Part One: How Heinrich Himmler Went From Nerdy Boy To Master of the SS

Robert sits down with Prop to discuss the early life of Heinrich Himmler, the man who built the SS into Hitler's engine of genocide. (6 part series) LIVE SHOW ALERT: We are doing a new Behind the Bastards Live show! In the Alberta Rose Theatre, Portland, September 25th at 8pm! All performer proceeds go to support the Portland Defense Fund. Tickets: https://albertarosetheatre.com/event/behind-the-bastards-live/alberta-rose-theatre/portland-oregon/ Sources: Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) | American Experience | Official Site | PBS https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/goebbels-himmler/ THE CAREER OF HEINRICH HIMMLER_0001.pdf https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/THE%20CAREER%20OF%20HEINRICH%20HIMMLER_0001.pdf Longerich, Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life (p. 13). OUP Oxford. Kindle The Unsuccessful Adolescence of Heinrich Himmler on JSTOR https://www.jstor.org/stable/1851620?read-now=1&seq=8#page_scan_tab_contents An Architect of Terror: Heinrich Himmler and the Holocaust | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/heinrich-himmler-holocaust An Architect of Terror: Heinrich Himmler and the Holocaust | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/heinrich-himmler-holocaust "In Memory of the Girl in the Red Coat:" Heinrich Himmler’s Annotated Volumes of Mein Kampf https://mjhnyc.org/blog/in-memory-of-the-girl-in-the-red-coat-heinrich-himmlers-annotated-volumes-of-mein-kampf/ https://ia803406.us.archive.org/29/items/docuv3/Books/The%20Third%20Reich/The%20Celebrations%20in%20the%20Life%20of%20the%20SS%20Family%20by%20Fritz%20Weitzel%20%281939%29.pdf https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/himmlers-bridal-bootcamp-school-nazi-brides.html https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/nazi-germany-1933-1945/himmler-s-secret-directive-to-all-members-of-the-ss-and-the-police-on-the-care-of-all-legitimate-and-illegitimate-children-of-good-blood-october-28-1939 https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Master-Dark-Arts-Yenne-ebook/dp/B004NNUY2Y https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/26/266698688/heinrich-himmlers-private-letters-published-in-german-newspaper https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-private-heinrich-himmler/id6505124720 https://www.amazon.com/Himmler-Evil-Genius-Third-Reich-ebook/dp/B01M2A6B3G/ref=sr_1_17?crid=E50LI9MCINFL&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.z6x_l5l35NMXS2OQuWFaVyTyeQToCbFtWufYLO0Ky4L51lUaUoGgVfmp9dpb0YgMMGMBzk6Ds5M4KY8XSGQdvzs_UWlPu3KkmHJV0_w1Lis71gwuHqxL4QpDLUxg_RgLfXjB7BuAQbn7kAstKkyA7w_NZpcXTr-nDXe0RoewTewNaEu0ci8AQ1anNJXxG-Dy.nKYUB17tVmFaGgeBMu1awu8zpzoH45_FAeO3Um6YpBs&dib_tag=se&keywords=himmler+biography&qid=1756935132&sprefix=himmler+biography%2Caps%2C139&sr=8-17&xpid=KnVwOODWUvtST https://www.amazon.com/Himmler-Evil-Genius-Third-Reich-ebook/dp/B01M2A6B3G/ref=sr_1_17?crid=E50LI9MCINFL&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.z6x_l5l35NMXS2OQuWFaVyTyeQToCbFtWufYLO0Ky4L51lUaUoGgVfmp9dpb0YgMMGMBzk6Ds5M4KY8XSGQdvzs_UWlPu3KkmHJV0_w1Lis71gwuHqxL4QpDLUxg_RgLfXjB7BuAQbn7kAstKkyA7w_NZpcXTr-nDXe0RoewTewNaEu0ci8AQ1anNJXxG-Dy.nKYUB17tVmFaGgeBMu1awu8zpzoH45_FAeO3Um6YpBs&dib_tag=se&keywords=himmler+biography&qid=1756935132&sprefix=himmler+biography%2Caps%2C139&sr=8-17&xpid=KnVwOODWUvtST See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, wow. What time is it? Oh, my gosh. It's Bastards 30. It's actually 1:17 in the afternoon, better known as my 8 a.m. I am Robert Evans, and I'm not good at getting up early. But you probably are. I imagine you're listening to this podcast on your way to work at the medical factory or at the whatever else job you do. I don't remember any other jobs but doctor.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  The medical factory?

• 0:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, where doctors work, Sophie. Come on, you know that.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  I'm gonna start telling my brother he works at the medical factory. See how that goes.

• 0:43Robert Evans?

  Speaking of doctors, our guest today has a PhD in performing? I don't, that was supposed to like rhyme something better than it didn't, it didn't, whatever. Prop, Jason Petty.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  What's up, man? Look, baptized, baptized in the funk, you know what I'm saying? I got a PhD in being me, H me, whatever that means.

• 1:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, see, that's so much better than the one I did.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Bars.

• 1:08Robert Evans?

  Wow, yeah, that was much better than how I did it. Prop, you are the host of a show called Hood Politics, which you can find the listener on this exact podcast network.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  I had the privilege of being the first offspring.

• 1:25Robert Evans?

  That's right, that's right.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  Of the network, you feel me?

• 1:28Robert Evans?

  Independent, and we are quite, you're the Instagram to our Facebook.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Wow, basically, I am the reels to, I am the stories to your, to your Vine.

• 1:40Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm, that's right, that's right. Ooh, boy, we probably shouldn't compare ourselves to Vine. That's not gonna go well.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 1:47Robert Evans?

  Prop, how are you feeling today? You good?

• 1:50Speaker 02

  Uh, feeling some, I mean, feeling the same low-level existential dread everybody else is feeling.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Before you, before you got on, Robert, I did warn him. I was like, it's a biggie. It's a biggie.

• 2:03Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I feel like I'm about to like, I'm about to, you about to ruin my day.

• 2:08Robert Evans?

  I, I, I feel like- Like I'm about to ruin several of your days because this is gonna take us a couple of weeks to go through prop. We are, you know, I try to vary the bastards and vary the level of bastardry to keep things interesting. You know, for the whitest variety of people, but I got a list in my head of the heavy hitters. You know, the big guys, a lot of big folks, folks and it was like, oh, you haven't done Juan Peron yet, you know, you haven't done Marcos yet. You haven't done Mao yet. And today, we're going back to the Nazi well. For reasons that should be obvious to people who watch the news, that's extra relevant right now.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:45Robert Evans?

  And it's time for us to hit one of the big ones. Today, and this week and next week, we're doing Heinrich Himmler.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Oh shit.

• 2:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, baby. Yeah, baby.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  The Scottie Pippen of Nazis.

• 2:59Robert Evans?

  The Scottie Pippen of Nazism, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's not, you know, Hitler's the Jordan, he's the Scottie Pippen. Obviously Herman Gering is Shaq, you know, everyone knows that.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Joe Dumars.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Shaq taking strays.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Dang, I was like Rick Fox, maybe.

• 3:19Robert Evans?

  Gering is like.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Rick Fox, great, oh, great callback.

• 3:23Robert Evans?

  He's not the worst of them. So I guess that's nicer to Shaq than calling Scottie Pippen the Himmler of basketball.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  God damn it, the Murphy Lee, fucking Lloyd Banks. Yeah. Who's the other second guy, Quavo, like, you know what I'm saying? The fucking offset of.

• 3:43Robert Evans?

  We're beyond my basketball knowledge now.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Oh, we're not even in basketball anymore. We went to music there.

• 3:49Robert Evans?

  Himmler, Himmler's, if we want to put it in the political terms, Himmler's the Dick Cheney of Nazism, right?

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Do you know who Quavo is?

• 4:00Robert Evans?

  I, Jose? Yeah, Quavo? Yeah, we've been acquainted for years.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  I wish.

• 4:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we're gonna need some for these. No, I have no idea who Quavo is.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  We're talking amigos.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're talking Raekwon and Ghostface to Method Man right now, dude.

• 4:14Robert Evans?

  Oh, okay. No, I know, I know Ghostface and Method Man.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:17Robert Evans?

  Well, the Method Man of Nazism is probably not Heinrich Himmler. I'm not sure who.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 4:22Robert Evans?

  Maybe, hmm, yeah, that's a good question.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  I mean, Meth is like, you know, that's, that's the leader. Or is it RZA? Nah, let's go with Meth. Anyway. This is old, this is old head stuff, like.

• 4:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I guess, yeah, Hitler's the method man of Nazis.

• 4:40Robert Evans?

  Although, you know, RZA, I think it was RZA who did the soundtrack to Ghost Dog, which I don't think Hitler could have done.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  No.

• 4:48Robert Evans?

  If Hitler is RZA.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  RZA is like-

• 4:50Speaker 01

  They're so dumb. They're so dumb. I love it.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  RZA's actually a genius.

• 4:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  And Jizza, the genius, is actually a doctor. Like, he's an actual PhD. But anyway.

• 5:03Robert Evans?

  Well, Heinrich Himmler was none of these things.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  At all.

• 5:06Robert Evans?

  What he was is a man who believed himself the reincarnation of an old Germanic prince who died around the year 1000.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Oh, word?

• 5:15Robert Evans?

  He's the biggest nerd of the Nazis. This is, and in fact, one of the books I have on this, Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts, which is about Heinrich Himmler and the occult, and we'll be talking a lot about that through these episodes, like, basically describes Himmler and his kind of fellow travelers, the one who were really into this German occult stuff that's gonna be a part of these stories, as like, these are, like, they would have been into D and D, you know, in a different period of time.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Nerd core, yeah.

• 5:41Robert Evans?

  They would have been the really toxic nerds, right? Like, the guys who are, like-

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Goddamn it.

• 5:46Robert Evans?

  Threaten to murder people over fanfiction about Lord of the Rings or something. Like, that's the kind of dude he is.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  The guy that's gonna argue that, uh, the little Ariel should be white because she on the bottom of the ocean.

• 5:57Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Okay, word.

• 5:59Robert Evans?

  He would have been, he would have been writing so many fucking letters to Disney and Marvel about, like, woke and stuff.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Worst reboot ever, yeah.

• 6:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah. That, Himmler is, is the that-est guy of the Nazi high command.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  The that-est guy, okay. And then you put him in charge. Here we go.

• 6:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:18Speaker 03

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• 6:22Robert Evans?

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• 7:22Speaker 05

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• 8:25Robert Evans?

  So if we were in a country where kids hadn't all been left behind since, you know, I was in high school, I would be like, this is a guy who doesn't need introduction. But obviously, he does need introduction, this being the United States. Heinrich Himmler is the guy who, he didn't create the SS. Like, it exists and has a couple leaders before him, but he's almost from the jump, the leader of the SS. It has very little history before him, and he makes it into what it is. And the SS, the Schutzstaffel, is, you know, initially starts as Hitler's bodyguard and, you know, several units of Hitler's bodyguard. It's kind of the elite within the Nazi party. And it turns Into a state within a state.

• 9:05Robert Evans?

  The SS is handling a significant amount of, they're kind of like the FBI CIA. Like there's division of the SS, the SD that is that for the Nazi state. And they are also running all of the concentration camps, right? Like the Death's Head units that have the famed, the skull and crossbones thing that the SS is famed for. Those are the guys who are running the camps. Those are the concentration camp guards. They're manning the death camps. They also, there are SS combat units, the Waffen SS, which means the weapons SS. There's like well over a million people in the SS at the height. It is the elite of the party. And these are the guys who are doing the bulk of the war crimes. Not that the Wehrmacht doesn't, but like the SS is the war crimes organization.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:51Robert Evans?

  And Himmler created them kind of, he wanted them to be a knightly order, right? Like, like he was very much inspired by the medieval, some of these medieval orders, like the Knights Templar. And his goal was to create a new aristocracy using the SS. Which is why, and to a big part, they're the guys doing the very worst of the Holocaust. And we have spent a lot of time talking about other SS men who are the implementation guys for the Holocaust, right? We've talked about Reinhard Heinrich, we've talked about Eichmann, we've talked about the Einsatzgruppe. And, you know, several of the people in that who are the units actually like doing the direct shooting, tens of thousands of Jews to death in the East.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:30Robert Evans?

  Um, and so in these episodes, one thing that people might find a little weird, we're not going to not talk about that, but we're not going to go into most of, we're not going to spend very much detail talking about the death camp stage of the system that the SS is a part of. Because we have covered implementation guys, and these are people, Himmler hires Heinrich. Himmler is talking to, giving orders to Eichmann, right? So I, we're, we're mostly going to cover Himmler up until the point that like the war gets going and the SS is running and the camps are running to talk about how he got to where he did. Um, and how he, he built the system that winds up doing the Holocaust. We'll spend less time on the Holocaust, just because we have covered the implementation guys, right? And.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  And I also think, I also think this is like, like this is the service that is needed at this moment. Because we all understand, there's been movies about find out.

• 11:28Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  There ain't been movies about fuck around.

• 11:30Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  And fuck around is clearly where we're at. And anybody who understands that find out comes after fuck around is going, guys, hey, this is fuck around.

• 11:45Robert Evans?

  I think they're fucking around.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  We're fucking around. Yeah, like, the flag don't get redder.

• 11:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? So I feel like, and like you said, the child left behind thing is just like, the ability to understand that four comes from two plus two is probably one of the most frustrating things that is happening, I think, in our political dialogue right now. Like, you, like, you want, like, you want a one to one. You want this to be as neat as possible, you know? And then people hide in that. Like, for example, like, when people talk about, like, well, ICE is like the Gustavo, and it's like, well, okay, in vibe, like, it's got Gustavo vibe. It's more like the secret police, but there's really no one to one.

• 12:30Robert Evans?

  It's more like the SS, right?

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's more like this.

• 12:33Robert Evans?

  But like, yeah, what they're trying to do with ICE is a lot more like

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:37Robert Evans?

  the SS. I mean, but again, none of this crafts directly. There are some things you can compare to the SA, the brown shirts, and like, I don't want to, we'll talk some about that as we go on, but, but this is important because, number one, we're going to be talking a lot more than we usually do about Heinrich's early life and childhood because there's so much on him. There's a tremendous amount of detail. One of the things, we'll talk about, one of the things that's unique about Himmler of all of the Nazis is we have almost his entire life and diaries from the time he was a little kid. Like, he kept notes on most of his life. Like, we have

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Fucking nerd.

• 13:12Robert Evans?

  most of his daily life up to a certain point, which is very weird and very rare with some, a historical figure like this. And so I want to try and, I mean, the show is behind the bastards, right? And a lot of these guys, there's just not enough information on their childhood to really get that far behind, but with Himmler, we will. And we're going to spend a lot of time talking about how he came to believe some of these weird mystical beliefs that he believed and how they influenced, because the SS Is largely formed based on his occult beliefs. Like, a lot of how he organizes it and what he wants it to be is based on these esoteric things he believes about race and reincarnation. And so we'll be talking about all of that in these episodes, but I should just dive in, you know?

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, see, I think too, like, it's something I've kind of been trying to think about, like, how to put into words for some upcoming episodes for Hood Politics is like, the actual, like, power and danger of a really smart, like, nerd that ain't afraid of you.

• 14:21Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Like, there's, like, that combo is dangerous. Whether it's they create a death cult like you finna talk about, or you turn into like a Nipsey Hussle.

• 14:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Like, Nipsey is, Nipsey, like, some of the stories from his childhood was like, when he wanted to first start recording, he just made a computer out of, like, scraps he found at a junkyard. Like, he built the first computer that he was, when he was a little boy, you know what I'm saying? You gotta, you gotta, you gotta roll in 60 crib talking about, like, assets and liabilities and investing his, you know what I'm saying? So, like, somebody who's a nerd, but is like, "I'm not afraid of jail."

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  You know what I'm saying? Can become either the leader we all needed or Hydrick Himmler.

• 15:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and Himmler, yes, and as we'll talk about, Himmler's, he doesn't have quite the courage to be, like, he doesn't want to get arrested, like, he's, but he also, he idolizes the guys who do, right? He really wants to be them. So, we're getting ahead of ourselves, let's just dive into this man's life. Heinrich Louis-Pold Himmler was born on October 7, 1900, in Munich, Germany. His family are generally described as middle-class, and most kind of short summaries of his upbringing. This undersells their level of comfort by a bit. We might be more accurate to say that his parents came from something, had started out more working-class, but had

• 15:50Robert Evans?

  Worked their way up to like the upper middle class by the time he's born. They are, they are more comfortable than most middle class people, right? They're, they're taking vacations through most of World War I, right? And that you, you have to be doing pretty well if you're able to still afford that in Germany in like 1916, right?

• 16:09Robert Evans?

  His father was Gebhard Himmler. And he was the son of a civil servant in the Bavarian government. Now, this is the early 1800s when, when Gebhard is born. And that's before the unification of Germany. Johann Himmler, Heinrich's grandfather, his Gebhard's dad, was the son of peasants from Ansbach who trained him as a weaver. So Heinrich's dad grows up being like taught to be like a peasant who's like weaving stuff. But he manages to, this is as modernity is really kicking in around Germany. And he manages to elevate himself up out of the peasantry by getting a job. He joins the military first and he's in the military. He's, he travels around a couple of places in the military.

• 16:51Robert Evans?

  I think there's a period of time in which he's almost kind of working as like a soldier for hire. And eventually back in Germany, he gets a job as a police officer and he works his way up to sergeant.

• 17:04Robert Evans?

  They use a different word for the term sergeant in Germany, but that's what he is. He's like a, he's like a, a upper middle level kind of local police officer. So by the time Gebhard, Heinrich's dad, is born in 1865, Germany is five years away from becoming a country. And Johann is retired, you know, when his kid is born, but he's still working for the local government. He's one of these guys, he retires with a pension from his police job. And then he gets a job basically in like the city council, almost that kind of thing. So he's like a fairly important man in town, right? And, and fairly, so the, the family is connected. Yeah, this is, this is Heinrich's grandfather. Grandfather, okay. Right? So this is Johann.

• 17:45Robert Evans?

  So Johann dies when Gebhard is seven, uh, which is normal for German kids of this area, era, and this socioeconomic group. If your dad is, manages to make it up to be like a fairly, you know, middle or high level local government functionary, Probably has kids later than a lot, a lot of other guys. He's probably pretty old. And a lot of this is kind of what happens to Hitler too, right? Like his dad is much older than his wife. His dad is a mid-level functionary and dies when he's, he's very young.

• 18:15Robert Evans?

  So as soon as Johann dies, uh, his wife, Heinrich's grandmother, raises Gebhardt, switches him from Protestant to Catholic. We don't really know why. Uh, this is very weird. It doesn't happen.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:28Robert Evans?

  A lot.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:29Robert Evans?

  The opposite is more common in Germany because Germany is a more Protestant kind Lutherans come from Germany.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Martin Luther.

• 18:37Robert Evans?

  You're right.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Is German. Yeah.

• 18:39Robert Evans?

  So the opposite switch is kind of weird. Uh, and we don't really fully know why, but by him, Heinrich Himmler's biographer, Peter Longrich, seems to suggest that her motivation may have partly been the idea that being Catholic would be better for her son's future career. Because where they are in Munich, more of the local government was Catholic. And so maybe it would help, you know, if he was Catholic. The reality of that's kind of unclear, but Gebhardt grows up to be a school teacher. And it's a mark of how different Germany is in this place and time to where we are now. That that's a big step up the ladder of social mobility. Like a teacher's a good job, right?

• 19:19Robert Evans?

  Especially compared to like, you know, what his family, their families had been doing previously. Yeah. So he gets it. He gets a job at a grammar school as a teacher initially, but he's so good at the work. He's a very good teacher. Most people seem to agree. There's some argument about this, but he's successful at least. Enough so that after four years as a teacher, he gets kind of scouted for like the majors of being a teacher, which is being a private tutor for a member of the royal family.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I was going to say, yeah, you get a little comfy job. Right. You're not just at the public school teaching, teaching a riffraff.

• 19:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. He still teaches the, the riffraff, but he is also now private tutor for a prince of the Bavarian royal family, which is like a big deal, right?

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:05Robert Evans?

  Cause among other things, you've got one-on-one connection with someone who is going to be very. Powerful and influential. So this is a job. Not only does it pay pretty well, but it connects you to the royal family. Now, at this period of time, we're in Imperial Germany. They're ruled by a Kaiser and people miss this a lot just because we don't talk a lot about how Imperial Germany worked. Even under the Kaiser, prior to World War I, Germany is not just a state in the way that we conceive of a state. It's basically like, I think it's like four kingdoms that are lashed together and they're all nominally under the rule of the Kaiser, who is the Prussian king. But each kingdom has a technically, like the militaries are all independent, right?

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:51Robert Evans?

  When war comes around, they all have to, like, they're all unified, like it's written in basically to the constitution or whatever that they call it. But like, when there's war, everybody's under one central command. But outside of war, like the Bavarian and the Prussian military, these are separate entities. They have separate leaders. They have separate uniforms. When World War I starts, I think there's something like 215 different official German military uniforms? Like, it's nuts.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. I do like sometimes mourn and even finding it within myself, like, just us living in the era where we're in, where we just honestly cannot imagine, like, our brains can't fathom other ways to organize governments. You know what I mean? Like, that, like, well, they're not all, well, government's not even the right word. You know what I'm saying? Like, you feel me? You know what I'm saying? So it's like, it's hard to imagine them saying, well, yeah, this is all Prussia. It's like, well, I thought it was Bavaria.

• 21:49Robert Evans?

  This is Prussia. No, no, it is. Like, they're all part of the same state, but also, these are very different things.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's not like a state, like, as in California. It's like, as in a nation. But it's not like a nation, because there's no such thing as nations yet. Yeah.

• 22:01Robert Evans?

  They're starting to become, this is like, this is while the modernity of the nation state is being, like, worked out, right? Like, that's where this is all happening. And, yeah, it is, so it is a big deal. You know, when I say, his connection to the royal family is to the Bavarian royal family. So he's not connected to, like, the Kaiser's people. But he is, his official charge, the kid he's teaching, as it's starting as when this kid's like a teenager, is Prince Heinrich of Widdlesbok, right? And he is the son of the Prince Regent of Bavaria. The Prince Regent is the prince who's going to become the king. Yeah. And Prince Heinrich is not going to become, I mean, he could theoretically, but a lot of people would have to die, right? He's not close to the throne, but he's still a prince, right?

• 22:45Robert Evans?

  So it's still a big deal. And, you know, Gebert is the son of a cop who was himself the son of a peasant. And so the fact that in two generations, they've gone from we're peasants, we're weavers or whatever, to I am teaching a prince is a huge upgrade for the family circumstances. They have moved a lot. There's a lot of upward mobility for the Himmler family. Yeah. And the fact that, one of the things, ways this benefits him is that like shortly after becoming a private tutor to the prince, he gets a permanent job. Basically, he gets, you know, the equivalent of like tenure, teaching at a prestigious private grammar school, right? So he goes from like teaching at a normal school to teaching at a really nice school

• 23:29Robert Evans?

  because he's like, I think basically the, the royal family is like, hey, you should take this guy, you should hire this guy because we don't want the, the guy tutoring the prince to be working at like a normal school, right? Like he needs, he deserves a better position. So they start making good money and it's not just about that they're making, you know, upper middle class money now, but they have connections now. He can, I think it's the kind of thing where you don't want to ask too much, but if you ask for a favor, you can probably get it and the favor of a, a word in someone's ear from a member of the, the royal family of Bavaria can move things for you. So now that he's established, he's got these, this prestigious job, he's got these connections. It took him a while to get to this point, but now it's time for him to get married.

• 24:14Robert Evans?

  And as I said, he's going to get married later than is normal for people here. He falls for, or at least decides to marry, I don't know how in love they were, a woman named Anna Maria Heider, and this is Heinrich Himmler's mother. Anna's father was a successful local businessman, he had died years earlier. But she brings a sizable dowry to the marriage, right? Enough that they they might have been able to live off the dowry. Right? Like, like, that's how come I don't know if I'd say that they're rich. But they are upper middle class.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  That's a that's a score, man.

• 24:49Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  I gotta tell you, if there's if there's any if there's any incredibly toxic things from the past.

• 24:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  That I wish existed is like.

• 25:00Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Like you already in love, you're like, I already love this woman. She's already choosing to marry me. And I'm like, wait.

• 25:07Robert Evans?

  But also money.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  Wait, hold up.

• 25:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, it was mostly downsides, but yes, it would have been nice. Getting just getting money when you get married.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:16Robert Evans?

  Obviously, there's a lot that's toxic about this for a lot of people, but not for the Himmlers, you know? And and part of what this shows you is, and this is something that Heinrich's it it kind of runs in the blood or whatever. The Himmlers are really good social climbers. That's primarily how Heinrich gets the way like he has good instincts for. This is someone I need to meet and be friends with, and they're going to like, help me get a leg up. And then this next person is who I need to meet and be friends with, and that'll help me get it. Like, this is something his dad is clearly really good at. The the way the level to which his dad climbs and his grandfather had climbed. Show that there's just a degree to which Himmlers are really good at social climbing, you know? They've just got whatever that thing is.

• 25:59Robert Evans?

  So Heinrich Himmler is born, as I said, in 1900. He is the second child and the second son of the marriage. They'll ultimately have three sons. It's a mark of how well the Himmlers are doing that when Heinrich is born. Gebert asks his student Prince Heinrich if he'll be who's like 16 at this point. If he'll be Heinrich's godfather.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  I'm actually kind of surprised he's a middle child.

• 26:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he is a middle child that actually

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Surprising to me.

• 26:27Robert Evans?

  It has an influence on the guy he becomes.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:30Robert Evans?

  Um, and Prince Heinrich agrees again, which says that like they have a really good relationship. That's kind of a big ask from like a prince, like as hey, will you be my kid's godfather? But he says yes.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, you gotta really like this fool. Like I've had like most time Prince is like, wait, I'm sorry. What's your name again?

• 26:48Robert Evans?

  What's your name again? You're the help? Are you serious? But he says yes.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:53Robert Evans?

  They must have had a good thing going on.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  How many, how many people have asked you to be the godfather prop? I feel like you're a lot of people's godfather.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  I've, I've been asked many times.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I'm godfather to like six kids. I don't even know the kids.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:06Robert Evans?

  I, I, I just godfather, I'm a godfather for hire, baby.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  You just send them money on their birthday, man. And they come over, it's like, here's, here's 20 bucks, kid. No, there's only like, there's, there's two kids that I'm like actually active, one of which lives on our street. So I'm like, okay, well, I'm her godfather. She lives next door.

• 27:22Robert Evans?

  You're, you're really getting into the godfathering.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  You're a good choice.

• 27:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 27:27Robert Evans?

  You're a good choice. Obviously it comes natural to me being a Robert Evans. There, there's nothing more natural than being a godfather.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  You are the godfather.

• 27:34Robert Evans?

  Uh huh. That's right, baby. Speaking of the producer, Robert Evans, you know what he liked? Cocaine. Maybe that's who sponsored this show.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 27:48Robert Evans?

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• 28:32Robert Evans?

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• 28:57Speaker 06

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• 29:42Speaker 06

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• 29:58Robert Evans?

  We're back. I hope it was cocaine.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Did that blow your mind?

• 30:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  All right, all right, with the dad joke.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Hey, man, I'm a god dad.

• 30:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's right. We get to make, that means you get to make twice as many fucking dad jokes.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  God level, you feel me?

• 30:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, god level dad jokes.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's awful.

• 30:18Robert Evans?

  So, as he comes into the world, the Heinrich Himmler who would build the SS into one of the deadliest organizations in human history, is from the beginning a nepo baby. His parents put a lot of work, again, they wait until their 30s to get married, in part because they want to, you know, Gebert especially, doesn't want to have kids until he can make sure there'll be nepo babies. Because he is a climber. And the whole plan that Gebert and Anna Maria have is that the family money that his mom brought in, that's like their cushion, is going to pay for a, you know, childhood for their kids of like prestigious schools. And particularly for Heinrich, for whatever reason, it seems like they are setting Heinrich up more than anyone else for success.

• 31:02Robert Evans?

  Because he's the one who has the prince as the godfather. And, you know, they'll use the money to pay for him to get a really good education. And then the connections they've got with the royal family, they'll use to get him a lucrative job as an adult. And that will help the Himmler family ascend further towards the upper class, right?

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 31:19Robert Evans?

  That like, we made it to the upper middle class, Heinrich is going to take us up to the fucking aristocracy almost. You know, like, that's the plan.

• 31:29Robert Evans?

  Now, depending on who you ask, you'll get different opinions on Gebert Himmler as a father. A 1971 article I found for the American Historical Review by Pete Lowenberg describes him as, quote, "a pedantic and conscientious man." Ernst Hommstangle, who is an early friend of Hitler and an upper-class German and aristocrat, who attended classes taught by Gebert at the private school, described him later as, quote, "a terrible snob, favoring the young titled members of his class and bearing down contemptuously on the commoners." And I could see that, it makes a lot of sense, hearing other things about the guy. Although it's also worth noting that Hommstangle gives this account of Gebert after he's fled Germany and sat down with the OSS to gossip about Heinrich Himmler.

• 32:14Robert Evans?

  The first profile that the OSS, which becomes the CIA, gives about Himmler, Ernst is a major source, as he is for a lot of these guys, because he knew them all and then he had to flee. And that's not perfectly trustworthy. This guy who was Hitler's friend and a big Nazi until, you know, things went too far.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:34Robert Evans?

  It's one of those things, I don't, there's a lot of negative stories about like, yeah, Gebert was an asshole. He was like a bad teacher, he was a, that aren't entirely accurate, because a lot of the first generation of historians work backwards from like, well, Himmler was- Obviously terrible. So we everything about his upbringing must have sucked.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And maybe that's not totally accurate.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  And yeah.

• 32:57Robert Evans?

  His, his most recent bio, or one of his most recent biographers, who's a major, his book is a big source for these episodes. Peter Longrich takes a more reserved tone towards, towards Geppard, and he depicts him as actually a pretty good father for the time period. Quote, and this is from his biography of Himmler. As a father, he exercised his authority, not through being unapproachable or through overbearing strictness, but rather through patient efforts with his sons. They were subject to a system of rules and prohibitions while their father monitored their obedience precisely and at times pedantically. His strictness was designed to have a lasting effect and seems to have been altogether compatible with kindness, love and affection. So.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  I, dude, I think there's something here. I think there's, which probably will play out later, which you'll probably correct me about. But like, I think there's something to the fact that like, okay, this guy is not royal. Hendrick's dad.

• 33:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  But he was around royalty. So I feel like he probably was able to see just what his, and he's a teacher. So he's like, I wasn't poor. I didn't get out, get it out the mud, but like. You're, you're around probably very privileged people and you like, I definitely don't want my son to turn into this. But also I want to award him the types of like value, like he's a teacher. So it's like the types of like, sort of like hard work, value, you know, trustworthiness, like, you know what I'm saying? You marry into this like pretty rather wealthy family. You got no reason to be a hard ass. You know what I'm saying? Like, because, hey dude, like, it's like your needs are met. Like, we got a good job. You know what I'm saying?

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Like, and I, I, I really think that like that. I wonder if that plays into him being like, yeah, like our needs are met. I don't have to like, I'm not, you know, in a gulag somewhere like, which I know I could be. You feel me? So I'm like, I would much rather be like, man, let me spend some time with my kids. You know what I'm saying? Like I have been awarded this. Gift, you know what I mean, of being able to like spend time with my kids because I see what happens when you don't.

• 35:02Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  You know what I'm saying?

• 35:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  So I could imagine like that actually playing a role has to be like, yeah, he probably was a good dad, you know?

• 35:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and I think he was, he's also, you know, we used to, the phrase that a few years ago is that a book about like tiger moms, right?

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:16Robert Evans?

  Which is this term you get for like a lot of like, like Asian immigrant mothers who are like, that super like into their kids' education and very hands-on to try to ensure their success. That's how you might look at Geppard, right?

• 35:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:29Robert Evans?

  So he's very involved and he doesn't seem to be emotionally unavailable, like for the time.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:34Robert Evans?

  But he also is, he's obsessed with his kids' education and with their success, right? That is his business, you know?

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:41Robert Evans?

  And so there is, to the degree that that's kind of like, it can be a toxic thing, that's also present here, but it's not toxic, he's not the, he's not hitting his kids. We don't really have any reports.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:50Robert Evans?

  And I've read a couple from the old to the new biographies of Himmler, none really seemed to suggest that he was like abused in that way, but he is constant, he is pressured from the beginning to succeed, right?

• 36:02Speaker 02

  I could see that, man.

• 36:03Robert Evans?

  To do really well in school, right?

• 36:04Speaker 02

  I could really see that, because that's your ticket.

• 36:05Robert Evans?

  To be somebody.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's your ticket, it's like, you're not born, you're not a born a prince, you know what I mean? And like, this how you gonna do this, you're not born a prince and I don't want you breaking up rocks.

• 36:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  So like, let's do this.

• 36:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and it's, it's one of those things where, you know, a lot of these sources will kind of try to depict his father as being like, oh, yeah, he was this really boring pedantic man, it was like super shitty to anyone who wasn't rich, and I don't think that, that's not, that, that isn't, doesn't clash necessarily with the, and he was also very attentive and in a lot of ways a good dad. Like, I think he was, the evidence does suggest he was like very much a star fucker, like if you were not of a good family, if you didn't come from money.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  I get it.

• 36:47Robert Evans?

  He and Anna will like police who their kids are allowed to hang out with, to make sure that they are, they're helping, basically like, oh, this kid's gotta be an R level or above, otherwise.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:58Robert Evans?

  You can't hang out with them, so they are, there is that degree of toxicity.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Running from the slums, man.

• 37:02Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah, where it's like, you are going Going to be somebody and I am going to make goddamn sure of it, you know?

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:11Robert Evans?

  But also it's not like the kind of thing where his dad is like mentally abusing him or like hitting him or like fucking with his brain. His dad is just bound and determined to make him a success.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it sounds like some like respectability kind of politics where it's just like, you know, you know, for us, it was like, hey, you know, keep your hair nice. Don't be wearing hoodies like, you know, speak clearly, you know, don't be, don't be using odd, don't be using slang like, you know, just don't hang with them like.

• 37:39Robert Evans?

  Exactly.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  You won't like make these people respect you. Now I get it.

• 37:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So in February of 1903, when he's like a little kid, three, Heinrich falls seriously ill for the first time. Uh, this has something to do with his lungs. His older brother is also sick a bunch. Um, the family I just think isn't super, it's not clear what's wrong. It's always said as like a lung problem. I think it might be asthma, like he may have just had asthma.

• 38:06Robert Evans?

  It, it's not perfectly clear to me, but that would make sense. Uh, the ailment is severe enough that his, his mother takes him and his siblings to the Alps for a few months as a cure, right? Like that's what you do. You get them up in the mountain air.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  Fresh air.

• 38:19Robert Evans?

  Your doctor literally prescribed to go be in the mountains with these kids.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  It's also at this time, 1903.

• 38:25Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  So like, what the fuck is asthma? Like, what does that mean?

• 38:28Robert Evans?

  They don't know, they don't know what the fuck they're doing.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  We just figured out germs like a month ago.

• 38:32Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. So like, yeah.

• 38:34Robert Evans?

  And everyone doesn't believe it.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  And everybody don't believe it.

• 38:37Robert Evans?

  We're still fighting to get the doctors washing their hands.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm saying. Reusing smocks.

• 38:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So Heinrich recovers unfortunately, um, but moving to them and moving to the mountains doesn't, you know, cure him obviously, but like they, they think, anyway, he winds up coming back, but he's always a sickly kid and he has regular bouts of illness that will periodically, whenever he gets really sick, his parents focus on him again and he's the middle kid, right? So, you know, once he has a younger brother, there's a kind of, Longrich sort of suggests, and I like Longrich as a biographer, but he doesn't really provide evidence for this. I think it's just one of those things where. He's like, well, it makes sense. Maybe as the middle kid, he savored the fact that when he was sick, he got all this attention, but he doesn't really provide us much of the way of evidence on this.

• 39:23Robert Evans?

  So this may just be kind of him inferring. When Heinrich starts school in 1906, so you know, three years later, he's still ill enough that he misses 150 days out of his first year of classes. Due to a variety, everything he gets measles, he gets the mumps, he gets pneumonia several times. And his older brother had had a similar experience with school, but still gets really good grades, better than Heinrich, in fact. And Longrich suggests that the fact that his brother is, does better than him at school is something that frustrates Heinrich. I don't, the evidence of this, there's not like direct evidence, but there's some reasons to believe that he is very competitive with Gebert and kind of has some insecurity over the fact that he never outdoes

• 40:07Robert Evans?

  his brother in school. One of my secondary sources for these episodes is a very old biographer of Himmler, just titled Himmler by Willie Frishour. And Longrich doesn't love Frishour's book because it's one of, it's basically the first big biography of Himmler. And so it's outdated. I think it's written in the 50s. And that is true. I wouldn't use this as like the prime source because it is so old and historiography has moved beyond here. But it's from the first generation of books on Himmler, right?

• 40:39Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, like, it's closer to when it happened.

• 40:41Robert Evans?

  It's closer to when it happened. And more, I think, one of the reasons why I do find it worth reading is that it sets up, you see in Frishour's book, where a lot of both misconceptions and myths about Himmler start because this is the first, like, big history. And I think it is valuable for that, for understanding where some of these ideas come from. And one thing that is interesting, as outdated as Frishour's book, is it's one of the first, it's one of the only books of that first generation that kind of describes the Himmler family life the same way Longrich does, because other people writing about Himmler in that period really tried to emphasize the toxicity and the fact that Himmler grows up, you know, with this overbearing father and he's this like, kind of psychopath.

• 41:25Robert Evans?

  ... kid who has these, you know, and Frischauer's account of it really does jibe with long riches in, in the fact that like, no, his, his upbringing was reasonably good for the era. Frischauer emphasizes the fact that Gebhard was a huge nerd for German history and like into archaeology and that this has an impact on Heinrich. Quote, "As a little boy, Heinrich Himmler sat on his father's knee almost every evening, ear glued to the lips from which tales of wonderful adventure flowed in a rhythmic studied language. Hero of the tales invariably was grandfather Johann Konrad Himmler, soldier of fortune who had hitched his star to any army that would have him, a rugged 19th century warrior who

• 42:07Robert Evans?

  would burst the narrow confines of his time and branched out into the wide world. Grandfather's most glorious campaign had been fought in Greece. He marched in the shadow of the Acropolis. He had seen Thebes in the pass of Thermopylae and brought back to his own humble environment a breath of adventure and greatness."

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Hmm. See, to me, I feel like there's like, just for when you're just trying to understand a person, an era, a moment, there's like, you, like you said, like, a lot of this, a lot of maybe this particular book is outdated, but I do think just as a-

• 42:39Robert Evans?

  It is.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  It is. You know what I'm saying? But I do think as a practice, like, there's pros and cons to that. Like, but the pro is to understand their writing in a time and era. And it's like, this is actually telling me what you thought was important in 1950 to point out. You know what I'm saying? Like, this is how you thought about this. You feel me? Um, and like, and that, and that keys, that keys in, that keys into us. Like, you know, the, the, you know, the somehow or another, the Edward Sharp in Magnetic Zeros, like, video resurfaced where we was like, yo, this song is trash. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, people actually go, I never, and then we're thinking, you know, obviously

• 43:23Speaker 02

  us who was there, it was like, well, it was a vibe. You know what I'm saying?

• 43:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it was a vibe.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  It was a vibe. It sat in a time of other, just, that was just the vibe. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's like, yeah, like, the thought never crossed my mind to think about these lyrics, you know, or that they're from Las Feliz, which is like-

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Bro.

• 43:43Speaker 02

  You're from Griffith Park, cuz?

• 43:47Robert Evans?

  Surprising Edward Sharp hate coming out here.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was like, what? By the Griffith Observatory, cuz?

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, but, uh, anyway.

• 43:57Robert Evans?

  And that's the kind of, you don't see this story repeated in a lot of the modern historiography, which I, I, I think this is kind of important to talk about this because, and this gets more in the books about Heinrich and the occult, and none of the, I think the best of them is Himmler or Master of the Dark Arts, but it's not a great work of history, certainly not compared to Longrich's book, in part because all of the books that focus on Himmler on the occult need to, it's the same problem that like Blitz has with Hitler and drugs, where there's a lot of really good work and really useful original research done that I think the, the bigger biographies could stand to have more of, but because you're focusing on the occult thing, you make it a bigger deal than it really was, right?

• 44:39Robert Evans?

  But I think this is important, and it gets left out of a lot of the more modern accounts, and it seems to be based on, as far as I can tell, Frischauer, one of his major sources, he talks to Gebhard Himmler, the junior, Heinrich's older brother is also named Gebhard, and that's who's telling him about their childhood and about how they're raised. And Gebhard isn't an unproblematic source, right? Because he's Heinrich's brother, but I don't really see much reason to doubt the basics of this, right? You know, there's some reason to doubt, was Himmler's grandfather, did, did his life really go that way? But the fact that Himmler, Heinrich was raised with stories of his grandfather being this great warrior and, you know, that be, like, their ancestry being important and like

• 45:24Robert Evans?

  German history being important, and this kind of like medieval, like these medieval stories of like knights and kingdoms, you know, he, one of the things that obsessed, as a kid, they traveled this like medieval town that still got its old walls, and Heinrich is like obsessed with these walls. They, he, he has a big imagination, and it's always focused on almost these kind of like the German equivalent of the Arthurian myths, right? Like, that's, that's what, as a kid, he is a huge- Again, he'd be playing D and D, you know.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:55Robert Evans?

  He loves magic and he loves knights and this, this very much historically inaccurate, but common picture of what medieval Germany was like, right? And I think the fact that his dad is sitting them down and telling them these fanciful stories of like his own father and of old Germany, that's probably where this starts. And Gebhardt also, senior, he's an amateur archaeologist, right? He probably spent some time even digging for old artifacts. He collects coins and he collects like some old weapons, whatever he can get his hands on, which is a hip hobby at the time, right? Nationalism is a fairly new concept in the early 1900s and it's sexy.

• 46:37Robert Evans?

  And a big part of German nationalism, because Germany is very new, the country had only come into being a couple of decades earlier, there's a lot of focus in like official propaganda and it just becomes popular for archaeologists to find evidence of like the Germanic tribes are ancestors and we're going to pretend that they were a lot more united and that German identity was more of a thing for them than it really was. You know, when the Romans talk about the Germans, they're not talking about the Germans as we know them. Some of the tribes that they, they fought with are ancestors to modern Germans, but some of them were like Belgians or whatnot and they, they just all got kind of lumped together because the Romans aren't, you know.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  We don't know what y'all are like.

• 47:21Robert Evans?

  We don't know where you came from. You're here and you're all kind of like have some similarities. So you're, you're all the fucking Germans, right?

• 47:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, they just meant y'all up there, like that, like.

• 47:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. But they got hammered into being, Germany has just been hammered into being by Adolf on Bismarck. And so, and you know, the, another thing that happens around this time is Heinrich Schliemann, I think was his name, finds the ruins of the city of Troy. Well, he destroys the ruins of the city of Troy, digging to something older, anyway. But he, he finds where Troy probably was and that's a huge deal in Europe. And it kind of ignites this whole like, well, there's got to be other, let's find these ancient ruins of German civilization that prove that we're a great and ancient people, you know? And Himmler gets carried away with this. Gebhardt, his dad does and, and you know, Heinrich and his older and younger brother both catch this bug, right? They're Germany nerds.

• 48:16Robert Evans?

  They also get into stamp collecting. Gebhardt's a big stamp collector.

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Wait, wait.

• 48:22Robert Evans?

  Family of dweebs.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Oh my god, he's collecting stamps.

• 48:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  See, there is a role in culture that bullies are supposed to play. Do you know what I'm saying?

• 48:33Robert Evans?

  And alas. No, because it is one of those, if like Gebhardt was raising Heinrich Himmler today, like Heinrich would be sitting on his lap as he sends like death threats to Disney for putting women in Star Wars. Like, that is the kind of dude, that's the kind of family this is. Speaking of sending death threats to Disney.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  No.

• 48:51Robert Evans?

  Don't do that. Legally, please, please don't do that. Don't do that. But you know, send a death threat to yourself. Keep yourself on your toes.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  No, also, don't do that.

• 49:01Robert Evans?

  Why not? It's not illegal to threaten to kill, well, it might be, actually. Anyway, here's ads.

• 49:09Robert Evans?

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• 50:08Robert Evans?

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• 51:19Robert Evans?

  We're back. So when Heinrich is a kid, his dad, one of the, like, again, his dad is very hands-on. He's making his, when his kids are sick, he makes them like keep up with their schoolwork and whatnot. On like the weekends, he's sitting down with them and they're going over what they went over in class. He's super hands-on with this. And one of the things he makes his kids do as part of his educational plan for them is from a very early age, when they're quite little still, not a toddler, but you know, when they first learn to write, he teaches them stenography, right? So that they can write quickly and they write letters to each other. But he also makes his kids keep a detailed diary and he checks the diary. Like this is homework he's giving his kids. He's not checking it to like, I want to make sure you're not doing something bad.

• 52:04Robert Evans?

  He's checking it to make sure that you are writing well, right? And it's

• 52:08Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 52:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  Reading your essays.

• 52:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Longrich writes that Gebhardt, quote, "encouraged them," his sons, "to use school holidays to consolidate what they had been taught." So they're spending their holidays going over their homework and whatnot, their schoolwork. And he makes them keep these diaries. And as a result, we have, like, most of Heinrich Himmler's, a lot of his childhood documented from the day to day, sometimes on an hourly basis, in granular detail.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, now we're back to the tiger mom stuff. You're right, Doug. It is.

• 52:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And you won't be surprised to hear that, once this fact comes to light post-war, once, like, people find out, you know, first the extent of the Holocaust and Heinrich's involvement, and then that he's got this childhood diary, all of these psychoanalysts, armchair and official ones, are like, "Oh shit, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make my career analyzing, finding the evidence of psychopathy in the diary of young Heinrich Himmler," right? This has to be the key to his madness, you know? It's gotta be in this, because obviously, you can always tell when someone's a kid if they're gonna grow up to be a monster. And this is bad medical science and it's bad historiography, working backwards from, you know, someone, what they did as an adult, and trying to be like, "Ah, the key must

• 53:23Robert Evans?

  have been in this shit he wrote when he was seven." And it's bad, and it's always real, like, there's, every analysis that tries to look into his childhood from this standpoint that I've read is bad. One of them, I don't know, it's the most detailed, there's a lot of nonsense Freudian shit in it, but there's a paper I read called "The Unsuccessful Adolescence of Heinrich Himmler," written in 1971 by Peter Lowenberg, I mentioned it earlier. He's an American psychoanalyst and a historian, who, my analysis of him is that, as a young man, he discovered Freud and never looked back. And there's a lot of, there's a lot that's good in this paper, because he does go over all of the diary, which is not a thing I am able to do, is in detail, read

• 54:04Robert Evans?

  everything. And, and there's a lot of interesting stuff you get, and it's also married to, like, "And this is evidence of his anal fixation. This is evidence of a schizoid personality." It's like, man, none of this is real psych, like, we know this is all nonsense now. And you also can't psychoanalyze a child from this diary that is-

• 54:23Speaker 02

  No.

• 54:24Robert Evans?

  His diary is like, most of it is not, "Here are my thoughts and feelings that I'm pouring out." It is- You know, Monday, woke up at X hour, ate this for breakfast, went to school. It's very, very just nuts and bolts.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm like, you're stretching the term diary here. I'm like, no, this is, my daddy's making me write this.

• 54:42Robert Evans?

  Right, exactly.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  So like, I'm not gonna put nothing deep about my soul in this.

• 54:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  It's homework.

• 54:48Robert Evans?

  And there's, so I, I don't include a lot of his analysis of this, just because he's going way too far. But there, there are some really good things that he does make a note of, right? That are worth us quoting. And one of this is something that he writes about Heinrich's opinion of his mother, Anna. Quote, "Little is known about her. Unlike Gebhard Himmler, she scarcely receives mention in her son's diary." And I don't think this is, I don't see much evidence that he hated his mom. I think it's just, he doesn't think about his mom much as a person, right? Like, she is not, this is, it says a lot about his attitude towards women, which is consistent for his life. He's not all that interested in his mother, right? Or her influence on him.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, that to me is like, if you, like, if you wanna do, if you wanna do fake science.

• 55:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  It like, you actually miss what's really there. You know what I mean? What's actually really is interesting. Cause it's not like this is not.

• 55:40Robert Evans?

  This is useful, right?

• 55:41Speaker 02

  It's useful, but you so looking for Oedipus and shit.

• 55:45Robert Evans?

  And then he goes into like, ah, clear evidence of his psychopathies.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, no.

• 55:49Robert Evans?

  That's not in there yet.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  But here's what it is showing you.

• 55:52Robert Evans?

  But this is interesting, yeah.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 55:55Robert Evans?

  So I'm trying to pull the stuff that is interesting out of this paper without including a lot of the Freudian shit that I think is going way too far. But, um, so, um, there are, again, a lot of interesting details in here. And I'll quote another one. Heinrich Himmler always maintained a high awareness of rank and titles. He meticulously referred to the correct title and social status of anyone mentioned in his diary. And this is both, obviously, he's being raised to do this by his father. But this is an example of what I said his dad passes down, as I'm sure his granddad did to his dad.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:25Robert Evans?

  The kind of, the kind of things you need to do to be a social climber, and one of them is always know who people are.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  Know who you're talking to, yeah.

• 56:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. Know who you're talking to, how to refer to them, and who it's worth kind of getting in good with. And Heinrich is going to be good at this, and it's, I think this is the start of his, how he's acculturated to do this.

• 56:44Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, now that is useful.

• 56:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  It's somebody who understands, yeah, who's in the room and who I need to impress, who I don't need to impress. Like, that tells us something.

• 56:53Robert Evans?

  And, and you, you get a lot, people talk a lot about like, okay, like, kids who come from poor families, versus kids who come from rich families, what are the different, like, you know, rich parents raise kids in a way that make them understand money better and how to keep it better, because the parents know how to do that.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:11Robert Evans?

  And this is kind of the same sort of thing, right? Like, the fact that Heinrich is being acculturated to do this is evidence of how his dad is preparing him to be the kind of social climber that's able to get as far as he did in the Nazi Party. Now, another interesting fact from this diary is that we see in it very little evidence of antisemitism, right? Which is not to say he is antisemitic as a little kid, his family is antisemitic.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:36Robert Evans?

  But in a normal way for German Gentiles of the time, right?

• 57:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:40Robert Evans?

  There's not evidence as a little kid, in the way that there is with like Hitler, that he is really obsessed with this stuff, right? That we don't really see. And this comports what's in his diary, just because we always want secondary sources. One of the people who talked about Heinrich after, you know, when the war started, was a German who had fled to the United States to escape the Nazi regime, named Hulgarten. And Hulgarten, what, like, realizes as an adult, when the Nazis rise to power, that Heinrich Himmler had been in school with him, like, they were classmates.

• 58:11Speaker 02

  Oh, shoot.

• 58:11Robert Evans?

  Like, they went through years of school together. And so he gives us some interesting details on Himmler, from someone, and obviously not an unbiased source, but from someone who was observing him, you know, as, as a young kid. He describes his appearance as, quote, "a child of hardly average height, who was unusually pale and physically very awkward, with hair cut fairly short and even then a pair of gold-rimmed glasses on his slightly pointed nose, and who was seen with a, quote, 'half-embarrassed, half-malicious smile on his face.'" Now, Longrich continues to write in his biography of Himmler, quote, "According to Hallgarten, Himmler had been a model pupil, liked by all the teachers. Amongst the boys, he had been regarded as a swat and been only moderately popular. Hallgarten had a particularly

• 58:52Robert Evans?

  clear memory of the unhappy figure Himmler cut, much to the amusement of his fellows in gymnastics. Hatred of the Jews, Hallgarten went on to say, was not something Himmler was all at all associated with at the time. On the other hand, he said he remembered Heinrich's radically anti-French outlook."

• 59:09Speaker 02

  And so he was just like, he was just like a six.

• 59:12Robert Evans?

  He's a nerdy kid. He looks, he's like a weird look. He's not like a handsome kid. And he's not physi-, he's awkward. He does bad in gym, you know, kids make fun of him for that. But-

• 59:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's the guy that like, yeah, totally like your teacher, who I was one for a while, where you're just like, wait, this kid's in my class? Like, you just, like, you just miss him. You know what I mean? Because it's like, it's not, I mean, he turns in his homework.

• 59:37Robert Evans?

  He does good, but not that good. He's not the top of the class. He's in the upper 20% probably, but not enough that like, he's super stands out. But like, the teachers like him because he doesn't cause problems. And the other kids make fun of him because he's kind of, he's kind of physically, he's a dweeb. Look at a picture of Heinrich Himmler. I'm not trying to be like, body shaming the Reichsfer of the SS, but like, he's a nerdy looking guy, right?

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  He's just a little dweeb, yeah.

• 1:00:03Robert Evans?

  He's not, he doesn't look like an Aryan Superman, right? And this is, this is, this is relevant because it's going to have a lot of influence on how he, why the SS works the way it does and how he tries to present himself. But it does, I think Hallgarten's recollections, along with the diary, make a very solid case. Heinrich is not particularly anti-Semitic as a kid. And anti, being anti-French matters a lot more to him as a kid than being anti-Semitic, right? And the fact that you've got this guy who doesn't like him, who isn't biased, being like, yeah, I didn't see much evidence that he was super racist against the Jews as a kid. That's probably the case, right?

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. He ain't like the French, though.

• 1:00:40Robert Evans?

  He fucking hates the French. Oh, my God. Fuck you, Frenchie. He's inventing slurs for the French.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  What a dork.

• 1:00:47Robert Evans?

  Now, thanks to his father's obsessive involvement in their education, the Himmler boys do very well in school. Heinrich is, is not the standout of the family, though. His grades are good, but they're never as good as his older brothers. And he never makes it to the very top of the class. He doesn't stand out. Heinrich's mother pushes the boys to be observant Catholics and is so insistent on this that Gebhardt actually has to force his wife to ease up on them with the, he's like, you're going way too hard on the Catholicism stuff. We don't need to be-

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Slow down, cuz.

• 1:01:18Robert Evans?

  You know, they go to church every Sunday. They're diligent about it, but like, she wants them to be, she's, she's way more into it than he is. One of my favorite weird details from the Frischauer biography, which is that very older, much older biography, is that as a kid Heinrich said his prayers in front of, quote, "an ivory statue of Christ, cut from one big elephant's tooth." Just a, just a sign of the era that that's, that's a-

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  Word?

• 1:01:43Robert Evans?

  They've got. Cool, I guess.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  All right, yeah.

• 1:01:47Robert Evans?

  Frischauer claims that by age 10 Heinrich could, quote, "reel off the dates of famous battles. The saga of the Nibelungens were his bedtime stories. The wars of the Middle Ages fueled for his imagination." And this is what Heinrich's into while the other, the normal thing for boys to be obsessed with is stories of Native Americans fighting like the US cavalry, right?

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  Mmm.

• 1:02:08Robert Evans?

  That is like-

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  Cowboys and Indians.

• 1:02:10Robert Evans?

  We talk about this. Hitler's hugely into cowboy novels, right?

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Robert Evans?

  This German con man named Carl May. That is the big, that's the Harry Potter of its day. It's the major thing that kids are into. It's their fucking Dragon Ball Z or whatever, if you're a kid who grew up when I did. Heinrich is different in that he is ju, he is a nerd for, you know, these, this Wagner operas, The Ring of the Nibelungens, which is kind of a precursor to The Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings takes a lot from that saga and from like, you know, stories of the Crusades and these other battles and wars in the Middle Ages. This is what he's obsessed with, right?

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  Dude, you don't, like, this, it, this also reminds me of like, as you're talking, like, just how recent this is.

• 1:02:51Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  Like, this isn't, this is pretty, this kind of just happened. Yeah.

• 1:02:56Robert Evans?

  No, for another example of how recent it is, as like, an adolescent, I think from the time he's probably around like 10 or 11 to like his, you know, maybe pre-teen or teenage years, he regularly attends jujitsu classes. He's into jujitsu as a kid, right? Because this is an upper-middle-class kid and upper-middle-class- Western kids have been going to karate for forever.

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:03:16Robert Evans?

  It's not literally karate.

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  I we get it, we get it.

• 1:03:18Robert Evans?

  Shut up. It's fine.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  No, we get it. Batty sensei.

• 1:03:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Frishower also claims, quote, "For many months, the boy tortured himself with attempts to learn the piano, but his father soon realized that the awkward fingers would not follow the command of his overeager mind. Most boys are relieved when their parents agree to liberate them from the attention of their music teachers. To Heinrich Himmler, it was a sad day when he was told that his hopeless endeavors had come to an end. For years afterwards, he would sit silently and listen to his elder brother, extracting heavenly tunes from the self-same piano which had defied him. On Sundays, he'd accompanied his brother to the church, where to his envy, he was playing the organ for the congregation."

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  This is, uh, I'm sorry, this is two positive points in the dad bucket here again.

• 1:03:58Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  Just to have this, a lot of daddies ain't got that self-awareness to be like, "Son, son."

• 1:04:04Robert Evans?

  You're not gonna make it as a piano player.

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  Stop, stop, stop.

• 1:04:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we're giving up on that.

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  Son, you don't have to keep playing this. That's not your thing. Look, you write the stories. You into the novels. I'm not judging you about it. You a great student, son, but this piano, just leave that to your brother.

• 1:04:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, leave that to your brother.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  You doing jujitsu.

• 1:04:22Robert Evans?

  He's better than you a little bit.

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  Look, son, be, be good at what you good at. You do the jujitsu.

• 1:04:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  Son, you are an amazing student and I love you. Stop hitting them keys, son.

• 1:04:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, you're not, this isn't, this isn't gonna work for you.

• 1:04:36Speaker 02

  This ain't your thing, baby boy. And look, I don't need, I don't need you to do, don't do this for me, son. Like, go find something you good at.

• 1:04:42Robert Evans?

  If only someone had the same conversation with Ringo Starr.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:04:47Robert Evans?

  So, uh, yeah, that's coming in hot with some Ringo slander.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:04:51Robert Evans?

  One of the many similarities between Ringo and Heinrich Himmler.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  Eesh.

• 1:04:56Robert Evans?

  Sorry.

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  Poor Ringo trying to get bars off in the.

• 1:04:58Robert Evans?

  He didn't do anything wrong.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  Writing songs. Like, let that, what, what Ringo do wrong? I just, I just yes and you, and then it was like, wait.

• 1:05:06Robert Evans?

  I'm a Pete Best stan.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:05:09Robert Evans?

  So now again, Longrich cautions for Shower's biography as a source, and this is again, not just because it's outdated, but because we're talking about like, this passage really plays up that he is super jealous of his brother, his brother's beating much better than him at this. And the source for this primarily is Heinrich's older brother Gebhardt, after Heinrich's death, talking about like, "I was so good at the piano," and he was, he never got over the fact that I wasn't as good, he wasn't, he could never be as good as me, right?

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  Alright.

• 1:05:38Robert Evans?

  Maybe there's a degree to which Gebhardt's, but if that's the case, if Gebhardt is lying about this, and either, I mean, Heinrich did try to play the piano definitely, and wound up, it didn't work out. But if he's lying about Heinrich always, you know, being super jealous of his skill, that's just as interesting an insight into the Himmler family dynamics.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:05:58Robert Evans?

  Either way, if the story's true, or if it's a lie Gebhardt's telling, it's evidence that there's a lot of kind of competition and insecurity between the brothers, right?

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  Or yeah, or just how he felt about it. Like, I feel like my little brother's jealous of me. Like, that, as you said, that's, I mean, normal, you know what I'm saying?

• 1:06:15Robert Evans?

  Normal, but it suggests something about the family and about Heinrich, right? That there is this competitiveness between the brothers, and that is something that motivates him, is his desire to compete and prove himself against his older brother.

• 1:06:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Robert Evans?

  For Shower's book also goes into detail about the Himmler family's obsession with their ancestors, describes a shrine in the family apartment that Himmler later named the "Azenzimmer," or "Ancestors' Room." He tries to get basically every family, and certainly in the SS, to have an ancestors' room.

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:06:44Robert Evans?

  This is a thing later Heinrich makes a big deal about. Longrich doesn't really talk about it in his biography, and I think it's because he later makes this into a shrine thing. I don't think this is a shrine for his parents. I think that's Himmler kind of working backwards, and trying to say like, "Oh, my father established this practice that we should bring to the Reich of having an ancestor shrine." The literal description of it is like, it's some pictures of like, their grandfather, and some things he'd owned, and some things they'd been sent over the years, mementos from family members. It's a memento cupboard, right?

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, yeah, it's like, you know, I live in, you know, I live in There's ofrendas everywhere.

• 1:07:21Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  You know, you have your altars.

• 1:07:23Robert Evans?

  That's what this is.

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  It's not like an altar altar.

• 1:07:26Robert Evans?

  No, no. And Himmler gets super into the occult and will make this into, and I think Himmler is exaggerating what this was. This is just like a pretty normal thing for us to have. So by 1914, which is when the World War One is gonna break out. Heinrich is a promising teenage boy. He's 13, 14 years old this year. He's doing well in school and he's just a couple of years away from entering the working world. If he had been a poor kid, he would be functionally an adult working at this point in time, right? And the plan is when he, in a couple of years, two or three more years, when he's ready, he'll use the influence of his godfather to secure him a place in a really good school. And that'll help him secure a really good job and he'll elevate the family, right?

• 1:08:10Robert Evans?

  Unfortunately for everyone, world events are going to conspire to stop this future from coming into existence. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand was gunned down in Sarajevo by a crazed Bernard Montgomery Sanders, Heinrich Himmler was on vacation with his family on the Austrian border. Look, Sophie, the truth has to get out, you know?

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  You guys don't understand that.

• 1:08:29Robert Evans?

  Someone has to stop him.

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  Listen, time travel has existed for a long time. And I'm telling you, Bernard Sanders has got around, you know what I'm saying?

• 1:08:36Robert Evans?

  He's gotten around, you know?

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, he actually, he was actually even the group that signed Franz Ferdinand.

• 1:08:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The band as well.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  The band, yeah, they started, he signed a band too.

• 1:08:46Robert Evans?

  Every time there's a Franz Ferdinand in history, Bernie Sanders is involved.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  It's really Bernie.

• 1:08:49Robert Evans?

  Did he stab Caesar? You can't prove he didn't, so he must have. So the initial events, when, because Heinrich's on vacation with his family when the Archduke gets assassinated and like the chain of events that leads inevitably to war start off. He responds to this initial outbreak as just another, and like the beginning of the war as like just kind of another part of the day. His July 29th diary entry reads, Gebert's birthday, outbreak, and this is his brother, outbreak of war between Austria and Serbia, excursion to Lake Waging.

• 1:09:21Speaker 02

  I mean, he's 19.

• 1:09:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  So let's like, let's give him that.

• 1:09:25Robert Evans?

  His birthday, Austria and Serbia go to war, we go to the lake, you know, yeah.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I imagine like, yeah, like, that war for him is as far away as like, you know what I'm saying? Like, you know?

• 1:09:38Robert Evans?

  It's initially like, he doesn't know what it's gonna be, right?

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:41Robert Evans?

  And Longrich, especially because Austria and Serbia, like the Balkans, they're always, shit's always going down there, right?

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  You don't even know, like, what, yeah, what is, like, you don't know what they are. What is Austria-Hungary? Like, where's, where's the line at?

• 1:09:54Robert Evans?

  And obviously, he knows, but this is a little, for him, it's like, it's like you hearing like, oh, you know, Israel's exchanging missiles with Hamas again.

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  That's what I'm trying to say, yeah.

• 1:10:03Robert Evans?

  Like, prior to October 7th, right? Now, obviously, things are much, like, everything's been escalated significantly, you know, with the genocide and whatnot going on. But like, five or six years ago, you hear, oh, there's another exchange of missiles, right?

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. I was at this, uh, I was at this event one time, like, way up in the, uh, mountains in Utah, right?

• 1:10:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  The event with just these, like, people, like, fuck off money. And like, years ago, this was years ago, and then there was this, you remember, uh, at, what was happening with the Kurds at the Syrian border? Like, maybe about like, you know, five, six years ago, maybe now, seven years ago, right?

• 1:10:36Robert Evans?

  That would have been almost seven years ago, yeah.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, you was actually there, now that I think about it, right? So I was talking about it, and like I said, I'm at this event with these very wealthy people, uh, and this lady who was clearly like, clearly from the region, you know what I mean? Like, so we're talking about the situation, and she was like, wait, what are you talking about? I don't think I heard of that. And in my head, I'm judging her, like, man, see, this is what happens, man, you know what I'm saying? You get wealthy, and then she goes, oh, no, you don't understand, I'm from Beirut.

• 1:11:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:08Speaker 02

  I was like, oh.

• 1:11:09Robert Evans?

  Oh.

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  She was like, I'm born and raised in Beirut, I went, like, you're like, your, your school bus was blown out, like, the windows were blown out, because the martyr hit it yesterday. You know what I'm saying? So I'm like, oh, never mind, I apologize, carry on, joke's on me.

• 1:11:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, and that's kind of like, this is, yeah, it's another, oh, these, these countries that like, you know, this place where there's always a conflict, there's a conflict. However, he goes back kind of later, once it, because I think probably within hours, maybe a couple of days, it becomes clear that this is more severe. And he goes back to his initial entry and he like, he erases some stuff and he, he underlines the announcement of the outbreak of war later in red. And he writes the sentence, proclamation of a state of war. Once Germany declares war. So he goes back to his notes, once it becomes clear, uh, this is more severe. And he writes, he lists out the things that are happening as they're happening. Quote, number one, Germany mobilizes the second army corps, even the landstorm, which is like the, their, their national guard type units.

• 1:12:08Robert Evans?

  Number two, played in the garden in the morning, afternoon as well. 7:30, Germany declares war on Russia. Three, attacks on the French and Russian borders, planes and spies. We are packing up right away. So you, you get this, this is what's so interesting. You get this idea of like, starts out, we're playing in the garden and in the morning and the afternoon. And then I hear that like Germany has declared war. And then like, there's fighting on the borders already. There's planes, there's reports of spies. We're packing up, we're leaving, we're ending our vacation early. Things have gotten bad very quickly. You get that. It's so interesting.

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  There's something about that, that's, yeah, that's so modern. That's like so close. Like, you know, I live in not even an eight minute drive from the Alameda courthouse where the ICE, people that have been detained by ICE are like, I can, like, I hear when like the smoke, like I can hear them. You know what I mean? And it's like, you're, so I'm going, oh, made coffee, dropped soul off at school. Oh, heard some martyrs, heard some bombs go off. You know what I'm saying? Oh, there's some helicopters. You know what I'm saying? And it's like, I should go pick up my daughter. Like, you know, like, like just-

• 1:13:15Robert Evans?

  Maybe I'm gonna go grab her, yeah.

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

  Let me go pick, let me go pick her up. You feel me? Like, and then it's like, you drop her off and then me and my wife are like, we going to march? Yeah, we're going to march. So then we leave to go to, you know what I mean? So just like, that's that reality of like, or yeah, like you're scrolling through your feed and yeah, there's a, there's a mass starvation. On purpose happening and then the next one is some sort of joke about, you know, Edward Sharp, you know what I'm saying is the next thing you're looking at is just something so real about him saying, yeah, like,

• 1:13:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's super interesting. You very rarely get that.

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:47Robert Evans?

  And it's, this is the only member of the Nazi High Command that we have this kind of granular detail on. Like you get, there's pieces of like, there's that famous picture of like Hitler in Berlin when the Kaiser declares war. You can see him in the crowd, like you can literally find Hitler. It's a thing he wrote about and like, that's really interesting. For Heinrich, we've got almost like a minute to minute list of like, what's happening to him as a kid as the war breaks out. That's so interesting. And it's part of why these episodes, there's going to be so many of them. We'll try to keep it to two weeks, but there might be more than four episodes in those two weeks. Because we've got to close this episode out now, Prop. We're over an hour. So, you know, you got any pluggables to plug down at the end, dear?

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, dude, Hood Politics with Prop, man. We've been really trying to step our game up over here.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Tell them about the tap in.

• 1:14:31Speaker 02

  So we do a Friday tap in, which are like, you know, 10 minute things that are, yeah, just like little extra thoughts, you know what I mean? Some of them are, you know, a little, little more about me. We're, I'm releasing a poetry album about like the end of the world. So we're going to be talking about a lot of that on the tap in. And yeah, man, we've been doing that. Terraform's back. The Cold Brew's back. It's not online yet, but it's back finally.

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  Praise be.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  Praise be. Finally, dog.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  Bro, I'm telling you.

• 1:15:08Speaker 02

  Business lessons.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Listen.

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So the Cold Brew's back.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  I need it. I need the energy.

• 1:15:15Robert Evans?

  And also, folks, we are currently raising money for the Portland Bail Fund. If you Google donor box, one word, Defense Fund PDX fundraiser, you can find the fundraiser. Yeah, that would help a lot if you want to donate money to the bail fund. They help bail out primarily homeless people who, you know, it helps them get out, it helps them fight their case. You're a lot less likely to go to prison if you're out on bail as opposed to locked up. They do not, they bail out, anyone with the exception of like domestic abuse clients, right? So it's, it's a good fundraiser. They could use your help. Donor Box Defense Fund PDX fundraiser.

• 1:15:56Robert Evans?

  Just Google that. It'll take you right to it. Thank you all so much. Go to hell. I love you.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedi.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/behindthebastards.

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