Part One: Robert Maxwell: How Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad Ruined Science

Coolzone Media

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

And ladies and gentlemen,

we've got a real motherfucker of a motherfucker for you this week.

And to talk about one of the most interesting sons of bitches we're going to talk about on this series, I have one of the most interesting guests that we've had on this show, Adam Conover.

Adam, welcome to the program.

You hardly need introduction, but obviously you were the host of Adam Ruins Everything, and you've done, I mean, you've been in a ton of stuff since you were in Bojack Horseman.

You serve on the board of the WGA, and you have a podcast now, right?

Yeah, I do a show called Factually on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.

And I also do video monologues, which don't really have a title, but it's sort of the current evolution of what people know me for doing, doing topical comedy about the world around us, us.

Mostly about fascism.

I'm doing a lot of weekly videos.

A lot of that these days.

About creeping fascism and what we can do about it.

And

yeah,

trying to be a little green shoot in the ashes of the entertainment industry and, you know, doing stuff online now, having a great time.

Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

It's interesting to me.

You and I both came out of, because you came out of college humor, where you did a lot of your early work.

I came out of cracked.

So we're kind of like cousins in digital media terms.

Definitely.

Both of whom started out out doing like yeah pop culture commentary and now it's it's just all fascism it's just all fascism remember when there used to be websites and yeah on the websites you could do comedy about various things history or pop culture or just like you know uh something about uh dating college chicks and people would click on that you'd get some money and now you got to go on elon musk's platform and talk about how a judge was arrested.

Yes.

Yes.

Or you go onto Facebook and you see a crudely AI generated image of a soldier with no arms and a face that just isn't quite right that says, nobody will share this image.

It's great.

I love what's happened to media.

This is so much better than my friends having healthcare.

No one will share this image is the funniest trope.

of viral Facebook boomer content.

I love it.

I love it.

I love it.

It's so good.

So, this is actually slightly relevant to the person we're talking about today.

Cause our bastard this week is he's the man who ruined science in a lot of ways.

And he's also one of the major figures who like helped make media what it is.

He was Rupert Murdoch's nemesis for years.

And the primary reason you're going to know this guy, and I think everyone listening is going to know this guy, is he is the father of Gillen Maxwell.

We are talking this week about Robert Maxwell.

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Do you know anything about Robert Maxwell?

I know nothing about Robert Maxwell.

This guy is so fucking weird.

So part one of this is going to basically be like Inglorious Bastards because the first 20 something years of his life, he is a character from a Quentin Tarantino movie.

Like he is a righteous Avenger fighting Nazis.

And then he turns into like a business monster who destroys the industry of scientific publishing for quick profit.

It's such like a weird heel turn story.

I was wondering how he was going to destroy science and destroying scientific publishing is how you would do it.

And that has been done.

I know this has been done.

And so now I'm interested to hear about the bastard who did it.

Well, at first, he's going to be pretty sympathetic, although he's also going to commit a lot of war crimes.

So it's going to be a mix of things happening here.

But yeah, this is, this is Gillen Maxwell's dad.

She's obviously was Jeffrey Epstein's like right-hand woman,

was the only one to get convicted for his crimes because of obvious reasons.

And yeah, we're going to be talking about her dad because he's just so much more fucking interesting than her.

People would always refer to when you would, like, when I would read about, you know, what they had done, that she was an heiress.

And I had assumed she came from like older family money.

She does not.

The fortune just goes back to her dad.

Like, he is as he actually was a self-made billionaire.

And I say that because he grew up deeply impoverished on like the Ukrainian steppe in an incredibly poor Jewish village in like the 1920s.

So like not one of these guys, not like an Elon Musk story.

There's no emerald mines in his background, right?

This, This guy comes from nothing.

And like all people who would grow into, because he is kind of a con man, Robert Max.

Well, that is not the name he was born under, which you probably guessed when I said he grew up in a steppe village in the Ukrainian steppes, right?

Not the most Ukrainian name ever.

He was born Abraham Lieb Hawk on June 10th, 1923, in a village called Slatinsky Doli.

And most modern, and I just said he was born in Ukraine.

That's where his hometown is located today.

But when Abraham was born, it was part of Czechoslovakia, right?

Because all of those borders move around quite a bit in the first half of the 20th century.

He wouldn't have grown up really identifying as Czech, partly because being Czech was like a thing that had just really started, you know, in that period.

Like Czechoslovakia was a new country after World War I.

He would have identified, and most of the people around him, as Ruthenians, which is kind of this isolated eastern portion of what is then Czechoslovakia, where his family grows up.

Now, again, Abraham's family was Jewish, and the village that they came from, Slotinski Doli, was noteworthy because it's like, it was close to where all the pogroms were happening, but it was the place that usually was relatively safe.

So its entire history and its population, there's like, there's almost like sedimentary layers of different pogroms that occur over the course of the couple of centuries before this, where like you'll get a new wave of people moving to the village because everyone else in the area they came from got massacred by the Cossacks or whatever, right?

Like, that's the story of the village that he grows up in.

So, you know,

this is, again, not a guy who comes from money.

One of my sources for this episode is a biography on Maxwell by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dylan.

And here's how it summarizes this village.

It was a place where Jews were allowed to sell their goods to their Christian neighbors.

Some even had licenses to offer alcohol.

They were permitted to educate their children in the Judaic faith and wear their traditional dress and speak their own language.

Haunted by their own cruel past, there was hardly a family in the village that had not lost relatives to the pogroms.

They lived frugal lives within the sanctity of their faith.

And that says a lot right there, that like a key part of this is like some of the residents are even allowed to sell alcohol.

Yeah, they're allowed to.

These people are allowed to wear shoes and speak to one another and they can walk down the streets.

Yes, yes.

We let these Jews sell to Christians.

Can you believe it?

How progressive.

Not exactly easy living.

No, no.

Again, this guy comes from about as rough a background as you get.

And we're talking the life he's born into, these are peasants in 1923, but their daily life, if you had pulled someone from the same area in the 1600s into this village in the 20s, it would have mostly been familiar to them, right?

Wow.

Like that, that's kind of how behind the rest of the world and how isolated that they are.

Now, within kind of Czechoslovakia, Abraham and his family are double pariahs because they're Jewish and they're Ruthenian.

And Ruth, again, the kind of like regional racism that existed within Eastern Europe at this time, Ruthenians were seen as like backwards and almost less human by a lot of the rest of the country.

A travel guide to the region published by the Czech government in like 1920 praised the fresh air and the wildlife in the area, but warned visitors of the quote, rather unintelligent Ruthenians, whose expression is almost blank stare, who sit in the marketplace side by side, gazing at the distance, seldom speaking a word or moving a muscle.

This is their own government's tragedy.

Yes, yes.

This is this

visit Ruthenia where the people aren't people.

Yeah,

that makes sense.

You know, if I was doing a travel guide to LA, that's how I describe Santa Monica.

So, you know, it makes sense.

People just staring off into the distance, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's a product of all of the weed shops on Venice, but

so Robert Maxwell rarely talked about his early childhood.

And again, this guy grows into a consummate liar.

And so, what he did say is seldom reliable, but there are some things we can infer based on family lore and just our knowledge of the time.

His family last name, Hoch, was not their original last name.

That's not really like, again, this is not like a Germanic area.

These people are in like what's modern Ukraine.

The whole reason they have that last name is one day back when the Austro-Hungarian Empire is in charge of the village, a government official comes to town to do a census in this Jewish village, but he doesn't speak Hebrew or Yiddish.

And so he's asking everyone, What's your last name?

And Maxwell's ancestor, I think it's his grandfather at the time, this official can't spell their original last name.

So he just writes down Hoch and calls it a day because he speaks German.

So he's like, yeah, fuck it.

Close enough.

That's what you're called now.

In German, hawk hawk means high right yeah that sounds right i i don't i'm not good at german why why would he just what it's just a funny name to choose it's just a it's just a common name i think he was probably making up a lot of last names that day just talking to all of these people who speak like yiddish primarily like fuck it i'm just gonna start writing stuff like i don't give a fuck like

the austro-hungarian empire great at governance so uh in 1919 after the war slotinsky doly that's the village stops being part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and becomes part of Czechoslovakia.

And the family last name ceases to exist again because yet another, at this point, a Czech government official who speaks Czech shows up in village and does another census.

And he's like, hoch,

that's not a proper Czech name.

And so he gives them a new last name, Ludwig.

This just keeps happening.

I mean, that's the prerogative of empire.

Right.

Take over a town.

New names for everybody.

New names for everybody yeah

you're steve and you're bilbo oh man handed them out i'm gonna be honest if i had that job that would be one of the perks

now i don't like i i don't really like mike you know what

i'm gonna go through this copy of the lord of the rings and give you an orcs name just make it fun and in modern times that person's relative now misspells people's names at coffee shops yeah

the modern equivalent of these government officials is a starbucks barista that's great the Starbucks barista should be able to go into a town and give everybody the names they think you should have.

Yeah, yeah.

What if they were in charge of the names?

Yeah, we need to deputize them as judges, give Starbucks baristas the force of law.

So Abraham's father, Mehel, was known as Mehel the Tall because he's like the only tall man in town.

These people are not well-fed, but for whatever reason, Mehel comes out.

He's like a brick shit.

He's like six foot five.

And when you, yeah, so for like, that's tall today, these people people are all starving to death.

He's a giant.

And famously, so his job, he's like a small-time trader.

So his job, he walks from town to town with like goods,

like pelts or whatever, deer skins, and like trades or sells them.

And that's kind of how his family gets by.

And the thing everyone knew about him was that normally people who have this job travel in groups in like caravans because there's brigands.

This is a period of time where there's brigands, but he's like twice everyone else's size.

So he just walks alone with a stick.

I love a brigand.

They're much better than bandits.

You know, yeah.

Bandits are like level one.

Brigands are level three.

You got to be a little stronger.

They've got studded leather armor.

Exactly, exactly.

Yes.

I'm glad we both remember our third edition D ⁇ D source books.

So Abraham's mother, Hannah, or she's also called Chanka, which I think is just Hannah's just sort of like the dramatization of her Hebrew name, I'm guessing, is what's going on there as best as I can tell.

The unusual thing that you hear about her is that she was learned and intelligent, and people did not describe women in villages like this that way very often, right?

Given the nature of the time.

We got a family with a tall guy and a learned woman.

Right, that's his parents.

These people must have been ruling the town.

Not really.

They were like fairly prominent citizens in this town where no one has any money.

Yeah.

And her kind of defining trait that that people would remember later is that she would like scavenge newspapers from everyone else in town because she just was so interested in reading.

She's going to be when they're when for the very first time there's a Democratic Socialist Party that starts up and someone comes to this town that had been ruled by an emperor, you know, in her childhood and is like, hey, there's politics now.

And here's, there's this party.

She's like, yes, Democratic Socialist is exactly what I am, right?

She kind of sounds rat.

Okay, so she's like a college-educated leftist who's like reading Foucault and annoying everybody at the at the DSA meeting.

Yeah, yeah.

She's that, except for obviously there's no college.

She's just able to read.

Yeah, she's the equivalent in the same way that a six and a half foot tall man is an eight foot tall man.

Someone who has read page A4 of the newspaper is like, has high fallutin knowledge.

Yeah, there's one description of her I found that described her as an exception in the village because she read books.

She was almost an intellectual.

Oh, she sees spot run.

This woman is so full of herself.

She's basically got a bachelor's.

Right.

Now, Max

would later say regularly that his mother was a committed Zionist.

This is not impossible given the time.

It's also he becomes that later in life.

And we don't really, we have no like direct quotations of anything that she said.

And this is the thing he starts saying in the 80s.

So who knows?

But it would not have been like wildly out of like step with what a lot of folks in that situation believed at the time, given the realities of life in Eastern Europe for poor Jewish families.

Thanks to his mother, Maxwell grew up aware of the injustices that suffused his early life.

Thomas and Dylan write that she was, quote, a woman who was outspoken about the injustices of their life just because they were Jews.

The images of her which would survive would come much later from Maxwell.

He described her as intelligent and well-informed, different from other local women.

She was passionate about the need to improve the masses for for greater social justice.

And again, this is stuff he says decades later.

Some of this is probably like myth-making, especially the fact where he's like, none of the other local women cared about this.

Well, maybe they did.

Maybe you just are kind of want your mom to seem like she was the only one, because it, you know, burnishes your own story.

Yeah, we'll never know.

But Hannah and Mihel had the standard number of kids for that period of time, which is a shitload.

Abraham was the third of nine, two of whom died in infancy from something only described at the time as a bad cold.

You know, it's just what happened with kids.

One of Maxwell's earliest experiences would have been watching his parents bury their kids.

And that's a pretty normal life experience for people back then.

Starvation would have been a regular thing, like not to death, but they would have gone hungry regularly throughout the year.

That was pretty normal for people in this time in this village.

When he was still a baby and still named Abraham, his mom and dad had to register him with the Czech authorities, who advised them it would be better for everybody.

They're like, you want to call him Abraham?

Look, lady, I don't know if you got the news, but we're Czechoslovakia now, and Abraham is not a Czech name.

And let me give you some advice.

People here are pretty racist.

Your kid might have an easier time in the days ahead if you give him an undisputably Czech name.

And like, this sounds pretty bad.

It's also maybe what saves his life.

Because very soon, it's going to be really good to be an Eastern European Jew who has a name that does not sound Jewish, right?

And his parents take this guy's advice and they change his name from Abraham to Jan Abraham Ludwig, which would be changed yet again later in his life to Jan Ludwig Hyman Benjamin Hawk.

But yeah, he goes through a lot of different names, this guy.

The least Jewish name you could possibly, the most Germanic.

Yeah, Jan.

We'll call him Jan.

That seems safe.

Jan is the name you want to be giving at checkpoints in the not too distant future here.

So the first job that the future Robert Maxwell had would have been helping his family with the annual harvest, which he would have done from infancy on up.

A highlight of the year, this is described in every book about him I've read, was the hay harvest.

And it was a highlight because their beds were just like cloth stuffed with hay.

And by the time you do the harvest, the hay is like matted and it's riddled with lice and moldy.

And so, the day when you get to replace the gross old hay with fresh new hay is like, that's the best day of the year.

The best day of the year?

Yeah, that's that's the highlight of your year heyday the amount of lice i'm like itchy thinking about it oh yeah i mean everyone's got a lot of lice it's it's basically a medieval village most of the time though harvest time is nice because you get a good meal because that's when the food comes in right and you get but like the idea that harvest is the best day of the year because you get a slightly better bed to go to for an idea of where we've gone in a hundred years we've gone from my most exciting time of the year is the hay harvest to, yeah, once a year I get a new phone.

Although, none of these people, again, have to know Twitter.

So, who's who's better off?

Do you think,

like we do with phones, any of them were going, like, you know what, I can wait one more year before I have a refill my bed?

I'll just

really hold out for an extra year.

No, no, I hear bed five has all this spyware on it.

I don't, I don't really want to get into that.

Um, By age five, Jan had proven himself an advanced student, which in his world meant that he was learning to read and to memorize prayers.

By 10, he was a better writer than his father, although Mel the Strong was not renowned for his brain.

He was quick enough that the town rabbi recalled decades later his analytical ability and uncanny aptitude for learning and retaining what he was taught.

He could become a rabbi.

And at that time and place, if you're saying this kid could be a rabbi, that is the same as like today being like, you could be a physicist, right?

Yeah.

Like that is the highest intellectual achievement for people in this strata, right?

Kids aren't really like, it's not likely that kids are just going to go to college to learn things, you know?

Not in at this far off the beaten path.

So Jan grows up large.

Robert Maxwell is a big man.

He's going to be like six foot something too.

I love, by the way, that his name at this point has been changed

four or five times.

And it has not gotten any closer to being Robert Maxwell, which is where we know it's going to end.

We have at least four more name changes before we get there, by the way.

The amount of ground this guy's name covers, nuts.

He's good at soccer because, again, he's twice the size of everybody else.

And I did look it up.

The local kids in this town, when I say they, and I obviously called it football, but that's just wrong.

We know that, right?

We're in North America.

We use our word.

Yeah, we use our word.

The ball that they had was rags bound in cowhide.

Look, there's nothing better than Eastern European ball sports, okay?

Right, yeah.

I really remember there was a point in my life, and this is a little bit of a digression, but I do love to think about this.

Yeah, when the first Borat movie came out, the people of Kazakhstan were like, this movie is really mean to us.

It really portrays us in an unflattering light.

We're not that backwards.

And then somebody was like, yeah, but don't you guys have a sport where the ball is a decapitated goat's head?

Yeah, but that's awesome.

And they were like, yeah, you know, yeah, no, it's true.

It's awesome.

Like, it rules.

You got to embrace it.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, there's a

Afghanistan has a sport like that called Burskashi, and it's like the deadliest sport in the world.

People are like beheading each other on horseback with their fucking sticks as they go after this animal head.

I would love to watch it played.

That's great.

Why are we, why are we fucking around watching Arsenal when we could be watching goat head ball sports?

A rag bundled with leather.

Great.

Yeah.

Good.

Yeah.

Right.

So the uh the Thomas and Dylan biography, I get a couple of different accounts of whether or not Mehel the Strong was a good dad.

One of the books I read described him as like pretty gentle.

This is not an account that is repeated by Maxwell's most recent and probably most rigorous biography, Fall by John Preston, which alleges that Mehel beat his son in public on a regular basis, quote, often so hard that he broke the skin.

On one occasion, the young Maxwell threw up in the street.

Grabbing him by the hair, his father rubbed his face in his vomit while passersby looked on.

So by this account at least, his dad is abusive by again, like 1920s rural village and Czechoslovakia standards.

So rough upbringing in a lot of ways.

He was born left-handed.

His teachers force him to write with his right hand.

And he was like, everyone in town would yell at him if they saw him using his left.

So he just like stops being a lefty.

Also very common at the time.

You can't have those left-handers.

Yeah, I'm a lefty and our people suffered under the yoke of forced rightyism for a long time.

Yeah, exactly.

We're finding people

freely.

Yeah.

I actually did.

My first grade teacher tried to stop me from being left-handed.

Really?

That happened?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

In rural Oklahoma.

Holy shit.

Yeah.

It was honestly as a white man in America, it was the first time that I ever felt myself as part of a formerly persecuted.

Lefties?

Like, I was literally told as a child, you know, lefties really used to be treated poorly and we've come a long way.

I'm like, yes, thank you to

my ancestors.

To our brave left-handed forefathers.

Yeah.

To Ned Flanders with the leftorium making a place for us.

I'm so sorry that you had to deal with tricky scissors.

So brave.

So brave, guys.

Whenever you get like RFK being like, why are autism rates skyrocketing?

Have you looked at a graph of how many more left-handed people there are now?

Do you think there's something environmental there?

Or we're just not hitting kids for using their hand?

Literally.

It's the best argument for why is there more gay people and everything.

I mean, people have made this argument over and over again, but yeah, like once you aren't slapping people around for being something, they're a little more willing to say that's what they are on a survey.

Right, exactly.

Pretty obvious.

So at 11, the no longer left-handed Jan goes to a yeshiva.

Because again,

most of these kids are not getting sent away to Bratislava, to the city to go to a yeshiva.

He's smart enough that like the rabbi basically pulls some strings to make sure that he gets a chance at this.

And so he's, he's kind of like in training to potentially be a rabbi and he's good.

He's like really good academically, but he hates it.

He doesn't like reading rabbinical literature and he grows really bored with formal schooling and he starts like cutting rabbi school to sell jewelry on the street, like to be like a small time like a merchant.

Because this guy just has business brain, right?

Like you put this man in any time and place and he is going to find a hustle.

hustle.

That's just the kind of man Jan is, right?

In March of 1939, when he is 15, the Nazis invade Czechoslovakia.

Um, now, the fact that Jan's family is in Ruthenia winds up being beneficial to them because when the Nazis take Czechoslovakia, Hungary is allied with the Nazi state, and Hitler kind of gives them this chunk of Czechoslovakia, Ruthenia, because Hungary had been claiming it for it's this whole thing.

It's one of these border regions that everybody claims, right?

So, Hungary winds up annexing where his family lives, And the Hungarian government is not anti-Nazi, right?

Obviously, but it is a safer place initially to be than the Reich, you know, like not a high bar, right?

But there's a little bit of protection there for a short period of time.

And I emphasis on the short because it's not going to last.

The fact that Jan's mom had given him a check name pays off because he immediately, and this is one of the things that's interesting about this guy, he's very perceptive.

As soon as this happens, there are a lot of people who are like kind of burying their heads in the sand, trying to be like, I don't know how bad it'll be.

Jan immediately is like, all right, I'm going to join the underground and start fighting the Nazis.

That's obviously what has to happen at this point, right?

So he drops out of the yeshiva.

He shaves his side locks because he doesn't want to look as Jewish.

And he flees.

He gets, goes into the underground.

He knows he can't go back to the village where he'd been born to stay with his family.

And he later claimed, the Hungarians were taking over that part of Czechoslovakia.

And I said to my parents, I'm leaving because I want to go and fight.

They didn't want me to go, but I went anyway.

So far, this story just kind of rips.

He sounds awesome.

Yes, he is awesome up to this point, right?

And there's a little bit of doubt about, like, did he actually immediately try to join the resistance, or did he fall into it because, like, at a certain point, you don't have any other options?

But

he is fighting the Nazis at a very early point, right?

And here's what writer Robert Philpott sums up about what Maxwell would later claim of his own wartime experiences.

The teenager joined the anti-Nazi resistance, but was captured, accused of spying, and sentenced to death.

Maxwell later claimed that he had managed to escape relatively easily after overpowering a one-armed guard while being transported to a court appearance.

Hiding under a bridge.

Don't have the guard be one-armed.

Well, that's, yeah, yeah.

There's your first mistake.

Two armed guards.

Come on.

That guard only has one arm.

You think I can overpower him?

I think I could probably take this guy.

Yeah.

I just to push him.

Hiding under a bridge, he recounted on one later retelling, he was aided by a gypsy lady who freed him of his handcuffs.

That's how he phrases it.

Now, again, John Preston, his biographer, lays out that large portions of this story have to have been made up after the fact, right?

Quote, intriguing though the story is, it does beg a number of questions.

However stretched the Hungarian prison service may have been at the time, it seems odd that they couldn't wrestle up a single two-armed guard to take him to court.

every see see we're seeing the holes as the

holes.

There's a couple of them.

Yeah, a little convenient to have the one-armed guard.

Right, right.

In earlier versions of the story, Maxwell didn't say anything about hitting the guard with his manacles.

He claimed to have used a stick, nor did he say anything about the mysterious lady who helped him.

Why hadn't he thought of her worth mentioning before?

Had she simply slipped his mind?

Then there's the question of what was she doing under the bridge in the first place?

Did she live there or just conveniently happen to be passing with a lockpick?

And what's weird about this is that we have a lot of guys who lie to make themselves sound cooler.

The core of this is true.

He is sentenced to death and escapes.

That's cool.

You don't have to lie about like a lady under a bridge picking your locks or fighting a what?

I don't get why he does this.

Yeah, that doesn't make you sound cool.

No, it just makes the story sound more fake.

But yeah, more fake and racist.

Yeah.

So I don't know why he does this.

Again, he will repeatedly lie about his wartime experience, and what we can confirm is one of the coolest stories I've ever heard out of World War II.

Like, it's nuts that he's like, feels the need to lie about this.

It's like if Oscar Schindler added another 30 people to the list of folks that he saved, you didn't exist.

Like, what?

But you, why would you do that?

Speaking of,

I don't know what I'm speaking of.

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We're back.

So, again, his real story is one of the most intense World War II stories I've ever heard.

He's sentenced to die.

He escapes the Hungarian authorities.

He goes into the underground.

He spends months on the run, fleeing from Belgrade to Beirut to Marseille.

So he takes like a boat to Marseille and he lands in Marseille while Germany is invading France.

And so while the Germans are busting through the Maginot line, he enlists in the French Foreign Legion in an all-Czech unit because he's like, I'm gonna, I want to fight.

I want to fight right now.

You guys are fighting the Nazis.

I'll fucking help.

Now, unfortunately, it's kind of a bad time to join the Foreign Legion in France because the French army is not going to last very long in

France, right?

Yeah, I don't think they didn't win those particular battles, did they?

Not super well.

Those engagements don't go for them.

No.

Now, this Czech, all Czech unit he joins is like a lot of other Czech.

Basically, people who flee Czechoslovakia when the Nazis take over into France and are like, yeah, I'll fucking fight to liberate my country, right?

So he joins this unit, which has like 10,000 people in it, but by the time he's like trained up and equipped, the French lines are fully collapsing.

And he winds up routed with large portions of the French and British forces.

And he is one of the guys who gets evacuated as part of the Dunkirk landings.

Like Robert Maxwell is there at Dunkirk.

And by the time he's there, this 10,000-man unit just has 4,000 people left in it.

So like this is a chaotic and hideous time.

Like he experiences some shit, right?

This unit, once they get over to the United Kingdom, the unit is reformed and retrained.

And the idea is that they will, at one point, take part in the liberation of their homeland.

Now, Maxwell is still going by Jan at this point.

And even though all of these guys are like fighting the Nazis together, they're still super racist against him because they're very anti-Semitic.

They're not like Nazis, but they're super anti-Semitic.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

How do they know this man is Jewish?

His name is Jan Hoch.

And he cut off

his things, you know?

I think he may have made the mistake, I guess, of admitting to his war comrades and thinking that, like, well, you're fighting the Nazis.

You're probably not racist.

Nope.

I see.

Bad call?

Yes.

Common mistake.

Common mistake.

So he decides, like, well, fuck these racist checks.

I'm going to join the British Army.

And so he actually, like, joins this, like, it's effectively a trash unit in the British Army for the foreign volunteers that nobody trusts.

The thing about this is, like, there's a bunch of German doctors who fled the Nazis because they are like, I'm not a Nazi.

I'm going to go to whoever will fight them.

Please, like, I am a German who wants to fight these people.

And the British are like, oh, no, we can't trust Germans.

And, but they also, a lot of the Germans who are in the UK at this point, they're literally putting in a camp.

Like, there is a concentration camp in Germany for, or in Britain for German citizens because that they don't trust.

But doctors are valuable.

So they put them in this unit where they're like, we'll find something for you to do, but we don't want to like trust you, right?

And so that's where they put Jan, because as a Czech, he's basically a German in their eyes.

And as a man who's read a book, he's basically a doctor.

He's essentially a doctor, yes.

And in true British fashion, they mostly have these guys doing backbreaking manual labor.

He's like busting stones for a while, basically.

But this does, shockingly, this experience like convinces of, you know what?

I want to be British.

That's the nationality for me.

I love these people.

At least they're fighting the Nazis, right

i like how in these early days of nationalism you can kind of just like pick and choose and like wander around to decide your decide your nation in a way that they don't really let you do today you just join armies and like

it i'll be british i tried being french no no no the brits are for me

um yeah so he learns english in six weeks and this is some kind of exaggeration but he is he dies speaking like 11 languages so he really does have like a faculty for this and he he bases his accent off of Winston Churchill because he talks for his whole life with a British accent that he patterns off of Winston Churchill.

And he will, he will claim, I started imitating his accent before I understood English because I could just tell what he was saying, even when I didn't speak the language because of the way he said it.

What if you like ran into a Czech guy who talked exactly like Donald Trump?

Like, yeah, that's got to exist.

Like, how did people not?

It would be one of the most famous voices in the country.

Yeah.

I used to know, I knew an Afghan guy who had been an interpreter, you know, for the U.S.

military in Afghanistan, who'd grown up in a refugee camp in Pakistan and taught himself English by repeatedly re-watching Rambo with subtitles.

And he sounded so cool.

He was like the coolest talking motherfucker I've ever heard.

Maxwell proved himself an excellent mimic, and most casual observers would only have noticed his foreign origins by his use of idiosyncratic and frankly wrong mix-ups of colloquial English phrases, like you can't change toads in midstream, which is I actually kind of love.

You can't change toads.

In midstream, yeah, you can't.

Try it, Adam.

I've never done it once.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

Nobody has.

To go with his new accent, Jan picked a name for, and this proves proves that like he's pretty good at languages but he's not hasn't immediately picked up everything because the the proper british name that he picks for himself to blend in is ivan demarier

a name name number four

yeah five

and just like what's a british name ivan that's it how did he come up with this shit well he came up with the last name because his favorite brand of cigarettes were dumariers

but this is also douglas adams joke about Ford Prefects.

Right, right, yes.

Naming yourself after a brand.

He literally does that.

People love these cigarettes, so they'll like me.

Unfortunately, this was like even worse than being German, because if there's one thing the British hated more than the Germans at any point in time, it's the French, even during World War II.

Do people just treat him worse because he now sounds like he's got a French name?

So he's going to change his name again soon, right?

He's going to change his name so many times, Sophie.

We're not even, we're like 60% of the way through the name changes.

So so far, this entire story is just this guy going from country to country and doing a terrible job of faking a different ethnicity in every place.

It's so funny.

Ivan, really?

His fortunes finally changed when he began an affair with an elderly wealthy widower.

And this lady is British and she happens to know a brigadier general and she convinces him to do her a favor.

Ivan Dumarier is transferred to a real fighting unit.

So he goes from this like unit where we're kind of keeping the guys we don't trust.

This lady pulls some strings.

And it says a lot.

Maxwell repeatedly, his only goal is to get to grips, to get into hand-to-hand combat with the German army.

That is what he wants, right?

Everything he's doing is to orchestrate.

I want to shoot Nazis.

Yeah, he's literally a Terrano.

You're so right with the Terencino character.

And by God, he finally does it.

So he gets in.

He is close to the tip of the the spear.

He lands at Normandy a couple weeks after the initial landing and engages almost immediately in a hard, close quarters fighting at Normandy.

He is promoted very quickly to Lance Corporal and then made sergeant in charge of a sniper unit, where he got his first experience leading in combat, and he does very well in this.

And in fact, after this first big battle that he is like leading the sniper unit in, he's recommended for an immediate battlefield promotion to lieutenant.

Now, it's worth really leaning into what this means because privates and sergeants are NCOs and lieutenants are officers.

These are two different career tracks in the military.

You don't just jump from one to the other unless everyone else is dying and you're really good at your job, right?

Like that's why Ivan gets this promotion to lieutenant because like every all the other officers are getting shot and he's not.

But this is like a very unusual level up.

Yes, like he's very good as a soldier, right?

Like that's what this says is that he's he's like an excellent fighter and an excellent combat leader.

That said, his subordinates didn't like him all the time.

One of his adjutants told a reporter in the 60s, he had a smooth, silky way about him, a big fellow, very dark, a bit of a mystery, which just makes him sound cooler at this point.

So, again, it's 44.

He's fighting his way across France.

He has no idea what's happened to his family, right?

But he's hearing the stories of what are happening to Jews in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, right?

So, he has to know, like, it's probably not good.

And his whole motivation is, I want to fight my way back to my home village to rescue my family, right?

I'm going to kill every Nazi in between me and my mom and dad.

And as a result, he is filled with the kind of rage that you would expect from a man in this situation.

So he does stuff that you're not supposed to do, like he would rob every killed and captured German soldier of all of their money.

You're not really, again, supposed to do this, but also, They're Nazis, so I don't feel that bad about this.

His comrades did kind of think he was a a dick because they noted he kept all of the cash for himself and handed out the change to his men.

So

a little bit of a dick move there.

One of his first real distinguishing moments was his successful infiltration of an occupied village by dressing up as a Nazi officer.

Now, again, you're not supposed to dress in a enemy uniform.

That's like against the rules of war.

But Maxwell was like, well, let me get a lot closer.

And so I was able to figure out how to kill him a lot better.

Fuck it.

And nobody punishes him for this.

This is the most Tarantino-esque thing yet.

Yes, yes, yes.

And as a result, because this is so successful, his like reconnaissance, he's so good at this, the military's like, hey, you might have a future in like spy shit.

We got to give you a new name.

So they start calling him Leslie Smith.

That's the best they could come up with.

They start calling him Leslie Smith?

Leslie Smith?

this is the british army this is the british army he's issued a name all right

leslie is like a british name from that time yeah you're leslie now here's a rifle

well yeah so he's achieved is he's achieved his goal of being british

he does now sound british yeah you're like ivan no no no no no you're british now

leslie leslie smith within days after becoming leslie he distinguished himself in the brutal fighting to cross the Orin River, and his courage was celebrated in a Canadian radio broadcast which identified him as Leslie DeMarrier, a name he had never gone by.

All this confusion and Maxwell's clear ability to navigate it marked him out to his superiors as someone who's like, again, this guy might make a good spook.

He clearly has no issue going under a bunch of different names.

This guy has hundreds of names.

Everyone's confused all the time.

But he's navigating it with a plum.

Yeah.

make him a spy.

And I think I think it's time for another one.

Yeah, yeah.

They do give him another one at this point.

So he is issued a new name, Private Jones.

And he's sent to Paris, has just been recaptured.

And the Allies are worried that there might be a communist uprising in Paris after beating the Nazis out of it.

So they send him there.

And he's like, sometimes he'll dress as a British officer.

Sometimes he'll dress as a French.

He's wearing all these different uniforms and fake identities to try to like figure out if there's an uprising planned.

And like there wasn't.

Nothing really happens here.

But he seems to have had a lot of fun.

Basically, he's getting to like play dress up and get drunk in Paris in the middle of like his war experiences, which is a nice little break.

And he finally has a cool name.

And he's finally got a cool name, Private Jones.

I love that.

Near the end of 1944, he is commissioned as an officer officially.

And since he's now an officer and a gentleman in a prestigious regiment, he decides to pick what will be be his final name for himself.

What's Bab?

He's got rid of Private Jones?

He gets rid of Private Jones because a friend of his who's a Scottish officer is like, you should call yourself Robert Maxwell.

And that's the name he picks, is Robert Maxwell.

Wow.

How many total names did he go through on the way?

It's like 10, right?

Like, he has so many fucking names.

You just went through four in the last 90 seconds.

Yeah.

It's so many names that after he changes his name to Robert Maxwell, his banker sends sends him an angry letter being like, if you change your name one more fucking time, we're dropping you.

Like this, this had better be your last name.

I think that's valid.

Oh, man.

But we are, this, he has finally landed on his ultimate name.

So, you know, that's, that's good for him.

Is this his, is this his Wikipedia name?

Because that's the most important name that you have.

Yes, this is his Wikipedia name.

Okay.

Yeah.

Speaking of Wikipedia, I don't, I'm not really speaking of Wikipedia.

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We're back.

So while Bobby Max is in, which is what I'm going to call him, is in Paris, he meets this French lady, Elizabeth Menard.

And she goes by Betty,

I think because she's going to wind up living in the UK and that just works better for everybody.

I was going to say, I thought it was because you were going to say that she heard he likes people with different name changes.

He likes people to change their names.

Really into it.

She's like, she's like, yeah, I like what you like.

I'm Betty.

Hi.

She describes herself as almost passing out when she sees how hot he is.

That is something everyone.

He is described a little later than this by the Czech Secret Service as looking like a handsomer Clark Gable.

Like, that's how good looking this man is.

Oh,

yeah.

No, she, Betty is like, I almost passed out when I saw him for the first time.

He was so fucking hot.

I'm sorry.

This is just like,

he's like a character from, like a self-insert character from a novel.

He's so tall and handsome, and everyone loves him when they see him.

And they're constantly

giving him promotions and new names, you know?

It's like, I just read the book of the new sun last year.

It's like.

that character like just describing how awesome he is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I just looked him up and I have questions.

He does does not grow into like his him as a mature adult is not a particularly handsome man.

But this is what Betty says.

Like she writes a book and she describes him as this hot.

And again, the Czech Secret Service says he looks like Clark Gable.

And why would they lie about it, right?

Like they don't have a vested interest in making this guy sound hot.

He gets just enough time off while waiting to continue fighting the Nazis that he's able to court Betty and propose to her.

And during this proposal process, he makes the kind of bold and impossible promises that men make to women in such times.

In this case, the promise is, I'm going to win a military cross, right?

Basically, that's the British Medal of Honor.

And he's like, I'm going to win one of these for you, Betty, right?

And then when I get out of the army, I'm going to get rich and I'm going to become the prime minister and we're going to be happy forever.

And he does not fulfill all of these promises, but he does fulfill the first like half of them.

So like immediately after promising Betty he's going to go win a military cross for her, he like, he just goes and does that.

Within weeks, actually within days of them getting married in 1945, he wins the military cross for heroism in the face of the enemy.

And the actual story is fucking nuts.

So on January 29th, 1945, his battalion captures a town called Parlow, but they get counterattacked by Germans in rubber boats who like cross this river in the middle of the night.

And the Germans assault the houses that Maxwell and his unit are billeted in.

And so just in the middle of the night, suddenly there's Germans throwing grenades into the rooms that they're in and just emptying their machine guns into these houses at random at close quarters.

It is like the most chaotic and disorienting combat situation that it's possible to be in, right?

Like you talk to anyone who has been in heavy combat, being surprised in a night attack, like in urban fighting, is like it's just the worst situation you can be in.

So the Nazis occupy a bunch of these buildings in this town, and Maxwell's commanding officer, Major DJ Watson, orders a counter-attack.

And Watson and his men, as soon as they try to counterattack to retake these buildings, get shot the fuck up, and they have to pull back and withdraw.

And I'm going to quote from John Preston's book, Fall Here, describing what happens next.

Withdrawing his men, Watson witnessed a remarkable sight.

As he wrote in his official account, Mr.

Maxwell, also a platoon commander, sallied out of the darkness.

Maxwell had repeatedly asked to be allowed to lead another attempt on the houses.

At first, Watson had refused his entreaties, but when it became clear that the men inside were sure to be killed unless there was another rescue attempt, attempt, he changed his mind.

The officer, Maxwell, then led two of his sections across bullet-swept ground with great dash and determination and succeeded in contacting the platoon who had been holding out in some buildings.

Showing no regard for his own safety, he led his sections in the difficult job of clearing the enemy out of the buildings, inflicting many casualties on them, and causing the remainder to withdraw.

Wow.

And the fact that Maxwell lives through this is like a fucking mirror.

So when they get to this surrounded British platoon,

he thinks that they're Germans, that like the Brits in this building are Germans, because again, it's super chaotic.

And so he shouts upstairs in German, like, come down and surrender.

And the British soldiers upstairs hear a German shouting and start shooting.

They go, yes, you fucker, and open fire and they miss him by inches.

Cannot exaggerate how dangerous this is.

But what is funny is that Maxwell feels the need to exaggerate this.

And again, you don't need to lie about this story.

There's documentation from your CO of what you did.

You win a medal for it.

But he would later lie and claim that his commanding officer had ordered him not to attack and threatened to court-martial him, which is just like not true.

Like his CO nominates him for the award.

He's not saying like,

I'm going to punish you for doing this.

But Maxwell just decides later, nah, the story doesn't pop without the court-martial line.

I got to throw that in there.

Yeah, I did it even though nobody wanted me to do it.

Yeah.

They wanted me to do it so little that they gave me an award for doing it.

Right.

And again, you heroically rescued an entire platoon by like fighting Nazis in close quarters hand-to-hand combat.

You don't need to pretend.

Like,

that's awesome.

Yeah.

Just take the win, man.

Take the W.

Yeah.

So I'd said earlier he and Betty were already married.

Sorry, that was incorrect.

They were engaged at this point when he wins this award.

So he comes back, he gets a week or two of leave, and they get married in March of 1945.

And he writes her a letter laying out his expectations for the relationship.

Don't nag.

Don't criticize unduly.

Give honest appreciation.

Pay little attentions.

Be courteous.

Have the utmost confidence in yourself and in your partner.

You know, he's a four-day sky.

Sure.

Not super weird.

Don't nag.

Don't nag.

Number one.

The end is nice.

Have the utmost confidence.

That's good.

Yeah, that part's nice.

Yeah, have confidence in yourself.

Be confident.

Don't nag me.

Don't net, but don't fucking nag me.

Don't use any of my 15-old names.

So the same month, and this again, like within days of marrying Betty, he gets the knowledge that his mom and sister were executed by the Nazis as hostages, right?

Jesus.

And he finds out later they die at Auschwitz, right?

Like that's what happens to most of his family.

Most of his family is incinerated at Auschwitz, like nearly his entire immediate and extended family.

But he knows about his mom and sister at this point in the spring of 1945.

And again, his animating goal as a soldier this whole war had been to fight his way back to his hometown and save his family.

And the sudden knowledge that he had failed irrevocably in this goal, obviously through no fault of his own, broke something inside of him.

In her own memoir, his wife Betty later wrote, He was convinced that had he stayed home, he could have saved the life of his parents and younger siblings.

Nothing he achieved in life would ever compensate for what he had not been able to accomplish, the rescue of his family.

Which is like the tragic.

He's going to turn into a real piece of shit, obviously, but like, yeah, to have that hanging over you.

And again, you literally couldn't have done more to try to save them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, in addition to his mom and sister, his father, grandfather, and all but two of his remaining seven siblings are massacred at Auschwitz.

Um, Maxwell had always been aggressive towards the enemy, right?

This is a guy who does not fear being shot.

But in the wake of this, he steps things up again to like a Tarantino level and and to a war crimes level.

A week after his wedding, he's back in action during an attack on two German villages.

And in this attack, Lieutenant Maxwell alone, acting alone, kills 15 SS men and takes 14 prisoners.

In other words, he single-handedly kills or captures an entire platoon of the German army's best.

Wow.

It's fucking nuts.

Yeah.

How do you?

How do you do that?

I believe it's this, one of these situations where he gets them at a bad angle and he's got a machine gun okay yeah now there are some allegations that maybe they were surrendering and he massacres them that's unclear but he does do that later in this instance i think it's kind of unclear what actually happened but he increasingly starts killing prisoners right like in addition to killing guys in the heat of combat and he actually writes about this in a letter to his wife As you can well imagine, I am not taking any prisoners, and whatever home my men occupy before I leave it, I order it destroyed.

And those are both war crimes.

You're not supposed to do either of those things.

And in the days and weeks that follow that letter, Maxwell is as good as his word.

This quote from an article in the Independent describes an incident that occurred two weeks after his wedding.

His platoon was involved in mopping up resistance from the German defenders.

On 2nd of April, Maxwell ordered his men to fire mortars at a German village.

He wrote to Betty, A few minutes later, I saw them running out of the houses, and we started firing at each other.

I got two of them, and I ordered the mortars to shell the village for a few minutes.

It proved a very effective tactic that led to the surrender of the remaining Germans, and inspired Maxwell to try it once more as he moved towards a nearby town.

So I sent one of the Germans to fetch the mayor of the town, he told his wife.

In half an hour's time, he turned up and I told him he had to go tell the Germans to surrender and hang the white flag, otherwise, the town will be destroyed.

One hour later, he came back saying that the soldiers will surrender, and the white flag was put up, so we marched off.

But as soon as we marched off, a German tank opened fire on us.

Luckily, he missed, so I shot the mayor and withdrew.

And like, because this tank fires at him, he blows the mare's brains out.

And that is, again, a war crime.

This is an unarmed civilian who was not in any position to be giving orders to that tank.

Yeah.

One of Maxwell's comrades would later claim that he executed multiple German civilians, that he doesn't just shoot the mare, he starts shooting several civilians when this tank fires at them.

And Maxwell himself would both brag and express regret at committing several war crimes later in his life.

In one interview with journalist Mark Malloy, he discussed an assault on a fortified farmhouse.

I got up close to the farm door and shouted in German, come out with your hands up.

You're completely surrounded.

They came out and I shot them all with my submachine gun.

I thought my boys would be pleased, but all they said was, that's not fair, sir.

Those lads had surrendered.

Maxwell expressed incomprehension to Malloy over the reaction of his comrades.

Can you understand such an attitude?

And.

Wow.

Like,

yeah, war crimes are bad.

I understand, though, the discrepancy of like these guys who they don't like the Nazis, they're fighting them, but they didn't suffer from them, right?

Outside of that fighting.

And so they're like, they surrendered.

There's rules.

Maxwell's like, they're Nazis.

There's no rules.

Why wouldn't I kill every one of them?

I mean, his whole family has been murdered, right?

You can understand the psychology a little bit.

Yes.

Yeah.

How many, can I just ask, how many languages does this man speak, by the way?

He grew up speaking Hebrew or Yiddish?

Yeah, he grew up speaking Hebrew, Yiddish, and I assume he would have learned Czech.

He also grows up, he speaks German by this point, and he probably grew up speaking it, and he speaks English, right?

I believe he also speaks French at this point.

Incredible.

Quite a polyglot.

Yeah.

And there's a couple of different, so in that one with Malloy, he's obviously like, can you imagine being angry at killing Nazis?

But there's another moment his sons will talk about where they're watching like a World War II movie.

And he comes in and he like sees, you know, these young German soldiers on the screen.

And he's like, oh, you know, when I was, when I was a young man, I killed boys as old as you, my sons are today.

And like, I feel haunted by it.

I wish I hadn't killed so many of them, right?

When I didn't have to.

Wow.

So I don't see it as that as really inconsistent, right?

That like he feels differently about all these massacres as he gets older.

Yeah.

That said, he commits a lot of war crimes, but he's not punished for them, right?

No one's really inclined to punish a kid whose family is wiped out in the Holocaust for, again, mostly massacring the SS, although he does kill some civilians too, which isn't good.

But yeah,

very

you get it, right?

Like, yeah, well, he's he's not coming off like a you know, bloodthirsty, you know, guy who joined the army because he just wanted to murder people.

He's, he's blinded by grief and rage, and it's war, and people go nuts.

Like, yes, that's how he's coming off.

Yeah, he's coming off as like he, he wants to save his family.

He finds out he can't, and he just starts killing them in response, he sees is responsible.

And, like, yeah, bro, like, I get it, you know, Hard to blame him for all of this.

Although, again, definitely war crimes.

So the war ends and his military career continues to blossom.

In 1946, he is 23 years old and stationed in partitioned and occupied Berlin, working as an intelligence officer.

And he proves to have an immediate faculty for the skills required in that role.

He's an exceptional liar.

He speaks basically every language and he's not really scared of anything.

And it's here that he would make the connections that would turn him from the Quentin Tarantino character he's been this episode to the father of one of the most abusive industries in the world today.

But that's all coming in part two, Adam.

How we feeling?

I'm feeling great.

So far, I love this guy.

It's hard not to like him.

I don't understand why your show's called Behind the Bastard.

So far, all he's done is go on a Nazi killing spree, which we just discussed the ambiguous morals of how, you know, so.

I'm a little confused about the format of the show, but I guess I'll find out in the next part.

Yeah, it is.

It is, this is a real whiplash episode.

I don't know that we've ever had one for the whole first episode.

It's like, this guy fucking owns.

Like,

you're on like a Nazi death quest through Europe.

Like, that's fucking sick.

Yeah.

I mean, he, he, again, he, he feels like the hero of like a pulp novel.

Yeah.

Like, yeah.

You know, I, I, I have expected to be attacked by a dinosaur and wrestle it into submission.

Yeah.

And I guess if you, if you want to imagine it, you can, you can see this.

Part two is like right after In Glorious Bastards ends, you know, they're carving a swastika in that guy's forehead.

And then like Brad Pitt goes and gets a job in finance and destroys the world.

That's basically the story we're telling.

I think we need, honestly, I want more sequels that are that.

I want to see the people turn into bad people or disappoint or not, you know.

Yeah, John McClain grows up and campaigns against the rights of incarcerated people to have access to libraries or something like that after diehard.

Exactly.

And I want to see the sequel to the rom-com where the people fall in love and then they get married.

And then I want the sequel to them 10 years later not fucking each other and being resentful and cheating on each other.

Like, that's, come on.

Yeah.

Show us real people breaking down.

Right.

The Star Wars reboot should have been Luke Skywalker turning into like an anti-Ewok rights activist.

Just

getting real shitty.

All right, Adam, where can people find you?

People can find me.

I do a podcast called Factually.

I also have a YouTube channel where that podcast is, and I do monologues and things like that about the horrible state of the world.

And I have a stand-up special called Unmedicated that's out on Dropout on the TV platform Dropout.

Oh, hell yeah, Dropout.

I love Dropout.

Yeah.

Well, check out Adam everywhere you can find him.

Check out Dropout also to see Adam and just separately because it's great.

And check out Fighting Nazis, you know, because there's a lot of that that needs doing.

Anyway, the episode's done.

Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

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New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.

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