0:02

Okay, welcome back

0:04

to the podcast that this is, which

0:06

is not the podcast that this isn't um,

0:09

which is to say that this is behind the bastards

0:12

family. Was that? Come on? Come

0:14

on? I was being very specific, Sophie,

0:17

Love of God, you're talking about the worst people in

0:19

all of history. Okay, that's what we do. That's our that's

0:21

our milieu is the worst people bad, yes,

0:24

and one of the and one. Sometimes

0:27

those are bad people. There's dead babies.

0:29

We always have this wonderful lady on

0:32

Sophia Alexandria is here today

0:34

to talk with us about some dead babies.

0:36

Well, Robert, what did I say?

0:40

I said, stop only

0:42

inviting me to dead baby things? Can

0:44

you break it up with some adult murder

0:46

every once in a while? I mean, yeah, there

0:49

was some adult murder in the last one. Come

0:51

on, remember that doesn't

0:53

count of Part two. Is baby murder

0:56

that neiggates Part one? I

0:59

don't know that it is. I

1:01

think it just makes for more murdered

1:03

people. I think that we do one

1:05

baby murder episode, we do one other

1:08

people murder episode, and that is

1:10

a healthy balance for our relationship,

1:13

you know what. I respect that and

1:16

I accept it. Okay, all right, well,

1:18

good, See this is why communication

1:20

is so critical. I'm hugging you through

1:22

the zoom. Thank you so much,

1:24

Sophie. I'm hugging you to talk. Yeah,

1:28

oh yes,

1:31

right for having me. You're welcome

1:34

your will. So

1:36

this is part two of our episode you know about

1:39

Nazis and stuff? Right, actually

1:41

introduced me, you fool? Okay,

1:44

I did. I could said you're Sophia Alexandria,

1:46

who we talked about. Well, you're also a comedian

1:48

a podcast. First of all, pronounced

1:51

her last name, right, Sophia Alexandria.

1:54

Nope, what Alexandra?

1:57

Sorry?

2:00

What fucking I was thinking about

2:03

princesses. Um. I have literally

2:06

hundreds of hours with you. I

2:09

know I was thinking of princesses. I

2:11

too think of royalty when I think of Sophia,

2:14

but I know how to pronounce her last name. Yes,

2:17

you're so good at making him look like shit.

2:23

This is an episode about Nazis, and I'm

2:25

looking worse than the Nazis right now, not

2:29

worse than not after this episode.

2:32

I'm not Jesus what with all the baby killing?

2:34

All right, let's

2:35

let's all

2:39

right. So, you know, when

2:42

one of the nice things Sophia

2:44

about studying the old Nazis as

2:46

opposed to studying today's fascists

2:50

is that we we we do know

2:52

how things ended with the old ones, right,

2:54

Like you know, they don't win in

2:56

the end, um,

2:58

And we're all we don't know at about our fascists,

3:01

right, We're all still living through this. And there's

3:03

a there's a there's a pretty good chance they'll

3:05

wind up, they'll wind up taking home the trophy,

3:07

you know. Um,

3:11

Yeah, I do believe in us, but

3:13

it's certainly the game is not the game

3:16

is not ended. Um. The game

3:18

is certainly still afoot. Yeah,

3:20

And I think we all have to get used to the idea.

3:23

Like one of the frustrating things I think there's this, like,

3:25

especially if you have friends and family members who kind

3:27

of went went Trump and have been getting

3:29

increasingly at least

3:32

far right, if not explicitly fashy

3:34

over the last few years, is that like you

3:37

want some sort of emotional closure where

3:39

they're like, I fucked up, I was wrong,

3:41

Like I I made a bad call. It's

3:44

never gonna happen. It's never going to happen.

3:47

Um. And one of the things

3:49

that I think is most interesting about Meyer's

3:51

book, they thought they were free. Is

3:53

that he talks to like

3:56

former Nazis about that. These guys are You

3:58

would think if anyone can be like, ah, yeah,

4:00

that was the wrong horse to bag, it would be guys living

4:02

in Germany in like nineteen but

4:05

like, no, like they don't.

4:08

Like even those people weren't like, oh you

4:10

know what, this was a bad call. My

4:12

kids are dead in my house, got burned down in

4:14

a bombing raid. Probably voted

4:16

for the wrong guy. That's not what I want. I'm

4:19

sure there was some unfortunate mistakes,

4:21

but overall it's been a pretty

4:24

good couple of years. That's exactly

4:26

what they said. It's

4:30

it's amazing these guys, these little Nazis.

4:33

And again, these are not the guys who got rich

4:35

under Nazism, Like these are not the Venti

4:37

Nazis. They're just merely

4:40

tall yeah yeah,

4:42

yeah, tall, which again in Starbucks

4:44

and Nazi terminology means short. Um.

4:48

So yeah,

4:50

it's it's it's fascinating.

4:52

Rather than turning against Hitler, these little Nazis,

4:54

the guys that Meyer you befriended, they

4:57

looked back on the Nazi time and power as

4:59

like a golden age, and they blamed the Fewer's

5:01

failures on everyone but him.

5:03

Only one of Meyer's ten friends was

5:06

actually willing to condemn large aspects

5:08

of the Nazi system. As for the others.

5:10

Quote, the other nine decent, hard

5:12

working, ordinarily intelligent and honest

5:14

men did not know before nineteen thirty three

5:16

that Nazism was evil. They did not know between

5:19

nineteen thirty three and forty five that it was evil,

5:21

and they do not know it now. None of them

5:23

ever knew or knows now Nazism

5:25

as we knew it and know it, and they lived under

5:27

it, served it, and indeed made it. These

5:30

nine ordinary Germans knew it absolutely

5:32

otherwise, and they still know it otherwise.

5:34

If our view of national socialism is a little

5:36

simple, so as there's an autocracy,

5:39

yes, of course, an autocracy as in the fable

5:41

days of the golden time our parents knew,

5:44

but a tyranny, as you Americans use the term

5:46

nonsense. When I asked Tara Wedtkin to

5:48

the Baker why he had believed in national

5:50

socialism, he said, because it promised

5:52

to solve the unemployment problem. And it did,

5:55

But I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody

5:57

did. I thought I had struck pay dirt and

5:59

I said, what do you mean, what it would lead to

6:02

war? He said, nobody ever imagined

6:04

that it would lead to war. And that's interesting.

6:06

When they talk about what it led to, they're not talking about

6:09

the Holocaust. They're not talking about the deportations,

6:11

they're not talking about the murder of of the

6:13

Roma, they're not talking about the murder of you know,

6:15

Hitler's political enemies. They're talking

6:17

about the thing that fucked them up

6:19

personally. That's what they didn't realize

6:22

it would lead to. But you know what, that baker

6:24

has the kind of vibes where he would not

6:26

bake a cake for a gay couple. Definitely

6:29

not. And hearing reading that quote

6:31

reminds me of the perennially

6:33

relevant tweet by Adrian Bought. I

6:36

never thought leopards would eat my face, sobs

6:38

woman who voted for the leopards eating people's

6:40

faces party. But

6:47

like it also reminds me of a Simpsons

6:50

line. Um, sure,

6:53

Nazis have made some mistakes in the past, but

6:55

that's why pencils have a raisers. Yeah,

7:01

it's it's It's

7:04

very funny. I think though, if we actually

7:06

want to understand what happened Nazi Germany and understand

7:08

our own times better. As a result, we do have to understand

7:11

that, like when these little Nazis

7:13

say they had no way of knowing that

7:15

that Hitler was going to lead Germany into a war, they're

7:18

not lying. It seems like like, obviously,

7:20

how could you not know? German? Hitler wanted war um

7:24

but a lot of his early appeal to the

7:26

little Nazis was the fact that he was a wounded

7:28

war veteran and that he'd been a private right, that

7:31

he had been a very low ranking war veteran. And one

7:33

of the things you would say is that like, of course I don't want war.

7:35

I know better than anybody how bad war

7:38

is. I've been in the middle of one. Why would

7:40

I want something like that? Like that

7:42

was that was one of the lines that he took.

7:44

Now, it was transparent nonsense, and it

7:46

was obvious to people at the time who

7:48

really who were intelligent, who paid attention,

7:51

Like, for example, have you heard that Hitler was a Nobel

7:53

Prize nominee. That's

7:57

like a thing people talk about, right, that's pretty well known

7:59

asn't are you? I'm sorry, I

8:01

don't know if it was rhetorical or

8:03

no, No, he was, yeah, yeah, that that

8:05

that's the thing that gets brought up from time to time that he

8:08

was nominated for the Nobel Prize. You

8:11

were doing a thing where you're like, so

8:14

we all know this, right, And then I was waiting for you, I

8:16

thought, and then you were just waiting for me to

8:18

say something, and I was like, did you know that? On the same

8:20

page, I thought that was yeah.

8:23

I don't think that it's something that people talk

8:25

about as much as in being a vegetarian or whatever.

8:29

I read a lot of Hitler, so I'm I'm

8:31

I'm probably off on what's common

8:33

knowledge. So you're a big Hitler head.

8:35

We all know that he was a hitstand.

8:38

Yeah, he was nominated for a Nobel Peace

8:40

Prize, but the nomination was a joke. It

8:42

was a satire by a Swedish anti fascist

8:45

politician who was like being like,

8:47

like, it's absurd because this guy

8:49

clearly wants to pull the world into war. So obviously,

8:51

like a lot of people who anyone who paid

8:53

attention and who was modestly intelligent,

8:56

knew what Hitler was going to do. I'm

8:58

not saying that like it was hidden in any real

9:00

way, but it was hidden to these little

9:02

Nazis, not because like

9:05

Hitler, obscured it particularly

9:07

well, but because the only media

9:10

they paid attention to was essentially a like

9:12

either completely idiotic or complete

9:15

propaganda. They lived in a media

9:17

bubble, right um,

9:19

And that we we see that today.

9:21

As Meyer wrote, quote, remember, none of

9:23

these nine Germans had ever traveled abroad. None

9:25

of them had ever known or talked with a foreigner, or

9:27

read the foreign press. None ever wanted to listen

9:30

to the foreign radio when it was legal to do

9:32

so. None, except oddly enough, the

9:34

policeman, listened to it when it was illegal.

9:36

They were as uninterested in the outside world as

9:38

their contemporaries in France or America.

9:41

And you know, Meyer gets

9:43

it right. You can see reading this book.

9:46

He doesn't talk a lot about American fascism,

9:48

but you can see in the way he writes the book like

9:51

he knew we were vulnerable too, like

9:54

because these people are everywhere. Yeah.

9:57

I don't know how you feeling, Sophia, Just

9:59

you know, positive waiting for the babies

10:01

to get here, to

10:04

come on, and then to leave immediately,

10:06

and to leave a pair of shoes behind. Baby

10:10

shoes Comma never worn.

10:12

Yeah, baby shoes. See myself

10:15

out. Thank you for the hemmingway.

10:18

I've always said you're the hemming way of this

10:20

podcast, mainly because of the amount of time

10:22

you spend shirtless firing a shotgun. I

10:25

mean, people gotta get a load

10:27

of these ditties. I always say, yeah,

10:35

yeah, that's the that's the jacket quote

10:38

for hills like white elephants. People got to get

10:40

to look at these ditties. So

10:43

that is also the tagline for my

10:45

titties. A lot

10:47

of similarities. You also spent

10:49

a period of time in Havana. If I'm not mistaken,

10:52

my titties are there right now. So

10:56

yeah.

10:59

Meyer points out that like for his Nazi

11:01

friends who lived in small towns and away

11:03

from like a lot of where a lot of the violence

11:05

the Nazis did occurred, like the

11:08

negative things the Nazis did, the negative press

11:10

about them was drowned out by things like the Strength

11:12

through Joy program, which enabled

11:14

working Germans to visit places like Norway in

11:16

Spain at very little cost. These little

11:19

Nazis and those like them were concerned with the

11:21

economy, and again that meant not starving

11:23

in those days, and a lot of that appeared

11:25

to get better under Hitler. Some of this was a losory,

11:27

and a great deal of it was driven by what's called arianization,

11:30

which is the process of stealing Jewish businesses

11:32

and property and giving them to Germans,

11:35

to arian Germans. Um.

11:38

But Myer's friends felt is

11:40

like a really clean name for that. Yeah,

11:43

it is. And there's a there's a very good movie

11:45

about it, all called that was made in the Soviet

11:47

Union and like the sixties called The Shop on

11:49

Main Street. That's about like one

11:52

like Russian peasant in an occupied village,

11:55

um, who has given this old Jewish woman's

11:57

uh. I think it's like a it sells like button

12:00

and sewing equipment shop, um,

12:03

and she and he become friend and it's it's it's

12:05

it's a very It's an interesting movie

12:07

because like all of the people acting in it were

12:09

like peasants on the Russian steps when the Germans

12:12

invaded, and they lived in villages that

12:14

the Nazis took over and then like turned

12:16

like a lot of them turned in their

12:18

their own Jews. So like the actors aren't

12:20

like just acting, they're like remembering.

12:22

It's a fascinating film. I really

12:24

recommend it. I'm going to see it. Yeah,

12:27

it's a it's a very very good movie in a

12:29

very I mean very dark movie because

12:31

it's about Russia and World War Two. I

12:34

was gonna say, what do you mean. It's

12:36

kind of sounded like a lighthearted romp to

12:39

me. Yeah, compared to talk

12:41

about actually in part one

12:43

and you knew a name of an actor,

12:46

I was like, of course

12:48

you grant. Yeah. I was just impressed by

12:50

your just putting Yeah,

12:53

is he what? Yeah, he's in and he plays in the pame

12:56

Minister of England or something. Right, he's the sketchy

12:58

politician. Yeah, he's

13:00

the one that makes an

13:02

insane number of like body shaming

13:04

fat jokes during it. I don't

13:07

remember up,

13:09

but the only thing I remember is that Liam

13:11

Neeson is in it. Um

13:15

woman that's a supermodel, but

13:17

not a supermodel, Like

13:19

she's not supposed to be a supermodel,

13:21

but she is. In the joke he

13:24

just keeps talking about how, oh, like the

13:28

only person I'd marry is Claudia Schiffer

13:30

or whatever the fuck, And then this Claudia

13:32

Schiffer shows up. You know what, it

13:34

doesn't matter. That's not a good retelling

13:36

of the movie, but it's partially true.

13:39

But you know what, ties that back into

13:41

our our episode. How are you going to do?

13:44

Impressed? Well, you were, you were.

13:46

You were just telling me that Liam Neeson is in love

13:48

actually because of when love actually

13:50

was made. We're talking about we're

13:53

talking about what's that Holocaust movie

13:55

with the red dress?

13:58

Liam Neeson? Bam

14:00

back to We're back to World War two.

14:02

Perfect degrees of Hitler.

14:05

Yeah, well that's amazing, son

14:07

of a bitch. I know, I know, I know,

14:10

you know, I'm only three degrees away from him.

14:14

I mean like like genetically

14:16

or no, no, no, just in terms of like direct

14:18

handshakes. Okay,

14:21

yeah, hands with I shook hands

14:23

with a guy who at age eight, like the Nazis

14:25

came to power, and he was a member of the Hitler Youth and

14:28

they did a lot of meeting like meet and greet

14:30

gathering stuff with Nazi hy brass. And he shook

14:32

Herman Garring's hand. Uh

14:35

and obviously Herman Gerring by obviously

14:37

by Nazi transitive property,

14:40

you have shaken Hitler's hand.

14:42

I basically shook Hitler's hand. Yeah,

14:44

it's it's what we're talking about. Yeah.

14:46

The thing that's crazier about it to me is that

14:48

that dude's grandpa had

14:50

fought with a sword on horseback

14:53

as a cavalryman, and like that

14:55

that it's that recently that people were doing that.

14:57

Like, yeah, this dude fought in the eighteen seventy

14:59

one with like a fucking sword on horseback, and

15:01

I like shook hands with his grandson. And

15:04

as advanced as we are, we're that close to

15:06

like people stabbing each other while riding

15:08

horses. It's

15:10

wild, right, is that when you got into machetes.

15:13

No, I've always been in machetes, so

15:16

um, yeah, yeah, Sorry,

15:20

we got off on a little bit of a tangent here

15:23

um, but kind of what we're talking

15:25

about. Most of this is for you, but a little

15:27

bit of this is for me. Okay, okay,

15:31

it can't be just Hitler, Hitler, Hitler of

15:34

the time. Give me two of Hitler

15:37

related, Hitler adjacent

15:40

and yeah, we're talking about

15:42

a lot of Hitler adjacent little Nazis here.

15:44

And and these folks were able to kind

15:46

of get on board because they were, you

15:48

know, distracted by a lot of the benefits of Nazis

15:51

and they didn't see they didn't go looking

15:53

for the ugly stuff, even though they knew some of it

15:55

was there um because the stuff

15:57

that was positive was like way more in

15:59

their face is and that's really all they

16:01

cared about. And that's why even the the Nazis

16:04

never had an electoral majority, almost

16:06

every German got on board

16:09

with Nazism, even if they didn't join the

16:11

party during the years in which Hitler

16:13

was succeeding, right, because people back

16:15

a winner um, And that's what gets it.

16:18

That's what scares me most about imagining the United

16:20

States sliding into fascism. And it's not it's

16:22

not the midnight raids, the abduction

16:24

and execution of dissidents, the slow clamped down

16:26

and in resistance. It's the idea that most

16:28

Americans that like people I know and am friendly

16:30

with, would find ways to pretend

16:32

none of it was happening, while like people I love

16:35

and maybe me are disappearing and being murdered.

16:38

That's the scariest thing about it, right like

16:40

that is so much more frightening than imagining,

16:43

than thinking about the actual fascists

16:45

doing the killing. It's like the

16:47

people that I've I've hung out and played video

16:49

games with, like turning and

16:52

turning away while it happened.

16:55

Anyway, I'm gonna read another quote from Meyer's book

16:57

that's exactly on this topic. None

16:59

of the horror impinged upon the day to day lives

17:01

of my ten friends or was ever called to their attention.

17:04

There was some sort of trouble on

17:06

the streets as one or another of my friends was

17:08

passing by on a couple of occasions, but

17:10

the police dispersed the crowd, and there was nothing

17:12

in the local paper. You and I leave

17:15

some sort of trouble on the streets to the police,

17:17

so did my friends. And

17:20

it's the police who are disappearing the Jews in this

17:22

period, right, that's what's happening, along with all the political

17:24

dissidents. Um

17:26

and Meyer actually presented his friends

17:28

with an article from their local newspaper from back

17:31

in nineteen thirty eight about a group

17:33

of local Jews who were taken into protective

17:35

custody by the police, and Maya

17:37

writes, none of them, including the teacher, the

17:39

anti Nazi teacher, remembered ever

17:41

having seen it or anything like it. And

17:45

maybe they're lying. Maybe

17:48

that's just our brains are that good, And

17:50

when we're really hate reality,

17:52

closing it out, if we're able to

17:55

escape it, if we're safe enough to escape

17:57

reality. I don't know.

18:00

I mean, people's memories of events

18:02

are so unreliable, incredibly

18:05

so in general, um

18:08

much less when you like really want to forget

18:10

that you were a Nazi, yeah

18:13

yeah, or or just don't want to remember

18:15

that you what being a Nazi exact

18:18

exactly, exactly exactly

18:21

now, The cold, hard reality is that most

18:23

of the Germans who lived in the Third Reich knew what

18:25

was being done to the Jews. Not every detail, for

18:27

sure, but like they knew enough. Right, the

18:30

gas chambers, the death camps were

18:33

tremendously widely known, but the fact

18:35

that the Jews were being disappeared and that something

18:37

terrible was happening, you were everyone

18:40

was aware. This has not been kind

18:42

of historical consensus for long.

18:44

In two thousand one, Robert Professor Robert

18:46

Gladley, who we we quoted from earlier,

18:49

conducted a massive survey of German

18:51

mainstream media newspapers and magazines

18:53

from nineteen thirty three on. And he

18:55

started down this path of research when he was looking

18:57

through old German papers and he found

19:00

report of a woman who had been sent to the Gestapo

19:02

for looking Jewish and having sex with a neighbor.

19:05

Now at the time and this is like the late nineteen

19:07

nineties. When he came across this article, conventional

19:10

academic wisdom held that the majority

19:12

of Nazi atrocities had happened without the knowledge

19:14

of most Germans, gladially noted for

19:17

decades my generation had been told that so

19:19

much of the terror had been carried out in complete

19:21

secrecy. So coming up upon

19:23

that report openly in a major German newspaper

19:26

made him wonder if this was true, and so he decided

19:28

to look into the matter, and then the way that academics

19:31

do, very very in a very

19:33

like methodical way, and

19:35

I'm gonna quote now from a Guardian rite up on

19:37

the study he conducted. As a result of this, his

19:40

media troll with a research assistant, found

19:42

that as early as nineteen thirty three, local papers

19:45

reported the killing of twelve prisoners

19:47

by guards at Dakau, the first to be

19:49

set up as a model concentration camp

19:51

initially for communists. On May, the

19:54

dekaur Zeitung, which is the Dacow newspaper,

19:57

said that the camp was Germany's most famous

19:59

place and wrought new hope to the decou

20:01

business world, which obviously there's a town

20:04

also next to the camp By nineteen

20:06

thirty four, the main and widely read Nazi

20:08

owned paper Vocashabao Bacter was

20:10

reporting on a widening of policy to other

20:13

political criminals, including Jews

20:15

accused of race defilement. By

20:17

nineteen thirty six, communist prisoners

20:19

were no longer mentioned in a photo essay,

20:22

and the s S paper Dash Schwartz Corp. The

20:24

Dark Core emphasized

20:26

the camps has places for people for

20:28

race to filers, rapists, sexual degenerates,

20:31

and habitual criminals. That's

20:34

interesting to me that that's how they're That's how the Nazis

20:36

spun the concentration camps first not

20:38

as a place for Jews in specific,

20:41

but as a place for race to filer's, rapists,

20:43

sexual de degenerates, and habitual criminals

20:45

um and that process continued

20:47

through the years of the regime short life. In nineteen

20:50

thirty seven, Heinrich Heimbler made public announcements

20:52

that still more camps would be needed

20:54

for those with hydrocephalis, cross

20:57

eyed, deformed, half Jews, and a whole series

20:59

of racially inferior year types. In nineteen

21:01

thirty eight, after Christal knoch Gebel's made

21:03

a widely purported public announcement

21:05

that the final answer to the Jewish

21:07

problem would occur via government

21:09

decree. So far from being unaware

21:12

of the Holocaust, the little Germans

21:15

were well informed about a lot what was going on. They knew

21:17

their government was looking to a final answer

21:19

to the Jewish question, and they knew

21:21

what that meant more or less.

21:24

So, Yeah,

21:27

not only were the Nazi atrocities well known

21:29

as they occurred, but the desire of little Nazis

21:31

to pretend ignorance at the crimes that were enabling

21:33

was also really obvious to outside

21:36

and inside observers at the time. There's a

21:38

quote that I think is really useful from Peter

21:40

Viereck, who was a German American scholar,

21:42

and he wrote this in nineteen forty,

21:45

well publicized among Germans already

21:48

before Hitler came to power, and during a period

21:50

when he still depended on their consent rather

21:52

than coercion, were the many actual deeds

21:54

of butchery. Someday the same

21:57

Germans, now cheering Hitler strut

21:59

into Paris, will say to their American friends,

22:01

into their brave German anti Nazi friends,

22:03

we did not know what went on. We

22:05

did not know. And when that day

22:07

of no nothing comes, there will be laughter

22:10

in Hell. And

22:13

there's a lot to say about the forgetting

22:15

that happened after the war, and some of it was because we

22:18

wanted the Germans as allies against the Communists.

22:20

The US government was very much willing to

22:22

to let people forget, and it was

22:24

not a unified thing. Like one of the things Eisenhower

22:27

did that I think was really laudable was forced

22:29

Germans who lived near the concentration camps

22:31

to tour them where they were like still corpses

22:33

lying out and stuff like that. But

22:36

but for the most part, this was allowed

22:38

to be the mainstream

22:40

belief. For you go find old

22:42

documentaries about the Holocaust and stuff like. This

22:45

was a very widespread belief that most Germans

22:47

hadn't known because it

22:50

was politically dangerous in the period when

22:52

those same Germans were still running Germany

22:55

to admit that they'd known and

22:57

that they'd at least let it happen. Um.

23:01

And that's I mean,

23:07

it's a real bummer. Um.

23:14

Yeah. It also makes me think of like the fact

23:16

that, um, there's so many reminders

23:19

of what happened in Germany and

23:21

like all these monuments and stuff,

23:24

and um, how that's

23:27

really important. Also for reckoning

23:29

with UM, something

23:31

that is like a big historical

23:34

event that most people would

23:36

like to forget. Yeah, their country

23:38

was a part of. Yeah, they actually

23:41

put a lot of If you go to any of like the

23:43

any of the concentration camps that are actually in Germany,

23:46

like in order to be a guide at one of

23:48

those places, like there's a certain level of

23:50

education you have to have and and

23:52

the people there are extremely knowledgeable

23:54

about the Holocaust UM. And

23:57

it's something that the German government does

23:59

now put a lot of importance in UM

24:02

because you you have to people I

24:05

want to forget that. When people want

24:07

to forget, it's not that just they don't want to remember

24:09

a bad episode from history. They

24:12

want to forget that they might do that right.

24:15

They probably wouldn't be Nazis,

24:18

but they would let the Nazis do

24:20

what the Nazis did. And nobody wants to remember

24:22

that. Nobody wants to think about

24:24

that. But it also just makes you think

24:26

about how much wilder it is that people

24:28

fight for Confederate monuments here,

24:31

because they're the opposite of

24:34

of those

24:36

kind of monuments that you're trying

24:39

to remember the

24:42

people that were for something

24:44

horrible, not

24:47

the people that fought against

24:49

them. So it's it would

24:51

be like if you want to Nazi Germany and

24:53

all of the monuments, instead of being

24:56

too like, um, the

24:58

Germans being Nazis, we're like, let's not

25:01

this is so we don't forget that there were Nazis.

25:03

Here's uh Henrich

25:05

Hitler's uh statue.

25:08

Oh it's right next to you know, Hitler and

25:10

Hitler's garden. It's just like

25:13

that's I mean, and that's something that

25:15

has been taken for granted in America for so

25:17

long that like, yeah, Confederate

25:20

monuments of course, and

25:24

on that side, it's

25:28

time for an ad biats

25:30

that we can all take some deep

25:33

breaths off. Mike whoa.

25:44

I like it when we can be more playful. Robert

25:47

say, welcome back. I

25:49

say, woo, everything's

25:52

fine in the

25:54

world. So uh

25:57

yeah. So I think it's interesting. I think it's

25:59

important to note, because there's very

26:01

little nuance in our education of the concentration

26:03

camps that they started as

26:06

a place to put criminals,

26:08

right, sexual deviance, you know,

26:11

child molesters, right the the

26:13

that that's what the Nazi that's not what who

26:15

they were putting there, but that's how the Nazis justified

26:17

it, um. And you can

26:19

look at things like Q went on suggests

26:21

going after and whatnot and see

26:24

some see some lines there, but also

26:27

like what a crazy coincidence that,

26:29

um, like all

26:31

the people um that are

26:34

the murderers and the rapists and whatever are

26:36

Jewish and gay and roma

26:39

and communist and political.

26:42

Such a wild coincidence. Yeah,

26:44

but it is like you you see shades

26:46

of that in our own fascists, this idea that like everybody

26:49

who was opposed, who is actively

26:51

opposed to the regime is a criminal,

26:53

you know. And they're not just criminals

26:56

because they're breaking laws in their protests, but

26:58

there they all have like have

27:00

to be like part of some pedophile cabal they're doing

27:02

like they're they're they're they're all, um,

27:05

Like it's it's this, it's in the reason

27:07

they do that, right, The reason they do that is

27:09

because it stops normal people from caring.

27:12

Because normal people don't give a ship if a criminal

27:14

gets murdered by the cops, because that's supposed

27:17

to happen. You know, normal

27:19

people care when someone

27:21

they see as a good person gets

27:24

hurt. Um, they don't care about

27:27

criminals because there's

27:29

a lot that's fucked up in our society. But the

27:32

Nazis were taking advantage of that same thing too.

27:34

You know, you you don't. You don't say we're cracking

27:36

down on political dissidents. It's we're arresting

27:39

criminals, and then everybody's

27:41

fine with it. Yeah.

27:43

I'm gonna read a quote from a book

27:45

called Backing Hitler by Robert Gladalie,

27:48

who were just talking about. Um. It's a very good

27:50

book, and it talks about sort of how,

27:53

um, how the images

27:55

that the Nazi regime put out to justify

27:58

the people they were locking away. The

28:01

social reception of the images that were projected,

28:03

no doubt, varied enormously. At one end of the scale,

28:05

these published accounts that a terrorizing or deterrent

28:08

effect on potential opponents of Nazism

28:10

and those who were officially stigmatized. Certainly,

28:12

many people in the country would have seen through the propaganda.

28:15

However, for good citizens who wanted to return

28:17

to an idolized version of German law

28:19

and order, these images helped to ease

28:21

the appearance of even the terroristic sides of Hitler's

28:24

regime. They could read in the press that those who

28:26

suffered at the hands of the new system were other

28:28

people, Communists and various social

28:31

outsiders, and the Jews. Good citizens

28:33

were invited to see the camps as educative

28:35

institutions and as a corrective

28:38

and a warning to those described as social

28:41

rabble, that is, men and women who were habitual

28:43

criminals, the chronically unemployed, beggars,

28:45

alcoholics, homosexuals, and repeat sex

28:47

offenders. Totally

28:53

different. Now amount

28:56

of science. It's

28:58

like Robert says something, and then then I so

29:04

one thing about Robert and eyes chemistry

29:07

that's not really Robert and my chemistry.

29:09

That's not really popping off

29:12

over long?

29:15

What is this zoom call? We're

29:17

on zoom now? Yeah, yeah, thank you, because

29:20

I feel like you pause

29:22

for me to say something when I have nothing

29:25

to say, and I'm just defeated by the content.

29:28

And then when I do have something to say, You're like, I'm

29:30

in the middle of my thoughts and I'm

29:32

like, you're right, You're right. My thing was stupid.

29:35

And that's what's happening podcasting.

29:42

You know, maybe delete that. They don't need to know how

29:44

this sounds. It just made no I like it. Stop

29:47

saying that. Yeah,

29:51

So Jesus,

29:53

what a what a time to be alive? So I

29:56

could go through in link excerpts from articles

29:59

that kind of make that point about like Trump topping

30:01

talking about violent criminals and like you know, camps

30:04

at the border and all the crystal fascist

30:06

paranoia about trans people using bathrooms.

30:08

Which when they talk about the Nazis arresting sex criminals,

30:11

that's who they were arresting. It's not rapists,

30:14

it was people who had sex they thought

30:16

was criminal. Um. Yeah.

30:19

Or we could talk about q and On's obsession with

30:21

mythical child sex traffickers. But like you, we've

30:23

all been through the same news cycles. I'm sure

30:25

you see the parallels. Uh.

30:28

And a read through of Professor Gladalle's book,

30:30

which I do recommend reveal several of them. Quote

30:33

Orrick Herbert recently suggested that during the

30:35

Nazi years there was a growing lack of

30:37

moral concern in German society

30:40

for human rights and the protection

30:42

of minorities, which grew rapidly during

30:44

the years of the dictatorship, and which led to a profound

30:47

moral brutalization in Germany.

30:50

That's familiar, right, growing lack of concern

30:52

for human rights and protection of minorities

30:54

in the society leading to brutalization

30:57

Um. Yeah. Gladali

31:00

himself uses the term desensitization

31:02

to refer to the impact that the Nazis

31:05

years long drumbeat of like news

31:07

articles about the people that were arresting and sending

31:09

away and killing, the impact that had on people,

31:12

desensitization. Again, we're

31:15

experiencing a version of that ourselves, with all of the hundreds

31:18

of thousands of deaths from from from COVID

31:20

nineteen, with the violence in the streets, with like

31:22

these, these, this constant drumbeat of police

31:24

murders, like and and

31:27

just you know, not even from like stories about

31:29

death, but just like the sheer amount of horrible things

31:31

happening, it just numbs you after

31:33

a while that was going on then

31:36

too. Um another

31:38

thing we don't talk about enough. So

31:43

while we're talking about desensitization and

31:45

genocide, we should probably talk a little

31:48

bit about some of the little Nazis who wound

31:50

up as cogs in the machine of death that actually

31:52

made the Holocaust happen. This is the dead baby section,

31:54

Sophia. Finally, keep

32:00

your Jesus, I had a fucking prologue

32:02

in this some bitch, So I want to quote

32:04

now from an article in Der

32:07

Schpiegel titled Everyday Murder

32:09

Nazi atrocities committed by ordinary people

32:11

quote. Perpetrators included

32:14

both committed Nazis and people who had

32:16

nothing to do with the Nazis. The

32:18

murderers and their assistants included Catholics

32:21

and Protestants, the old and the young, people with double

32:23

doctorates, and poorly educated members of

32:25

the working class. And the percentage of psychopaths

32:28

was not higher than the average in society

32:30

as a whole. One thing you have to

32:32

accept if you really want to understand the Holocaust

32:35

is that most of the people involved were what we would

32:37

describe as mentally healthy. They were

32:39

not people who could have been diagnosed with any

32:41

sort of of of mental illness UM

32:44

which again like that, This is why I pushed back whenever

32:46

people talk about the Nazis being crazy or Hitler

32:48

Is being crazy, Like, no, these were

32:50

rational people taking

32:53

rational action that happened to

32:55

be the worst thing you can imagine. And

32:57

that's so much scarier UM now

33:00

in the early nineteen nine So didn't they

33:02

put mentally ill people. That's

33:06

the first people that they executed a lot of

33:08

That's the biggest than most

33:11

horrible irony to call people that

33:13

were just like willingly,

33:16

um, being agents of fascism.

33:19

Yeah, I'm comparing them and to

33:21

people that are actually mentally ill. It's

33:24

very it it is, it's sick, and it's wrong because

33:26

it ignored, it completely ignores

33:29

what was actually going down. Um.

33:32

And that's that's very important. Like the very first

33:34

um, you know, the gas chambers. Before the gas chambers,

33:36

they were actually using like like trucks

33:38

that they would hook up carbon monoxide

33:41

gas too and pump into the trucks and they'd fill them

33:43

with people. And the people they experimented

33:45

on first, the first people the Nazis killed

33:47

with any kind of poison gas were mentally

33:50

handicapped folks. Yep,

33:53

that's how it started. Um.

33:55

I think it was the T four ethan Asia program. Might maybe

33:57

getting things a little bit wrong there, but yeah. So

33:59

in the early nineteen nineties, a large group of researchers

34:02

and historians began the long plotting work of digging

34:04

through mountains of the Third Reich surviving records

34:06

and their goal was to put together for the first time.

34:09

And again, this is right around the time that they're starting to understand

34:11

that like actually most

34:13

Germans were complicit to some degree. Um.

34:16

So that they're starting to understand this, and they're trying to put

34:18

together a comprehensive list of actual

34:21

active perpetrators in the Holocaust

34:23

for the first time, not just the leadership,

34:25

but in everyone who pulled

34:27

a trigger or the equivalent, um,

34:30

the people who loaded Jewish folks in the train cars, the

34:32

people who man gas chambers, everybody, and

34:34

at present, the number of active participants

34:37

that they have listed. These are all individual

34:39

people include more than two hundred

34:42

thousand Germans and another two hundred

34:44

thousand Ukrainians, Estonians, Lithuanians,

34:46

and members of other occupied countries, including

34:49

Frenchmen. Now, one

34:51

of the little Germans who pulled a lot of triggers

34:54

was Walter Mattner. And Walter was

34:56

a police secretary from Vienna who

34:58

had been just kind of a function arry in the Viennese

35:01

police and then joined the s S

35:03

when the war started and became an administrative

35:05

officer. And we have a lot of his

35:07

letters to his wife back at

35:09

home, and from those we learned quite a bit about

35:11

the man. I'm gonna have a link to just like a sheet

35:14

that has all of his letters home on it, because

35:16

it's very compelling stuff. On September

35:19

one, right after his first entry into the conquered

35:22

territories of the Soviet Union after the invasion

35:24

started, he wrote, if I were not

35:26

already a national Socialist, the first

35:29

day of my wartime deployment would have turned me

35:31

into one through and through now

35:33

not that long after. On twenty nine September,

35:36

about a week later, he wrote a letter in which he assured

35:38

his wife that he and his fellow men of the s S

35:41

were not committing war crimes against the Jews

35:43

of Eastern Europe. He insisted, at

35:45

the most we arranged things, i

35:47

e. Everything is taken away

35:49

from the Jews. Just

35:52

a few days later, like three or

35:54

four days later, on October second, nineteen

35:56

forty one, he wrote this, This

35:58

is again a letter to his wife. I

36:01

should have already turned in. It's already nine

36:04

pm, and I volunteered for a special operation.

36:06

Tomorrow REVELI is at four thirty am,

36:08

and we're moving off at five thirty am tomorrow.

36:11

I'll also have the first opportunity

36:13

to use my pistol. I'm taking twenty

36:16

eight rounds with me. Probably won't

36:18

be enough, but another comrade will lend me

36:20

his pistol or carbine. I don't even

36:22

know if I'm being permitted to tell you this, but that

36:24

the Jews are our misfortune. That's something you've

36:26

known for a long time, and it's something we saw

36:29

again and again on our journey to Warsaw and onto

36:31

here. Just how many comrades are already resting

36:33

in the cool earth, and this is how many young men

36:36

are sleeping single and married the prime of

36:38

our German nation to protect our home from

36:40

the monsters we have gotten to know here. It

36:42

is simply dreadful to have to look at these

36:44

Asiatic hords. What we Europeans

36:46

feel when seeing this, You can understand

36:48

bitterness that takes a hold of me and which

36:51

everyone here feels when thinking of our home

36:53

and our great fateful struggle which we have to wrestle

36:55

through here. For our people, what are one

36:57

thousand, two hundred Jews who are two men

37:00

and yet another city and have to be bumped off?

37:02

As the saying goes, it is only the just punishment

37:04

for all the suffering they have inflicted and continue

37:07

to inflict on us Germans. Until

37:09

I arrive home. I shall tell you nice things,

37:11

but enough for today, Otherwise you'll

37:14

believe that I'm bloodthirsty. Wow

37:18

on October seven, Walter and his comrades

37:21

traveled to a village named Muglov

37:23

in Belarus. There they gathered

37:25

up two thousand, two hundred and seventy

37:27

three Jewish people. They stripped them of everything

37:30

but the clothes on their backs, line them up beside

37:32

an open pit, and shot every single one of

37:34

them to death at close range. Walter

37:36

Mattner, mild mannered police secretary,

37:39

wrote this home to his wife. For

37:41

the first truckload, my hand trembled slightly

37:44

when shooting, but one gets used to it. By

37:46

the time the tenth truck arrived, I was already aiming

37:48

steadily and fired surely at the many

37:50

women, children in infants. Bear

37:53

in mind that I also have two babies at home to

37:55

whom these hordes would do the same, if not ten times

37:57

worse. The death we gave them was a nice, short

37:59

death compared to the hell is torture meeted

38:01

out to hunt thousands upon thousands in the dungeons

38:04

of the gpu. Infants flew

38:06

in a white arc through the air, and we blew them

38:08

away while still in flight, before they then fell

38:10

into the pit and the water. Let's get rid

38:12

of this brood which has plunged the whole of Europe into

38:14

war, and is still mongering in America until

38:17

it drags them into the war as well. Hitler's

38:19

words are coming true what he once said before the

38:21

war began. If jewelry believes it

38:23

will be able to incite a war in Europe again,

38:25

it won't be the Jews who will triumph, but will herald

38:27

the end of jewelry in Europe. Magliev

38:30

has now lost a number with three Zeros,

38:32

but that's of no consequence here. I'm already

38:34

looking forward to it, and many here are saying that when

38:36

we return home, it's the turn of our

38:38

local Jews. This is

38:40

probably a cool time to mention that my grandma's

38:43

family was shot to death by

38:46

the Nazis. So it bringing

38:48

back some real fond memories. Yeah.

38:51

Yeah, these are the people who do that, and

38:54

it it um, it

38:57

happened to a tremendous

38:59

degree. The eyes who did this, for the most part were

39:01

um groups called the INSETS group

39:04

and which was like it means special task unit

39:06

and it was it was a lot of SS

39:09

like it was like the folks that they recruited for this, a lot

39:11

of them had been local police officers, before

39:14

um. And these were folks who were willing who

39:16

they This was kind of the first

39:18

attempt at carrying out a genocide and mass

39:20

and they did it with gunfire. And they realized

39:23

very quickly that this was not um. Yeah,

39:27

it was not efficient um. And we'll talk

39:29

about that a little bit later. But but reading

39:31

about Mattner's crimes in particular brought

39:33

to mind a passage from Meyer's book that I

39:36

find rather striking, and I'm gonna I'm gonna read

39:38

that passage. Now. The German

39:40

language, like every other, has some glorious epithets

39:43

untranslatable and will

39:46

get wordney Spiceburger is one of

39:48

them. It means very roughly, little

39:51

men gone wild. I

39:55

think about that a lot when I think about

39:57

us, when I think about some of the things

39:59

I've being in the streets, little

40:02

men gone wild. That's some

40:04

powerful ship. Yeah. So,

40:07

as it turned out, Mattner, obviously

40:10

former police officer killing people in

40:12

Belarus for the Third Reich, and his

40:14

fellow police back home in Germany were

40:16

hard at work on that same task. Uh,

40:19

and they thought they were free. Meyer notes that his friend,

40:21

the sensitive politician Hoffmeister quote

40:23

did his duty in nineteen thirty eight

40:26

when he was ordered to arrest Jews for being

40:28

Jews. One of those he arrested

40:30

the Taylor Morrowitz and this guy survived the war,

40:32

calls him a decent man, which

40:36

I have trouble getting into that guy's head too. Um.

40:41

But it's a it's a shade of genocide

40:44

that we don't see enough. I think

40:46

that is important to tell people about. Yeah,

40:50

definitely. One

40:52

of the most bitter and fucked up

40:55

realities of the Holocaust is that a lot of

40:57

the killing was done by folks who

40:59

would other wise be described as decent men,

41:01

people who were good husbands and good fathers and friendly,

41:04

positive members of their community, nice people,

41:06

people who would have smiled at you as you passed them

41:08

on the street when they were old men. Uh.

41:10

And people who also played an active role in

41:12

the extermination of millions, people

41:15

like, for example, Major Trap of

41:17

Reserve Police Battalion one oh one.

41:19

And I'm gonna quote from the Guardian to

41:21

tell you about Major Trap. According

41:24

to witness testimony, Major Trap was in tears

41:27

when he ordered the shooting a fifteen hundred women,

41:29

children, and elderly Jews near Warsaw, all

41:31

the while saying an order is an

41:33

order. In July ninety

41:35

two, his men drove the victims out of their homes, loaded

41:38

them into trucks, and took them to a remote clearing

41:40

to be executed. They shot them in the head or

41:42

in the back of the neck, and in the evening, the soldiers uniforms

41:44

were covered with bone fragments, brain matter, and bloodstains.

41:48

And that's like, that's

41:51

I think almost a more useful

41:53

picture of what it

41:56

means to commit genocide is

41:58

this man weeping and

42:00

going through with it anyway because

42:04

it's an order. That's

42:07

just so fucking frightening to me. Um.

42:10

I think anytime you justify

42:14

anything with it's an order, it's

42:17

a frightening thing because it's

42:19

just completely uh takes

42:22

away like the humanity a

42:25

decision all the way. Yeah,

42:28

And it's why we decided at Nuremberg that

42:30

like, being under orders was not an excuse

42:32

to commit genocide, because it's not. But

42:35

it is precisely because of

42:38

that guy. Um.

42:42

Now, you may have noticed that a lot of the folks

42:44

were talking about in this segment about people who

42:46

actually committed genocide by pulling triggers

42:48

themselves. A lot of those people were cops,

42:52

strange weird. I

42:56

wonder what the connection is there. Huh Yeah.

42:59

The Nazis stay was adept at using regular

43:01

police to round up Jews and other undesirables,

43:03

and overwhelmingly German police officers

43:05

who were not members of the Nazi Party

43:08

previously agreed to do this work without

43:10

complaint. Timothy Snyder, a Holocaust

43:12

scholar and one of the world's great experts on fascism,

43:15

one of your must reads if you want to

43:17

understand what happened, uh notes

43:20

in his book Black Earth that regular

43:23

police were a key resource for the Nazis.

43:25

Quote after its triumph

43:27

in the Night of Long Knives, the s S implemented

43:29

Hitler's fourth innovation, the hybridization

43:32

of institutions. Crime was

43:34

redefined, racial and state organizations

43:37

were merged, and cadras were rotated

43:39

back and forth. In nineteen thirty five,

43:41

in a significant reform, Himmler explicitly

43:43

redefined the s S and the police apparatus

43:46

as a single organ of racial protection.

43:49

Himler, who served a racial movement rather than

43:51

a traditional state, personally directed

43:53

both the s S and the German police. From nineteen

43:55

thirty six, the Investigative Service of

43:57

the s S proposed a new definition

43:59

of political crime. It was not crime against

44:02

the state. The state had validity only insofar

44:04

as it represented the race. Since politics

44:06

was nothing but biology, political crime

44:08

was a crime against the German race. Now,

44:11

later on in that same book, Snyder continues,

44:14

the Einstetz group and we're also hybrid

44:16

organizations, mixing SS members and

44:18

others. The police forces themselves were

44:21

hybridized from within, as police officers

44:23

were recruited to the SS, while s

44:25

S officers were assigned to the police. The

44:27

secret State Police, the detectives of the criminal

44:29

police, and even the regular uniformed order police

44:32

were to become Himmler's racial warriors.

44:35

And police

44:37

are tools of the state. They are they

44:41

are. And if we're talking about hybridization

44:44

of the police with shall we say,

44:46

federal forces vehicles

44:51

or I don't know, yeah, or deputized

44:54

cops who get federal arresting powers,

44:56

or what's been happening with ICE

44:59

for the last four years years. I'm gonna quote

45:01

from a Pro Publica article here. In

45:03

the year after President Trump took off, as state

45:05

and local police officers across Pennsylvania

45:07

swept car loads of Hispanic immigrants into ICE's

45:09

net. In the process, they helped the agency's regional

45:12

field off Talas office, Telly, more

45:14

than more at large ar rests of

45:16

undocumented immigrants without criminal convictions

45:18

than any of the twenty three other field offices

45:20

in the country. These are immigrants picked up

45:22

in communities, not at local jails in prisons.

45:25

Last year, five states New York, California,

45:27

Illinois, Oregon, and Washington limited

45:29

how police can question immigrants about their

45:31

legal status or hold them for ICE without

45:33

a warrant. Separately, more than four counties

45:36

restricted their engagement with ICE enforcement, according

45:38

to a national survey. On the other hand, fifty

45:41

nine local agencies and seventeen states

45:43

have partnerships with ICE to train and deputize

45:45

their officers to enforce immigration laws. Hybridization,

45:48

baby and

45:53

eat Yeah,

45:55

and it makes you wonder how many major

45:58

traps exist on our police force is today.

46:00

Men who might be friendly and polite,

46:02

um, but who would stand there with tears in their eyes

46:05

and shoot dissidents if that's what they were supposed

46:07

to do. Popular history likes to focus

46:09

on outrageous villains like you know, Hitler,

46:12

But I think these guys are

46:16

are are are more important to study

46:18

the the the these otherwise decent

46:21

normal people who completely fail

46:23

the thing that turns out to be the greatest moral

46:25

test of their lives. I say, agents, anyone

46:28

who's running any of the detention

46:30

facilities, abusing

46:32

children in those facilities,

46:35

any any of those things. But also,

46:37

in a way, all of us who

46:40

live with it, everyone

46:43

who's able to live with it. You know,

46:46

that brings me back to the little list of the little

46:48

Nazis, these guys, these men and women who lived

46:50

in quiet small towns and villages

46:53

and suburbs, you know, and most

46:55

of these people were people of conscience. They

46:58

didn't vote for Hitler when they had chance

47:00

to vote for Hitler um and

47:03

you know, to the extent that they were aware of what was going

47:05

on, a lot of them probably wondered, what

47:07

can I do? How can I keep this from

47:10

happening? And part of why

47:12

they let it happen, part of why they sat

47:15

back while their camps were

47:17

killing people, were sterilizing people, is

47:19

because they were just overwhelmed by daily life.

47:22

Like if you read these people's interviews, that's a thing

47:24

you'll hear a lot, is that there was just so much going

47:26

on, right, There was so much happening

47:28

in the world, and so many different like things

47:31

occurring. I didn't know what to do, and

47:33

I was just exhausted all the time. It's a great

47:35

excuse, isn't it. Like, Yeah,

47:38

there's a there's so. So. In his book,

47:40

Meyer talks to one of his German colleagues, and

47:42

this isn't one of the friends that he was studying,

47:44

because those guys were all members of the Nazi Party. This man was

47:47

not a Nazi, but he was a German who lived

47:49

in Germany when the Nazis were in power. Um.

47:51

He was a linguistics expert and an academic

47:53

who was obsessed with the study of Middle high German.

47:56

So he was he had his field of study that he loved

47:58

and was tried to kind of pour himself

48:00

into while the Nazis rose to power. He

48:02

told Meyer, quote, what happened

48:05

here was the gradual habituation

48:07

of the people little by little to

48:09

being governed by surprise, to receiving

48:12

decisions deliberated in secret, to

48:14

believing that the situation was so complicated

48:17

that the government had to act on information which

48:19

the people could not understand, or so dangerous

48:22

that even if the people could understand it, it

48:24

could not be released because of national security.

48:30

Yeah, and we've talked a lot about Trump

48:32

and this, but that's not Trump, that's

48:34

Obama, that's w. Bush,

48:37

that's Bill Clinton, that's Bush

48:39

Senior. That's an increasing thing

48:41

that's been happening in America under all of the good

48:44

presidents that have led us to this

48:46

point is the habituation of people to

48:48

being governed by surprise. You know. Yeah,

48:53

uh, speaking of being governed by surprise,

48:56

I'm gonna tell you to take an ad break.

49:00

Surprise Bitch Goods and Services nailed

49:04

it. Good to know that our comedic timing is

49:07

still a boy, Sophie

49:10

me, and you're better than ever rising

49:13

to the occasion. All

49:22

right, we're back. So for

49:25

most ordinary people, the

49:27

extraordinary degree of trust that they had in Hitler,

49:29

and there was a tremendous amount of that, especially as

49:31

he starts to win these victories. He starts to achieve

49:34

things that had seemed impossible, you

49:36

know, the retaking the Pseudente Land, rebuilding

49:38

the German military concrete in France. Um.

49:41

People had faith in him, and so

49:43

that was one reason a lot of them were able to ignore

49:46

the disappearances in the night. Um.

49:48

But that wasn't a factor for the people who

49:50

weren't Nazis the people who never converted.

49:53

For them, the thing that stopped them

49:55

from doing more was not just personal

49:57

fear. It was the exhaustion and

50:00

burnout they had from living in a society

50:02

like this. And I'm gonna quote again from

50:05

that linguist Zim talking

50:07

to Meyer. You will understand me when I say

50:09

that my middle high German was my life. It was

50:11

all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist.

50:14

Then suddenly I was plunged into all the new

50:16

activity as the university was drawn into

50:18

the new situation, that new situation being

50:20

fascism. Meetings, conferences, interview

50:23

ceremonies, and above all papers to be filled

50:25

out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires,

50:28

and on top of that where the demands in the community,

50:30

the things one in which one had to one

50:32

was expected to participate that had

50:35

not been there or had not been important before.

50:37

It was all rigamarole, of course, but it consumed

50:40

all one's energies. Coming on top of

50:42

the work one really wanted to do. You can see

50:44

how easy it was then not to think about

50:46

fundamental things. One had no time.

50:50

Those Meyer said in response are the

50:52

words of my friend the Baker one had

50:54

no time to think. There was so much going

50:56

on. Your friend the Baker was right, said

50:58

my colleague. The dictate leadership and the whole

51:01

process of its coming into being was above

51:03

all diverting. It provided

51:05

an excuse not to think for

51:07

people who did not want to think anyway. I do

51:09

not speak of your little men, your baker and so

51:11

on. I speak of my colleagues and myself learned

51:14

men. Mind you, most of us did not want to

51:16

think about the fundamental things, and never had.

51:18

There was no need to. Nazism gave

51:21

us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about.

51:23

We were decent people and kept so busy

51:25

with continuous changes in crises, and so

51:28

fascinated, yes, fascinated

51:30

by the machinations of the national enemies

51:32

without and within that we had no time

51:34

to think about these dreadful things that were growing

51:37

little by little all around us.

51:39

Unconsciously, I suppose we were grateful.

51:42

Who wants to think, Wow,

51:46

damn, yeah, I

51:49

didn't like that. But yeah, yeah,

51:53

myself in this photo and I don't

51:56

like it. That's how if you

51:58

really study the Nazis,

52:01

you should see yourself more and more with

52:03

everything you learn in them. And if you don't.

52:05

You're not studying them, right. That's

52:07

what's scary about them. That's

52:10

what's scary about the Holocaust. They

52:12

thought they were free as a chilling book. But

52:15

I don't think there's any competition for the most

52:17

frightening passage in the whole work. It

52:20

comes when Meyer sits down, sat down

52:22

with one of his colleagues, a chemical engineer.

52:24

And again this is another non Nazi, and

52:27

he is more depressing than the one you just read.

52:29

Oh yeah, yes, this is the bleakest

52:31

thing I may ever have read. So

52:34

he sits down with this anti Nazi colleague

52:37

of his, a chemical engineer who lived through the Reich,

52:39

and he asks him, one day, tell me, now,

52:41

how was the world lost? And

52:44

this is his colleague's response. The

52:47

world was lost one day in nineteen

52:50

thirty five here in Germany. It

52:52

was I who lost it. And I will tell you how.

52:55

I was employed in a defense plant, a war

52:57

plant, of course, but they were always called defense

52:59

plants. That was the year of the National

53:01

Defense Law, the law of total Conscription.

53:04

Under the law, I was required to take the oath

53:06

of fidelity. I said I would not. I

53:08

opposed it in conscience. I was given twenty

53:11

four hours to think it over. In

53:13

those twenty four hours, I lost

53:16

the world, yes, I said, and

53:18

this is Meyer speaking, you see. His

53:20

friend responded, refusal would have meant

53:23

the loss of my job, of course, not prison

53:25

or anything like that. Later on the penalty

53:27

was worse. But this was only nineteen thirty five. But

53:30

losing my job would have meant that I could not get

53:32

another wherever I went. I should be asked

53:34

why I left the job I had, and when I

53:37

said why, I should certainly have been refused

53:39

employment. Nobody would hire a Bolshevik.

53:42

Of course I was not a Bolshevik, but you understand

53:44

what I mean, yes, Meyer said. I

53:47

tried not to think of myself or my family.

53:49

We might have gotten out of the country in any case,

53:51

and I could have got a job in an industry or education

53:54

somewhere else. What I tried to think of was

53:56

the people to whom I might be some help later

53:58

on if things got worse, and as

54:00

I believe they would, I had a wide friendship

54:03

in scientific and academic circles, including

54:05

many Jews and Arians too, who might

54:07

be in trouble. If I took the oath and held

54:09

my job, I might be of help somehow as

54:11

things went on, if I refused to take the oath,

54:14

I would certainly be useless to my friends. Even if

54:16

I remained in the country, I myself would

54:18

be in their situation. The next day,

54:20

after thinking it over, I said I would

54:22

take the oath with the mental reservation that by

54:25

the words with which the oath began, I

54:27

swear by God, I understood

54:29

that no human being, in no government had

54:31

the right to override my conscience. My mental

54:34

reservations did not interest the official who

54:36

administered the oath. He said, do you

54:38

take the oath? And I took it. That

54:40

day the world was lost, and it was I who

54:43

will lost it. Do I understand?

54:45

Meyer said that you think you should not have

54:47

taken the oath? Yes, But Meyer

54:50

said, you did save many lives later on.

54:52

You were of greater use to your friends than you ever dreamed

54:54

you might be. His friend's apartment was until

54:57

his arrested imprisonment in nineteen forty three,

54:59

a hide out for hugitives. This man hid

55:01

people from the Nazis. For the sake

55:03

of argument, he said, I will agree that I saved

55:05

many lives later on, Yes, which you would

55:07

not have done if you had refused to take the oath in nineteen

55:09

thirty five. Yes, of course,

55:12

I must explain. First of all, there

55:14

is the problem of the lesser evil. Taking

55:17

the oath was not so evil as being unable

55:19

to help my friends later on would have been. But

55:21

the evil of the oath was certain

55:23

and immediate, and the helping of my friends

55:26

was in the future and therefore uncertain.

55:29

I had to commit a positive evil there

55:31

and then in the hope of a possible

55:33

good later on. The good outweighed

55:36

the evil, but the good was only a hope.

55:38

The evil effect there

55:40

then is my point. If I had refused to take

55:42

the oath of fidelity, I would have saved

55:45

all three million he says, three million.

55:47

He's talking about all of the eleven million people we now

55:49

know died in the Holocaust. This was before they had

55:51

a full count. You

55:54

are joking, Meyer said, No, you

55:56

don't mean to tell me that your refusal would have overthrown

55:58

the regime in nineteen thirty five. No,

56:00

or that others would have followed your example. No,

56:03

I don't understand. You are an American,

56:05

he said again, smiling. I will explain there

56:08

I was in nineteen thirty five a perfect

56:10

example of the kind of person who, with

56:13

all of his advantages in birth and education

56:15

and in position, rules or might easily

56:18

rule in any country. If I had

56:20

refused to take the oath in nineteen thirty

56:22

five, it would have meant that thousands and

56:24

thousands like me all over Germany

56:26

were refusing to take it. Their refusal

56:29

would have heartened millions. Thus the

56:31

regime would have been overthrown, or indeed

56:33

would never have come to power in the first place.

56:36

The fact that I was not prepared to resist in

56:38

nineteen thirty five meant that all the thousands,

56:41

hundreds of thousands like me in Germany were

56:43

also unprepared, And each one

56:45

of these hundreds of thousands was like me,

56:48

a man of great influence or of great potential

56:50

influence. Thus the world was

56:52

lost. You were serious, Meyer

56:55

said completely. He said, these

56:57

hundred lives I've saved, or a thousand or ten,

56:59

as you will, what do they represent a

57:01

little something out of the whole terrible evil?

57:03

When if my faith had been strong enough in nineteen

57:06

thirty five, I could have prevented the

57:08

whole evil. Your faith, Meyer

57:10

asked, my faith. I did not believe

57:13

that I could remove mountains the day I said,

57:15

no, I had faith in the process

57:17

of thinking it over. In the next twenty four hours,

57:19

my faith failed me. So in the next ten

57:21

years I was able to remove only antills,

57:24

not mountains. How might your faith

57:26

on that first day have been sustained? Meyer asked,

57:29

I don't know. I don't know, he said, do

57:31

you. I am an American, I said, my

57:34

friend smiled. Therefore you believe in

57:36

education, yes, Meyer said, My education

57:39

did not help me, and I had a broader and better

57:41

education than most men have had or ever will

57:43

have. All it did, in the end was

57:46

enabled me to rationalize my failure

57:48

of faith more easily than I might have done

57:50

if I had been ignorant. And so it was.

57:52

I think among educated men generally

57:55

in that time in Germany, their resistance

57:57

was no greater than other men's. When

58:01

do you think the day was lost

58:05

here? I don't know that it has been,

58:09

But I know that if

58:11

I just mean in terms of how

58:15

far like

58:18

that, we couldn't have imagined so far

58:20

that like we we

58:23

didn't know that Trump's presidency,

58:27

uh I would have resulted

58:29

in all of the things that it did. Even

58:31

though we didn't know that it would be

58:34

terrible. I So

58:36

when do you think was the moment that that

58:39

mass miscalculation happened for the

58:42

people that were not like active Trump

58:44

supporters, but that went along and

58:46

voted for him. I mean, I

58:48

guess you could say when they cast a ballot. Now

58:50

there's an element of which obviously the thing

58:53

that had happened in Germany that this person

58:55

is talking about has not happened to us yet. There's

58:58

no regime making us take loyalty. No,

59:00

no, no, of course not. But that's not what I'm

59:02

saying. I'm it's a one to one. I'm just saying

59:05

that as

59:07

pessimistic because I was Trump

59:10

got elected, I couldn't have even imagined

59:13

that it's been so much worse. So

59:16

yeah, so it just makes me wonder at what point

59:19

people who voted for

59:21

him, while you

59:24

know, quote unquote holding their nose or

59:26

whatever, at what moment it

59:28

was lost for them when they decided that,

59:30

you know what, I'll just fucking vote for him. Yeah,

59:34

I mean, it's got

59:36

to be. It

59:39

can't be the emails like what was the straw?

59:43

I don't know. Um, that's

59:45

a question I go with all of

59:47

the time, and some of it is that as

59:50

it was then, Um, you

59:52

know, the the

59:55

thing that I think this fellow is talking about that

59:58

that we we have not hit

1:00:00

yet, is that the time at which decent

1:00:03

people completely surrender to the regime.

1:00:07

Um. But it is a thing that will happen

1:00:09

if the regime gains enough power, because

1:00:11

decent people are always scared of dying. UM.

1:00:16

And I think

1:00:18

the folks who have crossed the

1:00:20

line already, we're

1:00:23

neither decent nor educated. You

1:00:25

have to have had a failure of education

1:00:27

or decency to have voted for Trump.

1:00:30

And you know it's not it's

1:00:33

not the people who vote for him that

1:00:35

scare me the most. It's

1:00:37

it's again the people who didn't

1:00:41

vote for him. But if

1:00:44

it meant the difference between their

1:00:46

lives or not, would let the

1:00:48

camps on the border where there's

1:00:50

force ticks directed me is occurring and babies

1:00:53

being put in cages, would let those turn into

1:00:55

full death camps because the alternative

1:00:57

would be would be their own not even

1:01:00

loss of life, but loss of comfort and prestige.

1:01:02

Like that's the that's the thing.

1:01:06

That's the thing. Like the lesson

1:01:08

that this guy is trying to get across to people is

1:01:11

that it

1:01:14

is not the fascists decision

1:01:18

to let the fascists win. They

1:01:20

don't make the final call. We

1:01:23

do. They only win if

1:01:25

we consent to their victory, as

1:01:28

millions of decent people consented

1:01:31

to the victory of the Nazis. Mic

1:01:34

drop, Yeah, you

1:01:37

want to plug your plugable story. Fucking

1:01:41

funk yourself. Sorry,

1:01:44

I was. I'm on the edge of teers, so I'm trying

1:01:46

to Oh, I know, I know, I feel

1:01:48

that. Um. I felt that energy this

1:01:51

whole time I was on the Virgin

1:01:53

Teers earlier. You know, it's the

1:01:55

kind of life we're living, my man cool

1:01:58

time, So you know, guys,

1:02:02

follow it out. I'm just

1:02:05

really don't want to do this. Get us

1:02:07

up on the Graham. Um.

1:02:13

If you want to not kill yourself, I guess,

1:02:15

uh, maybe listen to my

1:02:18

comedy album Father's Day available

1:02:20

wherever you listen to things.

1:02:23

Can I just can I just say that when

1:02:25

I plut a shuffle on my like

1:02:27

music library and it's you and

1:02:30

you come up like after like a really

1:02:32

somber song, it's so great.

1:02:38

It's just you being just your

1:02:41

radiant itself and it just like makes

1:02:43

my day every lovely

1:02:45

Thank you, Sophie. If you guys

1:02:48

want to find my podcasts

1:02:51

that are not about dead

1:02:54

babies, learning

1:02:56

some of great transitions from

1:02:58

Robert You can watch me

1:03:00

talking about fiance

1:03:03

with Miles Gray from The Daily day Gist

1:03:06

and Private Parts Unknown, my podcast

1:03:08

with Courtney Kosak about loving sex. Yeah

1:03:13

yeah, let's fight fascism

1:03:16

real quick, Yeah, real quick. Just

1:03:19

for a second, just treat

1:03:21

a couple of minutes. Yeah. Uh.

1:03:27

Podcasts, Happy Trump,

1:03:30

COVID day, no

1:03:34

comment, not a single

1:03:36

comment was given. Good

1:03:42

stuff, that's the podcast. Sorry

1:03:46

it was so depressing. Yeah,

1:03:48

damn, thanks, I guess all

1:03:53

right, well sorry,

1:03:55

Sophia M.