Part Three: Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself

In Part 3, the Reich has invaded Russia and Eichmann is on a fact finding mission that will determine the course of the Holocaust. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. We are talking about Adolf Eichmann this week and last week. Last week, we got through his childhood and his early rise through the SD, which is the SS's Security Division, to become the, in his words, czar of the Jews for Nazi Germany. And today, with our guest, Joe Kasabian, we're talking about what happens to Eichmann as the war moves towards its final phase. How you doing, Joe? You excited to hear about this guy? You think he's gonna finally break good in this last two parts?

• 0:44Speaker 01

  I gotta say, I'm not super optimistic that he's gonna have a redemption arc. I dressed up for this episode because I was surprised last time. So now I'm just wearing a shirt that says "All Pain."

• 0:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I'm treating this like people were treating like the second half of Andor, where they were hoping their favorite like monster Imperial characters were like, oh, this guy's gonna totally turn out good at the end, right? Yeah, this is our moment like that for Eichmann.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, most Nazis are not in fact the one from The Pianist.

• 1:17Robert Evans?

  No, no.

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• 3:01Robert Evans?

  Where we left off in part two, he had gone on a fact-finding mission to Eastern Europe in the fairly early stages of Operation Barbarossa, where the first parts of what we now know as the actual killing stage of the Holocaust began, which was a mix of, you know, gas vans showing up outside of various villages and Einsatzgruppen units just doing mass shootings. Well, Eichmann's watching all that, and he's taking notes, and he's figuring out, how do you actually kill a lot of, like, a shitload of people? Like, like, more people, like, as many, more people than would have died in a war a generation or two ago. We've got to, like, figure out how to get rid of, while we're fighting a war, how do we do that, right? And all of this is preparation for a big old meeting they're going to have called the Von Say Conference in early 1942.

• 3:46Robert Evans?

  So that's where we are right now. And yeah, that's, that's what we're, we're hurtling towards at the moment. And the, the problem the Nazis are dealing with as the war in the East starts to turn against them is they've got a logistical hurdle on their hands. They have captured way more Jews than they know how to handle, and they have no real process for dealing with them. If you think back to the numbers, we were talking- Talking about in the first parts of this series, they're dealing with a couple of hundred thousand people at a time as you know, they take over Austria, as they take over, you know, Czechoslovakia and then, you know, more when they take over Poland. But now that they've captured this huge chunk of what had been the Soviet Union,

• 4:25Robert Evans?

  they got millions of people on their hands, right? And these earlier decisions they'd had to make about what should we do? Do we deport these people? Do we find a place for them? The decision quickly moves towards like, all we can do is annihilate them, right? Uh, but we, we, we have a limit in our war material and a limit in how many soldiers we can have actually kill people.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  And that the vet should like, oh, how many people are willing to drive insane?

• 4:50Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Uh, and drink themselves to death by, by turning them into executioners.

• 4:55Robert Evans?

  That's a major problem for the SS at this stage, right? Um, so many of the sources that you'll find on Eichmann will point out that he never really wrote policy, right? He was just an implementation guy. And this is accurate technically in some ways, but I don't think it is in a way that matters, right?

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Eichmann wasn't a policy wonk, was he?

• 5:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he, he really kind of was, right? He's not the author of a bunch of stuff, but he's like, he's part of the process of authoring a lot of things. And he does help create policies, particularly like where the treatment of people with partial Jewish ancestry is concerned. And he's got this foundational role in how the Nazi state interacts with captured Jewish communities and deports them, right? And that's, that's not, he's not literally writing out policies all the time, but he is effectively making policy in all but name. Now that said, he doesn't give the order to start the Holocaust, right? That's obviously not his call. That happens way above his head. Which begs the question then, who does, right? You would expect in an organization as hierarchical as the Nazis, there's someone we can trace to like, and this is the moment the order was given, right?

• 6:02Robert Evans?

  We don't actually, we don't directly have that, right? We know Eichmann helps organize and facilitate the Von Say conference where it's planned. And this is on orders of his boss Reinhard Heidrich. And Heidrich takes his orders, you know, from Himmler and from Hitler. But we don't have any record of Himmler or Hitler saying, okay, it's time to do the Holocaust now, right? Because that's just not the way any of this works, right?

• 6:23Speaker 01

  And man, that has that led to a lot of problems and then Holocaust denial and Hitler rehabilitation and fucking name it.

• 6:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we have no evidence of Hitler saying, we've got to do this. And that kind of feeds into at the time, a lot of people in Nazi Germany who were often annoyed or even horrified by aspects of the regime, by things the SS and the SD did, right? We'd be like, well, but Hitler clearly doesn't know about this, right? Like, he's got, he can't have any idea this is going on. And this is something Hitler, you know, this is the smart way to play shit as a totalitarian dictator. You don't want your name attached to everything the regime is doing, especially shit that's not going to work out or that's more experimental. You need plausible deniability, right? Even if you're Hitler.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Not every tyrant or dictator is going to have a camp called like the Hitler camp for undesirables.

• 7:14Robert Evans?

  Right, right. That's just a bad business. And in the Nazi regime, again, there's this attitude, and this, this really is something that causes people who even aren't trying to do Nazi apologia, to do apologia for regular people under the Nazi system. There's this errant idea that like, well, normal people had no choice but to go along with what the regime is doing. It was so dangerous. Any degree of resistance would have gotten you killed, would have gotten your family wiped out. At no point in the history of the Nazi regime was that true, right?

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Of course not.

• 7:45Robert Evans?

  There were no, no members of the Nazi state and like were ever executed or punished for just refusing to take part in the Holocaust, right?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Most of them were given them out.

• 7:55Robert Evans?

  Yes. And people could take it, right?

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, like the Nazi reserve police battalions had to volunteer.

• 8:03Robert Evans?

  Yes, exactly.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  To do the Holocaust by bullets. And they overwhelmingly volunteered.

• 8:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And people who said no, didn't have their families killed or themselves killed. Killed, right?

• 8:13Speaker 01

  They didn't even get demoted. They just got moved somewhere else.

• 8:16Robert Evans?

  So much choice was involved in being part of the worst aspects of the regime. And there was, in fact, internal criticism inside Nazi Germany. And the regime even buckled under that criticism at times. When word of the T4 euthanasia program broke out, which was basically the gassing of, uh, you know, disabled people by the Nazi state. There was backlash among German civilians. And that backlash was significant enough that it made Hitler, number one, they backed away publicly on the program. And it made Hitler wary in the future of putting further policies of mass murder in writing. And I want to quote from an article by Kevin Sweeney in the journal Constructing the Past here. Between 1940 and 1941, the German people's negative reaction became increasingly vocal and vehement,

• 9:01Robert Evans?

  culminating in Hitler being openly jeered by a crowd watching mentally challenged patients being loaded onto a train at a rail station in Hoff, Bavaria in 1941. Ultimately, this negative public reaction to the T4 program and Hitler's sanctioning of it, bolstered by denunciations from Catholic and Protestant church leaders, forced Hitler to publicly cancel the program in August of 1941, though it continued in secret until 1945. So again, people yelled at Hitler over this and he backed down, right? Like, that's such a critical part of the story of how this regime worked.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Do you also think, like, this is something that is, is batted around a bit in, in my field of research? Where it's just like, this is the one that was taking average Germans' family members away as well?

• 9:44Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Uh, everybody was connected to it.

• 9:47Robert Evans?

  Yes. And there was, uh, there were other times where that happened, right? There was a moment where they started deporting people who had like one Jewish relative, but weren't like religiously Jewish and were married into, you know, Gentile German families. There were protests and they had to publicly back off of that because Germans were like, well, but these guys aren't really Jewish, right? What are you doing here? You know?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:06Robert Evans?

  Uh, like moments like that happened and the state was always conscious of how far they were pushing people, right? Which meant that the state could be pushed. Now, because of all of this, there's not a clear order to like, okay, Hitler signed this paper. Saying, kill everybody, right? And this has led even within, and again, these are, none of these people are what you'd call denialists. But there was a debate for a very long time, like half a century, between historians who specialized in the Holocaust, between what are generally called intentionalists and functionalists. And the intentionalists argued that Hitler personally instigated the final solution. The functionalists argued that it arose naturally as a result of the structure of the Third Reich. Now, this debate is mostly done.

• 10:50Robert Evans?

  We don't really, this is like, I think people will talk about in terms of the history of how we looked at this. There's not much argument here anymore. A preponderance of evidence that exists today proves that Hitler, that basically, aspects of both of these are very true, right? Yeah, I was actually gonna point that out. There's more, there's, there's a third camp, which I generally fall into, which is like, Hitler ordered it, however. A lot of it arose from the structure of the Nazi state, yeah. Even if he didn't, it would have happened. Yeah, Hitler premeditated on the slaughter of European Jewry, and also the functionalists have some very good points. One piece of evidence for the intentionalists that often get cited, that is important when we talk about Hitler's premeditation,

• 11:32Robert Evans?

  is an interview Hitler gave in 1922 to a journalist where he said, "Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews, as soon as I have the power to do so."

• 11:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and he's like, "I will have the gallows built and rose, and the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately until all of Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews." That's pretty hard, that's like not, you know, we can state that as pretty clear evidence of intent, right? Yeah, and Mein Kampf also kind of really lays it out there. Yeah, yeah, there's not a lot, there's, there's a, it's hard to argue he didn't say regularly what he planned to do, right? It's, it's what he's known for, it's his bit. It's his whole thing. And obviously, the fact that he said all this doesn't mean Hitler wrote out the plan for Auschwitz, or ever, like, he's not the guy, he didn't tell everyone, okay, we're gonna do an Auschwitz, and here's how it's gonna work, right? He was like, "We gotta kill these guys, figure it out. I'm Hitler, I got Hitler stuff to do, right? Like, there's a lot of, a lot of tasks on my hand.

• 12:29Robert Evans?

  You guys lock down how we're gonna handle this." Right? And there were always other possibilities up until, you know, things start to turn for them in the East. It's not a guarantee that mass slaughter is the only thing that will be done for all of these captured people. I think there was a point in which something like the Madagascar Plan, if that itself was never really feasible, could have been done for some amount of people, right? But at a certain point, the only thing they were going to do was was genocide. And Hitler had repeatedly countenanced that and urged that throughout his career. In 1939, he told the Czech foreign minister, "We are going to destroy the Jews. They are not going to get away with what they did on November 9, 1918. The day of reckoning has come." Eichmann himself would later claim, under interrogation,

• 13:12Robert Evans?

  that Reinhard Heidrich had told him about plans for the Holocaust as early as August 1941. And this is Heidrich talking to an interrogator. "The war with the Soviet Union began in June 1941. I believe it was two months later that Heidrich sent for me. I reported, he began with a little speech, and then, 'The Fuhrer has ordered physical extermination of the Jews.' Then Heidrich said, 'Go and see SS Obergruppenführer Otto Globachnik. The Fuhrer has already given him instructions.'" And, you know, that doesn't mean that's exactly what happened, because Eichmann lies under interrogation. But there's a good amount of evidence to suggest that's pretty much what happened, right? We haven't talked, we'll talk about Globachnik one of these days. He's a really interesting Nazi.

• 13:54Robert Evans?

  And from what we know of Heidrich and of him, this is pretty feasible, right? That something like this is basically what went down. There's a lot of outside kind of evidence that this is pretty close to what happened.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Those ideas definitely would have flowed through Heidrich.

• 14:07Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, through Heidrich and probably through Globachnik, too, in a similar way to how it's described here. And Bettina Stangneth basically argues that Eichmann was given the job of planning the Vonse Conference, nothing to coordinate all the different government branches who'd played a role in the genocide, because he'd made himself the Reich's gopher in anything related to the Jewish question. He's just the guy you reach for when you're like, well, we need someone to pull all of these things we've been doing together and plan the execution of the Holocaust. You've got Eichmann, right? You already know he knows how to do this kind of shit. So you pull for him. Stangneth writes, "When others were at a..." He was the man they called on. For example, a professor at Strasbourg University was adamant he wanted the schools of Jewish Bolshevik commissars

• 14:49Robert Evans?

  to add to a collection of skeletons, despite the fact that they were still alive. And Eichmann's the guy who gets pulled in to do that. He's just already been the kind of, we need someone to handle this unpleasant implementation. It's going to involve killing a lot of people, right? Well, Eichmann's who does that, you know?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Of course, that's a collection that existed at a German university.

• 15:07Robert Evans?

  Of course, that's a German university's collection, right?

• 15:10Speaker 01

  I mean, recently, a German university, I forget which one, maybe it was Salzburg, discovered, oh, we still have all these boxes of human skulls

• 15:20Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  from the Herrero and Nama genocide, just laying around.

• 15:23Robert Evans?

  Oops, oops. Yeah, don't.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Oops, all skulls.

• 15:26Robert Evans?

  Look, you don't want to go too deep into the, into the archive section of any German or British university, or any American university older than a certain age, honestly.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  I should, I should point out, due to my family's land deeds, or Turkish universities.

• 15:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, or Turkish universities. Very few old universities, do you want, and honestly, the Vatican sub-basements, we don't really want to get into those too deep either.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  No, those should stay locked. Yeah, those should stay locked for the good of all of us.

• 15:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's some, there's some fucking First Indiana Jones movie shit, if you go deep enough in that.

• 16:02Robert Evans?

  So, as the death camps spun up to full operation in the years following Von Say, Eichmann was set to the task of organizing the registration, collection, and eventual deportation or evacuation of captive Jewish populations to the camps. By this point, he was highly placed enough and the job was big enough that he often sent out trusted subordinates to handle the on-the-ground work for him, involving himself directly if he felt their progress was too slow, and acting as a wrecking ball whenever his people encountered resistance from local government officials. And this resistance is usually not, we have a moral issue with what's happening. Sometimes, especially later in the war, it's a mix of that, or they're just worried that they'll get blamed for it because they could see where things are coming. But a lot of the times, it's more, well, we need supplies for other things, right?

• 16:44Robert Evans?

  Like, we have issues that are a bigger priority to us and the general government of Poland or whatever, than the annihilation of these people. And why are we focusing on this? And Eichmann will come in and say, fuck off, we, this is the priority, right? Like, that's kind of part of his job. And one of his personal obsessions is ensuring that no individual Jews are exempted from the Final Solution. This is more of an issue than you might expect. It was often said that every Nazi had their "good Jew," or even recognized a handful of "good Jews" that ought to be spared. And in fact, this extends to Hitler, as I bring up on this show every now and then. He interviewed personally to save his childhood doctor, a Jewish man who he viewed as a decent person, right?

• 17:28Speaker 01

  And his personal driver, Emile Maurice.

• 17:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right. There were, there were guys, right, and, and ladies, right, that every, even a lot of the worst of the Nazis had. They would be like, "Well, this, this person should be spared." Eichmann, one of the things that makes him noteworthy is he doesn't have these people, right? And he actually sees it as his personal job to make sure none of the, like, every, even the worst of the SS are soft towards a Jew here and there. I have to make sure those people don't escape the Dragnet as much as possible, right?

• 17:56Speaker 01

  He has to be more evil than the most evil men on Earth.

• 17:59Robert Evans?

  Than Hitler? Yeah, that's part of his job here. I've gotta be harder even than the boss, you know?

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Hitler's, you know, he's too soft.

• 18:07Robert Evans?

  He can be soft on this issue, right?

• 18:09Speaker 01

  I have to pick up the slack. You know, Hitler, real soft on the Jewish issue.

• 18:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, at least softer than he's willing to be. And this is a thing that comes down from Heidrich too. Heidrich's very much similar in this attitude, right? So, and again, it's kind of, when we talk about his complicity, he doesn't order any of this. But his job is to make sure it's as total a victory for the Nazis as he can manage. And while his role here is important, we shouldn't neglect to highlight other major figures behind the Final Solution, including Eichmann's childhood friend Ernst Kaltenbrunner, as well as Heinrich Mueller, Theodore Daniker, Dieter Wyslinski, Franz Novak, and a bunch of other young men in Hitler's SS and SD. And it's really worth emphasizing how young a lot of the people doing this are, that the Holocaust is committed primarily from

• 18:55Robert Evans?

  an implementation stage by very young, ambitious men. An article for the National World War II Museum by Dr. Jason Dawsey notes of Eichmann's peers, quote, "None of them had reached the age of 35 when World War II ended. They exhibited a terrifying combination of attention to detail and steadfast commitment to the core ideas of Nazism." Reinhard Heidrich himself, Eichmann's boss, was 38 when he was killed by Czech partisans in June of 1942, just a few months after the Von Say conference. We've already covered Heidrich in other episodes, and there's not enough time in all in these ones to discuss all of Eichmann's subordinates and colleagues, the guys at his level. But we should talk about one of his men in order to kind of tell the story of several others, right?

• 19:39Robert Evans?

  Because I don't want it to look like, I never want it to be like a great man thing where Eichmann's the only one kind of at this level of importance. There are other guys who are at similar levels, and one of them is his subordinate Theodore Danicker, right? And we'll talk a little bit about Danicker, both because he's a monster worth knowing and because his story tells us something important about how Eichmann operated. Danicker was born in March of 1913 in Tubingen, southwest Germany. His father was a member of the comfortable middle class, as a lot of these guys are, and was a businessman until he died in 1918 fighting for the Kaiser. Theodore was raised by his mom, and he grows up, number one, angry about the war. He's bleeding in the stabbed in the back myth, like all of these guys do. And other than that, he's kind of mediocre, right?

• 20:24Robert Evans?

  His family was used to being more comfortable than they are after the war. He wants to do better. He feels like he's owed it, but he's not very good at anything. Like Eichmann, he's a mediocre student, right? He makes no real impact on his professors, and there's no signs that he's going to go on to have a really significant career. He's just kind of mid, right? These are all very young, very mid guys who are given their only chance to be excellent is with the Nazi party.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Man, that is unfortunate.

• 20:54Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  We need some kind of jobs program for dudes who are solidly mid.

• 21:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's this thing I come up with, with like guys like Ben Shapiro, like all of these dudes in the right wing media who try to make it into Hollywood and can't because they're mediocre. We need like a fake Hollywood where we like, we give these guys fake fans and let them pretend like they've got a TV. This is what we can use AI for, just generate their shitty scripts.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Robert, this already exists. It's the Hallmark Channel.

• 21:24Robert Evans?

  It's the Hallmark Channel. Thank God. We'd be in so much worse shape if it weren't for the Hallmark Channel.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, like Ben Shapiro could be cranking out, or like the Danickers of today, who are big balls who works at Doge, could just be, just be cranking out the world's worst Christmas movies year round for Hallmark.

• 21:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and we we use AI to give a bunch of fake fans so they feel like they're really making it. And yeah, I mean, on a serious level, it is important you understand people always, a lot of people get this wrong when they act like, oh, well, the Nazis were this. They came out of the the middle class, or they came out of like the poor and the working class, these people who had endured privation and that was, you know, the there's there were these real legitimate, you know, fear and anger of this this group of people who were really suffering that fed into Nazism. Some of those guys existed. And part of this Hitler was that kind of guy. Hitler really did suffer. He had a terrible early life, right?

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, he had a shitty fucking life.

• 22:18Robert Evans?

  Dog shit. That's very few Nazis, right?

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, that shitty life did not kill him.

• 22:25Robert Evans?

  No.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, Hitler was that guy, but like his inner circle, his the people that surround him absolutely weren't. There's like a lot of these guys were young, like you said, and a lot of them were mid.

• 22:34Robert Evans?

  Fucking Göring was like famous and kind of well off, right? Like a lot of guys were like that.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of these dudes are doctors.

• 22:42Robert Evans?

  Yes, doctors, lawyers, you know?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  PhDs.

• 22:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Fucking engineers, lawyers. He surrounded himself by Germany's elite.

• 22:50Robert Evans?

  Eichmann comes from oil and gas, like his dad was comfortable from oil and gas money, right? Danekker comes from like a comfortable, middle-class business-owning background, right? These are not guys who are poor, but they are guys who are not doing as well as they think they ought to be doing. And they blame that on whoever's convenient, which turns out to be the Jews and the communists, right? So that's Danekker.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  They would own a like, they would own like a Mitsubishi dealership today.

• 23:15Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. Not a great Mitsubishi dealership, but like they're able to go to an okay private school.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  It's not a great car.

• 23:22Robert Evans?

  None of them are great, right?

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, like they don't own a Ford, they don't own like a Chevy dealership. They're like, we have to, look, family, we have to settle for selling, I don't know, Evo Lancers or fucking whatever.

• 23:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, their their spokesman is like a fucking amateur baseball star. Like, it's just not that good.

• 23:41Robert Evans?

  So, speaking of amateur baseball, don't watch amateur baseball, listen to the rest of this podcast.

• 23:47Speaker 05

  Or watch amateur baseball while listening to this podcast.

• 23:51Robert Evans?

  No, absolutely don't do that. You'll turn into a fascist.

• 23:55Speaker 01

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• 24:02Robert Evans?

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• 25:02Robert Evans?

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• 25:41Robert Evans?

  We're back. So Theodore Danicker comes up, kind of mitted everything. When he's a young adult, he starts working as a textile dealer. And he, like Eichmann, he goes to a trade school because his grades aren't good enough for him to do anything else. And he feels pulled to far-right politics from a young age, like Eichmann, for a similar motivation. The Nazi Party offers him a chance to remake himself in a new regime that he wouldn't have been able to earn a place of similar kind of importance in the Weimar Republic. In 1932, he joins the Nazi Party at age 90. At age 21 in 1934, Danneker joins the SS, initially serving in the VT or the SS Dispositional Corps. These were essentially political soldiers at the direct command of Adolf Hitler,

• 26:24Robert Evans?

  except in times of war, in which case they'd be integrated into the army. This is the unit that eventually becomes the Waffen SS, right? It isn't that yet, but he's in the proto-Waffen SS. That's Danneker. Like Eichmann, Danneker's first real job for the regime is helping to guard an early concentration camp. In his case, it's Columbia House in Berlin. Now, this was the only official SS camp in Berlin, and it was built out of an empty prison in 1933. And like most wild concentration camps, which is kind of what the first camps are called, where they're like, "We've got this empty government building or school or whatever. We'll just throw some political prisoners in there. We'll torture them," right? Columbia House is noteworthy for being where lawyer Hans Litten dies, right? We've talked about

• 27:07Robert Evans?

  him in the past. He's the guy who puts Hitler on trial. So it's that kind of place. And it is Columbia House has been described by one historian and camp survivor as "an agony house" and the site of, quote, "perhaps the ghastliest atrocities imaginable." It acted as an SS testing ground for promising young officers. As historian Reinhard Burbek noted, quote, "This was not just a place where people were terrorized and tortured, but a school of torture. The people who had been commanders after Columbia later turned to commanders of other concentration camps at Buchenwald, at Sachsenhausen, at Majdanek, and Auschwitz." So once you had gone through concentration camp Columbia, apparently this was the perverse career step in order to stay in the SS and become a commander elsewhere, right?

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Oh, God, it was a concentration camp trade school.

• 27:52Robert Evans?

  Yes. And this is also important. We talk about how this is, this is like less on the intentionalist side of things, right? And more on the other side of things where you're like, well, they started building this system where you would train people up in how a concentration camp is to work. And once you've committed the kind of crimes you're committing at Columbia House, you don't go back. You only do worse and worse stuff. And you don't always have to be ordered to do that worse stuff, right? You are naturally, when you get put in charge somewhere, going to be even more extreme than you were at Columbia House, because that's just how this kind of thing works, right?

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Your humanity is sanded away, even if, even if the people who started off as like, you know, prison guards, say what you will about them and their ethics and morality, by the time they leave this place... They're just dead eyed psychos.

• 28:37Robert Evans?

  There's nothing left of humanity in them, right? And that that's important, too. No one necessarily orders that. I want you to do 20% worse than Columbia House. You just are that person by this point, right? And so that happens naturally.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  And nobody's tracking fingernail metrics.

• 28:51Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Yeah, it's like, how many fingernails did you pull out this week? Right? You don't have to do that anymore. So eventually Dannecker gets transferred over to the SS Security Office or the SD where Eichmann works, and he winds up working under Eichmann at the Department of Jewish Affairs in 1937. That same year, he writes a report urging the complete removal of Jews from political life in the Reich in order to bring Germany's Jewish question closer to its final solution. In this paper, he attacks the Gestapo for being too mild in their application to force and insufficiently committed to antisemitism. So like Eichmann, he's this guy where he's like, wow, the Gestapo really soft on the Jews. We gotta, we gotta, we gotta get these people under control, you know?

• 29:32Speaker 01

  I'm really sick of our local Gestapo being so soft and cuddly.

• 29:36Robert Evans?

  The woke Gestapo.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  These DEI policies have ruined the Gestapo.

• 29:42Robert Evans?

  He is that guy, though, right? And that's, you know, that's why he's the kind of guy who becomes Eichmann's, you know, second, effectively.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Fuck.

• 29:49Robert Evans?

  In 1938, after the Anschluss, Dannecker goes with Eichmann to Vienna to help expel thousands of Jews from their homes and confiscate their possessions for the state. And he brings this new expertise with him to Poland. He goes to Paris in 1940 after the German victory, and he helps oversee the French police in their roundup of the Jewish population of Paris. Now, it's not widely known or discussed that some of the most important early perpetrators of the Holocaust were local police all over Europe, and these are not German police. These are by and large, these are French police, right? Some of whom had been part of French far right parties, right?

• 30:23Speaker 01

  And Dutch police. Don't for, don't forget my local police here.

• 30:27Robert Evans?

  And Dutch police, right? But they're local cops, and most of them hadn't been super involved in the far right, you know? They were cops before anything else. And like, basically 100% of cops in basically every society, their identity as police matters more to them than the morale. of whatever actions they are asked to take, right?

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 30:47Robert Evans?

  So you can find arguments that French police help to shield. And this is true, there are individual French police who help to shield and hide hundreds of Jews from the Nazis. Right? There are individual French cops who act heroically to protect people targeted by the SS. But modern historiography has made it very clear, and I would say unarguable, that as an institution, French law enforcement was overwhelmingly a willing tool of the Nazi genocide.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Fuck, yeah, they were.

• 31:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, there's just no, no real argument out against that. In late 2018, historian Laurent Joly published The State Against the Jews, which compiled previously unknown documents about French police and government collaboration and the rounding up of tens of thousands of Jews. Per an article in France 24, quote, Joly told AFP that Paris police had "one of the most sophisticated systems in the world to classify foreigners." "Some 125,000 Jews were recorded in a roll based on the census the Nazis demanded in 1941, which Joly has said curiously remained unknown until my research because it got buried." Right?

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course it did.

• 31:49Robert Evans?

  In Vichy, France, the authorities were so eager to curry favor with their new Nazi masters that they began rounding up and handing over Jews without being asked. Per Joly, "The Germans were not asking for the Jews who lived in the Vichy-controlled part of France to be handed to them." Vichy was always trying to demonstrate its goodwill towards the Germans. In other words, the French police in Vichy, France, create a problem for the Nazis because they're handing over more Jews than the Nazis can process. And they're like, guys, Jesus, like, we're the Nazis, but come on, calm down here.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  I mean, that, that reminds me of early on in the Holocaust when the Gestapo put out, effectively, it was like a hotline to regular Germans to rat out people who were hiding Jews or people they, they thought were Jews. And so many people were ratting out their neighbors that the Gestapo had to kindly ask them to fucking stop because they couldn't handle it all.

• 32:39Robert Evans?

  God, and I, now thankfully, there's no SS analog in the US today that would put out a request for regular Americans to report their neighbors. That's right. Sequestering undocumented foreigners, right?

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:51Robert Evans?

  Weird how that's always what it is, right? Weird how that's what it is in Paris, you know?

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Remember, folks, tyranny doesn't work without the assistance of your friendly neighbors.

• 32:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and yeah, the cops and local government officials, and yeah, just the guy who lives next to you.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:04Robert Evans?

  Dan Ecker's job in Paris was to push French authorities to arrest and deport ever greater numbers of Jews, both foreign refugees who'd fled other areas the Nazis had advanced on, or native French people. Some were told that these deportees would be taken to a new Jewish state being established by the Nazis, essentially a variation of the reservation plan, although this was known to be false by anyone with half a brain. There had been ample reporting before the German invasion about the early stages of the KZ, or concentration camp, system. The first major arrest and deportation of French Jews in World War II was the green-ticket roundup. Eichmann and Danneker both helped to organize this scheme by which almost 7,000 foreign-born Jews living in France were sent a summons by mail, ordering them to visit

• 33:47Robert Evans?

  a local immigration office for a review of their visas. Anyone who showed up, as around 3,700 men did, was arrested and deported immediately. Now, again, you'd never see anything like this whereby people who are attempting to maintain their legal status, even though they're foreign-born people who have immigrated, would be asked to show up at the immigration office and then arrested as soon as they show up trying to comply with the law. That would never happen here, right?

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Thankfully not. I can't think of anything that's happening currently or before.

• 34:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It would be like, really, really wrong of me to just suggest that the Department of Homeland Security is the American SS based on something like this, because they've never done anything like this, right? You know, ICE hasn't, right?

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and ICE is certainly not the Gestapo. They would never do things that are Gestapo-esque.

• 34:32Robert Evans?

  No, they're not the Department of Jewish Affairs, right? There's no similarity between these organizations.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Never.

• 34:38Robert Evans?

  Right, exactly, because we haven't started death camps yet, just like the Nazis had in 1940, right?

• 34:43Speaker 01

  I feel like, I feel like, Robert, we can really trust the guy who wears a mask and snatches people into an unmarked van.

• 34:49Robert Evans?

  Yes, if I'm remembering properly from my Disney movies as a kid, the child catcher is a good guy, right?

• 34:57Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. So despite this success and the success of Operation Green Ticket, France lags behind the arbitrary deportation quota that Eichmann's office had set for them. It was Danneker's office to motivate French authorities. Eichmann came to consider Danneker almost as his right arm, someone he could drop into a new territory and trust to centralize the system by which Jews were rounded up and deported and leave it in such a way that whoever followed would be able to continue operating the system with ease because it runs on its own, right? That's a huge part of it. You leave as little up to chance as possible. You leave as little up to the mercy of individual members of the government as possible, all of whom are soft to some groups of people you want to get rid of. That's why you build a system that has no softness left inside it, right? That write-up for the National World War II Museum notes,

• 35:42Robert Evans?

  "Danneker was a completely modern form of perpetrator, really unknown before the 20th century. The deportation specialist," right?

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Oh, he's Tom Holman.

• 35:53Robert Evans?

  He's Tom Holman, right? This is how modern genocide is done. The primary perpetrators are not the guys who just shoot a bunch of people, right? They're the deportation specialists. That's who does a modern genocide, is a deportation specialist, right?

• 36:07Speaker 01

  I mean, not to keep linking these two things together, but one that like, one of the things that sticks out to me is in the book, Ordinary Men.

• 36:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  One of the things that sticks out is the German Reserve Police Officers were just normal guys who took this job because they wanted a pension and benefits. And then, again, they were voluntarily doing this. They were told multiple times they could back out whenever they wanted, but they're there pulling the trigger.

• 36:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  And then you got this fucking guy.

• 36:36Robert Evans?

  And there's this, this argument, you get it around Ordinary Men too, about like, well, it's wrong to look at these as like the banality of evil because these guys weren't banal. The things they did weren't banal, the kinds of crimes they committed.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Of course not, no.

• 36:47Robert Evans?

  But that's, that's the point, is that that kind of hideous mask-off nightmare evil is lurking behind your neighbor's eyes if he gets the opportunity, if it'll benefit him enough, right? If it'll get him that Mitsubishi dealership. You never know quite, just like you never know which, what motherfucking guy who like seems- Kind of lame and boring right now could be a hero when actually called upon to shelter people from a jury. I'm thinking about that judge, husband and wife cop couple in New Mexico, who were like destroying evidence to protect these undocumented friends of theirs who are now being tried, where it's like you would never guess that these people would have been heroes in a time like this. But god damn it, you can't look at them any way else, right? And in the same matter, some guy who you would never guess is anything but the dude who lives

• 37:30Robert Evans?

  next to you could become an absolute monster if he was given the opportunity, if it would advance him personally enough. And you don't know until the chips are down who's going to be what, right? There's hints sometimes, but you can't know perfectly. Cool stuff.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Just to be safe, I say if you've ever seen them shooting a video in the cab of their pickup truck at that upward angle.

• 37:54Robert Evans?

  Probably on the bad side of things.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, you need to stay the fuck away from them.

• 37:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right. Man, Daniker would have loved filming himself drunk in his car ranting about movies.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  God, they would love that so much. Yeah, yelling like, my wife left me.

• 38:09Robert Evans?

  So historian Robert Gerwath describes Daniker as one of the quote, "young, educated, self-confident and ideologically committed men, Heidrich actively cored for the Jewish desk." These men would develop the actual methodology by which Hitler's dream of a Jew-free Europe might be made a reality. To continue with another quote from that article, "Daniker utilized an array of weapons: the pen, the telephone, and the typewriter. Besides researching and working behind a desk, Daniker negotiated, cajoled, and berated officials, coordinated with the Reich Transportation Ministry to secure rolling stock, and worked with the SSSD, Gestapo, and German Armed Forces to ensure the efficient and orderly removal of massive numbers of Jewish men, women, and children." In the spring of 1942, Daniker visited the camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. This was the same

• 38:52Robert Evans?

  month that it transferred from being primarily a labor camp to being a straight-up death camp. And Daniker is one of the very first people to see Auschwitz in full operation. He reports back to his boss about it, and he immediately sets to work feeding a group of 1,100 French Jews into the factory of death. This annihilation acts as a proof of concept, right? This is the Death Star test firing of Auschwitz, right? Where you're like, yep, okay, we can we can get rid of people at the speed we need to here. Daniker reports back to Eichmann about how Auschwitz is working, and Eichmann could not have been happier. So he and Daniker spend several weeks planning a more ambitious operation to wipe out a substantial chunk of the French Jewish population. They call this Operation Spring

• 39:33Robert Evans?

  Wind. It had been initially scheduled for July 14th, but that was Bastille Day, and the French collaborators insisted it would be bad form to commit genocide on a holiday. So the operation is ultimately executed by French.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Oh, I hate that.

• 39:46Robert Evans?

  They're like, we'll do this, but not on Bastille Day, right? We can't do a Holocaust on Bastille Day.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  That's like the most fucking French way of this. They're like, no, you don't understand. We have the day off work.

• 39:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, everyone's got the day off work. Look, we'll do a Holocaust, but not on our day off, right?

• 40:01Speaker 01

  If you, if you make all the cops go in and do the genocide on the holiday, they're gonna riot and they're gonna fight the firefighters. It's something that happens here.

• 40:10Robert Evans?

  We really can't do this. So the operation is ultimately executed by French police on July 16th and 17th. They break into houses and they rip whole families out of their beds, arresting 13,000 Parisian Jews for deportation. The police insisted in public face and communications that these people were mostly, quote, "foreign and stateless." So they're barely people.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 40:31Robert Evans?

  Of course. Of course.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Fuck.

• 40:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Operation Spring Wind was the brainchild of a French vichy collaborator named Louis D'Arcier. He had fought in World War I and become a radical far-right activist in the 30s, actively participating in the 1934 far-right riot that was seen by some at the time as an attempted coup d'etat. He had become a journalist, largely to write articles drumming up anti-Semitic hate among his fellow Frenchmen. When the Nazis took over, they made him commissar general for Jewish affairs, basically the vichy counterpart to Eichmann. D'Arcier had suggested to denaturalize all Jews who'd acquired French citizenship since 1927, and he also suggested the mass arrest of stateless Jews, largely because it provided a legal coding for the general expulsion of Jews. This worked. Daniker himself

• 41:18Robert Evans?

  noted that once the shoddy justification was in place, the cops were happy to help the SS. The French police, despite a few considerations of pure form, have only to carry out orders, right?

• 41:29Speaker 01

  That's not surprising.

• 41:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's just how these guys work. That's how cops Cops are, right?

• 41:34Speaker 01

  And that's how cops are. And France was wildly anti-Semitic.

• 41:38Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  For, for people who don't know, um, uh, my, one of my co-hosts and producers, uh, on my show, uh, did, uh, he, he speaks French and did research on like French officers magazines in the French military. Uh, a little bit after this time, uh, in Algeria.

• 41:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  And like half, half of the titles are like li anti-Semitism.

• 42:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Shit like that, like.

• 42:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Yo, oh, I'm just subscribed to anti-Semitism Weekly.

• 42:05Robert Evans?

  Quarterly, yeah. Um, but by the way, folks, watch the Battle of Algiers. Uh, great movie. Uh, yeah, that, that's all I'll say about it for now. So Daniker's role in France came to an end shortly after Operation Spring Wind, which is better known as the Val d'Evroundup, right? Uh, his direct supervisor in the SD, a guy named Helmut Knacken, caught Daniker abusing his authority. By which I mean, he was stealing shit from deported Jews that the SS wanted to steal for Germany, right? And so he was transferred back to Berlin, right? It's yeah, it's like, look, you can kill these people.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  You can't steal from them.

• 42:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we're stealing from them. You're stealing from us when you steal too much from them, right? Come on, man.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 42:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, the system Daniker had built with Eichmann's guidance continued to operate for the remainder of Vichy France's lifespan. Ultimately, some 77,000 French Jews and Jews on French soil were deported and murdered by the Nazis under the direction of Eichmann and Daniker and with the enthusiastic aid of French collaborators in law enforcement and the Vichy government. After the war, Charles de Gaulle and the French government that replaced the Vichy regime refused to apologize for the role the police played in these genocidal crimes. Their argument was that.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Sounds like de Gaulle, right?

• 43:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that sounds de Gaulle, yeah. Their argument was that Vichy France wasn't the French Republic and the reestablished republic shouldn't have to apologize for the crimes of another government, right? Now, is it the case?

• 43:28Speaker 01

  All those dudes kept their fucking jobs.

• 43:30Robert Evans?

  Right. Is it the case that these cops are still cops? A lot of times, yes, but why is that our responsibility, right?

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Slipping off the armband.

• 43:37Robert Evans?

  You can't blame law enforcement as a whole for the fact that everyone in it did this, right? Oh, it's cool stuff.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  No, you do not understand. I was not throwing a piece of loot. I was just ashing my cigarettes very awkwardly.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 43:54Robert Evans?

  It was not until 1995 that French President Jacques Chirac finally admitted blame on behalf of French law enforcement and the state, right? So, you know.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  It's so bad that had to be Chirac that did it because he's like cartoonishly corrupt.

• 44:07Robert Evans?

  He's so lame otherwise, yeah, but he's like, ah, jeez, this is wow, we really fucked up here.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  That I will steal from everybody's pension and I will get France locked solidly into the Afghan war, but I will not cover for Nazi cops.

• 44:21Robert Evans?

  Not gonna cover for the Nazi cops. I got too much other shit I gotta do. After Paris, Danekar doesn't remain in Berlin long. He's sent and he's forgiven for his misdeeds. He's sent to Bulgaria in 1943 to arrange the deportation of some 11,000 foreign Jews to various death camps. He follows the Eichmann playbook in this, interfacing with a newly created Bulgarian commissar for Jewish affairs to arrange the deportations. In just two months, all 11,000 people had been shipped by train to Treblinka or Auschwitz, where nearly half of them died. The dead included some 2,000 children. This deportation, yeah, I mean, these guys, the level of mass murderer, the least of the SS men in Eichmann's office commit is, is pretty outrageous.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  I mean, I can't imagine a more cursed title that we've spoken, uh, other than a Bulgarian Jewish commissar.

• 45:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Oh, boy.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Like, oh.

• 45:12Robert Evans?

  Your war crimes did war crimes. Yeah. This deportation met with little local resistance as the Jews marked for expulsion were mainly from Thrace and Macedonia and thus not Bulgarian citizens. But Danekar's next move was to evacuate nearly 50,000 Bulgarian Jews from Sofia, the capital. This was done and some 48,000 Jews were stripped of their property and forced into a camp outside the city. However, this sparked resistance because again, these aren't foreigners, right? These are Bulgarian, you know? Jason Dossi writes, "Outrage from Dimitar Pășev, the deputy speaker of the parliament, clergy from the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, and representatives of communities where these Jews resided pushed King Boris III to intervene. Pășev, who was forced to

• 45:56Robert Evans?

  resign his position, still appealed to the honor of Bulgaria, wanting that our nation's reputation would be stained forever and its moral and political standing forever compromised if deportations ensued. Boris acquiesced and prevented the removal of Bulgaria's Jewish populace." And we can see this as both. There's legitimate heroism here, which saves a lot of lives, right?

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Right, of course.

• 46:18Robert Evans?

  But also, any pride in this has to be tempered by the fact that all these guys are only moved to act against the Nazis because now citizens were being deported, right? These Macedonian Jews and whatever, if they get exterminated, no one's gonna speak up, right? But now you're going after Bulgarian Jews and we've gotta say something, right?

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Of course. They shouldn't even be here. They broke the law just crossing the border, Robert.

• 46:44Robert Evans?

  I mean, Christ, you can't just break the law, right? That's fucked up.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Look, I wouldn't have voted for Hitler if he was gonna start going after the good ones.

• 46:52Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. These are the good ones, you know?

• 46:54Speaker 01

  He was only supposed to go after the criminals, you know?

• 46:57Robert Evans?

  And had the Nazi regime lasted, Eichmann and his colleagues would have taken another stab at this group that King Boris helps to protect. As it was, things were going pretty badly for the Nazis by the summer of 43, and the work of extermination was taking on an air of dire urgency. By this point, Danekar's qualities had been recognized outside the SD, and Eichmann's protege was sent by the Gestapo chief to Rome, which had just been occupied by the Nazis after Mussolini's overthrow. Eichmann by this point was the most prestigious name in the genocide business. His obsessive need to stamp his name on every part of the Holocaust, even in actions at which he had little to no known involvement, ensured him steady promotions and regular direct contact with Himmler. It also got him the attention of the international press. He and his friend Kaltenbruner would brag

• 47:41Robert Evans?

  to each other about their respective war criminal ranks during social events. Eichmann later recalled-

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Good God.

• 47:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's how they frame it. They're like looking at foreign press and be like, "Oh, man, I'm-" Higher ranking war criminal than you now, Counten Brunner. Ha, ha, ha, right?

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, what's impressive is I don't really think that there's like a lot of competition because nobody else wanted to put their fucking name on this shit.

• 48:02Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Everyone else is too smart to like stamp their fucking last, first and last name on this shit. Eichmann later recalled, quote, "I found the war criminals in a press review once. I was number nine and I had a bit of a laugh about it all." Right? And he will, he'll go back and forth between, "I was 14, I was nine, I was number one," right? Depending on who he's talking to after the war.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Oh, bro, you were never number one. Nobody ever thought you were number one.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Calm down. You were at like, I'll give credit, you were easy top 10, but you weren't, no one ever considered you number one.

• 48:36Robert Evans?

  I'll believe nine. Nine is credible, right? Yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  You're making the playoffs. Good for you.

• 48:41Robert Evans?

  Sure. Yeah, you're in the war crime playoffs. Yeah, you and Counten Brunner. In 1944, as the war neared its end, Adolf Eichmann was about to do something that would skyrocket him to the top of that list. In November of 1940, Germany had signed the Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan, officially creating the Axis Powers. And they considered it a priority to sign on as many new allies as possible, given how things had gone the last time Germany was isolated in an international war. Hungary's regent was a guy named Admiral Miklos Horthy, and he was offered the honor of becoming the fourth member of the club. But German diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop tacitly threatened that Romania might be allowed to join first if Hungary dithered. Ultimately, Horthy signed up, and this would prove to be a catastrophic mistake.

• 49:26Robert Evans?

  Horthy, who had served the Old Empire in World War I, had seen World War II as a chance to regain lost Hungarian territory and make his country great again, right?

• 49:35Speaker 01

  We did so good last time, boys.

• 49:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, World War I was, I mean, it could have worked better if we just did a couple of things different, right?

• 49:43Speaker 01

  I love that the Nazis were so fucking stupid, right? They're like, "Look, it didn't work out for us last time, but what if we allied with Austria, Italy, and Hungary again? It brought the band back together."

• 49:52Robert Evans?

  What if we got the band back together? Yeah. Oh, man. God, you know, now that you think about it, Italy really is the Pete Best of World War I, right?

• 50:04Robert Evans?

  Or a reverse Pete Best, I guess. I don't know.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  The Patrick Stumpf of World War I.

• 50:11Robert Evans?

  Hungarian troops, this seemed to work at first, right? World War II initially is go is kind of working like Horthe had hoped. Hungarian troops get to invade the Balkans alongside the Wehrmacht. And by the spring of 1941, Hungary was nearly tripled the size of where it had stood in 1938. Then came Operation Barbarossa and the invasion of the USSR. Hungary again sends troops, but this time there's no swift victory. Within months, 30% of the Hungarian army is killed or wounded too badly to fight.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  As tradition demands, when Hungary goes to war.

• 50:41Robert Evans?

  And, and by the way, if you're looking, if you're thinking from like a military planning standpoint, if you have lost 30% of your forces, killed or injured, you no longer have an effective army. It sounds like 70% is a lot. It's not enough. You've lost too much of your command and control, too much. You have to reorganize at that point before you can continue fighting effectively.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. From a military historian's perspective, I must say it is not good. If you're planning a war at home today, don't lose 30% of your forces in a year and a half.

• 51:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, it's a catastrophe. In early 1943, the entire Hungarian Second Army was smashed trying to anchor the German northern flank during the Battle of Stalingrad. Only 20% of the army survives the retreat home intact.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Hey, at least they have something in common with Romanians now.

• 51:26Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. Yeah, Hungary and Romania wiping out 80% of their army.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Hey, fellas, you want to meet up outside of Stalingrad and die?

• 51:35Robert Evans?

  Stalingrad, that's a nice name. I think, think things are going to go well for us there.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:39Robert Evans?

  So Horthe at this point, showing that he's smarter than Hitler, complains the war is lost, right? After Stalingrad, Horthe's like, well, fuck, there's literally no way we can pull a victory out of this one. And Hitler, for his part, complains that Hungarian soldiers had doomed the Wehrmacht, which is not really correct, you know, the Wehrmacht.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Not true. Yeah, that is, that is not true. Uh, over on my show, Lines of my Donkeys, we talked about Stalingrad for about six hours.

• 52:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Um, look, I'm not saying Hungary would have won the battle, but they certainly didn't lose them the battle.

• 52:09Robert Evans?

  No, no. Things were fucked by the point at which, you know, they get into action in this way, right? If you're, for one thing, if your entire battle plan comes down to the Hungarian army holding in the field, you have fucked up.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Uh, mein Führer, the army has been churned to goulash.

• 52:32Robert Evans?

  So, Horthy had never been a good guy. I think we've made that clear. But he's not personally genocidal towards the Jews of his nation, right? He doesn't, left to his own devices, he had no desire to wipe out the whole Jewish population of Hungary. And so for most of World War II, Hungarian Jews were fairly safe, right? For most of the war, this is the best place in kind of broader, the kind of broader Nazi and Nazi allied territory, one of the better places to be. But Hitler now demanded that Horthy kill or put his Jews into camps. Horthy refused. He has no issue, like they seized Jewish property to fund the war effort, he's fine with that. But he doesn't want, because he sees the writing on the wall. He's like, I don't want to be involved in a war crime of this scale right now, because we're not gonna win. There's gonna be a butcher's bill to pay.

• 53:18Robert Evans?

  As the Russians advanced, he and other Hungarian leaders tried to make a separate peace with the Allies. Hitler finds out and he orders German troops to conquer the country in March of 1944, which they do easily, because the Hungarians are very bad at having an army, right?

• 53:33Speaker 01

  And most of it's dead already.

• 53:34Robert Evans?

  Even the 1944 Wehrmacht can take them.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  Hungarians' military tradition, alright. They will lose every war they go in, but they'll be goddamned if they commit a genocide.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Be on the side of genociders, yes.

• 53:48Robert Evans?

  Sure, sure, but we're not that active in it.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  We have our standards here in Hungary.

• 53:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, which is we'll sit by and let it happen, right?

• 53:56Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 53:57Robert Evans?

  Now, Horthy is kept on as a puppet leader for a time. And as soon as Hungary was under the German occupation, Hitler orders the Jewish population wiped out. This is no mean task. There were somewhere between 700,000 and over 800,000 Jews in Hungarian territory. Sometimes you'll hear around a million. Eichmann is sent over to supervise the work of an Einsatzkommando, especially assembled for the task. Daniker and other colleagues in the SD are there as well, and they handle a lot of the ground actions while Eichmann coordinates this massive effort. What followed was one of the swiftest and bloodiest mass killings in human history, per Dr. Dossi's article. What happened in Hungary in the late spring and early summer of 1944 overwhelms our fragile capacities to advance.

• 54:40Robert Evans?

  Imagine it was simply a frenzy of killing in May and June of 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and 397,000 were plunged into Birkenau's gas chambers. Their fate exhibited just how desperate the Nazi regime was to finish the annihilation of European Jews, even as its hopes of winning the war disintegrated. Under increasing pressure, Horthy finally halted the deportations in July, temporarily sparing most of Budapest's Jewish populace. Eichmann and Danneker bit their time. The removal of Horthy three months later opened up new possibilities. When Swedish diplomat Roal Wallenberg openly offered sanctuary to Jews in Budapest as Soviet troops neared the capital city, the enraged Eichmann turned to Danneker

• 55:22Robert Evans?

  to raid the safe houses established by Wallenberg. Now, first off, that term frenzy of killing is the thing to remember when you're thinking about what did Eichmann do, what did Danneker do? They, Eichmann is the man who masterminds this. This is on him more than any other single person, right?

• 55:39Speaker 01

  And it's telling how important he is in the hierarchy in general and how much everybody relies on them when they're like, we have this insurmountable killing goal in mind. We have to bring in our experts. Yeah. And it's him and his boy.

• 55:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And it's Eichmann arrayed against Wallenberg, right? In trying to, Wallenberg is trying to save this Jewish population and Eichmann is trying to annihilate it. And we've done a reverse Bastards, a Christmas episode on Wallenberg. He's one of the great heroes our species ever produced. In the war's waning days, he was Eichmann's nemesis, granting fake Swedish documents to every Jew he could find. You're a Swedish citizen. You're a Swedish resident. You got a green card. They can't kill you. You're a Swede, right?

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, he reaches out your hand for the paperwork and just smashing meatballs in every single fucking one.

• 56:28Robert Evans?

  Go north. They can't deport you with a meatball in your hand. Oh, my God.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  It's your official Swedish paperwork.

• 56:35Robert Evans?

  These are not, there's nothing legal and legitimate. Only Wallenberg's charisma is backing these documents up, but he is so good at what he's doing that a lot of SSMN back off because he's like, look, if you're seen violating the law here, I'll make sure you get Your due when the war is over, right? And they're so fucking scared of him that he saves by some accounts 100,000 people. There's a lot of debate about these numbers, but it's in the tens of thousands at the very least. Personally.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  And, and these men know the war is fucked at this point.

• 57:04Robert Evans?

  No one, no one has illusions at this point, right?

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Everybody's fully and I have like, look, the guy with the meatballs is telling me he's good. He's fucking good. Fuck it.

• 57:13Robert Evans?

  Fuck it. I don't, I like, I, I don't want any more of his.

• 57:16Speaker 05

  Guy with the meatballs.

• 57:19Robert Evans?

  So Eichmann calls, uh, Raul the Jew dog Wallenberg and threatens to have Raul and all other friends of Jews assassinated. Someone subsequently blows up Wallenberg's car and he only narrowly escapes. In her book, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Bettina Stangneth describes Adolf Eichmann in this period as almost mad with a mix of desperation and megalomania. He could feel the walls closing in, but just as crucially as he feels the window closing, he feels that he might be losing out on his chance to achieve the only goal that matters to him at this stage. Winning the war against European Jewry. And this is important, you understand the Nazis don't see this all as one war. The war against the Jews, even though war against the rest of Europe may be unwinnable now, the war against the Jews of Europe is still winnable, right?

• 58:03Robert Evans?

  We have to pull something out of this.

• 58:07Robert Evans?

  Speaking of, have we done our second ad break yet, Sove?

• 58:11Speaker 05

  No.

• 58:12Robert Evans?

  Here it is.

• 58:16Robert Evans?

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• 58:40Speaker 06

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• 59:15Robert Evans?

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

• 59:22Speaker 03

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• 59:57Robert Evans?

  We're back. Boy, our sponsors really love being thrown to ads right after we talk about Eichmann wanting to win the war against European Jewry.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Well, hopefully the ad wasn't for like IBM or something.

• 1:00:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Critical partners in the Nazi war against European Jews. Yeah.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

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• 1:00:15Robert Evans?

  Oh, man, be a boss like Eichmann. Ew. Yeah. Ew. So the Nazi state was in chaos at this point. Eichmann doesn't report kind of, he's not technically on like an org chart. He's not directly reporting to Himmler, but he basically is reporting to Himmler. He's got regular meetings with the man. And so even though there's guys between him and Himmler on the org chart, Eichmann outranks everyone above him, except for Himmler, because he's regularly talking to Himmler. And so whenever there's a disagreement, he can bring Himmler in, right? And that's kind of how the Nazi state works, more than like officially, here's who's reporting to who. It's like, well, but this guy can bring in Himmler, or this guy can bring in Göring, right? This guy could bring in Hitler directly. So he's effectively in charge.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a whole power structure of just constant name dropping.

• 1:01:03Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Fucking horrible.

• 1:01:05Robert Evans?

  Absolutely, that's how it works. Now, Eichmann, as a show of how fucking important he is, he has access in this late stage of the war to a private aircraft that he can travel around what remains of the crumbling Reich in. That means he's a big man. And when he really wanted to impress another Nazi, Eichmann would claim to have personal control over the gas chambers at Auschwitz, right? I'm the guy running the gas chambers. That's his brag. Eichmann's colleagues later recalled some of Eichmann's most outrageous boasts, and these are all direct quotes from Eichmann. "I am a bloodhound. I'll set the mills of Auschwitz grinding." And "Blood for goods." This was, this is a reference to a promise that Eichmann made to send Hungary aid in exchange for Jews, right? That's the "Blood for goods" program. "You give us Jews, we'll

• 1:01:48Robert Evans?

  give you the aid that you need to continue holding on."

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Oh, God. That's like the most evil foreign aid package I've ever heard of.

• 1:01:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, "Blood for Jews." His favorite line was simply, "I'll inform Himmler," and his darkest boast was, "I'll do away with all the Jewish filth of Budapest." In the last months of 1944, Eichmann makes constant trips back and forth from Budapest to Auschwitz, dealing with Commandant Hess personally to ensure the smooth operation of the chief genocide machine in the Nazi toolkit. Stangnath writes, "He seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Eichmann talked so much and for so long that the people around him, ignorant of what was really going on, believed he might actually have been involved in the overthrow of Hungarian Reich Administrator Miklos Horthy." Wyslinski claimed that in Hungary, Eichmann boasted that he and Otto Globotchnik were behind the whole idea of exterminating the Jews. "Eichmann inflated his murderous lifetime

• 1:02:41Robert Evans?

  achievement to crazy proportions and believed there was certain to be a monument erected to me in Budapest. He threatened his victims with the prospect that after a final victory, Hitler would make him world commissar of the Jews." These are the things that Eichmann is bragging about. And you can see this as maybe he's lost his mind a little bit at the end of the Reich, or you can see this as he knows where things are going, but he knows that these are the boasts that will give him just enough flex to accomplish his mission, right? That's what matters to him at this stage.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  And I am curious, like, he's not a dumb person, so he probably has to know that the war is lost.

• 1:03:19Robert Evans?

  He sure does.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  But I am curious if he thought a lost war in their mind also include a complete loss of Nazi Germany itself, or if this is going to be more like a World War I situation where Germany just continues to exist, you know?

• 1:03:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's debatable at the point at which he knows even keeping that is not on the table anymore.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Robert Evans?

  But he, as we'll talk about in part four, he'll start, he's starting to make plans in 44 for what he's going to do after the war, right? I think it really is, it just is his personal response. He feels personally a duty to kill as many of these people as he can, even though the war is over, that that's what's important to him morally, right?

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  And it was his job.

• 1:04:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and it's his job, right? And he's gonna do it.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  He's always been a dead-eyed careerist, and if everybody else is failing, I bet he probably thinks the way to continue to stick out and feel great is to be successful when everything else is failing.

• 1:04:14Robert Evans?

  I will, I won't fail, you know?

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17Robert Evans?

  So, Eichmann is a master still at this late stage of shaping clout and the perception of clout into a weapon to get what he wants. In the case of Hungary, this allows him to oversee the slaughter of at least 437,402 men, women, and children in a matter of months. That is the number the Nazis officially document, so the real number is higher than that. Credible estimates of the number of people Eichmann is responsible for organizing to kill in a matter of, again, months, range up to almost 600,000 out of a pre-war population of 700 to 800,000.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 1:04:50Robert Evans?

  This is the most complete and fastest extermination of a Jewish population in Europe during the war.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  Fucking Christ.

• 1:04:57Robert Evans?

  Horst Grell, the advisor on Jewish affairs for the Budapest Embassy, later claimed that during this time, Eichmann bragged the enemy had promoted him to war criminal number one, and he's not super exaggerating at this stage, right? He would then repeat a German saying that translates to, "Many enemies, much honor. The more people are talking about me as a monster, the more honor I have for what I've done." Eichmann was so good at what he did that other SS men begin using his name in the same way he used Himmlers. When Kurt Becker, one of Eichmann's professional rivals, got stalled in negotiations over the expropriation of Jewish property, he threatened to get Eichmann involved. After the war, Eichmann himself would brag, "Every department was trying to squeeze everything possible out of the Jews, to Winkle it out by threatening them

• 1:05:42Robert Evans?

  with the big bad Eichmann."

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  He must have fucking loved that.

• 1:05:46Robert Evans?

  He does, but he also, he's smart enough to know, "We're not gonna win." And so now, this reputation, the fact that I'm getting accredited for crimes I hadn't committed, which is happening because I wanted that, right?

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  And I used to take credit for them.

• 1:06:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. That's a problem now, right? Now that like, you know, we're not gonna win, the fact that you're getting blamed for shit you didn't even do is an issue, right?

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my actions.

• 1:06:15Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. By early 45, he knows these days are numbered, and everyone, including Eichmann, increasingly knows that, right? This is part of why colleagues like Becker are eager to use his name. It's not just that it gets shit done, but it allows them to divert their own responsibility for genocide onto Eichmann, right? "Oh yeah, Eichmann's the guy making this happen. It's all Eichmann, not me."

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  I mean, it's the difference between swinging from the end of a rope, or doing like, five years in prison, and then getting a government job in West Germany.

• 1:06:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, man. Oh, boy. The Holocaust was awful. You know, we were all, it's like that scene in A Hot Rod where his friend's stolen the TV, and he's like, "Boy, riots are so terrible, you just gotta get out as fast as you can," right? Everyone's like, "Oh, the Holocaust, awful. Can you believe what that Eichmann guy made me do?" Fucked up.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 1:07:05Robert Evans?

  So, in the last months of the Reich, as it becomes clear to everyone what's happening, Eichmann's gonna become a pariah within the SD, right? People are like, "Oh, I don't wanna be associated with this motherfucker any more directly than I have to." And we'll talk about that, and how he gets himself out of this for a shocking length of time in part four. But first, Joe, let's talk about how you're gonna get yourself out of this podcast, by plugging your pluggables.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  I am the host of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. We talk about military history and history of genocides, war crimes, other uplifting things like that. So if you want to hear more about Stalingrad, we did hours upon hours about that, or other genocides like Rwanda, or the Armenian genocide, or the Herrera-Nama genocide, things of that nature. We've all, we've talked about that as well. So come listen to it and it will not improve your mood. I'm sorry.

• 1:07:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Speaking of things that won't improve your mood, the next episode of this podcast coming out Thursday.

• 1:08:06Speaker 05

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

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