Part Two: The Young, Evil God of Death: Reinhard Heydrich

lady who understands consent. Absolutely. You gotta enthusiastic communications, baby, Yes, that's what gets me on, even though she really is just saying it's happening whether you like it or not. But she gives me actually even consent at all. You could argue that, like, well you can press you can press the leave meeting button, which I mean that I'm tented every time. Every time I see it, I'm like, I could leave right now, as if any other time I couldn't. But you know, it's nice. It's nice to

have someone tell you when they're recording you. You know, that's us the law, I think, yeah, I mean that's probably that's why it's the law. Every state, Like where I live, I don't need to tell people if I record them. It's you know, states are either one party consent or two party state. It's basically so like either just the person recording like needs to know, or everyone does. Um So, Matt Leeb what's us? Comedian funny guy, podcaster

guy who podcasts podcast called Yeah, yeah you do. You get him in you you drop it into the p zones straight away. And this is of course behind the Bastards. This is part two of our podcast series about Ryan Heart Heydrick maybe the worst of the Nazis um which is saying a lot quite a resume line, like in

your Hell resume set, like what did you do? I'm the guy Hitler thought was extra I love the Hell entrance interview where you're sitting with the devil and he was like, uh, You've got some pretty impressive, you know, things that you've done in your life. I see here you were vale victorian at Nazi you know, yes, graduated Nazi come loudly and uh fucking you know, yeah, you got the job burning health for eternity. Uh yeah, what

an amazing piece of shit. Um So, Matt, you know, one of the problems with this episode, Like, right, this is the thing we talked. We just did the Dullest

Brothers episodes. Right, We did a three partner and there was like four hours of talking and let out a lot you know, um, and it was a lot of like we mostly left out the stuff that was was shitty, but kind of either you know, like the Kennedy assassination stuff where I can't really say one way or the other what their role was, or stuff like we didn't go to detail at in k Ultra because we're gonna

do it eventually. We preferred, though, to talk about like the you know, the coups and the genocides that extended from them, so that we weren't leaving out the biggest crimes against humanity that they've committed as part of this as the head of the you know, the head and then of the CIA and the head of the State Department with Reinhard Heydrich in order to make time, there's a lot of crimes against humanity that we're just leaving out or wallpre because it's like I can't talk about

all of the epoco crimes against like human nature and civilization that this guy did. That's how many crimes against humanity he was responsible for. His bio is too big. You know, you can't read his entire bio. You've gotta you gotta, really fucking you gotta find all of the ones that you're like this this will work. You gotta you gotta like you've gotta rank them, which is hard

to do in terms of crimes. So if you're I mean, there's there's going to be numerous people listening to this podcast asked whose family members were exterminated as a result of something Reinhard Heydrich did, and if we left out the particular crime against humanity he committed against your ancestors, I do apologize. There's too many of them. Yeah, we can't, can't go into every single one, which is it just goes to show how much of a piece of ship

this guy was. Really tremendous asshole. Um bad dude, bad, really bad dude. So we left off Hitler had just kind of taken power, you know, um N three was the year that Hitler kind of got his not quite ultimate power. Yet you know, there's still he's the Chancellor, there's still Hindenburg in there. He hasn't quite taken everything. But this is the year during which he he consolidates and and and gets total power. Um and it's a process. The Nazis don't just get elected and become in charge.

There's a lot of resistance to them at the start, including a lot of people, a lot of conservatives who are like, well, we're compromising by letting Hitler be in power, but he's not going to get total power, Like, we're still going to have all these different checks that against them. So the first thing the Nazis have to do is destroy any chance of their being checks against them, and they do this by taking over all of Germany's police agencies um and this was again there's resistance to this

in Bavaria and a number of other German states. Elements of the police resist Nazi control and they're all unsuccessful. Right at the end of the day, most cops just go along with it, and none of the cops who don't go along with it remain cops. Um now uh. In April of nineteen thirty three, Heinrich Himmler is appointed commander of the Bavarian political police. So there's like criminal police, there's there's order police, right which you're kind of like

your traffic cops. Basically cops you're like, you're drunk in the street, and there's political police whose job is to like, are you seditious? Are you going to carry out treason and ship And they've existed before during the Republic, but under the Nazis, the political police are going to be by far the biggest and most powerful police, because that's the Nazis are most concerned with right um and Heinrich Himler but comes ahead of the Bavarias, which is one

state's political police. He makes Reinhard Hydrick the police commissioner. So Himmler is the big picture guy. Ryan Hart is going to be running the day to day behind the scenes. The Nazis when they, you know, first start taking over these agencies, they have themselves a party, and because it's a Nazi party, that means they're beating and torturing and murdering people that they've had problems with for a while

but hadn't controlled the cops. Uh Reinhard's wife later wrote, quote I had to laugh so hard when she found out that Hydrick had been made the police commissioner. Quote. Reinhard said he felt great satisfaction that the same people who have been locking up the essay and the SS just half a year ago, who beat them down with rubber truncheon's could now no longer straighten their backs for all the bowing they did. It's correct now, Yeah, it's cool,

it's good ship. Now that he was in charge of the political police, Hydrick's job was to arrest every communist and social democratic enemy of the Nazi Party and have them tortured and beaten. More than two people were locked up in the first couple of days. Every one of them was beaten badly. Now at this stage, Jews were not the Nazi Party's chief priority. Um, so again they're rounding up mostly political enemies, mostly leftist. Some of those people in Jewish, and they do go after like there's

especially there's random violence against Jews. But the party is not focusing on fucking with Jewish people right now because they they still aren't in solid power. The left could take things back at this point, so that's going to be their focus right. Um. That said, there is a lot of violence against Jewish people, and Hydric gleefully related to his wife the story of a Jewish man that s S officers brought into headquarters. Quote they made short

work of him. They beat him with dog whips, pulled off his shoes and socks, and then he had to walk home barefoot in the company of s s men. That will give you an idea of how they do things. Many Jesuits and Jews have fled from here. No one is dead, no one has been seriously injured. But fear fear, I tell you, that's really the goal. And this is one of the things there was not from the beginning. This is and this is debated. There's a lot of argument as to whether or not from the beginning there

was a concerted Nazi plan to um to exterminate the Jews. Um. I think there was a concerted willingness to to to kill the Jews. I think there was a lot of joking and talking about it. I think there were plenty of people who didn't have an issue with it, but they weren't planning to do it necessarily from the beginning. There's strong evidence that it's something that kind of evolved

over time, and particularly in this period. That's not I think one of the important things is that it was not necessarily inevitable that the Holocaust would go the way that it did. It was inevitable that they were going to be Jewish people beaten, that there was gonna be some sort of apartheid state, probably not necessarily inevitable that

what happened was going to happen. Right, That's why part of the story, that's the final part of the final solution, that's what that's kind of you know, it was it

was the logical conclusion of the ideology. You know, it wasn't uh, it was talked about and joked about and you know kind of considered something that people used rhetorically as a rhetorical divice, but people didn't actually think this is something they would ever try to pull off, like not because it just seemed just h not only like irrational, but like I mean just logistically not possible. But boy

where they are wrong. Yeah, they And it's it's one of those things it's important to bring up the phrase final solution because people don't think about what that actually means enough. The Jewish question. Germans didn't invent that phrase, right, That's something being asked i'll throughout Europe, and the question is like, well, these people aren't like us, but they live in our societies. What did we do with them? Right?

And a lot of that's you know that we've talked you see the protocols of the Elder's Zion episode, the fact it's the final solution, because the Nazis try a couple of other solutions. Yeah, the final one is genocide, and that's the important part of the story. I think now proportionally more political enemies were arrested in Bavaria under

Hydrick than in any of the other German states. By April ten, ten tho people had been taken into custody by as s D. And again it's not just the s D. They're using cops as well, right, Um, there's cops, and also like they're just kind of like deputizing a bunch of Nazis in the s S to act as cops so that they can take in people. Um. There were protests against these mass arrests, and these protests are

violently dispatched by the German police. One lawyer, Michael Siegel, lodged a complaint to Hydrick against the arrest of a Jewish client. Hydrick had him beaten by s S auxiliary policeman and then forced march through the city carrying a sign that said I will never again complain about the police man fucking a and that honestly, it's just like especially where we are now, Hydri says, blue lives matter straight up. Yeah, straight up as like blue lives matter.

This is like the fucking the thin the thin blue rich you know, yeah, the thin blue Reich. Thank you for that. Yeah, it really is. It's God, this fucking someone just printing out all your tweets and making you walk around barefoot. Yeah. Now, up to this point, Yanhard's achievements amount to little more than being a good liar and knowing how to do very basic thug shit. But it was during this period that he would really distinguish himself as an innovator by helping to develop a new

tool for repression. So German law, when the Nazis came to power, provided for something called Shultzhoft, or protective custody. This gave police the power, under certain circumstances, to detain a person without judicial review, so without a warrant, without it charges, to essentially arrest someone to take them into custody. And I think the original idea was to allow the police to take somebody to custody who might present a

danger to themselves. Who might be in danger, who was in a situation, and it was in a situation where they couldn't get a ruling for the course at the same time. Right, the problem with giving the police any powers like this, even if the goal is maybe to protect people, is that once that power exists, fascists will find a way to use it, which is the same problem we're we're having and will continue to have with

our police now. In nineteen thirty three, Hydrick and his colleagues redefined protective custody in a way that allowed his s D and policeman to detain any citizen for any reason without involving the courts. This is the start of the development of the concentration camp system. This is the legal underpinning of why they're able to exist, of how

they're justified under the law. From this point forward, no court cases or warrants were necessary for the police to take in someone who was defined by the Nazis as quote an enemy of the Reich. Now, all these arrestees had to be put somewhere in the existing state prison and jail facilities were hardly built to accommodate such numbers. In March of nineteen thirty three, an abandoned munitions factory was converted into a concentration camp. This was not the

first under the Nazis. There were prior to this what we're called wild Concentration camps are basically just like we're gonna appropriate a facility to stick people were arresting, right, But they get and and Hydrick is not the only person who's a major driver of this. They get this abandoned me asitions factory, they put walls around it, they turned it into a concentration camp. Now you want to guess with the town this factory is in. It's called

oh god, guess what the town called summer village. You might have heard of called oh doc Yeah, that was yeah, this is doc How. Yeah. So the facility is quickly put in the hands of the s S. Hydrick is not in charge of doc Ou, but he's in charge of who goes to Dachau and when they're released. Right, that's important. There's a separation of powers here. But he's a big part of the dock house system because it's he who gets to shoes who who gets sent there.

You know, um Dackau is you. Everyone knows the name doc How. There's a shifver down the human spine when you say it. It was a horrible place. Prisoners were relatively regularly beaten to death. Thirteen people were killed in one month in nineteen thirty three, and a lot more would follow. By early nineteen thirty four, Ryan Hard's police

had arrested more than sixteen thousand people. Most of these people were beaten, arrested and released and given a warning basically that you were you were arresting these people, you beat the ship out of him, and you say, hey, stay the funk out of politics. From that right, more than two thousand though, the people who were like seeing as the real threats were interned in dock out. Now, it's important to note that the Nazis and him Learn

in particular. Again, we're big about separation of responsibilities. So the guy who actually runs dock out is a fellow named Theodore Ike, and we're gonna talk about him for just a little bit because, like Hydrick, Ike was a former military man who had been dismissed very quickly for bad behavior. Um so he'd been disgraced because of like fucked up ship he did in the military, kicked out

of the military. He had actually been arrested in the Weimar years and sent to a psychiatric asylum because he had illegal explosives that he was planning to do something fucked up with He's like, gonna make a kind of guy you get um. So he does well under the Nazis and they give him They put him in charge of doc Out. And part of why I'm bringing ike story up is because he and Hydrick have a similar background.

These are guys who had nothing before Nazism, who had disgraced themselves, and Nazism gave them a second chance, and they really saw it, not just in ideological terms, but this is my only chance to matter. Because the Nazi regime was fiercely competitive, and because competing within that crew often meant being the hardest and most violent, Hydrock and Ike would both compete to see who could be the most brutal, and that's a big part of why doc

Ou becomes so horrible. Hydrocs guys are competing to see how many people they can arrest, um, how brutally they can crack down on descent, how frightening they can be. Ike is competing with his to make his concentration camp the most horrifying place. He possibly can. None of them are getting necessarily from most of the stuff. They're not getting orders from above. They're interpreting things that their superiors are saying and passing and seeing what can I do

to please them? And that leads them to be as extreme as possible. God, it's just like it's just like spawned from this like fucking petty egoistic competition about who could be a bigger piece of ship. It's like exactly, you know, It's like it's like fucking John Lennon writing Strawberry Fields and Paul McCartney writing, uh, you know, Penny Lane, but like the dark side of that. You know, it's like they both made themselves better at what they did,

but but at murder, but it but but it murder. Yes, you could call Ryan Hart Heydrick Theodore I. Kinder came the Beatles of genocide. That's what what I'm trying to do is tie the Beatles into Nazism. So can you get a T shirt that's like the cover of Abbey Road, but with the Nazis walking across the street? Can we You think it's gonna go over? Well? Yeah, I think that will be really useful merch. Alright, I'm gonna make it on my own. Yeah, I mean conceptually I get it,

but probably not something that I would walk around. Yeah, it's not a joke people passing on the street. I still I still get. I still get strange looks and I where the maybe leaders are a bad idea emerge. M it's it's not Rushmore but with all the worst bastards ever. Like, Okay, I could see how that's hard can be misinterpreted family events, though you bring the shirt. Yeah, you bring it the family events, and you mostly just

keep it inside. I have I have a shirt, an entire T shirt that's just a giant close up of a butthole, and I don't wear it outside, you know, but I enjoy that I have it. Yeah, I have. I have a T shirt from the band Millions of Dead Cops, which I wear when I'm not driving anywhere. When I get pulled over in that shirt, I mean behind the police shirt is strictly for the house. Yeah, all of your merch are just shirts no one wears. Don't don't wear these if you might be over please um.

So again, it's important to understand kind of the way this These guys are kind of independent at Lee trying to top each other. And that's how a lot of these that's how a lot of the worst crimes of the Nazi regime are committed. And I'm gonna quote from Robert Gervat again. Hydrick's actions cannot simply be understood as those of a bloodthirsty sadist playing a preconceived role in

building a totalitarian police state. Since joining the s s and nineteen thirty one, he had immersed himself in a political milieu which thrived on the notion of being locked in a life and death struggle. Winning that struggle required decisive action against enemies in respect of whom even the most unimaginable cruelty was justified. As his future deputy vern are best observed, Hydrick tended to project his own proclivity towards intrigues and violence onto his real or imagined enemies.

Finally free to move against an ideological enemy who had supposedly enjoyed the upper hand until nineteen thirty three, he considered terror a justifiable weapon, in fact, the only adequate weapon against such evil. We can talk about Q and on here we could talk about the modern Republican Party.

The way that framing your enemies as like demonic, like inherently destructive, omniscile foes justifies any kind of terror you can dream of, both in human and also uh, the perception that they are just constantly on top, even in moments in which you are literally on top. Yeah, So if you happen to get you have to murder them as soon as you get the chance, because you know they're they're always winning otherwise because you're trying to be

in the playing field. Yeah, because they would murder me if they were if they if they had the chance to do it, then it's like, well they've ben't had the chance to do it. They never did, so they actually didn't. Uh yeah, yeah you notice here it's still alive and they never did that. But yeah they noticed that. Um anyway, so uh. While Hydric used terror as a weapon, he also spent a lot of his time in this period and throughout actually his early career in the as

a Nazi. As much as he is arresting dissidents, having them tortured, having them sent to concentration camps, as much as he does that, he threatens his subordinates with punishment for illegally beating or killing detainees. Um, this was not out of any kind of humanitarian desire. This is out of the fact that he wants to be seen. He wants the system he is running to be seen as

orderly and lawful. He does not want the majority of the German population to be frightened of the Nazis, because at this point they're still trying to win public support. And all these guys who will be fine with if you say I've put a criminal in a concentration camp, they're like, fine, if they see a dude getting beaten

in the street, that's disorder, that's nasty. They don't like that. Um, they want every death to be uh, at least have some semblance of justification in the eyes of people who aren't there, who don't know the reasons why, and who are just going to take the story, the general story that the fucking that the perpetrators they're gonna it's It's like a lot of Republicans were horrified by the George Floyd video, but at the same time, as long as

they don't see a video of it, they're just like, oh, well, he had he might have had a gun, right, They don't care. All they need to know is like, oh, a cop shot a dangerous man. I don't care about that. You see the reality of it, and it horrifies you. That's the thing Hydrick. He's very savvy. He knows I don't want random street violence. I don't want grams. I want orderly, state sanctioned legal repression and murder. That's Hydrick's

fucking bag, baby, um so. One of Hydrick's most prominent victims in this period was the Nobel laureate and critic of the Nazis, Thomas Man. Now Man had the fortune to be out on a reading tour of Europe when the Nazis took power, and he had been a vociferous critic of the Nazis, very public. He's a very famous intellectual. He'd been attacking them for uh for years. And he's out of Germany when they take power, and he is a smart guy. So he's like, I'm not going back home.

It seems like this isn't gonna be good for me. I'm gonna I'm gonna hang out elsewhere and wait, I'm gonna just chill for a minute on this whole going back to Germany thing, just kind of see what happened. Yeah, I think I want to let this play out a little bit before I go back Um. And while he was away, Hydrick's police rated Mon's home and took his cars, bank accounts, and private possessions. He eventually succeeded in having

Thomas Mann stripped of his German citizenship. By nineteen thirty four, Himler and Hydroc had created a remarkably effective terror regime in Bavaria. Their superiors noted their success and noted that Bavaria Nazi control is more complete. Their elimination of political enemies had been more effectively carried out than anywhere else in the New Reich. And so in April of nineteen thirty four, Hydric has given control of the Prussian Gestapo as well. And we're not gonna the Gestapo doesn't exist

before the Nazis. The Gestapo is kind of like unifying these Nazi intelligence apparatus is with the state political police, and that becomes the Gestapo. That's more Gering's bag. But Hydric is kind of from the beginning in control of a lot of it, in control of the practical details of what it does at least um. And so he's given control of the Prussian Gestapo in ninety four. This puts thousands of secret police and multiple states under his hands.

So now he's basically in charge of repression in Bavaria UH and in Prussia UM. It also means that he's now officially a big man in the Nazi party and this would give him meaningful input during the next critical stage stage of Nazi development. Now, if you'll remember, Ernst Rome and his brown Shirts had been a major locust of Nazi power in the early years. These guys are hitler street fighters, his gangsters, and Rome is a military veteran.

He's a very tough man. He's good at organizing street fighters. He's also a revolutionary. Rome isn't satisfied when Hitler takes power. For one thing, he doesn't want to rebuild the German military. He wants to replace the military with his essay. And he's a he's a he's a he's a He's not someone who's ever going to be satisfied with what the Nazi state became, because he's just a lot more radical than that. And once you're in power, a guy like

Rome is a liability threat. Yeah, because he keeps doing the street terror in random islands and ship and at this point, the Nazis are trying to play nice with the conservatives. They want the center right, the middle class majority of Germany to like see like, Oh, these Nazi guys are are are safe and normal and we're gonna have a stable society under them. Um So they got to get rid of fucking Rome. And I'm gonna quote

from a rite up by Bleaker Street Media here. While still fiercely loyal to Hitler, Rome's vision for Nazi Party future was increasingly at odds with Hitler's. For Hydrick and Hitler, there was a more pragmatic problem with the Essay. Although the two men ran the s D in the Gestapo, these organizations were officially under the domain of the Essay in Rome. To secure their independence, Hitler and Hydric conspired

with Herman Garring to create a case against Rome. On June four, Hydrick presented a dussier, a fabricated evidence to Hitler that detailed the trees in this plot in which the French were paying Rome twelve million marks to overthrow the Reich. Based on Hydrick's trumped up report, Hitler authorized a surprise attack against the Essay to take place on June thirty, Hydrick's men swooped in, arresting Rome with eight along with eighty five of his top officers, many of

whom we're intentionally shot to death in the process. When the smoke cleared, the Essay had been dissolved. Between a hundred and fifty and two hundred people, including Rome, had been murdered, and Hydrock and Himler were now free to run the sd and Gestapo as they saw fit. This is the Night of Long Knives. Hydrick is the big man orchestrating this. Yeah, you gotta you gotta love a foreign plot. That's just classic. That's a classic tactic. Just uh you know, he's uh, he's sucking. I heard him

talking to a Portuguese guy about taking over. So uh time the murder all of them. It's really it's it's smart. It always works. Yep, yep. Now, um so after the Night of Long Knives. The big thing that this does is it removes the s S finally from underneath the Essay shadow. And because of this, the Essay is able to grow to become the preminent terror organization within the Nazi state. Now, while Hydrick's career was soaring, his income

began to increase commence. Really as well, he benefited from a number of loans from wealthy members of the Nazi Party, which he was not expected to repay. He's basically just being given money. It's graft, you know. So he's able to build a mansion in a summer home and a hunting lodge, and despite his new wealth, he could not be ours to take care of his family. His parents were destitute still, and they begged him for loans, despite the fact that he'd begged them for a loan two

and a half years earlier. He turns them down and doesn't give them a fucking dime. Yeah, it's he's cold as ice. His sister repeatedly tells him their parents are going to starve if he doesn't help, and eventually he's able to give. He gives his mom like a little bit of money, but he requires her to take care of his kids in order to get it. Like he's just like, yeah, he's just such a piece of ship. Yeah, it's called program, And obviously we're talking about one of

the worst seas in history. Being addict to his family kind of pales, but it's it's useful. It provides some con text just because of like this guy wasn't even nice to the people he loved. Like he's just a real bad person. Yeah, it just it adds color to it because you're just like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, he hates the Jews, he's going to kill all the communist blah blah blah blah blah, but his his own mother. Fucking Hey, Robert, Robert, you know who will be nice

to all of our moms? The products and services that support this podcast, I mean one would hope except for Raytheon because you know who likes to show up at weddings his mom's and you know what Raytheon likes to do to weddings. Ah, here's some ads. We're back and we're talking about the Raytheon bit that I've been doing for like a hearing change now probably our longest running bit, and I try to like we've had a number of running bits on the show that I try to recycle

because I don't want to get old. You know, like we don't do the dur stuff anymore, we don't go through in bagels anymore, and we may I mean when when we can go in person again. We'll have a redux of throwing ship around the studio. Because it is fun. But um, you don't want things to get too old. I can't stand up with Raytheon. I can't quit them

because they're just they just give us material. There's an company whose former executive runs the Defense Department who has like orchestrated a series of who's who's like largely responsible for instigating and continuing to fund violence in a number of international countries in order to like make profit for themselves.

And their name is Raytheon. They're calling like fucking hell, it's like a classic super villain name and the And I also, you know, I love any any like evil corporation social media account during any month in which they're supposed to be like uh you know, sort of like an ethnic pride or like a pride, and they're just we love trans people. Were Theon is asking all of

our all of our customers to be better. Yeah, love it when IBM does ship like that, because like they literally built the punch card system that tricks the Jews that used in order to to orchestrate the Holocaust. Thanks IBM. Surely Ray Theon will never be a part of anything like that. They wouldn't let their missile guidance technology be used to massacre. I don't know, dissidence against the US government or against like a US backed regime in a

foreign country. That would never be the race, not ray Theon. They support all a A p I people, as you can tell by last month tweet thanks for that ray Theon. God. People keep like telling me that they found out that the knife missile, the rn I n X exists and

they thought it was a joke. I was making it first, Like, you can't joke about the funniest thing about the knife missile too, is it's they built this missile that is just filled with knives so that they can kill people who are like they can kill a single target without killing the people around them, right, because a knife missile less collateral damage than an I guess it's legitimately the fun I think about the knife missile, it's the best

idea anyone's had in the war on terror in twenty years, like, which just means it's not awful, but it's the only good idea ever. And I was like, oh, hey, we can actually kill less people with a knife missile. Yeah, right, And it was invented by a middle schooler in the nineties who like new metal. You know, it's the most new metal idea. This is my band knife missile, oh

manon anyway, when compared. Yeah, so throughout the rest of the early in mid nineteen thirties, Right and Harder Hydro embarked in a project to take control of all political intelligence gathering agencies in Germany. And I'm not going to go into extreme detail about all the politicking and Nazi in fighting here. The book Hitler's Hangman is I think it's a very good biography, very readable biography. Goes into

a lot of detail about this um. What's important is how he directed the increasingly powerful intelligence ratis he came to control. Now, early on, the Nazis had had real enemies, you know, communists and social democrats were trying to stop the Nazis, right, they were trying to make a different kind of government. They were legitimately enemies of the Nazis. By five right Hard largely rein Hard, But he and

his colleagues have wiped out the communist underground. There is no more political opposition to the regime that has any kind of meaningful power. Those guys have all been killed, put in concentration camps or frightened outside of political activision activism. This presented a problem because the Reich Interior Minister, a guy named phil Helm Frick, who was a conservative more than really a Nazi. Um. He doesn't uh, he doesn't really want a totalitarian state, right, he wants a right

wing dominated state where the left is illegal. But he doesn't want like, he doesn't want to live in what Nazi Germany becomes. UM And he's on paper Himler's boss. And now that the regime has wiped out the left, he's like, well, we should probably get rid of these extra judicial powers we gave the s S to allow them to wipe out the left. Otherwise this could get bad. We don't want this to get weird. Yeah, well does it get bad? Frick giant piece of shit. So Frick.

There's a fight between him and Uh and Himmler and Hydrick, and Frick loses this fight in June of nineteen thirty six, when Hitler formally appoints Himmler head of all German police. And I'm gonna quote from the book Hitler's Hangman here.

The victory of the s S and the power struggle with the Reich Interior Ministry was primarily the result of Hitler's decision to favor a more open ended definition of Nazism's enemies, a definition which Hydric had crucially contributed to and which went far beyond the persecution of the political

opposition that is typical of all dictatorships. In late nineteen thirty four, Himler and Hydric came to the conclusion that the justification of a permanent police state required a carefully elaborated scenario portraying an all pervasive and subtly camouflaged network of enemies who made necessary and extensive and sophisticated security

system to detect, expose, and defeat them. In nineteen thirty five and a series of articles for the s S journal Dash Schwartz Corps and republished in nineteen thirty six as the Transformations of Our Struggle, Hydric publicly defined such threats and the means to combat them, indicating the need

for a momentous reorientation of the Gestapo's activities. His central argument was that even after the successful elimination of the KPD and the SPD, the Communists and the Social Democrats, the enemies of the German people were by no means defeated. After achieving the immediate goal of Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January nineteen thirty three. Many Germans wrongly assumed that Nazi rule was now permanently secured. Hydro consisted that the

battle was by no means over. Instead, the struggle against Germany's enemies now faced its most difficult and ultimately its decisive phase, which would require quote years of bitter struggle in order to repulse and destroy the enemy once and

for all. According to Hydric, the driving forces of the enemy always remained the same world jewry, world freemasonry, and political priests who abused the freedom of religious expression and spirituality of large portions of the population for political reasons. First of all, I love that this is just like the foreign plot is now coming from inside the house. Uh. It could be anyone specifically, the Jews and the Freemasons and the Jesuits. The Jesuits, yes, which uh? And the

fucking they weren't these guys freemasons. Wasn't he a Freemason? His dad was? His dad was? Yeah? No, wonder that this is why he's letting his dad starve, Like I think he believes only parts of what he's said. Of course, now this is where we get into because again he's saying this because it justifies his power. Right. This is one of the most important things you have to understand

about the Nazis. First off, even when Hitler came to power, it was not a foregone conclusion that Nazi Germany would become the kind of tatalitarian state that it did, or

that the Holocaust would happen. We can argue over whether or not Hitler had a grand scheme or a desire to do that from the beginning, but it was not foregone that he would have the power even once he was in charge, because once he became the chancellor, there are still a lot of people in the government, people in the military, who could overthrow him, who could kick him out, and who didn't agree with most of what

he was saying. Um And the evidence we have shows that Hitler did not pursue genocide in an organized and cohesive manner from the beginning of his time in power. The pivot from left wingers as enemies to Jews and other internal enemies, which was orchestrated by Hydrich and justified by him in his public columns, was a key part of why the Holocaust came to pass, and while Reinhard was surely an anti Semite by this period, he did

this for fundamentally careerist reasons. If the Reich's new enemies were elusive racial and religious enemies, the police were clearly ill equipped to handle such a threat. He was able to increase his personal power and his personal clout by pitching the s S his SS as the ideological shock troops, which is what he called them of Nazism. Man. So it's just like, uh, you know, it's completely void of

any ideology beyond your own personal power. Void because I think he probably tells himself and believes elements of what he's saying, But the ideology is secondary to the desire

from exactly, yeah, it's secondary to it. It's like, you know, because you can take any German off the street and uh in this period and they have you know, a cultural fucking anti Semitism, right, But like this guy is actively organizing a mass genocide because he wants a better title and he wants more people to work under him. I mean just like this is like this is the logical conclusion of anyone in like a PMC class. It's like, I want to be the biggest baddest middle manager of

all time. Yes, exactly. Yeah, it's kind of hydra Yeah, yeah, he's a general side. Yeah. Now, Reinhard saw Freemasonry and communism in fact, and also the political church right, which is the Catholic church here you said Jesuits earlier. That's a big part of he goes after the Catholics. He does have to be very careful going after the Catholics because a lot of Germans are Catholics. And he and I mean yeah, he is too, um so he One of the ways he frames is that like Freemason's communists,

these political clerics are agents of Judaism. So Judaism is just one of a couple of internal enemies, but it's the one that's behind the others generally, and in fact, all social justice movements and they do frightenness is like they call it. Social justice movements are part of a scheme to weaken Germany by the Jews. In order to combat this scheme, Hydrick and his men would need quote

utter hardness. He acknowledged that the cruelty his men would have to display in order to do what was necessary would be difficult for them, saying at one meeting quote it is almost too difficult for an individual. But we must be hard as granite or else our viewer's work will be in vain. Much later people will be grateful

for what we have taken upon us. God, it's just like we all have to just stick together, just a bunch of men, hard as a rock, hard, a hard dude, just hard dudes, just fucking Oh, I'm talking vaining and hard. That's what we have to be in order to accomplish this. Hidrick was a major reason why the German police operated throughout the Reich in a permanent state of emergency. That's his a big part his doing. He's the guy who suggests this. At least he's like, we have extra powers

because of a state of emergency. If the state of emergency is over, because you've purged all of your political enemies, you lose those powers. So he's like, no, no, no no, because of all the Jews in the Freeman, there's still an immer ergencies, so we need these powers, though they never leave this state of emergency. Um now, to help develop new plans to deal with this new threat, he brings experts into the s S. One of these experts, his Jewish expert is a guy you might have heard

of named Adolph Aikman. Now later on in the sixties, when he goes to trial and is eventually executed by the State of Israel. Um Hannah rent Will famously right of Aikman that he embodied the banality of evil because he's he's a middle manager type guy. He's his dude who looks like someone you might see in lying at the fucking elementary school picking his kid up in a minivan. Um, and he's a big He's like Hydrick and that he's a he's an implementation guy. You know, he's not the

guy out they're giving the speeches. He doesn't get anybody like. He doesn't he doesn't fire up the masses. But in a meeting when you've got like multiple different government agencies, Hydrock and Eichmann are the guys who are capable of wrangling everyone together. They're like whips in the Senate, right, they whip votes, they whip support together, and they organize and figure out how to carry out plans of action.

Adolf Eichman is hired to the s S as his Jewish expert, and his experience for being a Jewish expert is that Um not not. At that point he eventually does learn Sebieish. He had been a salesman um and he liked crime books. He liked he liked, he liked detective novels. He liked the same books that Hidrick did. That's why he gets the job. You're the jew expert. You like the same books, and you you used to go to that deli all the time. You know what

locks one skin? You've had aer Dill? Tell us about them? What are they like? The articles Hydric wrote about the internal Jewish threat played a direct role in bringing on what scholars called the second anti Semitic wave in Nazi Germany, which began in nineteen thirty five with mass spontaneous violence against Jewish people in businesses. Hydrock did this because it was bad for the economy and for the sense of order. He knew that the German middle class, center right families

did not like seeing that ship. The Nuremberg laws. Then we're a response to street anti semitism. The Nuremberg laws existed to stop people from beating and murdering Jews in the street and destroying their businesses. Because that ship is bad for business. Right, there were like no, no, no, no, no, listen, we're gonna do this through the state. We're gonna have this state put they're they're metaphorical boot on their neck. Yes, we need to oppress the Jews with law, not with

random street violence, exactly exactly. And we need to know you know what constitutes did you? We need to know how much blood you need to have, you know how many how many times you know you've been to the theater. You know, we need to know all this stuff first before we can categorize you exactly. And that's a big part of the Nuremberg Laws. We're not going to go

into nearly enough to tail. I mean, there's whole just about the Nuremberg Laws, and there's this process of determining what a Jew is because this is and this is a big misconception. The Jews are not targeted by the Nazi state for their religion. They are targeted for their ethnicity. If you're a someone who had a Jewish mom and you're a hardcore Protestant or a Catholic, you're a Jew.

To ryanhard Hydrick. If you're an atheist and you marry a fucking bohemian woman who's a Catholic, you're a Jew. To Ryan Hard Hydrick, it didn't even matter if it was within Jewish law, like if you had a Jewish father but not a Jewish mother, like you know, that's not haloic lee Jewish. But and it depends because like the under the Nuremberg laws, I think that guy wouldn't be a Jew. He changed, Yeah, he he liked the Nuremberg Laws, but he thought they didn't go far enough.

And his big issues is that, well, this doesn't define enough people as Jewish, right, there's too many ways for someone with Jewish ancestry to slip into the people's racial community. And that's a problem for me. But he sees still this is a big step forward, right, the Nuremberg laws, because now there's this is the first real legal justification

for for sustained persecution of the Jews under the Nazi regime. Now, in nineteen thirty four, Hydroc had suggested in an internal memo that quote the aim of Jewish policies must be the immigration of all Jews, and he urged that voluntary immigration could be achieved by creating a legal climate so oppressive that Jewish people could no longer stand to stay in the Reich. To further this end. In nineteen thirty five, he had the Gestapo start keeping track of all Jewish

German residents. In nineteen thirty six, he started monitoring their financial transactions to stop them from putting their money in foreign banks. They had to leave, but he wanted most of their wealth to remain. Now. Hydrock supported to an extent the Zionist movement in Palestine UM and in fact he had we have these memos from him where he's saying like, I want to crack down on any sort of organizations supporting jew Is assimilation into German culture when

we should support the Zionist movement UM. And in fact, he actually sends Adolf Eichman to Palestine in the thirties to talk with a member of the Haganah UM which becomes the I d F, to discuss how they could further urge further immigration. And this there's we should go

into more detail about. There's some wild ship at this meeting, including the fact that this this UH, this emissary of the Zionist movement tells Aikman that the German like they're having problems with the German Jews who were leaving Germany and coming to Palestine because number one, they don't plan to stay. They want to go back to Europe. And there, in his words, workshy, which is also what the Nazis described.

It's it's really a lot of interesting history. They're very interesting internal anti Semitism amongst the kind of like right wing class in Israel. Yeah, and it it doesn't like again, as soon as the war starts with the vast majority of the Zionist movement, like is not just anti Nazi is like actively shooting Nazis of course, the but there's there's, as we talked about in some other episodes, there's a chunk of them that are willing to work with these

guys because they both think Jews shouldn't assimilate. Um. Now, even the Nazis were not uniform in their attitudes about what should be done to the Jews. And again, this is actually a thing that there's a lot of debate over because there's large chunks of the Nazi party who want the street violence, who think that the programs are the way to go about achieving their wins. Gebel's is

a big chunk of this. Gebel supports kind of a calodic melange of Boycott's street violence and vandalism against Jews. That's why he and his propaganda arms are trying are stirring up a lot of this street violence, right, That's their goal is to get Germans out in the street doing violence and destroying Jewish property and hi like, there's a big competition between these two wings of the of the German Party, both of which are essentially proposing different

answers to the Jewish question. Gebel's is saying, you know, we beat them and kill them in the street force and that will force you know, the ones we don't beat and kill to leave. Hydrick is saying, no, no no, no, we is the law to in an orderly way oppressed them so that they leave. Those are two different answers

to the Jewish question. In late nineteen thirty five, these various sides of the Nazi Party kind of came together decided, like, we can't keep arguing over this, we have to have a concerted strategy um and they held a big how to racism meeting. Now, the impetus of this was a massive program in nineteen thirty five that did millions of dollars in damage to the German economy, because again, when

you run through the streets, destroying businesses and departments. It's bad for business, right, Yeah, it's these these economies don't exist in a vacuum. Like you're actively hurting the German economy as well when you're doing this. Yeah, and so in this like this meeting is actually is called because the German economic minister a guy named Hilmar Shocked Um who's a friend of the Dullest brothers and also I

think a friend of of the Koch brother's dad. Um. He's an anti Simon, but he's I'll just tell you, I am Shocked Shocked. That's good. So he felt that the economic consequences of this were unacceptable, and so he holds this meeting to be like, we have to figure out a better way to do this. And Hydrick is very much in agreement with Shocked in this, and he takes this meeting as an opportunity to try to whip again the thing he does best. He tries to whip

everyone in line behind his strategy. Um. He says during the meeting quote the only way to both get the Jews out and avoid violence is a concerted campaign of economic marginalization Um. He also suggested a ban on mixed marriage, the prosecution of sexual intercourse between Jews and Arians, and restrictions of Jewish freedom of movement. His suggestion in this meeting led directly to the Nuremberg Laws, which were formulated

that September. So again that's why this all happens. So the Nuremberg Laws are the legal basis for all organized Nazi persecution of Jews and the first concrete step towards the Holocaust. And Hydrick's performance in that meeting, his ability to wrangle his fellow Nazis towards his desired plan of action, establishes him as the leading Nazi authority on the Jewish question. Now, the mid nineteen thirties are also the height of the weird Nazi period. This is the time when the occult

wings of the party where at their strongest. The ship you see in Hell Boy, right, elements that were real. There was a bunch of weird like Heinrich Kimler thinking he's the reincarnation of a Danish prince. Right, Hitler's best buddy who Rudolph. I think it was Rudolf hess Um who was like super into the occult and was like doing like seances and ship. Yeah, this is when they went like doing like full nerd ship, just learning out

on paganism. And that's not a big factor once the war starts, even right before the war starts, and in fact Hess's flight to Europe because he kind of loses his mind and floors to England to try and that's like a big part of like because he had been such an advocate of this, and because he had so, Hitler saw it as like a kind of a betrayal like that that kind of spells an into the influence of that. But there's always a level of it in the s S um and this has talked about a lot.

It's probably over emphasized now. It's fair to say Heinrich Kimler, hit or the other big Nazis didn't trust his Christianity, particularly Catholicism, and they wanted to minimize its influence, both in the Reich and in the s S. To this end, Hitler replaced marriage ceremonies for s S men with the Huy, which was a new fascist wedding ritual. He replaced Easter celebrations with Midsummer celebrations, and he brought in a whole host of pagan rituals. He claimed were ancient German old

time religion. Now this new quasi faith that Himler kind of cobbles together for the s S is called gout glaubit Kite and it was not popular. Again, this gets over emphasized and its height. About two of the s S follows this whatever you want to call it, religion about are Protestant and the rest are Catholic. Hydrick is one of the who buys into Himler's weird neo pagan Nazi thing, although this is more todying. He's trying to

impress his boss by doing this. After the war, Lena Hydric would claim that she and her husband made fun of Himler's weird religion in private, so he's not very committed to this. It does. He's doing virtue virtue signal those Nazi is Nazi overlords. But you know who won't virtue signal to their Nazi overlords, Matt is that the products and services. That's that is right. It is the products and services that support this podcast. None of them

our believers in German pagan SS philosophy. Yeah, they will never do weird Nazi weddings unless you want them to. Yeah, I mean well, Okay, let's just let's just all the ads at this point. Ah, we're back. So in nine six, Hydric launched a systematic torture campaign against the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Jehovah's Witnesses. This is important to note in terms of like absolute numbers, not a lot of these guys, not a sizeable chunk of the Holocaust, although a lot

of them get killed relative to their population. But the Jehovah's Witnesses are only group in the Third Reich who was persecuted purely on the basis of their religion. Um. And that's because Jehovah's Witnesses refused to swear allegiance to governments um. And that makes them enemies of the state under the Nazis. Hydrick's crackdown would eventually lead six thousand witnesses being arrested and interned in concentration camps. Hundreds died

in camps who were executed straight away. I think they wore a purple triangle in the concentration camps. Um. Now, Hydrick's prosecution of Freemasonry was, by comparison, a lot less brutal, mainly because Freemasons didn't hold that much power, and like none of them are willing to die for their dumb clubs. So once the Nazis take power, they all just kind of leave and he confiscates their stuff and he puts it in a museum. In subsequent years he establishes another

similar museum which is filled with Jewish artifacts. And that's kind of his idea, is like, we need to have these museums to show people the dangers of this ideology and like how how but also how silly it is, and like how like that's that's the and what do you put in museum? But things that no longer exist and are now in the past exactly the shadowing fucking scumbag shit ever, m it's good ship um. In ninety seven, Hydroc had his criminal police launched a massive dragnet operation

against what he called habitual criminals and A socials. Now, these were people who didn't work or didn't work enough, or lived on the street, or made their living in a less than legal manner. By the end of nineteen thirty eight, nearly twenty thousand A socials were in preventative detention. These people were also sent to concentration camps, mostly as a scare tactic. The Reich was in the midst of a labor shortage, and the point of this particular campaign

was to force people to work, not to kill them. Now, all these different crusades in the late thirties tax the concentration camp system, which had not been well planned from the beginning. In late nineteen six to thirty seven, the s S re organized the camps, shutting down most of the old ones and building new ones modeled off of

Dachau from Hitler's Hangman quote. The Dachow model, designed to regiment the prisoners and dehumanize their relations with the guards, was based on a system of graded punishment for various offenses, which ranged from denial of food to execution. To dehumanize relationship with prisoners, the guard's behavior was regulated to maintain distance and eliminate human contact. The first of these camps was Saxonhausen, north of Berlin, and if you're ever in Berlin,

I really recommend taking a tour of Saxonhausen Um. The German government is a very good job of of doing has done a good job of making these places into museums. And when you get a tour at one of these places. It's not just like some dude who's doing a summer job, some kid. It's somebody with like a degree like they they the people who work there. I've talked with a number of them. I did this tour. You can have long converse about Hannah Rent, about the nature of fascism,

about the development. They're very knowledgeable. Um. I walked away very impressed, and we did. The tour I went on was in like the dead of December, so you know, you're covered in snow, it's freezing outside, and everybody is like you're bundled up. It's the German winter, you know, and you're walking around you're seeing this concentration camp. You're

seeing that. I think one of the things that really stuck with me is they had these concrete pits, which are like these square pits like ten or fifteen feet deep with a great on top of them that people would be stuck in for days at a time, and you could look in and you could see the marks where they'd clawed at the concrete. Um you're like fingernail

marks still in it. And you would walk around like freezing your ass off, just utterly miserable in this cold, and you would go inside and the first thing you would see was one of the concentration camp uniforms, which is this threadbare black and white unitard thing. And it's just like this immediately oh oh yeah, yeah, certainly uh. Not taking the cold of the German winter into account with the universe well, or you could argue taking it very much into account and you to tell people, you know.

Um So, Hydrick was one of the major drivers and backers of the Dacow model, and it's worth noting that, unlike him, Heinrich Hemmler, Himler has trouble visiting and the concentration camps. He faints at Auschwitz, he does repeatedly. Here's the thing, though he repeatedly visits these camps to see what they're doing. Um Hydroch almost never does. Now. This is probably not because it was too horrifying for him.

In fact, his biographer thinks it was because he wasn't actually in charge of the camp, right he decides who goes there and who's released from there. Once he's inside the camps, he's in somebody else's domain. And Theodore Ike, who we talked about earlier, the guy who's running the camps, he doesn't like Theodore Um. They're both political enemies and they both are competing for Himler's favor Um, and so like he doesn't want to go to the camps because

he's he's putting himself basically in someone else's territory. I love it. It's like, why don't you go to these camps that you built to murder millions and millions of people? Oh, I don't want to be rude to a coworker. Yeah, well, I will say at this point, these are not camps

to murder people. Murder happens, but the German concentration camps at this point he could argue no worse than the British concentration camps for the Bowers, no worse, certainly no worse than some of the things that the Spanish camps did, No worse the British themselves had done. At this point, there's a difference. And the thing is Hydrick, with these concentration camps is stealing an idea from people and it

becomes more brutal than what it existed before. When they transition to the Daco model, that is an escalation from what concentration camps had been. He certainly didn't invent it, nor did they invent the race science used to just what they invent are the death camps. That is an innovation that Hydric gets. Um. Yeah, well, and again that's what this episode is about. So by the late nineteen thirties, Hydrick is on paper a member of the upper middle

class and in reality he's basically a millionaire. This happens to all of the big Nazis, and the way it worked for them is that they would receive allowances from the Gestapo, gifts and loans from prominent men and the Reich Um and his his rough income on paper like what he would legally admit to having was about seven times with a middle class German made um, and despite the fact that they're now rolling in cash have multiple home Lena constantly complained that his salary was quote barely

sufficient to live on in When his salary was increased yet again to eight times a German middle class income, he cut the salaries of his two domestic servants, again minor compared to the death camps. But it shows you, like this guy is comprehensively I mean, yeah, he's going through a checklist of like fucking bullshit behavior of just

but now evil ship, like fucking cutting the income. And also I love I love that his his wife is like still being like, you know, you don't make enough money and he just has to be like the women. Am I right? He always complaining about not having enough money. Was the shopping Oh my god, my mind got mine,

got god. So Heidrick and Hitler first met at a birthday reception or the fewer in the early nineteen thirties, and Hitler was impressed by Hydrick's aryan looks and impressed by the fact that he and his wife are both kind of like arians, and in fact, when he sees them, he says, what a beautiful couple. I am most impressed. I just I love every reaction to uh, to this guy is just like other Germans going, wow, he's very attractive. Yeah,

you're just like vow you look like just supposed to look. Yeah, like none of us actually look. Yeah you look. This is what she's saying into propagandas as we look like I love, I just want the world field with Zach Morris is normal, screaches, normal, screech just Zach Morris. Now. Um. Despite that, Hitler, you know, is impressed with him from early on, especially kind of just likes the way he looks um. Reynhard is never really in Hitler's inner circle.

They're not personally friends, but the fewer increasingly by the late thirties, cames to trust him and see him as loyal and talented, and he gives Hydrick increasing sponsibility for settling the Jewish question. Now in the late nineteen thirties, this is a fun little aside story, we gotta tell it. This is part of his establishment of the Nazi security state. In the late thirties, Ryanhard becomes aware of a woman named Kitty Schmidt who operated a brothel in Berlin now

is Germany's had a cop. His job is technically to arrest her, but he had a better idea. He had the s S take over the brothel and fill it with wire taps. Kitty still ran everything. He allowed her to, allowed her to keep running her brothel as long as he could use it. There's kind of it's kind of like the Nazi best little horhouse in Texas and his fascist Burt Reynolds, My god, what a visual. So yeah, So the SS Kitty like they basically re evamped this brothel,

and they do it for a specific reason. They want to collect intelligence using prostitutes. So they first off kind of let go a lot of like the staff. They see his lower class, and they hire high class German ladies. Most of the women working here are like the wives or at least mistresses of wealthy, upper class German men.

We have a recruitment profile for women who work at the brothel which reads, quote, wanted our women and girls who are intelligent, multi lingual, nationalistically minded, and furthermore, man crazy. We want the most boy crazy. We want horny fascist bitches. That's give me all your horny fascist pitches, just like radio commercials are your horny fascist bit where Hi, I'm just laying maxwell. And so the targets of this information gathering operation were German military officers. So a lot of

them weren't Nazis. Right, most people aren't Nazis even in the Nazi regime at this point. Um, so German military off users who might not be loyal to Hitler, but also other Nazis and visiting foreign dignitaries. Right, So Reinhard and his men, would you know they would sit down, they would a meeting with some guy. You know, maybe

they're having a meeting about some security matter. Maybe they're having a meeting with a foreign ally and they would at the end of the meeting be like, hey, you know you're in Berlin for another day or two for this meeting. Here, here's a special code word. If you go to this brothel, they'll give you the special menu with this code word. And the menu did entitle them to the special menu of these like super you know, from what the Nazis point of view, high class prostitutes.

But the menu when you came in and told Kitty Schmidt this password, it also told her, okay, turn on the recording equipment. They want to eavesdrop on this guy while he's fucking. I should have known when the passwords they gave me was honey popped, but I didn't put the pieces together. So one of the customers of this brothel, it was the son in law and foreign minister of Fascist Italy, who repeatedly insulted Hitler while he was fucking. Hitler's a chip. I hate a little bad I can

never do this. He can't fuck this good. He's kind of a funk like me. Look at the size of my penny. He has a one ball, single meat. The ball he has the only nay, I want to meat the ball and it's not the spicy one. Oh boy. Another who didn't give away anything evidently when he was there was s S. General Sep Dietrich, who is a terrifying man in some ways. Sep Dietrich is the founder of the idea of special forces. Um like, he's a

really legitimately frightening man. Um and Sept Dietrich when he goes into this brothel heet he gets the code word. He seems to know he's being recorded, but he just wants to fuck. So he goes in and demands all twenty of the women on the menu and has an all night orgy with these ladies. Beautiful. You know, I mean, I hate this guy on principle, but you know, if you're gonna do it, you know, live it up and just shut yeah. Gebbels was also a frequent customer. He

was said to enjoy lesbian displays. Another big customer was a major German tank ace who liked to drink toilet water after women use the bathroom. Um yeah, classic German shies upon yeah. Hydric himself also regularly visited the brothel, although the microphones were turned off for his visits. Oh yeah, yeah, well yep, I mean, that's an amazing, amazing aside. You know, just like the levels of evil of this person, they

just run the gamut. He's real piece of shit. So when Germany annexed Austria, Hydric's job was to put together a team of s S men to go into the stolen country and arrest political prisoners. In addition to putting two thousand people in camps, Hydrick's men launched a targeted operation to confiscate Jewish property. He announced that anyone caught stealing from Jews though during this period would be punished

mercilessly because their wealth was property of the Reich. So both, we're going to take everything that Jews have, but if random citizens start taking their ship, you're stealing from the government. Um. Now. There was, of course, a wide gulf between rhetoric and reality. The kind of men who joined the s S were thugs, and they were never able to help themselves from beating and murdering and robbing no matter what Hydric said. A big part of his job was putting out the pr

fires started by his subordinates. Much of the violence of the Angelus came from Austrian Nazis who took the end of their old government as an opportunity to let loose. They burned and looted businesses. Jews were forced by crowds to kneel and scrub the streets. One observer later recalled quote, the underworld had opened up its gates and set loosed its lowest, most disgusting hordes. The city transformed itself into

a nightmarish painting by Hieronymous Bosch. Demons seemed to have crawled out of filthy eggs and risen from marshy burrows. The air was constantly filled with a desolate, hysterical shrieking, and people's faces were distorted, some with fear, others with lies, still others with wild hate filled triumph one star review, one star for the Angels Now. When the violence prompted an outcry, and again an outcry even from some people who were in within the German government, Hydric blamed the

Pegram on disguised communists. It's the left, it's anti always, it's always that oh man. He said. They were trying to make Germany look bad and create propaganda for her foreign enemies. After the initial uncontrolled violence, Hydrick ss was able to push a more orderly terror. He established a central office in Vienna which would take in catalog Jewish property at the same time as it produced thousands of exit visas to allow Jewish families to leave the country.

And basically the idea was that we're taking the property of the rich Jews to a for the process of get of of immigrating the other ones out of here, getting the exit vas is sending them elsewhere. Now, this system would become a model used by other Nazi annexations, but it did not go quickly enough for many Germans. The Anschluss brought two hundred thousand more Jews into the German Reich, which more than canceled out the hundred and twenty eight thousand who had left by the end of

nineteen thirty seven. The most racist Germans were frustrated by this, and Hydrock responded with a crackdown on Polish Jewish immigrants in Germany. So one of the problems is they're trying to get these people out as fast as they can, and they're even to the point where if you're rich, they take some of your money, they'll leave you with some of it, because otherwise you're not going to be

taken anywhere. Um. And it's in general the biggest problem they have is and this is one of the things you do have to point out when you talk about, for example, Jewish immigration to Palestine during this period, that was one of the only places they could go. That was the number one place that Jewish refugees were able to go. Everywhere was close to them. Everywhere else. Yeah, the United States would not take any Jewish. We let boats full of Jewish refugees drowned in the ocean because

we wouldn't let them onto our shore. So and this is a problem for the Nazis, right, because they're trying to get these people out, but it's difficult. They're not taking it. And the places that are taking them are places like Czechoslovakia, which then the Germans take more places like Poland, which they want, and like the Polish the Polish state is as racist almost as the German state.

So the Polish state, these Jews who had fled Poland because there were programs in the early nineteen hundreds into Germany and had become German residents, get kicked out and forced into Poland, who denies their citizenship. So They're like, it's a whole fucking mess. No, it's the Earth. Earth in the thirties, real bad place, real bad place for the Jews. Nobody wanted him, and uh yeah, it's it's

not fun for us. And in nineteen thirty eight, one of the families who gets caught up in this, Hydrick is pushing the Polish refugees out of Germany. Um Poland doesn't want to take them. One of the family leads who gets sucked over in this are the green Spawns g r y n s z p a n s but I think it's pronounced green Span or something like that.

Their son, Herschel lived in Paris, and he was outraged by his family suffering by the fact that they've gotten kicked out of Germany after barely building a life there. And you know this, he's kind of goes mad with grief. And because everything seems fucked up, nothing seems nothing. The Nazis aren't facing any consequences for their actions, the international

community isn't doing ship to stop it. He can't think of anything better to do that to get a gun and go shoot a Nazi politician living in Paris, a guy who he did nothing wrong. Herschel Greenspan did nothing, nothing wrong. Yeah, he shoots this guy Ernst von Roth um and and von Roth eventually dies of his injuries. And then, to quote from a write up in Bleaker

Street Media here about what came next. Three days later, Hydrick sent out a memo with the subject line measures against the US Tonight, a communication that directed the police to maintain a hands off policy to the spontaneous national riots that Joseph Gebel's and he had orchestrated. All night long. Jewish businesses were destroyed, homes vandalized or destroyed, and families

rounded up and arrested, if not killed. In London at the Times calculated the damage quote no foreign propagandists bent on blacketting Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings of blackguardly assaults on the fenceless and innocent people which disgraced that country. Yesterday, more than a thousand synagogues and seven thousand Jewish businesses had been attacked, more than ninety people had been murdered, and thirty thousand

Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. To add insult to injury, the Jewish people whose property had been destroyed were charged by the state with its clean up. This is the Night of Broken Glass. This is Christal Knocked and Hydrick is not the only one behind it, but he's one of the organizing forces behind Christal Knocked. And maybe that seems a little bit odd considering his attitude towards street violence. But just wait for what comes next.

There's a reason why this is not the worst thing in the world for him. No, yeah, you're slowly becoming more and more okay with this. Well, it's even more subtle than that. It's even shittier than that. So the Night of Broken Glass. A lot of people don't know. This was a disaster for the Nazis and seen by Hitler and Gering in particular as a horrible idea because it brings them all this really bad international pr It makes Badya in the international community. Um, and it fucks

the economy. It does millions and millions of dollars to damage the economy. It sets back their five year plan. It's a real big problem for a lot of Nazis. And because they're so unhappy about what has happened during the Night of Broken Glass, they have a second big meeting of all the Nazis to be like, guys, we

gotta get on the same page about this. So because there's another that Hydric helps to instigate and ensure won't be stopped by his police, because there's another mass violent pagrah that creates enough negative thought towards street violence that there's another meeting. And what is Hydrick really fucking good at taken control of meetings like this and getting everyone on board with his ideas. He's a big meeting guy. Yeah, So Hydric uses the opportunity to make the case again

that yeah, of course street violence is bad. It's bad for the economy and makes people not like us. It makes us pariah's. We need to attack Jews through the law in an orderly manner. So he suggests an expansion of the restrictions that have been put in place at the Nuremberg Laws. For one thing, Jewish people should be restricted from using buses, from going to hospitals, from going to theaters, from visiting public parks and other public places.

He also suggested forcing Jewish citizens to wear a yellow star. Now during this when he suggests this, even Hitler is like, well, that's a bit far Yeah, that's that much. Ran Hard calmed down. You're going to you're going to Ryan Hord in the paint right now, going to need you to chill act be Ryan saw like, yeah, this would be done eventually. But in Reinhard is the guy who kind of he's the first big dude to suggest this. Um. But Reinhard, the thing that he had that he succeeds

in doing is he kind of very methodically. During this meeting, he lays out, um, how during the occupation of Vienna in his central office that he established had facilitated the expulsion of at least fifty thousand Jews. So he points out, like he walks them through, here's how we got We got fifty people in a in a matter of weeks out of out of Austria to leave for other countries. Um. No one else has gotten so many Jews to leave so quickly, and so you know, without so peacefully, without

disruption to the state as I have. Um. And he claims that I can, I can set up offices like this all throughout the Reich. I can generalize this process and it won't cost us a dime because we'll pay to expel them with funds confiscated from wealthy Jews. And he does a good enough job of laying this out that by the end of the meeting, everyone agrees to put Hydroc in charge of purging the German Reich of Jews, do racism and balance the budget at the same time.

Whatever exactly exactly he's able to get, he's able to marshal everyone behind. He's able to get them on the same page. You can answer to questions, the Jewish question and who's gonna pay for it? Questions. Now, by the end of the meeting, everyone agreed to put Hydroc in charge of purging the German Reich of Jews. He estimated this would take ten years. But for the first time since Hitler took power, the Nazis had a serious, actionable

game plan to purge Central Europe of its Jews. And this brings us back to the question, the core question, one of the core questions of Holocaust studies was the Holocaust planned from the beginning or did it evolve over time out of the circumstances that that you know, presented themselves. The real any of the situation seems to be that Adolf Hitler was an idea man, not a logistics man. He would give speeches, he would get excited, he would talk about the Jews being the eternal foe. He would

talk about needing to purge them. But he didn't come out with policy on his own to do that. See Hydrick job exactly. Hydrick and everyone else under Hitler, there was a policy and this is what they called it in the Nazi state, working towards the fewer. And what that means is that Hitler doesn't come up with plans and there doesn't say this is how we're gonna do,

this is what we're gonna do next. Hitler comes up with ideas, and it's up to Nazis if you want to impress Hitler, if you want to make a place for yourself in the party, to figure out what you think Hitler wants you to do, and then to do it right. Because the Nazi government was so competitive, this process evolved in increasingly extreme directions. Hydrick success came from the fact that he was a genius when it came to taking the racist rants of his boss and translating

them into action. His job was turning ideology into policy. That's what Hydrick does. Hitler and the others talk flippantly about getting rid of the Jews. There's a lot of talk in the yellow Nazi press about exterminating the Jews. Hydrick figures out how to make that ship happen. He's the Steve, wasn't Hitler Steve. He's an architect. Hitler describes his dream house. Ryan Hard figures out where the load bearing walls need to go. You know, that's the guy

he is. When Germany next annexed Czechoslovakia, Reinhard organized special task groups of the s S and the German word for special task group is ininseets grouping. Their job was to arrest politically dangerous and undesirable people, and they arrested between ten and twenty people in a matter of days. Many were sent to Dachau or other concentration camps. I

think about seven thousand in this period. Now, when Germany invaded Poland, which is what comes next, and I know we are YadA, YadA, ng at that's going on at the time, because he's he's got his hand and all of it. When Germany invades Poland, Hydric expands the ranks of the Einsetz Group and they eventually just initially just

been like a like eight hundred dudes. I think, you know, during the annexation of Czechoslovakia, there was a lot more They're like, they're like military units right during the invasion of Poland, and their task is much more ambitious. Hitler didn't just one undesirable and political enemies rounded up. Hitler

hated the idea that Poland would be a nation. The concept of Poland as a country was repellent to Hitler in the Nazis, and he had just inked a secret deal with Stalin to split Poland up after the invasion, and he needed to kill any conception of Polish identity and the Poland that he was going to conquer. He

needed to destroy any any sense that Polish culture existed. Right, So before the invasion, Hitler tells Hydrick that his job is to organize his Innsets group and to exterminate entire classes of Polish societies, specifically the classes that were, in Hitler's words, quote carriers of Polish nationalism. And he means carriers isn't like carriers of a virus. Carriers is of a disease. That's very much how Hitler frames this, and that's very much how he talks about the Jews to

they're a plague. Bacillus is the literal term he uses. Yeah, I mean, you know that's he's uh, he's just trying to he's trying to get rid of any other ideological virus and German nationalism. Now, before the invasion, Hitler's men created a mass or Hydrick's men, I should say, created a massive index card library of sixty one thousand people who they would have to arrest and in most cases execute immediately upon taking over Poland from Hitler's Hangman quote.

In mid August, at a conference in Berlin, leading members of the Einsets Group and received further oral instructions from Hydric and Best, instructions which even by Hydric standards were quote extraordinarily radical, and which included a quote liquidation order

for various circles of the Polish leadership, affecting thousands. According to post war trial testimonies of leading Task Force officers present that day, Hydroc opened the meeting by conforming the men of the atrocities being committed against ethnic Germans in Poland's noting that he expected heavy partisan resistance against the

German invasion. It was the responsibility of the Einsetz group and to neutralize these threats, particularly those posed by saboteurs, partisans Jews in the Polish intelligencia, an area is conquered by the German army and to punish individuals who had committed crimes against Poland's ethnic Germans in the preceding weeks. Although carefully guarded in his language, Hydroc consisted that in carrying out their difficult tasks, quote everything was allowed free

for all. Is goddamn Nazias murder, free for all. This is when the real Nazi ship starts. This is when the Nazis truly distinguished themselves as worse than the other hell regimes that existed in this period. This is the start of the not just being a dictatorship, not just being you know, fascist or whatever. This is the start of them being the fucking Nazis. We could do a whole series of episodes on German war crimes during the invasion of Poland, um to focus just on one group

of Hydrick's men. A single Ironsets group, a unit near the demarcation line for Soviet Poland, was tasked by Hydrick with inducing Jews to flee into Russian territory. Right, we want them to go into what the Russians are going to control so we don't have to deal with them.

They did this by going on a mass killing spree which included burning down a synagogue filled with Jewish women and children and massacring roughly five hundred people in mass shootings, and one week in September, members of Ironsetz group of four killed roughly dred Polish civilians. Now, while Hydrick's men massacred thousands, he followed behind them and ensured the job

was done properly. He remained concerned about destruction of valuable property and repeatedly investigated and punished s means suspected of stealing from Jewish own shops while they were burning down synagogues filled with people. Yeah, you wouldn't want them to commit any crimes because you don't want the property crimes. That's the problem is property, with the right wingers loving fucking property more than people. Is it you burnt down?

All of the targets was the economy? M So a truly accurate catalog of just hydricks crimes up to this point would go far beyond the time we have to discuss him. Books have been written about just the conquest of Poland and the crimes in its wake. Right, more books will be written in the future. I'm afraid we're going to have to YadA YadA a lot of other crimes against humanity. Just to move along here now, I'm sure you all know the broad basics of the war.

From this point on. The Nazis conquered Poland, they conquered the Netherlands, France, they conquer a bunch of places in Europe. They bombed the ship out of Britain. Things are going great for the Nazis. Hydrick continued to direct his forces to end up Jewish property as well as political enemies. And his job is in all of these places, arrest political enemies, take Jewish property, catalog all the Jews and the territory. They're not yet putting them in camps. They're

not yet. The death camps don't exist yet, um, but they're there. They're they're laying the ground for that. Although that said, even in nineteen forty, it was not a foregone conclusion that there would be death camps. Because in nineteen forty Hydric becomes the head of what is called the Madagascar Plan, which is an ultimately abandoned attempt to take the now millions of Jews and conquered territories and relocate them off the coast of Africa. This had existed

prior to the Nazis. Racists had been talking about pushing forcing all the Jews in the Madagascar for a while. And Hydric again, I think there's people who will argue like, oh, he always wanted to do the death camps. The Madagascar plan was just sort of like am for show. He puts a lot of effort into trying to plan this out. He spends a lot of time thinking how this will work, trying to organize it. I don't think I think this was something they thought they might be able to do

for a certain point. And it's important to understand, like this is a process of gen getting yourself ready for genocide, right, even the genocide committers have to amp themselves up. It's it's it's a series of steps. It's zero to genocide, right, That never happens. There's always a ramping up period. Yeah, And it's like with these guys especially, it's like the ethnic cleansing was going too slowly for them, and they were just ramping up and ramping up all to this

end conclusion. Yes. Um. Now, during the same time, Hydrock trains as a fighter pilot. He wants to get in his combat time, right. He missed a chance to fight in World War One. Um, So he becomes a fighter pilot. He flies like twenty combat missions. He's a gunner. Actually, he's not really a pilot. He doesn't like work as a pilot. He's a gunner. Um. And he flies some missions that are non combat over England with like a spy plane. Um. And this is a matter of vanity again.

He wants to he wants to have done his time as a soldier for the Reich so that he can stand up proud. And his time as a pilot kind of comes to an end because his plane has a landing accident and he hurts his wrist and he gets an iron cross and then goes back to his desk job. Um. Now. On the domestic front, hydris marriage to his wife is consistently rocky from the late thirties forward, mainly due to

the fact that he cheated on her fucking constantly. It was such a workaholic that she was basically abandoned with her children. After the war, Lena would admit that there were quote always other women in my marriage, and that Reinhard would go after anything in a skirt. Now, at one point one of his subordinates, a guy named Shellenberg, started having an affair with Lena, with Reinhardt's wife. Now,

she denies that. She claims they never fucked, that she was just kind of playing around with this guy to make her has been jealous because he was cheating on her with Furio. There's a lay exactly some soprano ship a bay over this. There's one possibly true story that they were fucking each other. And Hydrock found out about this, and so he takes Shellenberg out drinking and in the

middle of this like night drinking and talking. In mid conversation, Hydric's like, I just poisoned you, by the way, and I'll give you the antidote if you'll tell me what you've been doing with my wife. Um. And according to this story, Shellenberg admits that he's been sucking around. He promises to end the relationship, and Hydric gives him the antidote. Umh, we actually did poison him. That wasn't just maybe, I mean, we can't. I I don't know, you know, I think

Shellenberg tells this story. Also, Shellenberg survives the war and has sevested interest in making hydroc seem even first because he's trying because it makes him seem less bad by comparison, you know. And also it's very embarrassing if he was like I was just I was kidding. Of course, I don't have any fucking poison and an antidote, right, Yeah, and then that would have been a fake antidote to who knows. It would make him feel very stupid if he fell for that. Yeah. So on June tw Nazis

commenced their invasion of the uss Are. This is Operation Barbarossa, the largest war thing that has ever happened in the history of the human race. Um. Just impossible to overstate, Like every war the US has ever fought would fit into the Eastern Front battle between Germany and Russia, with a lot of space left over for dead people. Um. Now within this territory. Uh. And again the initial that

the Nazis are wildly successful. They conquer more territory faster than anyone ever has, and they take hundreds of thousands of military prisoners, and they bring in millions of new citizens into their their greater German Reich or whatever, I don't know, citizens is not the right thing to call them. There's but in addition to all these people, they get millions of new Jewish residents, to add to the several

million already brought in by Germany's other conquests. Now, even hydricks well oiled immigration machine could not handle this many people. And also, because they're conquering everything, where else are the Jews gonna go? You know? Um? So this was you know again, no one else is willing to absorb them, the Nazis ki conquering stuff that they have this real problem, um, And this problem becomes and this is where we get

to the kind of complicity of the German leadership. Because again a lot of people will say, there's nothing that directly connects Hitler to giving the orders for the Holocaust. Right now, that said, you can see where the orders

came from. Because Hitler and Guring have a conversation right around the time the Germans invade Russia about the Jewish question, about all these Jews they're capturing, And in July thirty one, Herman Gerring writes a note to Reinhard Heydrich and orders him to quote submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative, material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question. And Hitler absolutely ordered him to do this.

That's like or it came about as a result of the conversation. Hitler definitely wanted the genocide to happen at this point. Um. The thing on paper we have is you have Gearing tells Hydric to start figuring this ship out. Yes, and Hydric his you know this is again they still don't jump right to death camps Um, because there's again

a process of figuring out how this is gonna look. Now, the process of genocide, now that they're committed to genocide, starts with simple extensions of what Hydric had already done before. The Einsts group had been enlarged significantly for the invasion of Russia, and in the wake of the inasial and initial invasion, they're killing political enemies, they're killing commissars Um, but they're also they start massacring Jews, and in fact they start carrying out mass shootings on a scale never

equaled before or since in human history. These are the biggest mass shootings of civilians probably that there will ever be we we fucking hope. The first of these shootings is the Bobby Yard massacre, in which thirty three thousand, seven hundred and seventy one Jewish civilians were shot to death and ravine outside of Kiev in two days. Bobby Are was followed by the Odessa massacre later the same year, in which more than fifty thousand Jews were shot to

death and again roughly two days. There were hundreds of other smaller massacres, from a couple of dozen people to a thousands of people, and a lot of the killing is also it's not just shooting. Shooting is probably the biggest death toll here, but they are also killing people with mobile gas fans, which they had developed initially to

execute the mentally handicapped. Now at least one and a half million people and perhaps as many as two million Holocaust victims were killed this way, just being gunned down or gassed in small vans um by numbers of people. Now, this is still too slow for the number of Jews that there and other undesirables that the Nazis are acquiring in their conquests, and worse than being slow, it's bad for the men doing it. The Germans have limited manpower,

they have limited ammunition, um and they find that. You know, Hydra had called his as ideological shock troops, right, he'd made a big deal about how hard we have to be, how willing to do terrible things we have to be in order to save the Reich. But these guys, the hardest and worst of the Nazis, couldn't handle the mental strain of what they were doing. They're traumatic for them, which is they are. There are stories of them skeet shooting babies by the dozen, and it it destroys these people.

The suicide is rampant alcoholism becomes endemic to the einsets group of men. It creates a problem with morale, a problem with orderliness, and it's a problem for the r mocked. The guys not doing the killing are aware of it, and they have there are we the baddies moments in a lot of cases like oh boy, you know what, this doesn't seem good. I've always like imagined killing babies is being a bad guy thing. Yeah, but it sounds like not a defensive maneuver. Yeah, I mean, I guess

I get it. Excuse me, all, but Stumban fura, what is the self defense motive for shooting babies with a shotgun after throwing them in the air, And you at least lie to me and says the baby is actually a time bomb robot. It would make me feel better. And again, these guys feel bad. It breaks a lot of them. It's bad from a raw Almost none of them stopped being Nazis. Yeah, they all keep fighting for

the Reich, even though they're aware of it. There's a big myth of the clean r marckt of the fact that most Nazi soldiers, you know, they fought well and they didn't really know what was going on. They fucking did. Every one of them at least new enough to the numbers alone indicate that, like just a huge portion of

them had to have been involved directly in these atrocities. Yes, um, And like, yes, obviously a lot of the Vermacht was involved directly in atrocities, more than any other individual military on a per capita basis in the war, other than maybe the Japanese UM. But also they were all aware, broadly speaking of what was being done in their name, um. And there were some of them who spoke out. There were some of them whom who went a wall you know. Um,

and good good on those very few dudes. Yeah, thank you, all three of you. Yeah, not a lot of them, but some of them did. And and yeah I'll tip my hat to those fellows because of how few fucking did it. Now. Yeah, Um, so again this becomes a problem. It's bad for the s s. They need a better solution to the final solution. And on January nineteen forty two, Ryanhard Hydrick convenes a third meeting of top Nazi officials

from across the Reich. This meeting was held at a mansion, a mansion that had been confiscated by a Jewish businessman in a suburb of Berlin called von Say. Um, you can go to the Vance House today. I've I've been there. Um, you can see if there's a very good museum there. The actual houses used in the movie we discussed at the start of this conspiracy, which is basically based directly on the minutes of the meeting. They have to plan the final solution. Um. I'm going to quote from a

summary of that meeting in history dot com. Quote. The agenda was simple and focused to devise a plan that would render a final solution to the Jewish question in Europe, Various gruesome proposals were discussed, including mass sterilization and deportation to the island of Madagascar. Hydrick proposed simply transporting Jews from every corner of Europe to concentration camps in Poland and working them to death. Objections to this plan included

the belief that this was simply too time consuming. What about the strong ones who took longer to die, What about the millions of Jews who were already in Poland. Although the word extermination was never uttered during the meeting, the implication was clear. Anyone who survived the egregious conditions of a work camp would be treated accordingly. Months later, the gas vans in Helmo, Poland, which were killing a

thousand people a day, proved to be the solution. They were looking for the most efficient means of killing large groups of people at a time, and the rest is unfortunately history. The Vans conference led directly to the creation of death camps, which exterminated some four million Jews and five million other undesirables. These were, and still are today, the fastest and most cost effective method of genocide ever developed.

Reinhard Hydric gets rightful credit as architect of the Holocaust, but the vast majority of people killed in the death camps died after he died. He would not live to see what he brought into being. And I'm gonna quote from a write up by the United States Holocaust Museum here to explain why Hydric gets taken out of the picture.

After the invasion of the Soviet Union spurred a previously dormant communist resistance move meant in Bohemia and Moravia Czechoslovakia into acts of sabotage, Hitler dismissed reich Protector Constantine von Neuroth and An appointed Hydric acting Reich Protector in September nineteen forty one. Hydric first ordered a narrow wave of terror targeting real and perceived leaders of the opposition in

Czech Lands. In October and November nineteen forty one, Protector at Special Courts sinence three hundred and forty two people to death and turned twelve hundred and eighty nine over to the Gestapo. Hydric also established the Teresan Stack Camp ghetto in November. Under his rule, fourteen thousand Germans and Austrian Jews and more than twenty thousand check Jews were deported from Theresan stat to the Lord's Ghetto, to the Government General in Poland into the Reich Commissary at Austland,

which is where they were exterminated. Hydric Is, acting Reich Protector, then corded Czech industrial workers and farmers whose productive capacity was necessary to the German war effort, with wages and benefits packages equivalent to those of their German counterparts. The result of his policies was a seventy three percent reduction and acts of sabotage within six months. By spring of nineteen forty two, German authorities could boost of a pacification

of the Protectorate. Some have speculated that Hydric aim next to assume a newly created top civilian position and occupied northern France and Belgium, but he never got the chance to do this. The Allies were well aware of Reinhard hydrick Um and they needed a win, right two not a great time for the Allies. There's some early signs that the Nazi ship is going to turn around for them,

but they're not winning at that point um now. The so the British train and equip a two man cheam of team of Check soldiers because Check has a government Czecho Slovakia has a government in exile, right, they have soldiers who flee the company in the country, and the British government trains two of these guys up and air drops them into Hydrick's territory. They ambush him during his daily commute home from work, but one man's machine gun jams, right,

so they try to shoot him. Their gun jams Hydrick, who's driving in an open topped vehicle very stupidly Um sees that their gun has jammed, and again, think about everything about this guy. He's desperate to prove himself as a warrior, right, so his driver wants to drive the funk away right, get out of there, get his boss to safety. Hidrick has his driver stop. He pulls out his handgun and he attempts to attack both assassins. One of them throws a grenade as he's trying to do

his hero ship and it fucks reinhard right up. He gets horribly wounded. He's a vacuated hospital. Um. His wound turns septic and he spent seven days in in the hospital, slowly ding like really the only of the really bad Nazis who gets exactly the death he deserves, his body rotting, they pull his spleen out of him, like yeah, all death because he was a fucking idiot, and like, oh, I'm gonna fucking shoot these guys when keeping it real

goes wrong. Yeah. It's believed, although not certain, that the reason his wounds got infected and he died was because the upholstery in his his car was made out of horsehair, and the horse hair gets forced to do his wound by a grenade blast and it gets him. It causes a deadly infection. Very funny. Yeah, it was either that or he spend too much time around the you know the Germans who are going to the horhouse who like to eat the doodoo v D and his gut wound exactly, dude,

you know it's one of the other I love it. Publicly, the whole Reich mourns, and actually his funeral is one of the last really mass public events that the whole Nazi leadership attends because right the war doesn't go so well for them after this point, he's mourned as a

hero of Germany. Privately, though Hitler thought him a fool for throwing away his life for a chance to look heroic, saying such heroic gestures as driving in an open unarmored vehicle or walking about the streets unguarded are just damn stupidity which serves the country. Not one wit you shouldn't have done. See me, I'm going to just shoot myself in the head as soon as we're surrounded by the Red Army. Yeah, solid, solid shade Hitler, cradical support to Hitler,

for Queen Hitler. Why why can't he be smart and die cowardly like I like me after I shoot my dog and poison my wife, or die heroically like Joseph, like Joseph Gerbel's grenading his children to death like a hero of the Reich. Why did he do it with the grenade? I don't know. It was all he had. It was just like you kill your children now, Yes, when you have so many children, a grenade is just efficient.

I think they actually poison them. Whatever fuck it I needed? Well, we watched Downfall, the documentary, So yeah, both assassins are caught and executed, and the Nazis carry out a horrific series of reprisal prop populations. Actually, the check underground in this period and argued strenuously against assassinating Hydric because they knew it would lead to them being wiped out. And they are. They're just annihilated as a result of this, as are a lot of people not even involved in

the underground. The village of Lettuce, which was falsely implicated in sheltering the assassins, paid the brunt of the price. All one d ninety nine men in the village are executed, women are sent to a concentration camp. Eighty one children are gassed to death, and the remainder are sent out to other families. We don't really know. The surviving women of Lettuce go back to the destroyed side of the village and it's been the rest of their lives waiting

for their children to come home. And I never do. Um. Oh, it's it's fucking heartbreaking. Um. The check village of Lezaki was also destroyed because the radio transmitter belonging to Partisans was found there. Across the territory, more than thirteen thousand people are arrested and roughly five thousand people are murdered in reprisals for Reinhard's assassination. Um. And that's more or less the end of the story of Reinhard hydric A be a piece of ship. Oh man, So I gotta say,

you're right. He is a bastard. He really sucks. He's so bad. He is not a good guy, not chill. In fact, he is sketch. And I do not appreciate it. If you're making a short list of like guys for the that you're nominating for the title of like worst person in history, he's got to be in the running. Yeah he's Yeah, he's not top five, he's definitely top ten.

Like he's up there with Hitler, because again, without a guy like Reinhard, I don't know that Hitler is at least able to carry out the Holocaust in the same way, because you need the implementation man. Yeah, yeah, you need the guy who's able to engineer the whole thing. You know, you gotta get someone to execute it. And there's the

peanut butter. Heydrick is the jelly exactly. The other lying centuries of anti Semitism are the white bread, and he needs all of it to make your Holocaust peb and j. Yeah, this is why I'm allergic to peanut butter. Yes, because I'm Jewish. All Jews a peanut butter right, yes, yes, the most anti Semitic sandwich is of course the P and J. We've all been saying that for years. Oh man, that is uh, yeah, he's he's a bad dude, and

uh and I don't like him. And I think that's the point of this podcast is to find more people who I'm like. I don't like him, you know, because I like most people, but not that guy. That guy, I'm just glad that Hardy. It's rad that he died in horrible pain, seventy days sepsis. He's he's literally the one Nazi who gets what he deserves. Terrific lingering death caused that. And then and he's you know, he's thinking the whole time. Shit, if I just drove it, driven away,

i'd have I'd have avoided all of this agony. Yeah, yeah, I'm glad he got to think about his death as he really did. Like, fuck you reinhard Hydric, you piece of fucking trash. I'm glad your death was horrible. It is okay to luxuriate in the nightmarish agony of the architect of the fucking Holocaust. There should be a seven day celebration all over the world. We should celebrate the day he got shot by this check part of a Ryan Hard Hydrick started dying today, we should have seven

days of gifts and dances. We think painful sepsis is everyone fucking just like marking in the streets. He is the closest to the pure embodiment of human evil. I think it's it's like he's he's like Leopold of Belgium. He's that kind of monster which are the worst to me. I think in a lot of ways, he's worse than

a guy like Hitler. Um because again Hitler, if there had been resistance to Hitler, if there had been a solid block of conservatives who are like, we're gonna have Hitler be empowered, but we're not going to let him do this in this and we're gonna organ as the military, We're going to make sure which was a thing that was happening, there was a chance that that would happen. Hitler could have been a quasi dictator for five or ten, fifteen years, and then like which happened in other countries,

right which happened, he could have been like Franco. That was not necessarily impossible. If there's the way he was a pragmatist. He would have preferred that to being forced out of power or assassinated. If that had been like that, that was not an impossible thing. From the beginning, Ryan hard Heydrick is Um, I don't know, he's he He

might be worse. He might be worse than Big Age, you know what, dude, Well, you know, and at the end of the day, he got what he always wanted, which was a really big gold star on his report card. You know, he got he got to be bigger than Hitler's. I mean, I mean not, you know, in a way that most people know you there's no point. Really, it's stupid to be like, well, who was a worse person? Like they're all like, it doesn't doesn't matter, they're all

a's such a level of human evil. Trying to parse out differences between them is is silly. Um. But but he is I what I should the way I should frame is not that like, oh, I think he's worse than Hitler. He is the Nazi I find most personally offensive. Yeah,

and frightening. He's the one who's scariest to me, especially because like if you now, I haven't seen a picture of him yet and so this whole time, I'm just looking, I'm picturing yeah, blonde ken brauna, and it's like part of what's pissing me off about him mostly is just this like this fucking Zack Morris looking motherfucker committing the worst atrocities and executing atrocities, going above and beyond beyond Hitler even to like execute these mass you know, this

mass genocide, the Holocaust and U and just yeah, just like I this is why I hate hot people, you know, anyone who's attractive. Yeah, I wouldn't call him. He's definitely not as good looking as Kenneth Branda, but he is the most like Aryan looking of the Nazi leadership for sure. Yeah. Oh yeah, I'm looking him up right now. You're gonna look him up. I was just gonna send you that in the chat. Yeah, No, he's he's not. You're right, he's not that hot, but he's not hot, but he is.

He is, Like, he's blonde haired, blue eyed, he's got and he's tall, he's in very good shape. He's an athlete. You know, he's the most Nazi looking motherfucker I think I've ever seen. He really is the most Nazi looking of the of the of the high up nazis, right, Girbels. You look at gering Um, you look at fucking um Hess, you look at um Hitler, you look at Himler. Yeah. Ryan Hard is the one who looks like they say,

an arian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's the one. He's the one that they all draw when they're trying to be like, this is my perfect man. Okay, he's just superman. He's very tall, blonde, blue eyes, very sharp cheekbones, he's got naked more yeah yeah, yeah, and I'm not so obviously like Kenneth Brannah. One of the criticisms. Actually, the first time I watched Conspiracy, so I dropped out of college

obviously because fun that. But the last two years or so I was in college most of my classes and the thing that I was thinking I might get when I thought I might get a degree was UTD offered like a Holocaust studies program, and there's a series of classes on Holocaust and remembrance that I took, which is where I watched Conspiracy. And like one of the criticisms that people have of that movie, it's a very good and I think very accurate depiction of how the Vance

conference was handled right. It does a very good job of laying out the way these people talked, the way they actually in the way that you see the way the thing we talked about repeatedly in this episode, the way Hydrick orchestrates gets people on board, the way he whips support between different agencies to make them do what he wants. You see that in the movie. I think

they do a good job of it. Um, they make him hot, which you know, Kenneth Brann is a very good actor, and I think he very ably plays at the evil but also you cast Kenneth Branna, he can't not be hot. He's Kenneth Branna. He's he's hot. He's fucking hot as hell. Um. But people criticize it because they're like, why are you going to make him to make him hot? Which I think that's a fair casting though, especially given the fact that, like this was one of

the reasons that he rose up so high. Yeah, well it is, it is. I think there's an argument to him made that, like, well, Nazis saw him as good looking because he looked like a Nazi. Yeah, he was like a you know, front facing Nazi guy, someone you could like point to and go this is this is what we look like. In Hollywood. People are always better looking, So you've got to have the Nazist looking guy in the Hollywood movie be extra and Kenneth Branna looks like

a fucking Hollywood Nazi. And yeah, I think it was good. Casting is my my fame. It's a controversial movie again from people who are Holocaust nerds, which is a horrible way to describe it. But no, but there are Holocaust nerds out there are Holocaust Yeah, and I am on the side of I think it's and it's a movie

I show people when we went to Saxonhausen. Um, it was me and a group my my, my partner at the time and like some Australian kids that we met while just like chilling out and getting wasted in Berlin together. We all went together and we watched Conspiracy afterwards. Um it's a good movie to watch too. Um. Uh, yeah, it's it's it's I I recommend it to people again. You know, there's some controversies around it. It's very good. It's very good, and it's also uh and this is

not so much a historical note. Uh, it's a great example of a movie uh that can be compelling and only be in two or three different settings. Like most of it takes place in a meeting and a meeting, and they ever leave the grounds of this fucking house. No they don't. Yeah, there's like a scene in the bathroom, there's a scene in the hall, and most of it

is in this meeting room. And it's very compelling. And also it shows the I think the banality of evil is like a perfect you know, like that's that's what especially Aikman's portrayal by I think that Stanley Tucci, who was just like, yes, oh, he's so good in this

Stanley Tucci, who plays Aikman in that Yeah. Yeah, And and he's like, uh, you know, he's basically doing notes, he's taking it out, he's taking notes, and the fact that he's taking notes enables the slaughter of eleven million people, right, Like his notes are a key aspect of the machinery of death. Um, which is what the case was, right,

that's that's that is Aikman, that is who he was. UM. And there's this um there's a wonderful scene in the movie where they're all quibbly because a lot of people this was a real problem. Again, we talked about her. There's different chunks of the Nazis. They have different arguments. Uh. Some of the guys who had written the Nuremberg Laws are angry because Hydric is basically throwing out the restrictions on the Nuremberg Laws because he doesn't think they go

far enough. And they're arguing about like this isn't legal, you're going outside the downs of the law. And there's a moment where Hydrick, I think its asks raise your hand if you're a lawyer, and everyone in the room raises their hands, which are almost all of these guys were fucking lawyers. Yeah, it's yeah, and and you know it's like I remember that specifically when we were talking about the Nuremberg Laws and like Kenneth Braun as you know,

changing of them. I'm just gonna call uh Reinhardt Hydrick Branda boy. Uh No. It's like, you know, kind of like just going, hey, let's stop quibbling over how much blood if you have any blood, like he went one drop rule and that that always stuck out to me is like kind of like uh you know that that in the end was like, yeah, this is about ethnicity.

Let's stop pretending this is about religion. Let's stop pretending this is about Christ in any fashion, like this is about d n A racial makeup and and just it's totally fake race pseudo science. Yeah, anyways, you know again he pluggables to plug. No time to plug your plug doubles, like discussing the machinery that was built in order to enable the fastest mass extermination of an ethnic group in history. Yeah, yeah, you know. I always like to plug my podcasts about

the Sopranos right after talking about the Holocaust. Think about those rooms filled with human hair and empty shoes. And check out this podcast. Check out this great podcast in which we rewatch Sopranos and talk about it with wonderful guests. Uh. It's called Pod Yourself a Gun. Uh, and season five is about to start right now. We're through one through four,

so check it out wherever you get. You know, your podcast and the Fraud Cast, uh, which is the same type of podcast, same host, but we talk about movies instead. So check that out and follow me at Matt leave Jokes on Instagram and at Matt Leeb on Twitter. Yep, check him out. You can check out I have a novel. It's being launched as a podcast three chapters a week

after the Revolution. You can also find the text. Every week will upload a new e pub and there will be in browser readable versions of the text too, for free, you know ads at After the Revolution or sorry at a t r book dot com. So you know, think about the most monstrous act of soulless evil ever committed, and then check out pod, yourself a gun and read my book. Please please do those things. Yeah, and we hope you've enjoyed this horrible, horrible person, this real great

crash monster. Yeah, hey everybody. Initially I was going to plug the go fund made for the sequel to my book, UM After the Revolution, which you can find at a t R book dot com. But um, here in the Pacific Northwest, we're having an unprecedented heat wave and it's causing disastrous conditions, life threatening conditions for a lot of houseless people, a lot of people without air conditioning. UM,

particularly in the city of Salem. UM activists everywhere have been kind of gathering to try and um mitigate, set up cooling stations, hand out cold drinks, to do things to help people get their temperature down. UM. I want to try and raise funds for the Free Fridge of Salem, UM, which are doing cooling stations in the capital of Oregon, Salem. So if you go to venmo At Free Fridge Salem, that's venmo At Free Fridge Salem and send them a

couple of bucks, they could really use it. Um. Local government has destroyed a number like police particularly have destroyed a number of water and cooling stations they've set out. Um it's you know, we're not going to be in triple digit heats for the next couple of days after I'm recording this on Monday, but it's still going to be very hot. People still need this, So please venmo At Free Fridge Salem if you have the wherewithal and the financial resources to do so. One more time, the

venemo is at Free Fridge Salem. Thanks h