat home intact.
Hey, at least there's something in common with Romanians now, right, right, right?
Yeah, from Hungary in Romania wiping out eighty percent of their army.
Hey, fellas, you want to meet up inside of Stalogrid and die Stalograd. That's a nice name. I think things are gonna go well for us there. Yeah.
So Horthy at this point, showing that he's smarter than Hitler, complains the war is lost right after Stalingrad. Horthy's like, well, fuck, there's literally no way we can pull a victory out of this one. And Hitler, for his part, complains that Hungarian soldiers had doomed the Wehrmacht, which is not really correct, you.
Know, not true. Yeah, that is that is not true. Over on my show Lines of by Donkeys, we talked about Stalingrad for about six hours. Yeah. Look, I'm not saying Hungary would have won the battle, but they certainly didn't lose them the battle.
Things were fucked by the point at which you know they can get into action in this way. Right, if you're, for one thing, if your entire battle plan comes down to the Hungarian army holding in the field, you have fucked up.
Right, mind feure the army has been churned to Gulash.
So Horthy had never been a good guy. I think we've made that clear. But he's not personally genocidal towards the Jews of his nation, right.
He doesn't.
Left to his own devices, he had no desire to wipe out the whole Jewish population of Hungary, and so for most of World War two, Hungarian Jews were fairly safe. Right, for most of the war, this is the best place and kind of broader, the kind of broader Nazi and that's the Allied territory, one of the better places to be. But Hitler now demanded that Horthy kill or put his Jews into camps. Horthy refused. He has no issue. Like
they seize Jewish property to fund the war effort. He's fine with that, but he doesn't want because he sees the writing on the wall. I don't want to be involved in a war crime of this scale right now, because we're not gonna win. There's going to be a butcher's bill to pay. As the Russians advanced, he and other Hungarian leaders tried to make a separate peace with
the Allies. Hitler finds out, and he orders German troops to conquer the country in March of nineteen forty four, which they do easily because the Hungarians are very bad at having an army, right, even Thermacht can take them.
Hungarian's military tradition. All right, they will lose every war they go in, but they'll be goddamn just thinking of it. A genocide. Be on the side of jenociders, yes, sure, sure, but we're not that active at it. We have our standards here in Hungary, yeah.
Which is, will sit by and let it happen, right, that's right now. Orthy is kept on as a puppet leader for a time and as soon as Hungary was under the German occupation Hitler orders, the Jewish population wiped out. This is no mean task. There were somewhere between seven hundred thousand and over eight eight hundred thousand Jews in Hungarian territory. Sometimes you'll hear around a million. Eikman is sent over to supervise the work of an Einst's commando
especially assembled for the task. Daniker and other colleagues in the SD or there as well, and they handle a lot of the ground actions while Eichman coordinates this massive effort. What followed was one of the swiftest and bloodiest mass killings in human history. Per doctor Darsy's article, what happened in Hungary in the late spring and early summer of nineteen forty four overwhelms our fragile capacities to imagine. It
was simply a frenzy of killing. In May and June of nineteen forty four, four hundred and thirty seven thousand Hungarian Jews were transported to Auschwitz Berkanal, and three hundred and ninety seven thousand were plunged into Berkeenhow's gas chambers. Their fate exhibited just how desperate, the Nazi regime was to finish the annihilation of European Jews, even as its
hopes of winning the war disintegrated. Under increasing pressure, Horthy finally halted the deportations in July, temporarily sparing most of Budapest's Jewish populace. Eikman and Daniker bided their time. The removal of Fourthy three months later opened up new possibilities. When Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg openly offered sanctuary to Jeose in Budapest as Soviet troops near the capital city, the enraged Aikman turned to Daniker to raid the safe houses
established by Wallenberg. Now, first off, that term frenzy of killing is the thing to remember when you're thinking about what did Iikman do? What the Daniker do? They Aikman is the man who masterminds this. This is on him more than any other single person, right.
And it's telling how important he is in the hierarchy in general and how much everybody relies on them when they're like, we have this insurmountable killing goal in mind, we have to bring in our experts. Yeah, and it's him and his boy Yeah, and it's Aikman arrayed against Wallenberg right in trying to Wallenberg is trying to save this Jewish population and Eikmen is trying to annihilate it. And we've done a reverse bash. It's a Christmas episode on Wallenberg. He's one of the.
Great heroes our species ever produced. In the war's waning days, he was Aikman nemesis, granting fake Swedish documents to every Jew he could find. You're a Swedish citizen, you're a Swedish resident, you got a green card.
They can't kill you. You're a Swede. Right the hand reaches out your hand for the paperwork and just smashing meatballs in every single fucking one nor they can't support you with a meatball in your hand. Oh my god, sure official Swedish paperwork.
These are not. There's nothing legal in legitimate. Only Wallenberg's charisma is backing these documents up. But he is so good at what he's doing that a lot of ss men back off because he's like, look, if you're seen violating the law here all make sure you get your due when the war is over, right, And they're so fucking scared of him that he saves by some accounts
one hundred thousand people. There's a lot of debate about these numbers, but it's in the tens of thousands at the very least personally.
And these men know the war is fucked at this point. No one, no one has illusions at this point, right, everybody's fully an eye have Like, look, the guy at the meat balls is telling me he's good, He's fucking good.
Fucking yeah, fuck it. I don't want anymore of his guy with the meat ball. So Eikman calls Raoul the jew Dog Wallenberg and threatens to have Raoul and all other friends of Jews assassinated. Someone subsequently blows up Wallenberg's car and he only narrowly escapes. In her book Iikman Before Jerusalem, but Tina Stangneth describes Adolf Eikman in this period as almost mad, with a mix of desperation and megalomania.
He could feel the walls closing in, but just as crucially as he feels the window closing, he feels that he might be losing out on his chance to achieve the only goal that matters to him at this stage, winning the war against European Jewry. And this is important you understand, the Nazis don't see this all as one war, the war against the Jews. Even though the war against the rest of Europe may be unwinnable, now the war
against the Jews of Europe is still winnable. Right, we have to pull something.
Out of this.
Speaking of have we done our second advert?
Soovie, no, here it is. We're back boy.
Our sponsors really love being thrown to ads right after we talk about Aikman.
Wanting to win the war against European Jewry. Well, hopefully the ad wasn't for like IBM or something.
Yeah, Critical Partners and the Nazi war against European Jews.
Yeah, this ad brought to you by Hugo boss.
Ah Man be a boss like Aikman. Yeah, so the Nazi state was in chaos at this point. Eikman doesn't report kind of he's not technically on like an ORG chart. He's not directly reporting to Himler, but he basically is
reporting to Himler. He's got regular meetings with the man, and so even though there's guys between him and Himmler on the ORG chart, Iikman outranks everyone above him except for Himmler because he's regularly talking to Himmler, and so whenever there's a disagreement, he can bring Himler in, right, And that's kind of how the Nazi state works more than like officially, here's who's reporting to who. It's like, well, but this guy can bring in Himmler, or this guy
can bring in Gerring. Right, this guy could bring in Hitler directly, so he's effectively in charge.
It's a whole power structure of his constant name dropping.
Yes, fuck horrible, absolutely, that's how it works now. Iikman, as a show of how fucking important he is, he has access, in this late stage of the war to a private aircraft that he can travel around what remains of the crumbling Reich end That means he's a big man. And when he really wanted to impress another Nazi, Eikman would claim to have personal control over the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Right, I'm the guy running the gas chambers.
That's his brag. Iikman's colleagues later recalled some of Iikman's most outrageous boasts, and these are all direct quotes from Iikman. I am a bloodhound. I'll set the mills of Auschwitz grinding and blood for goods. This was This is a reference to a promise that Iikman made. This in Hungary, aid in exchange for Jews. Right, that's the blood for goods program. You give us, Jews will give you the aid that you need to continue holding on.
H Oh, God, that's like the most evil FOREI and aid package you've ever heard.
Huff yeah, blood for Jews. His favorite line was simply, I'll inform Himmler, and his darkest boast was I'll do away with all the Jewish filth of Budapest. In the last months of nineteen forty four, Ikman makes constant trips back and forth from Budapest to Auschwitz, dealing with Commandant Hess personally to ensure the smooth operation of the chief genocide machine. In the Nazi Toolkit, Stangneth writes, he seemed
to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Iikman talked so much and for so long that the people around him, ignorant of what was really going on, believed he might actually have been involved in the overthrow of Hungarian Reich administrator Miklos Horthy. Weslinsky claimed that in Hungary, Iikman boasted that he and Otto Globoschnik were behind the whole idea of exterminating the Jews. Eichman inflated his murderous lifetime achievement to crazy proportions and believe there was certain to be
a monument erected to me in Budapest. He threatened his victims the prospect that after final victory, Hitler would make him world Commissar of the Jews. These are the things that Eichman is bragging about. And you can see this as maybe he's lost his mind a little bit at the end of the Reich, or you can see this as he knows where things are going, but he knows that these are the boasts that will give him just enough flex to accomplish his mission. Right, That's what matters to him at this stage.
And I am curious, Like, he's not a dumb person, so he probably has to know that the war is lost. He sure does, But I am curious if he thought a lost war in their mind also include a complete loss of Nazi Germany itself, or if this is going to be more like a World War One situation where Germany just continues to exist. You know.
Yeah, it's debatable at the point of which he knows even keeping that is not on the table anymore. Yeah, But he, as we'll talk about in part four, he'll start he's starting to make plans in forty four for what he's going to do after the war, right, I think it really is. It just is his personal response. He feels personally a duty to kill as many of these people as he can, even though the war is over.
That that's what's important to him morally, right, And it was his job, and it's his job, right, and he's going to do it.
He's always been a dead eyed careerist, and if everybody else is failing, I bet he probably thinks the way to continue to stick out and feel great is to be successful when everything else is failing. Will I won't fail, you know? Yeah.
So Eikman is a master still at this late stage of shaping cloud and the perception of cloud into a weapon to get what he wants. In the case of Hungary, this allows him to oversee the slaughter of at least four hundred and thirty seven, four hundred and two men, women and children in a matter of months. That is the number the Nazis officially document, so the real number
is higher than that. Credible estimates of the number of people Aikman is responsible for organizing to kill in a matter of again months range up to almost six hundred thousand out of a pre war population of seven hundred to eight hundred thousand. Jesus, this is the most complete and fastest extermination of a Jewish population in Europe during
the war. Fucking christ Horst Grel, the adviser on Jewish affairs for the Budapest Embassy, later claimed that during this time, Aikman bragged the enemy had promoted him to war criminal number one, and he's not super exaggerating at this stage, right. He would then repeat a German saying that translates to many enemies much honor. The more people are talking about me as a monster, the more honor I have for
what I've done. Eikman was so good at what he did that other ss men begin using his name in the same way he used Himmler's. When Kurt Becker, one of Eikman's professional rivals, got stalled in negotiations over the expropriation of Jewish property, he threatened to get Aikman involved. After the war, Eichman himself would brag every department was trying to squeeze everything possible out of the Jews, to winkle it out by threatening them with the big bad Aikman.
He must have fucking loved that.
He does, but he also he's smart enough to know we're not gonna win. And so now this reputation, the fact that I'm getting accredited for crimes I hadn't committed, which is happening because I wanted that, right.
And I used to take credit for them.
Yeah, yeah, that's a problem now right now that like, you know, we're not gonna win.
The fact that you're getting blamed for shit you didn't even do is an issue, right, Well, well, well if it isn't the consequences of my ass.
Right right, by early forty five, he knows these days are numbered, and everyone including Iikman, increasingly knows that. Right. This is part of why colleagues like Becker are eager to use his name. It's not just that it gets shit done, but it allows them to divert their own responsibility for genocide onto Iikman.
Right.
Oh yeah, Iikeman's the guy making this happen. It's all Hikman, not me.
I mean, it's the difference between swinging from the end of a rope or doing like five years in prison and then being a government job in West Germany. Yeah, man, oh boy, Holocaust was off.
You know, we were all it's like that scene in a hot Rod where his friend's stolen the TV and he's like, boy, riots are so terrible. You just got to get out as fast as you can. Right, Everyone's like, wow, the Holocaust awful. Can you believe what that Iikman guy made me do?
Fucked up? Incredible.
So, in the last months of the Reich, as it becomes clear to everyone what's happening, Eikman's going to become a pariah within the sd right, people are like, oh, I don't want to be associated with this motherfucker any more directly than I have to. And we'll talk about that and how he gets himself out of this for a shocking length of time in part four. But first, Joe, let's talk about how you're gonna get yourself out of this podcast by plugging your pluggables.
I am the host of the Lions of My Donkey's podcast. We talk about military history and history of genocides, war crimes, other uplifting things like that. So if you want to hear more about Stalingrad. We did hours upon hours about that or other genocides like Rwanda, or the Armenian genocide or her Aeronama genocide, things of that nature. All we've talked about that as well, So come listen to it, and it will not improve your mood.
I'm sorry, yeah, speaking of things that won't improve your mood. The next episode of this podcast coming out Thursday.
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards