Part Two: Gay Resistance to Nazis

Sophie is on the line as well. Sophie, how are you? I'm great, drinking a cream soda Zevia, live in my best life, you know, so speaking of aftertastes and Nazis, and there's this I actually don't know how to do this segway. Um, But you are listening to the part two of our two part series on gay resistance to Fascism, and so you're probably a little bit confused if you haven't heard the episode that came out Monday, So you should go back and listen to it. If you haven't,

you really should. It's a really good episode and people learn about a lot of really cool people. And this is coming from a very big cynic. So this is good. It's like trying to impress the cynic is like an interesting not even about impressing. It's like, will I still be miserable by the end of this, you know what I mean? Like it's like, yeah, you know what. Okay, Well this one is going to be Oh, I don't

want to spoil it. Okay. So where we last left off, there was like a motley crew of queers, artists and medical students in Amsterdam who just pulled off a like heist movie level antics to blow up a Nazi records storehouse. And today we're going to bring things back to Germany.

So Germany, there's a country called Germany. Vimar Germany is the period from nineteen nineteen, after Germany got its fucking ass handed to it in the First World War to nineteen thirty three, when Hitler came to power and did the whole Hitler thing that I presume most people are familiar with on some level. And Vimar Germany had a lot going for it, right. It was a republic, for one thing, which is a step up from dictatorships and such.

People could like vote and ship, and there was free speech, there was free assembly, there was no state religion, some of the gay laws weren't being enforced, although they were still there, and the government was based out of a city called Weimar, which is how they got the name Bimar Germany. But Germany was completely fucked economically. World War

One left their economy and shambles. Hyperinflation took over. Everyone was hungry and you know, fucked, and then they had the fucking worldwide Depression after all of that on top of it. I mean, I think that's the reason why the Nazis worked, you know what I mean. They had to like kind of get the desperate, you know what I mean, Like they had to really and like then Hitler quotes like, oh he can save us kind of thing.

I think they had to have the previous shitty part in order to even part, if that makes sense totally, because people are so fucked they're like, I'll try anything exactly yeah. And then so so most of the stuff I had been exposed to about by our Germany, which focus on really cool stuff because by our Germany was very in seeing artistic time period, and mostly I've heard about the cabaret scene, all the sort of decadent queer artists who try to live fancy, free lives while they're

basically starving. And all that is like true and interesting and beautiful, but it's only one part of Germany's culture at the time, and actually only one part of it's it's queerness and it's queer culture. You've also got this really messy assortment of different organizations that have different names but get called like the vonder Vogel or the German youth movement or the hiking clubs, and these go back decades. They go back to the eighteen nineties and there's this

movement that it kind of looks like boy Scouts. Boy Scouts was like a funk off, huge thing that involved millions of boys and girls both through various levels of formal and informal organization, with weird paganism, vegetarianism, nudism, and queerness running out through the entire thing. So not actually very much like boy Scouts. I would like to be that kind of boy Scout. Okay, well then you're gonna

love our characters today. Um So, millions of German kids formed these hiking clubs and uh spent their days like camping and getting in touch with nature. It was an anti modernist movement a lot of a lot of parts of it, and whenever people are like, oh, it was this, it's like it's all kinds of different things all happening at the same time. Um, But it was kind of

a lot of it was about leaving civilization behind. A lot of it was German nationalist, although it didn't have necessarily an anti Semitic character as far as I can tell, um, at least on any systemic level. Some of it was really middle class and some of it was really working class, and a lot of it was just fucking outright criminal

in kind of the best and worst ways. Um. There's a French gay anarchist named Daniel Gurin who wrote about the movement in the nineteen thirties because he would go visit nineteen thirties Germany because it was a fucking awesome place to be a gay anarchist, and but he found it. He found this movement increasingly politically polarized between the communists and the fascists. And as the whole worldwide depression is hitting, more and more youth are finding themselves homeless. They choose

itinerant lifestyles over staying still in one place. So the movement keeps growing, and it keeps polarizing and doing all kinds of weird ship. In nineteen thirty three, huge chunks of has come to an abrupt end when Hitler bands all alternative youth organizations that aren't the Hitler Youth. A lot of the more mainstreams of these groups just basically become the Hitler Youth, and in nine he makes participation in the Hitler Youth compulsory um. And but the youth

movement went a lot of different directions. Not all of it went into Hitler Youth, as we'll get into, but some of it did. And so we're going to talk about gay Nazis now, these are not the cool people who did cool stuff. Well balance it out, I suppose. But also I'm fascinated where where this will go. My own experience with boy Scouts. Um, I was a boy Scout, and uh, my best friend and who was a boy Scout,

came out as trans like years before I did. Um, And so I love that you know me and my best friend because people are like, oh, they're they're letting girls into boy Scouts now, and then like me and a lot of other trans women are like, oh no, they always did but so gay Nazis. Uh, that's that's the thing. Yeah. So before Hitler took over completely and the National Socialists were just like one of the parties in Germany. They were actually the only political party in

Weimar Germany with unknown high ranking gay member. Ernst Rom was the leader of Hitler's essay, which are usually called the brown Shirts, which are basically the parties like street thugs who operate outside the law, like you know when Trump told his brown Shirts proud Boys to stand by and stand back, similar sort of organization. And and ernst Rom was really into this hyper masculinity thing. He's so anti you know, if you're so anti feminine that you

don't fuck women, right, Um. And he's really into authority and discipline and obedience as are good manly things, unlike democracy, socialism, anarchism, fucking girls, all that weird stocked Yeah. And this is not to say that the Nazis were pro gay. They were just kind of pro hypocrisy, I think. Um, even before they came to the power, they were the most

adamantly anti gay party in politics. But even the Social Democrats, who were the ones who weren't enforcing paragraph on seventy five and were part of trying to fight to get paragraph on SV repealed. When um they used they used homophobic language to try and talk shot on the Nazis.

Basically they were like, oh, Rom's gay, and so they like published his private letters in order to basically be like, if you support the Nazis, you support uh pedophilia and gayness, and the Nazis will corrupt our children, and so no one's fucking good at this point. No no political party is looking good. The Nazis are clearly looking the worst. But it's just kind of interesting to me. And this

causes us split in the gay rights scene. Right, some groups like the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which is, as Magnus Hirsh felt, the guy I was talking about a lot last episode, he warns the gay Zis. He's like, you know, the fucking Nazis are going to come after you too, right. But then the other big organization at the time, this is really not something to be proud of. Uh, They're like, what nah, They're not coming after all the gay people,

just those Jewish gay people. Um yeah, but but spoiler alert, the Nazis are coming after all. The case m hmm. So On June four, on what gets called the Night of Long Knives, Hitler has Rom and a whole bunch of the other brown Shirt leaders just murdered, and in public, Hitler was like, oh, I definitely did this because Rom was going to betray me. But it was really transparently. Hitler was tired of being made fun of for putting

up with gay people in the ranks. His pal Mussolini like to make fun of him, and they were like, ah ha, you harboring gays, you know whatever, you know his pal Musolini, Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. That's like the very first no homo with consequences or something. I don't yeah, totally. And then it what's kind of interesting is that Hitler probably didn't personally have a problem with Rome's homosexuality. He just he was a fucking people pleaser and he wanted

people to like him. Um, which has definitely never happened again. There's never been a populist right wing leader any time in history, certainly not in the past ten years in the United States who has clearly not had any problem personally with gay people. And then no, yeah, yeah, but greatest country in the world, we're the ones who beat these Nazis. Okay, so we're the heroes of this story. Yeah,

and then fire the conductor for being gay. Um. So in private, Hitler would either defend or attack romes have homosexuality, depending on the audience, right, Like, sometimes he was like, oh, that was in his misspent youth and he's learned better now. And other times he's like a US, worldly men, we understand that such thing has happened, and are fine. That's my Hitler accent. Um, I don't do accents. You should. Yeah. I also don't do accents, but I think I when

I tried, I've learned my lessons. So yeah, I'm reasonably so that if someone put a gun to my head and said that I had to speak like a British person for two minutes or I would die. I would die because I genuinely believe that with a gun to my head, I would not be able to talk with

a British accent. No, no, no, no no. I did a live reading of Twilight Ones with backdel Cast, another amazing podcast, and I had to voice one of the characters who was French and for and like in the thing, he has an accent, and so I tried before we recorded, I was like, can I do this? And I tried to have a French accent and I sounded like Jamaican every time it was so I was that was like cemented, like sharene. Accents are not for you. This is not so.

Accents are hard. So I understand and I don't want

to do that to the audience. Okay. So another one of the people that another one of the gay brown Shirts that Hitler has killed, was a guy named Edmund Hines who was actually Hitler's cell mate after the failed cove that Hall pusch Um and he was one of the fucking original Nazis, Like literally, he was number seventy eight in the enlisting in the National Socialists and he was gay as hell um And when they came for him during the Night of Long Knives, he was in

bed with a lover. By one Hitler starts suggesting the death penalty for gay kids and the Hitler youth, and then they passed the death penalty for gay s S members. But what they do instead, I mean a lot of them they kill, right, some of those sentences get commuted to go be cannon fodder in the war against Russia,

which I think they actually did to a lot of um. Yeah, a lot of people end up dying that way, get taken out of prison and sent to go die on the Eastern Front um or they're sent to serve in. It's like all criminal Durley Vanger Brigade of the s S, which is basically a brigade within the SS that's like all of the worst people and the criminals. And I put worse people in quotes, but like you know where they like go give criminals a chance to go. I

I bring all this stuff up. Okay, do you know that meme the I never thought leopards would eat my face, said the person who voted for the leopards eating people's faces. Party. No, I don't know this is I just said, okay, okay, okay, okay, no, no, no, I mean, it's just basically this It's like someone's like, but I never thought the leopards would eat my face, the person who voted for the leopards eating people's faces party. And that's how I feel about the gay Nazis. Yeah. Yeah.

And the reasons to bring this up in this like otherwise conversation about good gay people is that I feel like, okay, when we talk about the bad people in history who are gay. We're usually playing into this trope that like all of them were closeted, right, but these gay's Nazis weren't. They were not closeted. They were open about their interests. It was part of their like storied tradition of right wing homosexuality that ran concurrently with left wing in a

political homosexuality. And it's just like internalized homophobia or like hatred that I tried to wrap my head around stuff like that, like what they tell themselves to legitimize their existence or like what they're doing. So it's like, I don't know, just sucking racists, you know, and they're like, I like the Racist Party and then they're like what the Racist Party hates you for being gay? And you're like, well, I don't care. I'm so racist that that's you know.

It's like we see that a lot. Yeah. Yeah, And like the modern far right in the United States there are like, you know, gay members of it, and you're just like, what are you fucking doing? They hate you and will laugh at you and show you at the first opportunity, and they're like, no, they like me. You know, you know, I just thought of it's probably power that changes it, you know what I mean, Like if you feel like you're a little bit not untouchable but like protected,

you feel more able to be a hypocrite. I feel like, right, yeah, no, that that actually makes sense, honestly, Like almost everything comes down to power at the end. M wompomp Okay, ready okay. And so the other is gonna bring all this up is that, um, I think that we we forget that a lot of this ship has like really high stakes, the way that we talked about sex and sexuality and gender.

And I would argue that we should be on the lookout for when some segment of oh, I don't know, feminism or gay politics starts making common cause with the right wing, which obviously would never happen now, No feminists would just start making common cause with the right wing at all. No, no, no white feminism here. Yeah exactly. Oh god, I just thought I was I wanted to make like a really subtle Harry Potter reference, but I went fast enough, and so I just went with that

the most obviously. But you should know a listener that I was trying to uh talk about Jay, Yeah, me too, That's what I was thinking of. To Yeah. Okay, so so you've got the gay Nazis. They don't last very long, fuck them whatever. Um, But now I want to talk about gay pirates. Hell yeah, let's do Yeah. I want to talk about the edl wise pirates, who are so much fucking cooler, and they're on the opposite side of

all this. So all the youth from the what I was saying, when they're all itinerant doing all this crazy ship they're running around in these like it gets a million names buns or bands or clubs or clicks or whatever, and they're coming out of the vonder Vogel and all these related movements and the whitewashed version of history that I had run across primarily before doing this research honestly has them like wandering around the pristine German countryside, like

singing camp songs and thinking about like marrying their heterosexual sweethearts monogamously and popping up pure arian babies and all that ship. Right, But like this could not be further from the truth. Uh, this, this growing culture of vagabond is um and has a desire for change because they're all fucking broken, hungry, and mainstream societies completely failed them. And more and more of them. We're living in camps and again totally unfamiliar to people today's you know whatever. Um,

A lot of the clubs are gangs. They were the wild gangs, and they were in a war against civilization and everything boring. Every winter they would like disband in every easter, they would celebrate their click or their gang's rebirth. Their their camp songs where parodies of the Hitler youth songs. They told dirty jokes, They got into fist fights with

the Hitler youth. Um, basically with all the men off to war, the Hitler youth were acting like the police and a lot of German cities and so they and they lived criminal lives and they fucked and oh my god, did they fuck. And it was anything but straight, anything but monogamous. Like it's it's like queer enough to like maybe even get me a little bit like, oh my may that's not the right way to go about these things, you know. Um, So these are not the assimilationist gays.

These are street fighting, forest fucking, sex working, Nazi robbing criminal queers. Yeah. It's like the anarchy of gay Yeah. And and they're called the They have a lot of different names, and but the one I'm going to use now is the wild Fry, which means the wild free, which was one of their mottoes. And they would have like things emblazoned while I'll get to that, um. And they they live up to the name. History mostly remembers like a subsect of them called the Edelwise Pirates. And

and I've got yeah it's a flower. Oh interesting, Okay, I think I know, right. Yeah, So so I've got information kind of about two generations of the Wild Fry, and one chunk comes from about and one chunk comes from the early forties. And so I'm kind of doing my best to give an honest like the way that these two connect. But there isn't a lot of information about that because all of the ship is so heterowashed um.

But so it's an important I'm gonna do an imperfect job, but I'm gonna do the best I can and quote original sources and all that ship. And because people when they mentioned Edlwise Pirates, they present the sort of like generic working class youth subculture who ruled and we're bravest

fuck and they like fought Nazis. There's a movie about them called I think it's called Edowise pirates um but has taken out Yeah, totally, and it doesn't talk about their origins and it definitely doesn't talking about gay fucking and um. So so Daniel Garon, who's the French anarchists who wants to go hang out with gay folks in Germany. So does. He describes a run in with them in his book called the Brown Plague, which is a doesn't translate well now, but means that it's critical of the

rising tide of fascism. Okay, one Sunday on the outskirts of Berlin, we met by chance a strange troop on the road. Needless to say, neither they're short pants, their bare calves which disappeared under their long wolf vests, the bulky and sundry loads swain on their backs, nor their enormous hiking boots distinguished them from ordinary vagabonds. But they

were very much toughs. They had the depraved and troubled faces of hoodlums, and the most bizarre coverings on their heads, black or gray chaplinesque bowlers, old women's hats with the brims turned up in amazon fashion, adorned with ostrich plumes and metals, proletarian navigator caps created with enormous edel wise above the visor, handkerchiefs or scarves, and streaming colors tied any which way around the neck, bare chests bursting out

of open skin, vests with broad stripes, arms scored with fantastic or lewd tattoos, ears hung with pendants or enormous rings, leather shorts surmounted by immense triangular belts, alsho of leather, both daubed with all the colors of the rainbow, esoteric numbers, human profiles, and inscriptions such as wild fry or rude ber bandits around their wrists. They wore enormous leather bracelets.

In short, they were a bizarre mixture of virility and feminacy. Wow, that's a sentence, that is That is amazing, I know. And uh, and you two can buy all of their costumes from our sponsor, the Pirates Store UM, which is a nonprofit again because we're going full pure wholesome with the ads. Here is a nonprofit store. Uh yeah, what you said in blazon. The first thing I was like they have merch you know, like you know, this is that's one way to spread the word. Yeah, totally, Um

and we too. I actually don't think we have merged at the time of this recording, but we we do have advertisers, and some of them are hopefully the Pirates Store. Yes, we're manifesting. Yeah, here's some ads and we're back. So the Wild Fry they're there. They're self organized, right, they don't have this like overarching structure, but they do sometimes form into these larger coalitions, sometimes not. There's thousands of these bands and they all have fucking weird, fantastic names.

Some of them are Black Love, Red Oath, Fear Not Death, Bloody Bones, Dirty Guys, Forest and Field Sleepers, Tortoises, Brandy Frush, Black Flag, Forest Pirates, or the Northern Lights. Well. I love that it's like the Legends of the Hidden Temple, like the team names. Yeah, it's like, well, I'll get to why it sounds like fantasy in a second. It's one of the things I love about it. Um Okay.

They also they all had their own distinct styles of dress, which um and they basically the basic idea was take some idea from fantasy literature and just fucking run with it. Just basically like, try to live like you're in a fantasy novel um, they're like, what's the what's the cult? Uh, what's the thing. When you're role playing, it's like LARPing. LARPing, it's like laping. It's like laping. Yeah, but but for

really very creative and yeah. And so they and unlike a lot of the rest of the Vondervogel movement, which was fairly middle class, almost all of these are working class kids. And basically they're like, well, a fantasy life that sounds better than starving, right, And so some of them would dress up as like American frontiersman. Others would dress up like pirates, somewhere in stereotypical German garb and like leader hosen and ship. Others were like sader knights um.

Some were caricatures of indigenous Americans. All of them wore at a wise flowers, the single symbol that like united all of them and gave them the eventual name the Oedowise Pirates, and they were into tattoos, including on their genitals. Girls and boys both wore earrings and when the various gangs, this is one of my favorite details. I ran Chris, one of various gangs would meet up together, though instead of all wearing their like different colors from their different clicks.

They all wore like top hats and tailcoats and like the finest, like fancy clothes that I'm sure they stole. And I want to look up when wise flower looks like because I want I want to visualize their merch. Oh wow, oh that's a really it's like a starfish. Oh yeah, huh yeah, they're like for anyone's listening there, they're pretty white flowers with like yellow I don't know anything about biology botany. I definitely never seen one before.

It's very unique looking, but okay, cool. I have a visual um the most influential fantasy author for them, which is it's kind of funny. Is this guy named Carl May. Who is this nineteenth century adventure novel author who's you know I'm going with this, no, no, oh yeah, this is Hitler's favorite author, favorite author. May yea did not know that there's a hole behind the Bastard's episode about about Hitler and about how he loves uh Carl May. Wow,

old friend, I don'd how Carl felt. Oh man, this is like, I mean, you know, Robert describes Carl May as the J. K. Rowling of their day. Oh interesting, That's all I need to know. That's all I need to know. But I want to know because I think of like I'm in a metal band that takes a lot of inspiration from Tolkien, and so are a lot of Nazi metal bands, right, and so I think of it like that, you know, But I haven't read any Carl May um. But anyway, so these Carl may LARPers

who like rob people into sex work. Hey, a few years ago a modern queer sex worker focused radical publishing project called Underbelly translated some of their songs from German. And so I'm not gonna sing it unfortunately, I'm sorry everyone, um dar, but my my favorite is just making fun of the Hitler youth for being too masculine and NORMI and it's called short hair, big ears, Such short hair, such big ears. That means the Hitler youth must be here,

grow long hair, tango nights. There's no Hitler youth in sight. Oh ho oh ho. And one hears the words on every street. There's no Hitler youth. I'd like to meet o ho o ho. And they're fucking poets. Come on, that's amazing, amazing, um. And most of them are like fourteen eighteen. I'll get into that more. Uh, but that's the age where you kind of feel like invincible, right, Like,

that's the damn I would have been all over that. Yeah. Um. They made their living as delivery drivers in various unskilled positions, petty crime, non petty crime, sex work, especially at various gay bars throughout the city. And honestly, one of the reasons I love them so much as they just sound like my friends. That's just like a description of what

my friends do. Um, and especially when we were younger. Um. And then they would pull all their money and then use it to pay off all their criminal finds that they incur or to support their arrested friends, and they go to juvenile detention and jail and ship constantly, and they break out of juvenile detention constantly, Like the study. The study I read of fifty wild fry who had been held in detention, almost all of them had broken out at least once, and six of them had broken

out of detention centers more than twenty times individuals. That is incredible. Well yeah, yeah, I know. And the more they faced repression, the more they just resent mainstream society. This is even before the Rise of the nazis a lot of this stuff. They just resent mainstream society and they retreat further and further into their fantasy worlds. Um

in the city column where the movement is strongest. They coordinated all their gangs, which they called guilds into of course, they're called guilds, yeah, of course, right, yeah, And they coordinate them into rings, which are coalitions of each guild of guilds by district. And then each guild had a had a leader called a gang bull, and the bulls

of each guild would together elect the ring bull. And to be a bull, you had to prove that you're strong, brave, good at crime and down to fun down to fun, like good at criming down to fun. Yes, all kinds of weird ways. Um. And at least one gang, the Eagles of the Mountains, everyone in it was a bull because they were like no leaders, I guess, um. And each bowl had a queen, which I think might have been of either sex, but I'm not entirely sure. All male gangs had a beloved who is expected to be

sexually available to everyone in the gang. Um. Since some gangs didn't let girls in, girls formed their own all girl gangs. And then some boys wanted to join the all girl gangs, and so the girls let them in. And I appreciate that because that would have been me. I would have been the boy being like can I join the girl gang? Though? Yeah, I mean girls are nicer than yeah, yeah man. But I also was thinking, like just guilds and all these little factions and stuff.

This is like I r L World of warcraft, you know what I mean, This is just like factions and battle and like whatever, like wow, that's art is life and life are I suspect these kids weren't bored very often, you know, um and okay, So each new member, when they would join, was initiated through bizarre and ceremonial baptisms,

which were elaborate rituals of violence and sex. Uh. They would start off with fist fights and knife fights and then turn into public sexuality like fucking everyone in the gang, or masturbating in front of everyone, or getting off during sex fast enough, like literally someone sending a stopwatch and you've like get off fast enough. So it's like hazing, but like for badass yeah yeah totally. Um, it's like

way more like you're cool enough to be cool. Yeah, and it's hard for me to imagine the frat where the haziness. Now you've got to funk all of us. Um, but you know whatever, also a mixed gender frat um and they would all descend into drunken orgies every time someone knew was baptized. And there's actually there's I should have saved them in a file to make them easily available,

but there's actually photos of some of these um. Some of the like weird likeness, like people dressed like pirates with knives and all kinds of weird ship and they would they lived in the forests and in squats in the cities. They would like each each crew would have it each each guild would have its own squad basically um addicts or sellers or on unused storage rooms and they would put a single bed in the middle and they called it the fucking sofa and that was like

the only sleeping space. I mean, I'm sure they slept on the floor, but and they would just like I would not if I wasn't on this podcast, I wouldn't think this was true. No, I know, and like and so so I'll say that my main source of this is Daniel Garin's account of talking to of the more like crime sex stuff is talking to a sociologist a social workers sorry at the time, who did a study on these people, and that study is replicated in a book,

The Brown Plague. Um. But yeah, like because a lot of the later stuff that we hear about otherwise, pirates just doesn't talk about their drunken orgies at all, um, But stuff gets raised all the time, right, like as we've learned from this podcast and just life. Yeah, totally okay.

So they would like, like one account I was reading, they like they would steal and sell cars, and then they would like in their stolen car, they would like drive around and like I don't remember exactly, was like the guy who steals the car, he's like known his like a car guy that's like his name or whatever, you know. Um, And then they like go around and

rip off payphones. I didn't even know they had payphones back then, but they would like go and like rip off payphones and then try and get all the money out that they couldn't throw them in the river or whatever. Um. And they would fence all their stolen goods through bartenders in exchange for alcohol and this gets and this leads

a lot of them. A lot of them end up like in debt to these bartenders, and then like when they age out of the wild fry, they just enter like a more mainstream life of crime, for better or worse. I don't even consider that they would age out. Actually, now that you say that out loud, I know, you can't stay a wild fry if you're not a small fry. You have to be fire self committing crime all of a sudden. I don't know, yeah, I know, I know.

And it's like because one of the things that this reminds me so much of when I was like a teenage squatter. Um, but I did most of that one was like nineteen and twenty, and so I'm a little bit like, oh, I would have been too old to be you know. Yeah, And that's funked up. That's not fair. Yeah, it's like Harry Peter Panty lost boys about them, you know what. I'm totally yeah, it is just Peter Pan's army. Yeah. Okay.

So the Nazis come to power and they refused to disband, and in a lot of cities they're powerful enough that they completely just challenge the hedgemony of the Hitler youth. In some cities they outnumber the Hitler youth UM. And one of the slogans that they had at the time was eternal war against the Hitler Youth. And yes, yes, And so they did resistance in a lot of ways right like um, just by existing. They continuing to like hike and camp and wander their resisting Nazi era um

travel restrictions. But they they weren't hent with only doing that, and so it wasn't long before they go from like street fights with the Nazi the Hitler youth to distributing propaganda, like when the Allies would drop leaflets on the city, the wild Fry would run around and like stick the leaflets through people's doors and ship um they help people desert from the Nazi army. They would rob Nazi warehouses and uh, you know eventually started like killing Nazis who

needed a good killing. Um. And actually what you're talking about, like aging out. I think that I think that the war like Fox up the best I can tell the war like Fox up there, you know, sort of like their specific organizational structure, it becomes a lot looser and so some of the people that you know who get hanged and stuff for this activity are like formal edelwise pirates and shipped like that right, um, And so they're still hanging out with like sixteen year olds doing all

these crimes together. Um, And a lot of them get caught and get sent to concentration camps on November, thirteen of them or thirteen people six them who are teenagers and some of them are formal otherwise pirates get executed without trial and cole and I believe for for theft, murder and planning to blow up a Gestapo headquarters. This is the like most known thing that that they were doing. Forgive me you mentioned this, But like demographically what are

most of them? Are they just like mixed like ethnicity wise? Oh okay, they do so they are both Aryan and Jewish, or at least they specifically refused to disallowed Jews. I could not tell you what percent of the movement was Jewish. Um. Probably I don't know. I know that historically they allowed in Uh. That was like a thing that distinguished them from a lot of it is that they were like what funk all that? Um? It was like kind of started I would assume by like Aryan people, but that

that were good, probably, but I couldn't tell you. I couldn't tell you about Jewish proticipation in the beginning. I was just trying to imagine them for whatever reason, when imagine something badass and doing stuff, They're not white, so I have to rerange. Yeah, totally. Yeah, we're considering like the overwhelming majority of Germans at this point are not like really doing their best, you know. Um, so like I see my prejudice now, I'm just gonna um, I

think that's fair. Yeah yeah, and um and so so plenty of historians. So they run into this problem where they're not seen as political, uh, which in a sense it's true, right, because they were not friends of polite society, any polite society. They were criminals under the Weimar Republic. There were criminals under the Nazis, and they continued to be criminals when the Allies liberated the country. The wild fry and Soviet controlled areas were treated really harshly. In

many of them were sentenced to twenty five years in prison. Um. And because they're working class criminals, they were never acknowledged their anti fascist work until two thousand eleven, when and the families of the Edelwise pirates who are killed never received like reparations from the German and state on like other partisans. Um. And the last known surviving at a Wise pirate was a woman named Gertrude Cook. Uh coach, I don't know who died at the age of ninety two.

Well it's a long life. Yeah, you know who else survives? The people who drink tap water and eat potatoes? The sponsors of this show you will live forever. And this is especially funny because now I've been learning about the more about potatoes because I listen to buying the bastards, which I feel terrible to admit on this show. Um, how could you? I know? And I'm learning people only what a hack podcast? I wonder who produces that show. But anyway, here's some ads from tap water, potatoes and

whatever else gets mixed in there. And we are back and we are talking about pirates. Yes, when you first started with the pirates, I don't I've never heard of the otherwise pirates. But I was curious what definition of pirate you're going to use, like the actual like people that were pirates on you know what I mean? Because yeah, exactly or like just but it's just really funny that they're just like dress like pirates and they do pirty things.

It's all like they're I don't know, it's just kind of funny to see it all come together totally imagination. Yeah yeah, I mean they lived really similar lives to like Golden Age pirates, but they like we're doing it in costume, you know, yeah, which fucking rules honestly, Like it's it's it's yeah. It's like, especially at the time, it's like if the world is going to ship, just you live once, you know, like that's the I don't know, it's it's I like the uninhibited nature of their life. Yeah,

I do too, jesus. Yeah. And then one of the things I like about them is like it doesn't seem like it was like a a gay culture as in, like some of them are gay, and some of them are heterosexual, and some of them are by it was just fucking weird, Like I don't think any of them knew their sexuality. Some of them probably cared, and some of them probably didn't. And like they definitely weirdos unite, right sorry yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no, I mean

just like weirdoes all unite. Right, So it's like when you're in high school, the outcast are altogether, whether they're like people of color or gay or whatever. Like that's what happened to my experience anyway. Or like when you're Yeah, if you're what's the word, um, marginalized, marginalized exactly, if you're marginalized and you're fucking weird, you will unite because you want a weird community and weird. Honestly, I think it's a great thing. You should be weird being a normy, boring,

you know, so stay weird. Hell yeah, totally. And then okay, so the So these aren't the only queers fighting the Nazis within German any um. Far from it. I'm gonna tell you about some more some more of them. There's a gad Beck who was a gay part Jewish Berliner who in two he borrows a Hitler youth uniform and he marches into the pre deportation camp where his lover

man Fred, is being detained. So he shows up in his uniform and he goes to the commanding officer and he's like, oh, I need I need to borrow this guy for a minute on a construction project. And so the request is granted, and the you know, when he starts out the camp with with his lover Manfred, but then Manfred stops and he says, I can't leave my family basically, and he he goes back into the back into the camp. He dies him and his family. Um. But he basically said, you know, if I will never

be free if I'm not free with my family. Um. But so then gad Beck spends the next three years helping Jews escape before he gets betrayed by a fucking a Jewish spy for the Gestapo. Um and he gets arrested. But he survives the war. So this is gonna be another one of those like who lives, Who dies? Yeah, little list of me just listening intently until the very end. It's like, okay, yeah, well not of the next one.

Maybe the next one we better Yeah, well then this, you know, so this guy survives the war and he spends his lover doesn't but he does. Well it's nice that like, even after his lover doesn't go with him, he's actually true, like you know what I mean, he keeps doing fighting the good fight totally. He doesn't just sunk off, which would be exactly perfectly fair. I am not judging anyone who sucks off out of a place

is trying to murder them, you know, yeah, exactly. And he he lives to be eighty eight and he spends the last thirty five years of his life with his partner. Um. So I like when that's a good ending, Yeah, thank you others yeah okay. So then there's a Count Albrecht von Bernstaff who's a gay aristocrat and he's this. He's a short balding man. He's always impeccably dressed, and he wastes mostly war years sitting around cafes hitting on waiters. Or that's what he wants people to think. I mean,

he he does. He is these things. He's a short baulding, well dressed man who hits on a lot of waiters. But he's actually he's he's playing up the like foppish aristocratic gay man stereotype, um to draw attention from his actual work, which is he's running an underground railroad helping Jews and other dissidents get themselves out of Germany. Um that's genius, I know. And like that does take like front and center, you know, like put the gay out

front and then let me do my secret good job. Yeah, totally. Um, this one could keep him distracted. Yeah, he's like, oh, I'm just a creepy, harmless old gay guy, you know. Like uh. And and he's so aristocratic and I kind of love him for this. He's so aristocratic that he figures like, alright, I'm doing something that is obviously illegal, being being gay, but I'm so rich that everyone puts up with it. Yeah, exactly. Power. I think it was the last episode. Maybe it was, Yeah, it was last,

but like or you can you can get away with more? Yeah, totally uh and yeah, because because and money, power and money. Sorry, Like I have a lot of inside thoughts that are just I think, and they say it out loud, even if it's like not even my right timing. But I think that's the point of a podcast. Why my podcast cast, because otherwise it would be me talking to myself and that would be half as interesting. But no, money and power.

That's how you hack life, unfortunately, I know. And it's like all across history, if you're poor and gay, you're fucked, And if you're rich and gay, you're just eccentric, you know, Yes, very true, like Oscar Wilde. Yeah, totally, although it only sort of works out for him different points. Yeah, but still but that was a bad example whatever, No, no, no, no,

it is. It is a good example because like he's able to exist in that way at all because of that kind of exactly Yeah, who was accepted as what he was versus Yeah. Anyway, Um, so the so the so Count Albrecht he he coordinates with gay resistance groups in the Netherlands And to quote an anonymously written article that's coming from an upcoming issue of a magazine called Batten that the author let me read before, Count Albrecht had warned his contacts in Holland about the Nazi invasion

before it began, so they could prepare themselves. In one instance, members of a gay society took measures ahead of the German invasion. In preparation for the catastrophe. The editor of their paper, Levin Strict, burned the organization's mailing list. Another comrade, Aren't Vin saut Hoorst, committed the entire list to memory

so that they could find one another afterwards. And I really like that because I like because when I first started doing this, like everyone's like keeping these records and it keeps getting them all in trouble, right, and so I'm like, what do you what do you fucking do and burn your fucking records? Right, But then the guy who memorizes it all makes reminds me that I'm like, well, it was so hard for them to find each other in the first place. That like losing that is losing

something really important, you know. Yeah, memorizing in that's what. That's a great solution if you're able to do that, you know, totally mohammed of the profit of mom. He memorizes the Koran you know how to read it rite, so it works. Look at him now he's done. Well, yeah, I've heard of him, you know. Praise. Yeah. So eventually Count Albrett gets gets found out, and he gets arrested, and he gets into a series of concentration camps and

he gets really horrendously tortured. Um. But his his fellow inmates, they remember him based on how he kept everyone's spirits up. Like he would he'd be sitting around in the concentration camp and he'd be like, we're all going to have a most fabulous party at my house when this is all done. You are all invited. Everyone's coming over, Like, I'm you know, break out all the finest stuff, best party ever and um, and he he didn't survive the camps. He died in the camps. Um, But I don't know.

Hundreds of people, at least Jews and gays and gay Jews and at least two different countries survived the war because of his efforts and him disguising himself himself as a fop, you know, and playing into the like being like, oh, yes, homosexuals are cowards, we would never do anything bad, you know, use the stereotype to your benefit, just like you know what I mean, it's or like that benefit but like your advantage. Yeah uh yeah, Well what a guy. I know,

I like him. Um okay. And one of the things that it's kind of dark that I ran across in a lot of this research, a lot of the gay men who survived the concentration camps get immediately re arrested because they're gay, because you're not allowed to be gay, whether it's Nazi Germany or Soviet Union. While East Germany at least the Soviet Union had more complicated Oh yeah, right, I think Hitler had re I know that, like Lenin made homosexuality legal, and then Stalin was like j K

all you. Um. But um, anyway, one guy, for example, that I was reading about, I don't have his name in front of me. Um. He wasn't as much of a a resistance fighter, although just existing his resistance. I'm not trying to like knock him. Um. He retold his experience where he was taken back literally in front of the same judge that had sentenced him to a concentration camp previously, because they didn't actually get rid of the fucking Nazis,

they just like cut off the head of it. Yeah. Um, so he gets sent back to the same judge he's like you again and then sentences him right back to prison. Um. That makes me so mad. People empower stay in power ultimately. Yeah, Okay, I want to end with with one last short story about a queer poet named Robert desns and he was Yeah, he was heavily involved in the French surrealist scene. Um,

and he joins the resistance of Germany. Once you know, francis under occupation and like our Dutch heroes from last episode or last Monday whatever I know how to say, is this a new episode? Is this just the different half of the same episode. I don't understand the taxonomy of my own job. It's a two part Okay. In the last part of this two part episode, um perfect, thanks, thanks, I'm good at my job. So uh. He works as a counterfeiter and he makes fake I d s. And

he also does a ton of other stuff. He actually works for a collaborationist newspaper as a spy, and he passes along all the information he learns by working for a shitty pro German newspaper. He passes it along to to the Resistance. He also wrote for underground papers under a ton of different names, and he gets caught and he gets sent to a series of concentration camps. But

at heart, right, this guy's a surrealist. So one day, according to Holocaust, Holocaust survivor named a debt and it's relayed. This story is relaid through a writer named Susan Griffin. So Robert's waiting in line for the fucking gas chamber and and he just jumps up and runs up to a man who's ahead of him in line, and he just gets really excited and he starts reading the man's palm and he's like, look here, look at your lifeline.

You're going to live a long life, and you're gonna have three children, and his absurd as them, right, because

they all know what's happening, all right. I think it's his absurdism is so contagious that everyone's just like breaking out laughing, and it confuses the guards so completely that the guards sent them back to their barracks because they don't know how to handle these people who are supposed to just be like totally given up, who are like riotlessly riotously, who are laughing very hard, uncontrollably, and wow, that's so fascinating. And he he doesn't die in a

gas chamber. Um. He used the phrase unexecuted in your script. Everyone gets sent back to the barracks unexecuted, as the way I wrote it. Yeah, and he technically survives the war, but he caught typhoid I believe, in the concentration camp, and he dies within a month of liberation. Um. But again that doesn't seem right. I know the thing, okay. But the reason I want to end on that note is because I think people look at some of this

history wrong, at least like queer history. Um, because they're like, oh, did they succeed, Like a lot of the stuff I would read being like, oh, they didn't succeed because they died, or they didn't succeed because they only blew up eight hundred thousand records instead of three million records or whatever. Right, um, but they it's to me, it feels like they succeeded, right. They they chose resistance and a lot of them, most

of them didn't survive the war. But they say fucking thousands of people, and I don't know they died fighting, you know what I mean, like if they did die in a way that they shouldn't have, Like it's just a testament to like, I don't know, caring more about the world and yourself and like I don't know, I don't know where I'm going. I don't know what the end when I started. Um, but I think it's pretty badass.

I think that they like they basically they proved a fucking lot and they certainly proved like our man Willem said at the beginning that homosexual is not a fucking synonym for a week, which is what people used to treat it as um And and no one can say that they were cowards, you know, no one. Yeah, definitely not.

That's the last thing would be. I was thinking though not to like yes and but yes, and it uh like the vast majority of these people that we learned about are our men, correct, So it is interesting just to think, like how many more people there were that maybe didn't get like attention or history and about them, or that were who were I mean, there's a there's a spattering of women wore in there, for sure, But it does make me wonder if again it goes back

to power. As a man, you have more power, right, and maybe that's why you're able to accomplish more especially I mean back to that, and now what am I saying? But it's interesting to think about who gets written about, even like alt history, because as I'm a filmmaker, I want to say in quotes, but come on, I should like me whatever imposters ENDM one oh one, but imposter

syndrome is real. And but I was reading about like writing like scripts and movies and stuff, and how we're so used to just pretending that Western story structure is like the default way to tell stories and we forget that like so many cultures have different ways of telling stories, and like it's like Bollywood films are structures, so differently than ours, and we just we assume ours is the right default way. And I think that's the same with

just everything. That's all. You didn't mention that this is the westernized version of it, But it just makes me wonder what else is out there, because I know there are more amazing people out there. Maybe maybe we don't have to know about them. Just to know they existed is enough. I don't know if that made any sense. No, No,

I think that that actually gets at something really important. Um. One of the things that I kept running across with this is like I think I feel certain that there was as many you know, lesbians fighting against the Nazis right as there were gay men. And most of the people with names that are coming up with are gay men, and I think partly that's because they get written about for being gay in a way that a lot of

the women aren't being written about. Um. And then like it's actually telling that the Edlwise pirates who were a mixture of boys and girls, right, Um, they that's not a story full of names. You know, there are some names we have for that, but mostly you have these like anonymous masses of like mixed group of queer kids who are like, all right, let's sunk up these Nazis and they don't get fucking remembered except kind of collectively. And you know, I don't know whether that's better or

worse or different or whatever, but it does it. You're right, it leads to this, like you know, the which stories get told absolutely exactly. No, yeah, I think about this stuff all the time because I mean I don't know even like, yeah, the history stories or whatever, like what what we've even gotten as a civilization about like what we've learned and from our past centuries of existence, Like even that is curated, you know what I mean. It's like it just we just live in a matrix and

it's real. But um, but no, I I'm really happy to have learned all of this stuff from you today and on Monday two days ago because we're not recording at the same time. But but no, I I hope it makes other people think about this kind of stuff too, because it doesn't have to be like this default way of thinking of like, oh, this is just the way things are because this is the way they are. Is it the way they are because this is how they always have been because certain people make it this way

if that makes sense. So it's I don't know, just using your brain to philosophize. I think sometimes a good thing and like do some shrooms or something. Every other podcast about them like shrooms. But if you're able to it's I think it's the cure for things or just seeing the world in a different way. Can I shut up? Good? Okay, I'm shutting up though. Um yeah, when I when I saw shrooms, I saw the void. It was really bad

and dark for months. But okay, I stay correct, but my experience is not the I'm certainly not anti people messing around with this kind of stuff. You know, I gave it multiple shots. I shouldn't have made a blanket. You're right, No, No, I mean, but people should. I don't know. There's all kinds of blankets better dangerous. You know. All I meant to say was like, expand your mind and like I like that. I'm leaving this recording being like, you, what,

maybe we're not so bad? Hell yeah? Would you say that there's cool people who did cool stuff? You know? I would say that there are cool people that did cool stuff. Mentioned it, but thank you for having me letting me ramble to no end. This was really fun. Oh thanks so much for being on. Come back again, please please, I would love to come back and learn more good things about good people, cool cool things about

what am I doing. I'mussing get all up, cool things about cool people who happened to be good doing good. I'm doing it again. I'm gonna stop talking. This is the end of my sentence. Now Sharene before we send you off. Is there anything you would like to plug? Yeah, I'm Sharene. You can follow me on the internet if you want. Twitter Shiro Hero six six six and Instagram is just Shiro Hero Um. I make films, write poetry. I have a couple of poetry books out that I

self published. What's the newest one called um Archives. Yeah, it's basically just emo diaries I've decided to publish. It's very personal. Uh but yeah, that's just my I'm honest to a fault. And if you want to follow along, great. If you don't like me rambling, good because I'm going to stop now. Margaret plugs anything. You can also follow me on Twitter at Magpie kill Joy, where I try to be clever because Twitter is just this awful competition.

It's like an arena of people trying to um acquire enough clout to not starve by being clever and having all the right takes. And I always always but were you were you? Were you on Twitter when it was just like a place to like say your thoughts out loud. I looked at and the dumbest ship. It's like Facebook status is or like whatever where it's just like I'm hungry, Yeah, I'm going to fail my test. And now it's just instead of being like a random thought catalog. It's definitely

this one upping the arena of death. Yeah, speaking speaking of death, can I can I uh plug? Jamie Loftus is Ghost Church that's on cool Zone Media as well. That will be will be out by the time this this episode drops, So check that out. Ghost Church by Jamie Loftus, Queen future guest of this podcast, Jamie Future Guests of this podcast, Jamie Loftus. I also produce that one, so check it out. Sophie produces all podcasts I think

you've already heard me say. Yeah, legally all podcasts are mine, except except for once again, the Joe Rogan Podcast actually a YouTube show. Yes legally distinct, Yes, yes, thank you, and we'll be back Monday Right, Margaret yea Next Monday, Forever until the heat death of the universe. Cool by Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of

cool zone Media. For more podcasts on cool zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.