For the Cause

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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, All of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

It was a late night in Eastern Europe in 1942, and Tanya was hard at work.

She bobbled and weaved through the dining room, delivering food to hungry men.

To the officers who sat at the tables, She looked like nothing more than a pretty dark-haired waitress.

Rumor was that she was the daughter of a prince from the country of Georgia, and she hated the Soviets for killing her father, hated them enough to work in a Nazi officer's dining room.

As she passed by the table of drunk soldiers, she paused for a moment to deliver a very special dish to their table, one that she had made herself with a few extra ingredients.

She smiled at the SS officer, who gave her a wink and took a large bite before offering it to his friends.

And then she returned to the kitchen, grabbed her bag, and slipped out the side door.

She did not want to be there when the poison began to work.

Tanya was no Georgian princess.

She was really Tatiana Markus, a Jewish femme fatale from the Soviet resistance.

Born in 1921 in Kiev, then part of the Soviet Union, Tatiana wasn't a soldier, a spy, or even a train killer.

She was from a large Jewish family and worked as a railway secretary in Kiev before moving to Moldova in 1940.

But like millions of others, she suddenly found herself living in a nightmare as the Nazis invaded the rest of Europe.

And she could only watch from afar in horror as Kiev, her hometown, quickly became home to one of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust.

On September 29th of 1941, Nazi soldiers forced the Jewish population of Kiev to assemble at Babi Yar, a large ravine on the north side of the city.

Over two days, Beit systematically murdered over 33,000 Jews.

and buried them in a mass grave in the ravine.

In late 1941, Tatiana returned to Kiev to the remnants of her friends and family left behind.

But the second she stepped foot into the city, she was determined to make the Nazis pay.

Tatiana obtained fake papers under a new name, Tanya, and spread rumors about being a Georgian princess and being sympathetic to the Nazis.

This helped her get jobs infiltrating Nazi spaces, like serving in a dining hall or working as a secretary in their offices.

This was the perfect cover for a spy, and the information she carried back to the Soviet underground was invaluable.

But Tatiana didn't want to stop at collecting information.

She wanted to take action.

So she started a campaign of deadly sabotage against the Nazis.

In one instance, she and her father attended a parade of Nazis and distributed bouquets to passing soldiers.

Rather than handing them the flowers, though, the two of them threw them at the ground under the Nazis' feet.

The impact set off the grenades hidden inside the bouquets, which exploded, killing four Nazi soldiers.

In the chaos that followed, Tatiana and her father slipped into the crowd and disappeared.

Another time, she noticed that she'd caught the eye of a high-ranking Nazi official.

She flirted with the man and invited him home.

But the second they entered her apartment, she drew a pistol from her purse and shot him dead.

Tatiana wasn't just courageous.

She was terrifyingly effective.

Her missions were precise, personal, and often carried out in broad daylight.

Over the course of an entire year, Tatiana killed dozens of SS and Gestapo officers, as well as Nazi informants.

In one instance, she even left a note daring more to come after her.

The note said, All of you fascist reptiles are waiting for the same fate.

Honestly, how do you not love this woman?

But Tatiana's luck, like that of so many resistance fighters, eventually ran out.

In 1942, she was captured by the Gestapo.

And even then, she wouldn't break.

Although brutally tortured for five months, she refused to betray the resistance.

On January 29th of 1943, Tatiana was shot by the Nazis.

Some sources say that she was buried in Babayar, the same ravine where thousands of Jews had already been massacred, and thousands more civilians of all backgrounds would be murdered still.

In 2006, Tatiana was honored as an official hero of Ukraine, and in 2009, a statue of her was erected at Babayar, one of many honoring the people who were killed there.

She didn't survive the war, but her legacy lives on, not just in medals and memorials, but in what she represents.

Tatiana Marcuse stands as a powerful reminder that resistance doesn't require an army, just the will to act when it matters most.

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On July 17th, 1794, musket fire erupted just outside of Pittsburgh.

On a sprawling estate known as Bower Hill, United States militia clashed with a rebel army of over 500 men.

America wasn't even yet 20 years old, and already they were battling their own citizens.

Both the leaders of this rebellion died in the gunfire, and Bower Hill was burned to the ground.

But it was still a startling defeat for the United States government.

The dead rebels were seen as martyrs, and the resistance only grew.

President George Washington ordered his cabinet to assemble an even stronger militia to protect the integrity of the United States.

But when few men volunteered, a draft was implemented and Washington himself traveled to Pennsylvania to lead the troops, the first and only time a sitting American president personally took command of a field army.

A militia of 12,000 strong marched through western Pennsylvania.

They made several arrests along the way, but there was no more fighting.

The protesters dispersed at the show of force, and the conflict seemed to subside.

Ironically, the cause of all of this commotion was not dissimilar to one of the founding myths of the American Revolution.

It was caused by tax.

Three years earlier, the United States had been suffering from intense amounts of debt.

In order to ease the financial burden on the states, Washington had implemented a tax on whiskey distilleries, six to nine cents a gallon, at the suggestion of one Alexander Hamilton.

The subsequent uprising would become known as the Whiskey Rebellion.

As the dust settled on the rebellion, it seems that he recognized the mistake of this tax, pardoning those who had been arrested for organizing protests against the whiskey tax.

But that was just the first step.

Washington knew that it would take more than a few pardons to fully disperse the former rebels.

Washington reached out to Thomas Jefferson, then the governor of Virginia, to put together an offer for the settlers.

If they moved to the territory west of Virginia, they would be offered 60 acres of land to farm upon on the condition that they use the land to raise native corn.

And all of this resulted in three important things.

First, scores of settlers took Jefferson up on the offer, causing a wave of migration into the territory.

Second, Jefferson would later be able to successfully run his presidential campaign on the promise of repealing the whiskey tax.

And third, the settlers who moved from West Pennsylvania to Virginia produced much more corn than they knew what to do with.

And so they did what every society does when it has a surplus of produce.

They made it into alcohol.

This process would eventually coalesce into a few key guidelines, at least 51% corn and a certain amount of time spent aging in an oak barrel.

The resulting whiskey would have a dark brown color and would serve as a cheap alternative to French cognac.

It's the only liquor native to the United States, and it would eventually bear the name of the county that started it.

A lifelong francophile, Thomas Jefferson had named the westernmost part of the Virginia territories Bourbon County, Virginia, and in the mid-1790s it would become Bourbon County, Kentucky.

And this corn-based, oak-barrel-aged liquor is obviously known as bourbon whiskey, usually just shortened to bourbon.

It's a common enough saying that you are what you eat, but it may be a truer statement that you learn a lot about a culture based on what it drinks.

And every time you raise a glass of bourbon to your lips, you're drinking not just spirits, but flavors that trace all the way back to the whiskey rebellion.

It might be a beverage, but it's also a curious bit, a food for thought.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting CuriositiesPodcast.com.

The show was created by me, Aaron Mankey, in partnership with How Stuff Works.

I make another award-winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show.

And you can learn all about it over at theworldoflore.com.

And until next time, stay curious.

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