Part Four: Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself

World War 2 is coming to an end, and Eichmann cooks up an escape scheme that allows him to flee justice- for a while. Robert and Joe talk about what comes next and conclude the Eichmann story. 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?

  Oh my goodness gracious Jiminy Christmas. It's Behind the Bastards, a podcast about Adolf Eichmann for the last two weeks. Mr. Holocaust himself, as I shouldn't have titled these episodes. What's wrong with me?

• 0:19Speaker 01

  We don't have enough, we don't have enough time for that.

• 0:22Robert Evans?

  Whatever, yeah, whatever's wrong with me. It's not what's wrong with our guest for today, Joe Cassabian, who actually is a very similar kind of person in some ways. So anyway, Joe, welcome to the show.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 0:34Robert Evans?

  What is wrong with us? Why do we do this?

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Not enough time.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 0:41Robert Evans?

  All I know is that we're talking about friend of the pod Adolf Eichmann, who is, you know, the head of the Jewish desk for genocide at the SD at this point. He has prior, in the previous episodes, established himself as the czar of the Jews, partly by taking credit for a lot of acts of genocide that he actually didn't orchestrate, or that he had a smaller part in. You know, he's been kind of pissing off a lot of his colleagues prior to this point by lying about what he's done and taking credit for shit they've done. And now we're at the point in the war where things are bad enough that everyone's like, "Oh yeah, that shit I did? Eichmann definitely did it. This was absolutely him," right? And they're, they're going from being like, throwing his name around to get shit done,

• 1:26Robert Evans?

  to being like, "Oh, Eichmann? I hardly know him," you know?

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Eichmann showing up at the Nazi table to see if everybody could like, show off their ranks of war crimes, to find out he's the only one still doing it. Like, "Ah, fuck."

• 1:39Robert Evans?

  Oh yeah, you're, it's all on you, huh buddy? Yeah.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  I would have done that too, because I know he would have taken credit for it.

• 1:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, "Look, man, you've been stealing my content for years. Now you could have it."

• 1:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Heinrich Himmler's like, "Hey, you want my coat?" And my name documents?

• 1:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, buddy.

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• 2:06Robert Evans?

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• 3:04Robert Evans?

  So, in the final two years of the war, SS perpetrators, particularly the crew of men around Eichmann, would go through a rapid process of flipping from wanting the Holocaust to be on their CVs to wanting to hide their involvement. And this was often done by pinning their own actions on Eichmann, who was their most famous coworker in the field of genocide. He's the Alan Smithy, or whatever, that fake director name that you like put on a movie if you don't want your name on it? He's the Alan Smithy of genocide, where you're like, yeah, let's just say he did it. The Allies consciously sought to spook top Nazis in the final years of the war, and it's very fair to critique the Allies, to critique Roosevelt, to critique even Eisenhower, of

• 3:49Robert Evans?

  not doing enough to put a stop to the Holocaust, because they don't. They absolutely don't. Choices were made not to bomb railroads, and they knew what was happening. They had reports. This is on them, right? It's part of why Eisenhower acts so strongly to document what had happened afterwards, is he feels bad. He knows he could have done more, right? They all do.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  They straight up refused to bomb Auschwitz when there was an agent inside, I'm probably mispronouncing his name, but Vital Pilecki.

• 4:17Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Like beg them to bomb it.

• 4:20Robert Evans?

  It is like, look, we would all rather die. Stop it now. Right?

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. That was, that was the like, the, the underground take inside the camps. Like, we would rather all fucking die.

• 4:29Robert Evans?

  Yes. Please blow this place up with us in it. If it stops.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Just said no.

• 4:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And they said no. Um, one thing the Allies do do that does save some lives, right? Not enough, but some. Is they start broadcasting the names of SS mass murderers on illegal radio stations that are broadcasting into occupied territory, saying, "We know who you are, and if you cut the shit off right now, you might have a chance of surviving post-war."

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Ye olde doxing.

• 4:55Robert Evans?

  Right. Some number of guys are like, yeah, I'm gonna pull back a little bit, right? And that does save some number of lives. Not nearly enough, but it's a thing that they're doing, right? And this is partly why people start pulling back and letting Eichmann take more credit and trying to, because they're like, oh, I heard my name on the radio. That's not good. Have you heard how fast the Russians are advancing? Shit.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  I am already running west.

• 5:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. "Expunging the evidence of their own complicity and putting it on Eichmann was made easier by the fact that the self-proclaimed Tsar of the Jews seemed to have no overt sense of self-preservation, or desire to deny his role, even once it became clear that this was gonna be bad for him." He must have noticed the rapid change among his colleagues. Bettina Stangneth writes that in the last year of the war, his friends stopped meeting him for lunch. Quote, "Even though the..." And I love this part. "Even though the canteen in Eichmann's office building was one of the few who have, to have remained untouched by the air raids, right? He's the only guy in the working kitchen and we won't go to lunch with him. That's how bad his position is."

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Sad Eichmann sitting alone at lunch.

• 5:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah. "Does no one know that my kitchen is still working?"

• 6:01Speaker 02

  You guys want to trade my Bob only pack me PP and J?

• 6:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and they are all starving and they're like, no, but I'm not going to eat there, bro. Like, you don't want to be seen next to that motherfucker, right?

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Fuck that, I'm boiling my boots. This sucks.

• 6:14Robert Evans?

  He is so toxic, people will give up the guarantee of a full belly to be, avoid being seen next to him. He would later complain about the whiplash of being dumped so unceremoniously by the whole SS elite, and complained that a few years earlier, people couldn't do enough to invite me to ministers meetings or to unofficial meetings, private dinners and such like. But once the Russians broke through in Poland, he became a sort of ghost, right? He's like, man, a year ago, two years ago, I was at every dinner. No one even wants to eat at my place anymore.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  We used to be cool, man. What happened?

• 6:45Robert Evans?

  What happened, right? For his part, while Eichmann didn't seek to erase his own record, he did later claim that he spent the last months of the war engaged just in simple logistics tasks, right? Oh, I wasn't doing any more genocide at this point. I was trying to make sure enough food made it into Berlin for the defenders, right? That my office had enough defenses for the fighting, right? Like, I wasn't involved in anything horrible, right? Just normal war stuff. This is a lie. By the end of 44, even the most deluded SS officials knew their goose was cooked and also they had no more goose to eat. A decision was made-

• 7:17Speaker 02

  And no more goose to step.

• 7:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's no more gooses to step or to eat. A decision was made that even if the war against the Allies was going to be lost, they still had to win the war against the Jews. Therefore, the killing would continue right up until the last possible minute. Even if, and they make the choice, trains with critical war materiel are diverted from propping up the front line to the task of sending Jews to death camps. They choose, the High Command, Hitler and the military brass, choose the Holocaust over delaying the Russians.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Outstanding. Well done, boys.

• 7:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Heinrich Himmler personally approved such actions, and he had one-on-one meetings with Eichmann to ensure that Eichmann was properly briefed and supported to manage this task. While Hitler retreated to his bunker and travel within the Reich grew increasingly dangerous, Eichmann spent the last months of the war on the move constantly. Stengath writes, Eichmann was involved in the very last extermination campaign, the gassing of Ravensbrück concentration camp. On January 26th, 1945, Otto Moles' notorious special commando was sent to the camp with its gas fans, and gas chambers were also erected there. One of his duties, Eichmann's duties, was to gather up famous Jews and turn to different lower-security camps. Some prominent intellectuals and celebrities had been kept

• 8:30Robert Evans?

  in comparatively survivable accommodations in places like Thereseenstadt, which is, Thereseenstadt is like the nice concentration camp. And as we'll say, I don't mean it was a nice place. I mean, it was the best of the camps to be in, right? If memory serves me correctly, it was the one that they set up to bring the Red Cross to. Yes, that's what we're about to talk about. That's Eichmann's job, right? And this is, Thereseenstadt is comparatively nice because, as you said, it's meant to be a show camp that you can display to the internet. Death camps? No! These are just camps for like political, you know, we've got to have, everyone has some of these, right? And that's true. It's just, uh, it's just a labor camp for the undesirables. England has concentration camps for Germans, right? They're not death camps. They're

• 9:14Robert Evans?

  just constant. And there's a difference between the two, right? You're just concentrating people in a concentration camp. And that's, the Germans are like, no, our camp is just like what the English have for Germans, right? These are people who are politically unreliable, but we're not killing them? No! Right? We would never do that. This is why if you're a Jew who's internationally famous and gets caught, you saw, obviously, a good number of those people do get killed. But a lot of them are put into Thereseenstadt for a while because, well, people are gonna want to know what's happened to this guy. And if we can show them, him or her into Thereseenstadt, right, it'll keep the international community from thinking things are as bad as they are, right? Yeah, and we can handle them later. And yeah, we will handle. And again, a lot of these people do get killed. They're just kept there for a while, right? And these same prominent Jews that it was hoped, might

• 9:59Robert Evans?

  provide leverage for men like Himmler, right? Once the war gets late enough, they're like, well, now we don't want to kill these guys. But like, if we've got these famous Jews that we've kept kind of in the fridge, right, they're preserved, we can maybe trade them to let guys like Himmler escape, right? You know, we'll trade them to the Allies post-war to keep our own asses safe. So I mean- Oh, man. I don't think there's anybody famous enough for that to work. No, no, not by the end of this shit. Nope. Eichmann's job then is to both ensure some of these people are safe and also you have to convince them to keep their mouths shut about the murders they'd witnessed. For example- After that last gassing at Ravensbrook, Eichmann transfers several women from Ravensbrook to Thereseenstadt in February of 1945, and he meets with them personally. It'd basically be like, hey, y'all are gonna live.

• 10:43Robert Evans?

  The Red Cross is going to come here soon. What did you see at Ravensbrook, right? You didn't see any genocide, did you? And let me remind you, this is a pinky swear. Yeah, yeah, this is a pinky swear, right? You wouldn't break a pinky swear to Eichmann, would you? One of these women, Charlotte Salzberger, required Eichmann questioning her in a very polite manner about the extermination. His fame was such that even with that, he doesn't introduce himself as Adolf Eichmann, but he's famous enough that she guesses who he is, right? She later says, quote, "We knew who Eichmann was, even in Holland. We knew he was a man who used a lot of Yiddish and Hebrew expressions. And there was also a rumor that he spoke Hebrew and was born in Sirona. This was very clear from the way he spoke," right?

• 11:27Robert Evans?

  Because there are rumors that he's basically Jewish, and that's why he knows all this stuff. Ah, yeah. Right, right. I mean, he's had those rumors for a while now. Yeah. He spent some time asking them inconsequential details about their lives. Be like, what were you up to? You know, how are you? Like, try to be friendly, right? He's, he tries to be good cop before he pivots to the bad cop part of his routine. Quote. How was your weekend? How was your weekend? You know, death camping? This is a nice place, right? We got you some chocolate last week, right? Everything's been good, huh? After this, he pivots to the bad cop part of his routine. "He told us we now had the right to go to the Thereseenstadt ghetto. But if we said anything about our experiences in Ravensbrook or about anything we knew, then you will," this was the phrase he used, "be going up the chimney." Oof, God.

• 12:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's, he's still our Eichmann, you know? Within days of this, Eichmann himself was in Thereseenstadt to prepare for what would be the last visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross. So again, Eichmann is the guy who is show managing these Red Cross visits at the camp.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  While being internationally famous for murdering millions of people.

• 12:32Robert Evans?

  Yes, it's already known that he's doing a lot of this. Now, as I noted before, this was the nice concentration camp. Nazi propaganda describes Theresienstadt as being located in a spa town where elderly Jews could retire, right? This is a spa, basically. We're sending them to a fucking spa. You're calling us genocide? Come on.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Everybody's gonna leave there with their hair all redone and like, you know, veneers in. It's gonna be great.

• 12:59Robert Evans?

  It's the shit you saw with Abrego Garcia where they gave him like water and a glass with salt under him to be like, he's drinking margaritas in El Salvador. Come on.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Ah, yeah.

• 13:09Robert Evans?

  So, some famous Jewish internees are kept there, but the camp is also used as a transit camp for Czech Jews on their way to the killing centers. So this is not a nice place by any objective standards. In 1942 alone, so many people were dying due to starvation and disease at Theresienstadt that the Nazis built a crematorium capable of handling 200 bodies a day, roughly. And again, this is the nice concentration camp. 33,000 Jews die in Theresienstadt itself. And this is the nice place.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:40Robert Evans?

  I just, I can't exaggerate how bad all of this is. Even accounting for this, the living conditions there are still better than everywhere else because Eichmann and his colleagues, they don't want it nice all of the time, but you've got to be able to clean it up enough that at a moment's notice, you can take the authorities there, right? So it can't get too bad.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  I mean, the bar is so low in all of the other camps. It doesn't have to be good at Theresienstadt other than like, well, they ate today.

• 14:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, if we get the corpses out of here, it looks okay, right?

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:07Robert Evans?

  In 19, early 1945, his main concern was that rumors of the death camps had percolated widely within the community of Jews being held there. And Eichmann did not want those rumors getting to anyone at the Red Cross. And you can't make some of this shit up. You want to guess what day they pick for this Red Cross visit to Theresienstadt?

• 14:24Speaker 02

  April 1st?

• 14:26Robert Evans?

  April, you are literally right.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, oh no.

• 14:31Robert Evans?

  April Fool's Day, 1945, is when Eichmann personally meets Red Cross Representative Hans Denat and announces himself to be, quote, "the direct agent of the Reichsführer SS for all Jewish questions." They literally pick April Fool's Day, right? It's, it's so fucked.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  This is the, this is my least favorite thing I've ever been right about. Thank you, Robert.

• 14:52Robert Evans?

  So as soon as Eichmann meets with this guy, he gives a kind of rambling diatribe about his theories, RE, the Jewish question, and his now ended plan. He's like, yeah, we're gonna make a reservation for these guys, you know, like the America did with the Native Americans. We're not gonna kill them. Have you guys ever heard of Oklahoma? And we're gonna do that. Right. Obviously, the United States killed a lot. We did a genocide, several of them against them. Oh, boy, did we. But the average European wouldn't call what we did a genocide in this stage, in part because the war doesn't exist yet, right? To be fair, the average American today says it's not a genocide. Yeah, yeah. But this is the way this they're trying to be like, no, what we're doing is no worse than what the Americans did, right? That's all that we're trying to

• 15:32Robert Evans?

  do here. And what's weird, though, is that Eichmann also tells this guy, you know, Himmler supports the humane treatment of Jews in Nazi custody. And I don't entirely agree with my boss here, but I'm following orders, right? So I'm keeping things nice, too. Which is such a weird line for him to ride, being like, actually, Himmler wants the Jews to be treated well. And I think he's kind of crazy. But, you know, that's what I'm doing anyway. It's such a weird line. Imagine being told this as a Red Cross worker by a man wearing a skull and crossbones on his hat. Yeah, the skull and crossbones by literally Adolf Eichmann. You're just like, rolling your eyes so fucking hard. Now, so I bring this up to point out, there's very little sign at all that the Tsar of the Jews has any plans to flee from justice before the

• 16:16Robert Evans?

  fall of the regime. And this is one time where we have to give Eichmann credit for being a lot smarter than his colleagues. Because this is part of his tactic, right? He's not dumb. He's not actually, it seems like, wow, he's either so committed that he's ready to die, he's just trying to kill as many guys as possible, or he's really stupid for not trying to get his name off of stuff and to get out. What he's doing is actually smarter than all of his colleagues. He knows, you're fault, you're idiots for thinking you can escape this. Anyone at my level is a fool for thinking that you can get away. I'm going to take, I'm going to hide by pretending to be the guy that I've been pretending to be up until the last minute here. So that no one, none of my colleagues expect that I am setting up secret plans to get out, right?

• 17:01Robert Evans?

  But he is the whole time where he's doing this. He is making plans. He's getting fake identities printed. He's using like SS. The SS has a printing press for fake IDs. He's getting multiple fake IDs. He's making an exit plan with his wife and with his dad to hide out in the countryside under a new name, like in the last stages of the war. He'd started laying the groundwork for his escape months earlier when he lied to close colleague Dieter Wyslinski, who's a member of the SD and who would later try to sell Eichmann out to the Allies. Eichmann knows, well, Wyslinski's a worm. He's gonna sell me out the instant he can. So he tells Wyslinski, you know, I actually cut ties with my dad and my family years ago. They don't believe in all this Nazi stuff as much as I do, so I'm not even in touch with them anymore.

• 17:46Robert Evans?

  Now, the reality is Eichmann's father is a committed fascist, right? And Eichmann's still close to his dad. But by doing this, Wyslinski will tell the Allies, oh, no, he wasn't really in contact with his family. Right? Which is who he's gonna be relying on. Eichmann would also, so there's this guy, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who's an Arab nationalist and a Muslim leader with deep Nazi sympathies. And he spends a lot of World War II hiding out in the Third Reich. And he is super on board the genocide. Eichmann lies a lot and pretends that he and the Mufti are really close. They have nothing more than like a passing connection, right? They're not actually that tight, which isn't, I'm not saying that to say that the Mufti isn't, the Mufti is a monster, right?

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, seems like a real piece of shit.

• 18:26Robert Evans?

  He and Eichmann don't know each other well, but Eichmann pretends they're close friends. And at the end of the war, he's telling Wyslinski and his other colleagues, I'm gonna flee to the Middle East. The Mufti's got my back. I'm gonna hide out somewhere like Syria, right? Which some guys in the SS do. And so when Wyslinski starts being questioned by the Allies, he's like, oh, no, his family wouldn't hide him. They hated him. He's got some connection with the Mufti. He's fleeing from the Middle East, right? You gotta start looking for him there or trying to make his way there, right? So Eichmann has seeded a false story for his plans for the escape with his colleagues in the SS, knowing they're all going to rat on him. He wants them ratting and he wants them giving up the wrong info.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Of course he knows that they're pieces of shit. They're in the SS.

• 19:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he works with these assholes. He knows how much they suck.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  You guys stopped eating lunch with me. You're all fake friends anyway.

• 19:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he knows they're fake friends and I you hate you don't want to give it to a guy like Eichmann, but he's really smart here. He knows like this is very, very intelligent and it's going to work extraordinarily well.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Game recognize game. He knows what kind of pieces of shit are the SS is full of. He's one of them.

• 19:34Robert Evans?

  He's one of them. He's the worst of them, right?

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Through all of this, he vocally expounds upon his commitment to the Nazi cause and the genocide he's orchestrating. So no one will expect that he's planning to flee or that he's been lying to them. He takes to posing with guys like Himmler in pictures, carrying his service revolver. He hadn't really needed to wear a gun. He starts wearing it, being like, I'm an old fighter. I'm gonna go down shooting, you know? When this ends, I'm gonna die on the field, you know, in the last minute that I can, still loyal to the cause. In his last meeting with his subordinates in Berlin, he told them, if it has to be, I will gladly jump into my grave in the knowledge that five million enemies of the Reich have already died like animals. Right? He's really telling them, I'm happy to die because I killed five million people, you know? So I can go out

• 20:20Robert Evans?

  with my conscience clear. Now, this is a lie. He was committed to killing those people, but he doesn't want to die. He's gonna do whatever he can to escape. So April 1st is when the Red Cross visits Terezinstadt. Hitler dies at the very end of April, the same month that had begun with that show tour. Peace and an end to the war in Europe is not far behind. By the point that Hitler kills himself, Eichmann has already disappeared into the mass of Nazi war prisoners under a new name. He just bounces one day, destroys his old info, picks up one of these fake IDs and starts living under a new name, Adolf Karl Barth. Now, his last order that he had gotten as Eichmann was given by his childhood friend Kaltenbruner. And Kaltenbruner had told him, you're going to go and carry on this guerrilla

• 21:04Robert Evans?

  struggle in the Alps, right? We're gonna keep on fighting, you know, in the mountains. We'll hold out till the last. And Eichmann's like, yeah. Totally, absolutely. And then he just leaves one day, shows up in new clothes and like gets taken prisoner, right, as like a low ranking enlisted member of the SS. So he gets put in a POW camp with all of these thousands and thousands of other low ranking SS guys. And while he's in the camp, he actually transitions and destroys that old ID and takes on yet another new ID. And there's a couple of reasons for this, but he starts going by, he had been pretending to be Karl Barth, who's this enlisted member of the SS, and he upgrades himself to an officer, to Untersturmführer Otto Eichmann.

• 21:49Robert Evans?

  Now, the logic of this was both, first off, Barth, pretty far off from Eichmann. If somebody recognizes me and calls out Eichmann, I could be like, Eichmann, Eichmann, no, no, I'm Eichmann, yeah, yeah, yeah, Eichmann, that's me, right? It's smart, right? Like, it's, it's close enough that it, it won't draw suspicion if he like responds to the name Eichmann or something. And the other reason that he upgrades from being enlisted to a low ranking officer in the SS is that as an officer, he doesn't have to do labor on a daily basis.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  I fucking knew it. I knew that was gonna happen. I knew he was gonna switch himself to be either a Wehrmacht officer or an SS officer because no labor and better treatment.

• 22:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And for the record, most of the SS, most of the Einsatzgruppe, even the officers, get off essentially scot-free after the war.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Of course, yeah.

• 22:38Robert Evans?

  I am of the opinion, we should have executed every member of the SS.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 22:43Robert Evans?

  As well as every member of every, every person in government in the Nazi state. There were so many more people we should have killed that we didn't.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  If you wanted like be embraced by something warm and nice, just know that most of the ones that fell into Soviet captivity died horribly.

• 22:58Robert Evans?

  Yes, and in this case, you do have to give it to the Soviets. Like, the fact that we let so many of these guys off is why this kind of shit keeps happening, right?

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Ninety-nine percent of SS men got away with little more than a slap on the wrist and a quote-unquote rehabilitation process.

• 23:13Robert Evans?

  If there had been another million or two that had been taken out by the Allies after this, because there were that many who directly... Took part in the Holocaust.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Easily.

• 23:22Robert Evans?

  They deserved death, right? You could have justified even more. Maybe this wouldn't have kept happening, right? Maybe there would have been enough of a warning, you know? But we don't. We let most of these guys off.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Hey, and you know, once you, uh, once you cut in, uh, you know, take away the clean Wehrmacht, you got, you got a whole lot of Germans to kill and he'd still be all right with it. And I know I would be.

• 23:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And part of what's so fucked up here is that like, this shows how, how soft we are on these guys. The fact that just by being like, no, I'm an SS officer. Oh, of course you don't have to labor in the prisoner of war camp as an officer. Why would we make an SS officer work?

• 23:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's a gentleman.

• 23:56Robert Evans?

  Done. He's a gentleman. You can't make him do hard labor.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 24:01Robert Evans?

  So you might expect working something like this out where he's like shifting identities while in a POW camp to be hard, but it really wasn't. His father outside the camp is able to fetch these forged documents that he'd squirreled away for him and smuggle them to him. And because all of the central records in Breslau had been destroyed at the end of the war, there's not a lot of, that no one can find out that this guy wasn't real, right? Eichmann had made sure that Ekman's birthday was exactly one year later than his. So it's not hard to remember. He doesn't have to like, keep it in his mind. It's his own birthday. It's just a year later. You're just pretending you're a year younger. In the immediate wake of the war's end, most of the top players in the Nazi party like Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels were dead. Now Herman Göring is in custody, along with a handful of other Reich notables.

• 24:46Robert Evans?

  By far the largest Nazi in the wind at the war's end was Eichmann, who was noted by the Jewish Agency for Palestine as being the highest ranking wanted Nazi as of June 8th, 1945. So everyone is very aware, everyone who cares about the Holocaust is very aware, this Eichmann guy is a real big deal and he's in the wind and something needs to be done about it, right? So that is known from the jump.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  And there's, um, there was a few Nazis that at the end of the war, they did just vanish and people thought they could have done a runner like everyone else, but then they just came like, who's like?

• 25:19Robert Evans?

  I think Alfred Rosenberg is one of those guys. Yeah.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they're like, oh, they're just one of the thousands of people who died in fighting and just namelessly died on the side. They're like a fucking dog.

• 25:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I may be getting the name wrong. Yeah, there's a lot of, there are some high rate, cause like, yeah, you were in Berlin at the end and like, it's not easy to get out, right? It's pretty dangerous place. Oh, man. So you know who didn't escape Berlin at the end of 1945?

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Mitsubishi?

• 25:47Robert Evans?

  That is right. They were pretty far away from Berlin. Let's now talk about what else Mitsubishi was doing.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Oh, God, no.

• 25:58Robert Evans?

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• 26:58Robert Evans?

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• 27:38Robert Evans?

  So we're back. Oh my goodness. Uh, just like Mitsubishi, you know, we're back and we're cleansed of whatever crimes that we were implicated in previously, right? All we made was engines, guys. Come on. All IG Farben made was medicine and some, some other, you know, Cyclone B, a little bit, you know, not all that much.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Just a little bit.

• 28:00Robert Evans?

  Just a little bit.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Look, I was all on board with the Mitsubishi rehabilitation until they came out with the Model 731. That's a little too on the nose.

• 28:08Robert Evans?

  Jesus Christ. Oh, guys. So it had become clear by June 8th, 1945, that there are going to be war crimes trials and the World Jewish Congress asked later that month for Eichmann to be tried as one of the main architects of the Holocaust. Since he was missing, Allied prosecutors had to interrogate his former friends like Wyslinski, who sang like a canary and blamed all of his own crimes on Eichmann, right? He made me do it. I didn't want to be in the SS. This is all Eichmann. What a dick. We all hate him, right?

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Everybody would agree with me. Everybody hates him. You guys should get him.

• 28:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you should get him. I'm, I'm basically a victim. He was so mean to me. Like, you don't even know. So while Eichmann is interned as Ekman, there were attempts to catch hiding war criminals within the mass of SS prisoners. The Allies know some of the big dudes are in this mass of like prisoners that we gotta get. Some of them are hiding as Wehrmacht prisoners, right? He later recalled the days when, quote, "Jewish commissions would visit the camp." Quote, "We had to line up. They sized me up, yes, seeing if they could spot any mugs they recognized. We had to line up by company and there was a commission of maybe 15 of these," and then he uses a slur. "They went carefully up and down the rows, staring each of us right in the kisser. Yes, me too, right in the mug, all smiles. We weren't allowed to speak or we'd have called them all kinds of names.

• 29:27Robert Evans?

  And when they were done, two steps forward and on to the next line." Right? And he recalls this later while he's like in fucking Argentina with a sneering sort of arrogant glee that like, "They had me. They were face to face with me and they couldn't catch me. Ha, ha, ha." This is true that he does get away, that he is like that close to these guys and they miss him. But he's also, he doesn't feel safe, right? He doesn't actually feel like, no, this is a very dangerous position for him. Part of why is that the comradesliness, a lot of these guys in the SS know Ekman is in our company? I don't remember there being an Ekman in our company. This guy must, there's something sketchy here, right?

• 30:09Speaker 02

  I mean, all these guys got captured together. They were probably in units together. They probably didn't know each other all that long due to, you know, all the mass casualties.

• 30:17Robert Evans?

  Right, right.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  But they were at least familiar as one another. And now this guy comes in as officer.

• 30:21Robert Evans?

  Something's weird about this Ekman guy.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Was that guy your commander? He wasn't my commander.

• 30:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you remember Ekman being around? I don't remember Ekman. Sounds like Eichmann a lot, you know?

• 30:31Speaker 02

  He looks fucking familiar.

• 30:33Robert Evans?

  You know, in the war, these guys are all comrades. We're all on the same side, right? And that comradesliness between Nazis burns up very quickly after the regime falls and its crimes become impossible to deny. There are enough soldiers in the camp who know that this guy isn't who he says he was, and they don't feel safe there. So Eichmann begins to arrange his escape. I want to be clear that Eichmann's fame, which he had aggressively cultivated, was the only reason that he was in danger here. The Allies did not consider the Holocaust a priority in terms of prosecution. During the Nuremberg trial, only one man was assigned to documenting and charging prisoners over the genocide. Stangdath notes, quote, "The prosecution was also cautious about placing too much emphasis on Jewish affairs

• 31:18Robert Evans?

  for fear of being criticized by their own countries." So during Nuremberg, we're like, oh, we don't want to do that much Holocaust prosecuting because then our own people might say we're like, being too soft on the Jews, that this is all about the Jews to us. And like, there's still a lot of antisemitism going around here.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Just so fucking much.

• 31:38Robert Evans?

  And this had been part of why Roosevelt doesn't do more prior to and during the war to save Jewish people is consciously, there are people in his administration that are like, yeah, we didn't want to be seen as, we didn't want this. We were trying to work up, getting America involved in the war was hard, right? It was super controversial and it would have been bad for our effort to get the US involved if we'd made it look like this was all about the Jews. Cause they're just not popular, right?

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. And like similar to Churchill as well.

• 32:05Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  The Nazis and fascism were wildly popular within the British upper class to include the fucking king.

• 32:13Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  All the way up until they got dragged into the war.

• 32:16Robert Evans?

  And this is, this is a thing where it's like, in terms of Roosevelt, it is like, you wouldn't want to be in his position where it's like, well, the right thing to have done would have been to put the Holocaust first and foremost, but maybe that stops you from being able to get involved as quickly. Maybe it cuts the support you need to try and start to keep getting arms to the UK. This is a hard, I don't think he makes the right option, but it's a, everyone is so shitty, right? It's such a difficult position to be in where you're like, well, maybe doing the right thing here makes it harder to actually beat these guys, right? That's how they're thinking. Now, by the time Nuremberg is happening, it's just cowardice, right?

• 32:54Robert Evans?

  And lingering antisemitism on behalf of the allies. So they're like, we don't want to be seen as being, you know, is this all being about the Jews to us, right? Um, so, uh, Wyslinski is the guy who gives most of the testimony about Eichmann that would become a central part of Eichmann's post-war mythos as the architect of the Holocaust. As we've stated, this is an exaggeration. Wyslinski makes Eichmann out to be a bigger player than he was because he's trying to protect himself. The bigger, Wyslinski's like, the bigger a deal I make Eichmann, the less likely they are to kill me. And this does not work out for Wyslinski. He is extradited to Czechoslovakia and hanged for war crimes in 1948. So it doesn't work, but it does create the myth. It does help really bolster this myth in the public eye.

• 33:40Robert Evans?

  Theodore Danicker, who had been Eichmann's right-hand man, was smarter. He avoided capture like his boss at the end of the war until he was caught by the US Army in December of 1945. He committed suicide at a prison camp before he could go on trial.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  He was almost certainly gonna hang as well.

• 33:56Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, he would have, he would have fucking hung. He was just too big, too implicated and too much. Um, you know, unlike Wyslinski, he doesn't trick himself into believing he's got a chance. Eichmann proved remarkably successful as a fugitive. Working with a mix of a few former SS colleagues he could trust and their family members, he hid out on a farm in northern Germany. While he lived in a rustic college and engaged in a simple peasant life, working basically as a forester, right? He's doing like lumber work. What remained of the Third Reich's leadership went on trial. Eichmann's name came up repeatedly in segments of Nuremberg that dealt with the Holocaust. Wyslinski blamed his old boss for being abusive and violent, and basically was like, he threatened me into doing it.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, shut up, you fucking bitch.

• 34:40Robert Evans?

  Another SS man, I think his first name was Otto, Olendorf, uh, entered into the record Eichmann's claim that he would leap laughing into the pit of hell because he'd killed six million Jews, right? That's where we get that quote first is Olendorf being like, that's how bad Eichmann was. He said this.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  You guys should go get him still, not me.

• 34:58Robert Evans?

  And it's, Gering is really the only member of the Nazi High Command who like, doesn't do what Wyslinski does, where he's like trying to throw everyone under the bus, right? Gering states while he's watching Wyslinski on trial, this Wyslinski is just a little swine who looks like a big one because Eichmann isn't here. Um, Ekman is no longer there either. Three months after escaping the prison camp, Eichmann is registered under a new name, Otto Henninger. He just turned 40. He managed to stay employed, working for a lumber company and lived alone, a thing Wyslinski told Allied interrogators his boss could never do. Wyslinski says, anyone who knows Eichmann knows he's too cowardly to be alone. So we see how well Eichmann's cultivation of a fake personality has worked to protect him. He really lied

• 35:42Robert Evans?

  to the right guys.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's unfortunate how good he is at this.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, if, it is impressive that he was able to hide effectively and play the sights. And I do wonder if he was only able to get away with this because the people that, I mean, of course, he trusted some SS men, but the people that knew him as this fake person also kinda knew he was Eichmann?

• 36:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So by April of 1946, his friend Caltenbrunner had taken the stand and claimed that Eichmann was the man who carried out the whole extermination operation against the Jews. Now, again, Caltenbrunner's his boss. Caltenbrunner brings him into the SS, right? It's, he's foolish. Yeah, it's all him. Ah.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  He did it all by himself. It was the craziest thing.

• 36:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he was so fast.

• 36:35Robert Evans?

  Now, this was a massive exaggeration, but it's one that sticks. Lying does not, however, save Caltenbrunner. He's executed in October of 46, but it serves to continue building the Eichmann legend. Rudolf Hess, former commandant at Auschwitz, adds to this legend by crediting Eichmann with helping to decide to use Zyklon B to gas inmates. "We never would have come up with that idea without Eichmann. Yeah, I was trying to make a summer camp until he came around."

• 37:01Speaker 02

  I was just trying to give people veneers.

• 37:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The only guy in this like-

• 37:05Speaker 05

  I love Joe's obsession with veneers.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  It's a health spa.

• 37:13Robert Evans?

  Only Julius Stryker, who is the Nazi propagandist, we've covered him on this show, and he gets executed for war crimes. He's the only guy here to give an honest account, being like, "Fuck it, I've never even heard of this dude. Eichmann's supposed to be the chief anti-Semite? I'm the chief anti-Semite and I don't even know his name, right?" He's like offended.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Fuck this guy, but there's a certain amount of respect given. It's like, no, he knows he's gonna die no matter what. At least he's not gonna lie about it as he goes.

• 37:40Robert Evans?

  He's committed to being like, he's just angry that Eichmann's getting all of the credit for the Holocaust.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  I'm a piece of shit. Everybody should know about it.

• 37:47Robert Evans?

  I suck so bad hard. Why is he getting all the credit for sucking?

• 37:52Robert Evans?

  While the legend of Eichmann takes shape, the real man used his time in semi-captivity to start writing his memoirs. This is a bold move for a man who knows he's going to be captured and tried at any minute, or he could be. And it speaks to the fact that Eichmann is still very much a true believer, and he wants still to get credit for his work furthering a great historic cause. He thinks someday, the worm will turn again and we'll be seen as heroes, and I have to document how cool I was during the war, right?

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Real Stringer Bell moments, though, right? Like, are you taking notes to build a criminal conspiracy?

• 38:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's taking notes on a criminal, on the Holocaust. So while he's in hiding out, he reads voraciously about every news article on the trials and he documents the Nazi genocide, cutting out mentions of his own name. He's cutting out the articles that mention him and pasting them into like a scrapbook, right? While he's hiding as a forestry guy.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's something off putting about him scrapbooking.

• 38:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that he's, yeah, he's fucking scrapbooking. He follows the growth of his legend and the increasing obsession among different Jewish organizations with finding him and bringing him to justice. Aside from this, though, he lives a normal life. He even attends a coworker's wedding in 1947 where he's photographed in this like rural location. And the fact of it is, if he'd stayed there forever, he might have lived the rest of his life in isolation. But he doesn't want to live in isolation. He wants to live with his wife Vera and raise his kids. And they're never going to be able to do that in Germany. Vera is under constant surveillance, right? The Allies are watching her, figuring, he's gonna reach out at some point and then we'll catch him, right?

• 39:34Robert Evans?

  She is claiming at this point that she divorced Eichmann in March of 1945. And she and Eichmann's father tried to report him dead in 1947, claiming that they'd heard that he died fighting in Prague. The Allies don't really buy this, but you know, that's kind of what they're attempting to do. It's not fully clear when Eichmann makes the decision to flee Europe for Argentina. But we know that he starts the process of getting his paperwork in order in 1948. From pop culture alone, you're probably aware that a lot of Nazis escaped into Argentina after the war and it's worth discussing why and how. The first reason is that Argentina has a long tradition of hiring German military officers to train their soldiers. This is going on way before World War II, right?

• 40:17Robert Evans?

  So there's a lot of sympathy for Germany and for fascism in Argentina. Future dictator Juan Peron of Argentina received training in Mussolini's Italy while he was a young soldier and was attached to the Italian army from 39 to 40. The Argentine government was formally neutral, but deeply sympathetic to Nazi Germany, as was a sizable chunk of the Catholic Church. In 1946, Cardinal Cagianno, the bishop of Rosario and leader of a far-right anti-communist Catholic action group, visited Pope Pius VII. David Cesarini writes, quote, "Cagianno proposed to set up a pontifical commission of assistance that would provide identification papers for displaced

• 40:57Robert Evans?

  persons and refugees in Europe. More precisely, Cagianno wanted to help anti-communist fascists, Nazis and their collaborators, who were now on the run." So Cagianno goes to the Pope and is like, "We have to create a humanitarian commission to help refugees from Europe, you know, get their documentation." And by refugees, he means members of the SS, right? There's a chunk of the Vatican agrees to this plan and becomes a major active player in helping hundreds of SS war criminals escape, right? That's the Vatican is doing this.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  I mean, at least it's, I can't think of anything else the Vatican's ever done recently. So that's, at least they've seen the air of their ways.

• 41:38Robert Evans?

  Really out of character for the Vatican, Jesus.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, normally they're on the up and up.

• 41:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, and this is key, Adolf Eichmann escapes Europe with the help of a Catholic Cardinal, who provides him with the documents he needs.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  With the permission from the Pope.

• 41:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. The Cardinal's working with at least some degree of permission from the Pope here. Now, to escape, Eichmann also has to enlist the services of a people smuggler and a people smuggler who had the personal approval of Juan Peron. His identity papers were issued by Catholic Bishop Alois Hudal, who had appointed himself protector of persecuted war refugees, a term here that means Nazis who did the Holocaust. It takes two years, but Eichmann makes the journey to Argentina safely in 1950. His family follows a short time after, and they are soon living together, a facsimile of a normal life with a few compromises in light of his notoriety. Vera had to call him Otto, and he had to use a new name yet again, Ricardo Clement. But those who knew him said that he used his real name often enough with old comrades, who had now

• 42:38Robert Evans?

  made up a sizable community in Argentina. Eichmann described his own life.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  The world's most cursed diaspora.

• 42:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Nazi diaspora in Argentina. Yeah. Oh, and he's like, he's going by Eichmann fairly often, whenever he's around Germans. It's not super hard to figure out this guy.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  He's not hiding at all.

• 42:59Robert Evans?

  Oh, this guy Ricardo Clement, whose wife calls him Otto, and who goes by Eichmann whenever he's drunk? I wonder if he's Adolf Eichmann?

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Must be a different guy.

• 43:10Robert Evans?

  He lives a bucolic life in this period, though. He works for a hydroelectric power station for a while, and he leads survey missions deep into the mountains, exploring on horseback and climbing mountains. He takes his two young boys with him regularly and teaches them to hike and fish and ride horses while he worked. That job eventually falls apart in the mid 50s, but he gets a better one, managing a rabbit farm, right? It's, it's, there's a little bit of like, uh, historical symmetry here. Heinrich Himmler, before joining the Nazi party, is a chicken farmer, right? Yeah. Yeah. And Eichmann, after the war, runs a rabbit farm. Meanwhile, while they're in Argentina, his wife gives birth to two additional sons. He has to build a home with his own hands for his newly expanding family to live in,

• 43:54Robert Evans?

  and they take in two dogs, a German shepherd on a dachshund. In short, he lives the kind of calm, pleasant life that his work had denied millions of European Jews. David Cesarini writes, "Relations within the family were much as in any other. His sons were good-looking and sociable. There was no shortage of girlfriends. Claus had already been engaged to a local girl and took him on and was the first to marry, move out, and bring grandchildren into the family. But generational relations were not smooth. Eichmann looked upon his sons as boorish, interested only in trivial pleasures. They in turn thought he was authoritarian. Claus told journalists in 1966, "You will not believe how strict he was. Our old man was very strict." You won't believe this, but Adolf Eichmann was kind of a dick as a dad.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 44:38Robert Evans?

  Man, my dad is a real Nazi. Yeah, yeah, he's kind of a Nazi, if you catch my drift.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  My dad Adolf Eichmann is a real Adolf Eichmann.

• 44:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's real Eichmann character. So, when Cesarini's book was published in 2004, his understanding was that Eichmann didn't talk politics with his kids and forbade them from bringing anything about the family up outside of the house. This is an exaggeration, to say the least. However, even back then, before Stangnath's book, there was documentation of Eichmann writing on the war and his connections to other old Nazis. Cesarini wrote, quote, "His marginalia in works that fell into the hands of investigators indicate that he remained an unrepentant Nazi. For example, he took exception to Gerhard Bolz's The Last Days of the Reich Chancellery, because the author took an anti-Nazi line. At one point in the book, Eichmann scrawled in the margins, 'With swine like these, the war was bound to be lost.'

• 45:30Robert Evans?

  On the end papers, he jotted down his three-line credo: 'It could all be summed up as duty and obedience to orders.'"

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Christ.

• 45:37Robert Evans?

  One good friend post-war was the former SS Special Forces Commando Otto Scorsini, who introduced him to a Waffen SS veteran named William Sasson, who'd himself been tried for war crimes in absentia. These men helped to induct Eichmann into a community of unrepentant fascists, and Eichmann leaned into the reputation he'd accrued as the architect of the Holocaust. Among these friends, it was an asset again. Eichmann and other Nazis of the Sasson set felt no need to hide their opinions from the world. Sasson starts editing a far-right German-language newspaper, Der Weg, which was so fascist that Peron's government eventually suspends it from open publication, right? Like, that's how bad this is, when they get heat internationally?

• 46:18Robert Evans?

  And it was Sasson who introduced Eichmann to the only other Nazi émigré at his level of notoriety, Dr. Josef Mengele. Evidently, the two did not get along. Eichmann's frustrated because Mengele's got family money, so he's still rich while he's hiding? Well, Eichmann, they're like, kind of poor while they're hiding out in Argentina. They're not, like, super comfortable. And he's like, "Why does Mengele get to have money? You know, I suck just as bad."

• 46:44Speaker 02

  My family did build tractors.

• 46:46Robert Evans?

  He also, this is so funny. Mengele, and this is kind of like Mengele's being a dick to Eichmann. He's like, "Well, you know, if you guys are having trouble with money, I can be your family doctor for free." And Eichmann declines?

• 47:01Speaker 02

  I've seen your work, I'm not a fan.

• 47:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't think Dr. Mengele's gonna be the family doctor.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Oh, Adolf, it seems that your daughter has a bit of a cough. Have you considered injecting bleach into her eyes?

• 47:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's so funny, too, that Mengele does that as kind of like a dick move. He's like, "Well, if you're having trouble with money, I can be the fam-" Like, he knows what it means to offer to be the family doctor.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  He knows nobody wants him to be the family doctor. The man just smells like corpse.

• 47:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he knows he's Josef Mengele.

• 47:35Robert Evans?

  So Sassan had been a military propagandist during the war, and he wrote, ghost-wrote after the war, he ghost-writes biographies for several SS veterans. He proposed working with Eichmann to lay out a full history of the Final Solution, one that told the Nazi truth. Sassan meant to minimize the number of people who had been killed and to cleanse Germany of its war guilt over the Holocaust. He also wanted to clear Hitler's name. Eichmann has, let's say, different ambitions, and the result of their interviews was, in Cesarini's words, "sometimes blackly comic." And I'm gonna quote from Cesarini's book, Eichmann: His Life in Crimes here. "Eichmann initially welcomed the chance to unburden himself to someone who was both knowledgeable and supposedly sympathetic. I was happy to be able for once to talk about

• 48:18Robert Evans?

  the whole complex matter and to some extent dispose of it. But he discovered that Sassan had a perspective that was not wholly in accord with his own. While he was happy to record that Heidrich had received a fewer order to exterminate the Jews, Sassan questioned whether Hitler was truly responsible and wanted hard evidence for such a directive. At one point, Eichmann expressed incredulity that anyone would expect there to be a written order from Hitler himself, protesting that that was not how the Reich worked. Where Sassan wanted to diminish the number of Jews deported to the death camps, Eichmann was happy to brag about his achievements. At Sassan's insistence, the dialogue returned again and again to statistical assessments of the numbers killed, with Sassan and Eichmann arguing in opposite directions. The wine consumed during the sessions loosened Eichmann's tongue

• 49:00Robert Evans?

  more than was good for him. His self-pity and self-aggrandizing equally led to incriminating statements. He regretted his weakness in not being able to overcome the obstacles in the way of eliminating all the Jews. Impervious or uncaring as to what the transports meant in terms of human suffering, he lamented delays and rejoiced in trouble-free deportations. We had the same thing in Slovakia, we had the same thing in France, and although it started there very hopefully, we had the same thing in Holland, where the transports did, however, roll at the beginning, so that one can say it was magnificent, and where subsequently there was one problem after another. He remembered with satisfaction the times the deportations went well, notably in Hungary." So it's so assassins like like Hitler wasn't really involved. Do you have any evidence that Hitler ordered it? And I was like, you don't understand how this fucking worked.

• 49:44Robert Evans?

  Like, what the fuck is wrong with you?

• 49:46Speaker 02

  I don't think that many people died. I would have killed more.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  I do like that the reason like, um, I couldn't hold his wine.

• 49:53Robert Evans?

  No, no, no.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  He was a lightweight.

• 49:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  He was a lightweight and got really moody afterwards.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, he drank wine, got a little weird.

• 50:03Robert Evans?

  You know who also gets a little weird whenever they're drinking wine?

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Mitsubishi?

• 50:09Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 50:09Robert Evans?

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• 51:22Robert Evans?

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• 51:29Speaker 04

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• 52:00Robert Evans?

  We're back and we just got reached out to by Mitsubishi. And this is very good. I think this is going to be really positive for the whole podcast. They stated, quote, "If you continue referencing our name, we will bring you into court." So yeah, very excited. Super psyched. Uh huh.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  This and more in Wake Island Drift.

• 52:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 52:21Robert Evans?

  So Eichmann's post-war friendships all have one thing in common. His utterly repentant openness about the scale of crimes he'd committed. He told one Dutch Nazi immigré, "To be frank with you, had we killed all of them, the 10.3 million European Jews, I would be happy and say, all right, we managed to destroy an enemy." So, you know, he's, he's, he's continues to be Eichmann.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's still a piece of shit.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  He's still a fucking Nazi asshole.

• 52:49Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. Now Ricardo Clement lives with his wife and sons outside of Buenos Aires for almost a decade. As I noted earlier, his Boerish sons grew up there and began dating. One of them started seeing a young girl who was also a German immigré, Sylvia Hermann. Now, you might think this would make the two a good match, but there was a problem. Sylvia's family were the other type of European immigré, right? Her father Lothar hadn't informed her of this, but he was a Holocaust survivor who had fled Europe after surviving Dachau.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  Now, this is the world's worst fucking Hallmark movie.

• 53:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the worst meet cute.

• 53:28Robert Evans?

  By this point, Lothar was old and blind as a result of repeated beatings by the Gestapo. As his daughter courted this Eichmann boy, Lothar starts putting things together in his head and is like, "Oh, fuck, I think this kid might be the son of like a major war criminal," right? Now, these are initially just suspicions and the family moves away from the area not long afterwards. So Lothar doesn't think a lot more about this until 1957, when he comes across news coverage of another Nazi back in Frankfurt. And I'm going to quote from an article by the Museum of Jewish Heritage here. Lothar's realization that Ricardo Clement may in fact be Adolf Eichmann led him to the chief prosecutor of the West German state Hessen, Fritz Bauer.

• 54:11Robert Evans?

  In order to pursue Eichmann and make a case for investigation, Bauer needed evidence. Bauer, who acted outside his official role as chief prosecutor, was concerned that his colleagues were Nazi sympathizers and would thwart the investigation. At Bauer's request, Lothar went in search of more details regarding Eichmann. Soon enough, Lothar was able to positively identify Eichmann, sending good word back to Bauer. So fucking Lothar is like, well, this German prosecutor's been prosecuting Nazi war criminals. I'll reach out to him and say, I think I know Eichmann. Bauer's like, I can't do this as part of my legal job. There's so many fucking Nazis still in the German state. They'll warn him. If anyone becomes aware in Germany that I'm looking for Eichmann, he'll get warned because again, I'm surrounded by Nazis still. So

• 54:56Robert Evans?

  Man, the Allies should have killed way more of my coworkers. So many more of these guys. So Bauer is like, basically, once he gets like confirmation from, uh, from this dude in Argentina, Bauer, rather than like going after, uh, like going through the German government to try to prosecute this guy, he's gonna go directly to the Mossad because he's like, again, I'm surrounded by Nazis. And this is not an uncommon state of affairs. Post-war West Germany talked to great game about war guilt and hatred of the regime, but a ton of second and third tiered Nazis were by now running the show. Oh, fuck yeah, they were. And one of the people responsible for this is a famous anti-Nazi, Konrad Eidenhour.

• 55:38Robert Evans?

  And Eidenhour had been, he'd been an opponent of the party prior to Hitler's rise to total power. And he had been imprisoned several times by the Nazis. But he was like a liberal politician who hated the Nazis, but was willing to govern beside them, right? Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my political ideology. Right. And the good news is that Eidenhour was such a committed anti-Nazi that the Allies let him form a government and become West Germany's first chancellor in 1949. The bad news is that because he was such a committed anti-Nazi, he was able to personally accept a ton of Nazis into his government and his own reputation acted as a shield for them. Per the Irish Times, Challenged on this many times by political rivals and foreign critics,

• 56:23Robert Evans?

  Aiden Howard hit back that one does not have to throw out the dirty water as long as one doesn't have any clean water, right? Well, everybody who knows how to run the state is so implicated in Nazism. We can't afford to punish them all. Otherwise, we won't be able to have a Germany. We gotta have a Germany, right? Uh, counterpoint. What if we didn't? Yeah. Now, in 1957, Eichmann had actually written an open letter under his own name to Aiden Howard, right? And the letter was negative. He and Sassan both wanted to destroy Conrad's government, but it shows how much impunity he felt by this point, that he could write a letter to the fucking chancellor, right? And feel like it was not a super dangerous thing. Now, since he couldn't trust his colleagues anymore, but did trust Lothar Snooping,

• 57:07Robert Evans?

  our boy Bauer sent the information about Eichmann back to the Mossad, who had a whole Nazi hunting division at this point and were ready to use it. In May of 1960, they sent 11 agents to Argentina. After weeks of gumshoe work to track Eichmann down and case his home and the pattern of his daily life, they launched an operation to kidnap him and spirit him to Jerusalem. Now, there's a whole long story here, and I'm really boiling out the details because it's the best known part of Eichmann's life. And it's really not super worth into what's getting into detail here about it. But the short of it is, they capture the fucker and he winds up on trial for his many crimes in Jerusalem. Now, the exact form that this trial takes is the work of David Ben-Gurion, who's the prime minister of Israel and for whom this was not just a matter of justice, but a matter

• 57:52Robert Evans?

  of personal political pride. Hannah Arendt, in her famous cover, coverage of the trial, described Ben-Gurion's motivations this way, quote, and this is from Eichmann in Jerusalem. "There was the lesson to the non-Jewish world. I went to establish before the nations of the world how millions of people, because they happen to be Jews, and 1 million babies, because they happen to be Jewish babies, were murdered by the Nazis." That's Ben-Gurion's words. "Or, in the words of Devare, the organ of Ben-Gurion's mapai party, let the world opinion know this, that not in Nazi Germany alone was responsible for the destruction of 6 million Jews of Europe. Hence again, in Ben-Gurion's own words, 'we want the nations of the world to know, and they should be ashamed.'" The Jews in the diaspora were to remember how 4,000-year-old Judaism, with its spiritual creations, its ethical strivings, its messianic aspirations,

• 58:37Robert Evans?

  had always faced a hostile world, how the Jews had degenerated until they went to their death like sheep, and how only the establishment of a Jewish state had enabled Jews to hit back, as Israelis had done in the War of Independence, in the Suez Adventure, and in the almost daily incidents on Israel's unhappy borders. And if the Jews outside Israel had to be shown the difference between Israeli heroism and Jewish submissive weakness, there was a complimentary lesson for the Israelis. For, quote, "The generation of Israelis who have grown up since the Holocaust were in danger of losing their ties with the Jewish people, and by implication with their own history. It is necessary that our youth remember what happened to the Jewish peoples. We want them to know the tragic facts of our history." And this is a Rint writing, that Ben Gurion, he's not just trying, he doesn't just want to see this guy brought to justice because he's a Nazi.

• 59:21Robert Evans?

  He wants to see this guy brought to justice because the story of Eichmann highlights how cowardly the European Jews were, that they let themselves be slaughtered, and that that's different from the heroic Israelis who are willing to fight, right? That's part of why Ben Gurion puts this trial on, right? There is a propaganda angle here.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  There is a lot of very disgusting language that was used towards European Jews, despite the fact that a lot of these guys are descended from them, or their kids, or their neighbors, or whatever. Yeah, it's absolutely horrible.

• 59:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And this is something, Rint is very critical of Israel, and sees a lot of the problems that are going to result in the shit we're seeing today, very early on. She sees a lot of the horror of like what's done to the Palestinians. She sees a lot of what's coming, and she's deeply critical of why this, not that Eichmann's on trial, she obviously thinks he needs to be, but she's deeply critical about why he's being put on trial, and what else is happening here.

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  You've heard of the imperial boomerang, this is the genocidal boomerang.

• 1:00:20Robert Evans?

  Right. And there's a lot of good, modern criticism of Arendt and of her writing in Eichmann on Jerusalem, because in Jerusalem, because her picture of Eichmann as this banal pencil pushing figure is wrong. He is, I think we've made the case, a pretty outwardly bombastically villainous Nazi.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, she fell for his

• 1:00:38Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  personal portrayal of himself while submitting himself to a Jewish court.

• 1:00:43Robert Evans?

  Right. But when it comes to dissecting Israeli policies and the message that this trial was meant to show, Arendt is incredibly incisive. And I want to make it clear here, she's not saying that what she what she lays out in the paragraph uncritically, right? She's not saying, and it's good that Ben-Gurion is doing that. She has deep reservations about what he's doing and about the treatment of Holocaust survivors in Europe. I'm going to quote again from Eichmann in Jerusalem. "Equally superfluous was the lesson to the Jews in the diaspora, who hardly needed a great catastrophe in which a third of their people perished, to be convinced of the world's hostility. Not only has their conviction of the eternal and ubiquitous nature of antisemitism been the most potent ideological factor in the Zionist involvement since the Dreyfus affair, it must also have been the

• 1:01:26Robert Evans?

  cause of the otherwise inexplicable readiness of the German Jewish community to begin to negotiate with Nazi authorities during the early stages of the regime. This conviction produced a fatal inability to distinguish between friend and foe. The German Jews underestimated their enemies because somehow they thought that all Gentiles were alike." And yeah, that's such an important point to make, too. And this is why, well, we have to point out what Arendt got wrong. You need to keep this in mind, right? That both like, well, this is a lot of what Ben-Gurion is doing is totally unnecessary. And it's also based on him kind of falling into the same mistake, a different version of the same mistake, that a lot of European Jews made early on, which is thinking that all the Gentiles are alike, right? Which leads them to misunderstand their enemies.

• 1:02:09Robert Evans?

  One thing that really gets lost in casual discussion of Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem is that Israeli authorities also kind of put Holocaust survivors on trial for their timidity. They, of course, needed witnesses to call to discuss the details of the killing system Eichmann had helped to implement. Arendt describes, quote, "The prosecutor, asking witness after witness, why did you not prosecute?" Protest, "Why did you board the train?" Fifteen thousand people were standing there and hundreds of guards facing you. Why didn't you revolt and charge and attack these guards? Harped on for all it was worth. But the sad truth of the matter is that the point was ill-taken, for no non-Jewish group or non-Jewish people had behaved differently. Sixteen years ago, while still under the direct impact of the events, a former French

• 1:02:52Robert Evans?

  inmate of Buchenwald, David Russet, described in his book, "The Logic That Obtained in All Concentration Camps," quote, "The triumph of the SS demands that the tortured victim allow himself to be led to the noose without protesting, that he renounce and abandon himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity. And it is not for nothing, it is not gratuitously out of sheer sadism that the SS men desire his defeat. They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victims before he mounts the scaffold is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery, in submission. Nothing is more terrible than these processions of human beings going like dummies to their death." The court received no answer to this cruel and silly question, but one could easily have found an answer had he permitted his imagination to dwell for a few minutes on

• 1:03:37Robert Evans?

  the fate of those Dutch Jews who in 1941, in the old Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, dared to attack a German security police detachment. Four hundred and thirty Jews were arrested in reprisal, and they were literally tortured to death, being sent first to Buchenwald and then to the Austrian camp of Mathausen. Month after month, they died a thousand deaths, and every single one of them would have envied his brethren in Auschwitz had he known about them. There exist many things considerably worse than death, and the SS saw to it that none of them was ever very far from the mind and imagination of their victims. In this respect, perhaps even more significantly than in others, the deliberate attempt in Jerusalem to tell only the Jewish side of the story distorted the truth, even the Jewish truth." And this is such an important criticism, that not only are the victims of Eichmann

• 1:04:22Robert Evans?

  also on trial in Jerusalem, but that by framing it this way, by being so obsessed with, "Well, why didn't they fight more? Why didn't..." And by being so obsessed with just the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, they're distorting even the story of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, that that's also happening here.

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  Hmm hmm. It's something that continues to happen with, unfortunately, Israeli history of the downplaying of the other victims and even other genocides as well in order to tell their own crafted version of it of going like sheep to the slaughter is a famous quote.

• 1:04:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  And it was even used as a rallying cry by, I believe his name was Abner Kovner.

• 1:05:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Kovner. Yes.

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, to launch attacks against surviving SS men and even attempt to poison an entire city in Germany.

• 1:05:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, as we talked about, they had part of a group called Nakam. Yeah.

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was like the rallying cries, like, we did not go like sheeps to the slaughter.

• 1:05:25Robert Evans?

  Yes. And they did. And there were so many other examples of resistance, right? But the point that Arint is making is both that, like, you can't imagine the position these people were in and what had been done to them already. And also, like, the degree of, like, critiquing them for this, they acted like everyone else. And we know this because every other group that was targeted by the Nazis that was put into this system, they more or less all behaved similarly, right?

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:05:51Robert Evans?

  Like, this is not just a problem with Jewish people in Europe. This was just something, this was a result of the sheer amount of violence that was deployed and what it does to people.

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  It happens with every genocide. And this story gets told with every genocide. I am Armenian, and Armenians tell the same thing, that like, they put their own history through the same, well, why did they, why did they just walk off like that and do as they were told? They're like, how fucking stupid are you?

• 1:06:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Speaker 02

  How fucking dare you?

• 1:06:27Robert Evans?

  It's this desire, both to avoid what you see as the shame, that like, they didn't fight back more, and also this belief to think that, like, well, I would never be in that position.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm built different.

• 1:06:37Robert Evans?

  I'd fight back. And I can see it because, like, now that I'm on the side, now that I'm part of a country that has a military that's capable of, like, fighting, I'm, you know, we're fighting, right? Like, we would never just give up, you know? And it's this desire to believe that, like, you were now safe from this horrible thing.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Robert Evans?

  And this desire to believe also that It's this deeply insidious attitude that like, people who suffer something that badly, even if they're your people, they must have done something wrong.

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:07:06Robert Evans?

  They didn't fight hard enough, right? There's something that they could have done that I would do if I was in their situation, right?

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, everybody, "Oh, that couldn't happen to me, I would do this." I assure you it will.

• 1:07:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it would be me, yeah.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  It fucking would.

• 1:07:20Robert Evans?

  And I think Arant's work is so valuable in part because she brings this criticism up that is, it's very hard to talk about this. It's very hard to be critical of like, especially in public, of how Israel handled the Eichmann and what they did. And the story of Israeli treatment of Holocaust survivors is much deeper than just this. And it's difficult to be, for a lot of people to be critical about it because it's hard to not seem like you're saying something. And like, Arant is a Holocaust survivor. She is smuggled out of Europe, right? Like, she is, and she is the one making these criticisms of Israel during the trial, right? As she's reporting for, I think, the fucking New Yorker, you know? It's very important.

• 1:08:02Robert Evans?

  And Eichmann in Jerusalem, for all of its flaws, is still very important to read for these reasons. Now, "I find stuff like this much more interesting than Eichmann's actual performance on trial. In short, his defense counsel tries to use the argument that Hans Globke had drafted the Nuremberg racial laws in 1935, and thus Eichmann had only been following orders. Eichmann himself sought to inhabit the image of a timid middle manager. Oh, we'd handled some logistics, sure. He'd helped send Jews to camps. He was making the trains run, but he wasn't putting people in gas chambers. He testified personally, 'I had nothing to do with killing Jews. I've never killed a Jew, and I've never ordered anyone to kill a Jew.'" The German government, for their part, when he brings, part of what Germany's doing,

• 1:08:47Robert Evans?

  when Eichmann brings up Globke to try to be like, "No, this was the guy responsible." Germany tries to hush that up, right? And they're like, really talk, like, pushing internationally, like, "We've got to keep this shit quiet." Because Globke, at this point, is the senior most civil servant in West Germany, working under Konrad Eidenhour, right?

• 1:09:06Speaker 02

  There it is.

• 1:09:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The guy who drafted the Nuremberg racial laws is working for the government again. He's the senior most civil servant in West Germany under Edenauer. So obviously, the outcome of this trial is never really in doubt. Now, there are some very valuable things that happen during the trial and that get out. And it's very valuable that a lot of Eichmann's victims are allowed to talk about what happened to them, are allowed to put that on the historic record. I'm not claiming that like, this is all a failure or bad. A lot of good does come of his trial, right? That is also a part of the story and it's an important part of the story. And the fact that a lot of victims of the Holocaust get to go in front of a perpetrator and lay out what he did to them is good. There are also horrifying moments, right? One of the worst moments of the trial is a former Auschwitz inmate is shown a camp

• 1:09:51Robert Evans?

  uniform while he's on trial and he has a stroke in the courtroom.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:09:55Robert Evans?

  Like, it's fucking nightmarish, right? Because in this case, they are trying to do like, the right thing, where it's like, we need this on the record. But like, of course, that's what happens sometimes, right? Like, it's just, it's horrible. Like, there's no easy way to handle all this stuff.

• 1:10:11Robert Evans?

  On December 11th and 12th in 1961, the court declared Adolf Eichmann guilty of crimes against the Jewish people and humanity as a whole. He was sentenced to death by hanging and executed on June 1st, 1962. He died unrepentant. And that's the Eichmann story.

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  I mean, it's not surprising he went screaming to hell, refusing to admit that he was wrong.

• 1:10:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:10:34Robert Evans?

  That's Gans.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  Yep. Well, uh, good, I guess.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:40Speaker 02

  I'm glad it ended that way, rather than going out the Mengele way, which I, dying of a heart attack while swimming, yeah.

• 1:10:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Oh, man. Anyway.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  Though admittedly, I feel like drowning would be a lot worse, so who's to say?

• 1:10:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, who's to say? I mean, I don't know. My grandma nearly drowned to death and always had said it was a pretty pleasant way to go. Like, you feel really warm and nice at the end. I don't know, I've never drowned.

• 1:11:05Speaker 02

  Do we know if Israel did it right and he didn't strangle to death? I feel, I feel like that's something that an Israeli prison guard would fuck up on purpose.

• 1:11:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't think he, like, it wasn't like, because that happens to a lot of the Nuremberg guys, like, the hangman, like, purposefully fucks up.

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, that hangman ruled.

• 1:11:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we've done episodes on him as like a pretty cool guy.

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  Just a drunk guy who wanted to strangle a lot of Nazis and accidentally had to rip their heads off.

• 1:11:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he was the right man for the job. Yeah, he is executed by hanging. I don't, I don't think he was particularly fucked up. It should have been.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  Oh, that's unfortunate.

• 1:11:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, do it the slow way. Like, oh, no, we made, we built it too low.

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  Israel, you can't fuck up the one thing we want you to fuck up.

• 1:11:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, really screw over this hanging. Yeah. Um, anyway, well, if you ever get a chance to hang a Nazi, be bad at it.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:11:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  The only way to be good at that job is by fucking it up harder than you fucked up. Anything you fucked up before.

• 1:12:04Robert Evans?

  You need to get drunk. You've got to really practice to be incompetent at this.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  There you go. Yeah.

• 1:12:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:13Robert Evans?

  All right, everybody.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  Listen to, listen to Joe's podcast.

• 1:12:16Robert Evans?

  Listen to Joe's podcast. Yeah.

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. If you want to know more about, uh, actually weird that this, everything you bring up keeps coming back to a series that we've done, but we did a series in Otto Scluzeni.

• 1:12:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26Speaker 02

  He's a psycho.

• 1:12:28Robert Evans?

  He's a psycho.

• 1:12:28Speaker 02

  Listen to, you could listen to that series that we did, uh, or one of the other 300 or so episodes we've done over the last 70 years. You'll find something you like. Gold Lions Live by Donkeys. Listen to it. We have a Patreon. Check it out.

• 1:12:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, check out their Patreon and, uh, yeah, go do something happy now. Have fun.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  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. 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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