Part One: Gay Resistance to Nazis

Margaret talks with Shereen Lani Younes about everything from queer youth gangs fighting the Hitler Youth in the street to artists who turned their talents to forgery and sabotage. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
the podcast about all the rebels and weirdos and revolutionaries
who fought against all the worship that the world has
to offer. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me
today is Sharine, who is a director and artist, a poet,
a general jack of all trades, and as the co
host of the podcast Ethnically Ambiguous. How are you doing today, Shrine?

(00:21):
I'm doing Hi, Sharine. I have a podcast that I've
done so many of these, and every intro I've ever
done is so awkward. I'm Sharin. That's actually something that
I really appreciate about podcasts. It makes me feel like, um,
I'm doing okay. Yeah, that's why I to reassure, to

(00:44):
reassure everybody. But if I can do what you could do,
it probably better. Um. We've also got our producers, Sophie
listening on like the voice of God or maybe like
one of the three norns weaving the fate of the
rest of us mortals. How are you doing to Sophie,
that's my favorite intro you've done. I'm great, you know,

(01:06):
surviving kind of exited for this script. It's a good one. Thanks.
Thanks cutting some threads. Um, that is a great image,
and Sophie is like that. I guess that was great. Okay.
So I figured today we should do something like really lighthearted,
easy breezy and talk about Nazism. I figure no one ever,

(01:29):
no one ever talks about these guys, right, Like, when
was the last time anyone talked about Nazis? So we
figured we should talk about But more specifically, I want
to talk about how during the early twentieth century there
was this like queer accepting culture that was blooming all
across Europe, which the Nazis tried to crush. But it
turns out the it didn't it didn't actually work out

(01:50):
that way in the end, that the Nazis actually spoil
our alert get crushed. Um, And they took out a
lot of queer people along the way, but a lot
of queer people fucked up the Nazis too. So that's
what we're gonna talk about today. I like that. I
like a good like I don't know, revenge, Uh yeah, yeah, no,

(02:11):
this is good. I think you might like some of
this story. Then obviously not all of this story, unfortunately. Okay,
So I don't know if you knew this, but there's
actually not one way to be to be gay. Um,
a very different yeah. No, I was shocked to learn
this as well, there's one straight way to be gay.

(02:32):
Thank you for laughing so much. Uh yeah, the like,
every culture has had different conceptions of homosexuality and transnis
and all of these different things, and like to be
to be clear, like, guys have been fucking guys since
the beginning of time, girls have been sucking girls, and
wherever there's been gender, there's been people transgressing gender roles.

(02:52):
But since Western civilization is like trying it, so I
almost feel like guilty focusing on this particular conception of
of gayness and how we developed to our current Western
conception of gayness. But since Western civilization is trying its
hardest to be like the one single culture over the
entire world, I feel like it's worth knowing it's history
of queerness, or at least some of it. And kind

(03:15):
of oddly, a lot of the history we have about
gayness in our culture doesn't come from like the ladies
who liked scissorin, but instead the the priests and the
governments that tried to stop us from doing that. Instead,
So I want to start with this Book of Monsters. Hell, yeah, yeah,
lever Month Storum, this is this, it's the It's a

(03:40):
series of three volumes that was written in Old English
around the turn of the eighth century, and it's got
like cyclopses and centaurs and ship in it. But it's
not just like a collection in alphabetical order. It was
written in kind of a specific like they picked who
to put first and who to put at the end,
and yeah, exactly exactly. It's a monster lay list that

(04:00):
this guy is writing to try and impress someone, probably,
which makes it perfect actually, because the very first monster
in the very first book of Monsters in English is
a trans woman um or possibly an intersex person. Those
concepts were very blurry all throughout history, and so to

(04:21):
quote liber Month Storem from a translation by Andy Orchard, indeed,
I bear witness at the beginning of the work that
I have known a person of both sexes, who, although
they appeared more masculine than feminine from their face and chest,
and were thought male by those who did not know yet,
loved feminine occupations and deceived the ignorant among men in

(04:42):
the manner of a whore. But this is said to
have happened often amongst the human race. Oh so is
the person writing this pretending they're not human? Or no? No,
I think he's It's just like just the way the
old English works sounds strange, Okay, yeah, sickly. Uh So,
the very first monster in all of English history is

(05:04):
a fucking it's me. Um. So that rules. Um but
I kind of projecting they're they're projecting if that's the
very first playlist or song in the playlist they chose, Hey,
look inwards. That's a that's a very good point. Um.
And the same book also describes, uh it specifically quotes

(05:26):
like Ethiopians also as monsters and it it's it's not
exactly a a tome I would like to see live
on in the modern world in any appreciable degree. Um
But okay, So fast forward a couple hundred years and
in the tenth century the Church of England, they were
passing around these manuals of recommended penance for sinners based

(05:47):
on their different sins or whatever, right, and one of
the passages refers to a third gender of person, which
is the baid ling or maybe bad ling. I don't
actually know how to pronounce Old English. Um. I'm gonna
go with bad ling. And and we know that they
meant it as a third sex because the specific rule
is that any man who quote has sex with a
bad ling or with another male or with a beast

(06:10):
ought to fast for ten years and penance well. And
so this is probably again the same concept. This is
a concept of someone who is either intersects or trends
and it's um and it's related to all these other
effeminate words that they had at the time, or words
for effeminine men that they had at the time, including

(06:33):
battle and baden or badden. There's a lot of arguments.
People like to argue about the ship endlessly on the Internet.
I don't know if you've met the internet, um, but
it likes to argue about ship like this. There's a
chance that the word bad comes from this, which I
will also happily take. I'm like totally down to be
the origin of monsters and bad. I mean bad, that's

(06:55):
that's badass. Like I don't even mean that. That's a pun,
but I think that's really cool. Yeah, and different people
have tried to reclaim these words in different ways to
various degrees. But um, okay, fast forward even more, and
you've got two important pieces of legislation. Who's bigotry has
echoed throughout the world thanks to colonialism the Holy Roman Empire,

(07:17):
which stretched from northern Italy up to modern day Germany.
In in fifteen thirty two, it passed something called the
I don't pronounced load, even though I took three years
of it, Constitutio criminalist Carolina. And one of the laws
in this set of laws is when a human commits
fornication with a beast, a man with a man, a

(07:39):
woman with a woman, they have also forfeited life and
they should be, according to the common custom, banished by
fire from life into death Jesus. Yeah. Um, So they
weren't like huge fans of homosexuality, not really. It seems
like they just kind of hate hate us. Yeah yeah. Um.

(08:01):
The very next year, it must have been like sweeping
the Europe at the time, because the very next year,
Henry the Eighth of England, in fifteen thirty three, he
passed the Buggery Act, which made anal sex and beast
reality punishable by death. Um. And it's just so disgusting
to me that those are always coupled together, like and

(08:22):
I say this as someone that used to have a
friend like five years ago that was arguing that point,
and I'm not I'm not a friend anymore. But like
I can't. I could not believe someone my age would
be able to still have any any thought about that,
and it blew my mind. So I'm very I just
hate that's just is beyond the upsetting and disgusting to me,

(08:43):
I just yeah whatever, like yeah, no, no, It's like,
I don't know. It just makes me really mad that
humans are like that. But also like, okay, I studied
our history in college and the Roman Empire or whatever
the all a lot of their artworks involved all genders everywhere,

(09:04):
and their gods are intersects and all this stuff. So
it's just so ironic to me that they're also birdening
people alive. I honestly, like the best I can figure out,
and I'm not sure, but the best I can figure
out from like all this research I'm doing for this
episode is that like, not only have there. It's like
it's not like everyone was just like hiding in the

(09:24):
closet and afraid of the witch hunters the whole time.
It seems like it like cycled people would be like, oh,
being gay rules, and the people like, yeah, it does rule,
and then I would just have like a whole culture
of people being like this rules, and then someone would
get into a moral panic and then murder us all
and drive the rest of us back into the closet um,
which is a really cool pattern that we are hopefully

(09:45):
not in the middle of right now. Well, that makes
me very nervous the way you said that, But we'll
keep thinking this story. Stop thinking about that at all, okay,
do you all? Right? So, so England's law get exported
all over the world because they are fucking colonialist scum,
and the Holy Roman Empire's law becomes Prussian law, which

(10:07):
becomes German law, and then becomes Nazi law and then
actually stays the law after the Nazis go away too.
But we'll get to that. So the Nazis didn't invent
the prosecution of gay people, the persecution of gay people,
They just turned it up to a lemon Uh. In
contrast at all, during all this time France when they
did their whole revolution thing, uh in the legalized homosexuality,

(10:31):
And that's pretty incredible. I didn't know that. No, I
didn't either, honestly, And then I hate that. I'm about
to say something positive about a Napoleon. But um, then
when he went around and conquered Europe, he he brought
the French law with him and eradicated anti gay laws everywhere.

(10:51):
He went. Wow, short King, I know, sure read Hey,
that's that's pretty freaking cool. Yeah. And so it's like
so so so Prussia becomes Germany by bringing in Bavaria

(11:12):
and some other regions, and Bavaria actually had legalized homosexuality,
but Prussia did not. So in eighteen seventy one, when
when Prussia becomes Germany, the whole country suddenly as an
anti gay log and and it's a law called paragraph
one seventy five, and and it was the law in
Germany from fucking eighteen seventy one until do you want
to guess what decade they got rid of paragraph eighteen

(11:34):
seventy one? What I don't know, I'm genuinely gonna say
like nineteen sixty or something. No, no, no, it's gonna say.
I was gonna say you were alive, you were alive.
Oh my god. I just thought like after fucking I

(11:54):
don't know, NATO one, maybe they were like in a
good mood and the sixties stuck, I think about it,
but that is that is very unfortunate and sad. And
they did, like they actually they did reform the laws
in the late sixties and early seventies and like, and
I think what they did. I don't have the notes

(12:16):
in front of me, but I think what they ended
up doing was making it so that there was just
a higher age of consent for for gayness than for
straight no us or whatever. Um So, like straight kids
were allowed to funk at fourteen, but gay kids weren't
allowed to funk until they're twenty one or something, which
is like progress, but in the weirdest, most horrible way,
you know. Um So, this this, this law paragraph one

(12:40):
seven five is unnatural fornication, whether between persons of the
male sex or humans with beasts, is punished with imprisonment,
with the further punishment of prompt loss of civil rights.
Well and okay, so like most of these laws are
just about men, right the Holy Roman Emperor one managed
to include lesbians as well, but so Germany. They actually

(13:03):
tried to extend it to include lesbians a couple of times,
but they couldn't reach consensus on exactly like how women
would go about sucking each other and so like exactly
what would be illegal, And that's so funny. It's like
straight guys making lesbian port or something, you know what
I mean, They're just like is this what they do? Yeah? Totally.

(13:25):
I just like to imagine that there's like this room
full of dudes and like powdered wigs or maybe like
hats with spits on them, and they're like trying to
mimic exactly what they thought. Maybe like one of them
puts their fingers with some scissors by accident or something,
you know. Um. So, and in England they tried to
expand the law to women as well, the English law,

(13:45):
but they got afraid that if they did, it might
give women ideas. So the the earl of I don't
pronounced English names, well, I mean like women can't have
ideas though, Margaret, like that's so dangerous is yeah? Well,
I mean this actually ties into my I mean, like
I think the reason that men hate lesbians is that

(14:07):
they realized that, um, if women can enjoy each other,
then the men have no purpose. Um. And I actually
think this is why they even hate trans women especially
or also is because like because they could hold on
too like, well, at least the human race wouldn't continue,
and yeah, sorry, we're gonna sunk that one up for

(14:29):
you too. Well, no, I think you're correct, that is why.
So okay, so the earl of desert, I'm just gonna
call the desert desert. I don't know if I could desert.
I think desert. Okay, they colonized like half the fucking world.
They can get their names wrong. How many people does
one suppose really are so vile, so unbalanced, so neurotic,

(14:52):
so decadent as to do this. You may say there
are a number of them, but would be like, at
most an extremely small minority. And you're going to tell
the whole world that there is such an offense, to
bring it to the notice of women who have never
heard of it, never thought of it, never dreamed of it.
I think that is a very great mischief. I love that.
I love the performance. Um, but I was just thinking

(15:15):
about it, like annihilating the human race, or not annihilating,
but slowly killing us off. That would be have you
seen us? Have you seen this planet? Like that's the
way to save the world lesbians and women? Yeah, the
man that wrote the men that wrote that, uh, just

(15:38):
probably so gay. Yeah, yeah, I mean that's the other
thing we're gonna like there's a lot of different conceptions
that come up about, like, you know, whether sexuality is
in it or whether it's like socially contagious and like.
So that wasn't even part of the question yet. It
was more just like the act Oh yeah, yeah no,

(15:59):
I was saying that later in the script, we're gonna
talk about yeah no no. So they didn't they didn't
expand the law to include women because they couldn't, you know,
they didn't want to give any women ideas. Um. But Okay,
despite the fact that there's all these anti gay laws
on the books, nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, Germany was
like fucking unbelievably gay through and through, left wing, right

(16:21):
wing center gay people everywhere, and and of course a
lot of these people were fighting for their rights, which
brings us to the Institute for Sexual Research. Uh. From
nineteen nine to nineteen thirty three, there was a place
in Berlin called the Institute for Sexual Research, which was
opened by three Jewish sexologists. The most famous of these
is a guy named Magnus Hirschfeld. And this place, I

(16:46):
don't know. As far as I get tell, A ruled right.
Twenty thousand people visited every year from around the world.
There was this Museum of Sex, there was a massive
research archive. UM. They offered consulting on matters of sex
to gay and straight people, Like if you're confused about
your sexuality, you could just like show up at the
institute and someone would um set you straight or gay.

(17:08):
That I wish I had that now, I know how
that's so ahead of its time, I know. And they
did endless scientific research in the homosexuality. Uh, some of
it seems like really weird today. Like at one point
they spent a while trying to and this is all voluntary,
but they tried to transplant testicles from straight men into
gay men to see if it would cure the gay

(17:29):
men of their gay um. But they and again this
wasn't a forced conversion therapy. This was like people being
like I want to do this or whatever. Um. But
they kind of dropped anything like conversion therapy pretty quickly,
and then they moved apparently all their focus to helping
people navigate homophobic society rather than you know, trying to
fucking cure them or whatever. They they coined the words

(17:53):
both transvestite and transsexual. I know transvestite isn't invoke now,
but like it actually was a word that meant a
lot to me as something when I was younger before
identified it as as transgender because I prefer women's cloth. Yeah, exactly,
words changed and they involved in their meaning and I
had no idea that's wherely were coined from. That's what
an amazing little institute. Oh yeah, no, this place is

(18:15):
just like there's so much cool ship. Um, they pioneered
this idea. I mean, I'm sure other people came up
with this idea too, but they pioneered this idea is
like a scientific thing that if you just let trans
people exist and you let us like go through society
the way that we know we should belong in society,
that we're happier and society is happier and we don't

(18:35):
like kill ourselves as much. Um, because like you know, homopope,
society is drive an awful lot of people to hurt themselves.
And the government hears then they're like, no, we have
to keep them miserable or also need us to keep
them scared and miserable and sad. That's actually the truth yeah,
I genuinely believe that. Um, they're like, I'm miserable, so

(18:56):
you have to be visible, you know, Okay. And they
also they performed probably the first gender confirmation surgery in history,
or at least the one that's known about in Western
records or whatever. I have a feeling some people tried
and did this a long time ago too. But this
woman named Dora Richter in thirty was the first person

(19:16):
to in in our understanding, to to undergo full like
gender confirmation surgery. And she actually worked at the institute.
She was a maid basically, Um, it was one of
the only places in Germany where trans people could get jobs.
But I honestly, I don't know how well they were treated.
It sounded like they all got kind of ship jobs,
like this woman was a maid, um, and Hirschfeld was

(19:38):
like traveling around staying in luxury hotels and show it's
always a negative side, I'm sure everybody. Yeah. And they
also tied were tied in with the first Western pro
homosexual advocacy group in history, which was the Scientific Humanitarian Committee,
which was founded in and they treated homosexuality as gender.
So this is getting to the there's a lot of

(20:00):
different conceptions about gayness arguing at the time, and the
Institute's theory was that homosexuality and gender exists in the
body and are essentially determined at birth rather than being
conscious choices, um, which led them down to some strange paths.
They presented this idea that homosexuals were sort of a
third sex, halfway between men and women, which implied that like,
all lesbians are a bit masculine and all gay men

(20:22):
are like a bit feminine. Um. They did, however, separate
out transpeople from all of this to not be exactly
the same as gay people. Um. So it's like progress
and and they got away with a lot of this
gayness because even a one seventy five paragraph one seventy
five was technically a law in the books. The local
government basically told the police, like, now, I don't enforce this,

(20:44):
because the local government was like far more progressive. That's
something at least. But I mean, it's also interesting, this guy,
Magnus Archfield wasn't out as gay. He was very very
clearly gay, but he wasn't out, um, And like lived
with this partner and was active in the gay scene.
And I don't love everything that this guy did. For

(21:05):
one thing, um as part of the coalition to abolish
paragraph on the law that they advocated instead would have
legalized homosexual prostitution. And he was and Magnus was like, no, no, no, no,
take that part out. Not because he hated sex work,
but because he um, it would be like too controversial.
It would like, you know, and I don't know, sex

(21:26):
workers get thrown under the bus fucking constantly, and and
it also kind of throws on working class gay folks
under the bus more right, if you do that, yeah, exactly.
And he was also super fucking assimilationist. I'm not trying
to like rag on this guy, but I feel like
you can't understand him. You know, if you had stopped
like three minutes ago, like he started institution whatever, like

(21:48):
that's great, but this is an example of like, don't
meet your heroes, right, If I would have just kept
him as like at this heroic figure, if you just
stopped there, it's good to know everything, it's good to
be so at one point he was like when he
was trying to convince everyone that that gays were cool,
he would like bring cops to gay bars and to
be like, look, we're just like everyone else. And like,

(22:11):
I like to imagine being in that bar and trying
to be like, okay, we're we're what, we're like everyone
else all right, yeah yeah, yeah, totally everyone put on
your everyone else yeah totally like quick stop sucking in public.
Um And and they asked, okay, so they weren't the
only game in town either. Um. The there was this
anarchist named Adolph Brand who started the world's first game magazine. Again,

(22:35):
whenever I say like the world's first or whatever, I
want to like really heavily disclose that, like all of
these history books are going to call it the first
whatever and they mean the Western world and you know whatever,
Still fucking cool. At least started this game magazine in
the nineteenth century, um in eight nine six, And the
name of the magazine translates to the unique. And he

(22:56):
was really fucking out, Like he kept getting arrested for
being gay and they be like, are you gay, and
he'd be like, funck, I'm gay, fuck you, and and
he but he also and I don't love this guy either.
I'm gonna get to that, but um, he didn't funk
around with this, like gayness is a feminine thing to him.
Male homosexuality was like the epitome of masculinity UM, often

(23:16):
bordering on or falling into outright misogyny, right because it's
like men who only need men, and which we've all
run across, you know, I mean both Yeah, with women
and with men. I would say that happens totally, totally.
And then the activism that came out of his circle
was called the Path Over Corpses and which is really

(23:38):
metal but not actually very cool. And what they did
is they outed high profile gay men um often often
leading to those people to kill themselves. And they just
didn't care. And that's why I was called the Path
Over Corpses did canceled culture culture culture. We don't even

(24:00):
Twitter anymore. Yeah, well, well that's one way to go
about it, but like not, that's not a great way. Yeah,
And I I usually root for the anarchists and anything,
but like I actually not this time, Okay. And then
there's this this third conception that I think was floating
around a bit the Western world, but actually, as far

(24:22):
as I can tell in my limited reading, was far
more common in like Southwest Asia and northern Africa, which
was this um and and gay men from the West
would go visit Southwest Asia to go be a bit
more free for a while. And it was this conception
that sexuality and gender weren't things that you are, but
instead there are things that you do interesting and and
all of those are going to come up through the

(24:43):
different characters that we're going to get to. It's part
of what I'm trying to lay the scene. It's very interesting. Um,
but you know what else is wholesome besides sexuality is
I've decided that the show will only be sponsored by
incredibly wholesome things, the most wholesome things we can think of.
And so today, so we can we just be sponsored
by tap water, like the concept of tap water. I mean,

(25:06):
but what about the potatoes. That's true, I do really
like potatoes. Okay, tap water and potatoes two things that
are very I mean, that seems fair. We do need
more than one sponsor. I'm okay with that. Protect the potato, yeah, okay,
So we're sponsored by those things and then maybe these
other things and we'll be right back. Okay, and we

(25:33):
are back and uh, of all of these different, you know,
types of things that are happening, it seems like Hirshfeld
and the Institute had the longest and most widespread impact
on the Western world, and the Nazis didn't like that
at all. It turns out, do you know that famous
photo of Nazis burning books are like, if you imagine

(25:54):
Nazis burning books, ye, the image popped in my head.
Yeah yeah, um so, and everyone's like, oh, look, the
Nazis are bad. They burned books. And what usually goes
on said is that the books they were burning was
the research library of the Institute of Sexual Research, and
these photos, Wow, why don't they mention that they should?
They should at least mention that the caption somewhere what

(26:16):
the huge pile of books on fire? Yeah, than just
Nazis naziing Yeah, well, I mean definitely gonna help that
they were Jewish either, right, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Honestly, I
think the reason it isn't mentioned is because I think
that most of polite Western society was secretly fucking glad
that all those fucking books got burned. And like, you know,

(26:39):
we're erased from history in a lot of different ways,
and the Nazis liked to racing us more actively than
the sort of like liberal democracies, but they like try
and fucking too Um, it's dark but true and unfortunately, Yeah,
on May sixty three, the Nazis showed up and they
burned like two books, destroying endless amounts of research into homosexuality,

(27:03):
trans sexuality, cross dressing, everything. Joseph Goebels, I don't pronounced
Gobel's name, which I should, because he's like one of
the famous people in history. Um, he's the chief propagandist
of the Nazis, and he gives a speech to forty
people during this fucking book burning. And Dora Richter, the
first trans woman to undergo gender confirmation surgery, probably was

(27:25):
killed in this attack. Um, it's possible that she was
arrested and died in prison shortly after. There are a
couple rumors that people that don't have as much evidence
to back them up that she got out, and I
like to think she got out, but she probably didn't. Um. Meanwhile,
Magnus hirsch Felt he sees the writing on the wall,

(27:45):
like before all this happens, and so he's off on
a world tour basically trying to figure out where the
funk to get his gay Jewish asked too, because he's like,
this is not going to fucking work. I can't stay
where there's Nazis. But he didn't destroy his own wreck
birds and lists of names before he left. Oh so
the Nazis got those, and those are like the one

(28:06):
things they didn't burn was the list of like all
the fucking gay people in Germany. Um not clearly, not
all of them, you know. But but that's a ship.
I can't wait to hear what happen his xt. Yeah,
I mean, okay, So the Nazis get those, they use
them in a campaign to eradicate the homosexual blight. Because
the Nazis minus the gay Nazis I'll talk about in

(28:27):
a second, um or later, they turned and see homosexuality
is like something inherent and natural. They saw it as
a plague that needed to be destroyed. Let it infest
everything or whatever. Um So Magnus Hirschfeld. He never comes
back to Germany. He goes into exile in France, and
he dies of a heart attack on his sixty seven
birthday on May. Adolf Brand the anarchist who path over

(28:53):
corpses guys. He was super brave before the Nazis, and
then when the Nazis come over, he retires from active
a marries a woman to try and like play straight,
and then he just like shut the funk up and
tried to survive the war. Uh. And he didn't because
an Allied bomb fell on his house in Berlin. Died
at the age of seventy. The Nazis then expanded paragraph one,

(29:16):
like substantially. It used to be a gay men can't funk,
but then it became gay men can't try to excite
the sexuality of other men. And so that's where the
plague right like mentality comes in. Like yeah, you know,
like if I get if this gig even comes near me,
like yeah, maybe I'll Yeah, I keep thinking about dick. Yeah,

(29:42):
many people do. It's a natural thought. Okay. So, like
something like a hundred thousand men who are accused of
homosexuality are arrested, and a lot of them are like
this is often like a it's a really easy way
to blackmail people. It's very similar to like witch hunting.
You know, like you're mad at some one, just say
he came onto you and you can get someone arrested. Um,

(30:04):
So a hundred thousand men are arrested, half of those
did prison time, ten thousand of them or so. Everyone
argues about numbers. Uh, were sent to concentration camps, where
they were forced to wear the inverted pink triangle badges,
which is where the pink triangles a symbol comes from. UM.
In the camps, at least by everything I read, they

(30:24):
were treated socially like kind of the worst. It was
like them and Jews at the bottom of everything. And
then gay Jews had to wear like an inverted it
was both a pink triangle and a yellow star of
David over top of each other. And they had it
the worst. I read really gnarly accounts of what they suffered,
and I'm not going to tell you about it. Thank
you for that. Thank you so much. My imagination is enough. Yeah,

(30:46):
and about them survive, so sixty of them die and
there's no law on the books against lesbianism. But the
Nazis didn't like gay women any better, and so what
they did is they basically found excuse has to send
as many of them as possible to the camps uh
non Aryan ones in particular, and then arian ones would
get forced to have babies, which again we will leave

(31:12):
there um. And those who resisted were arrested on imaginary charges,
like two women were arrested for disrupting their workplace by
sleeping with women from work. Um. Interesting. So Nazis didn't
like gay people, but fortunately for history, a lot of
gay people didn't like Nazis either, and they decided to
do something about it, which brings us to one of

(31:35):
the best places in LGBT history, Amsterdam. I fucking love Amsterdam.
I still got to go there. I want to go there.
Let's go one of my top places I want to visit.
It's yeah, I remember, like sitting on a triangle memorial
is like a dock into one of the canals. It's
like a triangle memorial. When I was like a baby,

(31:57):
I barely even knew I was queer, like travel in squatters,
staying there, Um, it must have been powerful, I can imagine. Yeah. Okay,
So one of the most iconic acts of gay resistance
to the Nazis is in Amsterdam after the occupation. It's
a story that weaves together some of like my favorite
people I've learned run across in history, at least judging

(32:18):
by their actions. I actually don't know much about them
as people, but you know, like they did fucking cool ship.
And we're gonna start with Willem Arandeis. He was born
in Amsterdam into a theater family. His parents were costume designers.
Originally they support he's an artist, right and they support
him in his art, of his writing and painting. But
then he came out when he was seventeen is gay,

(32:38):
and they kicked him out of the house. Um, homosexuality
was legal in the Netherlands. But um, you know, no
one liked it. I mean lots of people liked it,
but you know, society like to frown upon it. So
he develops his art. He starts taking on commercial art jobs.
He paints ads, stamps, that kind of ship. He did
some like tapestries and coats of arms for some cities,

(32:59):
at least one of which is still around. He did
a mural for the Rotterdam town hall. And you can
look up his art. Actually it's really good. Um, anyone
listening you should look it up because well, because I
think you should get tattoos of it because the rules.
But um, it's like more designery than fine art, and
which I think is cool and so. And some of
his art is on display it at the met and

(33:20):
at the reichs Museum in Amsterdam. But he wasn't really
well known at the time to be real. This is
he's a commercial artist, not something like yeah, I mean
everyone every most not every most artists are not really
well known or famous until after they pass. Yeah, totally.
And if you want to be a famous artist, UM,
you should do stuff like Willem goes on to do.

(33:42):
That's my recommendation to Okay. So he spends years of
his life partnered with a man named Jan Tison, and
he supports the two of them barely on his art
and from on the royalties. From a biography he writes
about a painter named Matthias Marris who had fought in
the Paris Commune. UM. But Willem is dirt poor, largely unknown.
He shifts to novels in five and he publishes novels

(34:05):
with the names like The Owl House, The Tragedy of
the Dream, and then this is my favorite because it's
the most Dutch gay title I've ever heard in my
life and I love it. In the blossoming Winter radish,
Oh my gosh, perfect, no no notes, you know, I
want to read it. Um. And the Nazis take over
in nineteen forty and they start off kind of trying

(34:25):
to be nice to some of the Dutch people. Clearly
not all of the Dutch people, but homosexuality have been
legal in the Netherlands for more than a century, and
so William is one of the first people to go
off and join the Dutch resistance, which was actually more
non violent in character than elsewhere in Europe, but they
weren't slouchers. By the autumn of ninety four, the resistance

(34:47):
was hiding or had hidden three hundred thousand people, and
somewhere between sixty to two hundred thousand people were doing
that hiding, and over a million people were actively letting
all of that happen just by like knowing their neighbor
is hiding somebody and not fucking saying anything about it. Yeah,
like allies. Yeah, Yeah, that's a big number. I wasn't
expecting to hi have a number where that's pretty incredible. Yeah,

(35:09):
and like gives me a little bit of hope whenever
I want to drag hope out of this kind of thing. Oh,
that's the point of this podcast, right, Um, there's over
a thousand, one hundred separate resistance newspapers which reach a
readership of over a hundred thousand people during the occupation.
But but William's partner can't handle all the heat in Amsterdam,

(35:29):
and he he fox off and moves back to a
small small town somewhere else, and Willem stays in Amsterdam
and he keeps going. In two, he starts an underground
newspaper called brendars be Brief, which means letter of insignia.
In three, emerges with another paper called I'm just gonna
say the English translations called The Free Artist, which was

(35:52):
edited by a man named Garrett von der Veen, who's
another one of today's here is actually but I believe
tragically heterosexual. No one's perfect exactly exactly, and he doesn't
get as much screen time in the story. So I
want to tell you a little bit about our man Garrett,
he who's I could be mispronouncing his name. I'm actually

(36:14):
I'm actually sorry, Dutch listeners, but I can pronounce the
name Schward, which is gonna come a little later anyway. Okay,
So he starts off his career as a mechanical engineer,
but he really just wants to be a sculptor. And
then one day before the Nazi invasion and ship, he's
standing on the shore when a fully loaded oil tanker
catches fire, so he the crew flees and gets away,
but he dives into the water, swims out to the ship,

(36:37):
extinguishes the fire in the engine room. Whoa, I know. Yeah,
he's just like this guy on the shore. He's like, oh,
ship a fire, I'm gonna go put it out. It's
like it's like Keanu Reeves helping what's her face when
someone's car breaks down and helps that person and then
but no one had, no one has evidence of this,

(36:57):
and that just my guy just did it. Yeah, need
to paparazzi to capture it. Yeah, totally totally a good person. Yeah,
and so those so the sailors, Um, they're so grateful
that they buy him a ticket to Amsterdam and pay
for a year's tuition for him to go to art
school or like an allowance for him to become a sculptor,

(37:19):
because that's what he wants to do, is he wants
to go become a sculptor. So he does. He becomes
a sculptor because he's performed this heroic deed and and
his ship is really good, like looking at photos of
and stuff, a lot of it's still around. But after
the invasion, Um and I believe he's of Aaryan ancestry,
but I'm not sure. And they asked him to sign
a paper saying sign this paper to say you are

(37:40):
of Aaryan ancestry, and he's like, no, funk, no, I'm
not going to do that, um, because he's a good person.
So instead he goes underground. He starts a newspaper, and
most importantly to our story, he starts forging I das
for for Jews and other people who are hiding from
the Nazis. So William joins vonder vonder Vine's crew and
it's made up of like art and dancers and poets

(38:01):
and ship a lot of them are openly gay, and
they just start cranking out fake I d s just
all over the place. Uh. They made more than eighty
thousand fake I d s. And because everyone over the
age of fifteen was required by the Nazis to carry
an I D and Jewish names were like Jewish ones
were marked with a big J on them. The counterfeiters

(38:22):
called their services Personal's Proof Central, and they sold the
ideas but at a sliding scale. So basically, if you're rich,
you pay a lot of money, and then if you're poor,
you would pay no money. I love that. Yeah, yeah,
how they financed the whole thing, you know, and I
to the world should be to be honest. But yeah,
totally okay. And so then there's a problem. They're making

(38:43):
all these ideas, but there there's records on everyone being
stored in a storehouse, so curious Nazis and collaborators, which
I guess you could just call them Nazis, honestly, that's
the word for Nazi collaborator, I think. So they just
they just go and go and double check the ideas
against the records stored in the warehouse and then bust
people later. And so but the Dutch resistance had people everywhere,

(39:05):
including in these records keeping storehouses or whatever, and so
they're working as fast as they can to falsify documents.
I think they're basically saying, like, okay, we did this,
following I D change the records, and they're like okay,
and they go and they change the records, but it's
not fast enough. And by the start of they all
get this sense that like really bad shit is coming
and so they need to step this up. Um, so

(39:28):
they come up with a plan and okay, So the
problem is that there's a bunch of records, right, and
the records are stored in a building. Right. But but
buildings are notoriously vulnerable to explosions and like the game
of paper rock scissors, you know, um dynamite or the
kryptonite of buildings. One might say, I like when Sophie

(39:50):
laughs at my scripted jokes. Hey, a lot from Sophie
is so affirming. I agree it. It's funny and writing.
And when he said it, thanks, what can I say? So? Okay, So,
so a lot of this crew are Pacifists. Um, not

(40:11):
all of them, We'll get to that later, but some
of them were so. Not only so they devise a
plan to not only destroy hundreds of thousands of Nazi
records and and blow up a building, but to do
it without killing or seriously injuring anyone. Um, which is
my argument is that these people invented the heist movie. Yeah, yeah,
that's funny, to be honest. To be honest, it takes

(40:36):
a lot for me to laugh out loud, Like when
I'm watching comedy or whatever, I'm usually just silent and
I feel like a piece of ship. But I find
thinks funny. I just don't react it's fine. It's fine,
I say, you thought that was funny. So it's this
is not a small plot. In the end, fifteen people
get arrested for it, and there's so many more people

(40:57):
involved than that. Um. But to tell it like a
heist movie, I'm to start with the action on march
Arndeus and the whole crew of of other people. They
dress up as like army captains and ship um police captains. Actually,
I think they march over to the record storehouse and
they're like hey, they say to the guards, because the
guards are on you know, they're like, something's up. We're

(41:18):
gonna be really careful. And so they show up and
they're like, hey, we we think that there's people trying
to blow up this building, so we're here to sweep
the building and check for explosives. Um. Well, I love this.
I love this. Where's this movie? And so the guards
believe them and let them in. Uh. And then medical

(41:39):
students who are with them pull out syringes full of
sedatives and inject the guards, rendering them unconscious. They drag
them over to the zoo next door because this buildings
next to the zoo, and just like leave them unconscious
in the zoo. Okay, zoo twist, not expecting that last
thing I thought were gonna say was zoo. It's incredible.
I love that dish into their plan. They could have

(42:02):
just left them there, but they put them in right
now exactly because they didn't want to hurt anybody. So
they pull all the records they can find, They pile
them up in the center of the room. They pour
benzene on them as an accelerant. They place bombs, They
grab all the blank I d s and all the
money that they can find, and they get the funk
out and the building goes boom. Successful heist movie. Yeah

(42:25):
it wasn't so it wasn't completely destroyed. But the building
is soon on fire. So the fire department comes and
they show up kind of late, and then they kind
of take their sweet time putting out the fire. And
then when the fire is out, they just keep pouring
water on the building, just keep going because because they're
trying to destroy all the records. Because the fire department

(42:46):
got tipped off saying hey, hey, can you help us
destroy this building. You can always count okay, the fire department,
You can always count on them. Like you know, there's
there's cops, then there's firemen, and there's always a good guy.
And yeah, it comes for history obviously. The way that
my dad put it once is that no one becomes
a firefighter because they enjoy having power over other people. Yeah,

(43:10):
I love that. I've never put heard it in those words,
but yes, yes, and opposite for cops, yeah, exactly. Um
So in the end, they destroyed about eight hundred thousand
records on people, uh, which and it gets painted as
this failure because that was only about of the total
that were stored in the building. Um. But they also

(43:30):
they make it out with six d blanc ideas and
fifty thou guilders. And I could not, for the life
of me figure out how much fifty thousand guilders is
in today's money. And U S dollars. I tried, I promise,
I tried someone. I'm gonna say it's a lot. Yeah,
it's more money than I currently have. I'm willing to bet.
And yeah, it's like okay, So sometimes like history is like,
oh and they kind of failed. I'm like, okay, they

(43:50):
didn't like single handedly save everyone in Amsterdam all at once,
but they fucking destroyed eight hundred thousand records and like
saved thou pens of lives, you know, they put guards
in zeus. What I would say, it's mostly a success.
I mean obviously not like stupendously. I don't know. Yeah, okay,

(44:13):
so there was a trader in their midst, and unfortunately
for the heist movie and for them and for us,
we do actually we actually don't know who the trader
was Judas. Yeah, and they get sold out and one
by one the conspirators get arrested. William when he's arrested,
they grab his journal and use it to catch a
bunch more of the people. And like, just I'm really

(44:37):
not trying to shame anybody, but if you're going to
blow up a Nazi warehouse, you should burn all the
evidence at your earliest convenience. So keep that in mind. Yeah, exactly,
And okay, so fifteen of them are rounded up, William Arandeus.
His defense in court is basically like I did literally
all of it. Blame it all on me, No one
else had anything to do with it. And it's not
the first time that doing research for this podcast, I've

(44:58):
run across people using this defense and court um because
it's it's a cool thing. That cool people sometimes do,
and it it saves two of his codefendants lives. Two
of the medical students are like just given like fifteen
years in prison or whatever, which fortunately means they're given
a couple of years in prison and then you know,
the Allies liberate the Netherlands. Um. But he didn't save everyone.

(45:22):
Along with twelve others, he was marched out to the
dunes and executed. Um. His last communication was through his lawyer,
who was also a badass. I'm gona talk about her
in a little bit, and he said to her, And
this gets translated a thousand different ways in every retellion
of it, but he said to her basically, never let
them say that homosexuals are cowards. Well, yeah, that is beautiful.

(45:44):
What a life, what a good guy? I know? That
is I like this show. Thanks, I do too, Um
any the thing I I mean, like, I was, like
I cried so many times when I was like researching
this episode, because mean, this guy just wanted to fucking
like paint and write novels and like funck his boyfriend.

(46:05):
And then instead Nazis took over his fucking country and
he did what he had to do, and like and
the other guy that's like a sculptor. Yeah, it's you're
not allowed to express yourself creativity or like as an artist,
you're you're like you're forced into activism almost because to survive,
if that makes sense. Totally forced, but you're by default totally.

(46:26):
But yeah, it's Wow. I'm glad to know about these people.
That is cool. I'm gonna tell you about more of them. Yeah,
more cool people that do cool things. Okay, I'm gonna
tell you about his boyfriend next. Um, not the one
who like fucked off because she got too hot, but
the one that um he dated later and was dating
during at all. His name was Schward Baker. And um,

(46:48):
that's the name you can say. Yeah, yeah, totally because
one of my best friends in Amsterdam his name is short.
Um and I actually am still not saying it correctly. Um,
but you know, yeah, everyone i'm short knows. Um. Hopefully
my friend short is listening to this and forgives me. Okay, so, uh,
he's a tailor, not my friend my friends owns a

(47:08):
pizza shop, but this guy is as a tailor and
short bocker. He sewed the counterfeit police uniforms that they
all wore into the office, and because he was William's partner,
the defense tried a strategy of like basically be like
go easy on him. He only did it because he
was in love with willem Um. And then short was like,
oh fuck no, like no, I fucking did it and

(47:30):
I would do it again, like fuck that love so
again not cowards. But that's like, you know what, that's amazing.
He could have just saved his ass and then instead
and this is the gayest part of all and the
part that I love. Um, right before he dies, he's
offered one last request and I don't see what you say.
It is about choking up. He asks for his pretty

(47:52):
pink shirt, and so he puts on his pretty pink shirt.
And that's a pretty pink shirt is a translation some
machine translate shan I you know, but but he asked
for his pretty pink shirt. Um. He gets marched out
to the dunes and he gets executed alongside his lover.
And it was his shirt, his pink shirt, that helped
people identify the bodies of all the people who got executed. Um,

(48:15):
that's I. My eyes are kind of water so sweet
and sad, you know. And then his his his brother
and his uncle kept fighting and they also died later
in the resistance. Um. But then you got someone who survives,
Frieda Belafonte who's a part Jewish, lesbian celliston conductor, and

(48:35):
she's the first woman in the world to serve as
the permanent conductor for a professional orchestra. But that that
comes later because she survives. And it's not very often
that you get to say the lesbian survives in a
story like this. You know, Um, she was this promising cellist,
she won a conducting competition against entirely men, and then
Nazis takeover, and as someone whose father but not mother

(48:59):
was Jewish, she was allowed to apply for a special
dispensation to keep working professionally under the under the Nazi regime,
at least at the start. But she was like, no,
fuck you, I'm not going to fucking do that, And
so she puts down her music career, puts it on hold,
and she goes underground and starts forging fake I d
s Um. And after the bombing, she goes underground again

(49:20):
and she dresses as a man, as she often did
to avoid detection or for whatever reason that she felt
like dressing like man. Um, probably being part of an expert.
Fake ID ring helps when you're trying to go underground,
you know, Um, I would imagine that's a good asset
to have. I was just thinking like, how all these

(49:40):
badass people they consciously like every opportunity that was presented
to them as like you can save yourself, like you
can have an easier life if you just like, kind
of what's the word, like, um, I know, I can't
think of the word either, but if you just roll
over and just go along with it, not consolid but

(50:01):
there's a word that I'm thinking of. That's not the word,
but it's really cool. But with every opportunity that was
presented to them, they're still like, no, this is who
I am. I'm not a coward. Yeah, it's it's not
even I don't even think the kind of I would
go on record saying like they didn't even think of
it that way, you know what I mean, just basically
did it because that's the right thing to do, and
they're good people. Totally. Yeah, I think that there was

(50:23):
like that that's not an option, like why would I exactly? Um,
But but what is an option is buying fake I
d s from our sponsor Fake I d ring dot
is it net or calm Sophie, I think it's it's yeah,
it's definitely dot org okay, nonprofit. Yeah. And so for

(50:44):
our next wholesome sponsor is the concept of fake I
d s as well as whatever other ads come after
I say this and then stop talking. But mostly but
mostly fake ideas. Yeah, and potatoes, m okay, and we

(51:05):
are back so free to um So resistance folks smuggle
her first to Belgium to France, and then she has
to get across the Alps into Switzerland. But it's a winter,
so she crosses on foot. She crosses the fucking Alps
on foot in winter. Holy ship, that is yeah. Yeah,
it's like not something I'm trying to do. You know. No,

(51:27):
I already thought she was a badass, like before the break,
but now it's like, oh yeah, yeah, confirmed, yeah. Uh.
So she makes it to Switzerland and she starts a
choir in the refugee camp. Um of course she does
love her and then uh and then she becomes local
to you all. After the war, she moves to Orange County, California.
I actually don't know Orange County is I think we

(51:48):
don't know? Ship? Okay, it's I mean, like technically, like
if you're looking at a map, sure, but we don't
we don't. We don't clip. Los Angeles does not clip
Orange County. Okay, maybe maybe back then it was more like, oh,
this is all this hot desert so Cal. We're all
the same. But at this point, Orange County is like

(52:08):
a red red, very red, very vaccine anti mask situation
in Anaheim. Anaheim is part of Orange County and I
was born there. Well, shout out to Anaheim for doing
something right. Yeah, just me, just given a strain. Literally,
all I know about Orange County is that someone I
went to high school with was an actor on the

(52:30):
O C. That's that's. That's as much as you should know, honestly. Yeah,
you're The theme song just went bursting into my head. Actually, wait,
I know people from Anaheim going to be like mad
at me for even saying that. So I had to
look it up. Oh no, it is the second largest

(52:53):
city in Orange County. Okay, great because that's also where
Disney is. So I was like, is it Angeles or
Orange County? Okay, sorry, anyone out there, uh please don't
add me, thanks, okay, Okay, Um, So now everyone knows
that I don't know anything about California. I'm a fucking
Appalachian girl at the moment. Okay, that's that's that's what
we're here for. Yeah, honestly, I wish I wish I

(53:16):
did not know anything about this place. I wish I
was catapulted into out of space. I don't want to
be here. I don't want to know anything, said good
to know. Um, Freida wanted to be there, not l A,
but Orange County. So she goes to Orange County and
she starts. She organized the Philharmonic Orchestra and does it
as a nonprofit and all their concerts are free to

(53:37):
the public, and she she runs the orchestra for about
fifteen years, and now she's the aforementioned first permanent conductor
of an orchestra or whatever. Um, a woman conductor of
an orchestra. And then one day, after like fifteen years,
someone's like, and I'm paraphrasing here is and making this
exact way it goes up whatever, making this part of
but not the thing that happens, just the words. Okay,
So one day someone's like, oh, ship, we're letting a

(54:00):
woman run an orchestra, and so they start talking about
firing her right because like whoops, we accele woman. But
then they're going back and forth about it. They're like, ah, yeah,
but she's like really good, like maybe we should let
her keep doing it. And then someone's like wait, wait wait,
but she's also a lesbian, so she gets fired cause
that person. Yeah, And I feel like it's like worth
pointing out that, like you know, like like a lot

(54:23):
of World War two is like the bad guys and
then the so so guys, you know, like, um, it's
not like everyone fucking like it's not like Brittain was like, man,
we're so and not a whatever. Britain's really anti Semitic too,
is what I'm trying to say. But there's still like
a scale, you know. I agree, it's there is no

(54:43):
It's like it's not black and white thinking. There's no
good and evil, like you know what I mean, Like
again what you said earlier, people that support Nazis are Nazis,
you know what I mean, People that are like even
a little bit homophobic or like whatever. It is like
it's just like I don't know that makes sense. I
guess that partly black and white thinking, but I think
you know what I mean, And I'm going to shut up.

(55:04):
Let you continue. It's black and gray thinking. There's the evil,
and then there's the slightly less evil, and then there's
the I know, and then the good. Are the individuals
who are doing this kind of ship you know, yes, yes,
And so the Kanu read yeah of our race, Yeah exactly,
And I'm I'm like trying to picture counter Reeves playing

(55:26):
her in the movie. Um, but I know that it's
not allowed. Okay anyway, um okay. So she gets fired
and she but she keeps working with music the rest
of her life. And one of her whole things that
she ends up having to do is that the whole
story that I'm telling you, this whole bombing plot, people
took the gay angle out of it. In history, Like
even though William's last fucking words were like never let

(55:48):
never let them say that homosexuals are cowards. People were
just like, look at these great resistance fighters and like,
never talk about their sexuality. And so it wasn't until
the nine like history. History is all made up and
made up by mostly straight white man Yeah, Trust history books,
the Trust history books. Um ah no, no, no, I mean.

(56:10):
And so it's in the nineties when she is able
to like tell them like, no, the fucking the fact
that we are like gay is fucking part of this
um and needs to be part of the legacy. Um.
And she dies. She's a good fucking run of it.
Another guy, Karl Groger, He was part Jewish, although he'd
been baptized Catholic. He had been born in Austria as

(56:32):
father was a lawyer and his father was like defended
the people who later became Nazis. Um. But young Carl,
he was a social democrat and he was a medical student,
and he gets the funck to Amsterdam as soon as
he can to get away from the Nazis. But then
the Nazis come after, of course, and he gets conscripted
into the German Army, and then they quickly figured out
that he's part Jewish and kick him out, so he

(56:53):
joins the resistance. He works on a newspaper called ratten
Kreutz or something rat Poison, which is a fucking punk
rock name for goddamnpaper. Super metal. Yeah, and he's um.
I think he's one of the medical students who sedates
the guards, and I think he's the only one of
the medical students who gets executed. But I'm not hundreds
and sort of about that. Um. But his last letter

(57:14):
to his parents includes the line I believe that with
this one action, I brought more boon to humanity than
an entire life as as a physician would have done. Um.
And he's probably right. No, I think so too. It's
he's I don't know, it's like, what what will what

(57:35):
will shift the thinking of humanity versus what you know
what I mean, like totally, the fact that he had
even like a nudge of that arrow is so much
more helpful than versus like, I don't know, I was
gonna say, oh my god, I was going to say,
delivering a babe. Maybe I should not see that. I mean, like,

(57:55):
doctors could do lots and lots of good stuff and
I'm entirely but he like, but he definitely saves more literal,
just immediate lives just by fucking burning eight hundred thousand records,
and he like, yeah, and you're right. He also just
shows that people can stand up for ship, you know. Okay,
So then another one. You've got another Willam William Sandberg

(58:16):
and he's a He was a typographer, which is seems
like a good skill set if you're gonna become a counterfeiter,
and he he helped plan the whole thing. And then
he actually he goes underground and he survives. He's hidden
by a dentist friend after the bombing, and he keeps
up his typographic work. He like keeps doing his art
while he's underground, and he releases nineteen experimental typographic pamphlets

(58:37):
because he's a fucking artist, um, while he's on the run.
And I kind of love that too, like he said,
asides art a little bit. But then he was like, oh,
but now I have all this time to work on
my art because I'm hiding from that. I gotta express myself.
I'm an artist. Yeah, And and he designs the plaque
for all of his dead friends, um that hangs on

(58:58):
the building where the attack happen. And he goes on
to direct one of the more important museums in Amsterdam,
the stead Lick, where he he constantly runs into trouble
for trying to present art that involves sexuality, because Nazis
aren't the only shitty prudes around. Um. Then there's a
Rudy Bloomgarten who's a very nonpacifist Jewish resistance member. Before

(59:22):
before the bombing. He tried to assassinate a high up
Nazi collaborator after the bombing. When they came to arrest him,
he shot the arresting officer and got the funk away. Um.
He was caught later in a nearby city. He didn't
survive the war, but like, fuck it. He blew up
a Nazi warehouse and shot a Nazi And I don't
what more can anyone else? Yeah, like, yes, thank you

(59:43):
for that. You gave us a good life. Okay. Another
nonpacifist was Johann Brauer. And almost everyone else is like
artists and students and ship right, But Johann was a
bank robber, uh, at least in that but and more
than that. So he's a bank robber in the twenties.
And then he murders a guy who's blackmailing him about
the bank robbery, and then he goes to prison for

(01:00:05):
murdering the guy's blackmailing about the bank robbery. And then
he gets out, and then he gets his PhD and
like Spanish mysticism, uh, and he converts to Catholicism and
then he fights in the Spanish Civil War on the
Republican side, which is like not what most Catholics are doing.
Most Catholics are specifically on the fascist side of that one.
And then he comes back from the Spanish Civil War
and becomes a professor and the Nazis to come take

(01:00:27):
over the country. They fire him because they figure he
was a murderer and he probably shouldn't be teaching kids,
which I actually think he should be teaching kids, because
so he up himself the blackmailed. Come on, come on, yeah,
that's a well rounded guy. He could teach kid Yeah, exactly. Um,
And so he blows up their records and I think
he gets executed. I wish I want to find out

(01:00:47):
more about this guy, because he's sucking. Yeah, he sounds
really fast, and I know I want to be friends
with him. He's a complete wing nut who always throws
down when you need when you need it, you know, Yes,
I love that, love it. Love the con Yeah. I
love a good scam. Yeah, totally. The guy who helped
them figure out where to place the explosives was named
Martinists Knight Kniehoff. He was a World War One vet

(01:01:11):
who fought against the German invasion as part of a
regiment of bicycle infantry. I was not aware that bicycle
infantry was a thing until I I read about this man. Um,
but yeah, me either. The more you say it, the
more I'm like, can I am I managing? Just like
an army of bicyclists in their little spio outfits. That's
that's what I imagine. A bicyclist is a little like

(01:01:33):
skin tight, you know what. I like the brand? Yeah, no, yeah, yeah,
not like whatever shrine. As much as a man in
uniform was very handsome, I think a man spito is
more handsome. I'm fully okay with the great thank you
this version of Yeah. And so he's like the explosives
guy for him. Uh, he looks up the he gets

(01:01:55):
the blueprints of the building from an architect who's one
of them, and he suggests, okay, here's where you should
place the bombs. And he wasn't caught. I don't think
he actually went on the actual raid. He just told
them where to place the bombs. And after the war
they had a hunger winter, which is never a good
time when you're when your country is a hunger winter
where twenty Dutch people starved to death or frozen to death. Um,

(01:02:18):
because I've never heard that term before. Yeah, I didn't
even heard about the Hunger Winner until reading about this guy. Um.
And then he because war has all kinds of unintended
consequences um or intended consequences, I guess sometimes. And so
he he hangs out at his house and hands out
all of his food to two kids until his supplies
are exhausted. Um, and he survives, and he's mostly remembered.

(01:02:40):
First poetry. So I like that the speedo wearing um
explosive sky from the heist movie. I'm talking about these
like real people as if they're whatever anyway, Um, they aren't.
I mean, no, he's a poem. And as I mean,
a good heist movie is like there are real heists
in the world, we just call it a heist, you
know what I mean. But in a highst movie, there

(01:03:02):
are a bunch of different characters with a bunch of
different like backgrounds of qualifications. So this just makes sense
to me. There's a poet, there's a bank robber, there's
a sculpture, there's an art I can keep going. Okay,
another guy who was named CNIG and after the bombing,
he just like goes back to school his medical school,
like nothing happened. But then He just gets arrested while

(01:03:25):
he's staking his medical exam and he he's one of
the people who gets saved by by Willem by his admission,
and he goes to a concentration company. He's freed when
the Netherlands ise liberated. And then you got your noble
because you need a random noble in all of this too,
write you need a rich guy. You need so Edwards
Samuel Adrian von Moossen Broke Broke uh moose Chin broke.

(01:03:50):
He was. He was basically nobility. He also didn't like
the Nazis, and so he fights against the German invasion.
And then the Dutch army capitulates, and you know, the
Netherlands gives up. So he he and his friend drive
off to join the British army and then he joins
and fights with the British Army as far as France
before he's captured by the Germans. He escapes the Germans,

(01:04:10):
he makes his way back to Amsterdam. He joins the resistance,
helps blow up the records. Then he goes into hiding,
but he was tracked down, arrested and executed um and
he spent three months in prison with his arms chained
above his head in a cell and his his father
was also sentenced to five was since to five years
in prison because he had sent a postcard to his

(01:04:32):
kid that was like good luck and its like was
probably good luck blowing up the Nazis. But um sad yeah,
Um okay, then you have a double agent cop, because
you needed a double agent cop, the only good kind
of cop. I would say that. I agree, Um. Cornelius Ruse.

(01:04:53):
He's supposed to be policing the Jewish quarter, but instead
he's actively helping Jews escape, including at least in one case,
high ding them in his house. And he's the one
who steals the police the two police uniforms that he
then gives to short in order to have them copied. Um.
And he also uh after the attack, he's passing along
all the police information about how they're trying to catch everyone. Um.

(01:05:17):
But unfortunately, because he's passing along those documents, when one
of the people is caught, they find the documents, they
trace it back to him. Um, and he's executed alongside
his comrades. Every time you introduced someone like, I'm just
so curious where it's going to end up, like and
then they were executed or and then they got what
you know what I mean totally um good another another

(01:05:39):
good person uh, Henry Hobart Hobbard stat Uh. He arranged
the explosive heist in the first places. They needed to
steal the explosives to blow up the other place, right. Um.
And so one of his relatives was a cop, and
he gets the relative cop double agent to sneak out
the explosives to him, which he then used personally on
some like railway lines to to funk up with the

(01:06:00):
just sunk up the Germans. But then he um, he
gives bombs to the the bombing plot and he gets
executed for that. Uh. And then there's Garrett Vonderveen who
I was talking about earlier, the sculptor Um. Before the bombing,
he actually wants set fire sculptor. This is the guy
with the ship. Yes, I've been curious about the guy. Okay,

(01:06:21):
So before the bombing, he actually set fire to an
employment office for the same purpose, but he didn't do
a very good job of it, so it didn't really
do much damage. Then he had the more successful bombing, right,
and then he goes on underground. He stays on the
run for two years, and he gets it gets increasingly desperate.
At one point, he and two others carry out another
raid that scores them like ten thousand blank ideas instead

(01:06:43):
of like the six d they grabbed the time before.
But more and more of his friends are winding up
in prison and so he can't have that right, so
he tries to raid the prison to set them free.
Six times, um. Six times he tries, and six times
he fails, like he just won't sing quit attacking the prison.
And then the last time he attacks the prison is

(01:07:04):
on May one. He and twenty eight others were let
in by a friendly guard but they I know, But
they get attacked by a guard dog and Vondervin shoots
the dog um, which everyone hears, and so a firefight
breaks out. Vondervin gets shot in the back and paralyzed

(01:07:24):
from the waist down and somehow still escapes. Uh Like,
maybe he's carried away by a comrade. That's like the
more likely thing, but I don't know. This guy just
like doesn't know how a fucking quit, So it's like
kind of easy to imagine him just like crawling away,
yes exactly, And a friendly doctor treats him and they
are all caught a couple of weeks later, and he
was tried and executed another The ending is always the

(01:07:48):
one that was like, where's it gonna go? Okay, one more?
One more? No, no, no, no, I love really only
wrote one more. Um, that's fine. Okay. So so even
their fucking lawyer is cool. Okay. The woman Yeah, yeah, okay,
So Lao Mazarel, I'm listening. Yeah, no, no, no, I

(01:08:15):
think you are. Solo is down for the struggle before
the Nazis, during the Nazis, and after the Nazis. She
represents immigrants and refugees and queers and Romani folks. Before
the Nazi invasion, she tried and failed to get the
Dutch government and the synagogues to destroy all the records
about who's Jewish. Basically, she's like, this ship is gonna happen.

(01:08:37):
Have you seen Germany? You should get rid of your lists,
and they're like yeah, we like lists, you know. And
then it happens that she's like seen, yeah, I told
you yeah, and her her smart lady, I know her,
her Jewish husband goes on the run with her her kids,
who are so because their kids are part Jewish or whatever.
Get get in trouble too, and uh, they actually I

(01:09:00):
have the war two. And she frees people like legally
when she can and illegally when she passed to. One time,
she like literally jumps on a train to drag Jewish
kids off of them, basically being like, you can't kill them,
They're like under my legal protection or whatever. Yeah, oh
my god, I love these people. And she was originally
gonna go with everyone on the night of the bombing

(01:09:21):
and helped do the bombing, but in the end she
decided not to go because she was too short to
realistically pass as a cop um. So as soon as
I read this, I like message my my lawyer friend
and was like I found you in history um and uh.
And then after, you know, after the Nazi thing is

(01:09:43):
over or whatever, she becomes In addition to fighting for
all these other things, she also becomes an anti census
activist because she's like, I've seen what happens when governments
keep lists of people. You know what, yes, yes, I've
always you know, the census always drives me the wrong way.
I don't understand it. This woman she does what's that

(01:10:04):
They also never seem to do it right in America. Yeah, no,
what's the whatever. But I do like that because she
was the one that Willem I hope that's his name,
that he told her that. I just don't let anyone
say gays aren't counts, right, or homosexuals or whatever the
word he so if because she was the one, the

(01:10:26):
only person that was told that. She probably is the
one that kind of like wrote like or helped write
what happened in the history and stuff, right, That's that's
what I would assume. I think, so m she also no,
I just was gonna say, that makes her really cool
to me. Like in nineteen forty six, I just didn't
even make it into my script, but like in ninety

(01:10:47):
six she um forms or helps form one of the
like main gay rights organizations, um, and just like she's like, yeah, okay,
Like I think she's probably as a straight too, I
don't know whatever, she's married as kids, that doesn't make
her straight, but you know, she's just like, I'm gonna
fucking absolutely get involved in LGBT ship as soon as
this happens a true ally yeah, like in an actual

(01:11:10):
sense of the word, like allies and like the two
of us are invading a country together, you know, like
mm hmmm, mm hmm. Yeah, no, totally. Um, I like her,
like all these people. I like all I like all
these people. This is you know, before I hopped on
Happy the best day, you know what I mean. But

(01:11:31):
you know, I'm pleasantly surprised these people are. So I
want to look up all these people when we're done
with this and just excuse me. I mean, I'm a
very cynical person and I don't have faith and humanity.
I think we are terrible. Um, and I unfortunately think
the bad at weighs the good because bad usually wins.

(01:11:51):
But this kind of stuff really gives me hope that
like actual good people will keep doing good things, you know,
and there's a reason like jumping in the ocean and
helping a ship not be on fire, like you know
what I mean, There's always going to be that I
don't know what I'm saying, But there's always a point, Yes,

(01:12:15):
there's always a point in every podcast where I start
to philosophize. So this is the point where is the
right time I'm here for? But um, but no, I
think I think, especially in the culture that we are
in now, which I don't like, how there's like you're
being observed at all times. There's cameras everywhere or like you,

(01:12:37):
and when you're not being observed, you want to be
the observer and like record something or take a photo
or there's all these outside forces that influence your accents,
your actions. Unfortunately, um, even subconsciously. I think that happens,
whether it's like posting something or you want to share,
especially as artists. If you want to share something, there's
going to be a reaction and you have to be
on line to even feel relevant in all this stuff.

(01:12:59):
So I think if we just dial all that back in,
like I don't know, doing good things just to do
them versus like like I hate when celebrities are like
I fit the homeless today, just like go through the homeless,
you know what I mean, go do any money. You
don't have to tell us about it, you know what
I mean. If they're actually good, they would just do
it and not say a word. How would they get

(01:13:22):
how would they get compliments on the Twitter? And so
performative But that's just prus it's performative, you know what
I mean. Um, But maybe one day the good my
way the bad. But the current trajectory, I don't know. Man, Yeah,
I don't know. It's ah, I don't know. We'll see

(01:13:43):
what happens, but I like this kind of show to
give me hope. I'm I'm glad. Uh yeah, I don't know.
I I One of the things I like about how
all of them are artists and stuff is that they're
not doing it for cloud. You know, they're just doing
it because they're like, well, I'm an artist, but I
also gotta I gotta do this ship now, like exactly

(01:14:04):
like some of them, you got to use their skill sets,
like the typographer or whatever. But the cellist isn't like
I'm playing cello for the revolution. The cellis is like,
I guess I'm making fake ideas now, you know. Yeah,
these are very talented people in their own rend because
they're notable in whatever they're doing. Yeah, not that it
matters to be notable, but you know what. And then okay,

(01:14:25):
so the the this whole plot I've been calling it
like the Amsterdam plot and all my notes, it doesn't
have a cool name in history that I've able to
been able to find, like even the group of them,
they don't get called like, I don't know, the cool
gay artists who blew up Nazis or whatever blew up
Nazis warehouses. They just get called the Garrett Vonderveien Group
because there's a strike guy there who like helps run

(01:14:47):
some of it. Um, I don't know, do you have
any do you have any name ideas for them? Like
what do we call the you know, the gay bombers
of Amsterdam or you know, um not to about you
on the spot very literally, I mean, this is this
is so the first thing I thought it was bad.
It's not good. I thought of glam Squad just on

(01:15:12):
the g G train, you know what I mean. I
was on that. I was on that word. Um. I
think squad can be a badass edition, but I also
think it's like predictable and maybe you should just be
some random word like I don't know the I'm trying
to come by, Like just find a word that's like bombers,

(01:15:32):
but like the person of that, like that's just that's
not what I want. Well that's what they did, though.
They showed up and they were like, hey, we're the
bomb Squad. We're here to check for bombs. That's pretty
Actually they're the original. They're the very first bomb squad
that you should ever know what they are. They're the
O G Bomb Squad. That's what they are. Bombs. I'm

(01:15:54):
glad we came up. That's not the greatest, not the greatest,
but I will finish there. So that's it for today.
When we come back on Wednesday, we're gonna keep talking
about this stuff. We're gonna talk. We're gonna move back
over to Germany, and we're gonna learn more about cool
gays who did cool gay stuff like fight Nazis. Yeah,
thanks for having me. Thanks. Do you have any uh

(01:16:15):
plugs fresh your shoe? Oh? Yeah, that again about being
observed and needed to stay relevant. Um. If you want
to follow me on the internet, you're allowed to. I'm
on Twitter at Shiro Hero six six six um and
on Instagram is just Shiro hero. And if you want
to know anything about me, you can just Google me
and find it there. It's fine. I don't don't. I

(01:16:37):
feel very jaded at this point. I have a podcast,
I have a poetry book. It's all of the internet
somewhere I don't know find it. Yeah, if you really care,
you would dig for the information. Any any plugs for
you at the moment. Uh? Well, I still like plugging
my new podcast Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff that
you often listen. I like you plugging that too, Yeah,

(01:16:57):
I just don't know where they can listen to it. No,
I'm not sure either. I think you actually can't find
podcasts anywhere, um but legally Yeah, totally so hard to find.
Or if you're willing to go underground to the to
find it everywhere you listen to podcasts, you can do that. Yeah,

(01:17:20):
good show, I like it. See you all, Weinstein. Cool
People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool
Zone Media. Or more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit
our website cool zone media dot com, or check us
out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
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