Part Two: Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself

Robert tells Joe about Eichmann's entrance to the Nazi Party and his time as a concentration camp intern during the start of the Third Reich. 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.

• 0:06Robert Evans?

  I don't know why. It's behind the bastards. We're back. This is part two. Adolf Eichmann. You know, the Ike man.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  No.

• 0:15Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  No.

• 0:17Speaker 02

  Maybe he's, uh, he's the Ike from Mike and Ices.

• 0:21Robert Evans?

  That's right.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  He's the Ugh man.

• 0:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Mike and Ices, Mike Badano and Adolf Eichmann, uh, together at last in a candy.

• 0:30Speaker 02

  Oh, no, not Mike Madano. I heard he was a nice guy.

• 0:36Robert Evans?

  Well, I know nothing about him. Um, he was the only Mike I could, uh, famous Mike I could come up with on a short order. Anyway, how you doing, Joe?

• 0:46Speaker 02

  I'm good.

• 0:47Robert Evans?

  Any big changes in life in the last like 10 minutes?

• 0:50Speaker 02

  No, uh, I got up, walked around a bit, uh, came back. Uh, turns out Adolf Eichmann still a piece of shit.

• 0:57Robert Evans?

  Yes, uh, he has not become less of one. Yeah.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Vent, vented candy while I was gone.

• 1:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, well, yes, the candy stuff is new. A lot of, a lot of researchers aren't aware of that yet because it's a lie.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  We have the forbidden knowledge.

• 1:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:14Robert Evans?

  You know, Nazism is based on the big lie, uh, which, you know, it's very funny to me. I get it more if you're German, right? Cause the German Imperial Army at the start of World War One, almost certainly the best army in the world. And really comes within a hair's breadth of pulling it off, right? Like they, they came pretty, it's not like World War Two where it's like, well, past a very certain point. This was fucked. Like they were, they were in the fight right up until the last year there, you know?

• 1:45Speaker 02

  But if you're Austrian, it's just like, ugh.

• 1:47Robert Evans?

  You were fucked from the jump. Come on, man.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  This is why they all had to become German nationalists was like, yeah, we, we tried our thing, didn't work out. Turns out we don't deserve it.

• 1:57Robert Evans?

  We immediately got pantsed by both the Russians and the Serbians because the Hungarians were just like, you think Germany's strapped to a corpse? Boy, we're gonna go limp as fuck.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  I'm gonna go hang out at this place called Assanzo for a very long time.

• 2:15Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. Let's be worse than the Italians at 20th century war.

• 2:20Robert Evans?

  It's not easy. Um, so I, anyway, it's always funny to me that like, yeah, so many Austrians got hung up on the big lie. It's like, guys, you didn't need anyone else to explain your defeat. Neither did the Germans, really, but the, there's just a little bit more to it with the Germans.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Starting a political party that's just anti Austrian while I'm also Austrian. Cause it's like, we don't deserve it. We don't deserve it.

• 2:45Robert Evans?

  It would have made more sense for them to get really pissed at the Hungarians.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true.

• 2:53Speaker 03

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• 2:57Robert Evans?

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• 3:38Robert Evans?

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• 4:04Robert Evans?

  So by mid 1932, Adolf Eichmann has joined the Nazi Party. Uh, he starts reading their newspapers before he officially becomes a member. He gets kinda involved in like the, the fanfiction Expanded Nazi Universe before he, he takes the plunge itself. Um, his favorite paper is Volkeschobeho Bakter, which is the official Nazi Party newspaper edited by Alfred Rosenberg, friend of the pod. He's not a friend of the pod. He was, I-

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Friendship with Alfred Rosenberg over.

• 4:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're not gonna have him on the show anymore. It was a mistake in the first place to bring him on. I just wanted to know his opinions on Idi Amin. They were bad. Oh, we didn't run that episode for a reason.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  This is why you lost your Spotify deal.

• 4:49Robert Evans?

  Um, yeah. Anyway, uh, Cesarene reports that he was drawn in at first by these lurid stories that were printed in Nazi papers of, of these grand street battles between the brown shirts, uh, and the SS and communists and other anti-fascists in Berlin. Right? Cause that was a major part of Nazi propaganda in kind of the early 30s is these like heroic street battles that are winning us the country. And you get the sense, and Eichmann never writes this, but you get the sense that he wants, like a lot of young men do, some play in that martial glory, right? He wants to feel like he's got a part in it, right?

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Even if he didn't before, I imagine he got that kind of beaten into his skull by the Junior Veterans Association.

• 5:33Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Like you really need to be in a fight to be a man.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:37Robert Evans?

  Now, what's interesting is he'd taken no real part in the urban combat that had existed between right and left in Austria up to this point, right? For the last five or six years, there'd been a ton of it. He had plenty of opportunities to get involved in like these kind of street fights. And he had chosen not to.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Solid choice, I must say.

• 5:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, which is, you know, shows some judgment. But he clearly is like feeling it by this point, right? Like the fact that he's spent all this time on his social life and his career instead of becoming a hero to fascists. So what finally tips him over the edge into joining? Well, the answer seems to be simple ego. The Austrian Nazi Party had been founded by a war veteran named Alfred Proch, who was close friends to a guy named Bolek, who himself was the Gauleiter or leader of the Linz Nazi Party. Bolek was friends with Eichmann's dad, which again goes to, you know, his politics, right?

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Oh my God, this keeps coming back to his dad.

• 6:35Robert Evans?

  He is such a nepo baby. He is the Nazi nepo baby of all Nazi nepo babies, right? So another family friend and colleague of his father was the father of Ernst Kaltenbruner. And if you know your Nazi war criminals, Kaltenbruner is a big one. He will go on to be an Austrian SS member who becomes director of the Reich Security Main Office, the RSS, right? Like, it's the organization that fucking Heydrich is running for a while, right? Kaltenbruner is a major member of the SS. But at this point, he's a young member of the SS, which is itself a fairly new organization, and it's just starting trying to like, spread in Austria, because Hitler's already got the Anschluss planned here, right?

• 7:18Robert Evans?

  So the younger Eichmann and Kaltenbruner had known each other for most of their lives. And when Eichmann shows up at this Nazi party meeting, Ernst embraces him and addresses him using the familiar "du" form of greeting, which is a German way of basically talking to somebody like they're a close friend or a member of the family, right? A lot of hierarchy of where you actually stood in the Nazi state had less to do sometimes with your actual rank and mortar do with like, can you call Hitler "du"? Right? Can you like, use this intimate form of greeting with the Führer? If so, or can you use this intimate form of greeting with Himmler, you know, or with Göring or whatever, right? With somebody who's part of the High Command? If so, you've got clout, right? Maybe more than someone who technically outranks you.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  And of course, after "du", you have to finish it with the formal "hast".

• 8:05Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. Yes, as Rammstein reminds us all. So, Eichmann would later-

• 8:11Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, that wasn't a good one. I'm ashamed.

• 8:14Robert Evans?

  I don't know if it's a good one either. I don't know German. I just know every book about Hitler talks about the people who are allowed to call him that, right? It was a big deal. Eichmann would later recall that he was kind of drawn in to the Nazi party and to the SS, as much by anything, by how good Kaltenbruner's uniform looks. He's like, "Damn, those SS uniforms are slick, right? I want to look like that", you know?

• 8:39Speaker 02

  He fell for the fucking dumbest thing!

• 8:41Robert Evans?

  So many, so many guys did!

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know.

• 8:45Robert Evans?

  He was impressed by the rapid growth of the Nazis, their ascendance in Germany, how well they marched, and how good their branding was. Then Kaltenbruner told him, "You, you belong to us." And Eichmann decided, yes, yes, he did. Now, at first, he was a bit of an oddity at party gatherings. Unemployment is soaring in Austria right now, and most of the far-right street fighters right are either out of work or working irregularly. Eichmann's first impression on his colleagues is that he has money, right? He can afford to buy beer and bread for everybody, and a lot of them can't, right? So that's kind of, and again, that that makes him sort of an oddity in this organization in this period, is that like, he's Mr. Moneybags to them.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  So is he a guy that gets invited to the party because he brings beer?

• 9:30Robert Evans?

  That's, that's, that's both nepotism in that he has money for beer, and one has to assume cigarettes.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Okay, we've all invited that guy to the party before.

• 9:38Robert Evans?

  Right, right, yes. In early 1933, Eichmann was laid off from his job as a result of the economic downturn. Now, this seems to have been an amicable split. He was on the chopping block because he was unmarried, and they, they fired unmarried people before people who were married and thus had families to support. And his severance was generous for the time. Now, the fact that the person who lays him off is his Jewish boss makes it tempting to be like, oh, is like that an inciting incident? But he just doesn't write about this as if he's angry. Like, his writing about it is like, yeah, you know, I knew, like, this was happening everywhere, I knew it was gonna happen eventually. I had already started looking for new options, and they gave me good severance, right? He just doesn't, doesn't really describe himself as being particularly put off by this.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  It doesn't seem to be that thing that everybody's looking for.

• 10:26Robert Evans?

  No.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  It's obvious that his, that his antisemitism is coming while he's already in the SS.

• 10:31Robert Evans?

  Right, he's, he's not quite in it yet, but he is, he's heading up towards the SS, right? He's in the Nazi party, and he clearly aspires to the SS, so he's getting more antisemitic. It's just, it's careerism, I think, that, that inspires him to get more antisemitic, rather than like, something happening outside of that, which people seem to constantly want.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's chilling with his bros who are in the SS. He's going to be antisemitic eventually, or, or lie about it.

• 11:00Robert Evans?

  Or pretend.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  To hang out with his friends and get, and get a fucking job because he just lost his.

• 11:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and honestly, to a certain point, does it matter if you're like, pretending to be antisemitic in the SS?

• 11:09Speaker 02

  No, god, no, not at all.

• 11:10Robert Evans?

  Or really antisemitic, right?

• 11:11Speaker 02

  It's just like, oh, I said that slur ironically.

• 11:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  No, you didn't.

• 11:14Robert Evans?

  No, no, man. You're literally in the SS, come on. So the party is kind of his social safety net and it's also his backup plan. When he loses his job, he goes to Kaltenbrunner and he's like, look, I need work now. Can I get some help? And Kaltenbrunner pulls some strings and gets Eichmann taken in by the SS. Now Austria bans the Nazi party not long after this. And so some of the people who had been high ranking leave and go to Germany, right? To participate because the Nazis are now in power in Germany. So these guys like leave Austria to help run the German government and run the SS in Germany. Kaltenbrunner is one of them and he takes Eichmann with him, right?

• 11:56Robert Evans?

  So Eichmann kind of flees Austria when the Nazis are banned with Kaltenbrunner and gets a job in the SS. He goes through-

• 12:03Speaker 02

  He's doing a weird Nazi birthright, yeah? We have to go back to Germany now.

• 12:07Robert Evans?

  He's doing a Nazi birthright thing. And he goes through months of military training and indoctrination and then further training on how to run and operate a concentration camp. Now, at this point, the concentration camps are not what they will be. A lot of them, at the point at which he comes over, are what you'd call wild concentration camps, which are, we've got this old school or police building, we've got a bunch of political prisoners, communists and whatnot that we're going to torture. Some of them will kill. Let's just throw them in there and have guards like fuck them up a bunch, right? Gradually, the system gets more formalized. But at this point, obviously Jews are a lot of the people being taken in. But also just a lot of like communists, a lot of political enemies, social democrats, people who are enemies of the regime are being put in camps.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  And it wasn't also, also wasn't unheard of for people to get released from the camps at this period of time either.

• 12:56Robert Evans?

  No, no, most people do. These are not death camps yet, right?

• 12:59Speaker 02

  You get like paroled.

• 13:01Robert Evans?

  Like people die at them, but they're not death camps, you know? The goal of these camps is not to kill you. The goal is primarily to scare people, right? By 1934, he was working under camp commander Theodor Eich at Dokau. This involved a transfer to the SD, which is the SS Security Service, which at the start of the Reich is a small organization, but it's powerful and feared. Now, Eichmann gets in too late to participate in the Night of Long Knives, but he benefits from the fact that the SD had been the sharpest of those knives. So it's kind of extra, people are extra scared of it and it has an extra degree of prestige because of how it performed during that period, right? Um, in the space of less than two years, he goes from being a mid-level manager at an oil

• 13:46Robert Evans?

  company on his way to unemployment to a member of the most feared security agency in the German world. His boss, like the guy, once he kind of gets moved to the SD, his direct superior is former Bastards Pod alumni Reinhard Heidrich. And Eichmann before Jerusalem Bettina Stangneth writes, "This was a big step up in the world. Eichmann felt he had established himself, a fact in his decision to marry and start a family, which within the SS was also a good career move. He married Vera Liebel, a woman from Milet in Bohemia, four years his junior. She and her two brothers, who worked for the Gestapo, would come to profit from her husband's social climbing." And this is a big part of how shit works, right? This is like a gangster regime. A lot of the

• 14:28Robert Evans?

  benefit, Eichmann doesn't have money, right? He's still not, he's not like rich-

• 14:32Speaker 02

  His connections.

• 14:33Robert Evans?

  But he can get married and convince them because he's got connections, which will help your family out, right? So like, yeah, if you, I don't have enough as much money as you might want from a suitor, but I can help my brothers-in-law get contracts and stuff, right?

• 14:47Speaker 02

  I could, I could be a Nazi job program for your shitty brothers.

• 14:50Robert Evans?

  Right, right. For your fail brothers. Yeah, that's exactly how a lot of the stuff works in this period.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. I mean, his dad has gotten him almost every job he's ever had, and now he's a Colton Brunner hanging out with him. He's set, in the worst way possible, but he's set.

• 15:05Robert Evans?

  He's a made man with a Nazism, yes.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, he went to the local trade school on concentration camps. He's everything you're looking for in a husband.

• 15:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's perfect. So, one of the things he likes most about the SD is that you don't have to wear your uniform every day, right? You can like, wear normal clothes when you're in the SD, because you're like the FBI of the Nazis.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 15:24Robert Evans?

  And you don't have to also, you don't have to do any of the pointless drills and marching that like, a lot of guys in the SS do. There's less of the paramilitarism, which is boring, right? It kind of makes life a chore.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  It totally is. The military makes everything a fucking chore. They're the only people that can make you sick of walking.

• 15:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and this is like your fake racism military, and Eichmann gets to skip the bullshit, right? And he gets to skip the bullshit in a way that makes him feel special, right? I get to skip the bullshit because I'm like, smarter and more valuable than the other guys, right? And like, his ego, he, so much of why he becomes so dedicated to the Nazis is that Nazism feeds his ego and his belief that he's special, that the world had not really tailored to earlier in his life.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  And unfortunately, it seems to like a lot of these guys, of course, it's careerism, but like he was good at it.

• 16:15Robert Evans?

  He's he is going to be unfortunately good at it. Yeah.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, unfortunately, he's very good at.

• 16:21Robert Evans?

  He's got a good brain for logistics tragically.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:24Robert Evans?

  Um, after April of 1935, SS members were officially forbidden from having personal contact with Jews. This was waived for the SD because the nature of their work meant that they were always on duty. Eichmann decided to rebrand himself as an expert on Jews and Judaism, and he starts going undercover to Jewish civil organizations and making connections to different community leaders. And he pretends to be a liberal, right? So he'll show up at Jewish gatherings. Remember, this is early in the Third Reich. These communities have not been completely disrupted or uprooted yet. And they're trying to figure out, how do we protect ourselves from this government that's getting increasingly hostile towards us? And Eichmann starts showing up and being like, hey, man, fucked up what those Nazis are doing. I'm really curious about your faith. Would you like to tell me some stuff

• 17:09Robert Evans?

  about how things work? Right?

• 17:10Speaker 02

  God.

• 17:11Robert Evans?

  Um, yeah. And he was.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  I hate that.

• 17:14Robert Evans?

  He would occasionally, he would be open about being in the SS, but a lot of Jewish community leaders would still talk to him because they were like, well, it's useful. He's a man in the SS we can reach, right? He seems like a decent enough guy. We can like convince him that we're people and maybe he'll provide us with some protection, right? We can convince him of our humanity. He goes so far as to briefly take Hebrew classes from a Jewish teacher, despite being officially forbidden on two different occasions from doing so. And this is something, it's going to be, it's exaggerated. He because he will exaggerate it. He's never a fluent speaker of Hebrew, right? He picks up a couple of phrases that he can use and whatnot. And he likes to drop them. He likes to drop Hebrew

• 17:58Robert Evans?

  phrases and like SS meetings and stuff to show everyone how knowledgeable he is about the Jews, that he's the expert, right?

• 18:06Speaker 02

  What's really funny is I think most people at the time would speak Yiddish and not Hebrew anyway.

• 18:10Robert Evans?

  Well, he also, he also picks up some Yiddish, right? He takes Hebrew classes, but he does pick, he picks up little bits of both. This is something.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Sure, sure.

• 18:18Robert Evans?

  The movie Conspiracy, he kind of, the Eichmann in that claims to have learned a lot more Hebrew than he really did. But that's also what real Eichmann did to his colleagues, because none of them are able to be like, you don't really speak Hebrew, right? Because they don't know they're Nazis, you know?

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Right. They don't know the first thing about it, because it's, and he can make himself seem like more of a

• 18:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  A strategic thinker. He's like, no, I know my enemy and such and such.

• 18:43Robert Evans?

  I know my enemy. You know, he's doing his Sun Tzu shit. Yeah.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  And you see that kind of shit all the time when people are reframing these guys and making them seem like evil geniuses and not just like, again, a Nepo idiot who was really good at logistics.

• 18:58Robert Evans?

  The genius here is not that he was so well informed about Judaism and like gained such a deep, it was that he knew, all I have to do, if I take a, if I can get like a dozen words and phrases down, and I can read passages from a couple pieces of rabbinical literature, everyone else knows so little about these people, then I will be the most knowledgeable guy about Jews in the SS, and that's probably a really good path to career advancement. No one's ever gonna call me on this shit, and I can make a place for myself in this organization, right?

• 19:29Speaker 02

  He's literally the world of the blind, the man with one eye is king, but he has one eye for Hebrew.

• 19:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right. Stangnath's book goes on to describe the extent of his studies. Later Eichmann would speak of a course of study that took three years. He didn't mention that his superiors occasionally had to reprimand him for disorganization and tardiness. It would be easy to mistake his lifestyle for that of a scientifically inclined estete with some crude political views. Except that between coffeehouse chats, memos, lectures, and evening conferences with his colleagues, he was meticulously keeping denunciation files and writing anti-Semitic propaganda, making arrests, and carrying out joint interrogations with the Gestapo.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 20:06Robert Evans?

  Now, there were occasional rumors within the SS, because of the way he talks, because of what he's doing, that Eichmann is either sympathetic towards Jews, and there even, there's, there's a long series of myths that he has Jewish ancestry, that he's like born Jewish, that he's born in a Jewish part of the world, right? Like, there are myths about that within the SS, but that also gets overstated like he dealt with a little bit of shit probably but the overwhelming reaction of his colleagues seemed to have been respect for his knowledge by 1936 Adolf Eichmann was widely considered the SD's chief expert on Judaism his mentor in the SD Adler von Mildenstein had become fascinated with Zionism and started to consider if immigration

• 20:49Robert Evans?

  to Palestine was a possible solution to Germany's Jewish question right could we ship all these people to Palestine right and have that let us get rid of them

• 20:58Speaker 02

  right reminds me of the Madagascar plan as well

• 21:01Robert Evans?

  we're about to talk about that yeah yeah yeah um so Eichmann you know he's he's one of these guys where there's a lot of unscientific thinking and a lot of just like propaganda around the Jews that is is just made out of fantasies because they're just at a certain point when they're rising to power just throwing out as many lies as possible to scare people but Reinhard Heidrich in the SD is like no no no we need a scientific approach to race and we need to have a real understanding of what's going on here and as a result Heidrich is going to kind of pick out Eichmann and be like this this guy is someone we need to uh like bring further into the fold

• 21:41Robert Evans?

  per an article on BBC's website titled Adolf Eichmann the mind of a war criminal quote while rabble rousers like Joseph Goebbels railed against the Jews and called forever harsher but directionless measures against them the SD quietly promoted Jewish immigration to this end Eichmann contacted Zionist in boys and may even made a visit to Palestine in 1937 now again Eichmann is going to make a lot of tea out of the fact that he's been to Palestine this is a total nothing burger Eichmann makes it to the border of the British mandate in Palestine and the British authorities are like are you literally Adolf Eichmann get the fuck out of here what do you think you're doing we know who you are get out of here like get your SS

• 22:26Robert Evans?

  out of fucking here yeah

• 22:28Speaker 02

  this is classic Heidrich as well it's like he takes all these street thugs and is like okay I like the energy but we need to professionalize it to make it palatable for everybody

• 22:39Robert Evans?

  right

• 22:40Speaker 02

  we can't we can't all just be street clubbing racists we have to be gentlemen racist in our really stupid Hugo Boss uniforms

• 22:49Robert Evans?

  all right who who here's read a book just Eichmann okay you're my expert

• 22:54Robert Evans?

  And for the rest of his career, Eichmann would constantly talk about like, you know, I've been to Palestine. I've seen what the Jews are like in their natural environment, right? Like, that's the way he phrases it. And it's like, again, you like, got to the border.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  You're making the Nazi Richard Attenborough.

• 23:07Robert Evans?

  Right, right. That's what he's trying to be. And again, he has, he does nothing over there, right? The British will not let this fucker in. This is where we start to see his brilliance for branding, right? If he was coming up today, he might have been an ad man, right? Because he's gonna, he's going to use this very effectively, even his failures to kind of blend into this myth he's creating for himself, about himself. His specific recommendation to the SD after he finishes talking to, you know, this trip, and he also has a lot of interviews with a bunch of different Zionists in Europe, and he makes an official recommendation that the SD should not promote the creation of a Jewish state. Per that BBC article, "Instead, it should encourage Jewish immigration to

• 23:49Robert Evans?

  backward countries where they would live in poverty." And his assumption is that like, well, if we send a bunch of them over to Palestine, and they like, when the British leave, they make like, a state, you know, with the Palestinians, that state might do well. And then there will be like, a place where Jewish people are comfortable. We can only send them to places that are like, completely fucked, right? That's his attitude.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's why the first thing they came up with was called the Ohio Plan.

• 24:16Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. Yes. So, immediately after this, he's promoted and sent to Vienna. Austria had just been annexed by Germany, and as the SD's Judaism expert, Eichmann was put in charge of an operation to convince Austria's Jews to immigrate. Here, he applied his experience from the corporate world, cutting through red tape and ordering all the different agencies who had a hand in the immigration process to combine and operate out of a single physical space to speed things up. He also does, and obviously that works, that's generally better, especially in this time where you don't have the internet, if people are just like, have to go down a floor to like, get this paperwork stamped by another organization before this family can leave.

• 24:58Robert Evans?

  He also does his normal thing of, and this is, this is a big part of his logistical work in this very early stage of the Holocaust. He is directly interfacing with rabbis and other representatives of the Jewish community in the different places he's working, in this case Vienna, right? Where he will sit down and say, look, there's all these different groups, you know, you've got Orthodox folks, you've got folks who are like these different kind of communities within Vienna. You all need to form a single organization to represent you and elect representatives so that I can negotiate with a representative on behalf of all of you in order to execute the plans that we're going to be executing, to try to push you guys out, right? I want a single umbrella organization.

• 25:39Robert Evans?

  And that organization, we will let raise money from rich Jews to fund the immigration of poor Jews out of Austria, right? This is what he's doing in this period of time.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  I need you guys to form a government that represents you so I can get rid of you.

• 25:53Robert Evans?

  So I can get rid of you, right? We need you to centralize, because I don't want to talk to fucking 40 different people to like actually like, like work this together, right? And despite his antipathy towards Zionism, he starts allowing Zionist organizations to operate in Austria because he's primarily being judged on what are the number? It's like, you know, with ICE right now, it's just how many, what can we get, how many numbers can we get on the board? Is the easiest thing to go after like law-abiding people who are showing up in court the way they're supposed to and just arrest them? That's easier, pumps our numbers up. What Eichmann's doing is like, look, these Zionist organizations, I just told everyone I think it's a bad idea, but they're, they're getting people out, they've got money, and all I'm being judged by is how fast Jews are leaving Austria, right?

• 26:36Robert Evans?

  That's all that matters to me right now, you know? Right now, that's all that matters to him. In Germany, Eichmann had used charm to try and convince Jewish leaders to meet with him. If that didn't work, he'd hold up the SD's bloody reputation as a threat. In Austria, armed with potent new legal authority, he simply subpoenaed every Jewish community leader he wanted to meet. Bettina Stangnath writes, "Eichmann flaunted his black SS uniform, his riding crop, and his knowledge of Judaism and Zionism." Adolf Bohm, who had just completed the second volume of The History of the Zionism. Zionist movement learned that Eichmann was one of his most avid readers who knew whole pages of the first volume from memory. Bohm realized that the SS was going to use the knowledge he had painstakingly gathered

• 27:17Robert Evans?

  as its access point to the world of Jewish organizations and as a weapon against the Jews. Eichmann then explained what he expected from the third volume, a lengthy chapter about himself, Adolf Eichmann as a pioneer of Zionism. The fact that Adolf Bohm couldn't bear the thought and never wrote another word tells us all we need to know without even thinking about what happened next. This guy, this scholar's like, wait, who's reading my, oh no.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Imagine doing the convention circuit and, and he comes up to your desk like, I retire forever. I'm not, I'm not, I'm done.

• 27:49Robert Evans?

  I fucked up. I fucked up.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  I think I need to be a cobbler.

• 27:53Robert Evans?

  If Eichmann's my biggest fan, I made a mistake. I'm sorry. This was, I was not doing the right thing.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  You have chosen poorly in life.

• 28:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I see that now.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  You need to find a new venture.

• 28:05Robert Evans?

  Like, I think we could all agree, if Adolf Eichmann is your book's biggest fan, get rid of that book. Get rid of that book.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  It would be like if Nick Fuentes came to one of my live shows, like, show's over.

• 28:16Robert Evans?

  I love your shit.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Podcast is over.

• 28:18Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, we're hitting the wrong demo.

• 28:22Robert Evans?

  So the guilt and shame from this caused Bohm to have a nervous breakdown for which he was institutionalized. As you may be aware, the Nazis first started experimenting with Zyklon B and with gassing in general, they weren't using Zyklon B yet, as part of the T4 euthanasia program, which can be accurately summarized as murdering disabled people. Adolf Bohm was gassed at the Hartheim euthanasia center on April 4th, 1941. His wife was gassed at Auschwitz in 1944. Both of their children escaped to the West, right? The guy that writes this book.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Christ.

• 28:53Robert Evans?

  Now, I've gotten ahead of myself a little bit here. I just, it's bleak stuff. Speaking of bleak stuff. Ads.

• 29:05Robert Evans?

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• 30:04Robert Evans?

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• 30:14Speaker 05

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• 30:59Speaker 05

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• 31:15Robert Evans?

  We're back. So where we are in the story now, the Angelus has just happened. Austria is Germany now. Eichmann is currently in Vienna, tasked with getting as many Jews to leave the country as possible. Cesarelli writes, quote, "He established an assembly line system whereby a Jew could end up at the Central Immigration Office with his papers and proceed from desk to desk until he arrived at the end with a passport and an exit visa, but stripped of his property, cash, and rights. Within a few months, the office had emigrated 150,000 Jews." Now, this is seen as a massive success, not just by his boss Heidrich and the SD, but across the whole Nazi party. He was promoted again, and after the annexation of Czechoslovakia, was ordered to repeat his performance in Prague. He does this well,

• 31:58Robert Evans?

  and he winds up in late 1939, attached to a major Gestapo office in Berlin and tasked with managing the immigration of Jews from the entire Reich.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  He's got great Nazi sabermetrics.

• 32:10Robert Evans?

  He really does, right? Like, that is, he's a logistics guy, right? Like, that's his whole involvement in Zionism is all like, well, these people have like a, already have a path to getting folks out. Even though I may not, I personally, like, have already expressed why I don't think that's a great idea. All that I care about is my career, and this will, this puts numbers on the board for me, right? That's fundamentally who he is. Now, by this point, by the point, time after Prague, when he's in Berlin and he's in charge of immigration out of the Reich of all of the Jews in the Greater German Reich, he has fully become the man who will ultimately organize the mass murder of about 6 million Jews, right? And Eichmann loves being this guy.

• 32:51Robert Evans?

  There is nothing banal about it. He luxuriates in the power and prestige of his position, and he describes himself as a member of the ideological elite in the SS. One Jewish witness who met him at one of these meetings described, "And then Eichmann entered, like a young god. He was very good-looking at that time. Tall, black, shining."

• 33:13Robert Evans?

  In Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Stangneth continues, "His behavior too was godlike. He was master of arresting and then releasing people, of banning institutions and then allowing them to resume. He initiated and censored a Jewish newspaper and eventually even got to decide who could access the Jewish community's bank accounts." And he loves this, right? This power, this "I can make your organization legal or illegal with a snap of my hands. I have control over your community's bank assets, right? And I get to use that to make you do whatever I want, right? I have gone from being this middle manager to being this guy with like, I am in charge of the Jewish people in the Reich, right?" That's his position here.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  He seems to be basking in the globe because the banning and unbanning thing to me is more of a clue than the bank account thing because he's controlling people that can come together. He's like, "Never mind you're banned. Never mind you can come together. I can just do this all day."

• 34:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. This is totally within my power. By the end of the 1930s, he is famous across Central Europe, not just within the small world of the SD, but among the entire remaining Jewish population in Central Europe. And Eichmann makes damn sure everyone knows he's the shot caller, even when he isn't. He bragged that the Zionist Review, a German Jewish newspaper, was "my newspaper" because of how extensively he'd exercised control over its contents.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  That's Nazi stolen valor.

• 34:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jews across the Reich wrote about him to each other and in letters to relatives and colleagues on the outside. So this is the point at which people start talking about Eichmann in newspapers and whatnot outside of Germany. And in fact, he is the first guy directly associated with like, implementation of anti-Jewish policies in Germany who gets discussed widely outside of Europe, right?

• 35:10Speaker 02

  And somehow he's the guy that becomes the portrait of banality.

• 35:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and he's really not.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  A Nazi rock star.

• 35:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. He's like a rock star of racism, right? There's nothing banal about it. Holocaust scholar Tom Seggev pointed out that while Eichmann was not very high ranking on paper, he is not a top member of the SS, he answers to Reinhard Heidrich, right? And that's not his only superior, there's other people who are his bosses on paper, but he's answering to Heidrich, who is very high up in the Nazi hierarchy and favored by Hitler. And Eichmann is the highest ranking member of the SS to sit directly with Jews and talk to Jewish community leaders, right? And as a result, this is Seggev writing, "The Jews looked upon him and Hitler as the two Adolf's who perpetuated the Holocaust."

• 36:02Robert Evans?

  So part of this is, he's really burnishing his image, and part of it is, you know, every Jewish survivor obviously hates Hitler, but also they hate Eichmann because a lot of them were face to face with him. They saw him interacting with their... He's the guy!

• 36:14Speaker 02

  He's literally the face of their deportation misery.

• 36:18Robert Evans?

  Right, right, exactly. "This is very helpful to his career in the immediate term. It ensured he was taken seriously and that local Jewish leaders who still believed there could be some sort of compromise with the Nazi state would bend over backwards to do what he said. This makes it easy for him to hit his quotas, which ensures his continued prestige and the rise in his career prospects. By the immediate pre-war period, he'd been invited to meetings with Hermann Göring and was known personally by guys like Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler. More than rank, personal connection to famous figures in German leadership are what ensured one's position in the Reich." And once, once you see Eichmann with the literal Reichsmarshall, Hermann Göring, right? The guy who's supposed to take over if Hitler dies, right? He starts getting invited to

• 37:03Robert Evans?

  things, right? Because you're like, well, fuck, this guy's, this guy's in, right? We'd better, if I want to be in, I'd better make sure he's at my parties. And so he starts getting invited to these high-end social functions. In 1938, at age 32, he's invited to a film industry ball in Vienna. He takes parts in parades in annex Czechoslovakia. And when he has ideas for experiments, like creating forced labor camps for Jews in Austria, he's allowed to divert funds and manpower to attempt them. Now, oh, he's again, he's, he's loving this, right? Both the flex of power and the respect that he's giving. He's never the only mind behind implementation, right? Or execution. There's other guys in the SD who are interested in Austin, in labor camps for their Jewish prisoners.

• 37:48Robert Evans?

  But Eichmann is like the guy who's helping to pitch this. And he's also making sure his face is out in front of it because he thinks it's a good idea. He is better than any of his comrades at PR. And he starts giving himself nicknames and his favorite nickname is the czar of the Jews.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. We, we love a guy who nicknames himself and the nicknames are always terrible.

• 38:10Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm. Awful. But it shows you how he views himself, right? And what is satisfying.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:17Robert Evans?

  He's not satisfied at this point that he's eliminating these people. He's satisfied primarily that they have to bow to him. Right? That's his first high here, right?

• 38:25Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, he, he probably enjoys that. And the fact that people know that he's doing it more than the fact that he's doing it. Right. Because again, we haven't talked about any of his like hardcore antisemitic writings or ideological turn. Like this is all careerism and self-promotion for him. He would do this if they weren't Jewish, he would do this to some other group.

• 38:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and he is writing very antisemitic papers here. But I do think, I think that the benefits to him personally for going down this road are more a motivation. Although he does, he also makes himself increasingly antisemitic as he's doing this too. Right? He is getting more and more racist and more and more hateful.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I could also see this as kind of like fitting the part because before he got all these connections, people were spreading rumors about him having Jewish family members because he was, you know, having, let's say FaceTime with Jewish community leaders. So now he's like, no, I'm going to do both. And now nobody is going to be confused about this. And this is not like, of course, a good thing. That the fact that he's willing to do this for bald-faced careerism is not a better or worse thing.

• 39:33Robert Evans?

  No, it's not only by the time we get to the Holocaust, there is more than bald-faced careerism in it. But I think that's his, I think that's what. A lot of this is right now, right? He takes a lot of joy whenever he hears his nicknames repeated in the wild by other people because it proves that they're spreading. And he sees his names start to be in constant use in Western newspapers around the world, particularly like socialist inclined papers, which are some of the earliest ones to report on early stages of the Holocaust.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  He must have loved that so much.

• 40:02Robert Evans?

  Oh, he fucking loves it. He makes a big show about being angry at the Jewish press for calling him names, but he has his staff members comb dozens of newspapers from different countries, looking for mentions of him and like clipping them out. And he keeps them in like, he has these little keepsake books for his news coverage.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  God, just rapidly coming up with new nicknames like he's Chris fucking Jericho.

• 40:25Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right. And these two, like these nicknames and all of these the news clippings about him, he uses them as weapons during his endless meetings with Jewish community groups. Ben O'Conne, a representative for the Jewish community in Berlin, recalled one such meeting years later. "It began with a forceful attack by Eichmann on the representatives of the German Jews. He had a folder of press cuttings in front of him, foreign of course, in which Eichmann was portrayed as a bloodhound who wanted to kill the Jews. He read us excerpts from the Periser Tagblat and asked if this was correct and said the information had to come from our circles. Who spoke to Landau from the ITA? It must have been one of you." And it's interesting to me that he's like, he's taking these both to yell at them for

• 41:09Robert Evans?

  like, who's talking to these different newspapers? Who, how could they possibly know? And also to like, show them, look at how they're talking about me, right?

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, isn't this cool?

• 41:16Robert Evans?

  You need to take me seriously, right?

• 41:18Speaker 02

  You guys aren't gonna blink at me when I hit you with the Teen Vogue clipping.

• 41:21Robert Evans?

  Right. And bloodhound is a common title that members of the SS get in this if they're very aggressive at pursuing Jews. And Eichmann, despite what he says in this meeting, is proud to be called a bloodhound, right? In Hungary in 1944, he would introduce himself in meetings by saying, "Do you know who I am? I am a bloodhound," right? Like, that's what he's, that's how he's talking about himself.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  It's the Christoph Waltz character.

• 41:46Robert Evans?

  Yes, he very much is.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Do you know what they call me?

• 41:47Robert Evans?

  Right, yes.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:50Robert Evans?

  Um, now Eichmann was by far the best known of his comrades and the fact that he really was deeply complicit shouldn't obscure the reality that he also exaggerated his involvement and responsibility for clout. He was not the only guy with nicknames like this. Once the Nazis invaded Poland with the USSR, Amon Goethe became the head of a concentration camp in Krakow and earned the nickname Emperor of Krakow. This put him right up there with Joseph Weitzel, one of Eichmann's top employees and commandant of a camp in Doppel, which earned him the nickname The Jews Emperor of Doppel. Right?

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Christ.

• 42:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  If memory serves you right, isn't Amon Goethe the camp commander that was so corrupt that Nazis fired him?

• 42:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I believe he was the one that got shit canned for being so fucking like, yes. Oh, man. Um, so we don't really know, like, how often these nicknames are, you know, things that he came up with himself. How many of them are things that, like, people in Europe came up to describe him because of how major he is? But he was, a lot of the time, he created his own nickname, right? During, like, well, he's in Argentina and hanging out with other escaped Nazi friends, he would brag to them that he had been nicknamed The Jews Pope. And there's no evidence of this, that anyone ever called, this is a nickname he made up for himself? Like, no one would have called you that, Adolf Eichmann.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  Do you hear what they call me in Vienna? They call me Thunderbird.

• 43:16Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Isn't that cool?

• 43:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He also told friends, "The men in my command had the kind of respect for me that prompted the Jews to effectively set me on a throne," right? This is very important to him, that, like, he be seen as having been worshipped by these people who are under his thumb, right? That's a massive deal for Adolf Eichmann. Now, he's often depicted as a fanatic, driven by hatred, but in deep reading, I see ego as at least as much a driver of his actions. He certainly hated, and his bigotry only increased alongside his power, but I read a hunger for power and respect that drowned out other motivations a lot of the time. Eichmann did not rise through the Nazi hierarchy because he was a fanatic. He became a fanatic because Nazism offered him an opportunity to be a great man, one which no other system would have afforded him.

• 44:02Robert Evans?

  Now, the conquest of half of Poland presents a problem for Eichmann. Prior to the Nazis invading, Jews had made up about 1% of the population of the Reich, which is about half a million people out of a population of 67 million. Significant numbers of these folks had immigrated, and in general, the Austrian and Czech Jewish populations were also comparatively small, right? Which had made it easy for Eichmann to put up good numbers using the tactics we've discussed. Almost 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland prior to World War II. This meant overnight, the task on Eichmann's lap increased by an order of magnitude, per a BBC article titled "Eichmann: Mind of a War Criminal." Eichmann explored a fresh option, deporting Jews to a designated Jewish territory.

• 44:44Robert Evans?

  He traveled to Poland to identify an appropriate location and then ordered that thousands of Czech and Viennese Jews be rounded up and sent eastward to lay the basis for this territorial solution. Within a few months, however, the plan was scrapped. Eichmann's office lacked the resources for it, and other SS projects had preference. At the same time, he was brutally evicting hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews to make way for ethnic Germans transplanted from Eastern Europe into the newly annexed areas of the Reich. As a temporary measure, the displaced Jews were packed into ghettos, but where would they go eventually? After the fall of France, Eichmann took up a plan emanating from the German Foreign Office to ship 4 million European Jews to Madagascar. And he's not the author of the Madagascar Plan, but he is, for a while, kind of its most prominent, like, adherent, right?

• 45:29Robert Evans?

  Which is this idea that, like, we gotta get these people out of Europe, and maybe if they live in Madagascar, that'll be fine, right? It'll be safer for...

• 45:38Speaker 02

  This is why those movies were dangerous. They give people ideas.

• 45:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, you think different things about Madagascar, including the fact that there's already plenty of people there.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  A lot of people, yeah, famously.

• 45:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, this is also the Madagascar Plan, because this doesn't really happen, it never gets close to happening, but it's evidence that the Holocaust was not necessarily a given from the jump. As we'll talk about, you can find quotes from Hitler and other top Nazis going back to the 20s that can be seen as preludes to the Holocaust, but it wasn't a settled plan until the early 40s.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there's something of a unfair amount of weight that gets put on the Madagascar plan. Like, no, obviously, of course, Holocaust deniers, like, the ones that acknowledged the camps existed, but the people died from, like, disease or whatever is the track that they take. Like, there is these detailed plans in place to send all these people to Madagascar, rather than it was drawings on a drunk person's napkin.

• 46:35Robert Evans?

  They talked about a lot of shit, right, that they didn't come close to doing, right?

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 46:41Robert Evans?

  And Eichmann, you know, the reason he gets involved is not that he is a major believer in this, it's that any new idea that comes through his office, he tries to stick himself to because, like, you know, if it fails, he's not the guy who instituted it, but if it succeeds, his name's attached to it, right?

• 46:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, it's good for him either way. He doesn't lose anything, he only has things to gain.

• 47:02Robert Evans?

  Right. In 1939, after the invasion of Poland, Eichmann briefly championed a plan to remove Jewish people from newly conquered and absorbed territory to a reservation guarded by the Nazis near Lublin. Thousands of people were forcibly transferred to what became a ghetto before the plan was abandoned in the spring of 1940. And this is, they were very much looking at what the US government had done to Native Americans, and we're like, well, maybe we can do something like that with the Jews, right? Maybe we like, we find a chunk of land that's like our Oklahoma that we don't really want, and we put them all there, and we just kind of like, keep them locked there, right? That's the, that's the basic idea. And it's evidence of, you know, again, how much of all of this is based

• 47:44Robert Evans?

  off of them looking at the United States and being like, well, shit, this seems to be working for them, right?

• 47:50Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:51Robert Evans?

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• 47:56Speaker 01

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• 47:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 47:58Speaker 02

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• 48:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's right. Oklahoma, the Lublin of America. Yes. Sorry to both Lublin and to Oklahoma.

• 48:12Robert Evans?

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• 48:36Speaker 04

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• 49:11Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit dovato.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 49:20Speaker 05

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• 50:22Robert Evans?

  So, as the Second World War gets a-moving and Germany blazes through France and then starts tearing through big old chunks of Western Russia, the fevered egos of men like Eichmann, who now feel like masters of the universe, gave way to ever more sweeping eliminationist concepts. In September of 1941, Eichmann lobbied successfully to extend the definition of "a Jew" to include "half-Jews," right? He had loud conflicts with those among the party who argued that people with just one Jewish grandparent shouldn't count, or that Jews who converted to Christianity weren't Jewish. And Eichmann is on the "no, no, no, it's all about the blood. Any drop of it is somebody we gotta get rid of," right?

• 51:01Speaker 02

  Once again, taking it from the United States and the one-drop.

• 51:05Robert Evans?

  The one-drop rule, right. Now, he moves from city to city orchestrating the expulsion of one local Jewish population after the other. From Szezecin and Pozin, he forces tens of thousands of people into ghettos far from home. The horror of forced resettlement earns him even more media attention, and Eichmann uses it in meetings with Jewish leaders in other cities to say, "Hey, if you don't make sure your people leave when I tell them to leave, and we meet our immigration quotas, I can do to you what I did in Pozin," right? You read the news, right? "That was all me, baby, right? You gotta do what I, you know, you don't want that here."

• 51:38Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:39Robert Evans?

  By this point in '41, the international press is increasingly reporting on the violence and mass killing that had often followed such resettlement campaigns. Eichmann's not always involved in these mass killings and in these resettlement-- he's not doing all the resettlement. He's not the only guy doing this, right? There are a lot of war crimes being committed in '41, and he's not central to most of them. He's not running the Einsatzgruppen, right, on the eastern front, right?

• 52:03Speaker 02

  He's just the one that seems to be really comfortable putting his face on it.

• 52:06Robert Evans?

  Exactly. And so, he gets credit for a lot of massacres in the foreign media that he was not involved with. And sometimes, this was done out of pure habit, right, where they would be like, "Oh, and Eichmann must have ordered this, because he's the guy everyone knows is doing stuff like this."

• 52:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:21Robert Evans?

  And at the time, Eichmann is proud to take the credit, right? He's like, "Yeah, absolutely. I'll take the blame for that, sure."

• 52:27Speaker 02

  Stolen valor, once again.

• 52:30Robert Evans?

  He's stealing valor from even worse Nazis, although, yeah, maybe that, I don't know.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  He's stealing valor from Nazis so he can get a discount at Nazi Chili's.

• 52:38Robert Evans?

  Right, yes. He's putting fake Nazi medals on his new uniform.

• 52:43Robert Evans?

  Now, he is so proud of his reputation that when Heinrich Himmler announced an exhibition celebrating the mass resettlement campaign titled "The Great Homecoming," which was essentially meant to be a big PR announcement for the opening of the Holocaust, Himmler plans it with the goal of burnishing his own image, right? Himmler's plan is like, "I want to be seen as the guy who was responsible for this." But Eichmann's like, "Hey, boss, I should get like, like a room in this big thing for like the stuff I've been doing, right? Like, you know, I did good, didn't I? Shouldn't I get like a whole room that's just about what Eichmann did to help with this resettlement campaign?" And Himmler eventually agrees that he'll get a special hall in the exhibit to sell, to share his achievement to the masses. Stangneth writes, "The main welfare office for ethnic Germans objected, preferring to

• 53:28Robert Evans?

  leave this section out for fear of a negative public reaction. Pictures of happy new settlers were one thing. Numbers and images of people who had been expelled were another. But Eichmann's pressure was for nothing. The exhibition was postponed until June 1941, and having viewed it, Himmler canceled it at the last minute, putting off the experts who had provided the content until March 1942. The exhibition never took place, in part because the success that was hoped for was never achieved."

• 53:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, he didn't learn his lesson from Heidrich. Like, you don't show people this shit that you're doing.

• 54:00Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, Eichmann's all in, "Yeah, I want my name in a whole room." And Himmler like sees the plans for this bragging about the early Holocaust party and is like, "I don't know, man, I don't think I want that shit out. I don't think, why, I want my name attached to this, actually."

• 54:14Speaker 02

  You made, you made Himmler uncomfortable.

• 54:18Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Yeah, the only other thing that did that was literal Auschwitz.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 54:24Robert Evans?

  So, the other reason this gets canceled is that by March of 1942, the Wehrmacht has gone through its first winter on the Eastern Front, and it's become obvious to any intelligent Nazis that this is not going to be a quick or easy war, right? Now, I don't think they're all aware that defeat is a foregone conclusion, although they probably should have, but a fear starts to set in that both aligns the desire to brag about what's being done and introduces a growing sense of desperation to solve the Jewish questions sooner than later. In early 1941, Himmler had given orders to deport all remaining Berlin and Viennese Jews at the end of the war, which was expected imminently. By October, it was clear that this would not be the case, and the growing desperation of the Eastern Front acted as

• 55:09Robert Evans?

  a justification for more extreme acts of violence as revenge. A new deportation campaign was executed in Berlin by the SD. A Swedish newspaper at the time described, "The campaign began on the night of October 17th. People were pulled from their beds by the SS in order to get dressed and pack a suitcase. Then they were immediately taken away, their apartment sealed and everything in them confiscated. Those who had been arrested were taken to railroad freight depots and ruined synagogues and transported east on October 19th. They were all old men between 50 and 80, women and children. They will be used for useful work in the east, which means drying out the Rakitno marshes. The work will be done during the Russian winter by old men, women and children, and the clothes in which they

• 55:50Robert Evans?

  were arrested. There can now be no doubt that this campaign is premeditated mass murder. The campaign leader is SS Gruppenführer Eichmann."

• 55:58Speaker 02

  Eesh.

• 56:00Robert Evans?

  And we see in this, from the Swedish paper, a great example of the half-accurate reporting, right? The broad strokes of the deportation are correct. Eichmann is involved in it, but he's not running it. He's not the campaign leader of the program, and he's also not a Gruppenführer, right? That rank roughly equivalents to lieutenant general, and he never reaches that high. Um, yeah. So Stengert suspects that he gets given this rank by the press because they can't imagine someone they've heard about so much is anything but like a central spoke to the Nazi party, right? Like, he's gotta be-

• 56:33Speaker 02

  Rather than some well-connected hanger-on.

• 56:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and I think his, I think his actual rank is close to like a major or captain, but they're like, "That's just not high enough. We gotta, we gotta bump it up," right? Otherwise, he's not gonna seem as central as we've decided he is.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  I think it also owes to a lot of modern misunderstandings of how the Nazi government and the infrastructure worked, where everyone likes to say that, or believe rather, that it all functioned a certain kind of way because, you know, Germans are just very efficient and, you know, it was a militarist culture, so it had to be run this way, blah, blah, blah. No, it was just a bunch of weird, connected barnacles. Ranks were involved, but they're mostly just window dressing for people wearing incredibly overdone uniforms.

• 57:18Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  But it really didn't matter.

• 57:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. What matters most is your connection, like who you know, right?

• 57:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, which is, you know, the case with, with all authoritarian organizations like this.

• 57:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:32Robert Evans?

  Now, alongside the German invasion of Russia, the Einsetzgruppen had started carrying out the first mass killings of Jews of what would come to be known as the Holocaust. Eichmann has nothing to do with organizing this part of it, but it becomes rapidly clear that just shooting millions of people is not practical, right? There's a number, first off, bullets are gonna be a problem for Germany, right? Like, they don't have enough of anything, let alone bullets. Second problem, this kind of destroys your elite troops, which is what they're using. Like, they're using guys who were like, would be usable as fighters, and shooting babies all day, even for guys who suck as much as the Einsetzgruppen does, it just kind of ruins human beings, right? Like, they're not able to handle it for long.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, they all start killing each other drinking.

• 58:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, drinking is a major problem, and so they start experimenting with other ways. And one place they start experimenting is with the use of gas fans at a place called Helms. And in that summer of like 1942, Eichmann travels to the east to, or of 1941, sorry, in the summer of 41, Eichmann travels to the east to observe the process, these first gas fans in use. He spends that summer and the later part of the year in what becomes a fact-finding mission for the Montse Conference in early 1942, which is the meeting where the Nazis are gonna lay out their plan for the final solution. So Heidrich basically has him being like, "Hey, the east is our laboratory for killing Jews. I want you to talk to the folks doing the shooting, go see some of these gas fans and how they work,

• 59:01Robert Evans?

  and come back to us with information on the best way to kill a lot of people at scale." Because- We're going to start next year ramping up the actual extermination of all of these, these Jews that we've gotten a hold of in the parts of Europe we've conquered.

• 59:15Speaker 02

  He puts them in charge of the Holocaust soft launch.

• 59:18Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Yeah. And he's, he's, he's largely, he's like fact finding, right? So that we can, we need to know how quickly can you gas people? How much does it take? What are the best kinds of gas? What do we need to know to start constructing these camps, right? Eichmann is going to be a big part of getting that information, right? And again, you see both, he's not what he claims. He's not leading this. Eichmann didn't make the call to do a Holocaust, but he's the guy who's respected intellectually as an expert. And when it becomes clear, we're going to do a Holocaust, they go to him and are like, hey Adolf, we got a job for you.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  We got a guy for that.

• 59:50Robert Evans?

  Need you to gather some info. You're, you're good at that, right? You're good at gathering information. Come help us with this.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  Everybody's sitting around the office. We need to build how many camps with this stuff? I got a guy for that. Get me my camp guy.

• 1:00:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Give me my camp guy. Bring, bring an old Ike. Yeah.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  We, we sent him to concentration camp night school. He should know how to do this.

• 1:00:10Robert Evans?

  He's probably good at this by now. And yeah, we'll, we'll talk about that and more in part three. Joe, how you feeling?

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  Just wonderful, Robert. Absolutely wonderful. I, I set myself up for failure for this one because I came to this like, last time I was on here, we talked about Leverentie area for four hours. What could you do that's worse than that? And you've showed me, you've showed me real good.

• 1:00:36Robert Evans?

  Yep. Yep.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  I've been hoisted by my own petard.

• 1:00:39Robert Evans?

  We all love our petards. Um, are we allowed to say petard anymore? I don't know.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  You can't say the hard P.

• 1:00:47Robert Evans?

  You can't say the hard P.

• 1:00:50Robert Evans?

  It just sounds wrong.

• 1:00:56Robert Evans?

  Great. All right, everybody. This has been Behind the Bastards, a podcast.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Joe, you have anything you want to plug?

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I am the host of the Lines of my Donkeys podcast. Uh, we talk about history, military history, genocide, you know, fun, lighthearted stuff like that. If you want to hear more about the Eastern Front in winter, we talked about the Battle of Stalingrad for, I believe, five hours. So you can go listen to that series and we do all sorts of stuff like that.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  Fantastic.

• 1:01:26Robert Evans?

  Excellent. All right. Well, everybody.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 1:01:37Speaker 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/AtBehindTheBastards.

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