Part One: Martin Niemöller, the author of 'First They Came', was a murderous fascist

You've heard Martin Niemoller's famous poem about Nazi Germany: "First they came..." In these episodes, Robert exposes Martin's true past as a war criminal and Nazi supporter. 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.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome, friends, back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And I've got a controversial pick for y'all this week. But before I introduce him, I want to introduce my guest, somebody you know and love, the great Margaret Kiljoy. Margaret, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for coming.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Thank you. Always glad to hear about terrible people. It's a nice reprieve from hearing about good people.

• 0:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is, I made some statements online a couple of weeks ago about a guy that everybody knows, right? That I don't like and a lot of people think is, came around to become a good person and a laudable person. And part of what we're going to be doing this week is I'm going to try to present you what I think is like a fairly fair look at his life. And we'll see if you come to the same conclusion about this son of a bitch that I do. Maybe you don't think he's a son of a bitch.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Are we doing Lovecraft?

• 0:59Robert Evans?

  No, no, but we will one day. Don't worry. Yeah, we're definitely, although I, I don't think Lovecraft was a bastard at the end of his life, right? At the end of his life, he wrote, like, and right at the end, but he wrote about like, I regret horribly being a fascist all those years I was a terrible person.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know he was that way about the Nazi stuff specifically. Anyway.

• 1:17Robert Evans?

  He, he came around, he was starting to on some, anyway, he got cancer before we could have seen, but he, and he also never really hurt anybody other than being like a voluminous racist in his personal life, but he didn't have power, right? Anyway, whatever, that's not important. We will do Lovecraft because you could argue he was a terrible person. There's plenty of evidence for that, too. But no, we're talking about a different guy today. We're talking about a poet, Martin Niemoller, right? And you probably know him as the guy who wrote the first they came poem, right? First they came for the communists and I did not speak out because I was not a communist, right? That guy.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  I like that poem.

• 1:56Robert Evans?

  Everyone does.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  I know that he was conservative. Oh, this is going to be interesting.

• 2:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, conservative is one way to put it.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 2:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, because that's, I think, what most people think when they read it is that like, this is a poem from somebody who was like a conservative or a centrist, right? And didn't take action during the rise of the Nazis, right? That's what the poem seems to be about. Somebody who was either somewhat conservative or like more of a centrist by nature and just didn't do anything to stop the Nazis and regretted it, right?

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, I can see where you're going with this. Uh huh.

• 2:33Robert Evans?

  That's not really accurate to who Martin was.

• 2:39Robert Evans?

  His, he, he may have been a little bit more enthusiastic about the rise of the Third Reich than the, the poem would suggest, right?

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. First they came for the socialists and I was really excited because I hate them too.

• 2:51Robert Evans?

  It was pretty cool, actually. I thought that was lit.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  I was outside with my balcony with a pennant. Killed the trade unionists.

• 2:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I was shooting at trade unionists, which we'll talk about that. So there are numerous versions of the poem, but I think we should start by just reading the, how the original version of the poem went, as far as I can tell, right? This is sort of the original version of the poem. First they took the communists, but I was not a communist, so I did nothing. Then they took the social democrats, but I was not a social democrat, so I did nothing. Then it was the trade unionist's turn, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they took the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came and took me, there was no one left who could have stood up for me. Now, that's a great poem about someone who did not act enough during the rise of the Nazis. That is not accurate.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:44Robert Evans?

  For example, Martin didn't do little when they took the Jews. Martin kind of was enthusiastic about them taking the Jews.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Big faux hand that says I'm an anti Semite.

• 3:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like number one racist. Yeah.

• 4:00Robert Evans?

  The most common variant of the poem, right? Because, because you, you said, first they came for the socialists at one point, and that is generally the version you'll hear. A lot of school textbooks switched communist for socialist at some point because it made it a little bit easier, I guess.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  It allows, it's allowed in the Cold War, America. Yeah.

• 4:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. And you've seen, like, in the first, sorry.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  So I recently wrote an essay, I don't know anything about this man's life, but I recently wrote an essay about this poem and the fact that it is referenced constantly. And I looked up the speech that it comes from and there's no, in the, in the German, there's no first.

• 4:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  It's like, it's not first they did this, then they did this, then they did this. It's when they did this, when they did this, when they did this. And so I don't know why that matters to me, but it's so interesting to me.

• 4:52Robert Evans?

  That is, that is actually a really good point. Yeah. And I should have said that the one I read is the, is close to the original translation, but I, I think you're probably right that he was saying like, when they took the communists, I was not a communist and did nothing. And it's, yeah.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  I only think it matters for the American context when people are like, well, who's the first in the poem? As if we're like doing oppression Olympics on our way to the camps. And I'm like, I'm not Russia to be first in line, but trans people are in there, you know?

• 5:19Robert Evans?

  Definitely. And that's, you know, there's a, you've seen some versions of the poem, some new ones that people have made for the Trump era. I think they, right about 2016, right? I think the first article I saw was in 2016 in an article for Quartz. Gideon Litchfield provided a rewrite for Trump's America that I wouldn't say is super accurate, but it's first Trump came for the women and I did not speak out because I was not a woman. Then Trump came for the people with disabilities and I did not speak out because I did not have it. I don't know, I don't know if that's like the order I'd put these things in, but.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 5:54Robert Evans?

  I don't need to go, you get the idea, right? And in the wake of Trump's reelection, the poem has spread further and wider than ever before. And again, from the text of it, you would assume the author was something different than I think he was, right? There are hints, however, about the, about Martin's real politics, or at least what they were during the Nazi era in what he leaves out of the poem, right? For example, the modern variant, the Trump era one, mentioned the disabled. Martin's original poem does not mention them coming for the disabled, even though by the time he wrote it, he knew that thousands had been sterilized and even gassed under the T4 euthanasia program. The original poem also leaves out queer people, Slavs, the Roma, and these emissions are not coincidental.

• 6:39Robert Evans?

  These are emissions because Martin was kind of fine, actually, even after the war with them having done that, really.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  I know that the queers were still, you know, they did, a lot of the gay men didn't get out of the camps at the end of the war.

• 6:52Robert Evans?

  To be fair to Martin, the United States government did not care about queer people being part of the Holocaust, right? We were fine to continue punishing them afterwards. So most people sharing Martin's work, though, don't notice that because again, on a casual reading, the poem does like describe a large number of people's reactions to fascism, both then and today. But Martin was not a neutral observer, nor was he what anyone would have called apolitical. You do run into some people who know this, and I will say it seems more common now to describe the motivation behind him writing the poem as like a leopards eating faces type of thing. And those people tend to describe Martin as a reformed fascist sympathizer, right? Somebody who saw the error of his ways after Hitler rose to

• 7:35Robert Evans?

  power and then fought tirelessly but fruitlessly against him. This is the most common historical depiction of Martin because prior to World War II, he did protest openly against Hitler and he was imprisoned in several concentration camps for it. And as a result, he became an international symbol of anti fascism. I think the common view of Martin is summarized very well by his obituary in the New York Times, which was titled, Martin Niemoller, Resolute Foe of Hitler. And I'm going to provide you with a somewhat different depiction of Martin. I think more historically accurate, but I'll admit how we ultimately feel about Martin and whether or not he became a good person is somewhat of a matter of opinion. I don't think he did. I certainly don't think he was a resolute foe of Hitler. But maybe you'll feel different.

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• 8:26Robert Evans?

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• 10:09Speaker 05

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• 10:18Speaker 06

  He talked friendly. He sounded friendly. They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff and they said, maybe she'll find out where this girl is.

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  I saw him violent. Backhanded her, pow.

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• 10:56Speaker 04

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• 11:28Robert Evans?

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• 12:06Robert Evans?

  Don't invite me to karaoke. I'm going to make it weird. Someone's going to try to sing Leave, Get Out, or Too Little, Too Late, or Baby, It's You.

• 12:12Speaker 07

  Oh, no.

• 12:12Robert Evans?

  And I'm going to be like, okay, cool.

• 12:15Speaker 07

  Check out my conversation with JoJo, Wallow267, and more on The Questlove Show. Listen to The Questlove Show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Peace.

• 12:32Robert Evans?

  So, let's, let's talk about where this guy comes from. Martin's ancestors, stretching back to the medieval era at least, had made their livings traveling around as farm laborers or as small, independent farmers in what's now like Westphalia, Germany. Their last name comes from a relative, probably in the 1600s, who moved to a village near Wersen in Westphalia and worked as a miller. Niemoller just means new miller, right?

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 12:56Robert Evans?

  Which gives me hope that one day, Margaret, our, our descendants, or relatives, or whatever, will have the same last name. Like, Podcaster? If we go back to that naming scheme?

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. New Pod, new Podcaster.

• 13:08Robert Evans?

  New Podcaster? Margaret Podcaster. Yeah, yeah. Maybe one day.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Well, it's like the way that people end up with names in a phone is very different from... I think the way we name people in our phone, like, John Barista, is more accurate.

• 13:23Robert Evans?

  Drug Dealer Three.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Historically, yeah, exactly. Like, yeah. John Good Coke, you know?

• 13:31Robert Evans?

  It's extra funny coming from you.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Susie Harrow, welcome. Yeah, I don't do coke. Fuck that.

• 13:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Mac would just do drugs.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 13:39Robert Evans?

  No, it's just a bit. So, sometime around the late 17 to early 1800s, the patriarch of the family seems to have decided to make education a priority for at least some of his sons. Martin's grandfather, Gerhard, became a schoolteacher in the mid-1800s, and his son, Heinrich, became a pastor in the town of Lipstadt. Like nearly everyone in that part of Germany at that time, and roughly like half of Lep Gwobegon today, the Niemullers were Lutherans. As most people sort of know, Martin Luther was a Catholic priest who came to have some opinions that the Pope did not appreciate.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, a bunch of them. He wrote them down.

• 14:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, a lot, a lot of them. He wrote a list. He would have been a poster. You can, one thing you can say about Martin Luther, he would have been a poster.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Oh, he, he did literally post, so.

• 14:21Robert Evans?

  He was a literal poster.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:24Robert Evans?

  You had to use nails back then.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  I think, I think if you still had to use nails, the internet would be a better place.

• 14:29Robert Evans?

  It, I agree. I could, and if you did it on churches still, right?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 14:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He was excommunicated in 1521, and yada, yada. Shit happens and you get Protestants, right? I'm, I'm leaving that a lot. But that's basically how it happens. And by the time, you know, our story starts, in the late 18, early 1900s, Westphalians are like militantly Lutheran. And Lipstadt was the most Lutheran of all of the Lutheran towns in the area. Their claim to fame was that they were the first town in the region to accept Martin Luther's teachings, right? That like, we are the earliest of the Lutherans in this region.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 15:04Robert Evans?

  So, "These people took everything," Martin Luther said, "very seriously." It's probably relevant, then, for me to point out that in addition to the 95 theses that Martin Luther wrote that ended up splitting a Catholic church, he wrote another book and published it in 1543, on the Jews and their lies.

• 15:25Robert Evans?

  Thanks, Martin. The, the book does not get better after the title. Luther very much thought that the Jewish people deserved to suffer for what had been done to Jesus. Only, if I'm remembering right, God it slash Jesus like wanted that to happen? So, I don't really get the blame.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  It like, it was necessary, right? It all worked out in the end from a Catholic, Christian point of view.

• 15:44Robert Evans?

  It was kind of his plan.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Also, like, just never made sense to blame the Jews. That, that includes Jesus? Like, like, what do you want?

• 15:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  You know?

• 15:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's, there's a lot of incoherencies here. But Luther chased his condemnation of the Jews with an exhortation to burn synagogues and a statement that Christians, quote, "are at fault in not slaying them," right? If you don't kill the Jews in your midst, you're fucking up, right? Martin Luther was a fucking monster when it came to that sort of thing. Luther's book would become very popular among the Nazis, and a lot of scholars will argue that Luther's book is the formative moment behind like modern antisemitism. Martin Luther kind of invents modern antisemitism, right? And takes it from like, well, those people are just kind of like different, and they live here, and so like, we're sort of shitty to them, to like, now there's lore behind that hatred, right?

• 16:35Speaker 01

  The Middle Ages is so funny, because you have all of these people fighting against power structures, where you're like, there's no way they can mess this up. And then instead, you have them like, doing all of these revolutions that are completely counter-revolutions just constantly. And you're like, how can you fuck up being critical of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages? How can you mess that up? You somehow made it worse.

• 16:58Robert Evans?

  I think the unfortunate problem is that when you carry out a successful revolution against even like a very bad power structure, it creates this awareness of possibility. And then everybody starts thinking, well, I've got some shit I want to change. And a lot of that's going to be bad, right? That's, yeah, that's just a complication anybody who wants to change things has to deal with. Heinrich Niemoller, Martin's father, grew up venerating Luther and became a pastor with the deliberate goal of copying Martin Luther as directly as possible. His parish was famous mainly because Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III had visited and made some proclamation there. Heinrich venerated the whole Inzolern family almost as much as he venerated Luther, right?

• 17:42Robert Evans?

  Martin Luther and the, the royal family of Germany are like this, right? Like, they are the protectors of the faith, and he almost worships the Kaiser, right? In 1889, he marries Paula Muller, the daughter of a local businessman, and the two have their first child, Gerhard, in 1890.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Which is a good name. I don't know anything about that man, but Gerhard is a good name.

• 18:03Robert Evans?

  Gerhard's a solid name. Not enough Gerhard's.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  No.

• 18:06Robert Evans?

  Two years later, they had Martin. Too many Martins. And on January...

• 18:10Speaker 01

  There's some good ones, but...

• 18:12Robert Evans?

  Some, sure, but, you know.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  That, that one famous one, that's the one I... There's even a good Martin Luther. There's one good Martin Luther, you know?

• 18:20Robert Evans?

  There was, there was. Although he had King, I assume, he was junior, so there must have been two, right?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I don't, I don't know anything about his dad yet. One day I'm going to learn about it.

• 18:27Robert Evans?

  I don't, I don't know enough about his dad.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:29Robert Evans?

  Martin Niemoller is born on January 14th of 1892. His life as the second son might have been somewhat different than it wound up being. We'll never know, though, because in 1894, Gerhard dies of being a little kid in 1894.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Oh, even the name couldn't protect him.

• 18:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, sorry. Martin's going to be the oldest from this point forward. His younger brother, William, recalled him playing a leading role among the kids. For his part, Martin says that his older brother's death was the source of some of his earliest memories, particularly his very first thoughts about Jesus Christ in heaven. Since Heinrich died on Martin's second birthday, this may be a lie. He told a lot of lies. I don't know that he actually has any memories around this, but he'll claim this later. And it's a good story for a pastor, right?

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he might have like fabri, as a kid, he might have like decided that about his younger time, you know?

• 19:23Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  But he doesn't remember being two, but like...

• 19:25Robert Evans?

  I doubt it.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  But he might remember having thoughts about being two, you know?

• 19:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and his parents explaining, you know, the putting out a place for him during a Christmas dinner or something. Yeah, I don't know. So, he died, Martin Luther. Martin Luther had died centuries before any of the Niemullers were born, but Martin Luther was still a constant, almost invisible, family member for generations in their home. Heinrich, the father, wrote a booklet for his sons, Martin and Wilhelm, about how to be a man, which was later published in 1927, I think by Martin, as like, my dad was such a good, like, this, you know, this, this is his guide to being a man. And one of Martin...

• 20:01Speaker 01

  It's kind of neat that he wrote it just for his kids. It kind of ruins the magic to publish it wide, yeah.

• 20:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I would say so.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Also, it's probably a terrible book, considering how this guy turns out.

• 20:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. One of Martin's biographers, Benjamin Simon, describes this booklet in a passage from one of my prime sources for these episodes, the book Hitler's Personal Prisoner. Quote, "Heinrich explained how he imagined the role of a Protestant pastor. The idea of the pastor is the paterfamilias, hearkened back to the emphatically idealized example of Martin Luther and his household in Wittenberg. Glorying Luther as a model of national Protestantism, Heinrich postulated that the thought of the Kloisterhaus in Wittenberg would provide refreshment and edification as long as there is a German history. Referring to the relationship between Luther and Katerina von Bora, Heinrich claimed that the husband is the head of the wife, right? So, it is, this is the most patriarchal kind of relationship that you can have,

• 20:55Robert Evans?

  is the one that Heinrich is encouraging for his, his children to have with their wives, right? Yeah. Ew. And it's based on the example Martin set. Yeah. So, again, maybe not, maybe letting the priests marry was not the right call.

• 21:08Robert Evans?

  It didn't, it didn't work out in this case.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's one of those things where you're like, this seems silly. We should get rid of that. And you're like, how do we make it worse?

• 21:14Robert Evans?

  Oh, no.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  We somehow made it worse.

• 21:15Robert Evans?

  Once the religious guys start talking about how to do marriage, it gets even worse.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:20Robert Evans?

  It just makes it worse. Yeah, I don't know.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Well, it makes everyone like cop, like everyone is it. It's up to everyone to determine how to do things, you know?

• 21:29Robert Evans?

  That's kind of the problem.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, the priest just tell tell me what to do and I ignore it, you know?

• 21:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and not that not that I'm like pro Catholicism being the only way things should be, but there were definite downsides when we gave the Bible to everyone.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 21:43Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:45Robert Evans?

  Um, when we decided anyone's interpretation is valid.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  It's just the time of counter revolutions.

• 21:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Like, they try to get rid of kings and they make it worse. How do you do that?

• 21:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, how do you fuck that up worse? Well, you know, because the king made a society where, once he was gone, there was no one who knew how to like, anyway, whatever.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, anyway, sorry.

• 22:03Robert Evans?

  I've talked in a couple of other episodes about how patriarchal German society was in the lead up to World War I, and this is a big part of why this Lutheran kind of heritage. And again, I'll remind you also of the Roman origins of the term patrifamilias, which is this idea that like the the the husband or the man of the family has like power of life and death over his children and the women.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  You ever seen the play Titus? Titus Adraonicus?

• 22:29Robert Evans?

  Yes, exactly.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's I've heard you talk about patrifamilias before, and all I can think of is the movie version of Titus, and it's scarring young me.

• 22:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it hits.

• 22:42Robert Evans?

  So this is a very hierarchical society and male dominated, although Martin's household did have a twist on that. Zeiman claims that among the Niemöllers, quote, "The mother was responsible for corporal punishment." Martin is said at one point to have told an elementary school friend that this family quirk was a good thing because, quote, "It doesn't hurt that much when mothers hit." So I guess that's a benefit. The kids get less injured.

• 23:09Robert Evans?

  They were not a military family, but in the way that every but in like a way every German family was, right? Like, you're all doing some amount of compulsory service. You all expect that at any moment you might get called up to fight for the Fatherland. His father described himself as "the sergeant on duty for the family" when it was time to inspect his children's bedrooms or monitor their overall behavior. So they are kind of raised like soldiers from the jump, as are many Germans. That's more normal than it is not. Hence, World War I in some ways. Martin's other biographer, Matthew Hockenos, describes him growing up, quote, "in the shadow of the church." And Martin himself would later write that "bells ushered in and closed each of our days."

• 23:50Robert Evans?

  The fact that Martin and Wilhelm's father was the pastor of their church and the pastor of the church where those bells were located only increased his perceived aura of power, right? Your dad isn't just your dad, he's the man who talks, who's got like a line to God, right? Both boys grew up practically worshiping Heinrich, who, for his part, was absent constantly and at several points made it clear that his sons were a secondary priority in his life. God and the Kaiser would always come first. Heinrich's proudest moment in his life was not the birth of either of his sons, but was the time that the Kaiser visited his parish. He left his family behind for six months, left his wife with two young boys, to follow the Kaiser on a trip to Palestine, when Martin was like six. He's just like, all right, I gotta go.

• 24:34Robert Evans?

  I gotta go do weird Christian stuff, bye y'all.

• 24:36Speaker 06

  What a cool guy.

• 24:37Robert Evans?

  Gotta go where I am absolutely not wanted or needed.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Well, he wrote a book. I mean, what more do his kids need?

• 24:44Robert Evans?

  And what do we, yeah, the book will teach you. I got you, read this.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  That's why he wrote a guy device, so that you don't have to.

• 24:50Robert Evans?

  If I ever had a kid, that's what I'd give him. Yeah, yeah. Go give drugs to your friends and somehow pay off your student loans by doing it. It worked for me, kids. So as part of his duties, Heinrich made more than 2,000 house calls to parishioners a year, and he made Martin follow him often to groom the boy to follow in his footsteps as a pastor. As Matthew Hockenos writes, quote, "One home visit made a lasting impression on the boy. He accompanied the father to the his father to the home of a poor weaver dying of tuberculosis. As his father prayed with the man, Martin eyed on the wall a framed piece of cloth stitched with gold colored beads that read, 'What would Jesus say?'" This was Martin's introduction to the social question. What would Jesus say about the poor, the sick, the infirm, the victims of the industrial revolution? Right?

• 25:34Robert Evans?

  So he is a he's going to, he does think a lot about social justice in his own way and about welfare in his own way. That's a constant concern of his, but it is always through the lens of his religion, right?

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:46Robert Evans?

  And not the lens of like, what's good, best for people, right?

• 25:49Speaker 01

  And like nationalism, it seems like, like.

• 25:51Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  But also, what would Jesus do is way older than I thought. I thought that was a late 90s bracelet thing that happened to the people around me in high school and was terrible.

• 26:00Robert Evans?

  Nope. It's been going on a while. I mean, it obviously like he's the deity, right? Like, of course, people say shit like that.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

• 26:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, of course, it goes back that far, I guess. It just is weird to hear some, it does sound very modern, right?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:15Robert Evans?

  Heinrich, although it is the birth of the modern era that we're talking about here, Heinrich adhered to a specific sect of the Lutheran faith that followed the ideas of a pastor named Adolf Stoker, who was viciously anti-Semitic and supported legislative reforms to reduce social misery while also enshrining class differences as ordained by God. Kaiser Wilhelm himself advocated the so-called doctrine of two kingdoms, which had been crafted by friendly, right-wing pastors to enshrine the emperor as the supreme bishop, whose God-given authority was a sin to question. Right? There are two kingdoms. God is the absolute master of his kingdom, and no one can question him, but the Kaiser is who God has made the absolute master of the earthly kingdom, right? And in the same way, no one should question him, is kind of the idea.

• 26:59Robert Evans?

  Martin, like all little German boys, grew up first learning to follow. In school, Martin and his classmates would have sung songs like "The Emperor is a Kind Man" alongside hymns in church with titles like "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." One of Martin's friends later said that "the national ideal was always foremost in Martin's mind when he was a young boy," right? He is thinking of the of Germany constantly as a child and what he can do for Germany as he grows up.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  It's amazing that this person ended up writing a "I don't really like how the whole Hitler thing happened" poem.

• 27:32Robert Evans?

  It is, it is surprising, although, again, when we, wait, wait.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Wait, I'm still convinced it's all gonna turn out all right for our guy. But, well, no, I'm not.

• 27:43Robert Evans?

  It, at the very end, maybe, there's some debate, but yeah, we'll see how you feel.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  I mean, even Hitler did all right at the end. That's one thing that you could say.

• 27:51Robert Evans?

  The very last move, no one can blame with, right?

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, no one gives him enough credit. The man who killed Hitler.

• 27:57Speaker 06

  It's time for ads before we go any further on this bit.

• 28:01Robert Evans?

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• 28:13Robert Evans?

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• 29:26Speaker 06

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• 29:39Speaker 06

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• 29:46Speaker 05

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• 29:49Speaker 04

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• 29:58Speaker 05

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• 29:59Speaker 04

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• 30:40Speaker 05

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• 30:44Speaker 04

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• 31:01Speaker 06

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• 31:04Speaker 07

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• 31:13Speaker 07

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• 31:22Speaker 06

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• 31:40Speaker 05

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• 33:53Speaker 07

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• 34:07Speaker 03

  Don't invite me to karaoke. I'm gonna make it weird. Someone's gonna try to sing Leave It Out, or Too Little Too Late, or Baby Two.

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• 34:14Speaker 03

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• 34:44Speaker 07

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• 35:04Robert Evans?

  We're back. And a quick correction, folks. I just checked in with our sponsors. Blue Apron did shoot Eva Braun in the bunker on that dark day, but not Hitler. So just as a heads up.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Robert, no. So the assist.

• 35:14Robert Evans?

  Sophie.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Robert, no.

• 35:16Robert Evans?

  That's a good thing to say they did.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:18Robert Evans?

  Pretty much.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:20Robert Evans?

  Basically, Hitler's wife.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Other problems later, but you know. You're annoying. Continue.

• 35:27Robert Evans?

  One of Martin's earliest biographies is the book God's Man by Clarissa Davidson. And it describes Martin at this point as a child as "thin, dark-haired, brown-skinned, active, energetic, and an imaginative little boy. One of his first conscious wishes was for a toy boat. His father ordered it made by the plumber out of tin as a Christmas gift." Right? That says a lot about the way life worked back then.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:49Robert Evans?

  Like, that's your toy store?

• 35:51Speaker 01

  What does it mean for him to be marked as brown-skinned at this time? Does that mean, like, Mediterranean?

• 35:57Robert Evans?

  He's active. He gets a tan. He spends a lot of time outside. No, no, no, no, no. They didn't, they didn't use terms like that in a racial way. If you, if you hear a white guy described that way, it means that, like, you get a lot of sun, right?

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 36:10Robert Evans?

  Martin's childhood coincided almost perfectly with the beginning of the reign of former Bastards Pod subject Kaiser Wilhelm. He was closely related to the British royal family and insecure about his cousin, the king's naval dominance. So Wilhelm made massive expansion of the German navy a priority from the beginning of his reign to his and Germany's peril, right? This is one of the things that leads to World War I, because the British are like, we're fine with Germany being the main continental, like, land military power. But once you start trying to have a navy that can fuck with the Royal Navy, that is not okay with us. We have some, we have some real PTSD about the Spaniards and the French in that regard. And once Germany starts doing this, it's, it's one of the things that makes

• 36:55Robert Evans?

  war more likely, right? But the Kaiser fucking loves his navy. He is, he's like a kid playing Warhammer. I do make that comparison a few times, but that is how he treats his navy, right? He's got his little ships that he's building and he's, he's, he takes so much personal interest in it that he's like picking individual officers to captain them as he, he wants to craft this great force, because it's like the coolest thing you can have. And because the Kaiser thinks that, a lot of Germans think that too, right? There's an enormous amount of naval propaganda. Yeah, and they're war gaming, right?

• 37:24Speaker 01

  They're the originators of, I think them and the, that's part of how they beat the French and the, his dad's generation.

• 37:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the, the War of 1870, 1871. Yes. And so all of this is very popular. And so Martin, as a boy, as like a child and adolescent, grows up obsessed with this stuff and obsessed with the navy. He has like posters that have silhouettes of all of the different kinds of German battleships on his wall and stuff, which is another very modern thing, right? But he, from the earliest we know about Martin, no later than age five, he is telling everyone he is gonna join the navy when he grows up. And he will never veer from this dream until he finally does. Per Hakonos's book, quote, "When asked what he wanted for Christmas, marine calendars and nautical posters topped the list. He shared with his siblings, perhaps foisted upon them, his enthusiasm for games of ships

• 38:14Robert Evans?

  played in bed using sheets for sails. He expected his sisters to memorize the types and names of ships in the German fleet from the large poster in his bedroom. Indeed, you could not see the wallpaper for the newspaper clippings, postcards, and photos of ships that covered it. Heinrich hoped that his son would take an interest in the priesthood, but during his early years, Martin never wavered from his goal of a career on the high seas." This is, this kid could not love boats more. It's his favorite thing.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Boat boy.

• 38:40Robert Evans?

  He just wants to die.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  He's a boat boy.

• 38:43Robert Evans?

  As like a teenager, he's writing at like 1911, 12, that he wants to see the British nation annihilated and be a part of it, right? Like, so he's very much drinking all the Kool-Aid here.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  He's like, what if I got on? He has a Kool-Aid stand. He's like, what if I got boat and then I could, like, kill people? Woo!

• 39:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean, who doesn't want to kill people on a boat, right? But, but most of us grow out of that by the time we're in our, you know, at least 18 or 19.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  By the time that we're allowed to have guns, I hope.

• 39:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, you'd hope. At least by the time we're allowed to have boats. Martin would later say that the two main unquestioned rules of his household as a child were, "A good Christian is a good citizen and a good Christian is a good soldier." He was a great student also from an early age. Hakonos describes him as mastering his numbers before he was old enough to attend primary school by using his mom's tape measure and writing with chalk on the sidewalk. His other biographer, Ziman, is somewhat less praiseful of his academics, noting, "Teachers frequently lamented that Martin was easily distracted and was ever prone to be disruptive." And this is gonna be a pattern in Martin's life. Biographer Clarissa Davidson writes that even as a boy, he was not noted for his tact, and also notes

• 39:52Robert Evans?

  that he frequently read a more exciting book behind the covers of his dole, Easy Lessons. So he's, he's distracted. He does not like to pay attention so much in class. And he likes to make jokes and disrupt people, right? He likes to make statements that he knows will be disruptive. And this is gonna be with him his entire life, too, right? He's kind of a class clown type figure.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  So he's like a Little Edgelord kid.

• 40:14Robert Evans?

  Little Edgelord kid. Yeah, yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 40:17Robert Evans?

  So the Niemullers were not wealthy, but they were certainly upper-middle class. In 1908, when Martin was 16, they sent him to London for a six-week tour of Britain. He soon fell in love with the country and came to speak fluent English. During his trip, he began what would become a lifetime habit of keeping a diary. And Martin continued after returning home and wrote this in his diary just before his 17th birthday. "A new year has started, a year that holds unusual importance for me. It is my final school year. It will bring the decision on my professional path and impact my character building and intellectual development. I'm taking many things from the old year into the new one: Christian faith, youthful patriotism, all kinds of knowledge, and an old fervent love." Immediately after this, he wrote out the lyrics to a drinking song of his own

• 41:01Robert Evans?

  design that Zymon did not choose to reproduce in his book. So Martins, you know, he talks a lot about his diligence and how much he wants to help Germany and how much he's wants to be a good kid, but he also likes to party. There's, this is like a guy who

• 41:14Speaker 01

  He's writing dirty poetry.

• 41:15Robert Evans?

  He's writing dirty song lyrics. He's writing dirty poetry. He's flirting, you know? And he doesn't like to write about this later, but there is evidence that he really liked to party pretty hard as a young man.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  That's because he had that friend, John Good Coke.

• 41:29Robert Evans?

  That's right. John Good Coke is buddy. Very Lutheran name, Good Coke. But above all else, he was an obsessive student and a loyal subject of the Kaiser. While he was in secondary school, Martin created a navy club for his fellow classmates who'd come to share the Kaiser's obsession with making Germany a naval power. While the army was heavily dominated by the old Prussian nobility, the appeal of the new German navy was that any man with a decent family might make a name for himself there. You don't have to come from an old military family to become an, you know, an officer and a general or a general to have a future. The navy, any, any German man could make a career for himself there, right? And the Kaiser's made it clear by this point that the navy is his special

• 42:10Robert Evans?

  project. And by the time Martin is 18, the number of naval officers had almost tripled from where it had been in 1897. 85% of these new German naval officers were members of the middle class, which itself was very new. They're people like, they're from families like Martin Niemöller's family, right? These, these kind of newly middle-class families. And part of why you-

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Like Germany's, it's ocean. They have to like go around Denmark and shit to get anywhere, right? Like-

• 42:36Robert Evans?

  No, they have a, they have a port in what's now Poland. No, there's, they've got, they're, Germany at this point, a chunk of what's Germany at this point is what we call Poland today. And that's where their ports are. One of the things that's going to happen to Germany after the war is the Allies are going to take away some of their ports. So all of these, all of these new young navy officers are members of the fairly new German middle class, like the Niemöller family, right? These are families that hadn't had money previously, but do now. And you have to have some money to be a naval officer. There's like a pseudo-college that you have to go through to, that's like preparatory training to become a naval officer. And it's only available to men who'd already passed

• 43:17Robert Evans?

  the abitur or the college entrance exam, which Martin aced in 1910. And it also costs like the equivalent of $8,000 or $9,000 today, right? You have to pay money in order to become a naval officer to get this kind of training.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  That's like always been the whole distinction between enlisted and officers anyway. It's a class distinction.

• 43:35Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. I mean, it very much was at this point in time. You know, that's become less the case in modern years, but at this point, it definitely is. Martin graduates at the very top of his high school class. And I should note here that of the 23 men in his graduating class, you want to guess how many survive World War I?

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Uh, seven?

• 43:56Robert Evans?

  Five. You were close.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Oh, what a war.

• 44:00Robert Evans?

  You were close. Yeah. World War I really, really came for this generation of German boys like a fucking wheat thresher. Martin enters adult life in the navy desperate to experience war and fight for the fatherland. As a naval cadet, he became enmeshed in what we might rightly call a proto-fascist culture, arguably the first in Germany. Because the culture of the new German navy isn't just conservative, as military cultures tend to be, it was obsessively devoted to the greatness and brilliance of one man, the Kaiser. And in his frequent speeches to naval cadets and officers, Wilhelm made it clear that he considered his navy to be a bulwark against rising left-wing sentiment, which had seen social democrats consistently gain support in recent Reichstag elections. Per Hockenos'

• 44:45Robert Evans?

  book, quote, "Shortly before Niemöller entered the Flensburg-Merwick Training College north of Kiel on the Baltic Sea, none other than Kaiser Wilhelm had appeared in person to inaugurate the college and celebrate the cadet's choice of career. 'I love the profession which you, my young comrades, have chosen,' he announced at the opening of their new training center. Wilhelm mused that the honor and prestige of a naval career distinguished the officer cadets from the unpatriotic louts and scoundrels in the German parliament." Right?

• 45:11Speaker 01

  It's very proto-fascist. And you're going to get a lot, yeah. Oh, it's just, it's like, house, because a lot of times when there's like the guy that everyone's like, this is the best leader ever. Or at least I'm imagining it with like, like Trump is not a particularly incompetent or intelligent person. Was like, I'm not trying to defend their position, but was Kaiser Wilhelm like, at least competent?

• 45:37Robert Evans?

  No, no, he's terrible at his job. And everyone knows it. Everybody in the royal family, everybody in the German government is like, this guy is an idiot. He's a maniac. He doesn't know what he's doing. He's got a weird thing for his mom that we do not want to really talk about. And he's going to fuck everything up because he doesn't know what the hell he's doing. Right? People are scared of him in the government. Like, you can't say that. And the citizenry doesn't know that as a whole, right? But everyone close to the Kaiser is aware that he does not know what the fuck he's doing.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 46:10Robert Evans?

  I mean, this whole building a navy thing is evidence of that, right? Like, this is just needless provocation and expense that doesn't help Germany the things it's best at, right?

• 46:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. And most of what they want to do involves armies, not navies.

• 46:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every young boy obsessed over, every young navy boy obsessed over the same two things. The brand new U-boats that were basically the sexy new space-age tech of the day, and the fairly new gigantic battleships, the Dreadnoughts, that these had just become a thing, right? And everyone's obsessed with these absolutely Titanic battleships with guns the size of buildings, right? Like the single barrels bigger than your fucking house, massive Titanic war machines that have never fought each other yet, right? And everyone's like, well, that's got to happen. These massive ships are going to get to square off. We get to do it. We get to see what happens when they blast each other.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  We get to be the one who shoots the big gun. Never mind that the other guy's a big gun and they shoot it at me.

• 47:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. There's like one battle, I think, Jutland, where they kind of do, but it's not very satisfying. Like, it's like the big fucking blue balls of like naval history, if you're interested in this era. It's like, I just wanted to see them blast each other, right? But we figure out aircraft carriers too soon. And then these giant ships just get murdered immediately. Like, um, so Martin enters the navy college as one of the 85% of cadets who were middle-class, and he swore a personal oath to the Kaiser. Quote, "In peacetime and wartime, regardless of where this may be, he would take that oath deadly serious until the death of the Kaiser in 1941." He considers himself bound by this oath even once the Kaiser leaves office. So Zymon notes that Martin and his fellows

• 47:51Robert Evans?

  considered themselves the emperor's elite corps. They saw that, as navy men, they felt like they had a personal bond with the Kaiser, which the Kaiser himself stressed by regularly observing their training, both in person and from his yacht, giving regular speeches where he called these boys, a sizable number of whom were pastors' sons, like Martin, his comrades. That's like a major, like a significant chunk of these new navy officers are like the sons of pastors. That's like actually a major source of these guys.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  I'd say you get a lot of real loyal people is to be like, the middle class never had a chance to be this before, but I have given you this, me, your father figure.

• 48:29Robert Evans?

  And you have a personal relationship. You don't want to let me down, do you?

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:33Robert Evans?

  Napoleon was actually pretty good at the same thing. It's a big part of why he does what he does. So, young Niemöller had trouble connecting with his actual comrades at first. He wrote home to his mother about his unwillingness to socialize with his barracks mates. Per the book Hitler's Personal Prisoner, quote, "He did not want to take part in the trivial, everyday conversations in the barracks room, or like other sea cadets, seek diversion in cafes and shallow theater plays. His firm hope was that he would never learn to enjoy himself in such a mindless way." That's how he refers to his like comrades and their hobbies is mindless.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  He's a real neurotypical guy.

• 49:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So he seems to have gotten over some of his priggishness by the time he was sent out on his first extended deployment, traveling across the Mediterranean and winding up in Venice for New Year's Eve, which does sound nice. Per Clarissa Davidson's book, God's Man, after an overly riotous celebration, 45 of the 50 midshipmen were incapacitated on New Year's Day. The captain and his crew officers had been invited to join them for jelly-filled donuts in Grog. Preparations had been made for more than 50 guests. Although only five of the 50 were on their feet, the provisions in Grog disappeared. One of the rugged five was Niemöller, right? So 50 guys go out drinking and the next day, he's one of five who are like not too hungover to go to breakfast.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  This is the second time he's been one of five to make it through something. Well, the other one happens in the future, but yeah.

• 49:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It is funny. Martin finishes first in his navy class, which will become known to history as Crew 1910, because a lot of Crew 1910 guys become pretty prominent in World War I. His classmates included, Zymon notes in his biography, both a future radical pacifist and enemy of the Nazi state named Heinz Kraschutsky, and Hitler's briefly reigning successor, Admiral Karl Donitz. Donitz and Martin Niemöller go to navy school at the same time, right? After Hitler shoots himself donuts, takes over the Reich to do the surrender. So they're, those guys are classmates together. When Martin is assigned a ship first, it was disappointingly just a light cruiser, right? It's not one of the

• 50:39Robert Evans?

  sexy boats. But he does really well on this ship and gets promoted to full lieutenant in 1913. And so by age 21, on the eve of war, Martin Niemöller was commissioned as an officer in the Kaiser's navy. 1913 was a fun year for him. It was the Kaiser's Silver Jubilee, and no one knew that anything bad was just on the horizon, right? When trouble started brewing the next year after the assassination of the Archduke, Martin was unconcerned, or rather, he was ecstatic. Per Hockenos' book, quote, "Wilhelm II's pronouncements at the beginning of the war, including 'we shall show our opponents what it means to provoke Germany, and we are all German brothers,' resonated with many in the middle and upper classes. For them, the war was an opportunity for Germany to stand up to its hostile neighbors

• 51:24Robert Evans?

  and achieve its rightful place as hegemon in a new Europe, its providential place, some thought. When we fight for victory, a Sallesian pastor preached in 1914, 'we are not fighting only for our people and nation. No, we are fighting in the cause of law and truth, culture and education, humanity and Christianity.'" Martin Niemöller shared that view, right?

• 51:43Speaker 01

  How, how common, I always hear about World War I as like Europe was a powder keg waiting to go off. But there's an implication that it didn't want to go off, like, but- How common is it, was it everyone was like, less like a powder keg and more like runners at their starting positions, like waiting for the, the starter gun?

• 52:06Robert Evans?

  Yes. I would say runners at their starting positions is a better way to look at it because there is this very strong understanding that a European war is going to happen among a lot of people, and a lot of whom think it's, it's desirable. And armed schedules, armaments, you know, like refurbishment schedules and whatnot have a lot to do with that, too. Oh, we've got the best guns now, so we want the war to happen now. But there's also just, Bismarck, you know, a generation before had been worried that everything he'd built would be, you know, screwed over by some damn fool thing in the Balkans, which is what causes World War I. It's some damn fool thing in the Balkans. So-

• 52:41Speaker 01

  Which does not do Germany any favors, or its economy, or its-

• 52:44Robert Evans?

  No, no.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  18 of the 23 people in the graduating class-

• 52:50Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah, are dead. Now, have I ever done, I don't think I've done for the show, my, my personal World War I blame list, like where, how I have proportioned blame for the war?

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 52:59Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. Okay. You should, you should tell that, but first- Yeah. First, you know who's definitely responsible for World War I?

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:07Robert Evans?

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• 56:17Speaker 06

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• 59:11Speaker 03

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• 1:00:08Robert Evans?

  And we're back.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  We are sponsored by The Black Hand, right?

• 1:00:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, we're sponsored by that Serb terrorist organization. So I was gonna give my World War I blame list, right? And at the very, and I start at the bottom, right? And I almost don't include them because they don't deserve any blame at all, and everyone else has some degree of blame. But at the very bottom should be Belgium, because all Belgium really did was be like, no, you can't use our country as a military base, Germany. And then they got invaded. So like, they're, they're the least to blame for anything, right? Second, this may be controversial, is Serbia.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Do they get the most dead bodies per capita of anywhere else in that war?

• 1:00:45Robert Evans?

  I don't think so. I don't, I think it was actually Serbia that had the most deaths per capita, certainly among their military. Like, a quarter of the Serbs serving military dies.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't mean the Belgians themselves, but Belgium is, wasn't that one of the first places where people were like, let's try the machine gun out on these more people marching in a line?

• 1:01:05Robert Evans?

  Oh.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  I could be wrong about this.

• 1:01:07Robert Evans?

  Kinda. Not, I mean, I wouldn't say so. That's really the Battle of the Frontiers is where that happens in like, a major way. That, that is some of what happens.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  I'm not a big World War I knower.

• 1:01:14Robert Evans?

  They, they moved through Belgium pretty quick.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:18Robert Evans?

  No, but like, they're at the bottom of my list of my blame list. Serbia's gonna be second, because there is some blame. Serbian, like, intelligence was funding groups like The Black Hand and The Black Hand, which is what led to everything. But also ultimately, like, Serbia didn't say, yeah, we wanna start World War I, right? There were definitely people who wanted a conflict with Austria-Hungary within the Serb government, but it wasn't like the nation made the choice to have that war happen, right? Some of their intelligence agencies get the fuck out of pocket, a guy gets shot, and then Austria-Hungary makes some insane demands that they can't say yes to, and boom, they're in war and like, a quarter of the country dies, right? So they're second to the bottom on my blame list. Right above them, and I'd never give credit to the British Empire for anything, but it has

• 1:02:01Robert Evans?

  to be Great Britain. Because of all of the powers in World War I, they had the most noble reason for directly for getting involved. And this does, not to say that there were not, there were a lot of people within the British military establishment, particularly the Navy, who wanted a war with Germany to cut the Germans down to size, and that was a big part of it. But fundamentally, the reason why Great Britain got involved is that Germany moved through Belgium. Germany didn't need to move through Belgium, and that's a reasonable line to draw morally, I think. Saying like, if you guys do this, we, we gotta get involved, right?

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't fuck with our friends. Yeah.

• 1:02:34Robert Evans?

  You can't fuck with our friends. Yeah. Next, least in blame. And by now, we're getting into the middle. So obviously, there's still blame to a portion. And this is, again, none of these are zero blame by this point. But next is going to be Austria-Hungary, right? And it's a terrible empire. They only make bad decisions. Every single decision anyone in Austria-Hungary in power makes for this whole period is the wrong one. But on a human level, they shot your guy, right? And it's a human thing. If somebody shoots your guy and you have a chance to fuck them up, you're gone. That's just how people are, right? Like, we build all these structures to try to make that be less how people are, but that is how people are. And their guy did get shot. So they do kind of have a reason for going crazy.

• 1:03:16Robert Evans?

  And then the most blame, and I share it pretty equally between France, Germany, and Russia. If I had to pick, I'd say Germany and Russia have more blame than France. But they're all sort of guilty of the same thing, which is like, none of you could have been forced into this war. Nobody's making Germany get into World War I. Germany says, we're not backing Austria-Hungary's place, sorry. And likewise, nobody's making, nobody's gonna invade Russia if they say, we're not backing the Serbs, right? And nobody's gonna invade France if France does not say, we're going to fight in this, right? All of you had the ability to try to hold back the dipshits that you were chained to, and you failed to. And so I, that's how I apportion war blame.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  Literally.

• 1:03:55Robert Evans?

  Kind of more than anything.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:03:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:03:57Robert Evans?

  That's my, that's my World War I blame list, right?

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 1:04:01Robert Evans?

  Martin does not feel like I do. Martin feels Germany is completely in the right. And not just like in the right because it's a good, he doesn't even really care about why the war is happening. What he cares about is that Germany's honor has been insulted, and this is a chance to prove and to make ourselves the greatest nation as we know we are, right?

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  They do have really big guns.

• 1:04:20Robert Evans?

  They have the biggest guns. That is true. It seemed like it should be a shoe-in. Niemoller would later explain his thinking at the time as that the war started. Quote, "If there is a war, a German doesn't ask, is it just or unjust? But he feels bound to join the ranks." And I guess I would say, yeah, Martin, that's kind of the problem with you guys at this period of time, right? I don't, I'm not disagreeing with you, but that is sort of the issue. In his book, Hockenos provides a photo of Martin, top foreground at the outbreak of war stationed on a mine-laying ship. And you can see it in the Netflix, it's guys on a boat. I don't know, you don't really see much of his features here, but like, yeah, there's him on a mine. And that's what he's doing when the war starts. He's laying mines, right?

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Oh, classically ethical behavior.

• 1:05:05Robert Evans?

  Classically ethical job. He's gonna do only ethical jobs in World War I, Margaret.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Excellent.

• 1:05:11Robert Evans?

  He was very good at all of the tasks the Navy set to him, which are, were universally the most ethically gray and fucked up jobs they had. As I said, he starts the war laying mines. Now, the British established a naval blockade early on because Germany had to import half or more of all of its basic foodstuffs, not to mention war materiel. The German Navy was potentially mighty enough to have fought the Grand Fleet of the British and maybe have won, right? The German Navy could have beaten the Royal Navy. It's theoretically possible, but it will always remain something that was theoretically possible because when you're the Kaiser and you've built this like your precious little Warhammer army, you, you might find you can't work up the courage to risk sinking it all, right?

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:05:53Robert Evans?

  And that's their fucking problem.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Oh, Hitler's not gonna have that problem.

• 1:05:57Robert Evans?

  No, no. Hitler loves blowing his shit up. But the Kaiser, they're never able to work up the courage to really take a risk with this fleet. So for most of the war, the bulk of the surface fleet sits bottled up, waiting while Germany relies on mine layers and U-boats to conduct a different sort of war against not just warships, but civilian shipping. In April and May of 1916, mines laid by Martin's boat, U-73, sank six ships. Their prize kill was the Russell, a major British warship. Martin and his fellow crewmen were decorated by the Austrian emperor for their victory. At around the same time, the British and German navies met for what would be their only grand clash. I think this is the Battle of Jutland, I think it is, which involves more than 200 vessels.

• 1:06:39Robert Evans?

  And it's one of these, it's the, the only time we really get to see these navies, turn of the century navies with massive dreadnoughts, fight like in, in like a Trafalgar-style mass battle, right? And if this is a video game, you'd call it like a slight victory for Germany, really, but it's a draw effectively. And I would say it winds up being a win for Great Britain because it scares the Kaiser enough that they never try again, right? And so the weight of the German naval expectations is going to fall on U-boat officers like Martin for the rest of the war. That summer and fall, they mined the Aegean Sea and sink nine more ships, per Hockenos, quote.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Wait, he's on a U-boat? Sorry, I thought he was on a light cruiser.

• 1:07:23Robert Evans?

  He's on a, these are, he's on a light cruiser to start. When the war starts, he's on a mine layer, which is a U-boat. Like, some of, there are, that's not the only thing that lays mines, but the mine layer he is on is a U-boat, right?

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:34Robert Evans?

  There are U-boats that are meant to torpedo boats primarily, and there are U-boats that are mostly laying mines. And he's laying mines.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Okay. I don't know anything about World War I submarines, but I'm weirdly obsessed with submarines in World War II. So I'm like, curious, yeah.

• 1:07:47Robert Evans?

  This is, it is interesting stuff, but like, they're, they're using it because a sub's really good at putting mines somewhere.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  No, that makes sense.

• 1:07:54Robert Evans?

  And the reason, like, the justification Martin gives is revenge, right? Like, that he writes in his diary after sinking a bunch of boats, revenge is sweet. From Hockenos's book, quote, "Niemoller bragged in his memoirs that one of their mines near the Greek island of Kea had bagged the British hospital ship, Britannic, the sister of Titanic, taking 30 lives. It was at that time the largest Allied ship sunk in the war." So if you want to know what kind of soldier was Martin Niemoller, he's, he's really happy that he sunk a hospital ship.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's the, that's the revenge that's necessary. What? Yeah.

• 1:08:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Revenge against the hospital? I mean, what he is talking about in terms of revenge, and this is important on a moral level, because what the German U-boats are doing is really gross and disgusting. We don't often think enough that what the British Navy was doing was just as disgusting, if not much worse. It's just less, they're not shooting directly at like shipping, but they're stopping shipping from entering Germany, which leads to a famine that kills around a million people, mostly children and old people, right? The British Navy does that. That's a war crime.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:55Robert Evans?

  So when we, when we, when we, I think we should say it's kind of, it's pretty shitty that Martin was doing this stuff, but the average British sailor is engaged in an act just as bad, I think, in a lot of ways. It's just less immediately, obviously fucked up, right? Because they're not laying mines to sink hospital ships.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Well, and that's like, submarines' task is, I think, is like, not necessarily to destroy enemy battleships, but to destroy enemy merchants.

• 1:09:18Robert Evans?

  If you can. But yeah, it's, yeah, it's to do economic damage, it's to do logistical damage. And it is, this is reported at the time as an outrageous act, right? The New York Times coverage read, "Pirate sank the Britannic despite clear red cross signs," right? And this will be talked about as a war crime because you're not supposed to sink hospital ships, and it was very clearly marked as a hospital ship. So by the standards of the time, this is bad.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:09:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. An article by Andrena Alpini in, for In Depth Magazine notes, "The Germans accused of committing a war crime by targeting a hospital ship defended themselves by claiming the vessel had carried troops, not wounded men. The British, the Germans argued, had disguised a warship with white paint and red crosses." Now, this is true in other cases.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  I've never heard of anything like that in the current world.

• 1:10:06Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah. Nobody does stuff like that, claims the hospital they shot was full of soldiers, right? There is, there are some boats that get sunk that we will claim was like, oh, that's civilian shipping, and we know now, well, that was loaded with guns. Like, we, we had filled those ships with guns to send to the British, right? But that's not really what's going on here. But it doesn't matter to Martin and his crew. There are millions of dead comrades in Europe, and the fact that their own wives, mothers, and children were going hungry back home thanks to the British blockade more than justified their actions, at least in Martin's mind. In January of 1917, he was transferred to a proper U-boat. This is a torpedo boat, right? That's meant to go out and directly engage and sink ships. It's got enough speed to use them directly. The, the boat he's on is U-39.

• 1:10:50Robert Evans?

  And U-39 is going to end World War I as the second most successful U-boat in the entire fleet, sinking 153 ships. One of the boats that they take down was a French troop ship, the Admiral Magot, which held 935 soldiers in addition to her crew. From Hockenos's book, quote, "This is about after he sinks this troop ship. It sank in 10 minutes. While one of the destroyers sought to rescue the men from the water, the other two sped off with the second troop ship. The U-39 stayed in the vicinity, attempting unsuccessfully to sink the remaining destroyer. All we could do was put up our periscope here and there to prevent the destroyer from picking up too many survivors," Niemoller later wrote. War is war. "The entire crew of U-39, Captain Forstmann recalled, was proud of its deed.

• 1:11:32Robert Evans?

  The whole purpose of war, Forstmann asserted, was to annihilate the enemy's armed forces. The people being picked up out of the water after all were soldiers bound for the front, soldiers who would not hesitate to kill Germans. After the Admiral Magot had slipped beneath the surface, along with 203 French soldiers and crew members, U-39 made for home, where Niemoller was awarded the Iron Cross First Class. I wore my Iron Cross with a feeling that I had earned it."

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, he killed a thousand guys.

• 1:11:57Robert Evans?

  This is a war crime.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:58Robert Evans?

  This is a war crime. Well, cup 200. But, and this is in the Napoleonic War. If you had, if you as a fucking French sailor had told Napoleon, we sunk their ship and then we killed them in the water rather than rendering aid, he'd have been pissed at you, right? He was not a nice man. But this has been, it, for a very long time, Europeans had considered in war, once you sink a ship, as long as you're not in ongoing danger, it's your duty to try to rescue the people you sunk, right? That had been the norm in European war for quite some time. So the fact that the Germans are doing shit like this is very upsetting to a lot of people, but not Martin. He has no problem with this. But what I find interesting is that his earlier biographies did not report the story the same

• 1:12:43Robert Evans?

  way that Hockenos's book does. So Gods Man by Clarissa Davidson was published in 1959, which is decades before Hockenos's book. And it, its passage about this same act reads, "A destroyer and a trawler appeared on the scene to rescue the survivors. The submarine had one torpedo left. Stand by, the captain shouted. First tube ready." "No, Captain," Niemoller protested. "We can't torpedo that destroyer again. It's not right." The captain looked at him as if he thought he was mad. "But every soldier they pick up will be fighting our men in a few days," he said. Niemoller persisted and won out. The rescue mission was allowed to go on." That's just a lie. That's just a bald-faced lie. And the reason why that lie is in there is that in 1959, Martin was an anti-fascist hero, right?

• 1:13:25Robert Evans?

  And so he didn't want to admit that he was a deliberately drowning helpless man?

• 1:13:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Have you, have you ever seen the, the submarine movie Das Boot?

• 1:13:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  It, it's like considered the most realistic submarine movie of all time. And it, it follows a German crew in World War II. And the whole thing, the captain starts crying when he realizes that, that boat he torpedoed, like, still had crew on it.

• 1:13:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  And I, I'm like, I'm not convinced that that's an accurate piece of the movie.

• 1:13:59Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, no. It's technically very accurate in terms of like how the boats work.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:05Robert Evans?

  But more often than not, the norm for these guys was like, fuck yeah, kill as many of them as we can.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10Robert Evans?

  Right? For one thing, these are the most radical of Germany's soldiers. In the trenches, you get some of that trench solidarity, some of that nobility, like the Christmas truce. U-boat guys are the most radicalized, or the most radicalized part of the German military machine. They are not nice people, by and large.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  I can't believe you're telling me that the three and a half hour movie I watched made by Germany in the 1980s was not an accurate depiction of the German military in World War II.

• 1:14:39Robert Evans?

  I'm, I'm sure there were some U-boat guys who tried their best to act ethically, right? You know, and it's always, again, there's always a degree of silliness where we're like condemning Martin for killing these men in the sea who are helpless, but we're not condemning a bunch of British sailors who are starving babies to death.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  Right, totally.

• 1:14:55Robert Evans?

  Right? Like, but still, I think at, at the end of episode one, Martin Niemöller, not, not sounding like a nice guy, right? Maybe understanding how he's not going to be super anti Hitler in a couple of years.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  No, I, I am shocked that he will be anti Hitler at all. That is what, that is what is shocking to me about the, the bit I know about the end of his story.

• 1:15:20Robert Evans?

  In our next episode, we'll find out when he really became anti Hitler, because that's a subject of some debate.

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  I assume it's when Hitler came for him.

• 1:15:29Robert Evans?

  You'd think.

• 1:15:32Robert Evans?

  You want to plug your pluggables?

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm Margaret Kiljoy. I have a podcast on this very network called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. I do basically the opposite of this, although it's still mostly actually about bad people, but it's about the people who fight the bad people usually. And I also have another podcast called Cool Zone Media Book Club, where every Sunday I read you a story, just kind of whatever kind of story, and then we talk about it. And also I write science fiction, fantasy. My most recent book is the third book in the Danielle Kane series. If you like the idea of punk rock Scooby Doo, check out the Danielle Kane series. The first one is called The Lamb Will Slaughter The Lion. It's available in German, actually. You could, you could get it.

• 1:16:14Robert Evans?

  Excellent.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  Das Lion, I don't remember how to, don't remember how to pronounce it.

• 1:16:20Robert Evans?

  Something, something, I don't know what German is for lamb either. Yeah.

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  No, I think, I think lamb might be L A M M, but.

• 1:16:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, something like that. Anyway, check out Margaret's book and, I don't know, sink some shipping in the Atlantic, you know? Maybe you

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  Or not.

• 1:16:35Robert Evans?

  could become the next Martin Niemöller and take out a hospital ship, you know? Why not? There's no harm in it, except for, for the people.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  All right, we're done.

• 1:16:46Speaker 06

  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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 1:17:36Speaker 07

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 1:17:41Speaker 03

  And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

• 1:18:02Speaker 05

  If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But soon they'll find it. He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly. They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff, and they said, maybe she'll find

• 1:18:20Speaker 07

  out where this girl is. I saw him violent. Backhanded her, pow!

• 1:18:28Speaker 07

  Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season Two, in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  You broke me. You do not deserve happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of Betrayal, Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life, until the messages started.

• 1:18:55Robert Evans?

  Someone's not going to make it out of this alive.

• 1:18:58Speaker 03

  Every piece of evidence pointed to the wrong guy.

• 1:19:01Robert Evans?

  He was not going to stop unless we stopped him.

• 1:19:05Speaker 03

  Listen to Betrayal, Season Six, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:19:13Speaker 06

  In 1986, a man named Scott Macklem was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect. Prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later, I'm reexamining this case. I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're, they're going to do their police job. Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time?

• 1:19:40Speaker 06

  Listen to Examine: The Backfire Effect on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:19:51Speaker 07

  On recent episodes of The Questlove Show, I chatted with JoJo about her music and Wallow267 about his story, everything in between.

• 1:19:58Speaker 06

  Don't invite me to karaoke. I'm going to make it weird. Someone's going to try to sing Leave It Out, or Too Little Too Late, or Baby It's You.

• 1:20:04Speaker 07

  Oh, no.

• 1:20:05Speaker 06

  And I'm going to be like, okay, cool.

• 1:20:08Speaker 07

  Check out my conversation with JoJo, Wallow267, and more on The Questlove Show. Listen to The Questlove Show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Peace.

• 1:20:21Speaker 02

  From shocking betrayals to carefully planned murders, The Black Effect's new original podcast series, Bloodline Crimes, hosted by me, Morgan Wood, explores the darkest and bizarre cases where family became the most dangerous threat of all. Listen to The Black Effect's Bloodline Crimes every Thursday, starting October 8th, from The Black Effect Podcast Network, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:20:51Speaker 06

  Detectives said he had stalked her before she died. Years later, they said he remained the person they continued to focus on. This is Hunter Gilmore, host of Hunting for Answers, a true crime podcast, shedding light on the silent epidemic of missing and murdered Black women and girls, bringing attention to stories that equally deserve to be told, and to the questions that still remain. Listen to Hunting for Answers, a true crime podcast from The Black Effect Podcast Network, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.