Thinking Sideways: Who Finked on the Franks

to another episode of Thinking Sideways. I'm Joe, joined by my incredibly good looking co host Steve and devon guys say, Hi, Hi, So anyway you guys, Yeah, do you want to do that again? No? I like it because I'm incredibly attractive exactly all right, So anyway, folks, we're going to talk about a mystery that surrounds and Frank, who you probably have heard of, but for a few of you haven't heard.

And Frank was a teenage Jewish girl who spent more than two years hiding in some rooms behind the business in Amsterdam, along with their family and four other people. Is that ragman a bells uh? And then one day in August ninety four, German police rated the building and took them away, and of course, says you all know, they met a grim fate yeah, Auschwitz and Bergen Belson and all that stuff. But it appears there and then that somebody ratted them out. So our mystery is is

who thinked on the Franks? Yeah? Yeah, well this has actually been heavily investigated. There was an investigation in nine nineteen sixty three, in nineteen eighty six, two thousand three investigation. Oh yeah, I have books have been written, you know, suspects put forward. First of all, before we start talking about our mystery, I want to take a minute to thank our listener Maggie, who said, as did this story

way way back when, like December last year. Yeah, so sorry for the long way, Maggie, but you know, here we are. Yeah, well we're here. We finally arrived. I'd also like to thank our listeners. Shanna hopefully hippernuts that correctly Shanna. Uh. Janna speaks Dutch and she helped me out with the pronunciation. Some of the names involved ironic that you don't know how to say. Her name actually spelled Channa, but she actually she actually spelled it out

fanatically for men. So Shanna unless it's Shanna, but it might be Shanna, so Shanna Shanna. Yeah, let me know if I succeeded. I'm almost certainly going to mangle these word these names anyway, but at least no, I won't mangle them quite as bad as I would have. Yeah, fantastically. Yeah. Okay, back to Anne Frank. Um, I'll just give you a brief overview of her story. And this was actually helpful

for me. I know, most school aged children, at least in America presumably most other places read Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. I did not. I was never assigned it, so I had not actually ever really read, you know, in depth. You kind of just vaguely understand that Anne Frank is a person who existed and happened, and she wrote some stuff about those bad things, and also also some stuff that people think is really offensive and pornographic. But I don't know. That's all I ever knew.

So this is really help No, this was I same thing. I I had a complete and total incorrect perception of the space that these people lived in, and and so reading it and then getting to see some of this stuff, it really it makes this the story makes more sense. I also didn't realize there was it was two years. Yeah, I thought, I don't know why I just kind of assumed it was a couple of months. They were there

for two years and a month. Yeah. Actually the Austrian police officer who finally rated the place and who and then arrested them and took them away, couldn't believe it. That's what Yeah, he said. Yeah, Otto Frank said, he is the policeman. The policeman just couldn't believe that they had been there that long. Yeah. But anyway, so let's talk about the story. I was talking about the story. Uh. And Frank was born in nine in Frankfurt, Germany. So yes she was German, not not Dutch. But she was

born to Ottawa and Edith Frank. She also had an older sister named Margot, about three years older than her. And in nineteen thirty three a couple of things happened that kind of prompted the family to move to Amsterdam. One is that Otto got an offer to help start a company there and to the National Socialist German Workers

Party came to power. It was along you know, I was reading about this just today, the whole convoluted process of Hitler getting appointed chancellor and then consolidating power, all the manipulations scheming that went on and it's way too complicated to go over. But he he did a masterful job of pretty much taking over the entire German government. And it took a little Oh yeah, it took a lot of scheming and it took and it took time and years. Yeah, it took. Yeah, it took a while.

But finally he was in charge of everything and that turned out well yeah, not really yeah yeah yeah. So uh so Otto, Frankie and his wife saw the writing on the wall and decided it might be time to beat Fete to Amsterdam. Smart choice. Yeah. So Otto worked in Amsterdam at a Pecto works in a building at two sixty Print, Amsterdam. Uh In night, he founded a second company called Pecticon, which was housed in the same building. And he was a bit of an entrepreneur. Yeah yeah,

well both companies are his. And it was something to do with gelatine. Yeah, pecton. Pecton is a is a derived from fruit and it's kind of jello in a sense. It's really interesting. I never really what you used to make jams and jelly. Yeah, that's it, thank you, which I understand would be high. It was highly important, but I never really thought about the fact that it was derived that way. So it's really interesting. You had to know what he was kind very intelligent guy to be

able to manage that. Yea, And that seems like it would be a high commodity at that time as well of canning and preserving happening at that point, refrigeration was not so good well as you kind of you know, if you're going to be living in the back of a house for two years, you know, yeah, two years in a month half and that. So things were going pretty well for the for the Franks. But in nineteen forty, unfortunately, the Germans invaded the Netherlands and immediately, of course began

persecuting Dutch Jews. Uh Anna Margot were forced to change schools because there were new rules mandating segregations, so that meant they could only go to a Jewish school as long as the Jewish school existed. It does It seems like it was a much slower process than I also thought, you know, I just kind of assumed the Nazis come to Amsterdam and then all of the Jews get carted away. Yeah, one day, the next. Yeah, it was a much slower

process of slowly segregating and then slowly carting away. Yeah, yeah, the carting away didn't didn't start right away, and it was like, yeah, I don't think they'd really ramped up the whole Holocaust to industrial proportions yet. Yeah. Yeah, that took a little time. So the girls had to go to a new school. They had to add to change schools. Jewish own businesses were being confiscated, so in y one, Auto Frank liquidated his companies and transferred all of his

assets to young young Geese. I hope I pronounced that correctly, shan up. Let me know. Um Geese was the husband of Neep Geese, who was Auto Frank's secretary, and also they were all friends too. In July two, Margot was ordered to report for relocation to a work camp. Remember Margot was was older than the Yeah, uh so the Franks. The Franks had been planning already to go into hiding, but they decided to move up the date a little

bit because of this. And on July six, who they left their apartment with many, many layers of clothes on, which must have been great on July Day. Yeah, you hope they left first thing in the morning. Yeah, yeah, in the evening or something. But they were tons of layers of clothes because they didn't want to be seen carrying luggage. Yeah, they left behind their cat, which kind of bothers me. Oh. I heard she that Anne gave the cat to their neighbor. Yeah, and her marbles. Yeah.

She was very, very concerned about her marble. She didn't want them to fall into the wrong hands. Yeah, and so so that made me feel better when I heard that the cat was okay in the marble. Yeah, yeah, in the marbles too. Uh. They walked to Auto's business where his two companies are, and and it was several kilometers but they had to walk because Jews weren't allowed to take public transportation. Cool. I such a weird rule,

but okay, yeah, I know. Well it's very similar to segregation that happened in America, and it's still a weird rule to me on that front. Yeah, okay, that's weird whatever. I don't know why, but okay, yeah, I know. Back to the business to building is one of those really tall, skinny Amsterdam buildings. I'm sure everybody's seen pictures of its

um like four stories tall. Yeah, exactly. It's it was actually a building that fronted on the street in the canal, and then behind it there was a second building called the annex, and they were connected together. The ground level was basically unfinished warehouse space for the business. Yeah yeah, extending underneath the back building too. Yeah, and so the

ground level was basically unfinished. The upper levels of the street side building were used as offices, and then there was a connecting doorway to the rear building on the second level, which and this this part of this space is known as the annex. So second from the second floor up to the attic that was the annex and had previously been used as a laboratory for product development, but during the war there was not much product development going on, so Otto Frank found another use for it.

They moved into that space and then they put a bookcase across the doorway to conceal it. And that's how they kept hidden for months, literally the spy movie door. Yeah. And there was like a bathroom and stuff in there, right, Yeah, there was, thank thank god, although they couldn't flush the toilet during the day because there were people working down

below in the warehouse. Yeah yeah, well yeah, at least yeah, yeah, you just learned to time your stuff, I guess, yeah, probably, Yeah, so they had to be really quiet for those two years and one month. Yeah, And there are pictures of this online, right, Yeah, there's a there's on the Wikipedia page. There's a really nice there's a picture of this from the and Frank Museum, And somebody built a model of the buildings and everything, and and there's a picture I

was kind of a cutaway model. And then all these spaces are labeled and stuff, so you can get a really great idea of the space that they were living. Yeah, which I think that it was. It was helpful to me to be able to see it. Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, Actually I was surprised because I had Again, because I hadn't really read the diary or anything like that. I was always under the oppression that they were living in

a much tinier space. And what they lived in it was basically a house, like a two story house, and they had yeah, not huge, not a huge amount of space but for the four of them. But it wasn't underground railroad kind of under the floorboards. Now, not like that, and not not like like glorious bastards the Jews were hiding under the floorboards. Yeah, although I'm sure there were some that were there, probably were. Yeah, anyway, that would have been a not a bad space for the frank family.

But about a week later, Hermand van Pel's, which was one of his employees, showed up with this family. So that's him and his wife and his son. And then several months later another friend showed up, Fritz Feffer. So all in all, eight people living in that space for over two years. Yeah, they weren't able to go outside and get fresh air and a little sunshine and only one bathroom between eight people. Yeah, so I'm thinking things got a little tents and yeah, but it does be

getting killed, yeah or worse. Yeah, yeah, not like the Nazis were, you know, the worst thing wasn't being killed by them. Yeah, that's true. They did some hideous things, yes, Yeah. The thing that gets me about this, I guess is like there had to have been blueprints or it seems like prime hiding spot right that you would be able to walk and say, oh, there's an extra house back there. I don't but I guess I don't know how active searches were or anything like that. Yeah, I don't know.

I mean it was it was if you're working in the building, it would be kind of obvious because the offices only extend back so far, and get the warehouse below extends back a lot further. But you know, the guys that worked in the warehouse maybe didn't get up to the opposite all that much. Probably not to the back office, or the sense of space is different. Keep in mind that it wasn't as if it's just a big empty space. It's a warehouse space on the bottom,

it's got stuff stacked up, an office space. It's got walls, it's got people and deaths, So there's things that can sort of distort your sense of proportion. Yeah. I don't know if you've ever been in an office where you feel like this place just goes on and on and on, and then suddenly it feels like you're in an area that's really small and every Monday through friends and there. It's just simply because of the way that it's arranged and what's in it, And to a degree, I think

that's what worked in the Frank's benefit. It seems also likely that on the off chance that a worker does come up and say it seems like there should be more back there, you can say, oh, there was lab space back there, but we closed it off. They want to be wasting money on heat, you know and stuff like that. Yeah, there's there's ways around, or just say shut up and take your paycheck and go. Just be happy you have the job. They say something like they said,

we don't know anything about any Jews, no one there. Yeah, I don't have people hidden in there anyway. So our our eight people are called the hiders, and there were six people called the helpers who who knew about them, and four of them worked there, and then there were two others. So there are helpers were Victor Kugler, meet Peace and I'm already mangling these Bet bush Kyl, Johannes Klayman, Yankee Johannes Vush Kyle who was Bebe's father, and young

young Kee was Meske's husband. Uh, they were the helpers and they did stuff like well, first off, toy kept their mouth shut about the whole thing I was important to do, and they did. They would would do other stuff too, like like jan would go out and find a way to get illegal way to get rationing cards because they had to get food for these people, right, so he had he procured rationing cards and they all went out and got supplies for them. But most especially

Meep did. She did a lot of shopping for those two years, and she was going out because she had to be a little profile about it. She had to go a couple of times, probably several times a day, and she could only see what her rule was to go to go to several different stores and at one by by a single bag of groceries and nothing more unless you could hide something under a coat and then bring it back and then go to another store. So

she I mean, these people worked hard. One who lived to be a hundred Yeah, she died in two Yeah, yeah, I don't remember what website it was. I was reading some story I think it was on the Guardian or something like that, and I was reading it and they had a picture of her in a hundred years old, and then they had a picture of her from I think nineteen forty or nineteen forty two, and Otto Frank was in the picture. But it was so weird. Is you see somebody and you're trying to figure out what

they looked like when they were younger. Except the photo was captioned incorrectly and it said so and so bottom center left, and so and so bottom center left, like two people, so I kept look at I was so confused until I finally figured out which one it was, because obviously she looked like her. But it was really it was really interesting that she managed to She was the last one of all of these people. Yeah, that the last survivor of the entire group. She must have

been eating a lot of pine cones. Is that what it is? I think, Grandma. Some of the other things that they did, they would keep them up to date on what's going on outside. I assume they brought in newspapers and books for them to read, bet order correspondence, courses and subjects like Latin and shorthands to keep them occupied. And the girls were taking those, yeah, and so doing

really well. Yeah, Margo, Margot, Margo. She didn't she get perfect scores on her shorthand test or something, Yeah, something like that. Yeah, so they were doing really well. Well. Yeah, that's that's a good idea. If you're sitting there, religant group of people, I think, oh yeah, smart, smart people. And you know that the girls obviously weren't able to go to school, so they want to do something for it to heal them. So's not too far behind when

the war is over. But as I said, to keep the factory workers, the guys down to the basement in the dark, they had to be very quiet during the daylight hours, and they couldn't plush the toilet during work hours. They also had to be careful at night because they couldn't really have lights on and they couldn't have the curtains open. Yeah, because there's there's other buildings and facing it. Yeah this yeah, this is uh, this is this isn't a block of buildings. And I don't know if you

lift the aerials of it. I'm sure you guys have. Yeah, And so there's like almost like a courtyard which is all the backyards of these buildings, which was kind of kind of an open space, and so people across the way it could look in the windows. So you had to keep those curtains shut. Yeah. One supposes that you would simultaneously not wear your shoes and not be on the lowest most level. That would do a lot of the During the day, you would be able to walk

around a little more freely. But I think you could talk in low voices. Well, yeah, because they're they're the lowest floor of their living space. There. Hiding space was actually the second floor. Yeah. But also it looked like from the model it didn't share actually share, It wasn't the same level. There was a space of insulation or something in between the warehouse and the floor. That's what it looked like to me. But it would still be you know, it's an old building. It's not going to be. No,

it's not quiet now, not at all that. Yeah, I'm sure they were able to move around, they just couldn't be shouting or playing loud music or anything like that. And then pictionary, yeah, and then and on the weekends sometimes sometimes Otto would allow allow and to go down and sit in his office at his desk, his old office from when he was when he was worked there. And so I'm sure that was a nice change. I mean it's not much, but I mean, you know, but

also a little privacy, a little privacy. So she would work at her diary and stuff. She was We didn't say this, really, we didn't do the math for people. She was thirteen when they went into hiding, so she was she was in hiding from thirteen to fIF teen. That's a bad time, yeah, be necessarily around people of the time. Good point. And she was working at a diary and she was very private about her diary, and she was always not wanting anybody looking over her shoulder

or anything. And so yeah, for her, that was probably really nice to sit in Dad's office and work in the diary and just be away from everybody else. Yeah.

I have a question about the diary because this is I obviously, as we said, didn't read it, but when I was reading stuff about it, it sounded like she edited the contents of her diary continually so that when the diary when she was taken away, the diary was in the voice of fifteen year old and Frank, even though it had initially in the beginning been written by thirteen year old and Frank, which is just it's so

it's execute perspective in a way, do you see. I think the sense I had was it wasn't so much. I mean, obviously it wasn't go back into lead because it was handwritten, presumably in penn. The impression I had it was more cross out and write in the margin,

or just write notes in the margin. I know there was one bit where it said she had written something about how much she hated her mother and she wasn't a mother of hers, and then she had gone back and crossed out and said like, and what are you saying? What are you doing? That's so dumb? I know that for me, you know, when I was a teenage girl, I kind of journal off and on, and I would do things like that. I would go back and read and write little notes to myself in the margin and

things like that. That was kind of the impression that I had. But again, I also haven't read it, so I don't Yeah, I I don't know. I mean, it just makes me think there's a book out there that I read years and years ago, Flowers for Algernon. I think it's how you pronouncing, and it's written, you know, in this voice that evolves in maturity and then devolves again.

And to me, it's almost as if I remember there was a passage in the book where it said I've been told not to go back and fix my writings in the beginning. And that's just one of those things that popped into my head when I was reading that about and well, she wanted to be a journalist, she decided. Everything I've read about it is that she recognized. And then you know, literary critics afterwards recognized that her writing

style improved infinitely. She was devoting herself, you know, that's all she was doing when she was and so I think she would probably you can't you go back and you read that stuff if it's there, if it's one of the only things that you have, you're gonna keep reading it and you'll get annoyed. And thank god, it's so childish. And she wasn't writing it as a book, you know, she was writing it as a diary for herself, so writing notes back in the margin and editing and

saying what are you doing? Or that sounded dumb? I can phrase it about her way. That's true because when we are all used to it as a book, yeah, which it wasn't intended to be. No, it wasn't. It was a girl's diary. I almost got the impression that she had her diary, which was a book that she wrote in what she made corrections in the stuff, but then she started a second, parallel one that kind of like copied it over and changed changed some of the names,

like it's like it like. It almost appears as though she didn't start writing the diary with the intention of publishing it, but that perhaps she decided she thought to herself that maybe this could be published, and so she started. I hadn't you saying she had a second book or she was starting over somewhere else in that I have heard rumors to that effect that she started the second one that was loose blue leaf papers. Yeah, I don't know. That's possible. I don't know. Maybe because I do remember

hearing about Ann's papers being scattered on the floor. Yeah. Yeah, but the diary was a bound book. Yeah, so so it was it was an autograph book, right, Yes, it was an autograph and white and red checked. Uh. Well, that good detail. I didn't even know that, dude. No, that's not all we do. Very clear, we go further than the Wikipedia, Yes we do. Yeah. And Andy, by the way, if you want to investigate this mystery, there are a lot of websites out there. Oh my god. Anyway,

I'm sorry. We kind of was straightway off path here. Uh, to finish off the story before we plunge into the suspects here. Um they were. The Hider stayed hit for twenty four or twenty five months until August fourth, nineteen four, when the Germans showed up and arrested arrested them and the rest of course is history. They were all sent to Auschwitz, where they mostly survived, but then in late nineteen Margot and Anne Frank were transferred to bergen Belson.

Their mother, Edith stayed behind and starved to death in Auschwitz, and then in early nine there was a typhus epidemic in the bergen Belsen camp, and Margot and both died. Edith died of starvation because Anne and Margot had scabies and they weren't getting fed in their hospital, and so she was giving all her rations to them. They were shipped off, and then she subsequently starved because she there was no recovering from the amount of Yeah, she just

gone too long. And I am I wrong in remembering that, And and Margot, We're gonna get sent somewhere other than the camp that they went to. But because they were held back and they might yeah, okay, yeah, but obviously if you can't figure out scabies means it was a filthy environment. I mean, I think most everybody knows the conditions that the camps were in the place they were put when they had scabies, had no electricity, and it was infested with rats. You know, that's they said, oh,

you have scabies. Okay, go go in this building to recover, and it was just rat and worst darkness. Yeah, fun times. Yeah, this is the bad time in history. Oh yeah, this kind of stuff is going to continue to happen, though, bravely predict that it'll happen again. But there's a little controversy over her date of deaths. I'm say mid February the say and of March, but the most recent scholarship on the subject says she died about mid February, yeah,

which I honestly prefer. Yeah, I'd rather she died earlier, and that it wasn't so heartbreakingly close to the liberation in what was an April at the end of March. That's just hard. That's just two weeks away, I know, really bad. So yeah, so only Otto Frank survived out of all eight people. Yeah, that's so lucky for him. But he didn't have a lot to come home too. Apparently when he came home he was very skinny. Yeah. Bad. He moved in with with I don't think any of

in concentration, was that, no, except for the guards. Yeah, So he returned to Amsterdam and and moved in with with Meep and young Geese and and they're I'm not sure exactly when he got got back to Amsterdam, but he was awaiting word of of Margot and Anne, and he finally got word in July n that they were dead.

So apparently that was kind of a blow. He knew pretty early that was dead, right, I think so, yeah, And I think it was right around that time that that me pulled out the diary and the papers and gave them to him, and also let me talk about the helpers just a little bit. Obviously, the four people there were taken into custody. Victor Coogler and you know, Johannes Claiming were arrested and sent up to prison camp. And Googler was in the work camps almost until the

end of the war. But he was being he was being marched like he had about six d other guys were being fourth marched and they were eventually supposedly going to go to Germany, but apparently there was some bombing going on in the immediate area. Everybody was taking cover. There was confusion. He managed to get away and so

he escaped, so good for him. And then Claiman was released about six or seven weeks after he was arrested because he had had health problems, and so she's weird when we've just talked about the terrible health conditions in the places that these people were put. Well, he wasn't Jewish. Yeah, he wasn't Jewish, and so they weren't they weren't his heart. Yeah, they were sympathetic, yeah, but yeah. Uh. And then also, of course Meep and Beth were the two other ones.

They're both women, of course, and they were they were interrogating release. And Meep said later that she kind of lucky break because the policeman the guy talked about before h his name was Carl Silberbauer, and he turns out he was from Vienna, and he was the guy who was interrogating her. Turns out Meep was also from Vienna. Then she just jumped up and smile and said, so I hear from your exit her from Vienna me too, you know. And so he stopped a little bit and

cut her a break and let her go. It seems also would have been as the wife of somebody, there's some plausible deniability there. It seems easier to say my husband made me do it. Sensibilities of absolutely currently less so, but more than when you say, my husband may do what I didn't want to do it, but he said he beat me. And I'm from Vienna and all my the were childhood friends, and it's a little there's a little more plausible than the ability there. Oh yeah, yeah.

So anyway, so they went back to the annex the next day and gathered up some of the loose stuff like that, ants papers and the diary, and me kept those in a drawer. They read, they read a diary, and they decided it was pornographic and they burned it. No, but they did say that if if they had read it, she didn't, she say, she said, if I had read it, I would have burned it. She said that, yeah, she

didn't read it. She respected ants privacy. She was expecting to actually and to survive because they all knew the war was close to end. The end. She was expecting to see Anne again, and so she planned to give it back to her. But she did say that apparently, turns out it had the names of all the helpers, not just the four in the building, but the other two. And it had the names of some of their black market suppliers in it. And so that's why she said

she would have burned it. And so yeah, because if it had gotten if the Germans have got ahold of it, Oh yeah, the whole liability goes away. Yeah. Yeah, I seen if somebody says, oh, she's been going all these different places, it's great, she totally knows what's going on, then you're you're just kind of screwed. Yeah. So yeah, I guess lucky for us, me didn't read the diary,

and so it survived, um in nineteen four. As I mentioned, there have been numerous investigations, Uh, sixty eight, six, two thousand and three. Didn't the first investigation get launched because didn't Auto get the book put out in forty seven? Yeah, it came. Yeah, he got it published the first time in Is that correct? Yes, it was, yeah, And so that's that's why I got I go. Always got the feeling that the investigation in forty eight was prompted because

of the instant popularity of the book. Yeah, I think so, yeah, and uhe And by the way, the one that was published in forty it was edited by Otto Frank because it had a few salicious bits in it, and so a little bit kissed a boy, right, like there's there's she talks about touching her genitals and stuff like, I get really offended. This is when my feminism well, I mean I think, yeah, this is when my kind of

feminist flag flies. I get really really upset when people talk about how offensive and pornographic it is, because like, it's totally fine to talk about dudes masturbating all the time, but as soon as a fifteen year old girl is like, I'm exploring my body a little bit, people are like, no, pornographic. That's awful. My cannot read it. It's awful, bannit no, But you know, just like I just cared about it,

about it. But the thing about it is Frank was her father, and probably he wanted to privacy a little bit, I understand at that point, but I was very private.

This has come up to that schools have been giving their fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen year old kids the unedited version of Diary of Young Girl, and parents are outraged because there's this little bit about Anne Frank discovering herself as a woman, and it's listen, if as a parent, I don't have the balls to talk to my children about sex, then take my place, because you don't have balls, doesn't exist. If I don't tell them about it that

now they can learn about it from the internet. They do, yeah, they do. But anyway, I'm sorry, but to get really angry for anybody out there who didn't know. There's the unabridged version of it, which has got all these these little details and totally pornographic guys like five pages longer. Yeah, I don't think he cut I have no idea how much. And by the way, this is totally unrelated to our mystery.

But there are people who claim that Otto Frank wrote the diary himself fake and there are people, Yeah, there are people who claim that the whole thing was a complete fake and a hoax, and there have been lawsuits over this and all kinds of back and forth. Lots of handwriting experts have confirmed it and wrote it, and yeah, I mean so obviously she did. But there are still people out there trying to claim that it's all just a fake. Yeah, yeah, just fiction, like eleven was an

inside job. Well, let's be fair. Even if it is fiction, still a very compelling, interesting story that's important for people to read. Oh yeah, even though I'm not I'm probably never going to read it myself. But now that I know, I know that, I know the bare bones. Yeah, I get that. I got the lesson there. You know. We shouldn't dump on each other. Yeah yeah, be kind to each other, don't be Nazis. Yeah yeah, I don't gas to Jews. Yeah, that kind of stuff, you know, normal stuff. Yeah,

the stuff to teach you with citizenship back in school normally. Yeah. Yeah. Well let's uh, let's talk a little bit about some of the suspects that could have that could have thinked on. So it's this basically our theory section. Then yeah, okay, okay, these guys are in no particular order. Actually, our second suspect was actually the popular suspect first in the sixty three and then yeah, a little bit. Our first one is Tonny Olers, who was a business associated with autos.

I think that I have to admit the relationship between Auto Frank and Tonny Owlers. I'm Tandy is short for anton or that's that's a nickname. But the relationship between those two is a little bit of a mystery to me. Um, there's a lot of confusing, conflicting information out there. One is that they were just business associates, or friends gone

south or enemies. I don't really do. Just the guy who was trying to extort money from Auto Well supposedly supposedly tried to extort a little money due to a letter that one of his employees had written, and that he was maybe kind of a braggerton. Yeah there was always that too, he uh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, and a criminal. But anyway, apparently he did have a sort of rival business, but he actually bought stuff from his from Auto Frank's company, so he was maybe a bit

of a middleman. Yeah, I think so. But I read in the Guardian from the UK that others did denounce Jews and members of the Dutch underground to the Germans during the war. So so so that's on mark in his favor for being our snitch. And in two thousand two, a writer named Caroline Lee published a biography of Auto Frank and read after that she was contacted by Tony Awler's son Anton, and Anton is sure that Tony was a rat. So his son she's even saying, oh no,

my dad definitely did that. Actually, a number of stories in the past months where this has been the case, where he had a child after the factor has come out and said my parent was a scumbag. On obviously did it because that's I mean, that's what he's like. Children resent their parents and maybe like not always bad even if their parents are bad. Maybe maybe. Yeah, No, it does seem like Anton was not nothing like his dad. His dad was. His dad was a real piece of work,

very you know, a huge anti semi pro Nazi. I think he was actually a member of the Dutch Nazi Party somewhere. Yeah. Anton contactas writer Carol Anley and says that he was he was the rat. And there are there's evidence that Tanny really didn't like Otto Frank even though they were associates, because Carol an Lee has got some copies of some letters that were written by Tanny apparently,

so he didn't like add Also, there's there's one motive. Also, Tonny's brother Kaz told a land Lee that Tony told him at some point in the past that he was the one who would rid it out the Frank family. And also one of the guys who showed up at the raid on the Annex in August fourth was a friend of Tony's. Yeah, he was, he was actually he had actually apparently moved in with them and moved into the same building at least but just the day before.

And her book Lee's said that the reason that others held off as long as he did before he dropped his dime is that his company actually depended on Otto Frank's company for supplies. But his company went bankrupt and so at that's at that point it didn't really matter. And there was also a bounty on Jews of forty Guilder's head, and so there was a money motive there. So Tony Olers told people he did it. He had a motive to do it, which included money, anti Semitism,

and a personal dislike of Auto Frank. But on the other hand, how did he find out there were people living in the end? Yeah? I don't know how often he went by that business that apparently there is there evidence that he went by on an occasional basis, at least to pick stuff up. But was he there long enough to actually find a detector, you know, figure out that there were people there? I don't think so well.

I guess it's possible if he had business dealings with Auto while the back annex was still a laboratory, it's possible that eventually he kind of put two and two together and said, there is an annex back there. No one seen the Franks recently, and they conveniently aren't using that space anymore. Well, yeah, but it's probably worth your time to go check that out. It could have been.

I mean, I still think that I'm not I'm not really sure that there was any way that he could have known, unless there's one way possibly could have figured it out. But I just want to say against his being the rat at the time he made his statements, this is well after the fact. This is well after that, after the die. Yeah, and it was and so it was a huge, huge deal. It was all well known, and that's when he started telling people that he was

the one that read him out. But he was a well known liar, and he just probably wanted to, you know, insert himself into the story. Even though that it makes him kind of the bad guy. He probably didn't care because he was a jerk. He possibly could have found out from one or more of the employees that worked there. Yeah, And maybe the employees figured it out and they were there.

They were the guys that were you know, much more like and they they would be the ones to yeah, yeah, I guess it's certainly possible that they would have figured it out, but you know, liked auto or didn't have the guts to have that on their conscience or whatever. They maybe didn't even know kind of vaguely thought, or even you you know, go out at the bar and you're like, that's the weirdest thing. Uh huh. Yeah, I

think it's haunted or something. Toilets flushing up by themselves. Yeah, yeah, but I think most people are not about to wrap people out and send him off to their desks. She would hope not you would you kind of hope for the good in people. But during this time, I kind of I'm willing to that goes out the window for a lot of people because there's suddenly the fear and self preservation. Yeah. And also and also, you know that anti Semitism was pretty pretty rampant in Europe at the time.

It kind of still is in a way, but it's not as bad as it was, but it's still there. Let's move on to our next suspect, Villain van Maaren. That's a mouthful, I know. Villain van Maaren. Uh. He was hired as a warehouse manager after the Franks and company took up residence in the annex. Apparently the previous manager become ill and left his job, So he wouldn't have felt the affinity for Auto that Yeah, not really, other employees would have. Yeah, probably not. It doesn't doesn't

make him a bad guy, but he didn't know. He didn't know Auto and his family. But he was reportedly really curious about the rooms at the back of the building and asked a lot of strange questions, like one time he asked to the guy named Otto Frank work here at some point? Where where would he have gotten that from? Well, yeah, I don't know. Maybe he got it from Tommy Ollers or you know, it might it might just be that he came across an old invoice

that was signed by Otto Frank too. I mean, who knows. I think that that could have been the entire genesis of the question. So it's not necessarily that suspicious. He may have at one point, at one point or another,

heard some noises. People get careless, especially after two years. Well, and if he's the manager, there are people who take that position amazingly seriously, and everything that goes on in that place needs to be under their supervision, and they need to know, so he may have felt that he had to investigate it all. Yeah, I know, and he was he did suspect that, he did suspect that people were entering the warehouse at night, and he left these

little tell tales around. Yeah, and I guess it's. Yeah, at that point you think maybe he thought it was people breaking in, might have thought that maybe that it was or water was breaking in and they were going to take inventory. And that point, if you're the foreman, you're the one who gets screwed if stuff goes missing. Yeah, I can't understand that, although at the same time, the interesting thing is is that he was actually stealing stuff

from the warehouse himself. Yeah, well, I guess then you then he's building a case, right, He's saying people are breaking in, it's the weirdest thing, and things are going missing, that that's entirely possible, and the blame doesn't fall on him. Yeah, and I don't. I don't know if the if the hiders ever, I know they came out into the offices occasionally, I don't know if they ever actually went down into the warehouse. Probably over the courses of two years, at

some point or another, than you yeah. I mean, I you know, if I were hiding, were hiding up there, I would I would leave it two in the morning and just take a brief walk and come back. And they might have even done that. I don't know. Be risky, but you gotta you gotta do it. There is a there are a few references to Van maren in and Frank's diary, believe it or not. Apparently the hiders were

wary of him. They've been informed about him, and he's questioning and all that stuff, and so he set traps and stuff, not not so much traps as like he would he would like leave things around that would easily be knocked off if somebody walked by, like a piece of paper on the edge of a piece of furniture and that kind of thing. So he was he really seriously felt that somebody was getting in there, and so I can see why that would be a cause for

concern for them. Yeah, and so super super snoopy. Yeah, And so it really put the Franks and the hiders and the helpers, I mean the hiders and the helpers who put them much kind of a strange position because this guy was because he was so inquisitive, he was a threat. He should have they should have fired him. But at the same time, if you fired the guy and he's all embittered, he might go to the police with what Yeah, I know that might have been the

thing to do. I know, but make him sit in that bathroom that you can't and the diary would have been and Frank girl assassin. Yeah, yeah, here's here's what Frank said about him that he said, quote, we wouldn't care what Mr Van Maren thinks of the situation or thought of the situation, except that he's known to be unreliable and to possess a high degree of curiosity. He's not want to let himself be fobbed off with a

flimsy excuse. So he wasn't buying the oh we just closed it off excuse, right, yeah, or the whole evidence said the hiders were coming out and moving around in the rest of the building after hours, and uh that was the theft, of course. Uh. And a worker at the warehouse, Lamberate Hardtog, testified that Van Maren told him two weeks before the raid that Jews were hiding in

the building. Suspicious. Yeah, yeah, so it sounds like Van Maren knew, but He was questioned in the and the nineteen sixties three investigations, and he admitted that he had suspicions they knew. He knew something was up in the annex, but he didn't he didn't tip off the Gestapo. He said he really didn't like him though. No, he wasn't pro Nazi at all. Uh yeah, And so you know,

maybe he needed the money. I don't know, but he was apparently aware of Dutch resistance activity in his neighborhood and and didn't tip anybody off about that stuff either. So he wasn't pro Nazi or pro German or anything. I'm inclined to think errant word to the wrong person at this time, you know, you yeah, if he's if he's like thicking like Tanya talking to Tanya Allers and says, hey, you know there's there's sinking stuff going on here, or even talking to like a co worker out at the

bar that somebody happens to be at. You know that you think you're safe, you think nobody's listening, and you say, it's it's weird. It's curtains are getting left open, my traps are getting they made the post slip sink ships just saying the simplest thing, the right set of ears puts it together and the whole thing falls apart. Yeah, so it's it's possible. I tend to think that he's he's innocent, and meet Geese for her, I want me

say that, right, meet peace. That's better. Said in in an interview that she didn't think Van Marin was the informant, and I think Otto, I think actually Otto Frank said so too. I don't know. I The thing I keep struggling with is, you know, like Steve said, with the

segregation doesn't make sense to me. The fact that somebody could in good conscience not feel awful about themselves in telling people these people are someplace and you know they're up to like almost certain death, that's insane to me. Getting in that mindset is insane to me. And unless you are kind of a liar, braggart or brown noser or pro Nazi, I can't imagine anybody who wasn't avidly

pro Nazi deliberately turning people in. No. I'm like, well, you know, maybe you're a sociopath and you're and you're not you don't really care one way together about the Nazis, but you you're a sociopath and it's forty guilders ahead,

so heyking out why not. But the thing is, Joe and I talked about this story a couple of days go, and the thing that I was bringing up is because he was basically saying the same thing, and I was talking about the fact that, well, there's these people that we like, you know, the collaborators, people hate, the collaborators who helped the Nazis do what they did but didn't necessarily support them. A lot of those people did what they did out of fear and just this thought that

this is my only way to survive. These people are gonna win, and I can either go ahead and die or I can survive. And so it could be one of those situations where somebody felt required to say something. I don't have a choice here. If I don't say something and they find out, I know, they're gonna kill both of us. Yeah, I know there was. There was. There was a lot of collaboration going on World War two. Absolutely,

like the famous French Resistance. Uh you know, turns out everybody was in the French resistance, but not really, not not at all. Yeah, same with the resistance in with the Dutch. But luckily there were still plenty of people like our six helpers for example. Yeah, we're some good people around. Oh yeah, there were plenty of good people, but there were plenty of rats. Okay. Our next suspect, Martins Slieger's who was the night watchman at the business.

Although he wasn't actually on premises. He uh, he was like the active one or he Yeah, he was responsible for a number of properties. So he bicycled around the canals, you know, just checking on various properties. And uh, he noticed in April nine the building had been burg old. Apparently the door was open or something. So he called in a policeman and then went through the building looking

for nearby wells. Didn't find any, and got as far as as the bookcase, but didn't discover the n X. I heard they the policeman settled that I don't know what exactly that was about. I mean, obviously it didn't fill it with it enough to move it, move it out aside and see that there was a door behind it. I get the impression that the bookcase wasn't flush against

the wall. If you look at the pictures of it from the Ann Frank House and I've seen pictures of it open, and unfortunately, the pictures I've seen where it's closed, they're straight on. But I get the impression that there was a bit of a recess between the door and the bookcase itself, and somebody may have figured it out. Yeah, i'ment sure that the pictures you were looking at were all recreations, because I don't think there's any pictures of

the original one. Oh okay, see, and these are these are things that we're from the Inn Frank House, So I don't know that they may very well. Oh okay, see, that's great to know, because I presumed, like an idiot, that the an Frank House would have actual pictures kind of things like that sort of thing you wouldn't take pictures of if you had this bookcase. They was covering something you wouldn't be like, and this is our bookcase.

It's not suspicious at all, but we have pictures of it. Anyway, years you know, after Otto got home, somehow I think they destroyed it. Okay, that was my impression him in that it was just like that bookcase was not going back up. Okay, Okay, they never mind. I why, I don't know why. I don't know what the fiddling with it. I don't know exactly what that entails. It's kind of vague. Yeah, and going this bookcase sucks. None of the books come

off of it for some reason. I think I read something that said that they had fiddled with it and moved it a bit, but everyone was really confident that the police officers hadn't reported them. But that I'm I don't know, I want. I want to believe that, like everybody knew that the Franks were back there, and everybody said, but let's keep them back there. That in my best of the stories, Well, yeah, I think that they were probably after after more than two years. There's probably a

lot of people suspected something. Oh, I'm sure a lot, and everybody but one person kept their mouth shut. Yeah, And I can't I really can't imagine a situation in which somebody would say, oh, yeah, Otto used to own that building, and there's that annex they don't use back there anymore, and we haven't been the Franks in two years, but stores of Jews, Yeah, not suspicious at all. I can't imagine a single person who knew that situation not

thinking they were back there. But I hopefully everybody just kept their mouth shut. I think I think a lot of people did. Um. And actually I forgot to mention that when they left their apartment, they sort of they left behind some papers and things like that that kind of just kind of give people the impression that they had gone to Switzerland. I heard they left it in

disarray as well. They let it kind of looked like they had just left, really left in a hurry, and they so that whenever the house was searched, Yeah, it looked like people I go, oh, they went Switzerland. Okay, you know. So uh, anyway, let's go back to our our night watchman, Martin Slieger's. Yeah, there's really nothing against him to speak of. I mean, he was just doing his job. He called the police and they went through

the place. And so I would say that even though he's been named as a suspect by a few places, he's pretty weak. Pretty weak suspect. Yeah, you name it is a suspect because he might have maybe known about it maybe. Alright, alright, Okay, our next suspect, Nellie bush kW Nellie Blushka was the sister of bet Bush kil Uh and just this year, a book like April two, a book by by be bush Kyl's son and a Flemish journalist claimed that bebs sister, Nellie blush Kaw might

have been the rat there. The basis of this claim is that she was in the a Nazi collaborator for four years, and they based this mostly on testimony from Beb's other sister, Diny, You don't do you think, Dinny Dinny, and also a guy who was Beyonce at that time, Burtis Yeah, Burdas, Yeah, Burtas. She reportedly, this is Nellie once again, the sister of Beb. Reportedly she was said to beb and Johannes, Well, Skyle, go then go to

your Jews. Even though they hadn't told her. Somehow she seemed to have found out about it so well, she had a suspicion of some kind. It seems that was the one who's doing all of the grocery shopping, right, Yeah, okay, never mind. I was gonna say, if somebody's coming home with a bunch of groceries from a bunch of places and then you're not eating any of them and they're just appearing anyways, evidence is pretty stark. But if it wasn't that then? Well I was gonna say, though, is

that in the defense of this Nellie for Nellie? Right? Yeah, I'm pronouncing that correctly. I don't know pronouncing it okay, because I'm the great mispronouncer anger of the Internet. Just making sure probably this isn't so it's probably a new Week, I know. The point is, My point is that they may have been in private, outspoken critics of the Nazi rhetoric and against Jews. They may have said, this is so dumb, why are we doing this and being poed at him. Just fine, go do that, go with me,

with your your people that you want to save. It could have it's you know, parents, you held this, fine, go to the rainforest and save the squirrels or whatever it is. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah, I mean it could have been. It could have been just saying hey, it's innocuous at that point. Yeah, exactly. And so again that the case against Nellie is pretty pretty thin. Again, the helpers had good reason to keep their mouth shut about this, big time good reasons. Yeah. They actually the Helpers got

off roll easy compared to what could have happened to them. Yeah. Absolutely, Yeah. And so because I think it wasn't it. I could be making this up, but I'm pretty sure that helpers were treated as soon as you were a Jew sympathizer, you were as good as a Jew. Well, yeah, not not quite that bad. When these guys got caught there, they're punishment was not nearly as hard guys, But I think that that was the kind of but they were.

But there you could have they could have been executed, you know, they really could have been executed or set off to one of the one of the big camps, Auschwitz or somewhere like that. And that's that's exactly what it's lesson of history. Of the two choices, execution was the best better, yeah, yeah. Otherwise yeah, it's quicker, are Yeah. Otherwise you go off and you either are starved and worked to death, or you die disease like Anne Frank didn't,

or you're experimented on or you're experimented on the somehow. Yeah, magneto. Let's move on to another suspects here. Lena Hardtag also known as Lena Hardtag Van it's probably the lead a hard Dog, but they're Hardtag van Bladder and I'm probably just announcing that too. She was the wife of that warehouse worker. I was talking about hard talk. Yeah, so he was the one that was told by Van Maren that there were Jews in the building. She also worked

in the building as a cleaner. Uh and so undoubtedly her husband told her what he had heard. Uh and and she was named as a suspect in the Biography of A Frank, written by Melissa Mueller when published in nine According to testimony in nineteen investigation, Ana Anagano, who was somebody who Lena also worked for. She didn't just clean the spaces at Otto Frank's building, she cleaned other places too. Yeah, so she was an employer, and Agana

was Lena's employer. And Lena said that she was worried about her husband's safety because he worked in a building where Jews were being hidden. So it appears that Lena knew. Lena and her husband both knew about the Franks. But this, again, this goes in line with what Devin was talking about earlier, where everybody's like, oh, there's nobody in that building, but we all really know. Yeah, Like that's that's that's how

I take that. Yeah, I know I think that I can see the I guess I can see her going and in attempt to protect her husband from being accused as a sympathizer, going to the authorities and reporting and saying, my husband and I couldn't possibly be involved in this thing. There are Jews living up there. We told you, so

it's not our fault. We just found out. Yeah. But um, the on the on the other side of the ledger though, if she was so concerned about her husband, then why was he there in the day of the raid because he was Yeah, well, I know, I don't believe it for a second, but I'm I don't know, I'm playing Deuvil's advocate. I'm going back and forth. She's a weekendidate.

On the other other hand, one of the I can't remember which one it was, one of the helpers that was at the office that day, said that the one that when the police showed up, uh, he like already has his coat on it. He was out the door. Yeah, like he had spotted the cops. Are knew the cops for coming at a certain time, and it's like, I'm out of here. So I don't know, I really don't know.

But you know, it's just it just seems like a bad idea because the problem from his point of view, if if he and his wife we're actually thinking about ratting on the Franks and company, is that the most of the people that you work for are going to get carted off to the camps and most likely not a great business model. Yeah and so and so by doing what you're doing, you're kind of guaranteeing the closure

of the business that pays your salary. And so, yeah, you actually had a financial incentive to keep his mouth shut. I think you think. Yeah. So that's why I'm thinking both Lena and her husband are probably not suspects as far as another suspect. And Jane know, uh, you know, yeah, I know, want the hell why the hell not? Because she did she was told that there were Jews hiding in the warehouse. But I just threw that one in for fun. I don't. I don't have any reason to

believe she is. And of course another theory is that, uh, they rated themselves out just by getting careless leading windows. And I'm gonna be honest, this is the one I'm leaning towards. How many times have you moved into a place and you've had to be one you had to do something very specifically and there's these rigid rules, and then you start to get more and more lax about it.

You're gonna get careless, and I gonna get careless. You're gonna leave the window cracked, you're gonna leave the blinds parted, you're gonna talk in a normal voice instead of a hush tone. You're just gonna automatically flush the toilet in the middle of the afternoon because you've really felt like that should have been flushed right away. I mean, like this, this just happens. People just tend to get comfortable and go back to their old habit, particularly if you've been

living there for two years. Two years and you think, well, we haven't caught yet. Yeah, I get just thinking, what the hell we're bulletproof. Yeah, but you know, I see, like Frank up the Granma phone. Well let's have a tap dancing competition. Yeah. But yeah, I still I still think that it wasn't one of those situations where somebody heard some weird stuff going on next door the building across the way I was talking in the cafe was overheard by a Nazi collaborator. There was a there was

a deliberate tip off. There was a phone call made so somebody did wrap them out. It just was probably not nobody on our list here. Could have been somebody who lived nearby, somebody lived across the street or worked

across the street and just kept seeing this weird stuff. Yeah, absolutely, And so quite possibly one of their neighbors that suspected something was going on there or saw people and there when when it was a business where there shouldn't have been people there on the weekend or after hours, there was money to be made. Um, it's a great way

to curry favor with the occupiers. So that most likely is it probably nobody on our list, just some random person watching the building and thought, hey, there's some jew hiding going on here, and wow, did you just make that one up? Yeah? Yeah, yeah. Uh. The problem with the mystery is there's just too many people who could

have known and could have had suspicions. Yeah, the policeman, I remember I talked about him, Carl silver Bauer, the guy from Vienna who was Yeah, he headed the raid and he was tracked down in Vienna in nineteen sixty three by Simon Visenthal. We've heard of Simon's Visens, all right, I think, so we never heard him. I haven't very very famous Nazi hunter. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's okay, Yeah, I knew I'd heard the name. Yeah, and it's a Visenthal tracked him down in Vienna because he was back

in Vienna. He was working in the Vienna Police Force at the time, and he was asked about the call that was made, and silver Bauer said that the call was made to his superior officer. He had no idea who the caller was, and he was he was just basically told to go to the apartment or go to the annex and arrest people. And so well that's what he did. But he had no idea and unfortunately the guy, the superior officer who actually took the call, but it's

suicide not long after the war. So the one person who probably knew the identity of the caller at the gender. Oh yeah, the gender, yeah, because nobody even knows the gender. A lot of people have said it was a woman,

but nobody really knows that for sure. Incidentally, silver Bauer he was he was suspended from his job at the Vienna Police Well, yeah, because he had been doing this, you know, sort of collaborating kind of stuff, you know, and and then but it turned out Otto Frank of all people have put an a word in his favor. He said that he felt like silver Bauer had been very civilized and nice to them and hadn't been hadn't

been brutal or anything like that or cruel. And then did you hear a lot of stories of guys in that position, Yeah, yeah, and and that he felt Frank felt that he was just doing his job and following orders and so and so that actually got him reinstated in the Vienna Police Force. That's one of those kind of like restorative moments for me, you know, Yeah, that

like restores my faith in humanity. That somebody who's gone through lost literally everything that they ever had in their entire life, and it's gone through just more hell than we could ever understand, would be so forgiving to be able to say that guy was just doing his job. It wasn't his fault. That's on the level of the things that you hear about like Gandhi or the Dali Lama do where somebody brutalizes and beats the holy hell out of him and they just turn around and there

it's not your fault, I forgive you, or something. Sometimes with shoot like mass shootings. Yeah, every once in a while people will come and comfort the family of the shooter, you know, the people who are families of the victims. That's insane to me. I would like to say that I would be that big of a person if something like that happened to me, but I definitely would not. I'd be like, no, that did it it with his Now, I think that this is why we do show stories

that are over five years old. So the kid get like that because yeah, yeah, I agree, and I think that I don't. I don't think that Otto Frank was you know, all saint like in Gandhi like her. But I think that was an incredible moment. Oh yeah, yeah, because you know, you know, you got this this one guy who's you know, perfectly frie fine and perfectly nice to you. It says Sarah, I'm so sorry, but I

gotta take you away. I apologize, you know, I was sympathetic, but you know, if I don't do what they tell me to do, they're shoot me. So yeah, and there's a bunch of other dudes here watching what we're talking about. Yeah yeah. So so that's about it, unless you guys have any many other theories or suspects. No, not really. Yeah. Actually I was gonna I was gonna try to like fit the chupa cop into this one, but Shanna told me no way. I read that she did. She like

used all three of us. She was like, if Steve, I mean, Devin, I mean you trying to blame this on the chop of cabra. Yeah, now we're not gonna go there, no chupercabra for this one. Yeah. Yeah, So that's it. I think that unless you know, it's still possible. I mean, somebody might somewhere find some papers or something. I mean, but at this point, I think that all of that stuff has been picked through with such a

fine toothcomb. Oh my god, I mean, this is this is one of another one of those ones where we talked about the hit kaifek. It's it's unsolvable at this point. Yeah. The key pieces of the puzzle are just gone. Yeah, they are right now. It's it would be just an entire fluke if you came across you know, somebody's papers and everything like that, and it was all very very very documented and everything maybe okay possible, I doubt I doubt that's going to happen. If you've got any theories

of your own. No, you can send us an email. That's at Thinking Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com. If you are indeed the and you're still alive while you're pretty old, but we love to hear from you, but we would love to hear from it. Come on, rat send us an email. Uh our website where you can Yeah, I think our website is Thinking Sideways podcast

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That's really yeah, that is really true. Yeah, people have been like hitting the Patreon appreciate rock yea. Yeah. Yeah, you guys have to offset the costs of maintaining the website and all that, because you know, it does cost us money because we get a huge amount of traffic, so I means we have to pay extra. Yeah, yeah for that, for for the website. What else? iTunes? Yeah, you can find us on iTunes, so please subscribe and review good review preferably. You can stream us from just

about anywhere. There's all kinds of streaming services. We're on Facebook. We have both our page and a group, so you can be part of both of those. And we're on Twitter thinking sideways, not thinking, but thinking. I actually did a tweet the other day. Yeah, that's rare. Actually I didn't notice that you did a tweet, so I'm I'm gonna have to go back and work at there was a single sentence in response to something, because that's all I know how to tweet. I don't know how I

feel about that. We also have the sub subreddit thinking. There's a there's an attempt at a conversation of every episode. It's it's interesting if you're on reddit subscribe. I don't of those conversations are happening on Facebook. Yeah, that seems to be the more popular way. I'm not gonna say it's the better way, but it's the more popular way currently. But absolutely, the reddit thread is another place to go

and discuss these things, and I'm there. If you see any of us quote unquote us talking on a reddit, it's me. Yeah, probably come talk to me. Yeah. What else we got to talk about here? Patreon much of that already, that's that's entirely voluntary, right, you can pledge a certain amount per episode. What's what's the eddress for that forum? So everybody knows what it is. It's Patreon

dot com. That's uh P A t R e O N dot com, slash thinking sideways, keeper easy, and you can you can go out there and pledge, you know, up to I don't know if there's a limit if there's not, so you can play pledge like a million episode if you want to. And I will go ahead and say, if you pledge a million episode, you own us. Be realistic for our listeners. Hundred bucks, hutterbucks, realistically realistic episode.

It's about the average we're seeing. Yeah, we we joke about this, but again, I know we said this every evens is so helpful. It'd be amazed at how those things add up, and they really do help us. Yeah, we like Yeah, So that's about it. Um any last parting thoughts you guys, No, I don't have anything else Yeah, I mean either, sorry and I'm just depressed now yeah I sad story yeah no wait wait wait to pick

us up. Thanks do. We'll do something cheerful next week to to to cheerful stories from Joe in a row Ye wait buddy, sorry about that. It will be something I'm going to do like an Easter bunny story next week. Sweet bye everybody, Bye guys. Ow