Part Three: Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history.

We are talking about Adolf Eichmann this week and last week.

Last week, we got through his childhood and his early rise through the SD, which is the SS's security division,

to become the, in his words, czar of the Jews for Nazi Germany.

And today, with our guest, Joe Kasabian, we're talking about what happens to Eichmann as the war moves towards its final phase.

How you doing, Joe?

You excited to hear about this guy?

You think he's going to finally break good in this last two parts?

I got to say, I'm not super optimistic that he's going to have a redemption arc.

I dressed up for this episode because I was surprised last time.

So now I'm just wearing a shirt that says all pain.

Yeah.

I'm treating this like people were treating like the second half of Andor, where they were hoping their favorite like monster Imperial characters were like, oh, this guy's going to totally turn out good at the end, right?

Yeah, this is our moment like that for Eichmann.

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

No, no.

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Where we left off in part two,

he had gone on a fact-finding mission to Eastern Europe in the fairly early stages of Operation Barbarossa, where the first parts of what we now know as the actual killing stage of the Holocaust began, which was a mix of, you know, gas bands showing up outside of various villages and Einset's group and units just doing mass shootings.

Well, Eichmann's watching all that and he's taking taking notes and he's figuring out how do you actually kill a lot of, like a shitload of people, like more people, like as many, more people than would have died in a war a generation or two ago.

We've got to like figure out how to get rid of, while we're fighting a war, how do we do that, right?

And all of this is preparation for a big old meeting they're going to have called the Von Say Conference in early 1942.

So that's where we are right now.

And yeah, that's what we're hurtling towards at the moment.

And the problem the Nazis Nazis are dealing with as the war in the East starts to turn against them is they've got a logistical hurdle on their hands.

They have captured way more Jews than they know how to handle, and they have no real process for dealing with them.

If you think back to the numbers we were talking about in the first parts of this series, they're dealing with a couple of hundred thousand people at a time as they take over Austria, as they take over

Czechoslovakia, and then more when they take over Poland.

But now that they've captured this huge chunk of what had been the Soviet Union, they got millions of people on their hands, right?

And these earlier decisions they'd had to make about what should we do?

Do we deport these people?

Do we find a place for them?

The decision quickly moves towards like all we can do is annihilate them, right?

But we have a limit in our war material and a limit in how many soldiers we can have actually kill people.

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

and drink themselves to death by turning them into executioners.

That's a major problem for the SS at this stage, right?

So many of the sources that you'll find on Eichmann will point out that he never really wrote policy, right?

He was just an implementation guy.

And this is accurate technically in some ways, but I don't think it is in a way that matters, right?

Eichmann does help.

Eichmann wasn't a policy wonk, was he?

Yeah, he really kind of was, right?

He's not the author of a bunch of stuff, but he's like, he's part of the process of authoring a lot of things.

And he does help create policies, particularly like where the treatment of people with partial Jewish ancestry is concerned.

And he's got this foundational role in how the Nazi state interacts with captured Jewish communities and deports them, right?

And that's, that's not, he's not literally writing out policies all the time, but he is effectively making policy in all but name.

Now, that said, he doesn't give the order to start the Holocaust, right?

That's obviously not his call.

That happens way above his head, which begs the question then, who does, right?

You would expect in an organization as hierarchical as the Nazis, there's someone we can trace to like, and this is the moment the order was given, right?

We don't actually, we don't directly have that, right?

We know Eichmann helps organize and facilitate the Vonsei conference where it's planned, and this is on orders of his boss, Reinhard Heydrich, and Heydrich takes his orders, you know, from Himmler and from Hitler, but we don't have any record of Himmler or Hitler saying, okay, it's time to do the Holocaust now, right?

Because that's just not the way any of this works, right?

And man, man, has that led to a lot of problems and Holocaust denial and Hitler rehabilitation and

fucking name it.

Yeah,

we have no evidence of Hitler saying we've got to do this.

And that kind of feeds into, at the time, a lot of people in Nazi Germany who were often annoyed or even horrified by aspects of the regime, by things the SS and the SD did, right?

Would be like, well, but Hitler clearly doesn't know about this, right?

Like he's got, he can't have any idea this is going on.

And this is something Hitler, you know, this is the smart way to play shit as a totalitarian dictator.

You don't want your name attached to everything the regime is doing, especially shit that's not going to work out or that's more experimental.

You need plausible deniability, right?

Even if you're Hitler.

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

Right, right.

That's just a bad business.

And the Nazi regime, again, there's this attitude, and this really is something that causes people people who even aren't trying to do Nazi apologia to do apologia for regular people under the Nazi system.

There's this errant idea that, like, well, normal people had no choice but to go along with what the regime is doing.

It was so dangerous.

Any degree of resistance would have gotten you killed, would have gotten your family wiped out.

At no point in the history of the Nazi regime was that true, right?

There were no

members of the Nazi state

were ever executed or punished for just refusing to take part in the Holocaust, right?

But most of them were knocked out.

Yes.

And people could take it, right?

Yeah.

Like, the Nazi Reserve Police Battalions had to volunteer.

Yes, exactly.

To do the Holocaust by bullets.

And they overwhelmingly volunteered.

Yeah.

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

They didn't even get demoted.

They just got moved somewhere else.

So much choice was involved in being part of the worst aspects of the regime.

And there was, in fact, internal criticism inside Nazi Germany, and the regime even buckled under that criticism at times.

When word of the T4 euthanasia program broke out, which was basically the gassing of

disabled people by the Nazi state, there was backlash among German civilians.

And that backlash was significant enough that it made Hitler, number one, they backed away publicly on the program, and it made Hitler wary in the future of putting further policies of mass murder in writing.

And I want to quote from an article by Kevin Sweeney in the journal Constructing the Past here.

Between 1940 and 1941, the German people's negative reaction became increasingly vocal and vehement, culminating in Hitler being openly jeered by a crowd watching mentally challenged patients being loaded onto a trade at a rail station in Hof, Bavaria, in 1941.

Ultimately, this negative public reaction to the T4 program and Hitler's sanctioning of it, bolstered by denunciations from Catholic and Protestant church leaders, forced Hitler to publicly cancel the program in August of 1941, though it continued in secret until 1945.

So again, people yelled at Hitler over this and he backed down, right?

Like that's such a critical part of the story of how this regime worked.

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

Yes.

Everybody was connected to it.

Yes, and there were other times where that happened, right?

There was a moment where they started deporting people who had like one Jewish relative but weren't like religiously Jewish and were married into, you know, Gentile German families.

There were protests and they had to publicly back off of that because Germans were like, well, but these guys aren't really Jewish, right?

What are you doing here?

You know?

Yeah.

Like moments like that happened.

And the state was always conscious of how far they were pushing people, right?

Which meant that the state could be pushed.

Now, because of all of this, there's not a clear order to like, okay, Hitler signed this paper saying kill everybody, right?

And this has led even within, and again, these are none of these people are what you'd call denialists, but there was a debate for a very long time, like half a century, between historians who specialized in the Holocaust, between what are generally called intentionalists and functionalists.

And the intentionalists argued that Hitler personally instigated the final solution.

The functionalists argued that it arose naturally as a result of the structure of the Third Reich.

Now, this debate is mostly done.

We don't really, this is like I think people will talk about in terms of the history of how we looked at this.

There's not much argument here anymore.

A preponderance of evidence that exists today proves that Hitler, basically, aspects of both of these are very true, right?

Yeah, I was actually going to point that out.

There's more,

there's a third camp which I generally fall into,

which is like Hitler ordered it.

However, a lot of it arose from the structure of the Nazi state.

Yeah.

Even if he didn't, it would have happened.

Yeah.

Hitler premeditated on the slaughter of European Jewry.

And also, the functionalists have some very good points.

One piece of evidence for the intentionalists that often gets cited that is important when we talk about Hitler's premeditation is an interview Hitler gave in 1922 to a journalist where he said, Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews.

As soon as I have the power to do so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he's like, I will have the gallows built in rows and the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately until all of Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.

That's pretty hard.

That's like not, you know, we we can state that as pretty clear evidence of intent, right?

Yeah.

And Mein Kampf also kind of really lays it out there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's not a lot.

There's, there's a, it's hard to argue he didn't say regularly what he planned to do, right?

It's what he's known for.

It's his bet.

It's his whole thing.

And obviously, the fact that he said all this doesn't mean Hitler wrote out the plan for Auschwitz or ever like he's not the guy.

He didn't tell everyone, okay, we're going to do an Auschwitz and here's how it's going to work, right?

He was like, we got to kill these guys, figure it out.

I'm Hitler.

I got Hitler stuff to do, right?

Like, there's a lot of tasks on my hand.

You guys lock down how we're gonna handle this, right?

And there were always other possibilities.

Up until, you know, things start to turn for them in the East.

It's not a guarantee that mass slaughter is the only thing that will be done for all of these captured people.

I think there was a point at which something like the Madagascar plan, if that itself was never really feasible, could have been done for some amount of people, right?

But at a certain point, the only thing they were going to do was genocide, and Hitler had repeatedly countenanced that and urged that throughout his career.

In 1939, he told the Czech foreign minister, we are going to destroy the Jews.

They are not going to get away with what they did on November 9th, 1918.

The day of reckoning has come.

Eichmann himself would later claim, under interrogation, that Reinhard Heydrich had told him about plans for the Holocaust as early as August 1941.

And this is Heydrich talking to an interrogator.

The war with the Soviet Union began in June 1941.

I believe it was two months later that Heydrich sent for me.

I reported he began with a little speech, and then the Führer has ordered physical extermination of the Jews.

Then Heydrich said, go and see SS-Obergruppenführer Otto Globotchnik.

The Führer has already given him instructions.

And,

you know, that doesn't mean that's exactly what happened because Eichmann lies under interrogation.

But there's a good amount of evidence to suggest that's pretty much what happened, right?

We haven't talked.

We'll talk about Globotchnik one of these days.

He's a really interesting Nazi.

And from what we know of Heydrich and of him, this is pretty feasible, right?

That something like this is basically what went down.

There's a lot of outside kind of evidence that this is pretty close to what happened.

Those ideas definitely would have flowed through Heydrich.

Yes, yes, through Heydrich and probably through Globotchnik, too, in a similar way to how it's described here.

And Bettina Stangneth basically argues that Eichmann was given the job of planning the Vonsei conference and helping to coordinate all the different government branches who'd played a role in the genocide because he'd made himself the Reich's gopher in anything related to the Jewish question.

He's just the guy you reach for when you're like, well, we need someone to pull all of these things we've been doing together and plan the execution of the Holocaust.

You've got Eichmann, right?

You already know he knows how to do this kind of shit, so you pull for him.

Stangneth writes, when others were at a loss, he was the man they called on.

For example, a professor at Strasbourg University was adamant he wanted the skulls of Jewish Bolshevik commissars to add to a collection of skeletons, despite the fact that they were still alive.

And Eichmann's the guy who gets pulled in to do that.

He's just already been the kind of, we need someone to handle this unpleasant implementation that's going to involve killing a lot of people, right?

Well, Eichmann's who does that, you know?

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

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

I mean,

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

from the Herero and Nama genocide, just later.

lands.

Yeah, don't

skulls.

Look, you don't want to go too deep into

the archive section of any German or British university or any American university older than a certain age, honestly.

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

Yeah, yeah, or Turkish universities.

Very few old universities.

And honestly, the Vatican sub-basements, we don't really want to get into those too deep either.

No, those should stay locked.

Yeah, those should stay locked for the good of all of us.

Yeah,

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

So, as the death camps spun up to full operation in the years following Von Say, Eichmann was set to the task of organizing the registration, collection, and eventual deportation or evacuation of captive Jewish populations to the camps.

By this point, he was highly placed enough, and the job was big enough that he often sent out trusted subordinates to handle the on-the-ground work for him, involving himself directly if he felt their progress was too slow, and acting as a wrecking ball whenever his people encountered resistance from local government officials.

And this resistance is usually not, we have a moral issue with what's happening.

Sometimes, especially later in the war, it's a mix of that, or they're just worried that they'll get blamed for it because they can see where things are coming.

But a lot of the times, it's more, well, we need supplies for other things, right?

Like, we have issues that are a bigger priority to us and the general government of Poland or whatever than the annihilation of these people.

And why are we focusing focusing on this?

And Eichmann will come in and say, fuck off, this is the priority, right?

Like that's kind of part of his job.

And one of his personal obsessions is ensuring that no individual Jews are exempted from the final solution.

This is more of an issue than you might expect.

It was often said that every Nazi had their good Jew or even recognized a handful of good Jews that ought to be spared.

And in fact, this extends to Hitler.

As I bring up on this show every now and then, he intervened personally to save his childhood doctor, a Jewish man who he viewed as a decent person, right?

And his personal driver, Emil Maurice.

Yeah, right.

There were guys, right, and ladies, right, that every, even a lot of the worst of the Nazis had.

They would be like, well, this person should be spared.

Eichmann, one of the things that makes him noteworthy is he doesn't have these people.

right and he actually sees it as his personal job to make sure none of the ind like every even the worst of the ss are soft towards a jew here and there i have to make sure those people don't escape the dragnet as much as possible, right?

He's supposed to be more evil than the most evil men on earth.

Hitler?

Yeah, that's part of his job here.

I've got to be harder even than the boss, you know?

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

He can be soft on this issue.

Break up the slack.

You know, Hitler, real soft on the Jewish issue.

Yeah, yeah, at least softer than he's willing to be.

And this is a thing that comes down from Heydrich, too.

Heydrich's very much similar in this attitude, right?

So, and again, it's kind of when we talk about his complicity, he doesn't order any of this, but his job is to make sure it's as total a victory for the Nazis as he can manage.

And while his role here is important, we shouldn't neglect to highlight other major figures behind the final solution, including Eichmann's childhood friend Ernst Kaltenbrunner, as well as Heinrich Müller, Theodor Daniker, Dieter Wislinski, Franz Novak, and a bunch of other young men in Hitler's SS and SD.

And it's really worth emphasizing how young a lot of the people doing this are, that the Holocaust is committed primarily from an implementation stage by very young, ambitious men.

An article for the National World War II Museum by Dr.

Jason Dawesy notes of Eichmann's peers, quote, none of them had reached the age of 35 when World War II ended.

They exhibited a terrifying combination of attention to detail and steadfast commitment to the core ideas of Nazism.

Reinhard Heydrich himself, Eichmann's boss, was 38 when he was killed by Czech partisans in June of 1942, just a few months after the Vonse conference.

We've already covered Heydrich in other episodes, and there's not enough time in these ones to discuss all of Eichmann's subordinates and colleagues, the guys at his level.

But we should talk about one of his men in order to kind of tell the story of several others, right?

Because I don't want it to look like, I never want it to be like a great man thing where Eichmann's the only one kind of at this level of importance.

There are other guys who are at similar levels, and one of them is his subordinate, Theodore Daniker, right?

And we'll talk a little bit about Daniker both because he's a a monster worth knowing and because his story tells us something important about how Eichmann operated.

Dannecker was born in March of 1913 in Tübingen, southwest Germany.

His father was a member of the comfortable middle class, as a lot of these guys are, and was a businessman until he died in 1918 fighting for the Kaiser.

Theodore was raised by his mom, and he grows up, number one, angry about the war, believing in the stabbed-in-the-back myth, like all of these guys do.

And other than that, he's kind of mediocre, right?

His family was used to being more comfortable than they are after the war.

He wants to do better.

He feels like he's owed it, but he's not very good at anything.

Like Eichmann, he's a mediocre student, right?

He makes no real impact on his professors, and there's no signs that he's going to go on to have a really significant career.

He's just kind of mid, right?

These are all very young, very mid guys who are given their only chance to be excellent is with the Nazi party.

Man, that is unfortunate.

Yep.

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

It's this thing I come up with with like guys like Ben Shapiro, like all of these dudes in the right-wing media who try to make it into Hollywood and can't because they're mediocre.

We need like a fake Hollywood where we like, we give these guys fake fans and let them pretend like they've got a TV.

This is what we can use AI for.

Just generate their shitty scripts.

Robert, this already exists.

It's the Hallmark channel it's the hallmark channel thank god we'd be in so much worse shape if it weren't for the hallmark channel yeah like ben shapiro could be cranking out or like the danikers of today or big balls who works at doge yeah yeah could just be just be cranking out the world's worst christmas movies year-round for a hallmark yeah and we we use ai to give them a bunch of fake fans so they feel like they're really making it and yeah i mean on a serious level it is important you understand people always a lot of people get this wrong when they act like oh, well, the Nazis were this, they came out of the middle class, or they came out of like the poor and the working class, these people who had endured privation.

And that was, you know,

there were these real legitimate, you know, fear and anger of this, this group of people who were really suffering that fed into Nazism.

Some of those guys existed.

And part of this guy, Hitler was that kind of guy.

Hitler really did suffer.

He had a terrible...

early life, right?

Yeah, he had a shitty fucking life.

Dog shit.

That's very few Nazis, right?

Unfortunately, that shitty life did not kill him.

No.

Yeah, Hitler was that guy, but like his inner circle, the people at surrounding him absolutely weren't.

There's like a lot of these guys were young, like you said, and a lot of them were mid.

Fucking Gehring was like famous and kind of well off, right?

Like a lot of guys were like that.

Yeah, a lot of these dudes are doctors.

Yes, doctors, lawyers, you know?

PhDs, fucking engineers, lawyers.

He surrounded himself by Germany's elite.

Eichmann comes from oil and gas.

Like his dad was comfortable from oil and gas money, right?

Dannecker comes from like a comfortable middle-class business-owning background, right?

These are not guys who are poor, but they are guys who are not doing as well as they think they ought to be doing.

And they blame that on whoever's convenient, which turns out to be the Jews and the communists, right?

So that's Dannecker.

They would own like a Mitsubishi dealership today.

Right.

100%.

Right.

Not a great Mitsubishi dealership, but like

a Mexican dealership.

It's not a great job.

None of them are great, right?

They don't own a Ford.

They don't own a Chevy dealership.

They're like, we have to, look, family, we have to settle for selling, I don't know, Evo Lancers or fucking whatever.

Yeah, their spokesman is like a fucking amateur baseball star.

Like, it's just not that good.

So speaking of amateur baseball, don't watch amateur baseball.

Listen to the rest of this podcast.

Or watch amateur baseball while listening to this podcast.

No, absolutely don't do that.

You'll turn into a fascist.

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We're back.

So Theodore Daniker comes up, kind of mid at everything.

When he's a young adult, he starts working as a textile dealer and he drags like Eichmann, he goes to a trade school because his grades aren't good enough for him to do anything else.

And he feels pulled to far-right politics from a young age.

Like Eichmann, for a similar motivation.

The Nazi Party offers him a chance to remake himself in a new regime that he wouldn't have been able to earn a place of similar kind of importance in the Weimar Republic.

In 1932, he joins the Nazi Party at age 19.

At age 21, in 1934, Dannecker joins the SS, initially serving in the VT or the SS Dispositional Corps.

These were essentially political soldiers at the direct command of Adolf Hitler, except in times of war, in which case they'd be integrated into the army.

This is the unit that eventually becomes the Waffen-SS, right?

It isn't that yet, but he's in the proto-Waffen-SS.

That's Dannecker.

Like Eichmann, Dannecker's first real job for the regime is helping to guard an early concentration camp.

In his case, it's Columbia House in Berlin.

Now, this was the only official SS camp in Berlin, and it was built out of an empty prison in 1933.

And like most wild concentration camps, which is kind of what the first camps are called, where they're like, we've got this empty government building or school or whatever.

We'll just throw some political prisoners in there.

We'll torture them, right?

Columbia House is noteworthy for being where lawyer Hans Litton dies, right?

We've talked about him in the past.

He's the guy who puts Hitler on trial.

So it's that kind of place.

And it is, Columbia House has been described by one historian and camp survivor as an agony house and the site of, quote, perhaps the ghastliest atrocities imaginable.

It acted as an SS testing ground for promising young officers, as historian Reinhard Burbeck noted: quote, this was not just a place where people were terrorized and tortured, but a school of torture.

The people who had been commanders after Colombia later turned to commanders of other concentration camps, at Buchenwald, at Sachsenhausen, at Majdanek, and Auschwitz.

So once you had gone through concentration camp Colombia, apparently this was the perverse career step in order to stay in the SS and become a commander elsewhere, right?

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

Yes, and this is also important.

We talk about how this is

like less on the intentionalist side of things, right?

And more on the other side of things, where you're like, well, they started building this system where you would train people up in how a concentration camp is to work.

And once you've committed the kind of crimes you're committing at Columbia House, you don't go back.

You only do worse and worse stuff.

And you don't always have to be ordered to do that worse stuff, right?

You are naturally, when you get put in charge somewhere, going to be even more extreme than you were at Columbia House, because that's just how this kind of thing works, right?

Your humanity is sanded away.

Even if the people who started off as like, you know, prison guards, say what you will about them and their ethics and morality, by the time they leave this place, they're just dead-eyed psychos.

There's nothing left of humanity in them, right?

And that's important, too.

No one necessarily orders that.

I want you to do 20% worse than Columbia House.

You just are that person by this point, right?

And so that happens naturally.

And nobody's tracking fingernail metrics.

Right, right.

Yeah.

It's like, how many fingernails did you pull out this week, right?

You don't have to do that anymore.

So eventually Dannecker gets transferred over to the SS Security Office, or the SD, where Eichmann works, and he winds up working under Eichmann at the Department of Jewish Affairs in 1937.

That same year, he writes a report urging the complete removal of Jews from political life in the Reich in order to bring Germany's Jewish question closer to its final solution.

In this paper, he attacks the Gestapo for being too mild in their application to force and insufficiently committed to anti-Semitism.

So like Eichmann, he's this guy where he's like, wow, the Gestapo really really soft on the Jews.

We got to get these people under control, you know?

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

The woke Gestapo.

These DEI policies have ruined the Gestapo.

He is that guy, though, right?

And

that's why he's the kind of guy who becomes Eichmann's, you know, second, effectively.

Fuck.

In 1938, after the Anschluss, Daniker goes with Eichmann to Vienna to help expel thousands of Jews from their homes and confiscate their possessions for the state.

And he brings this new expertise with him to Poland.

He goes to Paris in 1940 after the German victory, and he helps oversee the French police and their roundup of the Jewish population of Paris.

Now, it's not widely known or discussed that some of the most important early perpetrators of the Holocaust were local police all over Europe.

And these are not German police.

These are by and large, these are French police, right?

Some of whom had been part of French far-right parties, right?

And Dutch police.

Don't forget my local police.

And Dutch police, right?

But they're local cops, and most of them hadn't been super involved in the far right, you know?

They were cops before anything else.

And like basically 100% of cops in basically every society, their identity as police matters more to them than the morality of whatever actions they are asked to take, right?

So you can find arguments that French police help to shield, and this is true.

There are individual French police who help to shield and hide hundreds of Jews from the Nazis, right?

There are individual French French cops who act heroically to protect people targeted by the SS.

But modern historiography has made it very clear, and I would say unarguable, that as an institution, French law enforcement was overwhelmingly a willing tool of the Nazi genocide.

Oh, yeah, they were.

Yeah, yeah, there's just no real argument against that.

In late 2018, historian Laurent Jolie published The State Against the Jews, which compiled previously unknown documents about French police and government collaboration and the rounding up of tens of thousands of Jews.

Per an article in France 24, quote, Jolie told AFP that Paris police had one of the most sophisticated systems in the world to classify foreigners.

Some 125,000 Jews were recorded in a role based on the census the Nazis demanded in 1941, which Jolie has said curiously remained unknown until my research, because it got buried, right?

Of course it did.

In Vichy, France, the authorities were so eager to curry favor with their new Nazi masters that they began rounding up and handing over Jews without being asked.

Per Jolie, the Germans were not asking for the Jews who lived in the Vichy-controlled part of France to be handed to them.

Vichy was always trying to demonstrate its goodwill towards the Germans.

In other words, the French police in Vichy, France, create a problem for the Nazis because they're handing over more Jews than the Nazis can process.

And they're like, guys,

Jesus, like, we're the Nazis, but come on, calm down here.

I mean, that reminds me of early on in the Holocaust when the Gestapo put out effectively was like a hotline to regular Germans to rat out people who were hiding Jews or people they thought were Jews.

And so many people were ratting out their neighbors that the Gestapo had to kindly ask them to fucking stop because they couldn't handle it all.

God.

And now, thankfully, there's no SS analog in the U.S.

today that would put out a request for regular Americans to report their neighbors for

sequestering undocumented foreigners, right?

Yeah.

Weird how that's always what it is, right?

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

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

Yeah, and yeah, the cops and local government officials.

And yeah, just the guy who lives next to you.

Dan Ecker's job in Paris was to push French authorities to arrest and deport ever greater numbers of Jews, both foreign refugees who'd fled other areas the Nazis had advanced, on or native French people.

Some were told that these deportees would be taken to a new Jewish state being established by the Nazis, essentially a variation of the reservation plan.

Although this was known to be false by anyone with half a brain, there had been ample reporting before the German invasion about the early stages of the KZ or concentration camp system.

The first major arrest and deportation of French Jews in World War II was the Green Ticket Roundup.

Eichmann and Daniker both helped to organize this scheme by which almost 7,000 foreign-born Jews living in France were sent a summons by mail ordering them to visit a local immigration office for a review of their visas.

Anyone who showed up, as around 3,700 men did, was arrested and deported immediately.

Now, again, you'd never see anything like this, whereby people who are attempting to maintain their legal status, even though they're foreign-born people who have immigrated, would be asked to show up at the immigration office and then arrested as soon as they show up trying to comply with the law.

That would never happen here, right?

You know, thankfully not.

I can't think of anything that's happening

or before.

Yeah, it would be like really, really wrong of me to just suggest that the Department of Homeland Security is the American SS based on something like this because they've never done anything like this, right?

You know, ICE hasn't, right?

Yeah, and ICE is certainly not the Gestapo.

They would never do things that are Gestapo-esque.

No, they're not the Department of Jewish Affairs, right?

There's no similarity between these organizations.

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

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

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

Oh, man.

So, despite this success and the success of Operation Green Ticket, France lags behind the arbitrary deportation quota that Eichmann's office had set for them.

It was Dannecker's office to motivate French authorities.

Eichmann came to consider Daniker almost as his right arm, someone he could drop into a new territory and trust to centralize the system by which Jews were rounded up and deported, and leave it in such a way that whoever followed would be able to continue operating the system with ease because it runs on its own, right?

That's a huge part of it.

You leave as little up to chance as possible.

You leave as little up to the mercy of individual members of the government as possible, all of whom are soft to some groups of people you want to get rid of.

That's why you build a system that has no softness left inside it, right?

That write-up for the National World War II Museum notes, Danneker was a completely modern form of perpetrator, really unknown before the 20th century, the deportation specialist, right?

Oh, he's Tom Holman.

He's Tom Holman, right?

This is how modern genocide is done.

The primary perpetrators are not the guys who just shoot a bunch of people, right?

They're the deportation specialists.

That's who does a modern genocide, is a deportation specialist, right?

Not to keep linking these two things together, but

one of the things that sticks out to me is in the book Ordinary Men,

one of the things that sticks out is the German Reserve Police officers were just normal guys who took this job because they wanted a pension and benefits.

And then, again, they were voluntarily doing this.

They were told multiple times they could back out whenever they wanted, but they're there pulling the trigger.

Yeah.

And then you get this fucking guy.

And there's this argument, you get it around ordinary men, too, about like, well, it's wrong to look at these as like the banality of evil because these guys weren't banal.

The things they did weren't banal, the kinds of crimes they committed.

But that's the point is that that kind of hideous, mask-off, nightmare evil is lurking behind your neighbor's eyes if he gets the opportunity, if it'll benefit him enough, right?

If it'll get him that Mitsubishi dealership.

You never know quite, just like you never know, which what motherfucking guy who like seems kind of lame and boring right now could be a hero when actually called upon to shelter people from merger.

I'm thinking about that judge, husband, and wife cop couple in New Mexico who were like destroying evidence to protect these undocumented friends of theirs who are now being tried.

Where it's like you would never guess that these people would have been a heroes in a time like this.

But god damn it, you can't look at them anyway else, right?

And in the same manner, some guy who you would never guess is anything but the dude who lives next to you could become an absolute monster if he was given the opportunity, if it would advance him personally enough.

And you don't know until the chips are down who's going to be what, right?

There's hints sometimes, but you can't know perfectly.

Cool stuff.

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

Probably on the bad side of things.

Yeah.

You need to stay the fuck away from from that.

Yeah, right.

Man, Danneker would have loved filming himself drunk in his car, ranting about movies.

God, they would love that so much.

Yeah.

Yelling like, my wife left me.

So historian Robert Gerwoth describes Danneker as one of the, quote, young, educated, self-confident, and ideologically committed men Heydrich actively courted for the Jewish desk.

These men would develop the actual methodology by which Hitler's dream of a Jew-free Europe might be made a reality.

To continue with another quote from that article, Danneker utilized an array array of weapons, the pen, the telephone, and the typewriter.

Besides researching and working behind a desk, Dannecker negotiated, cajoled, and berated officials, coordinated with the Reich Transportation Ministry to secure rolling stock, and worked with the SSSD, Gestapo, and German armed forces to ensure the efficient and orderly removal of massive numbers of Jewish men, women, and children.

In the spring of 1942, Dannecker visited the camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

This was the same month that it transferred from being primarily a labor camp to being a straight-up death camp, and Daniker is one of the very first people to see Auschwitz in full operation.

He reports back to his boss about it, and he immediately sets to work feeding a group of 1,100 French Jews into the factory of death.

This annihilation acts as a proof of concept, right?

This is the Death Star test firing of Auschwitz, right?

Where you're like, yep, okay, we can get rid of people at the speed we need to here.

Danneker reports back to Eichmann about how Auschwitz is working, and Eichmann could not have been happier.

So he and Dannecker spend several weeks planning a more ambitious operation to wipe out a substantial chunk of the French Jewish population.

They call this Operation Spring Wind.

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

So the operation is ultimately executed by French.

We'll do this, but not on Bastille Day, right?

We can't do a Holocaust on Bastille Day.

That's like the most fucking French way of like, now you don't understand.

We have Bastille Day.

We have to work.

Yeah, everyone's got the day off work.

Look, we'll do a Holocaust, but not on our day off, right?

If you make all the cops go in and do the genocide on the holiday, they're going to riot and they're going to fight.

They're going to fight the firefighters.

Something that happens here.

We really can't do this.

So the operation is ultimately executed by French police on July 16th and 17th.

They break into houses and they rip whole families out of their beds, arresting 13,000 Parisian Jews.

for deportation.

The police insisted in public facing communications that these people were mostly, quote, foreign foreign and stateless.

So they're barely people.

Of course.

Of course.

Of course.

Fuck!

Yeah.

Operation Springwind was the brainchild of a French Vichy collaborator named Louis Darquier.

He had fought in World War I and become a radical far-right activist in the 30s, actively participating in the 1934 far-right riot that was seen by some at the time as an attempted coup d'état.

He had become a journalist, largely to write articles drumming up anti-Semitic hate among his fellow Frenchmen.

When the Nazis took over, they made him Commissar General for Jewish Affairs, basically the Vichy counterpart to Eichmann.

Derkyer had suggested to denaturalize all Jews who'd acquired French citizenship since 1927, and he also suggested the mass arrest of stateless Jews, largely because it provided a legal coding for the general expulsion of Jews.

This worked.

Daniker himself noted that once the shoddy justification was in place, the cops were happy to help the SS.

The French police, despite a few considerations of pure form, have only to carry out orders, right?

As long as not surprising.

Yeah, that's just how these guys work.

That's how cops are, right?

And that's how cops are.

And France was wildly anti-Semitic.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

For people who don't know,

one of my co-hosts and producers on my show did he speaks French and did research on like French officers magazines in the French military.

A little bit after this time in Algeria.

And like

half of the titles are like Lee anti-Semitism and like shit like that.

Yeah.

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

Quarterly, yeah.

By the way, folks, watch the Battle of Algiers.

Great movie.

Yeah,

that's all I'll say about it for now.

So Danneker's role in France came to an end shortly after Operation Spring Wind, which is better known as the Veldiv Roundup, right?

His direct supervisor in the SD, a guy named Helmut Nauchen, caught Danneker abusing his authority, by which I mean he was stealing shit from deported Jews that the SS wanted to steal for Germany, right?

And so he was transferred back to Berlin, right?

It's like, look, you can't kill them, you can't, but steal from them.

Yeah, we're stealing from them.

You're stealing from us when you steal too much from them, right?

Come on, man.

Jesus.

Yeah.

Now, the system Dannecker had built with Eichmann's guidance continued to operate for the remainder of Vichy France's lifespan.

Ultimately, some 77,000 French Jews and Jews on French soil soil were deported and murdered by the Nazis under the direction of Eichmann and Daniker and with the enthusiastic aid of French collaborators in law enforcement and the Vichy government.

After the war, Charles de Gaulle and the French government that replaced the Vichy regime refused to apologize for the role the police played in these genocidal crimes.

Their argument,

yeah.

Their argument was that Vichy France wasn't the French republic and the re-established republic shouldn't have to apologize for the crimes of another government, right?

Now, never never mind the fact that all those dudes kept their fucking jobs, right?

Is it the case that these cops are still cops?

A lot of times, yes.

But why is that our responsibility, right?

Slipping off the armband.

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

Oh, it's cool stuff.

No, you do not understand.

I was not throwing a pizza salute.

I was just ashing my cigarettes very awkwardly.

Oh, man.

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

So, you know,

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

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

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

I'm not going to cover for the Nazi cops.

I got too much other shit I got to do.

After Paris, Daniker doesn't remain in Berlin long.

He's sent, and he's forgiven for his misdeeds.

He's sent to Bulgaria in 1943 to arrange the deportation of some 11,000 foreign Jews to various death camps.

He follows the Eichmann playbook in this, interfacing with a newly created Bulgarian Commissar for Jewish Affairs to arrange the deportations.

In just two months, all 11,000 people had been shipped by train to Treblinka or Auschwitz, where nearly half of them died.

The dead included some 2,000 children.

This deportation.

Yeah, I mean, these guys, the level of mass murderer, the least of the SS men in Eichmann's office commit, is pretty outrageous.

I mean, I can't imagine a more cursed title that we've spoken

other than a Bulgarian Jewish commissar.

Yeah, oh boy.

Like, oh, your war crimes did war crimes.

Yeah.

This deportation met with little local resistance, as the Jews marked for expulsion were mainly from Thrace and Macedonia, and thus not Bulgarian citizens.

But Daniker's next move was to evacuate nearly 50,000 Bulgarian Jews from Sofia, the capital.

This was done and some 48,000 Jews were stripped of their property and forced into a camp outside the city.

However, this sparked resistance because again, these aren't foreigners, right?

These are Bulgarian, you know?

Jason Dossey writes, quote, outrage from Dimitar Peshev, the deputy speaker of the parliament, clergy from the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, and representatives of communities where these Jews resided pushed King Boris III to intervene.

Peshev, who was forced to resign his position, still appealed to the honor of Bulgaria, warning that our nation's reputation would be stained forever and its moral and political standing forever compromised if deportations ensued.

Boris acquiesced and prevented the removal of Bulgaria's Jewish populace.

And we can see this as both there's legitimate heroism here, which saves a lot of lives, right?

Right, of course.

But also, any pride in this has to be tempered by the fact that all these guys are only moved to act against the Nazis because now citizens were being deported, right?

These Macedonian Jews and whatever,

if they get exterminated, no one's going to speak up, right?

But now you're going after Bulgarian Jews and we've got to say something, right?

Of course, they shouldn't even be here.

They're like,

they broke the law just crossing the border, rather.

I mean, Christ, you can't just break the law, right?

That's fucked up.

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

ones.

Right, right, right.

These are the good ones, you know?

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

And had the Nazi regime lasted, Eichmann and his colleagues would have taken another stab at this group that King Boris helps to protect.

As it was, things were going pretty badly for the Nazis by the summer of 43, and the work of extermination was taking on an air of dire urgency.

By this point, Dannecker's qualities had been recognized outside the SD, and Eichmann's protégé was sent by the Gestapo chief to Rome, which had just been occupied by the Nazis after Mussolini's overthrow.

Eichmann, by this point, was the most prestigious name in the genocide business.

His obsessive need need to stamp his name on every part of the Holocaust, even in actions at which he had little to no known involvement, ensured him steady promotions and regular direct contact with Himmler.

It also got him the attention of the international press.

He and his friend Kaltenbrunner would brag to each other about their respective war criminal ranks during social events.

Eichmann later recalled.

Good God.

Yeah, that's how they frame it.

They're like looking at Foreign Press and be like, oh man, I'm a higher-ranking war criminal than you now, Calton Bruner.

Ha ha ha, right?

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

Right, right.

Everyone else is too smart to like stamp their fucking last, first and last name on this shit.

Eichmann later recalled, quote, I found the war criminals in a press review once.

I was number nine, and I had a bit of a laugh about it all.

Right?

And he will, he'll go back and forth between I was 14, I was nine, I was number one, right?

Depending on who he's talking to after the

never number one.

Nobody ever thought you were number one.

calm down you were at like i i'll give credit you you were easy top 10 but you weren't you no one ever considered you number one i'll believe nine nine is credible right yeah you're making the playoffs good for you sure yeah you're in the war crime playoffs yeah you and kaltenbruner

In 1944, as the war neared its end, Adolf Eichmann was about to do something that would skyrocket him to the top of that list.

In November of 1940, Germany had signed the tripartite pact with Italy and Japan, officially creating the Axis powers, and they considered it a priority to sign on as many new allies as possible, given how things had gone the last time Germany was isolated in an international war.

Hungary's regent was a guy named Admiral Niklos Horthy, and he was offered the honor of becoming the fourth member of the club.

But German diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop tacitly threatened that Romania might be allowed to join first if Hungary dithered.

Ultimately, Horthy signed up, and this would prove to be a catastrophic mistake.

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

We did so good last time, boys.

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

I love that the Nazis are so fucking stupid, right?

They're like, look, it didn't work out for us last time, but what if we allied with Austria, Italy, and Hungary again and brought the band back together?

What if we got the band back together?

Yeah.

Oh, man.

God, you know, now that you think about it, Italy really is the Pete Best of World War One, right?

Yeah.

Or a reverse Pete best, I guess.

I don't know.

The Patrick Stumpf of World War I.

Hungarian troops, this seemed to work at first, right?

World War II initially is kind of working like Horthy had hoped.

Hungarian troops get to invade the Balkans alongside the Wehrmacht, and by the spring of 1941, Hungary was nearly tripled the size of where it had stood in 1938.

Then came Operation Barbarossa and the invasion of the USSR.

Hungary again sends troops, but this time there's no swift victory.

Within months, 30% of the Hungarian army is killed or wounded too badly to fight.

As tradition demands, and Hungary goes to war.

And by the way, if you're looking, if you're thinking from like a military planning standpoint, if you have lost 30% of your forces, killed or injured, you no longer have an effective army.

It sounds like 70% is a lot.

It's not enough.

You've lost too much of your command and control.

Too much, you have to reorganize reorganize at that point before you can continue fighting effectively.

Yeah, from a military historian's perspective, I must say it is not good.

If you're planning a war at home today, you don't lose 30% of your forces in a year and a half.

Yeah, it's a catastrophe.

In early 1943, the entire Hungarian Second Army was smashed trying to anchor the German northern flank during the Battle of Stalingrad.

Only 20% of the army survived the retreat home intact.

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

Right, right, right.

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

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

Stalingrad, that's a nice name.

I think things are going to go well for us there.

Yeah.

So Horthy, at this point, showing that he's smarter than Hitler, complains the war is lost, right?

After Stalingrad, Horthy's like, well, fuck.

There's literally no way we can pull a victory out of this one.

And Hitler, for his part, complains that Hungarian soldiers had doomed the Wehrmacht, which is not really correct.

You know, the Wehrmacht is not true.

Yeah, that is not true.

Over on my show, Lines of By Donkeys, we talked about Stalingrad for about six hours.

Yeah.

Look, I'm not saying Hungary would have won the battle, but they certainly didn't lose in the battle.

No, no, things were fucked by the point at which, you know, they get into action in this way, right?

For one thing, if your entire battle plan comes down to the Hungarian army holding in the field, you have fucked up.

Right?

Meinfjor, the army has been turned to goulash.

So, Horthy had never been a good guy.

I think we've made that clear.

But he's not personally genocidal towards the Jews of his nation, right?

He doesn't, left to his own devices, he had no desire to wipe out the whole Jewish population of Hungary.

And so, for most of World War II, Hungarian Jews were fairly safe, right?

For most of the war, this is the best place in kind of broader, the kind of broader Nazi and Nazi allied territory, one of the better places to be.

But Hitler now demanded that Horthy kill or put his Jews into camps.

Horthy refused.

He has no issue.

Like, they seize Jewish property to fund the war effort.

He's fine with that.

But he doesn't want, because he sees the writing on the wall.

He's like, I don't want to be involved in a war crime of this scale right now, because we're not going to win.

There's going to be a butcher's bill to pay.

As the Russians advanced, he and other Hungarian leaders tried to make a separate peace with the Allies.

Hitler finds out and he orders German troops to conquer the country in March of 1944, which they do easily because the Hungarians are very bad at having an army, right?

Even the 1944 Wehrmacht can take them.

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

Be on the side of genociders, yes.

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

We have our standards here in Hungary.

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

Right.

That's right.

Now, Ohorthy is kept on as a puppet leader for a time, and as soon as Hungary was under the German occupation, Hitler orders the Jewish population wiped out.

This is no mean task.

There were somewhere between 700,000 and over 800,000 Jews in Hungarian territory.

Sometimes you'll hear around a million.

Eichmann is sent over to supervise the work of an Einsetz commando, especially assembled for the task.

Daniker and other colleagues in the SD are there as well, and they handle a lot of the ground actions while Eichmann coordinates this massive effort.

What followed was one of the swiftest and bloodiest mass killings in human history.

Per Dr.

Dawesy's article, what happened in Hungary in the late spring and early summer of 1944 overwhelms our fragile capacities to imagine.

It was simply a frenzy of killing.

In May and June of 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and 397,000 were plunged into Birkenau's gas chambers.

Their fate exhibited just how desperate the Nazi regime was to finish the annihilation of European Jews, even as its hopes of winning the war disintegrated.

Under increasing pressure, Horthy finally halted the deportations in July, temporarily sparing most of Budapest's Jewish populace.

Eichmann and Danneker bided their time.

The removal of Horthy three months later opened up new possibilities.

When Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg openly offered sanctuary to Jews in Budapest as Soviet troops neared the capital city, the enraged Eichmann turned to Danneker to raid the safe houses established by Wallenberg.

Now,

first off, that term frenzy of killing is the thing to remember when you're thinking about what did Eichmann do?

What did Danneker do?

Eichmann is the man who masterminds this.

This is on him more than any other single person, right?

And it's telling how important he is in the hierarchy in general

and how much everybody relies on them when they're like, we have this.

insurmountable killing goal in mind.

We have to bring in our experts.

Yeah.

And it's him and his boy.

Yeah.

And it's Eichmann arrayed against Wallenberg, right?

And trying to, Wallenberg is trying to save this Jewish population, and Eichmann is trying to annihilate it.

And we've done a reverse bastard.

It's a Christmas episode on Wallenberg.

He's one of the great heroes our species ever produced.

In the war's waning days, he was Eichmann's nemesis, granting fake Swedish documents to every Jew he could find.

You're a Swedish citizen.

You're a Swedish resident.

You got a green card.

They can't kill you.

You're a Swede, right?

Yeah,

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

Everyone decreases.

Go north.

They can't deport you with a meatball in your hand.

Oh, my God.

It's your official Swedish paperwork.

These are not, there's nothing legal and legitimate.

Only Wallenberg's charisma is backing these documents up.

But he is so good at what he's doing that a lot of SS men back off because he's like, look, if you're seen violating the law here, I'll make sure you get your due when the war is over, right?

And they're so fucking scared of him that he saves, by some accounts, 100,000 people.

There's a lot of debate about these numbers, but it's in the tens of thousands at the very least, personally.

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

No one has illusions at this point, right?

Everybody's Foley, and I have, like, look, the guy with the meatballs is telling me he's good.

He's fucking good.

Fuck it.

Yeah, fuck it.

I don't, I, like, I don't want any more of him.

The guy with the meatballs.

So Eichmann calls Raul the Jew dog Wallenberg and threatens to have Raul and all other friends of Jews assassinated.

Someone subsequently blows up Wallenberg's car, and he only narrowly escapes.

In her book, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Bettina Stangnath describes Adolf Eichmann in this period as almost mad, with a mix of desperation and megalomania.

He could feel the walls closing in, but just as crucially as he feels the window closing, he feels that he might be losing out on his chance to achieve the only goal that matters to him at this stage, winning the war against European Jewry.

And this is important.

You understand the Nazis don't see this all as one war.

The war against the Jews, even though the war against the rest of Europe may be unwinnable now, the war against the Jews of Europe is still winnable, right?

We have to pull something out of this.

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We're back.

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

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

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Like, Eichmann.

Yeah.

So the Nazi state was in chaos at this point.

Eichmann doesn't report kind of, he's not technically on like an org chart.

He's not directly reporting to Himmler, but he basically is reporting to Himmler.

He's got regular meetings with the man.

And so, even though there's guys between him and Himmler on the org chart, Eichmann outranks everyone above him, except for Himmler, because he's regularly talking to Himmler.

And so, whenever there's a disagreement, he can bring Himmler in, right?

And that's kind of how the Nazi state works.

More than like officially, here's who's reporting to who.

It's like, well, but this guy can bring in Himmler, or this guy can bring in Gehring, right?

This guy could bring in Hitler directly.

So he's effectively in charge.

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

Yes, fucking horrible.

Absolutely.

That's how it works.

Now, Eichmann, as a show of how fucking important he is, he has access in this late stage of the war to a private aircraft that he can travel around what remains of the crumbling Reich in.

That means he's a big man.

And when he really wanted to impress another Nazi, Eichmann would claim to have personal control over the gas chambers at Auschwitz, right?

I'm the guy running the gas chambers.

That's his brag.

Eichmann's colleagues later recalled some of Eichmann's most outrageous boasts.

And these are all direct quotes from Eichmann: I am a bloodhound.

I'll set the mills of Auschwitz grinding.

And blood for goods.

This is a reference to a promise that Eichmann made to send Hungary aid in exchange for Jews, right?

That's the Blood for Goods program.

You give us Jews, we'll give you the aid that you need to continue holding on.

Oh, God.

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

Yeah, blood for Jews.

His favorite line was simply, I'll inform Himmler.

And his darkest boast was, I'll do away with all the Jewish filth of Budapest.

In the last months of 1944, Eichmann makes constant trips back and forth from Budapest to Auschwitz, dealing with Commandant Hess personally to ensure the smooth operation of the chief genocide machine in the Nazi toolkit.

Stangneth writes, he seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once.

Eichmann talked so much and for so long that the people around him, ignorant of what was really going on, believed he might actually have been involved in the overthrow of Hungarian Reich administrator Miklos Horthy.

Wislinsky claimed that in Hungary, Eichmann boasted that he and Otto Globochnik were behind the whole idea of exterminating the Jews.

Eichmann inflated his murderous lifetime achievement to crazy proportions and believed there was certain to be a monument erected to me in Budapest.

He threatened his victims with the prospect that after final victory, Hitler would make him world commissar of the Jews.

These are the things that Eichmann is bragging about.

And you can see this as maybe he's lost his mind a little bit at the end of the Reich.

Or you can see this as he knows where things are going, but he knows that these are the boasts that will give him just enough flex to accomplish his mission, right?

That's what matters to him at this stage.

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

He sure does.

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

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

Yeah.

But he, as we'll talk about in part four, he'll start, he's starting to make plans in 44 for what he's going to do after the war, right?

I think it really is.

It just is his personal response.

He feels personally a duty to kill as many of these people as he can, even though the war is over.

That that's what's important to him morally, right?

And it was his job.

Yeah, and it's his job, right?

And he's going to do it.

He's always been a dead-eyed careerist.

And if everybody else is failing, I bet he probably thinks that the way to continue to stick out and feel great is to be successful when everything else is failing.

I won't fail, you know?

Yeah.

So Eichmann is a master still at this late stage of shaping clout and the perception of clout into a weapon to get what he wants.

In the case of Hungary, this allows him to oversee the slaughter of at least 437,402 men, women, and children in a matter of months.

That is the number the Nazis officially document, so the real number is higher than that.

Credible estimates of the number of people Eichmann is responsible for organizing to kill in a matter of, again, months, range up to almost 600,000 out of a pre-war population of 700,000 to 800,000.

Jesus.

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

Fucking Christ.

Horst Grell, the advisor on Jewish affairs for the Budapest Embassy, later claimed that during this time, Eichmann bragged the enemy had promoted him to war criminal number one.

And he's not super exaggerating at this stage, right?

He would then repeat a German saying that translates to, many enemies much honor.

The more people are talking about me as a monster, the more honor I have for what I've done.

Eichmann was so good at what he did that other SS men begin using his name in the same way he used Himmler's.

When Kurt Becker, one of Eichmann's professional rivals, got stalled in negotiations over the expropriation of Jewish property, he threatened to get Eichmann involved.

After the war, Eichmann himself would brag.

Every department was trying to squeeze everything possible out of the Jews, to winkle it out by threatening them with the big bad Eichmann.

He must have fucking loved that.

He does, but he also, he's smart enough to know we're not going to win.

And so now, this reputation, the fact that I'm getting accredited for crimes I hadn't committed, which is happening because I wanted that, right?

And I used to take credit for them.

Yeah, yeah.

That's a problem now, right?

Now that, like, you know, we're not gonna win, the fact that you're getting blamed for shit you didn't even do is an issue, right?

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

By early 45, he knows these days are numbered, and everyone, including Eichmann, increasingly knows that, right?

This is part of why colleagues like Becker are eager to use his name.

It's not just that it gets shit done, but it allows them to divert their own responsibility for genocide onto Eichmann, right?

Oh, yeah, Eichmann's the guy making this happen.

It's all Eichmann, not me.

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

Yeah, man.

Oh, boy.

The Holocaust was awful.

You know, we were all, it's like that scene in a hot rod where his friend's stolen the TV and he's like, boy, riots are so terrible.

You just got to get out as fast as you can, right?

Everyone's like, oh, the Holocaust, awful.

Can you believe what that Eichmann guy made me do?

Fucked up.

Incredible.

So in the last months of the Reich, as it becomes clear to everyone what's happening, Eichmann's going to become a pariah within the SD, right?

People are like, oh, I don't want to be associated with this motherfucker any more directly than I have to.

And we'll talk about that and how he gets himself out of this for a shocking length of time in part four.

But first, Joe, let's talk about how you're going to get yourself out of this podcast by plugging your pluggables.

I am the host of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.

We talk about military history and history of genocides, war crimes, other uplifting things like that.

So, if you want to hear more about Stalingrad, we did hours upon hours about that, or other genocides like Rwanda, or the Armenian genocide, or the Here-Nama genocide, things of that nature.

We've talked about that as well.

So, come listen to it, and it will not improve your mood.

I'm sorry.

Yeah.

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

Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Hi, I'm Morgan Summ, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.

There was the six-foot cartoon otter who came out from behind a curtain.

It actually really matters that driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

Should I be telling this thing all about my love life?

I think we will see a Twitch streamer president, maybe within our lifetimes.

You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.

This is an iHeart podcast.