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

Robert is joined by Matt Lieb to continue to discuss Reinhard Heydrich.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
What's being recorded by this meetings. I'm Robert Evans, hosted
Behind the Bastards. Zoom, if you're not aware, has recently
added in a horrible voice that tells you when the
meetings being recorded, and it's very traumatizing. But also because
trauma has broken my brain, I am now in love
with the zoom recording lady. We're going to be married.

(00:24):
She sounds hot. I'm not. She sounds fine as hell, right,
she sounds really good. First of all, I love a
lady who understands consent. Absolutely. You gotta enthusiastic communications, baby, Yes,
that's what gets me on, even though she really is
just saying it's happening whether you like it or not.
But she gives me actually even consent at all. You

(00:45):
could argue that, like, well you can press you can
press the leave meeting button, which I mean that I'm
tented every time. Every time I see it, I'm like,
I could leave right now, as if any other time
I couldn't. But you know, it's nice. It's nice to
have someone tell you when they're recording you. You know,
that's us the law, I think, yeah, I mean that's

(01:08):
probably that's why it's the law. Every state, Like where
I live, I don't need to tell people if I
record them. It's you know, states are either one party
consent or two party state. It's basically so like either
just the person recording like needs to know, or everyone does.
Um So, Matt Leeb what's us? Comedian funny guy, podcaster

(01:36):
guy who podcasts podcast called Yeah, yeah you do. You
get him in you you drop it into the p
zones straight away. And this is of course behind the Bastards.
This is part two of our podcast series about Ryan
Heart Heydrick maybe the worst of the Nazis um which

(01:58):
is saying a lot quite a resume line, like in
your Hell resume set, like what did you do? I'm
the guy Hitler thought was extra I love the Hell
entrance interview where you're sitting with the devil and he
was like, uh, You've got some pretty impressive, you know,

(02:18):
things that you've done in your life. I see here
you were vale victorian at Nazi you know, yes, graduated
Nazi come loudly and uh fucking you know, yeah, you
got the job burning health for eternity. Uh yeah, what
an amazing piece of shit. Um So, Matt, you know,

(02:40):
one of the problems with this episode, Like, right, this
is the thing we talked. We just did the Dullest
Brothers episodes. Right, We did a three partner and there
was like four hours of talking and let out a
lot you know, um, and it was a lot of
like we mostly left out the stuff that was was shitty,
but kind of either you know, like the Kennedy assassination
stuff where I can't really say one way or the
other what their role was, or stuff like we didn't

(03:01):
go to detail at in k Ultra because we're gonna
do it eventually. We preferred, though, to talk about like
the you know, the coups and the genocides that extended
from them, so that we weren't leaving out the biggest
crimes against humanity that they've committed as part of this
as the head of the you know, the head and
then of the CIA and the head of the State
Department with Reinhard Heydrich in order to make time, there's

(03:22):
a lot of crimes against humanity that we're just leaving
out or wallpre because it's like I can't talk about
all of the epoco crimes against like human nature and
civilization that this guy did. That's how many crimes against
humanity he was responsible for. His bio is too big.
You know, you can't read his entire bio. You've gotta

(03:45):
you gotta, really fucking you gotta find all of the
ones that you're like this this will work. You gotta
you gotta like you've gotta rank them, which is hard
to do in terms of crimes. So if you're I mean,
there's there's going to be numerous people listening to this
podcast asked whose family members were exterminated as a result
of something Reinhard Heydrich did, and if we left out
the particular crime against humanity he committed against your ancestors,

(04:08):
I do apologize. There's too many of them. Yeah, we can't,
can't go into every single one, which is it just
goes to show how much of a piece of ship
this guy was. Really tremendous asshole. Um bad dude, bad,
really bad dude. So we left off Hitler had just
kind of taken power, you know, um N three was

(04:31):
the year that Hitler kind of got his not quite
ultimate power. Yet you know, there's still he's the Chancellor,
there's still Hindenburg in there. He hasn't quite taken everything.
But this is the year during which he he consolidates
and and and gets total power. Um and it's a process.
The Nazis don't just get elected and become in charge.
There's a lot of resistance to them at the start,
including a lot of people, a lot of conservatives who

(04:53):
are like, well, we're compromising by letting Hitler be in power,
but he's not going to get total power, Like, we're
still going to have all these different checks that against them.
So the first thing the Nazis have to do is
destroy any chance of their being checks against them, and
they do this by taking over all of Germany's police
agencies um and this was again there's resistance to this
in Bavaria and a number of other German states. Elements

(05:15):
of the police resist Nazi control and they're all unsuccessful.
Right at the end of the day, most cops just
go along with it, and none of the cops who
don't go along with it remain cops. Um now uh.
In April of nineteen thirty three, Heinrich Himmler is appointed
commander of the Bavarian political police. So there's like criminal police,

(05:36):
there's there's order police, right which you're kind of like
your traffic cops. Basically cops you're like, you're drunk in
the street, and there's political police whose job is to like,
are you seditious? Are you going to carry out treason
and ship And they've existed before during the Republic, but
under the Nazis, the political police are going to be
by far the biggest and most powerful police, because that's
the Nazis are most concerned with right um and Heinrich

(05:59):
Himler but comes ahead of the Bavarias, which is one
state's political police. He makes Reinhard Hydrick the police commissioner.
So Himmler is the big picture guy. Ryan Hart is
going to be running the day to day behind the scenes.
The Nazis when they, you know, first start taking over
these agencies, they have themselves a party, and because it's
a Nazi party, that means they're beating and torturing and

(06:21):
murdering people that they've had problems with for a while
but hadn't controlled the cops. Uh Reinhard's wife later wrote,
quote I had to laugh so hard when she found
out that Hydrick had been made the police commissioner. Quote.
Reinhard said he felt great satisfaction that the same people
who have been locking up the essay and the SS
just half a year ago, who beat them down with
rubber truncheon's could now no longer straighten their backs for

(06:42):
all the bowing they did. It's correct now, Yeah, it's cool,
it's good ship. Now that he was in charge of
the political police, Hydrick's job was to arrest every communist
and social democratic enemy of the Nazi Party and have
them tortured and beaten. More than two people were locked
up in the first couple of days. Every one of
them was beaten badly. Now at this stage, Jews were

(07:04):
not the Nazi Party's chief priority. Um, so again they're
rounding up mostly political enemies, mostly leftist. Some of those
people in Jewish, and they do go after like there's
especially there's random violence against Jews. But the party is
not focusing on fucking with Jewish people right now because
they they still aren't in solid power. The left could
take things back at this point, so that's going to

(07:24):
be their focus right. Um. That said, there is a
lot of violence against Jewish people, and Hydric gleefully related
to his wife the story of a Jewish man that
s S officers brought into headquarters. Quote they made short
work of him. They beat him with dog whips, pulled
off his shoes and socks, and then he had to
walk home barefoot in the company of s s men.
That will give you an idea of how they do things.
Many Jesuits and Jews have fled from here. No one

(07:46):
is dead, no one has been seriously injured. But fear fear,
I tell you, that's really the goal. And this is
one of the things there was not from the beginning.
This is and this is debated. There's a lot of
argument as to whether or not from the beginning there
was a concerted Nazi plan to um to exterminate the Jews. Um.
I think there was a concerted willingness to to to

(08:10):
kill the Jews. I think there was a lot of
joking and talking about it. I think there were plenty
of people who didn't have an issue with it, but
they weren't planning to do it necessarily from the beginning.
There's strong evidence that it's something that kind of evolved
over time, and particularly in this period. That's not I
think one of the important things is that it was
not necessarily inevitable that the Holocaust would go the way
that it did. It was inevitable that they were going

(08:31):
to be Jewish people beaten, that there was gonna be
some sort of apartheid state, probably not necessarily inevitable that
what happened was going to happen. Right, That's why part
of the story, that's the final part of the final solution,
that's what that's kind of you know, it was it
was the logical conclusion of the ideology. You know, it
wasn't uh, it was talked about and joked about and

(08:53):
you know kind of considered something that people used rhetorically
as a rhetorical divice, but people didn't actually think this
is something they would ever try to pull off, like
not because it just seemed just h not only like irrational,
but like I mean just logistically not possible. But boy

(09:15):
where they are wrong. Yeah, they And it's it's one
of those things it's important to bring up the phrase
final solution because people don't think about what that actually
means enough. The Jewish question. Germans didn't invent that phrase, right,
That's something being asked i'll throughout Europe, and the question
is like, well, these people aren't like us, but they
live in our societies. What did we do with them? Right?
And a lot of that's you know that we've talked

(09:35):
you see the protocols of the Elder's Zion episode, the
fact it's the final solution, because the Nazis try a
couple of other solutions. Yeah, the final one is genocide,
and that's the important part of the story. I think
now proportionally more political enemies were arrested in Bavaria under
Hydrick than in any of the other German states. By

(09:56):
April ten, ten tho people had been taken into custody
by as s D. And again it's not just the
s D. They're using cops as well, right, Um, there's cops,
and also like they're just kind of like deputizing a
bunch of Nazis in the s S to act as
cops so that they can take in people. Um. There
were protests against these mass arrests, and these protests are
violently dispatched by the German police. One lawyer, Michael Siegel,

(10:18):
lodged a complaint to Hydrick against the arrest of a
Jewish client. Hydrick had him beaten by s S auxiliary
policeman and then forced march through the city carrying a
sign that said I will never again complain about the
police man fucking a and that honestly, it's just like
especially where we are now, Hydri says, blue lives matter

(10:40):
straight up. Yeah, straight up as like blue lives matter.
This is like the fucking the thin the thin blue
rich you know, yeah, the thin blue Reich. Thank you
for that. Yeah, it really is. It's God, this fucking
someone just printing out all your tweets and making you
walk around barefoot. Yeah. Now, up to this point, Yanhard's

(11:01):
achievements amount to little more than being a good liar
and knowing how to do very basic thug shit. But
it was during this period that he would really distinguish
himself as an innovator by helping to develop a new
tool for repression. So German law, when the Nazis came
to power, provided for something called Shultzhoft, or protective custody.

(11:22):
This gave police the power, under certain circumstances, to detain
a person without judicial review, so without a warrant, without
it charges, to essentially arrest someone to take them into custody.
And I think the original idea was to allow the
police to take somebody to custody who might present a
danger to themselves. Who might be in danger, who was
in a situation, and it was in a situation where
they couldn't get a ruling for the course at the

(11:43):
same time. Right, the problem with giving the police any
powers like this, even if the goal is maybe to
protect people, is that once that power exists, fascists will
find a way to use it, which is the same
problem we're we're having and will continue to have with
our police now. In nineteen thirty three, Hydrick and his
colleagues redefined protective custody in a way that allowed his

(12:05):
s D and policeman to detain any citizen for any
reason without involving the courts. This is the start of
the development of the concentration camp system. This is the
legal underpinning of why they're able to exist, of how
they're justified under the law. From this point forward, no
court cases or warrants were necessary for the police to

(12:26):
take in someone who was defined by the Nazis as
quote an enemy of the Reich. Now, all these arrestees
had to be put somewhere in the existing state prison
and jail facilities were hardly built to accommodate such numbers.
In March of nineteen thirty three, an abandoned munitions factory
was converted into a concentration camp. This was not the
first under the Nazis. There were prior to this what

(12:47):
we're called wild Concentration camps are basically just like we're
gonna appropriate a facility to stick people were arresting, right,
But they get and and Hydrick is not the only
person who's a major driver of this. They get this
abandoned me asitions factory, they put walls around it, they
turned it into a concentration camp. Now you want to
guess with the town this factory is in. It's called

(13:08):
oh god, guess what the town called summer village. You
might have heard of called oh doc Yeah, that was yeah,
this is doc How. Yeah. So the facility is quickly
put in the hands of the s S. Hydrick is
not in charge of doc Ou, but he's in charge
of who goes to Dachau and when they're released. Right,
that's important. There's a separation of powers here. But he's

(13:30):
a big part of the dock house system because it's
he who gets to shoes who who gets sent there.
You know, um Dackau is you. Everyone knows the name
doc How. There's a shifver down the human spine when
you say it. It was a horrible place. Prisoners were
relatively regularly beaten to death. Thirteen people were killed in
one month in nineteen thirty three, and a lot more
would follow. By early nineteen thirty four, Ryan Hard's police

(13:52):
had arrested more than sixteen thousand people. Most of these
people were beaten, arrested and released and given a warning
basically that you were you were arresting these people, you
beat the ship out of him, and you say, hey,
stay the funk out of politics. From that right, more
than two thousand though, the people who were like seeing
as the real threats were interned in dock out. Now,
it's important to note that the Nazis and him Learn

(14:12):
in particular. Again, we're big about separation of responsibilities. So
the guy who actually runs dock out is a fellow
named Theodore Ike, and we're gonna talk about him for
just a little bit because, like Hydrick, Ike was a
former military man who had been dismissed very quickly for
bad behavior. Um so he'd been disgraced because of like
fucked up ship he did in the military, kicked out
of the military. He had actually been arrested in the

(14:34):
Weimar years and sent to a psychiatric asylum because he
had illegal explosives that he was planning to do something
fucked up with He's like, gonna make a kind of
guy you get um. So he does well under the
Nazis and they give him They put him in charge
of doc Out. And part of why I'm bringing ike
story up is because he and Hydrick have a similar background.

(14:55):
These are guys who had nothing before Nazism, who had
disgraced themselves, and Nazism gave them a second chance, and
they really saw it, not just in ideological terms, but
this is my only chance to matter. Because the Nazi
regime was fiercely competitive, and because competing within that crew
often meant being the hardest and most violent, Hydrock and
Ike would both compete to see who could be the

(15:17):
most brutal, and that's a big part of why doc
Ou becomes so horrible. Hydrocs guys are competing to see
how many people they can arrest, um, how brutally they
can crack down on descent, how frightening they can be.
Ike is competing with his to make his concentration camp
the most horrifying place. He possibly can. None of them
are getting necessarily from most of the stuff. They're not
getting orders from above. They're interpreting things that their superiors

(15:41):
are saying and passing and seeing what can I do
to please them? And that leads them to be as
extreme as possible. God, it's just like it's just like
spawned from this like fucking petty egoistic competition about who
could be a bigger piece of ship. It's like exactly,
you know, It's like it's like fucking John Lennon writing

(16:03):
Strawberry Fields and Paul McCartney writing, uh, you know, Penny Lane,
but like the dark side of that. You know, it's
like they both made themselves better at what they did,
but but at murder, but it but but it murder. Yes,
you could call Ryan Hart Heydrick Theodore I. Kinder came
the Beatles of genocide. That's what what I'm trying to

(16:23):
do is tie the Beatles into Nazism. So can you
get a T shirt that's like the cover of Abbey Road,
but with the Nazis walking across the street? Can we
You think it's gonna go over? Well? Yeah, I think
that will be really useful merch. Alright, I'm gonna make
it on my own. Yeah, I mean conceptually I get it,

(16:44):
but probably not something that I would walk around. Yeah,
it's not a joke people passing on the street. I
still I still get. I still get strange looks and
I where the maybe leaders are a bad idea emerge.
M it's it's not Rushmore but with all the worst

(17:06):
bastards ever. Like, Okay, I could see how that's hard
can be misinterpreted family events, though you bring the shirt. Yeah,
you bring it the family events, and you mostly just
keep it inside. I have I have a shirt, an
entire T shirt that's just a giant close up of
a butthole, and I don't wear it outside, you know,

(17:26):
but I enjoy that I have it. Yeah, I have.
I have a T shirt from the band Millions of
Dead Cops, which I wear when I'm not driving anywhere.
When I get pulled over in that shirt, I mean
behind the police shirt is strictly for the house. Yeah,
all of your merch are just shirts no one wears.

(17:49):
Don't don't wear these if you might be over please um.
So again, it's important to understand kind of the way
this These guys are kind of independent at Lee trying
to top each other. And that's how a lot of
these that's how a lot of the worst crimes of
the Nazi regime are committed. And I'm gonna quote from
Robert Gervat again. Hydrick's actions cannot simply be understood as

(18:11):
those of a bloodthirsty sadist playing a preconceived role in
building a totalitarian police state. Since joining the s s
and nineteen thirty one, he had immersed himself in a
political milieu which thrived on the notion of being locked
in a life and death struggle. Winning that struggle required
decisive action against enemies in respect of whom even the
most unimaginable cruelty was justified. As his future deputy vern

(18:33):
are best observed, Hydrick tended to project his own proclivity
towards intrigues and violence onto his real or imagined enemies.
Finally free to move against an ideological enemy who had
supposedly enjoyed the upper hand until nineteen thirty three, he
considered terror a justifiable weapon, in fact, the only adequate
weapon against such evil. We can talk about Q and
on here we could talk about the modern Republican Party.

(18:55):
The way that framing your enemies as like demonic, like
inherently destructive, omniscile foes justifies any kind of terror you
can dream of, both in human and also uh, the
perception that they are just constantly on top, even in
moments in which you are literally on top. Yeah, So

(19:18):
if you happen to get you have to murder them
as soon as you get the chance, because you know
they're they're always winning otherwise because you're trying to be
in the playing field. Yeah, because they would murder me
if they were if they if they had the chance
to do it, then it's like, well they've ben't had
the chance to do it. They never did, so they
actually didn't. Uh yeah, yeah you notice here it's still
alive and they never did that. But yeah they noticed that.

(19:42):
Um anyway, so uh. While Hydric used terror as a weapon,
he also spent a lot of his time in this
period and throughout actually his early career in the as
a Nazi. As much as he is arresting dissidents, having
them tortured, having them sent to concentration camps, as much
as he does that, he threatens his subordinates with punishment

(20:03):
for illegally beating or killing detainees. Um, this was not
out of any kind of humanitarian desire. This is out
of the fact that he wants to be seen. He
wants the system he is running to be seen as
orderly and lawful. He does not want the majority of
the German population to be frightened of the Nazis, because
at this point they're still trying to win public support.

(20:24):
And all these guys who will be fine with if
you say I've put a criminal in a concentration camp,
they're like, fine, if they see a dude getting beaten
in the street, that's disorder, that's nasty. They don't like that. Um,
they want every death to be uh, at least have
some semblance of justification in the eyes of people who

(20:44):
aren't there, who don't know the reasons why, and who
are just going to take the story, the general story
that the fucking that the perpetrators they're gonna it's It's
like a lot of Republicans were horrified by the George
Floyd video, but at the same time, as long as
they don't see a video of it, they're just like, oh, well,
he had he might have had a gun, right, They
don't care. All they need to know is like, oh,

(21:05):
a cop shot a dangerous man. I don't care about that.
You see the reality of it, and it horrifies you.
That's the thing Hydrick. He's very savvy. He knows I
don't want random street violence. I don't want grams. I
want orderly, state sanctioned legal repression and murder. That's Hydrick's
fucking bag, baby, um so. One of Hydrick's most prominent

(21:27):
victims in this period was the Nobel laureate and critic
of the Nazis, Thomas Man. Now Man had the fortune
to be out on a reading tour of Europe when
the Nazis took power, and he had been a vociferous
critic of the Nazis, very public. He's a very famous intellectual.
He'd been attacking them for uh for years. And he's
out of Germany when they take power, and he is
a smart guy. So he's like, I'm not going back home.

(21:49):
It seems like this isn't gonna be good for me.
I'm gonna I'm gonna hang out elsewhere and wait, I'm
gonna just chill for a minute on this whole going
back to Germany thing, just kind of see what happened. Yeah,
I think I want to let this play out a
little bit before I go back Um. And while he
was away, Hydrick's police rated Mon's home and took his cars,

(22:10):
bank accounts, and private possessions. He eventually succeeded in having
Thomas Mann stripped of his German citizenship. By nineteen thirty four,
Himler and Hydroc had created a remarkably effective terror regime
in Bavaria. Their superiors noted their success and noted that
Bavaria Nazi control is more complete. Their elimination of political
enemies had been more effectively carried out than anywhere else

(22:32):
in the New Reich. And so in April of nineteen
thirty four, Hydric has given control of the Prussian Gestapo
as well. And we're not gonna the Gestapo doesn't exist
before the Nazis. The Gestapo is kind of like unifying
these Nazi intelligence apparatus is with the state political police,
and that becomes the Gestapo. That's more Gering's bag. But
Hydric is kind of from the beginning in control of

(22:53):
a lot of it, in control of the practical details
of what it does at least um. And so he's
given control of the Prussian Gestapo in ninety four. This
puts thousands of secret police and multiple states under his hands.
So now he's basically in charge of repression in Bavaria
UH and in Prussia UM. It also means that he's
now officially a big man in the Nazi party and

(23:14):
this would give him meaningful input during the next critical
stage stage of Nazi development. Now, if you'll remember, Ernst
Rome and his brown Shirts had been a major locust
of Nazi power in the early years. These guys are
hitler street fighters, his gangsters, and Rome is a military veteran.
He's a very tough man. He's good at organizing street fighters.
He's also a revolutionary. Rome isn't satisfied when Hitler takes power.

(23:37):
For one thing, he doesn't want to rebuild the German military.
He wants to replace the military with his essay. And
he's a he's a he's a he's a He's not
someone who's ever going to be satisfied with what the
Nazi state became, because he's just a lot more radical
than that. And once you're in power, a guy like
Rome is a liability threat. Yeah, because he keeps doing

(23:58):
the street terror in random islands and ship and at
this point, the Nazis are trying to play nice with
the conservatives. They want the center right, the middle class
majority of Germany to like see like, Oh, these Nazi
guys are are are safe and normal and we're gonna
have a stable society under them. Um So they got
to get rid of fucking Rome. And I'm gonna quote
from a rite up by Bleaker Street Media here. While

(24:19):
still fiercely loyal to Hitler, Rome's vision for Nazi Party
future was increasingly at odds with Hitler's. For Hydrick and Hitler,
there was a more pragmatic problem with the Essay. Although
the two men ran the s D in the Gestapo,
these organizations were officially under the domain of the Essay
in Rome. To secure their independence, Hitler and Hydric conspired
with Herman Garring to create a case against Rome. On
June four, Hydrick presented a dussier, a fabricated evidence to

(24:43):
Hitler that detailed the trees in this plot in which
the French were paying Rome twelve million marks to overthrow
the Reich. Based on Hydrick's trumped up report, Hitler authorized
a surprise attack against the Essay to take place on
June thirty, Hydrick's men swooped in, arresting Rome with eight
along with eighty five of his top officers, many of
whom we're intentionally shot to death in the process. When
the smoke cleared, the Essay had been dissolved. Between a

(25:04):
hundred and fifty and two hundred people, including Rome, had
been murdered, and Hydrock and Himler were now free to
run the sd and Gestapo as they saw fit. This
is the Night of Long Knives. Hydrick is the big
man orchestrating this. Yeah, you gotta you gotta love a
foreign plot. That's just classic. That's a classic tactic. Just

(25:25):
uh you know, he's uh, he's sucking. I heard him
talking to a Portuguese guy about taking over. So uh
time the murder all of them. It's really it's it's smart.
It always works. Yep, yep. Now, um so after the
Night of Long Knives. The big thing that this does

(25:47):
is it removes the s S finally from underneath the
Essay shadow. And because of this, the Essay is able
to grow to become the preminent terror organization within the
Nazi state. Now, while Hydrick's career was soaring, his income
began to increase commence. Really as well, he benefited from
a number of loans from wealthy members of the Nazi Party,
which he was not expected to repay. He's basically just

(26:07):
being given money. It's graft, you know. So he's able
to build a mansion in a summer home and a
hunting lodge, and despite his new wealth, he could not
be ours to take care of his family. His parents
were destitute still, and they begged him for loans, despite
the fact that he'd begged them for a loan two
and a half years earlier. He turns them down and
doesn't give them a fucking dime. Yeah, it's he's cold

(26:29):
as ice. His sister repeatedly tells him their parents are
going to starve if he doesn't help, and eventually he's
able to give. He gives his mom like a little
bit of money, but he requires her to take care
of his kids in order to get it. Like he's
just like, yeah, he's just such a piece of ship. Yeah,
it's called program, And obviously we're talking about one of

(26:54):
the worst seas in history. Being addict to his family
kind of pales, but it's it's useful. It provides some
con text just because of like this guy wasn't even
nice to the people he loved. Like he's just a
real bad person. Yeah, it just it adds color to
it because you're just like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, he
hates the Jews, he's going to kill all the communist

(27:16):
blah blah blah blah blah, but his his own mother.
Fucking Hey, Robert, Robert, you know who will be nice
to all of our moms? The products and services that
support this podcast, I mean one would hope except for
Raytheon because you know who likes to show up at
weddings his mom's and you know what Raytheon likes to
do to weddings. Ah, here's some ads. We're back and

(27:47):
we're talking about the Raytheon bit that I've been doing
for like a hearing change now probably our longest running bit,
and I try to like we've had a number of
running bits on the show that I try to recycle
because I don't want to get old. You know, like
we don't do the dur stuff anymore, we don't go
through in bagels anymore, and we may I mean when
when we can go in person again. We'll have a
redux of throwing ship around the studio. Because it is fun.

(28:08):
But um, you don't want things to get too old.
I can't stand up with Raytheon. I can't quit them
because they're just they just give us material. There's an
company whose former executive runs the Defense Department who has
like orchestrated a series of who's who's like largely responsible
for instigating and continuing to fund violence in a number

(28:28):
of international countries in order to like make profit for themselves.
And their name is Raytheon. They're calling like fucking hell,
it's like a classic super villain name and the And
I also, you know, I love any any like evil
corporation social media account during any month in which they're

(28:50):
supposed to be like uh you know, sort of like
an ethnic pride or like a pride, and they're just
we love trans people. Were Theon is asking all of
our all of our customers to be better. Yeah, love
it when IBM does ship like that, because like they
literally built the punch card system that tricks the Jews

(29:12):
that used in order to to orchestrate the Holocaust. Thanks IBM.
Surely Ray Theon will never be a part of anything
like that. They wouldn't let their missile guidance technology be
used to massacre. I don't know, dissidence against the US
government or against like a US backed regime in a
foreign country. That would never be the race, not ray Theon.

(29:35):
They support all a A p I people, as you
can tell by last month tweet thanks for that ray Theon. God.
People keep like telling me that they found out that
the knife missile, the rn I n X exists and
they thought it was a joke. I was making it first, Like,
you can't joke about the funniest thing about the knife
missile too, is it's they built this missile that is

(29:57):
just filled with knives so that they can kill people
who are like they can kill a single target without
killing the people around them, right, because a knife missile
less collateral damage than an I guess it's legitimately the
fun I think about the knife missile, it's the best
idea anyone's had in the war on terror in twenty years, like,
which just means it's not awful, but it's the only
good idea ever. And I was like, oh, hey, we

(30:18):
can actually kill less people with a knife missile. Yeah, right,
And it was invented by a middle schooler in the
nineties who like new metal. You know, it's the most
new metal idea. This is my band knife missile, oh
manon anyway, when compared. Yeah, so throughout the rest of

(30:38):
the early in mid nineteen thirties, Right and Harder Hydro
embarked in a project to take control of all political
intelligence gathering agencies in Germany. And I'm not going to
go into extreme detail about all the politicking and Nazi
in fighting here. The book Hitler's Hangman is I think
it's a very good biography, very readable biography. Goes into
a lot of detail about this um. What's important is
how he directed the increasingly powerful intelligence ratis he came

(31:00):
to control. Now, early on, the Nazis had had real enemies,
you know, communists and social democrats were trying to stop
the Nazis, right, they were trying to make a different
kind of government. They were legitimately enemies of the Nazis.
By five right Hard largely rein Hard, But he and
his colleagues have wiped out the communist underground. There is
no more political opposition to the regime that has any

(31:23):
kind of meaningful power. Those guys have all been killed,
put in concentration camps or frightened outside of political activision activism.
This presented a problem because the Reich Interior Minister, a
guy named phil Helm Frick, who was a conservative more
than really a Nazi. Um. He doesn't uh, he doesn't
really want a totalitarian state, right, he wants a right

(31:47):
wing dominated state where the left is illegal. But he
doesn't want like, he doesn't want to live in what
Nazi Germany becomes. UM And he's on paper Himler's boss.
And now that the regime has wiped out the left,
he's like, well, we should probably get rid of these
extra judicial powers we gave the s S to allow
them to wipe out the left. Otherwise this could get bad.

(32:08):
We don't want this to get weird. Yeah, well does
it get bad? Frick giant piece of shit. So Frick.
There's a fight between him and Uh and Himmler and Hydrick,
and Frick loses this fight in June of nineteen thirty six,
when Hitler formally appoints Himmler head of all German police.
And I'm gonna quote from the book Hitler's Hangman here.
The victory of the s S and the power struggle

(32:30):
with the Reich Interior Ministry was primarily the result of
Hitler's decision to favor a more open ended definition of
Nazism's enemies, a definition which Hydric had crucially contributed to
and which went far beyond the persecution of the political
opposition that is typical of all dictatorships. In late nineteen
thirty four, Himler and Hydric came to the conclusion that
the justification of a permanent police state required a carefully

(32:51):
elaborated scenario portraying an all pervasive and subtly camouflaged network
of enemies who made necessary and extensive and sophisticated security
system to detect, expose, and defeat them. In nineteen thirty
five and a series of articles for the s S
journal Dash Schwartz Corps and republished in nineteen thirty six
as the Transformations of Our Struggle, Hydric publicly defined such

(33:14):
threats and the means to combat them, indicating the need
for a momentous reorientation of the Gestapo's activities. His central
argument was that even after the successful elimination of the
KPD and the SPD, the Communists and the Social Democrats,
the enemies of the German people were by no means defeated.
After achieving the immediate goal of Hitler's appointment as chancellor
in January nineteen thirty three. Many Germans wrongly assumed that

(33:37):
Nazi rule was now permanently secured. Hydro consisted that the
battle was by no means over. Instead, the struggle against
Germany's enemies now faced its most difficult and ultimately its
decisive phase, which would require quote years of bitter struggle
in order to repulse and destroy the enemy once and
for all. According to Hydric, the driving forces of the
enemy always remained the same world jewry, world freemasonry, and

(34:00):
political priests who abused the freedom of religious expression and
spirituality of large portions of the population for political reasons.
First of all, I love that this is just like
the foreign plot is now coming from inside the house. Uh.
It could be anyone specifically, the Jews and the Freemasons
and the Jesuits. The Jesuits, yes, which uh? And the

(34:23):
fucking they weren't these guys freemasons. Wasn't he a Freemason?
His dad was? His dad was? Yeah? No, wonder that
this is why he's letting his dad starve, Like I
think he believes only parts of what he's said. Of course,
now this is where we get into because again he's

(34:43):
saying this because it justifies his power. Right. This is
one of the most important things you have to understand
about the Nazis. First off, even when Hitler came to power,
it was not a foregone conclusion that Nazi Germany would
become the kind of tatalitarian state that it did, or
that the Holocaust would happen. We can argue over whether
or not Hitler had a grand scheme or a desire
to do that from the beginning, but it was not

(35:06):
foregone that he would have the power even once he
was in charge, because once he became the chancellor, there
are still a lot of people in the government, people
in the military, who could overthrow him, who could kick
him out, and who didn't agree with most of what
he was saying. Um And the evidence we have shows
that Hitler did not pursue genocide in an organized and
cohesive manner from the beginning of his time in power.

(35:28):
The pivot from left wingers as enemies to Jews and
other internal enemies, which was orchestrated by Hydrich and justified
by him in his public columns, was a key part
of why the Holocaust came to pass, and while Reinhard
was surely an anti Semite by this period, he did
this for fundamentally careerist reasons. If the Reich's new enemies
were elusive racial and religious enemies, the police were clearly

(35:52):
ill equipped to handle such a threat. He was able
to increase his personal power and his personal clout by
pitching the s S his SS as the ideological shock troops,
which is what he called them of Nazism. Man. So
it's just like, uh, you know, it's completely void of

(36:13):
any ideology beyond your own personal power. Void because I
think he probably tells himself and believes elements of what
he's saying, But the ideology is secondary to the desire
from exactly, yeah, it's secondary to it. It's like, you know,
because you can take any German off the street and
uh in this period and they have you know, a

(36:35):
cultural fucking anti Semitism, right, But like this guy is
actively organizing a mass genocide because he wants a better
title and he wants more people to work under him.
I mean just like this is like this is the
logical conclusion of anyone in like a PMC class. It's like,

(37:00):
I want to be the biggest baddest middle manager of
all time. Yes, exactly. Yeah, it's kind of hydra Yeah, yeah,
he's a general side. Yeah. Now, Reinhard saw Freemasonry and
communism in fact, and also the political church right, which
is the Catholic church here you said Jesuits earlier. That's

(37:22):
a big part of he goes after the Catholics. He
does have to be very careful going after the Catholics
because a lot of Germans are Catholics. And he and
I mean yeah, he is too, um so he One
of the ways he frames is that like Freemason's communists,
these political clerics are agents of Judaism. So Judaism is
just one of a couple of internal enemies, but it's
the one that's behind the others generally, and in fact,

(37:44):
all social justice movements and they do frightenness is like
they call it. Social justice movements are part of a
scheme to weaken Germany by the Jews. In order to
combat this scheme, Hydrick and his men would need quote
utter hardness. He acknowledged that the cruelty his men would
have to display in order to do what was necessary
would be difficult for them, saying at one meeting quote

(38:08):
it is almost too difficult for an individual. But we
must be hard as granite or else our viewer's work
will be in vain. Much later people will be grateful
for what we have taken upon us. God, it's just
like we all have to just stick together, just a
bunch of men, hard as a rock, hard, a hard dude,

(38:29):
just hard dudes, just fucking Oh, I'm talking vaining and hard.
That's what we have to be in order to accomplish this.
Hidrick was a major reason why the German police operated
throughout the Reich in a permanent state of emergency. That's
his a big part his doing. He's the guy who
suggests this. At least he's like, we have extra powers

(38:50):
because of a state of emergency. If the state of
emergency is over, because you've purged all of your political enemies,
you lose those powers. So he's like, no, no, no no,
because of all the Jews in the Freeman, there's still
an immer ergencies, so we need these powers, though they
never leave this state of emergency. Um now, to help
develop new plans to deal with this new threat, he
brings experts into the s S. One of these experts,

(39:12):
his Jewish expert is a guy you might have heard
of named Adolph Aikman. Now later on in the sixties,
when he goes to trial and is eventually executed by
the State of Israel. Um Hannah rent Will famously right
of Aikman that he embodied the banality of evil because
he's he's a middle manager type guy. He's his dude
who looks like someone you might see in lying at

(39:34):
the fucking elementary school picking his kid up in a minivan. Um,
and he's a big He's like Hydrick and that he's
a he's an implementation guy. You know, he's not the
guy out they're giving the speeches. He doesn't get anybody like.
He doesn't he doesn't fire up the masses. But in
a meeting when you've got like multiple different government agencies,
Hydrock and Eichmann are the guys who are capable of

(39:56):
wrangling everyone together. They're like whips in the Senate, right,
they whip votes, they whip support together, and they organize
and figure out how to carry out plans of action.
Adolf Eichman is hired to the s S as his
Jewish expert, and his experience for being a Jewish expert
is that Um not not. At that point he eventually

(40:18):
does learn Sebieish. He had been a salesman um and
he liked crime books. He liked he liked, he liked
detective novels. He liked the same books that Hidrick did.
That's why he gets the job. You're the jew expert.
You like the same books, and you you used to
go to that deli all the time. You know what
locks one skin? You've had aer Dill? Tell us about them?

(40:43):
What are they like? The articles Hydric wrote about the
internal Jewish threat played a direct role in bringing on
what scholars called the second anti Semitic wave in Nazi Germany,
which began in nineteen thirty five with mass spontaneous violence
against Jewish people in businesses. Hydrock did this because it
was bad for the economy and for the sense of order.

(41:03):
He knew that the German middle class, center right families
did not like seeing that ship. The Nuremberg laws. Then
we're a response to street anti semitism. The Nuremberg laws
existed to stop people from beating and murdering Jews in
the street and destroying their businesses. Because that ship is
bad for business. Right, there were like no, no, no, no, no, listen,

(41:25):
we're gonna do this through the state. We're gonna have
this state put they're they're metaphorical boot on their neck. Yes,
we need to oppress the Jews with law, not with
random street violence, exactly exactly. And we need to know
you know what constitutes did you? We need to know
how much blood you need to have, you know how

(41:46):
many how many times you know you've been to the theater.
You know, we need to know all this stuff first
before we can categorize you exactly. And that's a big
part of the Nuremberg Laws. We're not going to go
into nearly enough to tail. I mean, there's whole just
about the Nuremberg Laws, and there's this process of determining
what a Jew is because this is and this is

(42:07):
a big misconception. The Jews are not targeted by the
Nazi state for their religion. They are targeted for their ethnicity.
If you're a someone who had a Jewish mom and
you're a hardcore Protestant or a Catholic, you're a Jew.
To ryanhard Hydrick. If you're an atheist and you marry
a fucking bohemian woman who's a Catholic, you're a Jew.

(42:30):
To Ryan Hard Hydrick, it didn't even matter if it
was within Jewish law, like if you had a Jewish
father but not a Jewish mother, like you know, that's
not haloic lee Jewish. But and it depends because like
the under the Nuremberg laws, I think that guy wouldn't
be a Jew. He changed, Yeah, he he liked the
Nuremberg Laws, but he thought they didn't go far enough.
And his big issues is that, well, this doesn't define

(42:53):
enough people as Jewish, right, there's too many ways for
someone with Jewish ancestry to slip into the people's racial community.
And that's a problem for me. But he sees still
this is a big step forward, right, the Nuremberg laws,
because now there's this is the first real legal justification
for for sustained persecution of the Jews under the Nazi regime. Now,

(43:15):
in nineteen thirty four, Hydroc had suggested in an internal
memo that quote the aim of Jewish policies must be
the immigration of all Jews, and he urged that voluntary
immigration could be achieved by creating a legal climate so
oppressive that Jewish people could no longer stand to stay
in the Reich. To further this end. In nineteen thirty five,
he had the Gestapo start keeping track of all Jewish

(43:37):
German residents. In nineteen thirty six, he started monitoring their
financial transactions to stop them from putting their money in
foreign banks. They had to leave, but he wanted most
of their wealth to remain. Now. Hydrock supported to an
extent the Zionist movement in Palestine UM and in fact
he had we have these memos from him where he's
saying like, I want to crack down on any sort

(43:58):
of organizations supporting jew Is assimilation into German culture when
we should support the Zionist movement UM. And in fact,
he actually sends Adolf Eichman to Palestine in the thirties
to talk with a member of the Haganah UM which
becomes the I d F, to discuss how they could
further urge further immigration. And this there's we should go

(44:18):
into more detail about. There's some wild ship at this meeting,
including the fact that this this UH, this emissary of
the Zionist movement tells Aikman that the German like they're
having problems with the German Jews who were leaving Germany
and coming to Palestine because number one, they don't plan
to stay. They want to go back to Europe. And there,
in his words, workshy, which is also what the Nazis described.

(44:40):
It's it's really a lot of interesting history. They're very
interesting internal anti Semitism amongst the kind of like right
wing class in Israel. Yeah, and it it doesn't like again,
as soon as the war starts with the vast majority
of the Zionist movement, like is not just anti Nazi
is like actively shooting Nazis of course, the but there's there's,

(45:01):
as we talked about in some other episodes, there's a
chunk of them that are willing to work with these
guys because they both think Jews shouldn't assimilate. Um. Now,
even the Nazis were not uniform in their attitudes about
what should be done to the Jews. And again, this
is actually a thing that there's a lot of debate
over because there's large chunks of the Nazi party who

(45:21):
want the street violence, who think that the programs are
the way to go about achieving their wins. Gebel's is
a big chunk of this. Gebel supports kind of a
calodic melange of Boycott's street violence and vandalism against Jews.
That's why he and his propaganda arms are trying are
stirring up a lot of this street violence, right, That's
their goal is to get Germans out in the street
doing violence and destroying Jewish property and hi like, there's

(45:43):
a big competition between these two wings of the of
the German Party, both of which are essentially proposing different
answers to the Jewish question. Gebel's is saying, you know,
we beat them and kill them in the street force
and that will force you know, the ones we don't
beat and kill to leave. Hydrick is saying, no, no no, no,
we is the law to in an orderly way oppressed
them so that they leave. Those are two different answers

(46:05):
to the Jewish question. In late nineteen thirty five, these
various sides of the Nazi Party kind of came together decided, like,
we can't keep arguing over this, we have to have
a concerted strategy um and they held a big how
to racism meeting. Now, the impetus of this was a
massive program in nineteen thirty five that did millions of
dollars in damage to the German economy, because again, when

(46:26):
you run through the streets, destroying businesses and departments. It's
bad for business, right, Yeah, it's these these economies don't
exist in a vacuum. Like you're actively hurting the German
economy as well when you're doing this. Yeah, and so
in this like this meeting is actually is called because
the German economic minister a guy named Hilmar Shocked Um

(46:49):
who's a friend of the Dullest brothers and also I
think a friend of of the Koch brother's dad. Um.
He's an anti Simon, but he's I'll just tell you,
I am Shocked Shocked. That's good. So he felt that
the economic consequences of this were unacceptable, and so he

(47:10):
holds this meeting to be like, we have to figure
out a better way to do this. And Hydrick is
very much in agreement with Shocked in this, and he
takes this meeting as an opportunity to try to whip
again the thing he does best. He tries to whip
everyone in line behind his strategy. Um. He says during
the meeting quote the only way to both get the
Jews out and avoid violence is a concerted campaign of
economic marginalization Um. He also suggested a ban on mixed marriage,

(47:34):
the prosecution of sexual intercourse between Jews and Arians, and
restrictions of Jewish freedom of movement. His suggestion in this
meeting led directly to the Nuremberg Laws, which were formulated
that September. So again that's why this all happens. So
the Nuremberg Laws are the legal basis for all organized
Nazi persecution of Jews and the first concrete step towards
the Holocaust. And Hydrick's performance in that meeting, his ability

(47:56):
to wrangle his fellow Nazis towards his desired plan of action,
establishes him as the leading Nazi authority on the Jewish question. Now,
the mid nineteen thirties are also the height of the
weird Nazi period. This is the time when the occult
wings of the party where at their strongest. The ship
you see in Hell Boy, right, elements that were real.
There was a bunch of weird like Heinrich Kimler thinking

(48:16):
he's the reincarnation of a Danish prince. Right, Hitler's best
buddy who Rudolph. I think it was Rudolf hess Um
who was like super into the occult and was like
doing like seances and ship. Yeah, this is when they
went like doing like full nerd ship, just learning out
on paganism. And that's not a big factor once the
war starts, even right before the war starts, and in

(48:38):
fact Hess's flight to Europe because he kind of loses
his mind and floors to England to try and that's
like a big part of like because he had been
such an advocate of this, and because he had so,
Hitler saw it as like a kind of a betrayal
like that that kind of spells an into the influence
of that. But there's always a level of it in
the s S um and this has talked about a lot.
It's probably over emphasized now. It's fair to say Heinrich Kimler,

(48:59):
hit or the other big Nazis didn't trust his Christianity,
particularly Catholicism, and they wanted to minimize its influence, both
in the Reich and in the s S. To this end,
Hitler replaced marriage ceremonies for s S men with the Huy,
which was a new fascist wedding ritual. He replaced Easter
celebrations with Midsummer celebrations, and he brought in a whole
host of pagan rituals. He claimed were ancient German old

(49:22):
time religion. Now this new quasi faith that Himler kind
of cobbles together for the s S is called gout
glaubit Kite and it was not popular. Again, this gets
over emphasized and its height. About two of the s
S follows this whatever you want to call it, religion
about are Protestant and the rest are Catholic. Hydrick is
one of the who buys into Himler's weird neo pagan

(49:45):
Nazi thing, although this is more todying. He's trying to
impress his boss by doing this. After the war, Lena
Hydric would claim that she and her husband made fun
of Himler's weird religion in private, so he's not very
committed to this. It does. He's doing virtue virtue signal
those Nazi is Nazi overlords. But you know who won't
virtue signal to their Nazi overlords, Matt is that the

(50:10):
products and services. That's that is right. It is the
products and services that support this podcast. None of them
our believers in German pagan SS philosophy. Yeah, they will
never do weird Nazi weddings unless you want them to. Yeah,

(50:30):
I mean well, Okay, let's just let's just all the
ads at this point. Ah, we're back. So in nine six,
Hydric launched a systematic torture campaign against the Jehovah's Witnesses
and the Jehovah's Witnesses. This is important to note in
terms of like absolute numbers, not a lot of these guys,

(50:53):
not a sizeable chunk of the Holocaust, although a lot
of them get killed relative to their population. But the
Jehovah's Witnesses are only group in the Third Reich who
was persecuted purely on the basis of their religion. Um.
And that's because Jehovah's Witnesses refused to swear allegiance to
governments um. And that makes them enemies of the state
under the Nazis. Hydrick's crackdown would eventually lead six thousand

(51:14):
witnesses being arrested and interned in concentration camps. Hundreds died
in camps who were executed straight away. I think they
wore a purple triangle in the concentration camps. Um. Now,
Hydrick's prosecution of Freemasonry was, by comparison, a lot less brutal,
mainly because Freemasons didn't hold that much power, and like
none of them are willing to die for their dumb clubs.

(51:35):
So once the Nazis take power, they all just kind
of leave and he confiscates their stuff and he puts
it in a museum. In subsequent years he establishes another
similar museum which is filled with Jewish artifacts. And that's
kind of his idea, is like, we need to have
these museums to show people the dangers of this ideology
and like how how but also how silly it is,
and like how like that's that's the and what do

(51:56):
you put in museum? But things that no longer exist
and are now in the past exactly the shadowing fucking
scumbag shit ever, m it's good ship um. In ninety seven,
Hydroc had his criminal police launched a massive dragnet operation
against what he called habitual criminals and A socials. Now,
these were people who didn't work or didn't work enough,

(52:18):
or lived on the street, or made their living in
a less than legal manner. By the end of nineteen
thirty eight, nearly twenty thousand A socials were in preventative detention.
These people were also sent to concentration camps, mostly as
a scare tactic. The Reich was in the midst of
a labor shortage, and the point of this particular campaign
was to force people to work, not to kill them. Now,
all these different crusades in the late thirties tax the

(52:41):
concentration camp system, which had not been well planned from
the beginning. In late nineteen six to thirty seven, the
s S re organized the camps, shutting down most of
the old ones and building new ones modeled off of
Dachau from Hitler's Hangman quote. The Dachow model, designed to
regiment the prisoners and dehumanize their relations with the guards,
was based on a system of graded punishment for various offenses,

(53:02):
which ranged from denial of food to execution. To dehumanize
relationship with prisoners, the guard's behavior was regulated to maintain
distance and eliminate human contact. The first of these camps
was Saxonhausen, north of Berlin, and if you're ever in Berlin,
I really recommend taking a tour of Saxonhausen Um. The
German government is a very good job of of doing

(53:22):
has done a good job of making these places into museums.
And when you get a tour at one of these places.
It's not just like some dude who's doing a summer job,
some kid. It's somebody with like a degree like they
they the people who work there. I've talked with a
number of them. I did this tour. You can have
long converse about Hannah Rent, about the nature of fascism,
about the development. They're very knowledgeable. Um. I walked away

(53:43):
very impressed, and we did. The tour I went on
was in like the dead of December, so you know,
you're covered in snow, it's freezing outside, and everybody is
like you're bundled up. It's the German winter, you know,
and you're walking around you're seeing this concentration camp. You're
seeing that. I think one of the things that really
stuck with me is they had these concrete pits, which
are like these square pits like ten or fifteen feet

(54:03):
deep with a great on top of them that people
would be stuck in for days at a time, and
you could look in and you could see the marks
where they'd clawed at the concrete. Um you're like fingernail
marks still in it. And you would walk around like
freezing your ass off, just utterly miserable in this cold,
and you would go inside and the first thing you
would see was one of the concentration camp uniforms, which

(54:24):
is this threadbare black and white unitard thing. And it's
just like this immediately oh oh yeah, yeah, certainly uh.
Not taking the cold of the German winter into account
with the universe well, or you could argue taking it
very much into account and you to tell people, you know.
Um So, Hydrick was one of the major drivers and

(54:47):
backers of the Dacow model, and it's worth noting that,
unlike him, Heinrich Hemmler, Himler has trouble visiting and the
concentration camps. He faints at Auschwitz, he does repeatedly. Here's
the thing, though he repeatedly visits these camps to see
what they're doing. Um Hydroch almost never does. Now. This

(55:08):
is probably not because it was too horrifying for him.
In fact, his biographer thinks it was because he wasn't
actually in charge of the camp, right he decides who
goes there and who's released from there. Once he's inside
the camps, he's in somebody else's domain. And Theodore Ike,
who we talked about earlier, the guy who's running the camps,
he doesn't like Theodore Um. They're both political enemies and

(55:28):
they both are competing for Himler's favor Um, and so
like he doesn't want to go to the camps because
he's he's putting himself basically in someone else's territory. I
love it. It's like, why don't you go to these
camps that you built to murder millions and millions of people? Oh,
I don't want to be rude to a coworker. Yeah, well,
I will say at this point, these are not camps

(55:49):
to murder people. Murder happens, but the German concentration camps
at this point he could argue no worse than the
British concentration camps for the Bowers, no worse, certainly no
worse than some of the things that the Spanish camps did,
No worse the British themselves had done. At this point,
there's a difference. And the thing is Hydrick, with these
concentration camps is stealing an idea from people and it

(56:11):
becomes more brutal than what it existed before. When they
transition to the Daco model, that is an escalation from
what concentration camps had been. He certainly didn't invent it,
nor did they invent the race science used to just
what they invent are the death camps. That is an
innovation that Hydric gets. Um. Yeah, well, and again that's

(56:33):
what this episode is about. So by the late nineteen thirties,
Hydrick is on paper a member of the upper middle
class and in reality he's basically a millionaire. This happens
to all of the big Nazis, and the way it
worked for them is that they would receive allowances from
the Gestapo, gifts and loans from prominent men and the
Reich Um and his his rough income on paper like
what he would legally admit to having was about seven

(56:54):
times with a middle class German made um, and despite
the fact that they're now rolling in cash have multiple
home Lena constantly complained that his salary was quote barely
sufficient to live on in When his salary was increased
yet again to eight times a German middle class income,
he cut the salaries of his two domestic servants, again

(57:14):
minor compared to the death camps. But it shows you,
like this guy is comprehensively I mean, yeah, he's going
through a checklist of like fucking bullshit behavior of just
but now evil ship, like fucking cutting the income. And
also I love I love that his his wife is
like still being like, you know, you don't make enough

(57:35):
money and he just has to be like the women.
Am I right? He always complaining about not having enough money.
Was the shopping Oh my god, my mind got mine,
got god. So Heidrick and Hitler first met at a

(57:58):
birthday reception or the fewer in the early nineteen thirties,
and Hitler was impressed by Hydrick's aryan looks and impressed
by the fact that he and his wife are both
kind of like arians, and in fact, when he sees them,
he says, what a beautiful couple. I am most impressed.
I just I love every reaction to uh, to this
guy is just like other Germans going, wow, he's very attractive. Yeah,

(58:22):
you're just like vow you look like just supposed to look. Yeah,
like none of us actually look. Yeah you look. This
is what she's saying into propagandas as we look like
I love, I just want the world field with Zach
Morris is normal, screaches, normal, screech just Zach Morris. Now. Um.

(58:42):
Despite that, Hitler, you know, is impressed with him from
early on, especially kind of just likes the way he
looks um. Reynhard is never really in Hitler's inner circle.
They're not personally friends, but the fewer increasingly by the
late thirties, cames to trust him and see him as
loyal and talented, and he gives Hydrick increasing sponsibility for
settling the Jewish question. Now in the late nineteen thirties,

(59:04):
this is a fun little aside story, we gotta tell it.
This is part of his establishment of the Nazi security state.
In the late thirties, Ryanhard becomes aware of a woman
named Kitty Schmidt who operated a brothel in Berlin now
is Germany's had a cop. His job is technically to
arrest her, but he had a better idea. He had
the s S take over the brothel and fill it
with wire taps. Kitty still ran everything. He allowed her to,

(59:27):
allowed her to keep running her brothel as long as
he could use it. There's kind of it's kind of
like the Nazi best little horhouse in Texas and his
fascist Burt Reynolds, My god, what a visual. So yeah,
So the SS Kitty like they basically re evamped this brothel,

(59:48):
and they do it for a specific reason. They want
to collect intelligence using prostitutes. So they first off kind
of let go a lot of like the staff. They
see his lower class, and they hire high class German ladies.
Most of the women working here are like the wives
or at least mistresses of wealthy, upper class German men.
We have a recruitment profile for women who work at
the brothel which reads, quote, wanted our women and girls

(01:00:11):
who are intelligent, multi lingual, nationalistically minded, and furthermore, man crazy.
We want the most boy crazy. We want horny fascist bitches.
That's give me all your horny fascist pitches, just like

(01:00:32):
radio commercials are your horny fascist bit where Hi, I'm
just laying maxwell. And so the targets of this information
gathering operation were German military officers. So a lot of

(01:00:53):
them weren't Nazis. Right, most people aren't Nazis even in
the Nazi regime at this point. Um, so German military
off users who might not be loyal to Hitler, but
also other Nazis and visiting foreign dignitaries. Right, So Reinhard
and his men, would you know they would sit down,
they would a meeting with some guy. You know, maybe
they're having a meeting about some security matter. Maybe they're
having a meeting with a foreign ally and they would

(01:01:14):
at the end of the meeting be like, hey, you
know you're in Berlin for another day or two for
this meeting. Here, here's a special code word. If you
go to this brothel, they'll give you the special menu
with this code word. And the menu did entitle them
to the special menu of these like super you know,
from what the Nazis point of view, high class prostitutes.
But the menu when you came in and told Kitty
Schmidt this password, it also told her, okay, turn on

(01:01:37):
the recording equipment. They want to eavesdrop on this guy
while he's fucking. I should have known when the passwords
they gave me was honey popped, but I didn't put
the pieces together. So one of the customers of this brothel,
it was the son in law and foreign minister of
Fascist Italy, who repeatedly insulted Hitler while he was fucking.
Hitler's a chip. I hate a little bad I can

(01:02:05):
never do this. He can't fuck this good. He's kind
of a funk like me. Look at the size of
my penny. He has a one ball, single meat. The
ball he has the only nay, I want to meat
the ball and it's not the spicy one. Oh boy.

(01:02:26):
Another who didn't give away anything evidently when he was
there was s S. General Sep Dietrich, who is a
terrifying man in some ways. Sep Dietrich is the founder
of the idea of special forces. Um like, he's a
really legitimately frightening man. Um and Sept Dietrich when he
goes into this brothel heet he gets the code word.

(01:02:46):
He seems to know he's being recorded, but he just
wants to fuck. So he goes in and demands all
twenty of the women on the menu and has an
all night orgy with these ladies. Beautiful. You know, I mean,
I hate this guy on principle, but you know, if
you're gonna do it, you know, live it up and
just shut yeah. Gebbels was also a frequent customer. He

(01:03:08):
was said to enjoy lesbian displays. Another big customer was
a major German tank ace who liked to drink toilet
water after women use the bathroom. Um yeah, classic German
shies upon yeah. Hydric himself also regularly visited the brothel,
although the microphones were turned off for his visits. Oh yeah, yeah,

(01:03:28):
well yep, I mean, that's an amazing, amazing aside. You know,
just like the levels of evil of this person, they
just run the gamut. He's real piece of shit. So
when Germany annexed Austria, Hydric's job was to put together
a team of s S men to go into the
stolen country and arrest political prisoners. In addition to putting

(01:03:51):
two thousand people in camps, Hydrick's men launched a targeted
operation to confiscate Jewish property. He announced that anyone caught
stealing from Jews though during this period would be punished
mercilessly because their wealth was property of the Reich. So both,
we're going to take everything that Jews have, but if
random citizens start taking their ship, you're stealing from the government. Um. Now.

(01:04:12):
There was, of course, a wide gulf between rhetoric and reality.
The kind of men who joined the s S were thugs,
and they were never able to help themselves from beating
and murdering and robbing no matter what Hydric said. A
big part of his job was putting out the pr
fires started by his subordinates. Much of the violence of
the Angelus came from Austrian Nazis who took the end
of their old government as an opportunity to let loose.

(01:04:34):
They burned and looted businesses. Jews were forced by crowds
to kneel and scrub the streets. One observer later recalled quote,
the underworld had opened up its gates and set loosed
its lowest, most disgusting hordes. The city transformed itself into
a nightmarish painting by Hieronymous Bosch. Demons seemed to have
crawled out of filthy eggs and risen from marshy burrows.

(01:04:56):
The air was constantly filled with a desolate, hysterical shrieking,
and people's faces were distorted, some with fear, others with lies,
still others with wild hate filled triumph one star review,
one star for the Angels Now. When the violence prompted

(01:05:19):
an outcry, and again an outcry even from some people
who were in within the German government, Hydric blamed the
Pegram on disguised communists. It's the left, it's anti always,
it's always that oh man. He said. They were trying
to make Germany look bad and create propaganda for her
foreign enemies. After the initial uncontrolled violence, Hydrick ss was

(01:05:43):
able to push a more orderly terror. He established a
central office in Vienna which would take in catalog Jewish
property at the same time as it produced thousands of
exit visas to allow Jewish families to leave the country.
And basically the idea was that we're taking the property
of the rich Jews to a for the process of
get of of immigrating the other ones out of here,

(01:06:04):
getting the exit vas is sending them elsewhere. Now, this
system would become a model used by other Nazi annexations,
but it did not go quickly enough for many Germans.
The Anschluss brought two hundred thousand more Jews into the
German Reich, which more than canceled out the hundred and
twenty eight thousand who had left by the end of
nineteen thirty seven. The most racist Germans were frustrated by this,
and Hydrock responded with a crackdown on Polish Jewish immigrants

(01:06:28):
in Germany. So one of the problems is they're trying
to get these people out as fast as they can,
and they're even to the point where if you're rich,
they take some of your money, they'll leave you with
some of it, because otherwise you're not going to be
taken anywhere. Um. And it's in general the biggest problem
they have is and this is one of the things
you do have to point out when you talk about,
for example, Jewish immigration to Palestine during this period, that

(01:06:48):
was one of the only places they could go. That
was the number one place that Jewish refugees were able
to go. Everywhere was close to them. Everywhere else. Yeah,
the United States would not take any Jewish. We let
boats full of Jewish refugees drowned in the ocean because
we wouldn't let them onto our shore. So and this
is a problem for the Nazis, right, because they're trying

(01:07:09):
to get these people out, but it's difficult. They're not
taking it. And the places that are taking them are
places like Czechoslovakia, which then the Germans take more places
like Poland, which they want, and like the Polish the
Polish state is as racist almost as the German state.
So the Polish state, these Jews who had fled Poland
because there were programs in the early nineteen hundreds into

(01:07:30):
Germany and had become German residents, get kicked out and
forced into Poland, who denies their citizenship. So They're like,
it's a whole fucking mess. No, it's the Earth. Earth
in the thirties, real bad place, real bad place for
the Jews. Nobody wanted him, and uh yeah, it's it's
not fun for us. And in nineteen thirty eight, one

(01:07:52):
of the families who gets caught up in this, Hydrick
is pushing the Polish refugees out of Germany. Um Poland
doesn't want to take them. One of the family leads
who gets sucked over in this are the green Spawns
g r y n s z p a n s
but I think it's pronounced green Span or something like that.
Their son, Herschel lived in Paris, and he was outraged

(01:08:12):
by his family suffering by the fact that they've gotten
kicked out of Germany after barely building a life there.
And you know this, he's kind of goes mad with grief.
And because everything seems fucked up, nothing seems nothing. The
Nazis aren't facing any consequences for their actions, the international
community isn't doing ship to stop it. He can't think
of anything better to do that to get a gun
and go shoot a Nazi politician living in Paris, a

(01:08:34):
guy who he did nothing wrong. Herschel Greenspan did nothing,
nothing wrong. Yeah, he shoots this guy Ernst von Roth
um and and von Roth eventually dies of his injuries.
And then, to quote from a write up in Bleaker
Street Media here about what came next. Three days later,

(01:08:56):
Hydrick sent out a memo with the subject line measures
against the US Tonight, a communication that directed the police
to maintain a hands off policy to the spontaneous national
riots that Joseph Gebel's and he had orchestrated. All night long.
Jewish businesses were destroyed, homes vandalized or destroyed, and families
rounded up and arrested, if not killed. In London at

(01:09:17):
the Times calculated the damage quote no foreign propagandists bent
on blacketting Germany before the world could outdo the tale
of burnings and beatings of blackguardly assaults on the fenceless
and innocent people which disgraced that country. Yesterday, more than
a thousand synagogues and seven thousand Jewish businesses had been attacked,
more than ninety people had been murdered, and thirty thousand
Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. To add

(01:09:38):
insult to injury, the Jewish people whose property had been
destroyed were charged by the state with its clean up.
This is the Night of Broken Glass. This is Christal
Knocked and Hydrick is not the only one behind it,
but he's one of the organizing forces behind Christal Knocked.
And maybe that seems a little bit odd considering his
attitude towards street violence. But just wait for what comes next.

(01:10:00):
There's a reason why this is not the worst thing
in the world for him. No, yeah, you're slowly becoming
more and more okay with this. Well, it's even more
subtle than that. It's even shittier than that. So the
Night of Broken Glass. A lot of people don't know.
This was a disaster for the Nazis and seen by
Hitler and Gering in particular as a horrible idea because

(01:10:22):
it brings them all this really bad international pr It
makes Badya in the international community. Um, and it fucks
the economy. It does millions and millions of dollars to
damage the economy. It sets back their five year plan.
It's a real big problem for a lot of Nazis.
And because they're so unhappy about what has happened during

(01:10:44):
the Night of Broken Glass, they have a second big
meeting of all the Nazis to be like, guys, we
gotta get on the same page about this. So because
there's another that Hydric helps to instigate and ensure won't
be stopped by his police, because there's another mass violent
pagrah that creates enough negative thought towards street violence that
there's another meeting. And what is Hydrick really fucking good

(01:11:06):
at taken control of meetings like this and getting everyone
on board with his ideas. He's a big meeting guy. Yeah,
So Hydric uses the opportunity to make the case again
that yeah, of course street violence is bad. It's bad
for the economy and makes people not like us. It
makes us pariah's. We need to attack Jews through the
law in an orderly manner. So he suggests an expansion

(01:11:27):
of the restrictions that have been put in place at
the Nuremberg Laws. For one thing, Jewish people should be
restricted from using buses, from going to hospitals, from going
to theaters, from visiting public parks and other public places.
He also suggested forcing Jewish citizens to wear a yellow star.
Now during this when he suggests this, even Hitler is like, well,

(01:11:48):
that's a bit far Yeah, that's that much. Ran Hard
calmed down. You're going to you're going to Ryan Hord
in the paint right now, going to need you to
chill act be Ryan saw like, yeah, this would be
done eventually. But in Reinhard is the guy who kind
of he's the first big dude to suggest this. Um.

(01:12:10):
But Reinhard, the thing that he had that he succeeds
in doing is he kind of very methodically. During this meeting,
he lays out, um, how during the occupation of Vienna
in his central office that he established had facilitated the
expulsion of at least fifty thousand Jews. So he points out,
like he walks them through, here's how we got We
got fifty people in a in a matter of weeks

(01:12:32):
out of out of Austria to leave for other countries. Um.
No one else has gotten so many Jews to leave
so quickly, and so you know, without so peacefully, without
disruption to the state as I have. Um. And he
claims that I can, I can set up offices like
this all throughout the Reich. I can generalize this process
and it won't cost us a dime because we'll pay

(01:12:55):
to expel them with funds confiscated from wealthy Jews. And
he does a good enough job of laying this out
that by the end of the meeting, everyone agrees to
put Hydroc in charge of purging the German Reich of Jews,
do racism and balance the budget at the same time.
Whatever exactly exactly he's able to get, he's able to

(01:13:15):
marshal everyone behind. He's able to get them on the
same page. You can answer to questions, the Jewish question
and who's gonna pay for it? Questions. Now, by the
end of the meeting, everyone agreed to put Hydroc in
charge of purging the German Reich of Jews. He estimated
this would take ten years. But for the first time

(01:13:37):
since Hitler took power, the Nazis had a serious, actionable
game plan to purge Central Europe of its Jews. And
this brings us back to the question, the core question,
one of the core questions of Holocaust studies was the
Holocaust planned from the beginning or did it evolve over
time out of the circumstances that that you know, presented themselves.

(01:13:59):
The real any of the situation seems to be that
Adolf Hitler was an idea man, not a logistics man.
He would give speeches, he would get excited, he would
talk about the Jews being the eternal foe. He would
talk about needing to purge them. But he didn't come
out with policy on his own to do that. See
Hydrick job exactly. Hydrick and everyone else under Hitler, there
was a policy and this is what they called it

(01:14:20):
in the Nazi state, working towards the fewer. And what
that means is that Hitler doesn't come up with plans
and there doesn't say this is how we're gonna do,
this is what we're gonna do next. Hitler comes up
with ideas, and it's up to Nazis if you want
to impress Hitler, if you want to make a place
for yourself in the party, to figure out what you
think Hitler wants you to do, and then to do

(01:14:43):
it right. Because the Nazi government was so competitive, this
process evolved in increasingly extreme directions. Hydrick success came from
the fact that he was a genius when it came
to taking the racist rants of his boss and translating
them into action. His job was turning ideology into policy.

(01:15:04):
That's what Hydrick does. Hitler and the others talk flippantly
about getting rid of the Jews. There's a lot of
talk in the yellow Nazi press about exterminating the Jews.
Hydrick figures out how to make that ship happen. He's
the Steve, wasn't Hitler Steve. He's an architect. Hitler describes

(01:15:25):
his dream house. Ryan Hard figures out where the load
bearing walls need to go. You know, that's the guy
he is. When Germany next annexed Czechoslovakia, Reinhard organized special
task groups of the s S and the German word
for special task group is ininseets grouping. Their job was
to arrest politically dangerous and undesirable people, and they arrested

(01:15:48):
between ten and twenty people in a matter of days.
Many were sent to Dachau or other concentration camps. I
think about seven thousand in this period. Now, when Germany
invaded Poland, which is what comes next, and I know
we are YadA, YadA, ng at that's going on at
the time, because he's he's got his hand and all
of it. When Germany invades Poland, Hydric expands the ranks
of the Einsetz Group and they eventually just initially just

(01:16:10):
been like a like eight hundred dudes. I think, you know,
during the annexation of Czechoslovakia, there was a lot more
They're like, they're like military units right during the invasion
of Poland, and their task is much more ambitious. Hitler
didn't just one undesirable and political enemies rounded up. Hitler
hated the idea that Poland would be a nation. The
concept of Poland as a country was repellent to Hitler

(01:16:33):
in the Nazis, and he had just inked a secret
deal with Stalin to split Poland up after the invasion,
and he needed to kill any conception of Polish identity
and the Poland that he was going to conquer. He
needed to destroy any any sense that Polish culture existed. Right,
So before the invasion, Hitler tells Hydrick that his job
is to organize his Innsets group and to exterminate entire

(01:16:58):
classes of Polish societies, specifically the classes that were, in
Hitler's words, quote carriers of Polish nationalism. And he means
carriers isn't like carriers of a virus. Carriers is of
a disease. That's very much how Hitler frames this, and
that's very much how he talks about the Jews to
they're a plague. Bacillus is the literal term he uses. Yeah,

(01:17:19):
I mean, you know that's he's uh, he's just trying
to he's trying to get rid of any other ideological
virus and German nationalism. Now, before the invasion, Hitler's men
created a mass or Hydrick's men, I should say, created
a massive index card library of sixty one thousand people

(01:17:41):
who they would have to arrest and in most cases
execute immediately upon taking over Poland from Hitler's Hangman quote.
In mid August, at a conference in Berlin, leading members
of the Einsets Group and received further oral instructions from
Hydric and Best, instructions which even by Hydric standards were
quote extraordinarily radical, and which included a quote liquidation order

(01:18:02):
for various circles of the Polish leadership, affecting thousands. According
to post war trial testimonies of leading Task Force officers
present that day, Hydroc opened the meeting by conforming the
men of the atrocities being committed against ethnic Germans in
Poland's noting that he expected heavy partisan resistance against the
German invasion. It was the responsibility of the Einsetz group
and to neutralize these threats, particularly those posed by saboteurs,

(01:18:25):
partisans Jews in the Polish intelligencia, an area is conquered
by the German army and to punish individuals who had
committed crimes against Poland's ethnic Germans in the preceding weeks.
Although carefully guarded in his language, Hydroc consisted that in
carrying out their difficult tasks, quote everything was allowed free
for all. Is goddamn Nazias murder, free for all. This

(01:18:50):
is when the real Nazi ship starts. This is when
the Nazis truly distinguished themselves as worse than the other
hell regimes that existed in this period. This is the
start of the not just being a dictatorship, not just
being you know, fascist or whatever. This is the start
of them being the fucking Nazis. We could do a

(01:19:10):
whole series of episodes on German war crimes during the
invasion of Poland, um to focus just on one group
of Hydrick's men. A single Ironsets group, a unit near
the demarcation line for Soviet Poland, was tasked by Hydrick
with inducing Jews to flee into Russian territory. Right, we
want them to go into what the Russians are going
to control so we don't have to deal with them.
They did this by going on a mass killing spree

(01:19:31):
which included burning down a synagogue filled with Jewish women
and children and massacring roughly five hundred people in mass shootings,
and one week in September, members of Ironsetz group of
four killed roughly dred Polish civilians. Now, while Hydrick's men
massacred thousands, he followed behind them and ensured the job
was done properly. He remained concerned about destruction of valuable

(01:19:54):
property and repeatedly investigated and punished s means suspected of
stealing from Jewish own shops while they were burning down
synagogues filled with people. Yeah, you wouldn't want them to
commit any crimes because you don't want the property crimes.
That's the problem is property, with the right wingers loving
fucking property more than people. Is it you burnt down?

(01:20:17):
All of the targets was the economy? M So a
truly accurate catalog of just hydricks crimes up to this
point would go far beyond the time we have to
discuss him. Books have been written about just the conquest
of Poland and the crimes in its wake. Right, more

(01:20:37):
books will be written in the future. I'm afraid we're
going to have to YadA YadA a lot of other
crimes against humanity. Just to move along here now, I'm
sure you all know the broad basics of the war.
From this point on. The Nazis conquered Poland, they conquered
the Netherlands, France, they conquer a bunch of places in Europe.
They bombed the ship out of Britain. Things are going
great for the Nazis. Hydrick continued to direct his forces

(01:20:59):
to end up Jewish property as well as political enemies.
And his job is in all of these places, arrest
political enemies, take Jewish property, catalog all the Jews and
the territory. They're not yet putting them in camps. They're
not yet. The death camps don't exist yet, um, but
they're there. They're they're laying the ground for that. Although

(01:21:19):
that said, even in nineteen forty, it was not a
foregone conclusion that there would be death camps. Because in
nineteen forty Hydric becomes the head of what is called
the Madagascar Plan, which is an ultimately abandoned attempt to
take the now millions of Jews and conquered territories and
relocate them off the coast of Africa. This had existed
prior to the Nazis. Racists had been talking about pushing

(01:21:42):
forcing all the Jews in the Madagascar for a while.
And Hydric again, I think there's people who will argue like, oh,
he always wanted to do the death camps. The Madagascar
plan was just sort of like am for show. He
puts a lot of effort into trying to plan this out.
He spends a lot of time thinking how this will work,
trying to organize it. I don't think I think this

(01:22:02):
was something they thought they might be able to do
for a certain point. And it's important to understand, like
this is a process of gen getting yourself ready for genocide, right,
even the genocide committers have to amp themselves up. It's
it's it's a series of steps. It's zero to genocide, right,

(01:22:23):
That never happens. There's always a ramping up period. Yeah,
And it's like with these guys especially, it's like the
ethnic cleansing was going too slowly for them, and they
were just ramping up and ramping up all to this
end conclusion. Yes. Um. Now, during the same time, Hydrock
trains as a fighter pilot. He wants to get in

(01:22:44):
his combat time, right. He missed a chance to fight
in World War One. Um, So he becomes a fighter pilot.
He flies like twenty combat missions. He's a gunner. Actually,
he's not really a pilot. He doesn't like work as
a pilot. He's a gunner. Um. And he flies some
missions that are non combat over England with like a
spy plane. Um. And this is a matter of vanity again.
He wants to he wants to have done his time

(01:23:04):
as a soldier for the Reich so that he can
stand up proud. And his time as a pilot kind
of comes to an end because his plane has a
landing accident and he hurts his wrist and he gets
an iron cross and then goes back to his desk job. Um. Now.
On the domestic front, hydris marriage to his wife is
consistently rocky from the late thirties forward, mainly due to
the fact that he cheated on her fucking constantly. It

(01:23:27):
was such a workaholic that she was basically abandoned with
her children. After the war, Lena would admit that there
were quote always other women in my marriage, and that
Reinhard would go after anything in a skirt. Now, at
one point one of his subordinates, a guy named Shellenberg,
started having an affair with Lena, with Reinhardt's wife. Now,
she denies that. She claims they never fucked, that she

(01:23:48):
was just kind of playing around with this guy to
make her has been jealous because he was cheating on
her with Furio. There's a lay exactly some soprano ship
a bay over this. There's one possibly true story that
they were fucking each other. And Hydrock found out about this,
and so he takes Shellenberg out drinking and in the

(01:24:09):
middle of this like night drinking and talking. In mid conversation,
Hydric's like, I just poisoned you, by the way, and
I'll give you the antidote if you'll tell me what
you've been doing with my wife. Um. And according to
this story, Shellenberg admits that he's been sucking around. He
promises to end the relationship, and Hydric gives him the antidote. Umh,
we actually did poison him. That wasn't just maybe, I mean,

(01:24:30):
we can't. I I don't know, you know, I think
Shellenberg tells this story. Also, Shellenberg survives the war and
has sevested interest in making hydroc seem even first because
he's trying because it makes him seem less bad by comparison,
you know. And also it's very embarrassing if he was
like I was just I was kidding. Of course, I
don't have any fucking poison and an antidote, right, Yeah,

(01:24:50):
and then that would have been a fake antidote to
who knows. It would make him feel very stupid if
he fell for that. Yeah. So on June tw Nazis
commenced their invasion of the uss Are. This is Operation Barbarossa,
the largest war thing that has ever happened in the
history of the human race. Um. Just impossible to overstate,

(01:25:11):
Like every war the US has ever fought would fit
into the Eastern Front battle between Germany and Russia, with
a lot of space left over for dead people. Um.
Now within this territory. Uh. And again the initial that
the Nazis are wildly successful. They conquer more territory faster
than anyone ever has, and they take hundreds of thousands

(01:25:33):
of military prisoners, and they bring in millions of new
citizens into their their greater German Reich or whatever, I
don't know, citizens is not the right thing to call them.
There's but in addition to all these people, they get
millions of new Jewish residents, to add to the several
million already brought in by Germany's other conquests. Now, even
hydricks well oiled immigration machine could not handle this many people.

(01:25:55):
And also, because they're conquering everything, where else are the
Jews gonna go? You know? Um? So this was you
know again, no one else is willing to absorb them,
the Nazis ki conquering stuff that they have this real problem, um,
And this problem becomes and this is where we get
to the kind of complicity of the German leadership. Because
again a lot of people will say, there's nothing that

(01:26:15):
directly connects Hitler to giving the orders for the Holocaust.
Right now, that said, you can see where the orders
came from. Because Hitler and Guring have a conversation right
around the time the Germans invade Russia about the Jewish question,
about all these Jews they're capturing, And in July thirty one,

(01:26:38):
Herman Gerring writes a note to Reinhard Heydrich and orders
him to quote submit to me as soon as possible
a general plan of the administrative, material and financial measures
necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the
Jewish question. And Hitler absolutely ordered him to do this.
That's like or it came about as a result of
the conversation. Hitler definitely wanted the genocide to happen at

(01:27:01):
this point. Um. The thing on paper we have is
you have Gearing tells Hydric to start figuring this ship out. Yes,
and Hydric his you know this is again they still
don't jump right to death camps Um, because there's again
a process of figuring out how this is gonna look. Now,

(01:27:21):
the process of genocide, now that they're committed to genocide,
starts with simple extensions of what Hydric had already done before.
The Einsts group had been enlarged significantly for the invasion
of Russia, and in the wake of the inasial and
initial invasion, they're killing political enemies, they're killing commissars Um,
but they're also they start massacring Jews, and in fact

(01:27:42):
they start carrying out mass shootings on a scale never
equaled before or since in human history. These are the
biggest mass shootings of civilians probably that there will ever
be we we fucking hope. The first of these shootings
is the Bobby Yard massacre, in which thirty three thousand,
seven hundred and seventy one Jewish civilians were shot to

(01:28:04):
death and ravine outside of Kiev in two days. Bobby
Are was followed by the Odessa massacre later the same year,
in which more than fifty thousand Jews were shot to
death and again roughly two days. There were hundreds of
other smaller massacres, from a couple of dozen people to
a thousands of people, and a lot of the killing

(01:28:24):
is also it's not just shooting. Shooting is probably the
biggest death toll here, but they are also killing people
with mobile gas fans, which they had developed initially to
execute the mentally handicapped. Now at least one and a
half million people and perhaps as many as two million
Holocaust victims were killed this way, just being gunned down
or gassed in small vans um by numbers of people. Now,

(01:28:50):
this is still too slow for the number of Jews
that there and other undesirables that the Nazis are acquiring
in their conquests, and worse than being slow, it's bad
for the men doing it. The Germans have limited manpower,
they have limited ammunition, um and they find that. You know,
Hydra had called his as ideological shock troops, right, he'd

(01:29:13):
made a big deal about how hard we have to be,
how willing to do terrible things we have to be
in order to save the Reich. But these guys, the
hardest and worst of the Nazis, couldn't handle the mental
strain of what they were doing. They're traumatic for them,
which is they are. There are stories of them skeet

(01:29:33):
shooting babies by the dozen, and it it destroys these people.
The suicide is rampant alcoholism becomes endemic to the einsets
group of men. It creates a problem with morale, a
problem with orderliness, and it's a problem for the r mocked.
The guys not doing the killing are aware of it,
and they have there are we the baddies moments in

(01:29:54):
a lot of cases like oh boy, you know what,
this doesn't seem good. I've always like imagined killing babies
is being a bad guy thing. Yeah, but it sounds
like not a defensive maneuver. Yeah, I mean, I guess
I get it. Excuse me, all, but Stumban fura, what

(01:30:18):
is the self defense motive for shooting babies with a
shotgun after throwing them in the air, And you at
least lie to me and says the baby is actually
a time bomb robot. It would make me feel better.
And again, these guys feel bad. It breaks a lot
of them. It's bad from a raw Almost none of
them stopped being Nazis. Yeah, they all keep fighting for

(01:30:41):
the Reich, even though they're aware of it. There's a
big myth of the clean r marckt of the fact
that most Nazi soldiers, you know, they fought well and
they didn't really know what was going on. They fucking did.
Every one of them at least new enough to the
numbers alone indicate that, like just a huge portion of

(01:31:02):
them had to have been involved directly in these atrocities. Yes, um,
And like, yes, obviously a lot of the Vermacht was
involved directly in atrocities, more than any other individual military
on a per capita basis in the war, other than
maybe the Japanese UM. But also they were all aware,
broadly speaking of what was being done in their name, um.

(01:31:23):
And there were some of them who spoke out. There
were some of them whom who went a wall you know. Um,
and good good on those very few dudes. Yeah, thank you,
all three of you. Yeah, not a lot of them,
but some of them did. And and yeah I'll tip
my hat to those fellows because of how few fucking
did it. Now. Yeah, Um, so again this becomes a problem.

(01:31:46):
It's bad for the s s. They need a better
solution to the final solution. And on January nineteen forty two,
Ryanhard Hydrick convenes a third meeting of top Nazi officials
from across the Reich. This meeting was held at a mansion,
a mansion that had been confiscated by a Jewish businessman
in a suburb of Berlin called von Say. Um, you

(01:32:09):
can go to the Vance House today. I've I've been there. Um,
you can see if there's a very good museum there.
The actual houses used in the movie we discussed at
the start of this conspiracy, which is basically based directly
on the minutes of the meeting. They have to plan
the final solution. Um. I'm going to quote from a
summary of that meeting in history dot com. Quote. The
agenda was simple and focused to devise a plan that

(01:32:31):
would render a final solution to the Jewish question in Europe,
Various gruesome proposals were discussed, including mass sterilization and deportation
to the island of Madagascar. Hydrick proposed simply transporting Jews
from every corner of Europe to concentration camps in Poland
and working them to death. Objections to this plan included
the belief that this was simply too time consuming. What

(01:32:52):
about the strong ones who took longer to die, What
about the millions of Jews who were already in Poland.
Although the word extermination was never uttered during the meeting,
the implication was clear. Anyone who survived the egregious conditions
of a work camp would be treated accordingly. Months later,
the gas vans in Helmo, Poland, which were killing a
thousand people a day, proved to be the solution. They
were looking for the most efficient means of killing large

(01:33:15):
groups of people at a time, and the rest is
unfortunately history. The Vans conference led directly to the creation
of death camps, which exterminated some four million Jews and
five million other undesirables. These were, and still are today,
the fastest and most cost effective method of genocide ever developed.

(01:33:35):
Reinhard Hydric gets rightful credit as architect of the Holocaust,
but the vast majority of people killed in the death
camps died after he died. He would not live to
see what he brought into being. And I'm gonna quote
from a write up by the United States Holocaust Museum
here to explain why Hydric gets taken out of the picture.

(01:33:56):
After the invasion of the Soviet Union spurred a previously
dormant communist resistance move meant in Bohemia and Moravia Czechoslovakia
into acts of sabotage, Hitler dismissed reich Protector Constantine von
Neuroth and An appointed Hydric acting Reich Protector in September
nineteen forty one. Hydric first ordered a narrow wave of
terror targeting real and perceived leaders of the opposition in

(01:34:17):
Czech Lands. In October and November nineteen forty one, Protector
at Special Courts sinence three hundred and forty two people
to death and turned twelve hundred and eighty nine over
to the Gestapo. Hydric also established the Teresan Stack Camp
ghetto in November. Under his rule, fourteen thousand Germans and
Austrian Jews and more than twenty thousand check Jews were
deported from Theresan stat to the Lord's Ghetto, to the

(01:34:37):
Government General in Poland into the Reich Commissary at Austland,
which is where they were exterminated. Hydric Is, acting Reich Protector,
then corded Czech industrial workers and farmers whose productive capacity
was necessary to the German war effort, with wages and
benefits packages equivalent to those of their German counterparts. The
result of his policies was a seventy three percent reduction
and acts of sabotage within six months. By spring of

(01:34:59):
nineteen forty two, German authorities could boost of a pacification
of the Protectorate. Some have speculated that Hydric aim next
to assume a newly created top civilian position and occupied
northern France and Belgium, but he never got the chance
to do this. The Allies were well aware of Reinhard
hydrick Um and they needed a win, right two not

(01:35:19):
a great time for the Allies. There's some early signs
that the Nazi ship is going to turn around for them,
but they're not winning at that point um now. The
so the British train and equip a two man cheam
of team of Check soldiers because Check has a government
Czecho Slovakia has a government in exile, right, they have
soldiers who flee the company in the country, and the

(01:35:40):
British government trains two of these guys up and air
drops them into Hydrick's territory. They ambush him during his
daily commute home from work, but one man's machine gun jams, right,
so they try to shoot him. Their gun jams Hydrick,
who's driving in an open topped vehicle very stupidly Um
sees that their gun has jammed, and again, think about
everything about this guy. He's desperate to prove himself as

(01:36:03):
a warrior, right, so his driver wants to drive the
funk away right, get out of there, get his boss
to safety. Hidrick has his driver stop. He pulls out
his handgun and he attempts to attack both assassins. One
of them throws a grenade as he's trying to do
his hero ship and it fucks reinhard right up. He

(01:36:24):
gets horribly wounded. He's a vacuated hospital. Um. His wound
turns septic and he spent seven days in in the hospital,
slowly ding like really the only of the really bad
Nazis who gets exactly the death he deserves, his body rotting,

(01:36:45):
they pull his spleen out of him, like yeah, all
death because he was a fucking idiot, and like, oh,
I'm gonna fucking shoot these guys when keeping it real
goes wrong. Yeah. It's believed, although not certain, that the
reason his wounds got infected and he died was because

(01:37:06):
the upholstery in his his car was made out of horsehair,
and the horse hair gets forced to do his wound
by a grenade blast and it gets him. It causes
a deadly infection. Very funny. Yeah, it was either that
or he spend too much time around the you know
the Germans who are going to the horhouse who like
to eat the doodoo v D and his gut wound exactly, dude,

(01:37:29):
you know it's one of the other I love it. Publicly,
the whole Reich mourns, and actually his funeral is one
of the last really mass public events that the whole
Nazi leadership attends because right the war doesn't go so
well for them after this point, he's mourned as a
hero of Germany. Privately, though Hitler thought him a fool
for throwing away his life for a chance to look heroic,
saying such heroic gestures as driving in an open unarmored

(01:37:52):
vehicle or walking about the streets unguarded are just damn
stupidity which serves the country. Not one wit you shouldn't
have done. See me, I'm going to just shoot myself
in the head as soon as we're surrounded by the
Red Army. Yeah, solid, solid shade Hitler, cradical support to Hitler,
for Queen Hitler. Why why can't he be smart and

(01:38:17):
die cowardly like I like me after I shoot my
dog and poison my wife, or die heroically like Joseph,
like Joseph Gerbel's grenading his children to death like a
hero of the Reich. Why did he do it with
the grenade? I don't know. It was all he had.
It was just like you kill your children now, Yes,

(01:38:39):
when you have so many children, a grenade is just efficient.
I think they actually poison them. Whatever fuck it I needed? Well,
we watched Downfall, the documentary, So yeah, both assassins are
caught and executed, and the Nazis carry out a horrific
series of reprisal prop populations. Actually, the check underground in

(01:39:00):
this period and argued strenuously against assassinating Hydric because they
knew it would lead to them being wiped out. And
they are. They're just annihilated as a result of this,
as are a lot of people not even involved in
the underground. The village of Lettuce, which was falsely implicated
in sheltering the assassins, paid the brunt of the price.
All one d ninety nine men in the village are executed,

(01:39:21):
women are sent to a concentration camp. Eighty one children
are gassed to death, and the remainder are sent out
to other families. We don't really know. The surviving women
of Lettuce go back to the destroyed side of the
village and it's been the rest of their lives waiting
for their children to come home. And I never do. Um. Oh,
it's it's fucking heartbreaking. Um. The check village of Lezaki

(01:39:42):
was also destroyed because the radio transmitter belonging to Partisans
was found there. Across the territory, more than thirteen thousand
people are arrested and roughly five thousand people are murdered
in reprisals for Reinhard's assassination. Um. And that's more or
less the end of the story of Reinhard hydric A
be a piece of ship. Oh man, So I gotta say,

(01:40:04):
you're right. He is a bastard. He really sucks. He's
so bad. He is not a good guy, not chill.
In fact, he is sketch. And I do not appreciate it.
If you're making a short list of like guys for
the that you're nominating for the title of like worst
person in history, he's got to be in the running.

(01:40:26):
Yeah he's Yeah, he's not top five, he's definitely top ten.
Like he's up there with Hitler, because again, without a
guy like Reinhard, I don't know that Hitler is at
least able to carry out the Holocaust in the same way,
because you need the implementation man. Yeah, yeah, you need
the guy who's able to engineer the whole thing. You know,

(01:40:48):
you gotta get someone to execute it. And there's the
peanut butter. Heydrick is the jelly exactly. The other lying
centuries of anti Semitism are the white bread, and he
needs all of it to make your Holocaust peb and j. Yeah,
this is why I'm allergic to peanut butter. Yes, because
I'm Jewish. All Jews a peanut butter right, yes, yes,

(01:41:10):
the most anti Semitic sandwich is of course the P
and J. We've all been saying that for years. Oh man,
that is uh, yeah, he's he's a bad dude, and
uh and I don't like him. And I think that's
the point of this podcast is to find more people
who I'm like. I don't like him, you know, because
I like most people, but not that guy. That guy,

(01:41:34):
I'm just glad that Hardy. It's rad that he died
in horrible pain, seventy days sepsis. He's he's literally the
one Nazi who gets what he deserves. Terrific lingering death
caused that. And then and he's you know, he's thinking
the whole time. Shit, if I just drove it, driven away,
i'd have I'd have avoided all of this agony. Yeah, yeah,

(01:41:55):
I'm glad he got to think about his death as
he really did. Like, fuck you reinhard Hydric, you piece
of fucking trash. I'm glad your death was horrible. It
is okay to luxuriate in the nightmarish agony of the
architect of the fucking Holocaust. There should be a seven
day celebration all over the world. We should celebrate the

(01:42:16):
day he got shot by this check part of a
Ryan Hard Hydrick started dying today, we should have seven
days of gifts and dances. We think painful sepsis is
everyone fucking just like marking in the streets. He is
the closest to the pure embodiment of human evil. I

(01:42:38):
think it's it's like he's he's like Leopold of Belgium.
He's that kind of monster which are the worst to me.
I think in a lot of ways, he's worse than
a guy like Hitler. Um because again Hitler, if there
had been resistance to Hitler, if there had been a
solid block of conservatives who are like, we're gonna have
Hitler be empowered, but we're not going to let him
do this in this and we're gonna organ as the military,

(01:43:00):
We're going to make sure which was a thing that
was happening, there was a chance that that would happen.
Hitler could have been a quasi dictator for five or ten,
fifteen years, and then like which happened in other countries,
right which happened, he could have been like Franco. That
was not necessarily impossible. If there's the way he was
a pragmatist. He would have preferred that to being forced

(01:43:20):
out of power or assassinated. If that had been like that,
that was not an impossible thing. From the beginning, Ryan
hard Heydrick is Um, I don't know, he's he He
might be worse. He might be worse than Big Age,
you know what, dude, Well, you know, and at the
end of the day, he got what he always wanted,

(01:43:40):
which was a really big gold star on his report card.
You know, he got he got to be bigger than Hitler's.
I mean, I mean not, you know, in a way
that most people know you there's no point. Really, it's
stupid to be like, well, who was a worse person?
Like they're all like, it doesn't doesn't matter, they're all
a's such a level of human evil. Trying to parse

(01:44:03):
out differences between them is is silly. Um. But but
he is I what I should the way I should
frame is not that like, oh, I think he's worse
than Hitler. He is the Nazi I find most personally offensive. Yeah,
and frightening. He's the one who's scariest to me, especially
because like if you now, I haven't seen a picture

(01:44:24):
of him yet and so this whole time, I'm just looking,
I'm picturing yeah, blonde ken brauna, and it's like part
of what's pissing me off about him mostly is just
this like this fucking Zack Morris looking motherfucker committing the
worst atrocities and executing atrocities, going above and beyond beyond

(01:44:50):
Hitler even to like execute these mass you know, this
mass genocide, the Holocaust and U and just yeah, just
like I this is why I hate hot people, you know,
anyone who's attractive. Yeah, I wouldn't call him. He's definitely
not as good looking as Kenneth Branda, but he is
the most like Aryan looking of the Nazi leadership for sure. Yeah.

(01:45:15):
Oh yeah, I'm looking him up right now. You're gonna
look him up. I was just gonna send you that
in the chat. Yeah, No, he's he's not. You're right,
he's not that hot, but he's not hot, but he is.
He is, Like, he's blonde haired, blue eyed, he's got
and he's tall, he's in very good shape. He's an athlete.
You know, he's the most Nazi looking motherfucker I think
I've ever seen. He really is the most Nazi looking

(01:45:38):
of the of the of the high up nazis, right, Girbels.
You look at gering Um, you look at fucking um Hess,
you look at um Hitler, you look at Himler. Yeah.
Ryan Hard is the one who looks like they say,
an arian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's the one. He's the
one that they all draw when they're trying to be like,
this is my perfect man. Okay, he's just superman. He's

(01:46:01):
very tall, blonde, blue eyes, very sharp cheekbones, he's got
naked more yeah yeah, yeah, and I'm not so obviously
like Kenneth Brannah. One of the criticisms. Actually, the first
time I watched Conspiracy, so I dropped out of college
obviously because fun that. But the last two years or

(01:46:24):
so I was in college most of my classes and
the thing that I was thinking I might get when
I thought I might get a degree was UTD offered
like a Holocaust studies program, and there's a series of
classes on Holocaust and remembrance that I took, which is
where I watched Conspiracy. And like one of the criticisms
that people have of that movie, it's a very good
and I think very accurate depiction of how the Vance

(01:46:44):
conference was handled right. It does a very good job
of laying out the way these people talked, the way
they actually in the way that you see the way
the thing we talked about repeatedly in this episode, the
way Hydrick orchestrates gets people on board, the way he
whips support between different agencies to make them do what
he wants. You see that in the movie. I think
they do a good job of it. Um, they make
him hot, which you know, Kenneth Brann is a very

(01:47:08):
good actor, and I think he very ably plays at
the evil but also you cast Kenneth Branna, he can't
not be hot. He's Kenneth Branna. He's he's hot. He's
fucking hot as hell. Um. But people criticize it because
they're like, why are you going to make him to
make him hot? Which I think that's a fair casting though,
especially given the fact that, like this was one of

(01:47:31):
the reasons that he rose up so high. Yeah, well
it is, it is. I think there's an argument to
him made that, like, well, Nazis saw him as good
looking because he looked like a Nazi. Yeah, he was
like a you know, front facing Nazi guy, someone you
could like point to and go this is this is
what we look like. In Hollywood. People are always better looking,
So you've got to have the Nazist looking guy in

(01:47:52):
the Hollywood movie be extra and Kenneth Branna looks like
a fucking Hollywood Nazi. And yeah, I think it was good.
Casting is my my fame. It's a controversial movie again
from people who are Holocaust nerds, which is a horrible
way to describe it. But no, but there are Holocaust
nerds out there are Holocaust Yeah, and I am on

(01:48:13):
the side of I think it's and it's a movie
I show people when we went to Saxonhausen. Um, it
was me and a group my my, my partner at
the time and like some Australian kids that we met
while just like chilling out and getting wasted in Berlin together.
We all went together and we watched Conspiracy afterwards. Um
it's a good movie to watch too. Um. Uh, yeah,

(01:48:35):
it's it's it's I I recommend it to people again.
You know, there's some controversies around it. It's very good.
It's very good, and it's also uh and this is
not so much a historical note. Uh, it's a great
example of a movie uh that can be compelling and
only be in two or three different settings. Like most

(01:48:56):
of it takes place in a meeting and a meeting,
and they ever leave the grounds of this fucking house.
No they don't. Yeah, there's like a scene in the bathroom,
there's a scene in the hall, and most of it
is in this meeting room. And it's very compelling. And
also it shows the I think the banality of evil
is like a perfect you know, like that's that's what
especially Aikman's portrayal by I think that Stanley Tucci, who

(01:49:19):
was just like, yes, oh, he's so good in this
Stanley Tucci, who plays Aikman in that Yeah. Yeah, And
and he's like, uh, you know, he's basically doing notes,
he's taking it out, he's taking notes, and the fact
that he's taking notes enables the slaughter of eleven million people, right,
Like his notes are a key aspect of the machinery

(01:49:40):
of death. Um, which is what the case was, right,
that's that's that is Aikman, that is who he was. UM.
And there's this um there's a wonderful scene in the
movie where they're all quibbly because a lot of people
this was a real problem. Again, we talked about her.
There's different chunks of the Nazis. They have different arguments. Uh.
Some of the guys who had written the Nuremberg Laws
are angry because Hydric is basically throwing out the restrictions

(01:50:02):
on the Nuremberg Laws because he doesn't think they go
far enough. And they're arguing about like this isn't legal,
you're going outside the downs of the law. And there's
a moment where Hydrick, I think its asks raise your
hand if you're a lawyer, and everyone in the room
raises their hands, which are almost all of these guys
were fucking lawyers. Yeah, it's yeah, and and you know

(01:50:23):
it's like I remember that specifically when we were talking
about the Nuremberg Laws and like Kenneth Braun as you know,
changing of them. I'm just gonna call uh Reinhardt Hydrick
Branda boy. Uh No. It's like, you know, kind of
like just going, hey, let's stop quibbling over how much

(01:50:43):
blood if you have any blood, like he went one
drop rule and that that always stuck out to me
is like kind of like uh you know that that
in the end was like, yeah, this is about ethnicity.
Let's stop pretending this is about religion. Let's stop pretending
this is about Christ in any fashion, like this is
about d n A racial makeup and and just it's

(01:51:06):
totally fake race pseudo science. Yeah, anyways, you know again
he pluggables to plug. No time to plug your plug doubles,
like discussing the machinery that was built in order to
enable the fastest mass extermination of an ethnic group in history. Yeah, yeah,

(01:51:26):
you know. I always like to plug my podcasts about
the Sopranos right after talking about the Holocaust. Think about
those rooms filled with human hair and empty shoes. And
check out this podcast. Check out this great podcast in
which we rewatch Sopranos and talk about it with wonderful guests. Uh.

(01:51:47):
It's called Pod Yourself a Gun. Uh, and season five
is about to start right now. We're through one through four,
so check it out wherever you get. You know, your
podcast and the Fraud Cast, uh, which is the same
type of podcast, same host, but we talk about movies instead.
So check that out and follow me at Matt leave

(01:52:08):
Jokes on Instagram and at Matt Leeb on Twitter. Yep,
check him out. You can check out I have a novel.
It's being launched as a podcast three chapters a week
after the Revolution. You can also find the text. Every
week will upload a new e pub and there will
be in browser readable versions of the text too, for free,
you know ads at After the Revolution or sorry at

(01:52:30):
a t r book dot com. So you know, think
about the most monstrous act of soulless evil ever committed,
and then check out pod, yourself a gun and read
my book. Please please do those things. Yeah, and we
hope you've enjoyed this horrible, horrible person, this real great

(01:52:54):
crash monster. Yeah, hey everybody. Initially I was going to
plug the go fund made for the sequel to my book,
UM After the Revolution, which you can find at a
t R book dot com. But um, here in the
Pacific Northwest, we're having an unprecedented heat wave and it's
causing disastrous conditions, life threatening conditions for a lot of

(01:53:17):
houseless people, a lot of people without air conditioning. UM,
particularly in the city of Salem. UM activists everywhere have
been kind of gathering to try and um mitigate, set
up cooling stations, hand out cold drinks, to do things
to help people get their temperature down. UM. I want
to try and raise funds for the Free Fridge of Salem, UM,
which are doing cooling stations in the capital of Oregon, Salem.

(01:53:39):
So if you go to venmo At Free Fridge Salem,
that's venmo At Free Fridge Salem and send them a
couple of bucks, they could really use it. Um. Local
government has destroyed a number like police particularly have destroyed
a number of water and cooling stations they've set out.
Um it's you know, we're not going to be in
triple digit heats for the next couple of days after
I'm recording this on Monday, but it's still going to

(01:54:01):
be very hot. People still need this, So please venmo
At Free Fridge Salem if you have the wherewithal and
the financial resources to do so. One more time, the
venemo is at Free Fridge Salem. Thanks h