Part One: Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself

Robert sits down with Joe Kassabian to discuss one of the worst Nazis: Adolf Eichmann, a major architect of the Holocaust. (4 Part Series) Sources: Adolf Eichmann (1906 -1962) | American Experience | Official Site | PBS https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/holocaust-eichmann/ The Complete Story of the Capture and Trial of Adolf Eichmann https://mjhnyc.org/blog/complete-story-leading-capture-trial-adolf-eichman/ Eichmann in Jerusalem—I | The New Yorker https://archive.is/eWJrt#selection-565.0-565.3070 BBC - History - World Wars: Adolf Eichmann: The Mind of a War Criminal https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/genocide/eichmann_01.shtml The CIA and Adolf Eichmann | National Archives https://www.archives.gov/iwg/research-papers/eichmann.html Organizing Genocide: Theodor Dannecker, Eichmann's Deportation Specialist | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/organizing-genocide-theodor-dannecker-eichmanns-deportation-specialist Organizing Genocide: Theodor Dannecker, Eichmann's Deportation Specialist | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/organizing-genocide-theodor-dannecker-eichmanns-deportation-specialist Eichmann : his life and crimes : Cesarani, David : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/eichmannhislifec0000cesa/page/31/mode/1up THE PAN-GERMANS’ PROGRAM FOR THE FUTURE https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9789633860953-004/pdf?licenseType=restricted&srsltid=AfmBOorMMk4plAB6_tDQqoqNmVdRYgXzzjxAZycUXf_ogBXhoyIrYVnQ Hungary's Wartime Leader Struck a Faustian Deal With Hitler https://www.historynet.com/hungarys-wartime-leader-struck-a-faustian-deal-with-hitler/ Budapest and Heroism – Wallenberg Legacy, University of Michigan https://wallenberg.umich.edu/raoul-wallenberg/the-story-of-raoul-wallenberg/budapest-and-heroism/ Depth of French police collaboration with Nazis revealed - France 24 https://www.france24.com/en/20180919-depth-french-police-collaboration-with-nazis-revealed RemovePaywalls.com - https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/excavating-one-of-the-nazis-first-concentration-camps/278877/ https://removepaywalls.com/https:/www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/excavating-one-of-the-nazis-first-concentration-camps/278877/ KZ Columbiahaus https://www.thf-berlin.de/en/history-of-location/national-socialism/kz-columbia-house We Will Never Speak of It: Evidence of Hitler's Direct Responsibility for the Premeditation and Implementation of the Nazi Final Solution https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1170&context=constructing 10-02-01_Student-Handout_Adolf-Eichmann.pdf https://echoesandreflections.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/10-02-01_Student-Handout_Adolf-Eichmann.pdf https://www.amazon.com/Eichmann-Before-Jerusalem-Unexamined-Murderer/dp/0307950166 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week I try to make you feel worse about life, even though life makes you feel worse about life every week. Why do I do this? Money. And also, I live to hurt you, you know? That's it. That's, that's, that's all that's going on with me. Let's talk about what's going on with our guest today, Joe Kasabian. Joe, how you doing?

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Hey, I'm, I'm great. I'm ready for pain to be inflicted on me and absorb the pain and the suffering like a sponge.

• 0:37Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, yes. Let me eat your pain. Your delicious pain.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  You say that, but when you hear what the topic is.

• 0:43Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Last time I was on, it was like four hours of La Vrenti Barea. What could possibly be worse than that?

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm so glad you asked that question.

• 0:52Robert Evans?

  What could possibly be worse than La Vrenti Barea, Stalin's head of the secret police, and almost certainly a pedophile on an industrial scale? What could be worse than that?

• 1:04Speaker 02

  I'm so glad you asked that question.

• 1:05Robert Evans?

  What could be worse than that? Sophie, what could be worse than that?

• 1:09Speaker 02

  I mean, I know the topic, but...

• 1:11Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. I think, I think, Joe, I think we've done an able job of finding a worse one for you.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  You're welcome.

• 1:17Robert Evans?

  Because this week, and motherfucking next week, because, boy, howdy, you can't do this guy in two parts, we are talking about Mr. Holocaust himself, Adolf Eichmann.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  You're welcome.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Are you fucking serious?

• 1:30Robert Evans?

  That's right, baby.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Fuck me.

• 1:34Robert Evans?

  Mr. Holocaust himself, I probably shouldn't call him.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a good, if he had a ring name, it would be Holocaust.

• 1:41Robert Evans?

  And he, as we'll talk about, he worked most of his professional career, he worked very hard to make himself the number one name associated with the Holocaust internationally. Like, that was a, he was not actually, like, he, his reputation, he was very involved, obviously, but his reputation is even higher than his actual involvement. And that was due to him trying to jink up his career. But I think it's fair.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Oh, God. He was trying to juice up his Holocaust brand.

• 2:07Robert Evans?

  He really was. He really was.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  And, and Joe, when Robert told me he was writing the scripts, he's like, who should we get as a guest? And I was like, Joe.

• 2:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we probably gotta get Joe in for this one.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Joe.

• 2:17Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  I'm glad I have a brand and it's horrible.

• 2:21Robert Evans?

  Oh, well.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Boy, howdy. Let's do it.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  I'm gonna say, though, you had me in the first half because you said Mr. Holocaust himself. Adolf, I'm like, did he, did he really, this motherfucker really bring me on for the Hitler episodes?

• 2:34Robert Evans?

  We've done so many Hitlers.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:37Robert Evans?

  We've covered, we gotta, you gotta cover Hitler in like little pieces. Like, we'll do two parts on how we fucked, you know? You gotta cover the, all the, there's so much niche Hitler stuff. Although, you know, as, it's, let's, let's come back from the cold open and we'll talk about the scope of these episodes, but we're done with the cold open. You're, you're warm now.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Very warm.

• 2:58Speaker 03

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• 3:02Robert Evans?

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• 3:34Speaker 04

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• 4:06Robert Evans?

  And we're back. We're back. We're all lathered up and hot, bothered. So, these episodes, if you know anything about Eichmann, and he's like, outside of Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, you know, Göring, he's probably the first name, one of the, one of the few names that like, the average person who knows anything about the Holocaust, you've heard of Eichmann, right? A lot of people will have. If you haven't, as I always say, there's a great movie called Conspiracy about the conference where they planned the Holocaust, where Eichmann is played by Stanley Tucci, and it's perfect performance.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Oh, my god. Is he really played by Stanley Tucci?

• 4:44Robert Evans?

  He's played by Stanley Tucci.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  The Tucci can play any part, okay?

• 4:49Robert Evans?

  And Stanley is incredible as Eichmann. Like, he really nails it.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  I can see it. I can see. He's got a face.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Is he also hot in the movie? Because Stanley Tucci's been hot in every movie he's ever been in, except the one where he played that pedophile.

• 5:03Robert Evans?

  I'm not gonna say. I will say, one of the critiques the movie got is that, and I also think he does an excellent job. Kenneth Branagh plays Reinhard Heidrich, and one of the complaints that, like, some Holocaust scholars had is that, like, he's a very good actor, he does a good job, but like, he probably shouldn't have made Heidrich hot, right? Like, maybe that was a mistake.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  That Heidrich is too sexy.

• 5:24Robert Evans?

  I tend to think the movie's just good enough. If you've watched the second season of Andor, the first episodes where they're planning that genocide on Gorman are themed after that movie, like, that movie Conspiracy.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Seriously?

• 5:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, had a big influence on it. Tony Gilroy's confirmed it. But Eichmann, the guy we're talking about today, is not the architect of the Holocaust, because that generally goes to Heidrich, although, obviously, he was not the only person involved in setting up the architecture. But Heidrich and Eichmann were both at this meeting, the Von Say Conference, where the architecture of the Holocaust was set up. And Eichmann's primary job, you might call him the trigger man, not a, because there were actually a lot of guys who just shot people, right? Like, the Einsatzgruppe, who shot tens of thousands at places like Bobby Yar.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  There were literal trigger men.

• 6:08Robert Evans?

  In terms of, like, the Nazi state had to build a system that was effectively a big gun for genociding people. And Eichmann was the man who worked. He was the guy who, his primarily, primary thing was, like, logistics, like, making sure how we're going to move, get all of these people out of the communities they're in, and move them into the different camps, right? He was the guy who managed that system. He was the deportation guy, right? That was a big, and he was, like, overseeing a lot of that system. As we'll talk about, there's other stuff that he did, but if you're making, like, a top-five list of the nine- Nazis who were most directly responsible for the genocide of European Jewry. Eichmann is gonna make the list every single time, right? Like, he's that central to what happened.

• 6:52Robert Evans?

  And kind of the biggest, probably, I don't know, pop culture is probably the wrong way to talk about Hannah Arendt's writing in 2025. But it was at one point popular culture, right? Like, because this guy goes on trial, he gets caught by the Mossad, and he goes on trial in the 60s. And Hannah Arendt, who's a famous philosopher and scholar of totalitarianism, writes a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem, right? Which is very much worth reading today, although very flawed, right? And it's very flawed in part, and one of the things it gets a lot of criticism for today is that, as she is describing Eichmann on trial, Arendt coins a term called the banality of evil, to describe the man that she sees in Israeli captivity, because he's just kind of this

• 7:33Robert Evans?

  late-middle-aged, balding dude, and he's mostly talking about, like, "Look, I was just following orders, you know? I was just doing what I was told to do, I was one cog in a bigger machine, I didn't actually kill anyone directly." That was like the bulk of his legal defense. And I think, I don't think the banality of evil is a useless term. I think it does describe a lot of people who were involved in administrative levels of the Holocaust, right? There are individuals whose job is pretty banal, and who were themselves pretty banal, and played an important role in the killing machine. Eichmann is not a good example of that, he was not banal at all. He is like a supervillain, in terms of his actual personality and how he talked about what he did. This is not a, that was his defense in court.

• 8:16Robert Evans?

  The reality of Eichmann was not a boring middle manager, right?

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, like, she saw, she saw Eichmann, like, out of power, in his old man sweater, pacing around, because there's famously a video of him pacing back and forth in Israeli prison cell.

• 8:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Uh, on the stand, like, of course he looked like the local accountant dork.

• 8:37Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Of course he looked like that.

• 8:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And, and it's one of those things, I don't think it's a useless concept, it's just misapplied to Eichmann. She does get, we'll talk about, she gets a lot right in this, we'll be quoting from it some in the last episode.

• 8:52Robert Evans?

  And it's one of those things, I don't reject the term the banality of evil. I just think it often is, it's less aptly applied to individuals, often in part because those individuals are not so banal as they may seem from the outside. But I think there's a real banality of evil in like the systems that we allow to exist and that we live inside that can be turned into instruments of mass violence or slaughter because we collectively make the poor choice to hand over more of our responsibility for our security to elected officials and government institutions that are neither accountable nor interested in our health, right? Like, you could use the term banality of evil for the 20 years that voters spent continuing to fund DHS and to expand ICE, right? Or to the work of editors at hundreds of publications deciding to greenlight more

• 9:37Robert Evans?

  stories about migrant crime because hey, that does well on Facebook and traffic is money, right? The banality of evil is the Sulzberger family who owns the New York Times ignoring the Holocaust because Eastern European Jews from rural areas aren't, in their words, worth caring about, right? The banality of evil is all of us like hearing about shit like this and being like, oh man, that's fucked up, but like I gotta, I gotta make the mortgage, so I guess I'm gonna walk right past this atrocity and then keep going, right? This can't be on me to fix, can it? Right?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, like the, the concept of banality of evil is not like, if you see a guy and you've heard of a guy, Eichmann, for example, he's not the definition of the banality of evil. That makes him management.

• 10:17Robert Evans?

  No, he's management and he's, he is again, a supervillain. Like you stick this motherfucker in a Bond movie, go on some of the rants he goes on and he fits perfectly. Um, so a big source for my episodes is a book by German philosopher and author Bettina Stangneth, who wrote a wonderful book called Eichmann Before Jerusalem. And, and in this book, number one, she's trying to kind of break some of the myths that came up as a result of a Rentsch piece, but she also highlights, opening this book, how relatively little we know about him in this passage. "We cannot speak of the systematic extermination of millions of men, women, and children without mentioning his name, and yet people are no longer even sure what his first name was. Carl Adolf Otto?

• 10:59Robert Evans?

  It's the simplest of questions, yet it can still surprise us, long after we thought we'd established who he was." Because he, you know, he has a couple of names and he goes by a few in his life. And, and there's kind of this open debate as to like, what, what was he actually called? As like a general rule by people that he knew?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  He's had a symbol to go off, you know, like Prince?

• 11:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Prince, right. Yeah, Eichmann. We could just call him that. He was born Otto Adolf Eichmann on March 19th, 1906, in Solingen, Germany. But Bettina's point is that depending on who you ask and what you read, there's room for debate as to what he would have given as his name during different points in his life, right? His first biographers were people like British journalist Comer Clark, who in 1960 tried to chronicle Eichmann's early life and came up with a sort of tale of woe you might expect from a great historic victim, right? And this is partly what you get when a journalist tries to do a biography, right? As he's like looking for the...

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Thank you. I hate this shit. It's one of my biggest pet peeves.

• 11:59Robert Evans?

  It's not what we do.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  A journalist tripped into writing a biography or writing in-depth history, like...

• 12:07Robert Evans?

  Not our place. Not our place. In Comer's telling, Comer Clark's telling, Eichmann's mother died before he was five years old. His mother had to move back to Austria from whence they hailed when he was young, but his father had to go back to Germany after this to escape the sorrow of being trapped with memories of his late wife. And so his boy was raised largely by his aunts. David Cesareini, who's a better Eichmann biographer, summarizes the rest of Clark's version of events. According to Clark, Eichmann was repeatedly mistaken for a Jew at school and beaten up, which left him with a lasting antipathy towards Jewish people. Against this background, it was natural that he should join the Nazi party after hearing Hitler speak. And this is all nonsense. None of that's true, right?

• 12:50Speaker 01

  If that happened, I really wish he would have learned the opposite lesson of that, which is...

• 12:55Robert Evans?

  Racism.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Oh, they must just, we all just must look the same. Like, this racism thing is stupid.

• 13:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, maybe, yeah, if I can get mistaken for these people, Jesus, this racism thing must be bullshit, right? This, this is almost certainly not what happened. Cesare Rini, who is the author of Eichmann, His Life and Crimes, describes similar cavalcades of bullshit from a generation of lazy, ahistorical pop bios of this guy. Quote, "Quinton Reynolds, another British pressman, declared that Eichmann was left motherless and introverted. His family was so poor that there was never enough food on the table. Young Adolf turned into a problem child and suffered even more once his father remarried a harsh, domineering woman. As a young man, he was unsuccessful and friendless, not least because he looked Jewish. He failed in job after job and walked the streets of Linz with the unemployed."

• 13:44Speaker 01

  That sounds more accurate.

• 13:46Robert Evans?

  It's not. But it sounds like it should be, right? Because it fits, it fits the Hitler profile. I think that's why they did this, is that like, well, that's kinda, I mean, Hitler was mostly in Austria by the time he was like, like, living homeless, right? He was-

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, living in a min's home.

• 14:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he was in Vienna by that point. But otherwise, like, yeah, that's kinda Hitler's life, right? Like, his dad dies early, doesn't have a lot of friends, he fails a job after job, right? Hitler didn't get mistaken for being Jewish often, but like, you know, the rest of that's pretty simple.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  No, just inbred.

• 14:20Robert Evans?

  The pieces fit together, right? Dead mom, dad not around, economic anxiety, bullying that gives him a convenient reason to hate Jews, right?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  A shitty life.

• 14:28Robert Evans?

  It's an easy, easy thing, easy biography to accept for Eichmann. Unfortunately, it's also hogwash. It's like if you were to do a biography of some modern-day homophobic bigot and say, like, well, he got called gay or the F slur a bunch on the playground as a kid, right? So that's why he did such monstrous things as an adult. And if you're like someone 300 years in the future and you read that, you might be like, oh, I guess, yeah, that makes sense. But if you were to talk to, like, either of us, like, if they could bring us forward into the future and be like, so is this why this guy did it? We could be like, no, everybody got called those things on the playground, man.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:00Robert Evans?

  Like, that was like a universal experience.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  They just called being born back then, yeah.

• 15:03Robert Evans?

  That was like living in the late 90s, early 2000s, man. Like, that cannot explain why he did what he did.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  And I'm also a bit worried because it's like, oh, you know, he, he failed at all these jobs, you know, shitty home life. I'm like, okay, so he is, at 17, he's going to enlist in the army and that is me.

• 15:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, a lot of guys, a lot of guys who don't go on to commit like hate crimes and war crimes. So maybe like, I don't know.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Got beat up for thinking of a different race than I am. That is just me.

• 15:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, in Eichmann's case, there's even less reason to believe his antisemitism resulted from bullying because there's simply no real evidence that he was bullied about this or accused of being Jewish, you know, in any way that impacted his development. Likewise, the claims that poverty and desperation drove him to fascism are baseless. And again, I think this is like a mainstream Hitler discourse thing, right? Like it sounds kind of like Hitler's backstory. So that makes it seem like, oh, of course, this is where fascists come from, right? It's more comforting than being like, no, fascists come from the same place like the guy who runs the local fucking credit union came from, right? Like they just come from the world. I'm going to read another quote from Cesarelli's book, and

• 16:17Robert Evans?

  I want you to think about how easily you could do a find and replace on this paragraph and make it sound like modern reporting on some American neo-Nazi mass shooter. Quote, "The NBC correspondent John Donovan concluded on the basis of interviews with Eichmann's schoolmates that he was a lonely and distant fellow. He was a fragile, underfed youth and an obviously unhappy one, a misfit. According to Donovan, Eichmann represented the classic pattern of disturbed, introverted personality, which so often produced the larvae of fanaticism. His father, a struggling and underpaid manager of a failing electrical company, simply could not provide for his abundant family, and more often than not, there was insufficient food on the table. The boy grew to manhood with a grudge and drifted around in a world without hope, until he traded a threadbare suit for a splendid SA uniform."

• 17:02Robert Evans?

  And again, not true. I'm bringing this up to talk about like how, how similar a lot of these very fake backstories are and what they say about what we wanna believe about a guy named Eichmann, right?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, we always wanna believe these people come from like disadvantaged backgrounds, or tortured family homes, or were bullied. I mean, I know we're about the same age, Robert, and what were we always told growing up about the Columbine shooters?

• 17:28Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  These people always need to be victims of some kind of lashing out. They can't be cold and calculated and ideologically driven, you know?

• 17:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And there's this, it's tough too, because like there's this belief that is very common on the left, and I think is not a bad guiding light that like, well, you should seek to improve people's conditions because that makes the world better. And guys like Eichmann point out that like, that yeah, you should, but that's not enough to avoid the birth of an Eichmann. Because what's gonna be scariest about this guy's backstory is that if you grew up in the suburbs like 10, 15 years ago, or like, you know, today, a lot of his backgrounds kinda sounds similar to you, right? Like in some ways that are like weirdly direct. So his birth town, Solingen, was a, an industrial town in the Rhineland, and his father was a modern German man with a modern German job. He worked

• 18:22Robert Evans?

  as a clerk for a company that supplied parts to power plants. His name was Adolf Karl Eichmann, and he was a strict disciplinarian, but not in a way that would have been weird to his son or anyone else. This was very normal for the time. Our Eichmann would recall in his own autobiography, "I acknowledged my father is the absolute authority." The earliest recollection that he gives us of his education is of a kindergarten teacher with an illustrated book of Bible stories, which showed Moses having demonic horns. Now, Eichmann gave this recollection when he was on trial for genocide. So, he may have been trying to defray his culpability by making a point about the deep roots of antisemitism in his culture. That said, as I've noted before, you can today find churches

• 19:05Robert Evans?

  in Germany and elsewhere in Europe with what's called a Judensau depicted on the outside, which is a sculptural depiction of a pig suckling Jewish babies. These are like medieval churches, but they're around today and there were more of them back then. So like the idea that he would have encountered this in Sunday school, not weird, right? Pretty racist culture.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Not at all weird. Germany was a deeply anti-Semitic place. And I also like the idea of like, maybe we shouldn't take the guy on trial for genocide.

• 19:36Robert Evans?

  The guy on trial for killing off for the Holocaust at face value? Yes.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Maybe the concept of innocent until proven guilty needs to be ignored on this one, perhaps.

• 19:49Robert Evans?

  There were a lot of fascinating like Jewish prudential arguments about the Nuremberg trials. And obviously this isn't a part of that. This was a different thing, but like, and part of it was like, number one, well, technically everything these guys did was legal in their country. So like, what law are we trying them under kind of ex post facto? And number two, like, well, we know, like, we know Herman Gerring doesn't have a defense against being Herman Gerring, right?

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the first legal precedent of, uh, fuck that.

• 20:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  We've all come together and our six or eight judge brains have decided, fuck it, bro.

• 20:25Robert Evans?

  Fuck it. Fuck it. We ball. Yeah.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Ball is life in my weird dress with my wig.

• 20:34Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. I did watch the fucking Mandela movie with starring Idris Elba as Mandela. And it was like, it was fine, but the opening of it is like early South African courts where everybody's wearing the wigs, even like the black lawyers. And it's like, oh, man, this is, did that really? I guess that must have really been how everyone dressed in those courts. Seems weird. I guess it's a holdover.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  I love that there's still places that do it. Like, this is ridiculous. I don't care if you're passing me, like, I could be sitting in front of you, hands cuffed together. And you're like, I sentence you to death. I'm like, bro, not you. Now bring out the real judge.

• 21:11Robert Evans?

  Give me a real guy. Yeah, whatever. Adolf Karl, his dad, moves back to Linz to take a job managing a local power company, and his wife and kids follow about a year later. They were evangelical Calvinist Protestants, which made them as much a minority in the small Austrian town of Linz as the Jewish citizens, right? Jewish people are like 17% of the population. Evangelical Protestants are like 19%. Linz is predominantly Catholic. And while Catholics believe that good works can win someone a place in heaven, Calvinists are as close to the opposite of Catholics as you get in Christianity, right? The idea is there's an elect few that make it to heaven, and those rules are fixed, right?

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It's very Dutch-coded.

• 21:54Robert Evans?

  It's very Dutch-coded. But there's no real evidence that this difference caused Karl a much trouble. His family overall seems to have blended in. His dad was a German nationalist and is a Protestant as well. He would have been drawn to George Ritter von Schonauer's Pan-German movement. This was a foundational pillar of the right in Austria and also a prelude to Nazism's conflict with the Catholic Church. Because the Pan-German movement is a heavily evangelical Protestant movement, right? That's where like the core of the membership comes from. And I want to read you a summary of Schonauer's life and career, written for Amsterdam University Press, which notes that his politics were, quote, "founded on antagonism towards Slavs, Jews, and Catholicism.

• 22:39Robert Evans?

  This culminated in his establishment of the Pan-German Party in 1879 and the subsequent Away-from-Rome movement, seeking mass conversion of Austrian Catholics to Lutheranism, echoing Bismarck's Kulturkampf in Germany. Schonauer became notorious for his pioneering use of physical and verbal violence. In 1888, he was imprisoned, losing his title and temporarily all parliamentary privileges after ransacking the offices of a Jewish-owned newspaper. In 1898, he orchestrated mob protests that expedited the dismissal of the Austrian Prime Minister Count Badini, one year after Schonauer's own reelection to the Reichsrat. This was in protest against Badini's language ordinances, obliging civil servants in Austrian Bohemia to speak Czech, excluding Germanophones, and it helped his party reach a high watermark

• 23:23Robert Evans?

  of 21 delegates in 1901. Schonauer helped create an entirely new political form and climate, described as being in a "new key, sharper, violent, demagogic." And Schonauer is a massive, because again, Hitler grows up in Linz. Schonauer is a huge influence on Hitler, right? Like, he is, like, the way his party works is a proto-Nazi party. These guys are destroying Jewish newspapers. They're getting into fights in the street. And they're, they're like a pan-German nationalist group, right? Who is seeking to destroy any of these religions that have ties. Like, his issue with Catholicism is its ties to Rome, right? Which is obviously not German.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, as a German nationalist, it makes a lot of sense. I like that he, he ascends to power because his entire thing is, uh, "I see you guys have a nationalist movement, and it's not doing very well. Have you considered violence?"

• 24:15Robert Evans?

  Have you considered beating people up?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, have you considered street crime?

• 24:19Robert Evans?

  "Oh shit, this is working great. Yeah, let's keep trying that."

• 24:22Speaker 01

  "This is wonderful."

• 24:26Robert Evans?

  So, Eichmann would later recall that his father had been essentially apolitical. Quote, "At home, politics was never discussed. My father didn't bother with politics." But that's the kind of thing people say when, like, they don't view whatever their family believes as political, right? And as a kid, Eichmann doesn't think German nationalism or pan-Germanism is political, right? It's just correct. It's like, you get, there's some religious extremists in the US who'd be like, "Christianity isn't a religion. It's just the truth." You know, right? Like, I've heard, that's a, that's a conversation I've had. It's like, I mean-

• 24:59Speaker 01

  And having Christianity in politics is neither something to argue for or argue against. It just should be something that exists.

• 25:05Robert Evans?

  It's just the truth, right? Yeah, it's just truth, you know?

• 25:08Speaker 01

  I hate to see yet another father get radicalized by using Facebook, you know?

• 25:12Robert Evans?

  Tragic. Yeah, his dad would have lost it to Facebook. So, Schonauer's party would have, was the first big political party to influence Hitler. And in a less direct way, the same would have been true of young Eichmann. His family did everything a loyal Austro-Hungarian family ought to do, which for Adolf's mom meant Maria popping out a child every single opportunity she had. Little Adolf was joined by four siblings, three of whom were boys, in the space of about eight years. And in other words, Maria popped out a kid, uh, once every two years. Until she died in 1916 and her death was a consequence of both. World War One is on at this point. Everyone is starving in Germany and Austria Hungary. And number two, she's just had not had enough time to recuperate between pregnancies.

• 25:57Robert Evans?

  Right? So like her body is already taxed and then there's not enough food while she's going through pregnancy. Number five in nine years.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Christ, give the woman a weekend off.

• 26:07Robert Evans?

  Nope, that not the way they did it back then. She dies at 32.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  That was a lot.

• 26:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  This, this dude couldn't pull out of a driveway.

• 26:19Robert Evans?

  The elder Adolf Eichmann remarried almost instantly. This was likely a product of two pragmatic realities. He had no desire to raise his own children and he needed more children because that's what you did as a loyal citizen of the empire. And a good evangelical Christian, right? His second wife was also named Maria. Perhaps.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Oh, that's weird.

• 26:40Robert Evans?

  Perhaps he had a type, although an Austrian woman named Maria, not too uncommon.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  I am looking for an Austrian woman named Maria who could give births in litters.

• 26:53Robert Evans?

  Three or four at a time would be ideal.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Really saves us time and money.

• 26:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  He was like, I'm not learning another name. What are you talking about?

• 27:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Oh no, this is the world's first puppy play enthusiast.

• 27:07Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 27:07Speaker 02

  I feel like, I feel like he just numbered his children and he's like, number one, come here.

• 27:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's faster that way. Yeah.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Why is it always the psychos that want the most amount of kids have the least amount to do with parenting them?

• 27:20Robert Evans?

  Because the, the point is to have the kids, not to be there with them.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Fair enough.

• 27:27Robert Evans?

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• 27:38Robert Evans?

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• 28:38Robert Evans?

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• 29:18Robert Evans?

  And we're back. All right. So, uh, his second wife, we'll call her Maria too. Her family has money, which helps a lot because they're gonna have more kids. Also, her family is closely tied to, she has like a number of relatives who had married into wealthy Jewish families in Vienna. And obviously, by that, you should know, these are like urban, sophisticated Jewish, sophisticated by the term of the day. They're not, they're, they're trying to just be Germans, right? Which is not an uncommon thing for people in Like the upper class who are Jewish in both in Austria and in Germany to do to try to kind of leave behind the religion and like we're basically secular, we're married into Christian families. None of this really saves a lot of these people come the Holocaust.

• 30:02Robert Evans?

  But there is this attempt to like integrate that like I'm a German before I'm anything else, right? And that's kind of her family is number one, you'd say probably more open minded than a lot because they are willing to marry into these families. Although it's also, you know, this thing of like, well, they got money, right? So that's, that's, that over, you know, overwhelms the fact that they're this race that a lot of people don't like, right? They're rich. Yeah, that, that, that, that kind of papers over that to some people. But it's meaningful in the case of Eichmann because you often don't hear this with him, you know? Every version of this backstory of his backstory emphasizes cultural antisemitism, which both he was raised with and tries to say that he was like accused of being Jewish.

• 30:43Robert Evans?

  But it ignores the fact that like, he was exposed to positive images and accounts of Jewish people as part of German society. His in-laws were Jewish, some of them, right? He knew Jewish people growing up and he would have had like a family relationship with them, right? So this is not a guy who was like destined by any means to be completely antisemitic, right?

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Destined by the stars to be a massive piece of shit.

• 31:10Robert Evans?

  Right. That's just not how it works. This is a choice he makes at a point, right?

• 31:15Robert Evans?

  Now, obviously his mother's death would have been traumatic for him. It's always traumatic for your mom to die when you're a little kid. But again, a lot of these stories are like, and he hated his wicked stepmother who was cruel to him. He never described her that way. He described her as a zealous and responsible guardian, like.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Which is like the highest compliment a German can pay you.

• 31:34Robert Evans?

  Right, right. You get the feeling he didn't love her like he did his mom, which again, isn't weird. But he was like, no, she was like respectable. She did the job that she was brought in to do, right? And three more children quickly joined the family. He later recalled of his family life, "There was no disorder. We were brought up in a strict way and we had a normal, quiet life." He did recall as a child that while his stepmother tried to get the family interested in the Bible, young Adolf Eichmann was primarily interested in the bits with battles and killing, which is not abnormal for young boys.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that that's more on brand. I would be more worried if he wasn't. He's like, no, I'm actually more really into the logistics half of this.

• 32:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do they, how do they, what do they, what kind of food were they carted around the desert for 40 years? How do they make that work? Right?

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Let me see the wagons.

• 32:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So one of his best friends as a child was a Jewish classmate, Misha Seba. Seba's father was a pharmacist and his mother owned a salon. And the two were close enough that Cesarelli describes them as regularly staying over at each other's houses. So again, this is not a guy who's destined to the kind of antisemitism that he is going to adopt in adulthood. It's a choice he makes. Seba and Eichmann would maintain their friendship, in fact, well into not just adulthood, but Eichmann's involvement with like far right organizations into the early, I think like 32 is when they have their last contact. So like, that's late, right?

• 32:57Speaker 01

  And that's also not uncommon, though.

• 32:59Robert Evans?

  No, no.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  All of the, all of these psychos who, you know, maybe put the blueprints of the Holocaust in place, or high ranking members of the Third Reich, had some kind of hands on shit. Like, all of them had close personal contacts with Jewish people and the, the mental gymnastics they worked. I was like, ah, well, he's one of the good ones. It's fine.

• 33:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And that is in fact, a thing that was talked about, like, and they cover this in, in conspiracy, but at the Von Say conference where they're trying to decide, like, how far do we go with this? And finally, like, look, everyone has their good Jew, but we just can't build that into the plan. We have to try to wipe them all out. Right? But like, as like Hitler even, there was one Jewish guy he picked to spirit out of Nazi Germany after he took power, his family doctor, right?

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Oh, there's, he was also his personal driver. Yeah. His, his personal driver was Jewish as well. Yeah.

• 33:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Like, he, like, all of these guys had relationships with Jewish people, right? But, you know, that's just the way racism works, right?

• 33:57Speaker 01

  And nobody ever accused them of being smart or logical in their racism.

• 34:01Robert Evans?

  No, there was a fucking, a great Louis Theroux documentary. Where he goes to see Tom Metzger, who used to lead an organization called White Aryan Resistance, or War, that was responsible for the murder of a young immigrant named Malu Geta Surah in Portland years back. And, you know, Metzger is as vile and anti Semitic as possible. And during Louis' time with him, he like meets his neighbor who's like a Mexican man, and they're like friendly. And Tom's like, no, I mean, like, we get along. Like, I like him. Like, it doesn't change my overall opinion about like, different races. And it's just like, yeah, that's just how these people are. Like, cognitive dissonance, you're not immune to it just because you're a bigot, right?

• 34:40Robert Evans?

  So anyway, Seba and Eichmann are friends for a while. And yeah, another friend of his was Friedrich von Schmidt. And this is a friend more that you would expect from a guy who grows into what Eichmann was. As you can tell by the von, Friedrich is the son of a noble family. His dad had been a field marshal for the Austro Hungarian Army, which means he was terrible at his job. None of them were that.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Nobody's ever been worse at their job.

• 35:04Robert Evans?

  Not a single good field marshal in that army. And his family was impoverished by the time that Eichmann met him, right? Probably because of the heretofore mentioned World War I, right?

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm glad to see at least one family got what they deserved. Poverty.

• 35:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Cesare Nini notes that the mere fact that Eichmann was allowed to play with this kid counters the narrative that he was like a desperate loner on the fringes as a kid. Because like, von Schmidt's family wouldn't have let them play, their son play with the weird kid, right? That's just not the way these groups worked.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  If anything, it's evidence that his family was quite well placed in society to be hanging out with us. Even though they are impoverished, it's that kind of European nobility that's poor, but they still have social standing.

• 35:49Robert Evans?

  And they're no, yeah, and they don't, and like, the Eichmann family is not like impoverished. I think they go from kind of lower middle class to solidly middle class by the time he's like an adult, right? Like, this is sort of how I, and again, middle class terms like that are not as useful when we're talking about Austro Hungary in the first half of the 20th century, but that's, or Austria, but that's kind of where.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  A used horse salesman, a used car salesman didn't exist yet.

• 36:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they, yeah, they drive the, they drive the equivalent of a Pontiac Vibe and horses, which I guess is just a horse with no legs. That you pull with a fucking.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Motherfucker, put my horse up on cinder blocks.

• 36:27Robert Evans?

  We pull a horse with mule.

• 36:32Robert Evans?

  Is Pontiac.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  This is my horse vibe.

• 36:39Robert Evans?

  So if we're looking for signs in his childhood of the monster he would become, we don't have a lot to go on from childhood trauma because he doesn't seem to have had a lot of childhood trauma. More than probably you and I or most kids, because he grew up in World War I, right? He's not fighting in it, but everyone is starving for a while, right? That's probably pretty bad for you. Um, now, what's interesting to me is that, like, it is a seminal moment, this war, for a lot of the Nazi old guard, whether they fought in it or not. But Eichmann didn't talk about it much, and we get little of his backstory on that. Now, he would have been inundated with imperial propaganda, and the shortages of the war years would have impacted him. But his father seems to have maintained a comfortable living for the family in spite of the times. And was

• 37:21Robert Evans?

  never drafted himself, which also suggests that what he was doing was really useful during the war, right? For to not get drafted by the end of that fucking thing as a...

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  He either had really good connections, or he did something, some kind of manufacturing.

• 37:36Robert Evans?

  Right. He's working in power, right?

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, by the end, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was scraping the bottom of the bottom of the barrel. They were drafting the horses with no legs.

• 37:46Robert Evans?

  Do you have one or more hands? Okay. That's not a good Austrian accent.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  What was that? That was so bad.

• 37:54Robert Evans?

  How am I doing it all?

• 37:56Speaker 01

  We have paperwork for something called the horse vibe.

• 38:02Robert Evans?

  So the war cost Austria what was left of her empire, right? And a third of the German-speaking population wound up separated into different countries, which really pisses off pan-Germanists like Eichmann's father. But again, we have nothing that shows child Eichmann was particularly traumatized at the war's outcome, nor is there any particular evidence that his dad blamed the Jews. We might do better looking at the place and systems he was raised in than the specifics of his family life. This is because the town he was raised in, Linz, is also the town where Hitler had raised a couple decades earlier. And the future Fuhrer was at this point on the Western Front during World War I. But he and Eichmann went to the same high school as kids, obviously with some

• 38:45Robert Evans?

  time in between them, and they had some of the same teachers, right?

• 38:49Speaker 01

  God, that's weird.

• 38:50Robert Evans?

  Eichmann has Hitler's history teacher, who is this guy, this guy-

• 38:55Speaker 01

  That history teacher has the most cursed alumni meetings ever.

• 39:00Robert Evans?

  And he's a piece, like, he's got some blame for what happens, right?

• 39:03Speaker 01

  He has to. I mean, his fucking track record is, uh, is, is spotless in tragedy.

• 39:09Robert Evans?

  No. And this is why I always tell my friends who are teachers, don't teach children things. It never ends well, you know? Keep their little minds empty, right?

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had a teaching job for years. I'm never gonna say it was a good one, but I, I'm willing to bet, I did not teach American Hitler.

• 39:26Robert Evans?

  Another Hitler?

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Way too busy watching Remember the Titans.

• 39:30Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah, just put that on a bunch, they'll be fine. His history teacher was named Dr. Leopold Poet, Poet, P-O-E-T, like poet, S-C-H. Both Hitler and Eichmann later wrote about the impact this man had on their developing minds, so it's probably worth looking into him a bit deeper. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote this about Poet. Quote, "An old gentleman, kind, but at the same time firm. He was able not only to hold our attention by his dazzling eloquence, but to carry us away with him. Even today, I think back with genuine emotion on this gray-haired man who by the fire of his words, sometimes made us forget the present, who as if by magic, transported us into times past and, out of the millennium mists of time, transformed dry historical facts into

• 40:11Robert Evans?

  vivid reality. There we sat, often aflame with enthusiasm, sometimes even moved to tears. He used our budding national fanaticism as a means of educating us, frequently appealing to our sense of national honor. This teacher made history my favorite subject, and indeed, though he had no such intention, it was then I became a young revolutionary." Not a good teacher.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  No, no, it's not good.

• 40:34Robert Evans?

  You fucked up, Leopold.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, at any point you're a teacher, do you get noted in your students that?

• 40:39Robert Evans?

  Manifesto?

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Manifesto, yeah.

• 40:42Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Not a, not a good vote of confidence.

• 40:45Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm. So Poet was a German supremacist, although he was also one, he was a weird kind because he was super loyal to the Habsburgs, which obviously Hitler does not become loyal to the Habsburgs. He leaves Austria to join the German army. His exhortations to nationalism influenced both Hitler and Eichmann, though. Eichmann recalled later that while he was never very political as a kid, he reflexively leaned towards right-wing nationalism. This would have kept him well inside the mainstream within Linz. For most of his childhood, the city government was run by Mayor Karl Bierley, who headed a coalition of lawyers, teachers, small business owners, and government employees, who were all bound together by a shared hatred of liberals, Jews, and the Catholic clergy.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  All right.

• 41:27Robert Evans?

  And, yeah.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  It's just a normal Republican meeting these days.

• 41:30Robert Evans?

  It's a normal Republican meeting these days. His father went through several career changes, Eichmann's, and significant reversals of fortune while he's a kid. The job in Linz had initially seemed like a step to the upper middle class, and for a time it was. But his dad retired early and put his savings into a 51% stake in a mining company based in Salzburg, which was experimenting with an early form of what we now call hydraulic fracturing, right? Like, he, he, his family, he has some family money from fracking Adolf Eichmann?

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Even.

• 42:02Robert Evans?

  He's an oil and gas kid?

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Oh, so would this make him, like, ancestrally from North Dakota or something?

• 42:09Robert Evans?

  Yes, no.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Is he Dakotan?

• 42:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's why Adolf Eichmann High School is located in Bismarck. No. I say sorry to our listener in, in North Dakota, but they don't have the internet there, do they?

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Explains all the Nazis there, to be fair.

• 42:26Robert Evans?

  Ah, it's, I'm sorry, North Dakota, I love you. I don't love you, but I've been to you.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  I don't think anybody could be in love with a Dakota.

• 42:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  It's more of a friend.

• 42:37Robert Evans?

  It's like loving a vampire squid, you know? You can appreciate some of its characteristics, but, um.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  A what?

• 42:43Robert Evans?

  A vampire squid.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  The fuck is a vampire squid?

• 42:46Robert Evans?

  It's a squid that's a vampire. Come on.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  The way your brain's working today.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  It is what it says on the tin.

• 42:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, it's, it's what's advertised.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Your brain is like this today.

• 42:59Robert Evans?

  That's a lot of days, Sophie.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Much like the legs of a vampire squid.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  There we go.

• 43:04Robert Evans?

  So this, uh, this 51% stake in a fracking company in Salzburg, it brings in a living, but it doesn't make them rich, right? You're in it a little too early to get loaded from fracking. So Adolf's dad invested what was left of his savings and his wife's inheritance into a mill in Upper Austria. This was a bad choice and the investment went bust quickly. Carl pivoted to an investment in a company making locomobils. I had never heard of these. They were in early form.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  What the fuck is a locomobile?

• 43:33Robert Evans?

  They were steam powered cars.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  That rules. I mean, you have to, you have to invent something when your horse has no fucking legs.

• 43:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. But so he gets into locomobils, but it turns out this isn't like a real investment. His business partner is a con man who hangs himself, so.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, you invested in steam powered cars with the local Austrian flim flam, man.

• 43:57Robert Evans?

  And you're an oil man.

• 44:01Robert Evans?

  Some biographers would try to make hay out of the impact his father's unstable employment and financial situation might have had, as with the fact that his dad is gone for a period. There's like a year where he's working in Germany while Eichmann's a kid. But Eichmann never related this as particularly traumatic. And the evidence shows, well, again, they had financial difficulties. They were never in danger of like losing their home or starving. If anything, the Eichmanns enjoyed unusual stability and financial security for people of their class and time, right? Not that they were totally stable, not that they didn't have anxieties, but they had it better than a lot of folks, right?

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, they're, they're making a killing, selling weird steam powered cars, saying their neighbors drinking water on fire with fracking.

• 44:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, his business partner in the steam cars thing killed himself because it would belly up. So I don't know about that part, but yeah.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  You're right. It's more of a Shelbyville thing, I guess.

• 44:53Robert Evans?

  It's a Shelbyville thing. Yeah. But he does get, he does get tricked by, yeah, the fucking music man. So, as I noted earlier, when I read Cesarini's biography, the big thing I took away was how similar Eichmann's childhood was to like, mine, which is not something that tends to happen with books about guys who grew up in Austria at the turn of the century. And I find this very weird, and I'm just gonna quote from that book now. "Eichmann's social life was typical of the children and youth of his class. Like every good bourgeoisie child, he was taught a musical instrument, and he became a proficient violinist. His father encouraged him to learn fencing, and he took classes in jiu-jitsu. He was enrolled in the Young Men's Christian Association and went to the club every Sunday after attending church with his family. He later joined the Wander Vogel, a sort of scouting or woodcraft

• 45:36Robert Evans?

  association that organized hikes and camps for teenagers. The particular Wander Vogel group he joined belonged to the Federation of Youth Organizations, which was ostensibly apolitical, although the movement had a strong, if diverse, ideological currents running through it. Eichmann's group, named after the Griffin bird, introduced him to older boys who were already in the ranks of right-wing Austrian militias." And just like the whole, "Yeah, he like, he has to learn an instrument, everyone does, he takes fencing classes, he takes jiu-jitsu, like he's doing karate classes? I didn't know they were doing that at this point in time in Austria."

• 46:08Speaker 01

  I love the idea of like, of a Nazi brown shirt getting in a street battle, he just falls on his ass and starts scooting around to try to do Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

• 46:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like a crab on his back?

• 46:20Speaker 01

  I'm gonna pole guard on the undermen.

• 46:22Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. It's so funny. Um, it's just, it's all, yeah, that's fascinating to me. And yeah, the Wander Vogel, there were like, there was like a left-wing chunk of them, but the group he is in, he doesn't get involved in right-wing militias, but he now has friends in them, right? And he will know people, kind of the rest of his life, until he gets directly in the far-right, who are in far-right groups, right?

• 46:44Speaker 01

  This makes sense to me as someone who did a lot of jiu-jitsu, where you never expect that you're gonna end up in the middle of a group of right-wingers, but the second you walk into a jiu-jitsu gym, like, huh.

• 46:54Robert Evans?

  The vibes are off.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess I'm in a right-wing space, aren't I?

• 46:58Robert Evans?

  I saw three people with hats that are problems walk in. I may not be happy here. Speaking of places I'm not happy, a world without these products and services.

• 47:10Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 47:14Robert Evans?

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• 48:14Robert Evans?

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• 48:53Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So Eichmann was an indifferent student. We might even say a bad one. His later life would show him to be a generally smart guy, or at least to possess kinds of intelligence. So the way I read this is that he's not motivated by any of the schoolwork he's doing, nor is he motivated by any of the paths set before him by his education. His father takes him out of traditional school in 1921 and puts him into a vocational program to train him as an electrician, right? So his Dad is like, you're not doing well in like school, school, and you have to learn how to like, do something, right? But he fails out of vocational school. He ultimately drops out without any kind of degree. So he's now failed both of the different kinds of schooling tracks in Austria at the time.

• 49:39Robert Evans?

  Now, for a young man with fewer means behind him, this might have ended with Eichmann winding up like Hitler, you know, as some of those other biographies had claimed, living on the streets of Vienna, homeless or at the edge of it. But unlike Hitler, Eichmann's father was still alive and Eichmann's dad used his plentiful connections to get his job. He owns a mining company, right?

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:59Robert Evans?

  And he gets his job involved in the fracking company, right? So Adolf Eichmann, future foreman of the Holocaust, his first like big boy job is hydraulic fracking, right?

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:10Robert Evans?

  That's, that's.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  As a fail son.

• 50:12Robert Evans?

  As a fail son? Yeah.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:16Robert Evans?

  His dad seems to have put him through a number of roles at the company, trying him doing, outdoing everything from squeezing through underground tunnels to running machinery above ground. Eichmann liked work in the tunnels. It was physical and dangerous and seems to have been the first labor that he found motivating. After some time working at the fracking company, he did an apprenticeship at an Austrian electronics company, which occupied him for two and a half years until his dad convinced him to take a gig as a radio salesman. This does not pan out and ultimately Eichmann gravitates towards a position he finds advertised in the paper at an oil company. His stepmom used a family connection through one of her Jewish in-laws to get him hired by the owner of the company, who was also a Jewish guy. Now, the executive who interviewed him told him he was too young for the job, but said,

• 51:01Robert Evans?

  I've been told to hire you anyway, so congratulations, like welcome in.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  He probably, I don't know if this guy survives long enough to regret this or not, but ooh.

• 51:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. If Eichmann was at all embarrassed or ashamed at the nepotism involved in keeping him afloat, he left no record of it. Instead, he seems to have enjoyed the job and the relative comfort it afforded him. He bought a motorcycle and devoted himself to the work well enough to get promoted. Key to his success was that the job involved constant travel, which he mostly did via the motorcycle that he bought. Already, Eichmann showed a preference for work that allowed him to set his own hours and mixed-decked work with time in the field. He spent a lot of time out in rural Austria, finding spots to build gas stations. And he had to handle a lot of logistical hurdles, scheduling fuel deliveries to make sure that shit got where it needed to be at the right time. And he gets good at this, right?

• 51:52Robert Evans?

  Like, his training for how to make the Holocaust trains run is setting up gas stations and gas-fuel deliveries, right?

• 51:59Speaker 01

  I, that is, honestly, something I could see coming.

• 52:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's not so surprising when you lay it out like that.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  A middle, middle-management Nepo guy in the oil and gas field to fascism pipeline? I feel like that's a pretty well-trodden path.

• 52:17Robert Evans?

  Now, he, he was known to work hard, often during the weekend, but he was also not someone who let his social life atrophy, as Cesarelli writes. "His social life flourished now that he had disposable income, freedom to come and go as he pleased on weekday evenings and a motorcycle with which to impress prospective girlfriends at the weekend. He was definitely not the lonely, gauche outsider, depicted as the typical recruit to Nazism in many of the psychological and socio-psychological explanations for the movement's growth. His prison memoir is filled with gratitude to his father for the move to Upper Austria, his second homeland, and for giving him a glorious, untroubled youth. A keen horseman, he spent hours riding in the countryside. He recalled that as for all young men, those days offered him love, spring, and life.

• 53:00Robert Evans?

  Motorsports, mountain sports, work, coffeehouses, friends and girlfriends, and why not, filled the days and years."

• 53:06Speaker 01

  So- Good for him.

• 53:09Robert Evans?

  He's living, he's living it up. He's, again, not at all the guy he's described as by a lot of people. He's a dude with a social life, he's a dude who's reasonably good with women, he's a dude who's, has options to be happy outside of joining the Nazi party, right?

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, if we didn't know how the story ended, I would say, well, I'm sure this guy turns out perfectly normal for a German of the era.

• 53:29Robert Evans?

  A normal dude, yeah. Now, throughout this period, the Nazi Party is a rising up in Germany, and in Austria, the left and right are engaging in open warfare in the streets, with the government cracking down hard against the social democratic militias. Eichmann isn't ignorant of any of this, although he is not initially much of an activist. His particular chapter of the Wandervogel movement shares members with some of these militias, and this seems to be where he starts the years-long onboarding process that eventually leads him to Nazism. His aristocratic friend, von Schmidt, convinces him to join an anti-socialist nationalist association for veterans. Obviously, Eichmann isn't a veteran, but that's not a problem. He joins the young veterans wing of the group, which is, I guess, for non-veterans?

• 54:12Speaker 01

  That, a young veterans?

• 54:15Robert Evans?

  I think it's, you'll be a veteran when the war we all know is gonna come, well, yeah, future veterans.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  I mean, a young veteran back then could have just been child soldiers as well, because there's plenty of them floating around, but I love that he's like Adolf Eichmann, honorary Austrian veteran.

• 54:32Robert Evans?

  Honorary Austrian veteran, yeah. We're gonna throw rocks at you, and it's like you're in the Tyrol, right?

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, what a fucking loser. What a bunch of nerds.

• 54:42Robert Evans?

  So, this is where he learns to march and shoot. Their leader, and it's so funny to me how close this guy's last name is to Hitler, their leader is Herman von Hiltl. Not quite Hitler, right? Hiltl? It's like carsonalization, but for fascists, like, evolution was always working to produce a Hitler? If Hitler, if our Hitler hadn't come up, the von Hiltl family would have produced a Hitler, given enough time, right? The name would have just started to shift, yeah?

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Give it enough time that the chances of Hitler approach one.

• 55:20Robert Evans?

  Their leader, Colonel Hermann von Hilter, was violently antisemitic and described Jewish Marxism as the enemy of Germany. He was an outspoken advocate of dispossessing Austrian Jews who owned land and stripping them of their citizenship. Von Hilter railed against Jewish immigration into Austria and held regular rallies where his loud, violent young followers would encourage their Jewish neighbors to leave the country. Now, this is the group that Eichmann starts hanging out in? There is a Nazi party in Austria by the late 20s, but Eichmann isn't interested in it because it's really weak and small. It's like by far the weakest part of what is at that point a vibrant far-right ecosystem. So he's like, "The Nazis, like, those are Germans and they're kind of losers. Like, there's better

• 56:01Robert Evans?

  far-right Austrian groups." Evan Burr Bukey, a historian of Linz, describes the Nazis in this period as "a party of outsiders." And Eichmann's not an outsider, right? Key aspect of him. He is never an outsider.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  A party of outsiders, okay.

• 56:18Robert Evans?

  It's the weirdos and the freaks who become Austrian Nazis in this period, right? And Eichmann is not, you know? He's a normal guy with pretty good connections. So he joins a mainstream far-right militia that hates Jewish people, right?

• 56:32Speaker 02

  He's like, "Sorry, not Nazi enough for me."

• 56:34Robert Evans?

  No, no, Nazis, mm.

• 56:37Speaker 02

  He's like, "I just think that you should be, you know, more Nazi."

• 56:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, a little fringe for me, darling. So I don't know why I gave Eichmann that.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, what? I'm telling you, your brain today is really fun.

• 56:50Robert Evans?

  I have, I've got, I've got George Lucas disease. I can't help but imagine Germans as sounding like British people.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  I mean, to be fair.

• 57:01Robert Evans?

  Look, it works. It makes sense, right?

• 57:03Speaker 01

  There's a reason why whenever they make, like, Nazi movies and the bad guys actually have speaking lines, they're always just played by people with British accents.

• 57:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  There's a reason for that.

• 57:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the big exception being Waltz in the Tarantino movie. We're like, "Oh shit, they actually have a German guy doing Nazi stuff."

• 57:24Robert Evans?

  In 1930, Eichmann gets engaged to a cop's daughter. The relationship is not going to work out, weirdly enough, because she doesn't like Nazis, right? She's like this cop's daughter, very, which doesn't mean she's not far right or racist. It just means they like another party and the Nazis are kind of weirdos. One day, Eichmann is over at her family apartment in 1931, which in their apartment sits above a bar that Nazis would gather in regularly throughout the week. And Eichmann later claimed, "In our circle," and like he's talking about their friend group, "it was the done thing to say that the NSDAP consisted of idiots and no-hobers." And his fiancee made the statement, a statement to that effect, when she saw a troop of brown shirts marching down the street. Eichmann got angry and snapped back.

• 58:08Robert Evans?

  "These idiots have order and discipline and they march well." He ended the engagement shortly thereafter. They're really good at marching.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  I can't put up with this. They walk too good.

• 58:19Robert Evans?

  They're so good at walking, goddammit. Don't you understand how important walking is? By 1932, the Australian economy is in the tank and Eichmann doesn't lose his job right away, but he can see the writing on the wall, right? That like his company is going to have to get rid of him. He may have ultimately joined the Nazi party as much as anything because he saw a future there and the potential for paying work, right? Not initially that he is such an ideological Nazi because he's still not at this point. He's a German nationalist, he's increasingly racist, but he could have gone a couple of ways. But he's like, "Look, the Nazis, they're starting to, they're no longer a fringe group in Austria by like 31, 32, right? They're starting to get more normal."

• 59:01Robert Evans?

  And if you know anything, like my career is based on a version of this. If you want to move ahead really quickly, you find a thing, an organization that's fairly new and growing rapidly and you just kind of stick yourself in there and find like a place where you can sort of make it your own, right? And that's what he's going to do with the Nazi party. He's like, "This is a new organization. I can push my way in."

• 59:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, it's, this is the way everything works.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  Did you just compare us creating

• 59:32Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, this is, this is way before that. I'm talking about like my early, like you find a, a company that's just started and they're desperate for people and you just start deciding my job's gonna be this, my job's gonna be that. And it's, it offers opportunity that doesn't exist in like the Austrian state, right?

• 59:48Speaker 01

  And I mean, this is definitely a guy that's a very, very comfortable job hopping whenever he sees an opportunity. Like, he doesn't have a career. He's like, I'm an oil man.

• 59:56Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  I'm also electrician.

• 59:57Robert Evans?

  I'm doing this.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  I worked as a clerk for a little bit. I'll guess I'll be a Nazi for a paycheck.

• 1:00:01Robert Evans?

  Well, and he's also, he sees, number one, the, the, the corporate economy is not going to be good for a while. The, the depression is starting and the Austrian government is a really ossified, so you don't move quickly in that. The Nazis, they're starting to take power in Germany by this point. The writing is on the wall there and he's like, well, maybe they'll take power in Austria. I think this is going to happen and the sooner I get in, the better my chances of getting a really good job in the new state, right? Because this is still a small organization. I can make myself a big part of it and when it takes over, I'll be really well positioned, right?

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Makes sense.

• 1:00:38Robert Evans?

  It's just a smart way to look at, like, any kind of, like, organization, right? Like, if, if you're, if you're looking to jump ahead in your career, find a place where they don't really have anything solidified yet, you know? That's just, that's just kind of always how big organizations work. By the end of 31, the Austrian Nazis had started getting their shit together, uh, just as the dominant far-right militia of the area, the Heimwehr, starts falling apart, right? Eichmann finally joins the party in the spring of 1932, after the Nazis sweep a bunch of local elections in Vienna and Salzburg, right? And we should see this again, as he knows where the wind is blowing, right?

• 1:01:17Robert Evans?

  Like, he does, I, he's aware of what's about to happen and he's positioning himself for kind of the next big part of his life, which we will be discussing in part two.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  Oh, boy. I, uh.

• 1:01:30Robert Evans?

  How we feeling about Eichmann?

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Weird. I don't, I don't, I don't know how to put it. Like, honestly, Eichmann is a guy, which, you know, obviously, we, we, we know a little bit about him just from the background, knowing about the Holocaust. But the fact that he seems so normal is off putting because even the normal Nazi guys, there's something truly strange about them. He is very normal up until, you know, we're about to get to when the Nazis take over Austria. He's still not even really ideologically driven, other than what could be considered mainstream politics at the time.

• 1:02:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah. No, and that's like, yeah, that, that, that's kind of the thing about him that's really, and it's, you can see a bit of this with Heidrick, too, where, well, you're, and even with Mengele, where it's like, yeah, that your biggest motivation is your career is this movement has allowed you to leapfrog ahead at a much younger age to a high position than you would have ever gotten in the old German state or the old Austrian state, right? That just wouldn't have happened. And, look, if you look at like, I'm just looking right now at this 22 year old kid that was appointed to DHS to lead terrorism prevention, right? It's the same thing going on right now. There's opportunities in shit like this for very young people who

• 1:02:48Robert Evans?

  aren't good or great at anything and who wouldn't have risen up in the traditional system, but things have been disrupted and they're primarily good at not causing problems for the people above them, right?

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Robert Evans?

  And, yeah, you can make, you can make a place for yourself that way.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  Auto move fast and break, break things.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  It's a great picture. It's a great picture, though.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  It's a horrible picture. The kid is terrible.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  It's so scary.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Someone needs to give that kid a swirly immediately. Like, I, I do wonder, would we have been better off if Eichmann did get the shit bullied out of him when he was a child? Like, is this a proper application of bullying?

• 1:03:31Robert Evans?

  There's only one way to find out, Joe. You and me.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Time machine.

• 1:03:34Robert Evans?

  We gotta get in a time machine and we gotta beat the shit out of the Little Kid Eichmann. And I mean, put that fucker in traction. Like Austrian, like a whole body, like a big old machine, like fucking rusted metal, nailed to his body until he gets better. That's what we're doing.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Me and you need to get, need to knock back a couple of pineskin, go back in time and beat the shit out of this child.

• 1:03:58Robert Evans?

  Just whale on his ass. Absolutely. Yep.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  Good call.

• 1:04:02Robert Evans?

  This is it. This is what we're doing. All right, everybody. If you have access to a time machine, let Joe and I know. I promise that's all we'll do. We're not gonna do any sports betting. Absolutely not gonna do a lot of sports betting with it. We would never do primarily sports betting instead of saving lives, you know?

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:04:21Robert Evans?

  We're not going back to 2001 to bet on the World Series.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Nope, not me.

• 1:04:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, not me. Well, obviously we'll stop 9/11, of course.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. I, I promise that I will only go back in time to beat up children.

• 1:04:36Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm. That's right.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  That's how I'll stop 9/11. I'll go back further in time. I'll beat up other children.

• 1:04:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna travel back to Saudi Arabia when Bin Laden's like seven and just kick the shit out of that kid until he's pissing blood. That's what we're doing.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:04:51Robert Evans?

  This'll fix all these problems.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  The only way that will stop it is time traveling child abuse.

• 1:04:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's the way to do it. Bin Laden waits another five years and his big attack is ramming a plane into a podcasting studio?

• 1:05:09Robert Evans?

  Good stuff. Okay, well, we should probably stop now.

• 1:05:14Robert Evans?

  We'll be back in part two for more genocide. Bye, everybody.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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