Part One: Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself

Speaker 1 Cools or media.

Speaker 1 Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week I try to make you feel worse about life, even though life makes you feel worse about life every week. Why do I do this? Money.

Speaker 1 And also, I live to hurt you. You know, that's it.

Speaker 1 That's all that's going on with me. Let's talk about what's going on with our guest today, Joe Kasabian.
Joe, how are you doing?

Speaker 1 Hey, I'm great. I'm ready for pain to be inflicted on me and absorb the pain and the suffering like a sponge.
Yes, yes, yes. Let me eat your pain.
Your delicious pain.

Speaker 1 You say that, but when you're here with the topic.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Last time I was on, it was like four hours of Lavrenti Beria.
What could possibly be worse than that? Oh, I'm so glad you asked that question.

Speaker 1 What could possibly be worse than Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's heads of the secret police, and almost certainly a pedophile on an industrial scale. What could be worse than that?

Speaker 1 I'm so glad you asked that question. What could be worse than that? Sophie, what could be worse than that? I mean, I know the topic.
Yes.

Speaker 1 I think, Joe, I think we've done an able job of finding a worse one for you. You're welcome.
Because this week and motherfucking next week, because boy howdy, you can't do this guy in two parts.

Speaker 1 We are talking about Mr. Holocaust himself, Adolph Eichmann.
You're welcome. Are you fucking serious?

Speaker 1 That's right, baby.

Speaker 1 Fuck me. Mr.
Holocaust himself, I probably shouldn't call him. And

Speaker 1 I mean, it's a good, if he had a rig name, it would be Holocaust. And he, as we'll talk about, he worked most of his professional career.

Speaker 1 He worked very hard to make himself the number one name associated with the Holocaust internationally.

Speaker 1 Like that was a, he was not actually like he, his reputation, he was very involved, obviously, but his reputation is even higher than his actual involvement.

Speaker 1 And that was due to him trying to jink up his career. But I think it's fair.
Oh, God. He was trying to juice up his Holocaust.
He really was. He really was.

Speaker 1 And Joe, when Robert told me he was writing the scripts, he's like, who should we get as a guest?

Speaker 3 And I was like, Joe.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we probably got to get Joe in for this one. Joe.
Yes, yes. I'm glad I have a brand that's horrible.

Speaker 1 Oh, well. Boy, howdy.
Let's do it. I'm going to say, though, you had me in the first half because you said Mr.
Holocaust himself. Adolph.
I'm like, did he did he really

Speaker 1 bring God from the Hitler episodes? We've done so many Hitler's.

Speaker 1 I know. We've covered, we gotta, you gotta cover Hitler in like little pieces.
Like, we'll do two parts on how he fucked, you know, you gotta cover all the there's so much niche Hitler stuff.

Speaker 1 Although, you know, as it's let's let's come back from the cold open and I'll talk about the scope of these episodes, but we're done with the cold open.

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Speaker 1 So, these episodes, if you know anything about Eichmann, and he's like outside of Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, you know, Gohring, he's probably the first name, one of the one of the few names that like the average person who knows anything about the Holocaust, you've heard of Eichmann, right?

Speaker 1 A lot of people will have.

Speaker 1 If you haven't, as I always say, there's a great movie called Conspiracy about the conference where they plan the Holocaust, where Eichmann is played by Stanley Tucci, and it's

Speaker 1 perfect performance. Oh my God,

Speaker 1 is he really played by Stanley Tucson?

Speaker 1 He's played by Stanley Tucci. Tucci can play any part.

Speaker 1 And Stanley is incredible as Eichmann. Like, he really nails it.
I can see it. I can see it.
He's got a face. Is he also hot in the movie?

Speaker 1 Because Stanley Tucci's been hot in every movie he's ever been in, except the one where he played that pedophile.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to say, I will say one of the critiques the movie got is that, and I also think he does an excellent job. Kenneth Branaugh plays Reinhard Heydrich.

Speaker 1 And one of the complaints that some Holocaust scholars had is that he's a very good actor. He does a good job, but he probably shouldn't have made Heydrich hot, right?

Speaker 1 Like, maybe the movie is in Misty.

Speaker 1 That Heydrich is too sexy. I tend to think the movie's just good enough.

Speaker 1 If you've watched the second season of Andor, the first episodes where they're planning that genocide on Gorman are themed after that movie, like that movie conspiracy. Seriously?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, had a big influence on it. Tony Gilroy has confirmed it.

Speaker 1 But Eichmann, the guy we're talking about today, is not the architect of the Holocaust because that generally goes to Heydrich, although obviously he was not the only person involved in setting up the architecture.

Speaker 1 But Heydrich and Eichmann were both at this meeting, the Von Say Conference, where the architecture of the Holocaust was set up.

Speaker 1 And Eichmann's primary job, you might call him the trigger man, not because there were actually a lot of guys who just shot people, right?

Speaker 1 Like the Einsatzgruppe, who shot tens of thousands at places like that.

Speaker 1 Literal trigger man.

Speaker 1 In terms of like the Nazi state had to build a system that was effectively a big gun for genociding people. And Eichmann was the man who worked.
He was the guy who, his

Speaker 1 primary thing was like logistics, like making sure how we're going to move, get all of these people out of the communities they're in and move them into the different camps, right?

Speaker 1 He was the guy who managed that system. He was the deportation guy, right? That was a big, and he was like overseeing a lot of that system.
As we'll talk about, there's other stuff that he did.

Speaker 1 But if you're making like a top five list of the Nazis who were most directly responsible for the genocide of European Jewry, Eichmann is going to make the list every single time, right?

Speaker 1 Like he's he's that central to what happened.

Speaker 1 And kind of the biggest, probably, I don't know, pop culture is probably the wrong way to talk about Hannah Arendt's writing in 2025, but it was at one point popular culture, right?

Speaker 1 Like, because this guy goes on trial, he gets caught by the Mossad and he goes on trial in the 60s.

Speaker 1 And Hanna Arendt, who's a famous philosopher and scholar of totalitarianism, writes a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem, right? Which is very much worth reading today, although very flawed, right?

Speaker 1 And it's very flawed in part.

Speaker 1 And one of the things it gets a lot of criticism for today is that as she is describing Eichmann on trial, Arendt coins a term called the banality of evil to describe the man that she sees in Israeli captivity because he's just kind of this late middle-aged balding dude.

Speaker 1 And he's mostly talking about like, look, I was just following orders. You know, I was just doing what I was told to do.
I was one cog and a bigger machine. I didn't actually kill anyone directly.

Speaker 1 That was like the bulk of his legal defense. And I think that I don't think the banality of evil is a useless term.

Speaker 1 I think it does describe a lot of people who were involved in administrative levels of the Holocaust, right?

Speaker 1 There are individuals whose job is pretty banal and who were themselves pretty banal and played an important role in the killing machine. Eichmann is not a good example of that.

Speaker 1 He was not banal at all. He is like a super villain.
In terms of his actual personality and how he talked about what he did, this is not a, that was his defense in court.

Speaker 1 The reality of Eichmann was not a boring middle manager, right? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, she saw, she saw Eichmann like out of power in his old man's sweater pacing around because there's famously a video of him pacing back and forth in an Israeli prison cell

Speaker 1 on the stand. Like, of course, he looked like the local accountant dork.
Yes, yes. Of course, he looked like that.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And, and, and it's one of those things, I don't think it's a useless concept. It's just misapplied to Eichmann.
She does get, we'll talk about it, she gets a lot right in this.

Speaker 1 We'll be quoting from it some in the last episode.

Speaker 1 And it's one of those things,

Speaker 1 I don't reject the term the banality of evil. I just think it often is.

Speaker 1 It's less aptly applied to individuals, often in part because those individuals are not so banal as they may seem from the outside.

Speaker 1 But I think there's a real banality of evil in like the systems that we allow to exist and that we live inside that can be turned into instruments of mass violence or slaughter because we collectively make the poor choice to hand over more of our responsibility for our security to elected officials and government institutions that are neither accountable nor interested in our health, right?

Speaker 1 Like, you could use the term banality of evil for the 20 years that voters spent continuing to fund DHS and to expand ICE, right?

Speaker 1 Or to the work of editors at hundreds of publications deciding to greenlight more stories about migrant crime because, hey, that does well on Facebook and traffic. is money, right?

Speaker 1 The banality of evil is the Sulzberger family who owns the New York Times ignoring the Holocaust because Eastern European Jews from rural areas aren't, in their words, worth caring about, right?

Speaker 1 The banality of evil is all of us like hearing about shit like this and being like, oh man, that's fucked up. But like, I gotta, I gotta make the mortgage.

Speaker 1 So I guess I'm gonna walk right past this atrocity and then keep going, right? This can't be on me to fix, can it, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, like the concept of banality of evil is not like, if you see a guy and you've heard of a guy, Eichmann, for example, he's not the definition of the banality of evil. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That makes him management. No, he's management, but he is, again, a super villain.
Like, you stick this motherfucker in a Bond movie, going on some of the rants he goes on, and he fits perfectly.

Speaker 1 So, a big source for my episodes is a book by German philosopher and author Bettina Stangneth, who wrote a wonderful book called Eichmann Before Jerusalem.

Speaker 1 And in this book, number one, she's trying to kind of break some of the myths that came up as a result of a Rinz piece, but she also highlights, opening this book, how relatively little we know about him in this passage.

Speaker 1 We cannot speak of the systematic extermination of millions of men, women, and children without mentioning his name, and yet people are no longer even sure what his first name was. Carl Adolf, Otto?

Speaker 1 It's the simplest of questions, yet it can still surprise us, long after we thought we'd established who he was.

Speaker 1 Because he, you know, he has a couple of names and he goes by a few in his life.

Speaker 1 And there's kind of this open debate as to like, what was he actually called as like a general rule by people that he knew? He just had a symbol to go go after like Prince. Yeah, Prince, right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Eichmann. We could just call him that.

Speaker 1 He was born Otto Adolf Eichmann on March 19th, 1906 in Solingen, Germany. But Bettina's point is that depending on who you ask and what you read, there's room for debate.

Speaker 1 as to what he would have given as his name during different points in his life, right?

Speaker 1 His first biographers were people like British journalist Comer Clark, who in 1960 tried to chronicle Eichmann's early life and came up with the sort of tale of woe you might expect from a great historic victim, right?

Speaker 1 And this is partly what you get when a journalist tries to do a biography, right? As he's like looking for the

Speaker 1 woodly shit.

Speaker 1 It's one of my biggest pet pieces. It's not what we do.

Speaker 1 A journalist tripped into writing a biography or writing in-depth history.

Speaker 1 Not our place. Not our place.

Speaker 1 In Comer's telling, Comer Clark's telling, Eichmann's mother died before he was five years old.

Speaker 1 His mother had to move back to Austria from once they hailed when he was young, but his father had to go back to Germany after this to escape the sorrow of being trapped with memories of his late wife, and so his boy was raised largely by his aunts.

Speaker 1 David Cesarini, who's a better Eichmann biographer, summarizes the rest of Clark's version of events.

Speaker 1 According to Clark, Eichmann was repeatedly mistaken for a Jew at school and beaten up, which left him with a lasting antipathy towards Jewish people.

Speaker 1 Against this background, it was natural that he should join the Nazi Party after hearing Hitler speak. And this is all nonsense.
None of that's true, right?

Speaker 1 If that happened, I really wish he would have learned the opposite lesson of that, which is... Racism is a lot of people.
Oh,

Speaker 1 we all just must look the same.

Speaker 1 Like, this racism thing is stupid. Yeah, maybe, yeah, if I can get mistaken for these people, Jesus, this racism thing must be bullshit, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 This is almost certainly not what happened.

Speaker 1 Cesarini, who is the author of Eichmann, His Life and Crimes, describes similar cavalcades of bullshit from a generation of lazy ahistorical pop bios of this guy.

Speaker 1 Quote: Quentin Reynolds, another British press man, declared that Eichmann was left motherless and introverted. His family was so poor that there was never enough food on the table.

Speaker 1 Young Adolph turned into a problem child and suffered even more once his father remarried a harsh, domineering woman.

Speaker 1 As a young man, he was unsuccessful and friendless, not least because he looked Jewish. He failed in job after job and walked the streets of Linz with the unemployed.
That sounds more accurate.

Speaker 1 It's not.

Speaker 1 But it sounds like it should be, right? Because

Speaker 1 it fits the Hitler profile. I think that's why they did this.
Is that like, well, that's kind of, I mean, Hitler was mostly in Austria by the time he was like

Speaker 1 living homeless, right? He was living in a Mins home. Yeah, he was in Vienna by that point.
But otherwise, like, yeah, that's kind of Hitler's life, right?

Speaker 1 Like, his dad dies early, doesn't have a lot of friends, he fails at job after job, right? Hitler didn't get mistaken for being Jewish often, but like, you know, the rest of that's pretty simple.

Speaker 1 No, just inbred.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 The pieces fit together, right? Dead mom, dad not around, economic anxiety, bullying that gives him a convenient reason to hate Jews, right? Shitty lot.

Speaker 1 It's an easy, easy thing, easy biography to accept for Eichmann. Unfortunately, it's also hogwash.

Speaker 1 It's like if you were to do a biography of some modern-day homophobic bigot and say, like, well, he got called gay or the F-sler a bunch on the playground as a kid, right?

Speaker 1 So that's why he did such monstrous things as an adult. And if you're like someone 300 years in the future and you read that, you might be like, oh, I guess, yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 1 But if you were to talk to like either of us, like if they could bring us forward into the future and be like, so is this why this guy did it?

Speaker 1 We could be like, no, everybody got called those things on the playground, man. Yeah.
Like that was like a universal experience.

Speaker 1 That was like living in the late 90s, early 2000s, man. Like that cannot explain why he did what he did.

Speaker 1 I'm also a bit worried because it's like, oh, you know, he failed at all these jobs, you know, shitty home life. I'm like, okay, so he is at 17, he's going to enlist in the army, and that is me.

Speaker 1 A lot of guys who don't go on to commit hate crimes and war crimes, so maybe like, I don't know, got beat up for thinking I'm a different race than I am. That is just me.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, in Eichmann's case, there's even less reason to believe his anti-Semitism resulted from bullying because there's simply no real evidence that he was bullied about this or accused of being Jewish, you know, in any way that impacted his development.

Speaker 1 Likewise, the claims that poverty and desperation drove him to fascism are baseless. And again, I think this is like a mainstream Hitler discourse thing, right?

Speaker 1 Like it sounds kind of like Hitler's backstory. So that makes it seem like, oh, of course, this is where fascists come from, right?

Speaker 1 It's more comforting than being like, no, fascists come from the same place like the guy who runs the local fucking credit union came from, right? Like they just come from the world.

Speaker 1 I'm going to read another quote from Cesareni's book.

Speaker 1 and I want you to think about how easily you could do a find and replace on this paragraph and make it sound like modern reporting on some American neo-Nazi mass shooter. Quote,

Speaker 1 The NBC correspondent John Donovan concluded on the basis of interviews with Eichmann's schoolmates that he was a lonely and distant fellow.

Speaker 1 He was a fragile, underfed youth, and an obviously unhappy one, a misfit.

Speaker 1 According to Donovan, Eichmann represented the classic pattern of disturbed, introverted personality, which so often produced the larvae of fanaticism.

Speaker 1 His father, a struggling and underpaid manager of a failing electrical company, simply could not provide for his abundant family and more often than not there was insufficient food on the table.

Speaker 1 The boy grew to manhood with a grudge and drifted around in a world without hope until he traded a threadbare suit for a splendid SA uniform. And again,

Speaker 1 not true. I'm bringing this up to talk about like how how similar a lot of these very fake backstories are and what they say about what we want to believe about a guy named Eichmann, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, we always want to believe these people come from like disadvantaged backgrounds or tortured family homes or were bullied. I mean, I know we're about the same age, Robert.

Speaker 1 And what were we always told growing up about the Columbine shooters? Right. You know,

Speaker 1 these people always need to be victims of some kind lashing out. They can't be cold and calculated and ideologically driven, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And there's this, yeah, it's tough too, because like there's this belief that is very common on the left and I think is not a bad guiding light that like, well, you should seek to improve people's conditions because that makes the world better.

Speaker 1 And guys like Eichmann point out that, like, that, yeah, you should, but that's not enough to avoid the birth of an Eichmann.

Speaker 1 Because what's going to be scariest about this guy's backstory is that if you grew up in the suburbs like 10, 15 years ago, or like, you know, today, a lot of his background's going to sound similar to you.

Speaker 1 right? Like in some ways that are like weirdly direct. So his birth town, Solingend, was an industrial town in the Rhineland, and his father was a modern German man with a modern German job.

Speaker 1 He worked as a clerk for a company that supplied parts to power plants.

Speaker 1 His name was Adolf Karl Eichmann, and he was a strict disciplinarian, but not in a way that would have been weird to his son or anyone else. This was very normal for the time.

Speaker 1 Our Eichmann would recall in his own autobiography, I acknowledged my father is the absolute authority.

Speaker 1 The earliest recollection that he gives us of his education is of a kindergarten teacher with an illustrated book of Bible stories, which showed Moses having demonic horns.

Speaker 1 Now, Eichmann gave this recollection when he was on trial for genocide. So, he may have been trying to defray his culpability by making a point about the deep roots of anti-Semitism in his culture.

Speaker 1 That said, as I've noted before, you can today find churches in Germany and elsewhere in Europe with what's called a Judensow depicted on the outside, which is a sculptural depiction of a pig suckling Jewish babies.

Speaker 1 These are like medieval churches, but they're around today, and there were more of them back then. So, like, the idea that he would have encountered this in Sunday school, not weird, right?

Speaker 1 Pretty racist

Speaker 1 culture. Yeah, not at all weird.
Germany was a deeply anti-Semitic place. And I also like the idea of like, maybe we shouldn't take

Speaker 1 the guy on trial for genocide.

Speaker 1 For killing for the Holocaust at face value, yes.

Speaker 1 Maybe the concept of innocent until proven guilty needs to be ignored on this one, perhaps.

Speaker 1 I think there were a lot of fascinating jurisprudential arguments about the Nuremberg trials. And obviously, this isn't a part of that.
This was a different thing. But

Speaker 1 part of it was like, number one, well, technically everything these guys did was legal in their country. So like, what law are we trying them under? Kind of ex post facto.

Speaker 1 And number two, like, well, we know. Like, we know Herman Goering doesn't have a defense against being Herman Gohring, right? Yeah.
It's the first legal precedent of fuck that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We've all come together and

Speaker 1 our six or eight judge brains have decided, fuck it, bro. Fuck it.
Fuck it. We've all

Speaker 1 is life in my weird dress with my wig.

Speaker 1 Oh, man. I did watch the fucking

Speaker 1 Mandela movie with starring Idris Elba as Mandela. And it was like,

Speaker 1 it was fine, but the opening of it is like early South African courts where everybody's wearing the wigs, even like the black lawyers. And it's like, oh man, this is, did that really? I guess

Speaker 1 that must have really been how everyone dressed in those courts.

Speaker 1 Seems weird. I guess it's a holdover.
I love that there's still places that do it. Like, this is ridiculous.
I don't care if you're passing me. Like, I could be sitting in front of you,

Speaker 1 hands cuffed together, and you're like, I sentence you to death. I'm like, bro, not you.

Speaker 1 Bring out the real judge. I can't take this seriously.

Speaker 1 Yeah, whatever. Adolf Carl, his dad, moves back to Linz to take a job managing a local power company, and his wife and kids follow about a year later.

Speaker 1 They were evangelical Calvinist Protestants, which made them as much a minority in the small Austrian town of Linz as the Jewish citizens, right? Jewish people are like 17% of the population.

Speaker 1 Evangelical Protestants are like 19%. Linz is predominantly Catholic.

Speaker 1 And while Catholics believe that good works can win someone a place in heaven, Calvinists are as close to the opposite of Catholics as you get in Christianity, right? The idea is

Speaker 1 there's an elect few that make it to heaven, and those roles are fixed, right? Yeah,

Speaker 1 it's very Dutch-coded. It's very Dutch-coded.
But there's no real evidence that this difference caused Carl much trouble. His family overall seems to have blended in.

Speaker 1 His dad was a German nationalist, and as a Protestant as well, he would have been drawn to George Ritter von Schoenerer's pan-German movement.

Speaker 1 This was a foundational pillar of the right in Austria, and also a prelude to Nazism's conflict with the Catholic Church.

Speaker 1 Because the pan-German movement is a heavily evangelical Protestant movement, right? That's where like the core of the membership comes from.

Speaker 1 And I want to read you a summary of Schoener's life and career, written for Amsterdam University Press, which notes that his politics were, quote, founded on antagonism towards Slavs, Jews, and Catholicism.

Speaker 1 This culminated in his establishment of the Pan-German Party in 1879 and the subsequent away-from-Rome movement, seeking mass conversion of Austrian Catholics to Lutheranism, echoing Bismarck's Kulture Kampf in Germany.

Speaker 1 Schönerer became notorious for his pioneering use of physical and verbal violence.

Speaker 1 In 1888, he was imprisoned, losing his title and temporarily all parliamentary privileges after ransacking the offices of a Jewish-owned newspaper.

Speaker 1 In 1898, he orchestrated mob protests that expedited the dismissal of the Austrian Prime Minister, Count Badini, one year after Schoenerer's own re-election to the Reichsrat.

Speaker 1 This was in protest against Badini's language ordinances, ordinances, obliging civil servants in Austrian Bohemia to speak Czech, excluding Germanophones, and it helped his party reach a high watermark of 21 delegates in 1901.

Speaker 1 Schoenerer helped create an entirely new political form and climate, described as being in a new key, sharper, violent, demagogic.

Speaker 1 And Schönerer is a massive, because again, Hitler grows up in Linz. Schönerer is a huge influence on Hitler, right? Like he is, like, the way his party works is a proto-Nazi party.

Speaker 1 These guys are destroying Jewish Jewish newspapers. They're getting into fights in the street.
And they're like a pan-German nationalist group, right?

Speaker 1 Who is seeking to destroy any of these religions that have ties. Like, his issue with Catholicism is it's ties to Rome, right? Which is obviously not German.

Speaker 1 Yeah, as a German nationalist, it makes a lot of sense. I like that he ascends to power because his entire thing is a...

Speaker 1 I see you guys have a nationalist movement and it's not doing very well. Have you considered violence? Have you considered beating people up?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Have you considered street crime? Oh shit, this is working great.
Yeah, let's keep trying that. This is wonderful.

Speaker 1 So Eichmann would later recall that his father had been essentially apolitical. Quote, at home, politics was never discussed.
My father didn't bother with politics.

Speaker 1 But that's the kind of thing people say when, like, they don't view whatever their family believes as political, right?

Speaker 1 And as a kid, Eichmann doesn't think German nationalism or pan-Germanism is political, right? It's just correct. It's like how you get, there's some religious extremists in the U.S.

Speaker 1 who be like, Christianity isn't a religion. It's just the truth, you know, right? Like, I've heard that's a that's a conversation I've had.
It's like, I don't know.

Speaker 1 And having Christianity in politics is neither something to argue for or argue against. It just should be something that exists.
It's just the truth, right? Yeah, it's just the truth, you know.

Speaker 1 I hate to see yet another father get radicalized by using Facebook. Yeah.
You know, tragic.

Speaker 1 Yeah, his dad would have lost it to Facebook.

Speaker 1 So Schoenerer's party was the first big political party to influence Hitler, and in a less direct way, the same would have been true of young Eichmann.

Speaker 1 His family did everything a loyal Austro-Hungarian family ought to do, which for Adolf's mom meant Maria popping out a child every single opportunity she had.

Speaker 1 Little Adolf was joined by four siblings, three of whom were boys, in the space of about eight years.

Speaker 1 In other words, Maria popped out a kid once every two years until she died in 1916.

Speaker 1 And her death was a consequence of both World War I is on at this point, everyone is starving in Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Speaker 1 And number two, she's just had not had enough time to recuperate between pregnancies, right?

Speaker 1 So, like, her body is already taxed, and then there's not enough food while she's going through pregnancy number five in nine years. Christ, give the woman a weekend off.

Speaker 1 Nope, that's not the way they did it back then. She dies at 32.
That was a lot. Yeah, this dude couldn't pull out of a driveway.

Speaker 1 The elder Adolf Eichmann remarried almost instantly. This was likely a product of two pragmatic realities.

Speaker 1 He had no desire to raise his own children, and he needed more children, because that's what you did as a loyal citizen of the empire and a good evangelical Christian, right?

Speaker 1 His second wife was also named Maria. Perhaps

Speaker 1 perhaps he had a type. Although an Austrian woman named Maria, not too uncommon.
I am looking for an Austrian woman named Maria who could give births in litters.

Speaker 1 Three or four at a time would be ideal.

Speaker 1 It really saves us time and money. Yeah.
He was like, I'm not learning another name. What are you talking about? Yeah.
Oh, no. This is the world's first puppy play enthusiast.
Right.

Speaker 1 I feel like he just numbered his children and he's like, number one, come here. Yeah, it's faster that way.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Why is it always the psychos that want the most about of kids have the least about to do with parenting?

Speaker 1 Yeah, because the point is to have the kids not to be there with them.

Speaker 1 Fair enough. So, you know, speaking of being with people, I want to be with our advertisers, you know, both both physically and financially.

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Speaker 1 And we're back. All right.

Speaker 1 So his second wife, we'll call her Maria 2. Her family has money, which helps a lot because they're going to have more kids.

Speaker 1 Also, her family is closely tied to, she has like a number of relatives who had married into wealthy Jewish families in Vienna.

Speaker 1 And obviously, by that, you should know these are like urban sophisticated Jewish, sophisticated by the term of the day. They're not.

Speaker 1 They're trying to just be Germans, right?

Speaker 1 Which is not an uncommon thing for people in like the upper class who are Jewish in both in Austria and in Germany to do, to try to kind of leave behind the religion.

Speaker 1 And like, we're basically secular, we're married into Christian families. None of this really saves a lot of these people come the Holocaust.

Speaker 1 But there is this attempt to like integrate that. Like I'm a German before I'm anything else, right?

Speaker 1 And that's kind of her family is, number one, you'd say probably more open-minded than a lot because they are willing to marry into these families. Although it's also.

Speaker 1 you know, this thing of like, well, they got money, right? So that's, that's, that over, you know, overwhelms the fact that they're this race that a lot of people don't like, right? They're rich.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 that kind of papers over that to some people. But it's meaningful in the case of Eichmann because you often don't hear this with him.

Speaker 1 Every version of this backstory, of his backstory, emphasizes cultural anti-Semitism, which both he was raised with and tries to say that he was accused of being Jewish.

Speaker 1 But it ignores the fact that he was exposed to positive images and accounts of Jewish people as part of German society. His in-laws were Jewish, some of them, right?

Speaker 1 He knew Jewish people growing up and he would have had like a family relationship with them, right? So this is not a guy who was like destined by any means to be completely anti-Semitic, right?

Speaker 1 Destined by the stars to be a massive piece of shit. Right.
That's just not how it works. This is a choice he makes at a point, right?

Speaker 1 Now, obviously, his mother's death would have been traumatic for him. It's always traumatic for your mom to die when you're a little kid.

Speaker 1 But again, a lot of these stories are like, like and he hated his wicked stepmother who was cruel to him he never described her that way he described her as a zealous and responsible guardian like which is like the highest compliment a german can pay you right right you get the feeling he didn't love her like he did his mom which again isn't weird but he was like no she was like respectable she did the job that she was brought in to do right um and three more children quickly joined the family uh he later recalled of his family life there was no disorder we were brought up in a strict way and we had a normal quiet life.

Speaker 1 He did recall as a child that while his stepmother tried to get the family interested in the Bible, young Adolf Eichmann was primarily interested in the bits with battles and killing, which is not abnormal for young boys.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's more on brand. I would be more worried if he wasn't.
He's like, no, I'm actually more really into the logistics half of this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 How do they, how do they, what do they, what, what kind of food were they carting on the desert for 40 years? How do they make that work, right? Let me see the wagons. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So one of his best friends as a child was a Jewish classmate, Misha Seba.

Speaker 1 Uh, Seba's father was a pharmacist, and his mother owned a salon, and the two were close enough that Cesarini describes them as regularly staying over at each other's houses.

Speaker 1 So, again, this is not a guy who's destined to the kind of anti-Semitism that he is going to adopt in adulthood. It's a choice he makes.

Speaker 1 Seba and Eichmann would maintain their friendship, in fact, well into not just adulthood, but Eichmann's involvement with like far-right organizations into the early, I think, like 32 is when they have their last contact.

Speaker 1 So like, that's late, right?

Speaker 1 And that's also not uncommon, though. No, all, all, all of the, all of these psychos who, you know, maybe put the blueprints of the Holocaust in place or high-ranking members of the Third Reich

Speaker 1 had some kind of hands-on shit. Like all of them had close personal contacts with Jewish people and the their the mental gymnastics they were currently like, ah, well, he's one of the good ones.

Speaker 1 It's fine. Yeah.
And that is in fact a thing that was talked about.

Speaker 1 Like, and they cover this in conspiracy, but at the Vonsei conference, where they're trying to decide, like, how far do we go with this?

Speaker 1 And finally, like, look, everyone has their good Jew, but we just can't build that into the plan. We have to try to wipe them all out.
Right.

Speaker 1 But, like, as I'll, like, Hitler, even, there was one Jewish guy he picked to spirit out of Nazi Germany after he took power, his family doctor, right? Oh, there's, he was also his personal driver.

Speaker 1 Yeah, his personal driver was Jewish as well. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. He, like, he, like, all these guys had relationships with Jewish people, right?

Speaker 1 But, you know, that's just the way racism works, right? Now, nobody ever accused them of being smart or logical in their racism.

Speaker 1 No, there was a fucking, a great Louis Theroux documentary where he goes to see Tom Metzger, who used to lead an organization called White Aryan Resistance or War that was responsible for the murder of a young immigrant named Malugeta Surat in Portland years back.

Speaker 1 And, you know, Metzger is as vile an anti-Semite as possible. And during Louis' time with him, he like meets his neighbor, who's like a Mexican man, that, and they're like friendly.

Speaker 1 And Tom's like, no, I mean, like, we get along. Like, I like him.
Like, it doesn't change my overall opinion about like different races. And it's just like, yeah, that's just how these people are.

Speaker 1 Like, there's cognitive dissonance.

Speaker 1 You're not immune to it just because you're a bigot, right?

Speaker 1 So anyway, Seba and Eichmann are friends for a while.

Speaker 1 And yeah, another friend of his was Friedrich von Schmidt. And this is a friend more that you would expect from a guy who grows into what Eichmann was.

Speaker 1 As you can tell by the Vaughan, Friedrich is the son of a noble family. His dad had been a field marshal for the Austro-Hungarian army, which means he was terrible at his job.
None of them were good.

Speaker 1 Nobody's ever been worse at their job.

Speaker 1 Not a single good field marshal in that army.

Speaker 1 And his family was impoverished by the time that Eichmann met him, right? Probably because of the heretofore mentioned World War I, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm glad to see at least one family got what they deserved. Right.

Speaker 1 Poverty. Yeah.

Speaker 1 cesarini notes that the mere fact that eichmann was allowed to play with this kid counters the narrative that he was like a desperate loner on the fringes as a kid because like von schmitt's family wouldn't have let them play his their son play with the weird kid right that's just not the way these these groups worked so do you think it's evidence that his family was quite well placed in society to be hanging out with this even even though they're impoverished it's that kind of european not nobility that's poor but they still have social standing and they're no then yeah and they don't and like the eichmann family is not like impoverished I think they, they go from kind of lower middle class to solidly middle class by the time he's like an adult, right?

Speaker 1 Like is sort of how I

Speaker 1 and again, middle class terms like that are not as useful when we're talking about Austro-Hungary in the first half of the 20th century, but that's or Austria, but that's kind of a used horse salesman.

Speaker 1 A used car salesman didn't exist yet. Yeah,

Speaker 1 they drive the they drive the equivalent of a Pontiac vibe in horses, which I guess is just a horse with no legs that you that you pull with a fucking

Speaker 1 mule. Put my horse up on cinder blocks.
We pull horse with mule.

Speaker 1 He's Pontiac.

Speaker 1 This is my horse vibe.

Speaker 1 So if we're looking for signs in his childhood of the monster he would become, we don't have a lot to go on from childhood trauma because he doesn't seem to have had a lot of childhood trauma.

Speaker 1 More than probably you and I or most kids, because he grew up in World War I, right? He's not fighting in it, but everyone is starving for a while right that's probably pretty bad for you um

Speaker 1 now what's interesting to me is that like it is a seminal moment this war for a lot of the Nazi old guard whether they fought in it or not but Eichmann didn't talk about it much and we get little of his backstory on that now he would have been inundated with imperial propaganda and the shortages of the war years would have impacted him but his father seems to have maintained a comfortable living for the family in spite of the times and as was never drafted himself, which also suggests that what he was doing was really useful during the war, right?

Speaker 1 To not get drafted by the end of that fucking thing as a

Speaker 1 he either had really good connections or he did something, some kind of manufacturing because by the end of he's working in power, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, like by the end, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was scraping the bottom of the bottom of the barrel. They were drafting the horses with no legs.
Do you have one or more hens? Okay.

Speaker 1 That's not a good Austrian accent. What was that?

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 How am I doing another one? We have paperwork for something called the horse vibe.

Speaker 1 So the war cost Austria what was left of her empire, right?

Speaker 1 And a third of the German-speaking population wound up separated into different countries, which really pits us off pan-Germanists like Eichmann's father.

Speaker 1 But again, we have nothing that shows child Eichmann was particularly traumatized at the war's outcome, nor is there any particular evidence that his dad blamed the Jews.

Speaker 1 We might do better looking at the place and systems he was raised in than the specifics of his family life.

Speaker 1 This is because the town he was raised in, Linz, is also the town where Hitler had been raised a couple decades earlier.

Speaker 1 And the future Führer was at this point on the Western Front during World War I, but he and Eichmann went to the same high school as kids, obviously with some time in between them, and they had some of the same teachers, right?

Speaker 1 Like Eichmann has Hitler's history teacher.

Speaker 1 This guy. That history teacher has the most cursed alumni meetings ever.

Speaker 1 And he's a piece, like, he's got some blame for what happens.

Speaker 1 He has to. I mean, his fucking track record is

Speaker 1 spotless in tragedy. No.
And this is why I always tell my friends who are teachers: don't teach children things. It never ends well.
You know, keep their little minds empty, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I had a teaching job for years. I'm never going to say it was a good one, but I'm willing to bet I did not teach American Hitler.
Another Hitler? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Way too busy watching Remember the Titans. Right.
Yeah. Just put that on a bunch.
They'll be fine.

Speaker 1 His history teacher was named Dr. Leopold Poetsch, Poetsch, P-O-E-E, like Poet, S-C-H.

Speaker 1 Both Hitler and Eichmann later wrote about the impact this man had on their developing minds, so it's probably worth looking into him a bit deeper. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote this about Poetsch.

Speaker 1 Quote, an old gentleman, kind, but at the same time firm. He was able not only to hold our attention by his dazzling eloquence, but to carry us away with him.

Speaker 1 Even today, I think back with genuine emotion on this gray-haired man, who, by the fire of his words, sometimes made us forget the present, who, as if by magic, transported us into times past, and, out of the millennium mists of time, transformed dry historical facts into vivid reality.

Speaker 1 There we sat, often aflame with enthusiasm, sometimes even moved to tears. He used our budding national fanaticism as a means of educating us, frequently appealing to our sense of national honor.

Speaker 1 This teacher made history my favorite subject, and indeed, though he had no such intention, it was then I became a young revolutionary.

Speaker 1 Not a good teacher. No, no, that's not good.
You fucked up, Leopold. Yeah, at any point you're a teacher, and you get noted in your students'

Speaker 1 manifesto? Manifesto, yeah. Right?

Speaker 1 Not a good vote of confidence.

Speaker 1 So Poetsch was a German supremacist, although he was also one. He was a weird kind because he was super loyal to the Habsburgs, which obviously Hitler does not become loyal to the Habsburgs.

Speaker 1 He leaves Austria to join the German army.

Speaker 1 His exhortations to nationalism influenced both Hitler and Eichmann, though.

Speaker 1 Eichmann recalled later that while he was never very political as a kid, he reflexively leaned towards right-wing nationalism. This would have kept him well inside the mainstream within Linz.

Speaker 1 For most of his childhood, the city government was run by Mayor Carl Bureli, who headed a coalition of lawyers, teachers, small business owners, and government employees who were all bound together by a shared hatred of liberals, Jews, and the Catholic clergy.

Speaker 1 It's just a normal Republican meeting these days. It's a normal Republican meeting these days.

Speaker 1 His father went through several career changes, Eichmann's, and significant reversals of fortune while he's a kid.

Speaker 1 The job in Linz had initially seemed like a step to the upper middle class, and for a time it was.

Speaker 1 But his dad retired early and put his savings into a 51% stake in a mining company based in Salzburg, which was experimenting with an early form of what we now call hydraulic fracturing, right?

Speaker 1 Like he,

Speaker 1 his family,

Speaker 1 he has some family money from fracking. Adolf Eichmann?

Speaker 1 He's an oil and gas kid. Oh, so does this make him like ancestrally from North Dakota or something?

Speaker 1 Is he Dakotan? Yeah, that's why Adolf Eichmann High School is located in Bismarck.

Speaker 1 I'd say sorry to our listener in North Dakota, but they don't have the internet there, do they? Explains all the Nazis there, to be fair.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, North Dakota. I love you.
I don't love you, but I've been to you.

Speaker 1 I don't think anybody could be in love with a Dakota. Yeah, it's more of a friend.
It's like loving a vampire squid. You know, you can appreciate some of its characteristics, but

Speaker 1 a what? A vampire squid. The fuck is a vampire squid? It's a squid that's a vampire.
Come on.

Speaker 1 Your brain's working today. It is what it says on the tin.
Yeah, no, it's what's advertised. Your brain is like this today.

Speaker 1 That's a lot of days, Sophie. Much like the legs of a vampire squid.
There we go.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 this 51% stake in a fracking company in Salzburg, it brings in a living, but it doesn't make them rich, right? You're in it a little too early to get loaded from fracking.

Speaker 1 So Adolph's dad invested what was left of his savings and his wife's inheritance into a mill in Upper Austria. This was a bad choice, and the investment went bust quickly.

Speaker 1 Carl pivoted to an investment in a company making locomobiles. I had never heard of these.
They were a dirty. What the fuck is a locomobile? They were steam-powered cars.

Speaker 1 That rules. I mean, you have to invent something when your horse has no fucking legs.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So he gets into locomobiles, but it turns out this isn't like a real investment. His business partner is a con man who hangs himself.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, you invested in steam-powered cars with the local Austrian flim flam man. And you're an oil man.

Speaker 1 Some biographers would try to make hay out of the impact his father's unstable employment and financial situation might have had, as with the fact that his dad is gone for a period.

Speaker 1 There's like a year where he's working in Germany while Eichmann's a kid. But Eichmann never related this as particularly traumatic.

Speaker 1 And the evidence shows, well, again, they had financial difficulties, they were never in danger of like losing their home or starving if anything the Eichmans enjoyed unusual stability and financial security for people of their class and time right not that they were totally stable not that they didn't have anxieties but they had it better than a lot of folks right yeah I mean they're they're making a killing selling weird steam-powered cars setting their neighbor's drinking water on fire with fracking yeah well i mean his business partner in the steam cars thing killed himself because it went belly up so i don't know about that part but yeah you're right it's more of a shelbyville thing i guess It's a Shelbyville thing, yeah.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 he does get tricked by, yeah, the fucking music man.

Speaker 1 So, as I noted earlier, when I read Cesarini's biography, the big thing I took away was how similar Eichmann's childhood was to, like, mine, which is not something that tends to happen with books about guys who grew up in Austria at the turn of the century.

Speaker 1 And I find this very weird. I'm just going to quote from that book now.
Eichmann's social life was typical of the children and youth of his class.

Speaker 1 Like every good bourgeoisie child, he was taught a musical instrument, and he became a proficient violinist. His father encouraged him to learn fencing, and he took classes in jiu-jitsu.

Speaker 1 He was enrolled in the Young Men's Christian Association and went to the club every Sunday after attending church with his family.

Speaker 1 He later joined the Wandervogel, a sort of scouting or woodcraft association that organized hikes and camps for teenagers.

Speaker 1 The particular Wandervogel group he joined belonged to the Federation of Youth Organizations, which was ostensibly apolitical, although the movement had a strong, if diverse, ideological currents running through it.

Speaker 1 Eichmann's group, named after the Griffin Bird, introduced him to older boys who were already in the ranks of right-wing Austrian militias.

Speaker 1 And just like the whole, yeah, he like he has to learn an instrument. Everyone does.
He takes fencing classes. He takes jiu-jitsu like he's doing karate classes.

Speaker 1 I didn't know they were doing that at this point in time in Austria.

Speaker 1 I love the idea of like a Nazi brown shirt getting in a street battle and he just falls on his ass and starts scooting around trying to do Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Yeah, like a crab on his back.

Speaker 1 I'm going to pull guard on the underman. Oh, man.
It's so funny.

Speaker 1 It's just, it's all, yeah, that's fascinating to me.

Speaker 1 And yeah, the Wander Vogel, there were like, there was like a left-wing chunk of them, but the group he is in, he doesn't get involved in right-wing militias, but he now has friends in them, right?

Speaker 1 And he will know people kind of the rest of his life until he gets directly in the far-right who are in far-right groups, right?

Speaker 1 This makes sense to me as someone who did a lot of jiu-jitsu, where you never expect that you're going to end up in the middle of a group of right-wingers, but the second you walk into a jiu-jitsu jib, like, oh,

Speaker 1 the vibes are off. Yeah, I guess I'm in a right-wing space, aren't I?

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Speaker 1 And we're back. So Eichmann was an indifferent student.
We might even say a bad one. His later life would show him to be a generally smart guy, or at least to possess kinds of intelligence.

Speaker 1 So the way I read this is that he's not motivated by any of the schoolwork he's doing, nor is he motivated by any of the paths set before him by his education.

Speaker 1 His father takes him out of traditional school in 1921 and puts him into a vocational program to train him as an electrician, right?

Speaker 1 So his dad is like, you're not doing well in like school school and you have to learn how to like do something, right? But he fails out of vocational school.

Speaker 1 He ultimately drops out without any kind of degree. So he's now failed both of the different kinds of schooling tracks in Austria at the time.

Speaker 1 Now, for a young man with fewer means behind him, this might have ended with Eichmann winding up like Hitler, you know, as some of those other biographies had claimed, living on the streets of Vienna, homeless or at the edge of it.

Speaker 1 But unlike Hitler, Eichmann's father was still alive, and Eichmann's dad used his plentiful connections to get his job. He owns a mining company, right?

Speaker 1 And he gets his job involved in the fracking company, right? So Adolf Eichmann, future foreman of the Holocaust, his first like big boy job is hydraulic fracking, right? That's that's

Speaker 1 as a fail son. As a fail son? Yeah.

Speaker 1 His dad seems to have put him through a number of roles at the company, trying him doing out, doing everything from squeezing through underground tunnels to running machinery above ground.

Speaker 1 Eichmann liked work in the tunnels. It was physical and dangerous and seems to have been the first labor that he found motivating.

Speaker 1 After some time working at the fracking company, he did an apprenticeship at an Austrian electronics company, which occupied him for two and a half years until his dad convinced him to take a gig as a radio salesman.

Speaker 1 This does not pan out, and ultimately Eichmann gravitates towards a position he finds advertised in the paper at an oil company.

Speaker 1 His stepmom used a family connection through one of her Jewish in-laws to get him hired by the owner of the company, who was also a Jewish guy.

Speaker 1 Now, the executive who interviewed him told him he was too young for the job, but said, I've been told to hire you anyway, so congratulations. Like, welcome in.

Speaker 1 I don't know if this guy survives long enough to regret this or not, but

Speaker 1 yeah. If Eichmann was at all embarrassed or ashamed at the nepotism involved in keeping him afloat, he left no record of it.

Speaker 1 Instead, he seems to have enjoyed the job and the relative comfort it afforded him. He bought a motorcycle and devoted himself to the work well enough to get promoted.

Speaker 1 Key to his success was that the job involved constant travel, which he mostly did via the motorcycle that he bought.

Speaker 1 Already, Eichmann showed a preference for work that allowed him to set his own hours and mixed desk work with time in the field.

Speaker 1 He spent a lot of time out in rural Austria finding spots to build gas stations.

Speaker 1 And he had to handle a lot of logistical hurdles, scheduling fuel deliveries to make sure that shit got where it needed to be at the right time. And he gets good at this, right?

Speaker 1 Like his training for how to make the Holocaust trains run is setting up gas stations and gas fuel deliveries, right?

Speaker 1 That is honestly something I could see coming. Yeah,

Speaker 1 it's not so surprising when you lay it out like that.

Speaker 1 A middle management Nepo guy in the oil, gas, fuel

Speaker 1 fascism pipeline. I feel like that's a pretty well-trodden path.

Speaker 1 Now, he was known to work hard, often during the weekend, but he was also not someone who let his social life atrophy, as Cesarene writes.

Speaker 1 His social life flourished now that he had disposable income, freedom to come and go as he pleased on weekday evenings, and a motorcycle with which to impress prospective girlfriends at the weekend.

Speaker 1 He was definitely not the lonely gausch outsider who depicted as the typical recruit to Nazism in many of the psychological and socio-psychological explanations for the movement's growth.

Speaker 1 His prison memoir is filled with gratitude to his father for the move to Upper Austria, his second homeland, and for giving him a glorious, untroubled youth.

Speaker 1 A keen horseman, he spent hours riding in the countryside. He recalled that, as for all young men, those days offered him love, spring, and life.

Speaker 1 Motorsports, mountain sports, work, coffee houses, friends and girlfriends, and why not, filled the days and years.

Speaker 1 So good for him.

Speaker 1 He's living it up. He's again, not at all the guy he's described as by a lot of people.
He's a dude with a social life. He's a dude who's reasonably good with women.
He's a dude who

Speaker 1 has options to be happy outside of joining the Nazi party, right? Yeah, if we didn't know how the story ended, I would say, well, I'm sure this guy turns out perfectly normal for a German of the era.

Speaker 1 A normal dude, yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, throughout this period, the Nazi Party is a rising up in Germany, and in Austria, the left and right are engaging in open warfare in the streets, with the government cracking down hard against the social democratic militias.

Speaker 1 Eichmann isn't ignorant of any of this, although he is not initially much of an activist.

Speaker 1 His particular chapter of the Wander Vogel movement shares members with some of these militias, and this seems to be where he starts the years-long onboarding process that eventually leads him to Nazism.

Speaker 1 His aristocratic friend, Von Schmidt, convinces him to join an anti-socialist nationalist association for veterans. Obviously, Eichmann isn't a veteran, but that's not a problem.

Speaker 1 He joins the young veterans wing of the group, which is, I guess, for non-veterans.

Speaker 1 Young veterans? I think it's...

Speaker 1 You'll be a veteran when the war we all know is going to come. Well, yeah, future veterans.

Speaker 1 I mean, a young veteran back then could have just been child soldiers as well because there's plenty of them floating around. But I love that he's like Adolf Eichmann, honorary Austrian veteran.

Speaker 1 Honorary Austrian veteran. Yeah.
We're going to throw rocks at you and it's like you're in the tie roll, right? Yeah, what a cold wizard.

Speaker 1 What a bunch of nerds. So this is where he learns to march and shoot.

Speaker 1 Their leader, and it's so funny to me how close this guy's last name is to Hitler. Their leader is Hermann von Hiltel.

Speaker 1 Not quite Hitler, right?

Speaker 1 Hiltel?

Speaker 1 It's like carsenalization, but for fascists, like evolution was always working to produce a Hitler?

Speaker 1 If Hitler, if our Hitler hadn't come up, the von Hiltel family would have produced a Hitler given enough time, right? The name would have just turned into shift. Yeah?

Speaker 1 Given enough time that the chances of Hitler approach one.

Speaker 1 Their leader, Colonel Hermann von Hiltel, was violently anti-Semitic and described Jewish Marxism as the enemy of Germany.

Speaker 1 He was an outspoken advocate of dispossessing Austrian Jews who owned land and stripping them of their citizenship.

Speaker 1 Von Hiltel railed against Jewish immigration into Austria and held regular rallies where his loud, violent young followers would encourage their Jewish neighbors to leave the country. Now,

Speaker 1 this is the group that Eichmann starts hanging out in. There is a Nazi party in Austria by the late 20s, but Eichmann isn't interested in it because it's really weak and small.

Speaker 1 It's like by far the weakest part of what is at that point a vibrant far-right ecosystem. So he's like, the Nazis, like those are Germans and they're kind of losers.

Speaker 1 Like there's better far-right Austrian groups.

Speaker 1 Evan Burr Buke, a historian of Linz, describes the Nazis in this period as a party of outsiders. And Eichmann's not an outsider, right? Key aspect of him.
He is never an outsider. Party of outsiders.

Speaker 1 Okay. It's the weirdos and the freaks who become Austrian Nazis in this period, right? And Eichmann is not.

Speaker 1 He's a normal guy with pretty good connections. So he joins a mainstream far-right militia that hates Jewish people.

Speaker 1 Sorry, not Nazi enough for me. No.
Oh, the Nazis.

Speaker 1 He's like, I just think that you should be

Speaker 3 more Nazi.

Speaker 1 Yeah. A little fringe for me, darling.
So I don't know why I gave Eichmann that old set.

Speaker 1 I know, I'm telling you, your brain today is making it.

Speaker 1 I've got George Lucas disease. I can't help but imagine Germans as sounding like British people.
I mean, to be fair.

Speaker 1 Look, it works. It makes sense, right?

Speaker 1 There's a reason why, whenever they make like Nazi movies and the bad guys actually have speaking lines, they're always just played by people with British accents. Yeah.
There's a reason for that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the big exception being Waltz in the Tarantina movie. We're like, oh, shit, they actually have a German guy doing Nazi stuff.

Speaker 1 In 1930, Eichmann gets engaged to a cop's daughter. The The relationship is not going to work out, weirdly enough, because she doesn't like Nazis, right?

Speaker 1 She's like this cop's daughter, very, which doesn't mean she's not far-right or racist. It just means they like another party.
And the Nazis are kind of weirdos.

Speaker 1 One day, Eichmann is over at her family apartment in 1931, which sit in their apartment sits above a bar that Nazis would gather in regularly throughout the week.

Speaker 1 And Eichmann later claimed, in our circle, and like he's talking about their friend group, it was the done thing to say that the NSDAP consisted of idiots and no-hopers.

Speaker 1 And his fiancée made the statement, a statement to that effect, when she saw a troop of brown shirts marching down the street. Eichmann got angry and snapped back.

Speaker 1 These idiots have order and discipline, and they march well. He ended the engagement shortly thereafter.
They're really good at marching. I can't wait to see.
Don't make fun of it. They walk too good.

Speaker 1 They're so good at walking. God damn it.
Don't you understand how important walking is?

Speaker 1 By 1932, the Australian economy is in the tank, And Eichmann doesn't lose his job right away, but he can see the writing on the wall, right? That like his company is going to have to get rid of him.

Speaker 1 He may have ultimately joined the Nazi party as much as anything because he saw a future there and the potential for paying work, right?

Speaker 1 Not initially that he is such an ideological Nazi because he's still not at this point. He's a German nationalist.
He's increasingly racist, but he could have gone a couple of ways.

Speaker 1 But he's like, look, the Nazis, they're starting to, they're no longer a fringe group in Austria by like 31, 32, right? They're starting to get more normal.

Speaker 1 And if you know anything, I like my career is based on a version of this. If you want to move ahead really quickly, you find a thing, an organization that's fairly new and growing rapidly.

Speaker 1 And you just kind of stick yourself in there and find

Speaker 1 a place where you can sort of make it your own, right? And that's what he's going to do with the Nazi Party. He's like, this is a new organization.
I can push

Speaker 1 my way.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry. Yeah,

Speaker 1 this is the way everything works. Just compare a screening cool sound media.
No, no, no. This is way before that.

Speaker 1 I'm talking about like my early, like you find a company that's just started and they're desperate for people and you just start deciding, my job's going to be this, my job's going to be that.

Speaker 1 And it offers opportunity that doesn't exist in like the Austrian state. Right.
And I mean, this is definitely a guy that's very, very comfortable job hopping whenever he sees an opportunity.

Speaker 1 Like, he doesn't have a career. He's like, I'm an oil man.
Right. I'm also an electrician.
I'm doing this. I worked as a clerk for a little bit.
I'll guess I'll be a Nazi oil man again.

Speaker 1 And he's also, he sees, number one,

Speaker 1 the corporate economy is not going to be good for a while. The depression is starting.
And the Austrian government is a really ossified,

Speaker 1 you don't move quickly in that. The Nazis, they're starting to take power in Germany by this point.
The writing is on the wall there. And he's like, well, maybe they'll take power in Austria.

Speaker 1 I think this is going to happen. And the sooner I get in, the better my chances of getting a really good job in the new state, right? Because this is still a small organization.

Speaker 1 I can make myself a big part of it. And when it takes over, I'll be really well positioned, right? Makes sense.
It's just a smart way to look at like any kind of like organization, right? Like

Speaker 1 if you're looking to jump ahead in your career, find a place where they don't really have anything solidified yet. You know, that's just, that's just kind of always how big organizations work.

Speaker 1 By the end of 31, the Austrian Nazis had started getting their shit together, just as the dominant far-right militia of the area, the Heimwehr, starts falling apart, right?

Speaker 1 Eichmann finally joins the party in the spring of 1932 after the Nazis sweep a bunch of local elections in Vienna and Salzburg, right?

Speaker 1 And we should see this again as he knows where the wind is blowing, right? Like

Speaker 1 he's aware of what's about to happen, and he's positioning himself for kind of the next big part of his life, which we will be discussing in part two.

Speaker 1 Oh Oh boy. I uh

Speaker 1 how are we feeling about Eichmann?

Speaker 1 Weird. I don't, I don't, I don't know how to put it.

Speaker 1 Like, honestly, Eichmann is a guy, which, you know, obviously we, we, we know a little bit about him just from the background of knowing about the Holocaust.

Speaker 1 But the fact that he seems so normal is off-putting because even the normal Nazi guys, there's something truly strange about them.

Speaker 1 He is very normal up until you know we're about to get to when the Nazis take over Austria.

Speaker 1 He's still not even really ideologically driven other than what could be considered mainstream politics at the time.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 No, and that's like, yeah, that's kind of the thing about him that's really, and you can see a bit of this with Heydrich, too, where, well, you're, and even with Mengele, where it's like, yeah, your biggest motivation is.

Speaker 1 Your career is this movement has allowed you to leapfrog ahead at a much younger age to a high position than you would have ever gotten in the old German state or the old Austrian state, right?

Speaker 1 That just wouldn't have happened. And look, if you look at like, I'm just looking right now at how this 22-year-old kid that was appointed to DHS to lead terrorism prevention, right?

Speaker 1 It's the same thing going on right now. There's opportunities

Speaker 1 like this for very young people who aren't good or great at anything and who wouldn't have risen up in the traditional system, but things have been disrupted and they're primarily good at not causing problems for the people above them, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah. And yeah, you can make, you can make a place for yourself that way.
Auto move fast and break break figs.

Speaker 1 It's a great picture. It's a great picture, though.

Speaker 1 It's a horrible picture. The kid is terrible.
It's so scary.

Speaker 1 Someone needs to give that kid a swirly immediately.

Speaker 1 I do wonder, would we have been better off if Eichmann did get the shit bullied out of him when he was a child? Like, is this this a proper application of bullying?

Speaker 1 There's only one way to find out, Joe. You and me,

Speaker 1 we got to get in a time machine and we got to beat the shit out of little kid Eichmann. And I mean, put that fucker in traction, like Austrian,

Speaker 1 like a big old machine, like fucking rusted metal nailed to his body until he gets better. That's what we're doing.

Speaker 1 Me and you need to need to knock back a couple of pineskin, go back in time, and beat the shit out of this child.

Speaker 1 Just wail on his ass. Absolutely.
Yep. Good call.
This is it. This is what we're doing.
All right, everybody. If you have access to a time machine, let Joe and I know.
I promise that's all we'll do.

Speaker 1 We're not going to do any sports betting. Absolutely not going to do a lot of sports betting with it.
We would never do primarily sports betting instead of saving lives, you know? That's right.

Speaker 1 We're not going back to 2001 to bet on the World Series.

Speaker 1 No, not me. Yeah, not me.
Well, obviously, we'll stop stop 9-11, of course. Yeah, definitely.
I promise that I will only go back in time to beat up children.

Speaker 1 That's right. That's how I'll stop 9-11.
I'll go back further in time. I'll beat up other children.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 I'm going to travel back to Saudi Arabia when bin Laden's like seven and just kick the shit out of that kid until he's pissing blood. That's what we're doing.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 This will fix all these problems. The only way that will stop it is time-traveling child abuse.
Yeah, that's the way to do it.

Speaker 1 Bin Laden waits another five years and his big attack is ramming a plane into a podcasting studio.

Speaker 1 Good stuff. Okay, well, we should probably stop now.

Speaker 1 We'll be back in part two for more genocide. Bye, everybody.

Speaker 3 Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

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