Part Two: How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible

There's dead babies. We always have this wonderful lady on Sophia Alexandria is here today to talk with us about some dead babies. Well, Robert, what did I say? I said, stop only inviting me to dead baby things? Can you break it up with some adult murder every once in a while? I mean, yeah, there was some adult murder in the last one. Come on, remember that doesn't count of Part two. Is baby murder that neiggates Part one? I don't know that it is. I think it just

makes for more murdered people. I think that we do one baby murder episode, we do one other people murder episode, and that is a healthy balance for our relationship, you know what. I respect that and I accept it. Okay, all right, well, good, See this is why communication is so critical. I'm hugging you through the zoom. Thank you so much, Sophie. I'm hugging you to talk. Yeah, oh yes, right for having me. You're welcome your will. So this is part two of our episode you know about Nazis

and stuff? Right, actually introduced me, you fool? Okay, I did. I could said you're Sophia Alexandria, who we talked about. Well, you're also a comedian a podcast. First of all, pronounced her last name, right, Sophia Alexandria. Nope, what Alexandra? Sorry? What fucking I was thinking about princesses. Um. I have literally hundreds of hours with you. I know I was thinking of princesses. I too think of royalty when I think of Sophia, but I know how to pronounce her

last name. Yes, you're so good at making him look like shit. This is an episode about Nazis, and I'm looking worse than the Nazis right now, not worse than not after this episode. I'm not Jesus what with all

the baby killing? All right, let's let's all right. So, you know, when one of the nice things Sophia about studying the old Nazis as opposed to studying today's fascists is that we we we do know how things ended with the old ones, right, Like you know, they don't win in the end, um, And we're all we don't know at about our fascists, right, We're all still living through this. And there's a there's a there's a pretty good chance they'll wind up, they'll wind up taking home

the trophy, you know. Um, Yeah, I do believe in us, but it's certainly the game is not the game is not ended. Um. The game is certainly still afoot. Yeah, And I think we all have to get used to

the idea. Like one of the frustrating things I think there's this, like, especially if you have friends and family members who kind of went went Trump and have been getting increasingly at least far right, if not explicitly fashy over the last few years, is that like you want some sort of emotional closure where they're like, I fucked up, I was wrong, Like I I made a bad call. It's never gonna happen. It's never going to happen. Um. And one of the things that I think is most

interesting about Meyer's book, they thought they were free. Is that he talks to like former Nazis about that. These guys are You would think if anyone can be like, ah, yeah, that was the wrong horse to bag, it would be guys living in Germany in like nineteen but like, no, like they don't. Like even those people weren't like, oh you know what, this was a bad call. My kids are dead in my house, got burned down in a bombing raid. Probably voted for the wrong guy. That's not

what I want. I'm sure there was some unfortunate mistakes, but overall it's been a pretty good couple of years. That's exactly what they said. It's it's amazing these guys, these little Nazis. And again, these are not the guys who got rich under Nazism, Like these are not the Venti Nazis. They're just merely tall yeah yeah, yeah, tall, which again in Starbucks and Nazi terminology means short. Um.

So yeah, it's it's it's fascinating. Rather than turning against Hitler, these little Nazis, the guys that Meyer you befriended, they looked back on the Nazi time and power as like a golden age, and they blamed the Fewer's failures on everyone but him. Only one of Meyer's ten friends was actually willing to condemn large aspects of the Nazi system. As for the others. Quote, the other nine decent, hard working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men did not know before nineteen

thirty three that Nazism was evil. They did not know between nineteen thirty three and forty five that it was evil, and they do not know it now. None of them ever knew or knows now Nazism as we knew it and know it, and they lived under it, served it, and indeed made it. These nine ordinary Germans knew it

absolutely otherwise, and they still know it otherwise. If our view of national socialism is a little simple, so as there's an autocracy, yes, of course, an autocracy as in the fable days of the golden time our parents knew, but a tyranny, as you Americans use the term nonsense. When I asked Tara Wedtkin to the Baker why he had believed in national socialism, he said, because it promised to solve the unemployment problem. And it did, But I

never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did. I thought I had struck pay dirt and I said, what do you mean, what it would lead to war? He said, nobody ever imagined that it would lead to war. And that's interesting. When they talk about what it led to, they're not talking about the Holocaust. They're not talking about the deportations, they're not talking about the murder of of the Roma, they're not talking about the murder of you know,

Hitler's political enemies. They're talking about the thing that fucked them up personally. That's what they didn't realize it would lead to. But you know what, that baker has the kind of vibes where he would not bake a cake for a gay couple. Definitely not. And hearing reading that quote reminds me of the perennially relevant tweet by Adrian Bought. I never thought leopards would eat my face, sobs woman who voted for the leopards eating people's faces party. But

like it also reminds me of a Simpsons line. Um, sure, Nazis have made some mistakes in the past, but that's why pencils have a raisers. Yeah, it's it's It's very funny. I think though, if we actually want to understand what happened Nazi Germany and understand our own times better. As a result, we do have to understand that, like when these little Nazis say they had no way of knowing that that Hitler was going to lead Germany into a war,

they're not lying. It seems like like, obviously, how could you not know? German? Hitler wanted war um but a lot of his early appeal to the little Nazis was the fact that he was a wounded war veteran and that he'd been a private right, that he had been a very low ranking war veteran. And one of the things you would say is that like, of course I don't want war. I know better than anybody how bad war is. I've been in the middle of one. Why would I want something like that? Like that was that

was one of the lines that he took. Now, it was transparent nonsense, and it was obvious to people at the time who really who were intelligent, who paid attention, Like, for example, have you heard that Hitler was a Nobel Prize nominee. That's like a thing people talk about, right,

that's pretty well known asn't are you? I'm sorry, I don't know if it was rhetorical or no, No, he was, yeah, yeah, that that that's the thing that gets brought up from time to time that he was nominated for the Nobel Prize. You were doing a thing where you're like, so we all know this, right, And then I was waiting for you, I thought, and then you were just waiting for me to say something, and I was like, did you know that?

On the same page, I thought that was yeah. I don't think that it's something that people talk about as much as in being a vegetarian or whatever. I read a lot of Hitler, so I'm I'm I'm probably off on what's common knowledge. So you're a big Hitler head. We all know that he was a hitstand. Yeah, he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, but the nomination

was a joke. It was a satire by a Swedish anti fascist politician who was like being like, like, it's absurd because this guy clearly wants to pull the world into war. So obviously, like a lot of people who anyone who paid attention and who was modestly intelligent, knew

what Hitler was going to do. I'm not saying that like it was hidden in any real way, but it was hidden to these little Nazis, not because like Hitler, obscured it particularly well, but because the only media they paid attention to was essentially a like either completely idiotic or complete propaganda. They lived in a media bubble, right um, And that we we see that today. As Meyer wrote, quote, remember,

none of these nine Germans had ever traveled abroad. None of them had ever known or talked with a foreigner, or read the foreign press. None ever wanted to listen to the foreign radio when it was legal to do so. None, except oddly enough, the policeman, listened to it when it was illegal. They were as uninterested in the outside world as their contemporaries in France or America. And you know, Meyer gets it right. You can see reading this book.

He doesn't talk a lot about American fascism, but you can see in the way he writes the book like he knew we were vulnerable too, like because these people are everywhere. Yeah. I don't know how you feeling, Sophia, Just you know, positive waiting for the babies to get here, to come on, and then to leave immediately, and to leave a pair of shoes behind. Baby shoes Comma never worn. Yeah, baby shoes. See myself out. Thank you for the hemmingway.

I've always said you're the hemming way of this podcast, mainly because of the amount of time you spend shirtless firing a shotgun. I mean, people gotta get a load of these ditties. I always say, yeah, yeah, that's the that's the jacket quote for hills like white elephants. People got to get to look at these ditties. So that is also the tagline for my titties. A lot of similarities. You also spent a period of time in Havana. If I'm not mistaken, my titties are there right now. So yeah.

Meyer points out that like for his Nazi friends who lived in small towns and away from like a lot of where a lot of the violence the Nazis did occurred, like the negative things the Nazis did, the negative press about them was drowned out by things like the Strength through Joy program, which enabled working Germans to visit places

like Norway in Spain at very little cost. These little Nazis and those like them were concerned with the economy, and again that meant not starving in those days, and a lot of that appeared to get better under Hitler. Some of this was a losory, and a great deal of it was driven by what's called arianization, which is the process of stealing Jewish businesses and property and giving them to Germans, to arian Germans. Um. But Myer's friends felt is like a really clean name for that. Yeah,

it is. And there's a there's a very good movie about it, all called that was made in the Soviet Union and like the sixties called The Shop on Main Street. That's about like one like Russian peasant in an occupied village, um,

who has given this old Jewish woman's uh. I think it's like a it sells like button and sewing equipment shop, um, and she and he become friend and it's it's it's it's a very It's an interesting movie because like all of the people acting in it were like peasants on the Russian steps when the Germans invaded, and they lived in villages that the Nazis took over and then like turned like a lot of them turned in their their own Jews. So like the actors aren't like just acting,

they're like remembering. It's a fascinating film. I really recommend it. I'm going to see it. Yeah, it's a it's a very very good movie in a very I mean very dark movie because it's about Russia and World War Two. I was gonna say, what do you mean. It's kind of sounded like a lighthearted romp to me. Yeah, compared to talk about actually in part one and you knew a name of an actor, I was like, of course you grant. Yeah. I was just impressed by your just

putting Yeah, is he what? Yeah, he's in and he plays in the pame Minister of England or something. Right, he's the sketchy politician. Yeah, he's the one that makes an insane number of like body shaming fat jokes during it. I don't remember up, but the only thing I remember is that Liam Neeson is in it. Um woman that's a supermodel, but not a supermodel, Like she's not supposed

to be a supermodel, but she is. In the joke he just keeps talking about how, oh, like the only person I'd marry is Claudia Schiffer or whatever the fuck, And then this Claudia Schiffer shows up. You know what, it doesn't matter. That's not a good retelling of the movie, but it's partially true. But you know what, ties that back into our our episode. How are you going to do? Impressed? Well, you were, you were. You were just telling me that Liam Neeson is in love actually because of when love

actually was made. We're talking about we're talking about what's that Holocaust movie with the red dress? Liam Neeson? Bam back to We're back to World War two. Perfect degrees of Hitler. Yeah, well that's amazing, son of a bitch. I know, I know, I know, you know, I'm only three degrees away from him. I mean like like genetically

or no, no, no, just in terms of like direct handshakes. Okay, yeah, hands with I shook hands with a guy who at age eight, like the Nazis came to power, and he was a member of the Hitler Youth and they did a lot of meeting like meet and greet gathering stuff with Nazi hy brass. And he shook Herman Garring's hand. Uh and obviously Herman Gerring by obviously by Nazi transitive property, you have shaken Hitler's hand. I basically shook Hitler's hand. Yeah,

it's it's what we're talking about. Yeah. The thing that's crazier about it to me is that that dude's grandpa had fought with a sword on horseback as a cavalryman, and like that that it's that recently that people were doing that. Like, yeah, this dude fought in the eighteen seventy one with like a fucking sword on horseback, and I like shook hands with his grandson. And as advanced as we are, we're that close to like people stabbing each other while riding horses. It's wild, right, is that

when you got into machetes. No, I've always been in machetes, so um, yeah, yeah, Sorry, we got off on a little bit of a tangent here um, but kind of what we're talking about. Most of this is for you, but a little bit of this is for me. Okay, okay, it can't be just Hitler, Hitler, Hitler of the time. Give me two of Hitler related, Hitler adjacent and yeah, we're talking about a lot of Hitler adjacent little Nazis here.

And and these folks were able to kind of get on board because they were, you know, distracted by a lot of the benefits of Nazis and they didn't see they didn't go looking for the ugly stuff, even though they knew some of it was there um because the stuff that was positive was like way more in their

face is and that's really all they cared about. And that's why even the the Nazis never had an electoral majority, almost every German got on board with Nazism, even if they didn't join the party during the years in which Hitler was succeeding, right, because people back a winner um, And that's what gets it. That's what scares me most about imagining the United States sliding into fascism. And it's not it's not the midnight raids, the abduction and execution

of dissidents, the slow clamped down and in resistance. It's the idea that most Americans that like people I know and am friendly with, would find ways to pretend none of it was happening, while like people I love and maybe me are disappearing and being murdered. That's the scariest thing about it, right like that is so much more frightening than imagining, than thinking about the actual fascists doing

the killing. It's like the people that I've I've hung out and played video games with, like turning and turning away while it happened. Anyway, I'm gonna read another quote from Meyer's book that's exactly on this topic. None of the horror impinged upon the day to day lives of my ten friends or was ever called to their attention. There was some sort of trouble on the streets as one or another of my friends was passing by on a couple of occasions, but the police dispersed the crowd,

and there was nothing in the local paper. You and I leave some sort of trouble on the streets to the police, so did my friends. And it's the police who are disappearing the Jews in this period, right, that's

what's happening, along with all the political dissidents. Um and Meyer actually presented his friends with an article from their local newspaper from back in nineteen thirty eight about a group of local Jews who were taken into protective custody by the police, and Maya writes, none of them, including the teacher, the anti Nazi teacher, remembered ever having seen

it or anything like it. And maybe they're lying. Maybe that's just our brains are that good, And when we're really hate reality, closing it out, if we're able to escape it, if we're safe enough to escape reality. I

don't know. I mean, people's memories of events are so unreliable, incredibly so in general, um much less when you like really want to forget that you were a Nazi, yeah yeah, or or just don't want to remember that you what being a Nazi exact exactly, exactly exactly now, The cold, hard reality is that most of the Germans who lived in the Third Reich knew what was being done to the Jews. Not every detail, for sure, but like they

knew enough. Right, the gas chambers, the death camps were tremendously widely known, but the fact that the Jews were being disappeared and that something terrible was happening, you were everyone was aware. This has not been kind of historical consensus for long. In two thousand one, Robert Professor Robert Gladley, who we we quoted from earlier, conducted a massive survey of German mainstream media newspapers and magazines from nineteen thirty

three on. And he started down this path of research when he was looking through old German papers and he found report of a woman who had been sent to the Gestapo for looking Jewish and having sex with a neighbor. Now at the time and this is like the late

nineteen nineties. When he came across this article, conventional academic wisdom held that the majority of Nazi atrocities had happened without the knowledge of most Germans, gladially noted for decades my generation had been told that so much of the

terror had been carried out in complete secrecy. So coming up upon that report openly in a major German newspaper made him wonder if this was true, and so he decided to look into the matter, and then the way that academics do, very very in a very like methodical way, and I'm gonna quote now from a Guardian rite up

on the study he conducted. As a result of this, his media troll with a research assistant, found that as early as nineteen thirty three, local papers reported the killing of twelve prisoners by guards at Dakau, the first to be set up as a model concentration camp initially for communists.

On May, the dekaur Zeitung, which is the Dacow newspaper, said that the camp was Germany's most famous place and wrought new hope to the decou business world, which obviously there's a town also next to the camp By nineteen thirty four, the main and widely read Nazi owned paper Vocashabao Bacter was reporting on a widening of policy to

other political criminals, including Jews accused of race defilement. By nineteen thirty six, communist prisoners were no longer mentioned in a photo essay, and the s S paper Dash Schwartz Corp. The Dark Core emphasized the camps has places for people for race to filers, rapists, sexual degenerates, and habitual criminals.

That's interesting to me that that's how they're That's how the Nazis spun the concentration camps first not as a place for Jews in specific, but as a place for race to filer's, rapists, sexual de degenerates, and habitual criminals um and that process continued through the years of the regime short life. In nineteen thirty seven, Heinrich Heimbler made public announcements that still more camps would be needed for those with hydrocephalis, cross eyed, deformed, half Jews, and a

whole series of racially inferior year types. In nineteen thirty eight, after Christal knoch Gebel's made a widely purported public announcement that the final answer to the Jewish problem would occur via government decree. So far from being unaware of the Holocaust, the little Germans were well informed about a lot what was going on. They knew their government was looking to a final answer to the Jewish question, and they knew

what that meant more or less. So, Yeah, not only were the Nazi atrocities well known as they occurred, but the desire of little Nazis to pretend ignorance at the crimes that were enabling was also really obvious to outside

and inside observers at the time. There's a quote that I think is really useful from Peter Viereck, who was a German American scholar, and he wrote this in nineteen forty, well publicized among Germans already before Hitler came to power, and during a period when he still depended on their consent rather than coercion, were the many actual deeds of butchery.

Someday the same Germans, now cheering Hitler strut into Paris, will say to their American friends, into their brave German anti Nazi friends, we did not know what went on. We did not know. And when that day of no nothing comes, there will be laughter in Hell. And there's a lot to say about the forgetting that happened after the war, and some of it was because we wanted the Germans as allies against the Communists. The US government was very much willing to to let people forget, and

it was not a unified thing. Like one of the things Eisenhower did that I think was really laudable was forced Germans who lived near the concentration camps to tour them where they were like still corpses lying out and stuff like that. But but for the most part, this was allowed to be the mainstream belief. For you go

find old documentaries about the Holocaust and stuff like. This was a very widespread belief that most Germans hadn't known because it was politically dangerous in the period when those same Germans were still running Germany to admit that they'd known and that they'd at least let it happen. Um. And that's I mean, it's a real bummer. Um. Yeah.

It also makes me think of like the fact that, um, there's so many reminders of what happened in Germany and like all these monuments and stuff, and um, how that's really important. Also for reckoning with UM, something that is like a big historical event that most people would like

to forget. Yeah, their country was a part of. Yeah, they actually put a lot of If you go to any of like the any of the concentration camps that are actually in Germany, like in order to be a guide at one of those places, like there's a certain level of education you have to have and and the people there are extremely knowledgeable about the Holocaust UM. And it's something that the German government does now put a lot of importance in UM because you you have to

people I want to forget that. When people want to forget, it's not that just they don't want to remember a bad episode from history. They want to forget that they might do that right. They probably wouldn't be Nazis, but they would let the Nazis do what the Nazis did. And nobody wants to remember that. Nobody wants to think

about that. But it also just makes you think about how much wilder it is that people fight for Confederate monuments here, because they're the opposite of of those kind of monuments that you're trying to remember the people that were for something horrible, not the people that fought against them.

So it's it would be like if you want to Nazi Germany and all of the monuments, instead of being too like, um, the Germans being Nazis, we're like, let's not this is so we don't forget that there were Nazis. Here's uh Henrich Hitler's uh statue. Oh it's right next

to you know, Hitler and Hitler's garden. It's just like that's I mean, and that's something that has been taken for granted in America for so long that like, yeah, Confederate monuments of course, and on that side, it's time for an ad biats that we can all take some deep breaths off. Mike whoa. I like it when we can be more playful. Robert say, welcome back. I say, woo, everything's fine in the world. So uh yeah. So I

think it's interesting. I think it's important to note, because there's very little nuance in our education of the concentration camps that they started as a place to put criminals, right, sexual deviance, you know, child molesters, right the the that that's what the Nazi that's not what who they were putting there, but that's how the Nazis justified it, um.

And you can look at things like Q went on suggests going after and whatnot and see some see some lines there, but also like what a crazy coincidence that, um, like all the people um that are the murderers and the rapists and whatever are Jewish and gay and roma and communist and political. Such a wild coincidence. Yeah, but it is like you you see shades of that in our own fascists, this idea that like everybody who was opposed, who is actively opposed to the regime is a criminal,

you know. And they're not just criminals because they're breaking laws in their protests, but there they all have like have to be like part of some pedophile cabal they're doing like they're they're they're they're all, um, Like it's it's this, it's in the reason they do that, right, The reason they do that is because it stops normal people from caring. Because normal people don't give a ship if a criminal gets murdered by the cops, because that's

supposed to happen. You know, normal people care when someone they see as a good person gets hurt. Um, they don't care about criminals because there's a lot that's fucked up in our society. But the Nazis were taking advantage of that same thing too. You know, you you don't. You don't say we're cracking down on political dissidents. It's we're arresting criminals, and then everybody's fine with it. Yeah. I'm gonna read a quote from a book called Backing

Hitler by Robert Gladalie, who were just talking about. Um. It's a very good book, and it talks about sort of how, um, how the images that the Nazi regime put out to justify the people they were locking away. The social reception of the images that were projected, no doubt, varied enormously. At one end of the scale, these published accounts that a terrorizing or deterrent effect on potential opponents of Nazism and those who were officially stigmatized. Certainly, many

people in the country would have seen through the propaganda. However, for good citizens who wanted to return to an idolized version of German law and order, these images helped to ease the appearance of even the terroristic sides of Hitler's regime. They could read in the press that those who suffered at the hands of the new system were other people,

Communists and various social outsiders, and the Jews. Good citizens were invited to see the camps as educative institutions and as a corrective and a warning to those described as social rabble, that is, men and women who were habitual criminals, the chronically unemployed, beggars, alcoholics, homosexuals, and repeat sex offenders. Totally different. Now amount of science. It's like Robert says something, and then then I so one thing about Robert and

eyes chemistry that's not really Robert and my chemistry. That's not really popping off over long? What is this zoom call? We're on zoom now? Yeah, yeah, thank you, because I feel like you pause for me to say something when I have nothing to say, and I'm just defeated by the content. And then when I do have something to say, You're like, I'm in the middle of my thoughts and I'm like, you're right, You're right. My thing was stupid.

And that's what's happening podcasting. You know, maybe delete that. They don't need to know how this sounds. It just made no I like it. Stop saying that. Yeah, So Jesus, what a what a time to be alive? So I could go through in link excerpts from articles that kind of make that point about like Trump topping talking about violent criminals and like you know, camps at the border and all the crystal fascist paranoia about trans people using bathrooms.

Which when they talk about the Nazis arresting sex criminals, that's who they were arresting. It's not rapists, it was people who had sex they thought was criminal. Um. Yeah. Or we could talk about q and On's obsession with mythical child sex traffickers. But like you, we've all been through the same news cycles. I'm sure you see the parallels. Uh. And a read through of Professor Gladalle's book, which I

do recommend reveal several of them. Quote Orrick Herbert recently suggested that during the Nazi years there was a growing lack of moral concern in German society for human rights and the protection of minorities, which grew rapidly during the years of the dictatorship, and which led to a profound moral brutalization in Germany. That's familiar, right, growing lack of concern for human rights and protection of minorities in the

society leading to brutalization Um. Yeah. Gladali himself uses the term desensitization to refer to the impact that the Nazis years long drumbeat of like news articles about the people that were arresting and sending away and killing, the impact

that had on people, desensitization. Again, we're experiencing a version of that ourselves, with all of the hundreds of thousands of deaths from from from COVID nineteen, with the violence in the streets, with like these, these, this constant drumbeat of police murders, like and and just you know, not even from like stories about death, but just like the sheer amount of horrible things happening, it just numbs you after a while that was going on then too. Um

another thing we don't talk about enough. So while we're talking about desensitization and genocide, we should probably talk a little bit about some of the little Nazis who wound up as cogs in the machine of death that actually made the Holocaust happen. This is the dead baby section, Sophia. Finally, keep your Jesus, I had a fucking prologue in this some bitch, So I want to quote now from an article in Der Schpiegel titled Everyday Murder Nazi atrocities committed

by ordinary people quote. Perpetrators included both committed Nazis and people who had nothing to do with the Nazis. The murderers and their assistants included Catholics and Protestants, the old and the young, people with double doctorates, and poorly educated members of the working class. And the percentage of psychopaths was not higher than the average in society as a whole. One thing you have to accept if you really want to understand the Holocaust is that most of the people

involved were what we would describe as mentally healthy. They were not people who could have been diagnosed with any sort of of of mental illness UM which again like that, This is why I pushed back whenever people talk about the Nazis being crazy or Hitler Is being crazy, Like, no, these were rational people taking rational action that happened to be the worst thing you can imagine. And that's so much scarier UM now in the early nineteen nine So

didn't they put mentally ill people. That's the first people that they executed a lot of That's the biggest than most horrible irony to call people that were just like willingly, um, being agents of fascism. Yeah, I'm comparing them and to people that are actually mentally ill. It's very it it is, it's sick, and it's wrong because it ignored, it completely ignores what was actually going down. Um. And that's that's very important. Like the very first um, you know, the

gas chambers. Before the gas chambers, they were actually using like like trucks that they would hook up carbon monoxide gas too and pump into the trucks and they'd fill them with people. And the people they experimented on first, the first people the Nazis killed with any kind of poison gas were mentally handicapped folks. Yep, that's how it started. Um. I think it was the T four ethan Asia program. Might maybe getting things a little bit wrong there, but yeah.

So in the early nineteen nineties, a large group of researchers and historians began the long plotting work of digging through mountains of the Third Reich surviving records and their goal was to put together for the first time. And again, this is right around the time that they're starting to

understand that like actually most Germans were complicit to some degree. Um. So that they're starting to understand this, and they're trying to put together a comprehensive list of actual active perpetrators in the Holocaust for the first time, not just the leadership, but in everyone who pulled a trigger or the equivalent, um, the people who loaded Jewish folks in the train cars, the people who man gas chambers, everybody, and at present,

the number of active participants that they have listed. These are all individual people include more than two hundred thousand Germans and another two hundred thousand Ukrainians, Estonians, Lithuanians, and members of other occupied countries, including Frenchmen. Now, one of the little Germans who pulled a lot of triggers was Walter Mattner. And Walter was a police secretary from Vienna who had been just kind of a function arry in the Viennese police and then joined the s S when

the war started and became an administrative officer. And we have a lot of his letters to his wife back at home, and from those we learned quite a bit about the man. I'm gonna have a link to just like a sheet that has all of his letters home

on it, because it's very compelling stuff. On September one, right after his first entry into the conquered territories of the Soviet Union after the invasion started, he wrote, if I were not already a national Socialist, the first day of my wartime deployment would have turned me into one through and through now not that long after. On twenty nine September, about a week later, he wrote a letter in which he assured his wife that he and his fellow men of the s S were not committing war

crimes against the Jews of Eastern Europe. He insisted, at the most we arranged things, i e. Everything is taken away from the Jews. Just a few days later, like three or four days later, on October second, nineteen forty one, he wrote this, This is again a letter to his wife. I should have already turned in. It's already nine pm, and I volunteered for a special operation. Tomorrow REVELI is at four thirty am, and we're moving off at five

thirty am tomorrow. I'll also have the first opportunity to use my pistol. I'm taking twenty eight rounds with me. Probably won't be enough, but another comrade will lend me his pistol or carbine. I don't even know if I'm being permitted to tell you this, but that the Jews are our misfortune. That's something you've known for a long time, and it's something we saw again and again on our

journey to Warsaw and onto here. Just how many comrades are already resting in the cool earth, and this is how many young men are sleeping single and married the prime of our German nation to protect our home from the monsters we have gotten to know here. It is simply dreadful to have to look at these Asiatic hords. What we Europeans feel when seeing this, You can understand bitterness that takes a hold of me and which everyone here feels when thinking of our home and our great

fateful struggle which we have to wrestle through here. For our people, what are one thousand, two hundred Jews who are two men and yet another city and have to be bumped off? As the saying goes, it is only the just punishment for all the suffering they have inflicted and continue to inflict on us Germans. Until I arrive home. I shall tell you nice things, but enough for today,

Otherwise you'll believe that I'm bloodthirsty. Wow on October seven, Walter and his comrades traveled to a village named Muglov in Belarus. There they gathered up two thousand, two hundred and seventy three Jewish people. They stripped them of everything but the clothes on their backs, line them up beside an open pit, and shot every single one of them to death at close range. Walter Mattner, mild mannered police secretary,

wrote this home to his wife. For the first truckload, my hand trembled slightly when shooting, but one gets used to it. By the time the tenth truck arrived, I was already aiming steadily and fired surely at the many women, children in infants. Bear in mind that I also have two babies at home to whom these hordes would do the same, if not ten times worse. The death we gave them was a nice, short death compared to the hell is torture meeted out to hunt thousands upon thousands

in the dungeons of the gpu. Infants flew in a white arc through the air, and we blew them away while still in flight, before they then fell into the pit and the water. Let's get rid of this brood which has plunged the whole of Europe into war, and is still mongering in America until it drags them into the war as well. Hitler's words are coming true what

he once said before the war began. If jewelry believes it will be able to incite a war in Europe again, it won't be the Jews who will triumph, but will herald the end of jewelry in Europe. Magliev has now lost a number with three Zeros, but that's of no consequence here. I'm already looking forward to it, and many here are saying that when we return home, it's the turn of our local Jews. This is probably a cool time to mention that my grandma's family was shot to

death by the Nazis. So it bringing back some real fond memories. Yeah. Yeah, these are the people who do that, and it it um, it happened to a tremendous degree. The eyes who did this, for the most part were um groups called the INSETS group and which was like it means special task unit and it was it was a lot of SS like it was like the folks that they recruited for this, a lot of them had

been local police officers, before um. And these were folks who were willing who they This was kind of the first attempt at carrying out a genocide and mass and they did it with gunfire. And they realized very quickly that this was not um. Yeah, it was not efficient um. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. But but reading about Mattner's crimes in particular brought to mind a passage from Meyer's book that I find rather striking,

and I'm gonna I'm gonna read that passage. Now. The German language, like every other, has some glorious epithets untranslatable and will get wordney Spiceburger is one of them. It means very roughly, little men gone wild. I think about that a lot when I think about us, when I think about some of the things I've being in the streets,

little men gone wild. That's some powerful ship. Yeah. So, as it turned out, Mattner, obviously former police officer killing people in Belarus for the Third Reich, and his fellow police back home in Germany were hard at work on that same task. Uh, and they thought they were free. Meyer notes that his friend, the sensitive politician Hoffmeister quote did his duty in nineteen thirty eight when he was

ordered to arrest Jews for being Jews. One of those he arrested the Taylor Morrowitz and this guy survived the war, calls him a decent man, which I have trouble getting into that guy's head too. Um. But it's a it's a shade of genocide that we don't see enough. I think that is important to tell people about. Yeah, definitely.

One of the most bitter and fucked up realities of the Holocaust is that a lot of the killing was done by folks who would other wise be described as decent men, people who were good husbands and good fathers and friendly, positive members of their community, nice people, people who would have smiled at you as you passed them on the street when they were old men. Uh. And people who also played an active role in the extermination of millions, people like, for example, Major Trap of Reserve

Police Battalion one oh one. And I'm gonna quote from the Guardian to tell you about Major Trap. According to witness testimony, Major Trap was in tears when he ordered the shooting a fifteen hundred women, children, and elderly Jews near Warsaw, all the while saying an order is an order. In July ninety two, his men drove the victims out of their homes, loaded them into trucks, and took them

to a remote clearing to be executed. They shot them in the head or in the back of the neck, and in the evening, the soldiers uniforms were covered with bone fragments, brain matter, and bloodstains. And that's like, that's I think almost a more useful picture of what it means to commit genocide is this man weeping and going through with it anyway because it's an order. That's just

so fucking frightening to me. Um. I think anytime you justify anything with it's an order, it's a frightening thing because it's just completely uh takes away like the humanity a decision all the way. Yeah, And it's why we decided at Nuremberg that like, being under orders was not an excuse to commit genocide, because it's not. But it

is precisely because of that guy. Um. Now, you may have noticed that a lot of the folks were talking about in this segment about people who actually committed genocide by pulling triggers themselves. A lot of those people were cops, strange weird. I wonder what the connection is there. Huh Yeah. The Nazis stay was adept at using regular police to round up Jews and other undesirables, and overwhelmingly German police officers who were not members of the Nazi Party previously

agreed to do this work without complaint. Timothy Snyder, a Holocaust scholar and one of the world's great experts on fascism, one of your must reads if you want to understand what happened, uh notes in his book Black Earth that regular police were a key resource for the Nazis. Quote after its triumph in the Night of Long Knives, the s S implemented Hitler's fourth innovation, the hybridization of institutions. Crime was redefined, racial and state organizations were merged, and

cadras were rotated back and forth. In nineteen thirty five, in a significant reform, Himmler explicitly redefined the s S and the police apparatus as a single organ of racial protection. Himler, who served a racial movement rather than a traditional state, personally directed both the s S and the German police. From nineteen thirty six, the Investigative Service of the s S proposed a new definition of political crime. It was not crime against the state. The state had validity only

insofar as it represented the race. Since politics was nothing but biology, political crime was a crime against the German race. Now, later on in that same book, Snyder continues, the Einstetz group and we're also hybrid organizations, mixing SS members and others. The police forces themselves were hybridized from within, as police officers were recruited to the SS, while s S officers

were assigned to the police. The secret State Police, the detectives of the criminal police, and even the regular uniformed order police were to become Himmler's racial warriors. And police are tools of the state. They are they are. And if we're talking about hybridization of the police with shall we say, federal forces vehicles or I don't know, yeah, or deputized cops who get federal arresting powers, or what's been happening with ICE for the last four years years.

I'm gonna quote from a Pro Publica article here. In the year after President Trump took off, as state and local police officers across Pennsylvania swept car loads of Hispanic immigrants into ICE's net. In the process, they helped the agency's regional field off Talas office, Telly, more than more at large ar rests of undocumented immigrants without criminal convictions than any of the twenty three other field offices in the country. These are immigrants picked up in communities, not

at local jails in prisons. Last year, five states New York, California, Illinois, Oregon, and Washington limited how police can question immigrants about their legal status or hold them for ICE without a warrant. Separately, more than four counties restricted their engagement with ICE enforcement, according to a national survey. On the other hand, fifty nine local agencies and seventeen states have partnerships with ICE

to train and deputize their officers to enforce immigration laws. Hybridization, baby and eat Yeah, and it makes you wonder how many major traps exist on our police force is today. Men who might be friendly and polite, um, but who would stand there with tears in their eyes and shoot

dissidents if that's what they were supposed to do. Popular history likes to focus on outrageous villains like you know, Hitler, But I think these guys are are are are more important to study the the the these otherwise decent normal people who completely fail the thing that turns out to be the greatest moral test of their lives. I say, agents, anyone who's running any of the detention facilities, abusing children

in those facilities, any any of those things. But also, in a way, all of us who live with it, everyone who's able to live with it. You know, that brings me back to the little list of the little Nazis, these guys, these men and women who lived in quiet small towns and villages and suburbs, you know, and most

of these people were people of conscience. They didn't vote for Hitler when they had chance to vote for Hitler um and you know, to the extent that they were aware of what was going on, a lot of them probably wondered, what can I do? How can I keep this from happening? And part of why they let it happen, part of why they sat back while their camps were killing people, were sterilizing people, is because they were just

overwhelmed by daily life. Like if you read these people's interviews, that's a thing you'll hear a lot, is that there was just so much going on, right, There was so much happening in the world, and so many different like things occurring. I didn't know what to do, and I was just exhausted all the time. It's a great excuse,

isn't it. Like, Yeah, there's a there's so. So. In his book, Meyer talks to one of his German colleagues, and this isn't one of the friends that he was studying, because those guys were all members of the Nazi Party. This man was not a Nazi, but he was a German who lived in Germany when the Nazis were in power. Um. He was a linguistics expert and an academic who was

obsessed with the study of Middle high German. So he was he had his field of study that he loved and was tried to kind of pour himself into while

the Nazis rose to power. He told Meyer, quote, what happened here was the gradual habituation of the people little by little to being governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret, to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that even if the people could understand it, it could not be

released because of national security. Yeah, and we've talked a lot about Trump and this, but that's not Trump, that's Obama, that's w. Bush, that's Bill Clinton, that's Bush Senior. That's an increasing thing that's been happening in America under all of the good presidents that have led us to this point is the habituation of people to being governed by surprise. You know. Yeah, uh, speaking of being governed by surprise, I'm gonna tell you to take an ad break. Surprise

Bitch Goods and Services nailed it. Good to know that our comedic timing is still a boy, Sophie me, and you're better than ever rising to the occasion. All right, we're back. So for most ordinary people, the extraordinary degree of trust that they had in Hitler, and there was a tremendous amount of that, especially as he starts to win these victories. He starts to achieve things that had seemed impossible, you know, the retaking the Pseudente Land, rebuilding

the German military concrete in France. Um. People had faith in him, and so that was one reason a lot of them were able to ignore the disappearances in the night. Um. But that wasn't a factor for the people who weren't Nazis the people who never converted. For them, the thing that stopped them from doing more was not just personal fear. It was the exhaustion and burnout they had from living in a society like this. And I'm gonna quote again

from that linguist Zim talking to Meyer. You will understand me when I say that my middle high German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then suddenly I was plunged into all the new activity as the university was drawn into

the new situation, that new situation being fascism. Meetings, conferences, interview ceremonies, and above all papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires, and on top of that where the demands in the community, the things one in which one had to one was expected to participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigamarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies. Coming on top of

the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was then not to think about fundamental things. One had no time. Those Meyer said in response are the words of my friend the Baker one had no time to think. There was so much going on. Your friend the Baker was right, said my colleague. The dictate leadership and the whole process of its coming into being was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway.

I do not speak of your little men, your baker and so on. I speak of my colleagues and myself learned men. Mind you, most of us did not want to think about the fundamental things, and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about. We were decent people and kept so busy with continuous changes in crises, and so fascinated, yes, fascinated by the machinations of the national enemies without and within that we had no time to think about these

dreadful things that were growing little by little all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose we were grateful. Who wants to think, Wow, damn, yeah, I didn't like that. But yeah, yeah, myself in this photo and I don't like it. That's how if you really study the Nazis, you should see yourself more and more with everything you learn in them. And if you don't. You're not studying them, right. That's what's scary about them. That's what's scary about the Holocaust. They thought they were

free as a chilling book. But I don't think there's any competition for the most frightening passage in the whole work. It comes when Meyer sits down, sat down with one of his colleagues, a chemical engineer. And again this is another non Nazi, and he is more depressing than the one you just read. Oh yeah, yes, this is the

bleakest thing I may ever have read. So he sits down with this anti Nazi colleague of his, a chemical engineer who lived through the Reich, and he asks him, one day, tell me, now, how was the world lost? And this is his colleague's response. The world was lost one day in nineteen thirty five here in Germany. It was I who lost it. And I will tell you how. I was employed in a defense plant, a war plant,

of course, but they were always called defense plants. That was the year of the National Defense Law, the law of total Conscription. Under the law, I was required to take the oath of fidelity. I said I would not. I opposed it in conscience. I was given twenty four hours to think it over. In those twenty four hours, I lost the world, yes, I said, and this is Meyer speaking, you see. His friend responded, refusal would have meant the loss of my job, of course, not prison

or anything like that. Later on the penalty was worse. But this was only nineteen thirty five. But losing my job would have meant that I could not get another wherever I went. I should be asked why I left the job I had, and when I said why, I should certainly have been refused employment. Nobody would hire a Bolshevik. Of course I was not a Bolshevik, but you understand what I mean, yes, Meyer said. I tried not to

think of myself or my family. We might have gotten out of the country in any case, and I could have got a job in an industry or education somewhere else. What I tried to think of was the people to whom I might be some help later on if things got worse, and as I believe they would, I had a wide friendship in scientific and academic circles, including many

Jews and Arians too, who might be in trouble. If I took the oath and held my job, I might be of help somehow as things went on, if I refused to take the oath, I would certainly be useless to my friends. Even if I remained in the country, I myself would be in their situation. The next day, after thinking it over, I said I would take the oath with the mental reservation that by the words with which the oath began, I swear by God, I understood that no human being, in no government had the right

to override my conscience. My mental reservations did not interest the official who administered the oath. He said, do you take the oath? And I took it. That day the world was lost, and it was I who will lost it. Do I understand? Meyer said that you think you should not have taken the oath? Yes, But Meyer said, you did save many lives later on. You were of greater use to your friends than you ever dreamed you might be. His friend's apartment was until his arrested imprisonment in nineteen

forty three, a hide out for hugitives. This man hid people from the Nazis. For the sake of argument, he said, I will agree that I saved many lives later on, Yes, which you would not have done if you had refused to take the oath in nineteen thirty five. Yes, of course, I must explain. First of all, there is the problem of the lesser evil. Taking the oath was not so evil as being unable to help my friends later on

would have been. But the evil of the oath was certain and immediate, and the helping of my friends was in the future and therefore uncertain. I had to commit a positive evil there and then in the hope of a possible good later on. The good outweighed the evil, but the good was only a hope. The evil effect there then is my point. If I had refused to take the oath of fidelity, I would have saved all

three million he says, three million. He's talking about all of the eleven million people we now know died in the Holocaust. This was before they had a full count. You are joking, Meyer said, No, you don't mean to tell me that your refusal would have overthrown the regime in nineteen thirty five. No, or that others would have followed your example. No, I don't understand. You are an American,

he said again, smiling. I will explain there I was in nineteen thirty five a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all of his advantages in birth and education and in position, rules or might easily rule in any country. If I had refused to take the oath in nineteen thirty five, it would have meant that thousands and thousands like me all over Germany were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened millions. Thus the regime would have been overthrown, or indeed would never

have come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist in nineteen thirty five meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands like me in Germany were also unprepared, And each one of these hundreds of thousands was like me, a man of great influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost. You were serious, Meyer said completely. He said, these hundred lives I've saved, or a thousand or ten, as you will, what do they represent a little something

out of the whole terrible evil? When if my faith had been strong enough in nineteen thirty five, I could have prevented the whole evil. Your faith, Meyer asked, my faith. I did not believe that I could remove mountains the day I said, no, I had faith in the process of thinking it over. In the next twenty four hours, my faith failed me. So in the next ten years I was able to remove only antills, not mountains. How might your faith on that first day have been sustained?

Meyer asked, I don't know. I don't know, he said, do you. I am an American, I said, my friend smiled. Therefore you believe in education, yes, Meyer said, My education did not help me, and I had a broader and better education than most men have had or ever will have. All it did, in the end was enabled me to rationalize my failure of faith more easily than I might have done if I had been ignorant. And so it was. I think among educated men generally in that time in Germany,

their resistance was no greater than other men's. When do you think the day was lost here? I don't know that it has been, But I know that if I just mean in terms of how far like that, we couldn't have imagined so far that like we we didn't know that Trump's presidency, uh I would have resulted in all of the things that it did. Even though we

didn't know that it would be terrible. I So when do you think was the moment that that mass miscalculation happened for the people that were not like active Trump supporters, but that went along and voted for him. I mean, I guess you could say when they cast a ballot. Now there's an element of which obviously the thing that had happened in Germany that this person is talking about has not happened to us yet. There's no regime making us take loyalty. No, no, no, of course not. But

that's not what I'm saying. I'm it's a one to one. I'm just saying that as pessimistic because I was Trump got elected, I couldn't have even imagined that it's been so much worse. So yeah, so it just makes me wonder at what point people who voted for him, while you know, quote unquote holding their nose or whatever, at what moment it was lost for them when they decided that, you know what, I'll just fucking vote for him. Yeah, I mean, it's got to be. It can't be the

emails like what was the straw? I don't know. Um, that's a question I go with all of the time, and some of it is that as it was then, Um, you know, the the thing that I think this fellow is talking about that that we we have not hit yet, is that the time at which decent people completely surrender to the regime. Um. But it is a thing that will happen if the regime gains enough power, because decent

people are always scared of dying. UM. And I think the folks who have crossed the line already, we're neither decent nor educated. You have to have had a failure of education or decency to have voted for Trump. And you know it's not it's not the people who vote for him that scare me the most. It's it's again

the people who didn't vote for him. But if it meant the difference between their lives or not, would let the camps on the border where there's force ticks directed me is occurring and babies being put in cages, would let those turn into full death camps because the alternative would be would be their own not even loss of life, but loss of comfort and prestige. Like that's the that's

the thing. That's the thing. Like the lesson that this guy is trying to get across to people is that it is not the fascists decision to let the fascists win. They don't make the final call. We do. They only win if we consent to their victory, as millions of decent people consented to the victory of the Nazis. Mic drop, Yeah, you want to plug your plugable story. Fucking funk yourself. Sorry, I was. I'm on the edge of teers, so I'm

trying to Oh, I know, I know, I feel that. Um. I felt that energy this whole time I was on the Virgin Teers earlier. You know, it's the kind of life we're living, my man cool time, So you know, guys, follow it out. I'm just really don't want to do this. Get us up on the Graham. Um. If you want to not kill yourself, I guess, uh, maybe listen to my comedy album Father's Day available wherever you listen to things.

Can I just can I just say that when I plut a shuffle on my like music library and it's you and you come up like after like a really somber song, it's so great. It's just you being just your radiant itself and it just like makes my day

every lovely Thank you, Sophie. If you guys want to find my podcasts that are not about dead babies, learning some of great transitions from Robert You can watch me talking about fiance with Miles Gray from The Daily day Gist and Private Parts Unknown, my podcast with Courtney Kosak about loving sex. Yeah yeah, let's fight fascism real quick, Yeah, real quick. Just for a second, just treat a couple of minutes. Yeah. Uh. Podcasts, Happy Trump, COVID day, no comment,

not a single comment was given. Good stuff, that's the podcast. Sorry it was so depressing. Yeah, damn, thanks, I guess all right, well sorry, Sophia M.