Fellow conspiracy realist. Have you ever been on the losing side of a war? Yeah, this one's for the war criminals. Have you ever needed a GTFO really quickly?
Yeah? Have you?
Please write to us. But by the way, this is seriously we hope that's never happened to you. We hope that you are not a war criminal. This episode, I think stands out to both of us because it combines history, it combines conspiracy, It combines crime not just on a local but on an international scale. And in short, Matt, we're talking about something called Odessa.
Yeah, we're going to get into it through the rat lines. We're gonna find our way through paper clip. It's kind of like paper clip. You'll remember that one. Do search for that. If you don't remember it, let's just dive in and see where we get to.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
A production of.
iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nolan.
They call me Ben. We are joined today with our super producer role brillianty. Most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. Quick question at the top of the show. Have you all ever had to make an escape? It could be an escape from a party don't want to be at, or a family function, an escape from a social obligation, and escape from a country.
I unsuccessfully participated in an escape room. Did not get out in the lot time? Oh no, it was quite a letdown. Did you get tortured?
No?
I blame one particular team member who shall go nameless, who had the confidence of a general and the intelligence of something much less than a general.
And to be clear, I've heard this story and you are not talking about yourself. No, okay, it's a different what about you met?
I was once at an extended in law's house far away and one of the persons there was acting as a bit of a bully, and then it escalated and escalated throughout the course of an evening, and you perhaps, and I packed up the things that I had unpacked with my wife and we got the heck out of there.
Good. Yeah, good forget those people.
It wasn't that crazy in hindsight, but it was certainly uncomfortable in the moment.
So, yeah, Ben, you're's talking getting kicked out of countries. Have you ever had to make a mad, crazy getaway.
Yes, I've had several close calls over my time. Got it one in Germany, two in Guatemala, one in Canada. Yeah, a number once where I get to say, I had to get out of a town in Guatemala after dark. It was it was in the it was in the jungle. It was strange. I was essentially racing to catch the last charter bus that would pass through that area of the of the country before dawn, so the next one would come at dawn. But I was not in a place where you would have want to stay overnight.
Gotcha using those diplomatic privileges wink.
No, Well sure, sure, anyway, I made it here, right, That's all that matters.
There we go.
Today's episode does have something common thematically with this series of escapes. We're talking about whether an escape room, whether a weird living situation, whether you are whether you are racing the darkness or the dawn. Today we are exploring a strange secret story. It's one that begins, we say, right around the close of World War two. But that's not entirely accurate. This story begins before the end of the actual war. It just the rubber hits the road
at the end. Wait war, what war are we talking about? Here are the facts.
That's why it's the Great War, the one that is taught to children across the world. No matter where you grow up, you will learn about this because it was such an important few I mean really didn't even last that long, but it was one of the most important things that ever occurred in the history of humanity.
It was the whole world and war with itself.
Yeah, for each other the second time, it's right, yeah, And it took place from nineteen thirty nine to nineteen forty five. World War two, of course, is what we're speaking of. If you didn't get it through those means. But here's the thing. I mean, that timeline isn't perfect, right, because there are machinations that occur prior to that. There are there's a lot of cleaning up essentially that occurs afterwards.
Well, there's a lot of setting up to socioeconomic positions that are changed or in an unsustainable way. In the thirties, also, there are a lot of banks evolved I'm going to say it. I know it's a different episode, but it would be naive to pretend that was not the case.
Certainly, and at least one major religious organization.
Yes, at least one. We know today that the opponents in the war were collectively primarily referred to as the Axis Powers and the Allied Powers. This is still the deadliest conflict in recorded history, Matt. I like what you pointed out about how that timeline actually seems thirty nine to forty five, especially when the news just broke this year this month. Actually that we're recording, they are US soldiers in Afghanistan who were born after the current US
conflict in that part of the world began. There are people who have grown up only knowing that war.
Yeah, or at least as the major defining war in their lifetime or in their world. Right. Yeah, that is that's very odd.
It's still not the deadliest war and recorded history. That dubious honor goes to World War Two. As you said, Matt, most children learn about this war at some point in school. Exactly what we learn depends on where we are raised.
We did an earlier episode on an episode or a video I cannot remember on the insidious ways that textbooks guide the reasoning of children, like if you read if you read a textbook about World War two that's published by a textbook company in Japan, it's going to be very different from a book about World War two for children that's published in Russia, or in China, or of
course in the US. But regardless of their disagreements, all these textbooks agree on one central point, including the German textbooks, mind you, and that is this The Nazi Party of Germany were the bad guys. They were the ones every textbook will tell you seeking global dominance, responsible for genocide, human experimentation, all these other atrocities, a seemingly unending list of war crimes. Nazi officials foresaw the close of the war and the fall of the Axis powers before it
actually happened. They could see the writing on the wall, you know what I mean.
Yeah, they knew that they got caught, they would have to answer for these crimes and be tried.
You know, as you kind of listed off a few of those things there have been These aren't things that are you're going to get a lenient sentence for. They were aware that the whole world essentially would be holding them accountable for these things, and they would be either in jail or put in front of a firing squad or hanged if the end would come either very swiftly or it would be an elongated process for perhaps decades.
Yeah, the human species is not perfect. But what, thankfully, one thing billions of people can agree on is that if you try to kill billions of other people, something bad should happen to you. Yes, you know, so go us, go team.
So understandably, these folks looked to plan their escape.
Yeah, anyway they possibly could get out of the countries where they were, because we're not just talking about Nazis in Germany. There were people in countries, you know, across that area in Europe, and again if you looked at Japan, people were trying to escape justice.
Yeah, yeah, and Italian fascists, members of that aspect of the Axis powers.
Well, even on some of the Allied powers. There were numerous Soviet higher echelon soldiers and military personnel that were trying to get out because they feared what would occur after the war. Yeah.
Yeah, can you imagine after the close of the war, Nazi officials who were captured were tried in court during a series of military tribunals known as the Nuremberg Trials. The Nuremberg Trials are incredibly important for human history. They're often depicted in works of fiction and films and so on, and they set some crucial precedents. The first tribunal began on November twentieth, nineteen forty five, and it was aiming to try twenty four prominent members of Germany's Nazi parties.
These people were tried in absentia because they had not been apprehended.
There is that, Like, what an awkward proceeding that must have been.
It's weird. People are really people are into it. I think they had to set the precedent. And then also if they find the person guilty in absentia, the law still apply. So anytime that person is found, who knows, maybe the sentence can be carried out immediately. Probably not something that medieval, but similar who.
Do they yell at and shame in the room though? Is they're like a proxy person that stands in for the absent party.
I don't know, because even when that one pope dragged the carcass of his predecessor out and had a trial for the dead guy. They at least needed that prop you know what I mean.
Well, yeah, in any court, at least within the US, if you don't have somebody to stand trial, then there is no trial. So but in this it really is. It was just a matter of needing to state, essentially, this person is guilty of these things. It is known now throughout the world that this guy did this.
And these were the big fish of the party, not all of them, but many of them were the drivers, the builders, the architects of the horrible socioeconomic engine that Germany had created, you know, the heads of economic policy, military of course, the people who were in charge of the concentration camps. The surviving members of the party worked
ardently to avoid justice. And it's interesting that today we're talking about escape because the stakes were so high that some people who could not well, I guess the best way to say it is, some people found only one route for physical escape, and they took it without hesitation.
And of course you're talking about both Joseph Gerbels as well as Adolf Hitler. And if you want to learn more about these guys, they chose to take their own lives. We did an episode called What happened to Hitler a little while ago, and gosh, I think it's twenty seventeen maybe, but you can learn about all of the theories surrounding Hitler's death. Whether he actually.
Died then he's probably dead now either way.
Yes, but listen to that episode if you want to learn more about that.
Figure out what people found, what people learned about the skull.
And then you had folks like Heinrich Mueller who just kind of vanished like Kaiser Susday style.
So what happened? Where did they go? We'll tell you after a word from our sponsors. Here's where it gets crazy. So this was a rumor, This was a whisper for a long time. What happened to these Nazi says? You said, nol What happened to these ones who disappeared? Iserse style. Over the decades since World War Two, declassified files have proven the Nazis had an ongoing conspiracy, or it's better to say, a nest of conspiracies, this cavalcade of secret
plans created to evade the consequences of their actions. This is not well technically speaking, this is not a conspiracy theory because it's not a theory. It really actually happened. It is a genuine conspiracy.
And it's really multi like you said, multiple conspiracies, multiple groups, and multiple plans, and a lot of them were successful.
Yeah, and there's overlap and some worked better than others. Right, And to a degree, this conspiracy, this let's call it an uber conspiracy since we're using German. Right, This uber conspiracy or medic conspiracy remains unsolved. It all goes back to something called ratlines. What is a rat line, you may ask.
Well, today the very escape networks, tunnels infrastructure used for this purpose by the Nazis and fascists at the close of the war are all collectively referred to as ratlines, and they were essentially plans for individuals and groups to vanish themselves, disappear themselves, leaving Germany for safe havens like South America and also the.
US shout out to Operation paper Clip.
Yeah. But yes, they also went other places, right, Yeah, like Switzerland. Yeah. And there are even a couple of rumors of areas in the Middle East where people were secreted away to write Syria. Yeah. But just to jump back to paper Clip again, we've done an episode on this.
This was the specifically the United States version of a rat line to get Nazi scientists generally scientists, but there are a few other characters in there to the United States for our own gain, because the mines behind some of the terrible things that occurred were or I don't know how else better to put this there, they were some innovative people that were doing things that were complicated, and the United States saw strategic advantage to using those minds for their own advantage.
That is just it's absolutely it's it's absolutely brutal and ruthless and machiavelian and true Nazi scientists are the reason that human beings ended up on the Moon if you think about it, And they're one of the reasons, right because Operation paper Clip focused on taking thousands of German scientists and engineers, particularly Werner von Braun.
Right, Yeah, that's the big name, right, who.
Had done so much work on V two rockets. If you think about it, that that expertise that the US took does lead maybe not directly, but does lead to the rocket technology that the US later used is to send people into space.
In the least, it helped tremendously.
At the very least, and I know it can be seen as somewhat of a hot take to again say the Nazis helped the US land people on the moon. It sounds weird when you, you know, boil it down to one sentence maybe former Nazis. Yeah, you know what, that's way more diplomatic former Nazis.
But again, I feel weird even saying that. It feels like I'm downplaying it.
Well, we know that some members, especially in the scientific community, some members of the Nazi Party were maybe members in name because of internal political pressure, and they had to do it to they say they had to do it to survive. We also will never know the true story.
Ben.
You read a really great quote on a recent episode of Ridiculous History where you said, nobody really cares about anyone's motivation for being a Nazi. Whether you did it on purpose or you know, were kind of strong armed into it, You're still called a Nazi at the end of the day. There's no like form or Nazi are like Nazi and name only really right.
Well, the things you did, the physical acts, the ideas that you created that you know, brought into this world were for a means that was nefarious and did terrible things to other people. Do you where there was a rocket that was being shot to blow up soldiers from you know, some other land.
Whether it's a punch card machine.
Yeah, like IBM, yeah, wow, Fanta, No, I'm just kidding this.
I mean, this is an excellent point. Right. So the reason Operation paper Clip happens without going into the full episode we have on it that you can hear whenever you wish available wherever you get your favorite shows. The primary reason Operation paper Clip exists is because the US boffins and eggheads and military leaders do a cost benefit analysis.
And before the end of World War Two, the beginnings of the Cold War are already it's nascent, it's kicking into gear, and the Soviet side and the US and the West are already planning on how to become the
global hedgemon. Right, So Operation paper Clip was this cost benefit analysis where US scientists and what did I say, boffins and eggheads and military leaders, they know that these these ideological orphans, right, these brilliant evil people because again like Noel said, they are Nazis, knew that they would be hunted around the world. But more importantly, the US knew that if they did not spirit these folks away, the Soviet machine would get them, and the Soviet government
did apprehend German scientists. I think the US only got around sixteen hundred or so.
But yeah, just sixteen hundred, yeah.
Right, just sixteen hundred of those top men. To quote Indiana Jones, right, doesn't he say that the ender Raiders of the Lost art things. Yeah, so we're going I'm going a little in the weeds on Operation paper Clip.
It's just very important for everyone living in the US to know that when you hear about ratlines, when you hear about countries like Argentina help Brazil, Yeah, yeah, yeah, when you hear about these countries helping war criminals disappear, we have to realize this is very much a glass house. Our country did the same thing, you know what I mean, and did it with even less of a clandestine attitude, more of an official stance. But okay, so what is
a rat line. Let's say, now, we're not going to pick on super producer Lull because it's his first day with this. So let's just pick someone no one can hate and say they're a Nazi. Okay, So what if like Tom Hanks is you know, he got caught up he's a Nazi and he needs to escape Germany. It's the fall of World War two. What kind of ratline would he use? What would he? How would he? How does it work?
Well? So, there are several routes that could be taken, like as far as locations that people are secreted through, but we kind of have to talk about the functionality of it. Right. The first thing you need to do to get past a border, right, if you're going to
do that, is to have a false identity. And generally that's how these things began, where you would have someone somewhere that could get you false papers and prove that you're someone else as you're leaving, and as you are attempting to leave somewhere like Germany or Austria or wherever you're heading out of, you would generally end up heading from Germany to Spain and then eventually over to Argentina.
That's one way, or one of the major ways. The other major way is from Germany to Italy Genoa in particular, and also that's going through Rome. And by the way, when you're going through Rome, you know who's helping out, can you guess?
No?
The Old Vatican, because again that is an arm that reaches very far and it has way too many fingers. You'd think it only had five fingers, but that arm just has like seventy five fingers.
You know, I'm not gonna I am not a theologian. I would say it does seem somewhat off brand, somewhat un christ like to assist mass murders and to assist war criminals.
But yeah, there's a deeper connection there with the Vatican and a lot of the happenings of World War Two that we were probably not going to fully get into today, but you can look that up if you wish. But anyway, they would also end up somewhere in South America. That that line that goes through Italy.
And there's the four rat lines that depended on the help of the Vatican of the Catholic Church. South America makes sense, right because there is so much Catholic presence there.
As well as the lack of extradition treaties in a lot of those places.
And I do want to say, I do want to say, when we're saying the Vatican or we're saying the Catholic Church, we're not talking about people who actually just practice Catholicism. No, no, no, we're talking more about the political machine, yes, rather than the spiritual idea. We do have etymology of ratline. It's a nautical term which I did not know because it's ratline sounds like something snarky that maybe someone in Western intelligence made up.
May I guess what it is? Yes, before it and then tell me if I'm WRONGY go for it. I always in my mind it's the small pathways that you'd have to get down on all fours essentially within a ship or something to access some of the other parts of the ship that, like the that are inaccessible.
I I like, okay, I like where your heads at this. The original rat line was a sort of last resort passage. It was a It was a rope, these small lengths of cord that ran between the big ropes, the proper ropes that fixed the top of a mast to the sides of a vessel. So rat lines you could use them because they were horizontal as these kind of makeshift ladders. So if you absolutely had to get someone up the mast,
they would crawl up this rat line. And there's a terrible image here, so they crawl up right, these these makeshift little rope ladders. Scampering up the rat line was something that desperate sailors would do when the ship was sinking, and so the last thing to go under the surface of the water is the mast, and so as the water's rising, they're running up the rat line.
Okay, checks out, makes sense.
And that's the people who missed out on the lifeboats. So that's that's interesting though, because in that etymology, there may be a deeper a deeper puzzle, right, certainly, and we'll get to that just we'll get to that just a second. But these roots that you're describing, the they start independently, right. The thing is, there's not a great conspiracy.
Yeah, you'll have you'll have basically a leader in one area that that generally has access to getting those kinds of identity papers that we were kind of briefly mentioning up up at the top there. If you can find one person like that who has a few other associates and then you can link up with that group, that then becomes essentially a cell right of network, because then
those are popping up everywhere. But it doesn't necessarily mean that that network is fully connected or communicating with each other. You just have to find your node.
Yeah. Yeah, like a lot of a lot of dirty things that state actors and governments do tend to be less an official decision of the government as a whole and more like a faction of people or community, a wheel within the wheel. Right. So, according to historian Michael Fayer, there were two alternate routes the ones you described at, and they developed independently, but they eventually merged, likely as the actors in these roots learned about one another and
they were able to help and assist each other. And for years after the war, the concept of these escape routes, these ratlines were, as we said earlier, rumors, whispers, They were not officially confirmed. And you can see why because at the close of World War Two, when US soldiers have died, it would be terrible and very it would be political suicide for members of the US government to say, Okay, we won the war. We're doing our best to bring
justice to people, except for the scientists. You guys, there's one dude who's just great at rockets, and we have to have them. We're sorry that your children have died, but we really want to get to the moon. You can't say that stuff. You know what I mean said, well, yeah, but I'm not not the president after World War Two.
It's not a great when you said it. It's not very authoritative, guys, hear us out listen here, Wow, let's take a beat.
That's I mean, it's true though, if you think about like who could who on earth would go public with that? So of course this was considered a wild tinfoil hat conspiracy, you know what I mean? And people who if someone told you in the nineteen sixties, hey, I think the US government is abducting scientists, right, or I think that the Pope is abducting Nazis and helping them live a new life in Argentina. Then if someone told you that,
you probably think, wow, this guy is on LSD. And I've never never see some one tripping like that's the.
Plot of a movie that exists, like a scientists are disappearing. They're all being spirited away to a secret underground lab to do evil research under duress.
Yeah, it sounds like Watchmen. It sounds like a whole bunch of different things.
Yeah, the odessify there you go, similar to right, because even today, like even today, now that this stuff is confirmed, there are historians and researchers, not necessarily fringe historians nor fringe researchers who believe that there's still something nefarious, that there is still more we need to learn about this. And one of the largest controversies in the story of Nazi ratlines is something called Odessa. What is that you ask, We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor.
So according to author Nazi hunter and Holocaust survivor Simon Wisenthal, Odessa or the Organization de Ermaligan SS ange Hourigan, was founded in nineteen forty six, one year after the close
of the war. Odessa Odessa is the US code name for the operation, and according to Guy Walter, as a historian, US intelligence first became aware of this term when members of the SS and thekzy Bensheim auerbach In tournament camp used it in conversation while attempting to gain special favors or privileges from the Red Cross.
So they would be The way this story goes is that these SS members would be trying to maybe get in communication with someone outside of where they were being held, you know, get maybe some cash, may maybe even try to see if they could get in touch with someone who could get them a passport, and from what we could tell, the conversation something like could you send this letter to my friend blah blah blah, and then say no, sorry, I can't can't send letters and they go, oh, but
it's care of vote DESA exactly. So the first mention of it from the Allied side shows up in this memo from American intelligence and that's on July third, nineteen forty six. So what was ODESSA like? What we know that these smaller roots or these these more discreete organizations and ratlines, we already know that they exist. What's the difference with Simon Weisenthal's Odessa?
So this author Weisenthal, he believed that Odessa was this big organization. I would kind of liken it to something like al Qaeda similar to that, like it's one big thing that was functioning together, right, and it was mostly
made up of veterans of the SS. And not only were these did this group Odessa, not only did they get them out of Germany initially with passports like we were talking about, but they would also assist these people in setting up new lives in new countries such as Argentina or Brazil or wherever they were going to end up in South America, a couple of times in the Middle East in places like Syria. But there is one major issue with this. Not everybody believes the same thing that Wisenthal.
Believes, right, That's the thing. Multiple other historians say Odessa as as he has described, never actually existed. Again, That's that's strange. No one is denying that the rat lines really did exist. And yes, everyone knows that some Nazi officials did successfully use these roots to escape, as well as some members of fascist parties and so on. But there's a complication to this narrative. Years before Simon Weisenthal of Issathal went public with his claims about Odessa, the
government of Austria had already been investigating the idea. It's sort of it's it's like, if you're familiar with James Bond, the World's Worst Superspy, it's sort of like the concept of specter. Remember this uh specter in the Bond films, is this global evil organization.
Every spy franchise as one, yeah and gets smart. I think it was chaos And all of them are acronyms that nobody remembers that.
They stand for. But they're generally like this quasi governmental private organization, right that the aunctions outside of any government or.
Yeah, and just has like a way cooler name than an actual government entity would ever have. It's like Scorpio, Chaos.
Spect the Octo Quad, the Octo Quad.
I would, yeah, I would join the Octo Quad.
But why is it octo because the symbol is like a weird eight and four together.
Take a roun. No, it's it's four octas.
It's a quad of octas. Okay, okay, so it's it's twenty four.
Excuse me, send us your design for octo quad and teach us how to do math. So that's but it's true. Like so the argument then is that Odessa is a real life version of this evil super spy Bond esque thing. And also Simon Weisenthal. In the fall of World War Two, he did not get along with West German military intelligence. They butted heads all the time. That doesn't mean that
his claims are untrue, and it doesn't, you know. All it means is that there's a wrinkle here, and it could people claiming that Odessa is not real could be seeking to discredit the Weisenthal Weisenthal organization. Or it could also mean maybe.
In his.
In his search to find these aped war criminals, that Bisenthal started drawing connections in his own head where none existed, you know what I.
Mean absolutely, I mean we all know that that's some of what gives conspiracy theory circles a bad rap. Sometimes it's easy to do foregone conclusions or sort of work backwards and like sort of have a preconceived notion of what something is when it maybe isn't actually that at all.
Yeah, and again, the thing is, so he was definitely right about the smuggling operations, the rat lines. Yeah, and we found proven ones, right.
Yeah, we did. We found a whole bunch of proved ones. And I just want to add on to what you're saying there, Guys, it feels like, and this is complete speculation on my part, that if Odessa really was a thing and it was kept you know, secret enough to where we are still in twenty nineteen, you know, postulating whether or not it could be real, it feels like it could have had ad integration somehow with one or
more intelligence communities or agencies throughout the world. And what intrigues me is that the CIA was involved in several of these, you know, secreting away of Nazis along with paper clip, you know what was occurring with paper clip, but in other instances as well, to get essentially s S officials and high level targets to then flip them and become informants, not only to find other SS you know, escapees, but also to inform them on strategy and other things.
Very tricky. So it's we're gonna, We're gonna continue down here because we know several of these names, people that escaped and people who were involved in things like this. But it just does make me feel like if Odessa was real, perhaps there was a higher involvement with some other powerful intelligence agency.
Right, some sort of institution capable of not only moving people across the world, but also cleaning up after themselves such that they could they could sweep up the trace. Right. We also, okay, we have to say it. We already mentioned this, but we have to say it. The Vatican
did it. That's the institution that has the power and the reach to move people across I'm not being an anti papist or whatever, and I'm not saying anything bad about the spiritual beliefs of anybody who ascribes to Christianity
or Catholicism. But the machine, the machine that runs that organization on an earthly level, is more than capable of creating these sort of I know it sounds very Dan Brown, right, but they're more than capable of enacting this sort of this sort of process, and in a very real way, the Catholic Church at this time was, you know, hand in hand with the ostensible governing powers of some developing countries, right,
and in some cases not all, not all. And again it's very it's very easy, I think, to connect dots where none exists. But it is true that in some cases the Catholic Church had so much influence over a country or parts of a country, that it was effectively the government.
Yeah wow, Okay, well, I don't even know to say following that, I just want to let you soapbox for a while.
Because I'm sorry, thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Well, no, because Wend we've found this to be true. I mean, if you look at somebody like, uh, Dragonov, I don't know how to precisely pronounce the name there, but this is a person who would get false identity papers like we were kind of mentioning before he would get them from the let's see this an unidentified person, an American who was serving at the Eligibility office of the International Refugee Organization in Rome. Okay, so you've got a person working with an office in Rome to get
some papers, right. That only apparently that only happened for a short time because things fell through with all of that. But then he ended up working with another organization, the National Catholic Welfare Organization, and as well as the Italian police in the Italian Foreign Office, and that was again to obtain false documentation for Nazis that were attempting to escape.
He would get false exit and entry visas for at least three South American countries, the Argentina that we talked about, Bolivia, even Chili and again and a lot of times. It's not known precisely how these documents are obtained, but it is known that there were just bribes that were going on with maybe an individual diplomat or somebody who could
have access to those. And it's not necessarily known the full let's say, compliance of any of these larger organizations that I've mentioned up here, but someone at a higher level or a high enough level to actually create and get these documents. Was involved because you say these weren't counterfeit documents.
These were official documents.
Yes, and with names with brand new names.
Right, Yeah, that's the thing. It's it's like, at what point is something of forgery, you know, and at what point is it real? So, because we're an audio podcast, Matt, you just held your hands the kind of the old six in one hand, hal, yeah, and another it's true.
And we have to also remember if we're being if we're being completely objective, we have to remember in this situation, with an organization the size of the Vatican or the Catholic Church, it is laughably unlikely that everyone knew this was happening. Again, these are factions, right this Dragonovic in what Croatia, right in the Nazi puppet state of Croatia at the time.
It's a Krunslav. Sorry I didn't say that.
Earlier, Oh first name, Yes, yeah, And we also have to note that the Red Cross was another institution not near as big nor as powerful as a Catholic Church, but they also effectively helped war criminals escape.
In the did I did I mention that Dragonovic was a Catholic priest, He was yet I don't. I don't think Yeah, I am so sorry. I totally bury the lead there. That was the whole point. It was it was a priest doing all of that work, obtaining all of these papers. Yeah, sorry, Croatian Roman priest.
Yes, yeah, yeah he was, Yeah, Kronos Draganovic. He was working in Croatia and was assisting Croatian fascists like sympathizers to the Nazi Party. Members of the Nazi Party working in Croatia, which at that point was a vassal of larger Germany. The Red Cross, though, the big question with them is whether they whether they aided in embedded war criminals on purpose or just through the sheer, the sheer weight of incompetence, the sheer inertia of ineptitude, because they
were overwhelmed with refugees. How easy is it if you're one, even as many as fifteen people, How easy is it for you to slip through with hundreds of thousands? And you know, imagine your job is every day, eight hours a day, you sit at the at the front of a never ending line. People hand you papers. It may or may not speak a language you understand. You have three to five seconds to look at the paper and stamp it. I'm spitballing here.
I know, no, this is I totally see this working, especially if you're talking about between nineteen forty five nineteen forty eight. Maybe if you show up to a refugee servicing area like that or processing location and you don't have official papers with you because whatever the excuses they you know where my country's literally at war. I don't have my papers with me. I'm trying to escape, right, How how do you prove the identity of somebody?
So the Red Cross had previously mentioned this that they said, yes, some Nazi war criminals or Axis criminals had escaped through the refugee process. But oddly enough, when I went back to look at the page on the Red Cross website where they mentioned it, it's been pulled. Yeah, maybe it's just an olderlink. I'm sure. I'm sure we can find the source out there. But they that's their argument, is
that the system was overwhelmed. No one was doing anything on purpose, but their process was supposed to have the equivalent of a background check from the Allied military. But it was pretty it was pretty cursory, and they often in the Red Cross relied on references from the Vatican
that could easily be duped up or fixed. And these travel papers that people would get they were called ten one hundreds or one zero dot one hundred, and they were very easy to get because when you're trying to process millions venicson people who have had their lives destroyed, you know, you want to make the process as quick as possible.
Right, Yeah, and you have to, I mean for safety, for health reasons. You can't just leave people in limbo like that.
So with Dragonovic, he is functioning as an agent in this chaotic time. He had what'd you say he had? He had set up travel to three different South American.
Yeah, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile.
So we know that he had some kind of pull what did they call it on the wire suction maybe it was, Yeah, I think it was in the.
A lot of suction.
Yeah, they had some kind of you know, juice or whatever Dragonovic did. And this rat line was abandoned or disbanded would be a better word than what the fifties.
Yeah, it was disbanded in nineteen fifty one and equated some sources, it was because they were just done with it. They'd gotten everyone out that they wanted to get out, they were able to shut it.
Down, so they succeeded essentially.
Yeah.
Yeah, and this leads us to this leads us to one of the great mysteries of World War Two, one of the real and genuine conspiracies. What happened to the ones that got away? You can find a plethora of ideas. I'm using that word correctly. Yep, you can find a plethora of ideas about this, but some are more plausible than others. In the Dragonovic case, we know that he assisted Klaus Barbie in escaping. This person has never been caught.
Yeah, Klaus ended up getting to Bolivia, at least that's what's believed. It's also believe that the United States ended up helping him get there along with Dragonovic. Was Barbie was actually captured in eighty three and then we found out that he died in nineteen ninety one. Uh and we found out because he was in prison in France.
There we go. Yeah, So some of these people just got away for a time.
Oh a lot. That's a That is the one of the main stories of a lot of these guys. They end up getting identified much later in life. Several of them end up in trial for you know, in various ways they end up in trial because they end up in a prison somewhere else, or they get used for a time as in Oh, who, which which guy is this? Let me jump back over here. I believe it's ALOI Brunner. Yes, I think Eloy Brunner. He is a guy who ended up in Syria and he was actually assisting the prior
to Bashar al Assade, Bashar's father. He was assisting that regime in military tactics, allegedly in developing something called the German chair, which was a torture device that would break someone's back when they were when it was a applied to them. He was like essentially century modern furniture. No, you know, I mean real torture. This guy was developing real torture while in Syria, and he was living a
fairly comfortable life early on when he got there. I think it's sometime in the fifties when he ended up in Syria, and he he's described as a card in the hand of a regime. Right, So, like we were talking about with the United States seeing strategic power and having these scientists, this guy was seen as a military strategist or a at least someone who could help them with their means to or in their ways to achieve greater power.
Right under the name George Fisher. Yes, he helped. He helped organize the this is let's see, it's important, but it's weird to explain. He helped organize the compartmentalization of the intelligences, and I think he trained some of the regime's top intelligence people. The big thing he was teaching them was that if you truly want to be in charge,
you compartmentalized information. You don't want your left hand knowing what your right hand is doing because one day you may have to clap them against one another.
Essentially, yeah, and only you and a very small group of people will know.
Anyway, here's this chair I made. It breaks people's backs.
Yeah, it's really messed up and it's a crazy story. You can read more about it at the Irish Times dot com. That's where we found an article called Nazi war criminal reportedly died in a Syrian dungeon. And again the name is A L.
O I.
S B R U N N E R.
And then there are others such as Adolph Eichmann, Joseph Mengele. There's one in particular one a touch on. This guy's name is or was Heinrich Mueller is the last chief of the Gestapo. His fate after World War Two. According to the Jewish Virtual Libraries account, Mueller got away or was thought to have gotten away for decades and decades. They thought he had just slipped the net, and no
one could find him after multiple investigations. However, the official story is that in October twenty thirteen, evidence surface that he had been buried in a mass grave in Berlin at the close of the war in forty five. However, that's this research still remains for some people a little I don't know, arguable, Like just like we've talked about with deaths of I hate to say it, the deaths of other historically notable, infamous or famous people. The story
doesn't die when the person does. Like there are people alive now who think Elvis Presley is somehow alive. And Elvis Presley was a celebrity and a musician who did briefly work with US law enforcement or attempt to.
But he was well being Asian man exactly talking and but but these are war criminals, and we will never know the fate of some of them.
That's why for decades, and that's why for decades after the war, you know, since before many of us were born listening today, there were people who just hunted these folks down. And the list doesn't stop there. We have a lot of like allegedly or is believed tos or
is suspected tos in these people's stories. We know, we know stories of Nazis where you can follow the line maybe to an extradition country, right, and then they disappear and there's a few years later a report of like an elderly an elderly German retiree expiring quietly in a small town.
And then somess found in the attic or something. But there are also a lot of these people who end up in a tribunal or a court when they are in their eighties because they get found out living in America somewhere, or living in France even sometimes, or in Argentina, Belivia,
wherever it's gonna be. There's so many story of this, stories about this and of people going through this and finally seeing justice because they're I mean, it's alleged like somewhere between, I don't know, the exact number, and we can't really ever know the exact number, but thousands of SS and German soldiers military made it out alive. We
just don't know exactly how many that is. I've seen it alleged up to ten thousand, I think perhaps even more, just through the alleged Odessa program exactly.
And there we have to leave it at this point. Still, it's twenty nineteen, and people will tell you Odessa was or was not real, right, we have to ask ourselves about the degree of sophistication, the degree of collaboration that these rat lines employed. While they may have not been members of some elaborate global secret society, those clandestine escape routes were real, and more often than some would like
to admit, these routes were also successful. Is this something that could happen in twenty nineteen, in these our modern days. It could. It would have to be different, though, because surveillance technology has just evolved, right.
It would have to be more of a low level human trafficking kind of situation, I think, where you're not actually going to use real papers. Well maybe that's not true, Maybe that's maybe that's not true at all.
So there's an interesting. There's an interesting dilemma here because although there have been so many technological breakthroughs that allow people to be closely observed, more closely than ever before at any point in history, the control of those technologies is also increasingly in the hand of a smaller and smaller and smaller subset of human individuals and institutions. So it's like there's more water coming out of the faucet, but there are fewer people capable of turning the knobs.
And what that means is that if this is entirely hypothetical, I'm not describing a real thing. What that means in theory is that if our super producer Lull needed to disappear for some reason and had the assistance of Uncle Sam in doing so, then the Alphabet agencies could simply erase his digital footprint. It's it's fascinating. It's something we don't really have an answer for. Again, that's entirely speculative, but it is possible.
Agreed, And I I don't want to talk about Nazis anymore today? Can we? Can we stop talking about Nazis?
Yes, I'm right there with you.
Do you want to talk about Nazis?
No?
No, I mean you do you want to talk about Nazis.
But you do tune into our nude podcast, Nazi Talk, Yes, coming out soon on the iHeart Radio podcast.
Did you call it our nude podcast?
That's what I heard too.
Yes, you do it in the nude Yes, and that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear your thoughts. That's right. Let us know what you think.
You can reach.
You to the handle Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on Facebook X and YouTube on Instagram and TikTok or Conspiracy Stuff Show.
If you want to call us dial one eight three three st d w y t K. That's our voicemail system. You've got three minutes. Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if we can use your name and message on the air. If you got more to say, then can fit in that voicemail. Why not instead send us a good old fashioned email.
We are the entities that read every single piece of correspondence we receive.
Be aware, yet not afraid.
Sometimes the void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.