Part Two: The Evilest Football Player of All Time

Cool zone media.

Oh goodness, it's Behind the Bastards, the podcast that you've been listening to, because this is part two of our episodes on Alexander Villeplan.

And if you're listening to part two, you've listened to the show before.

This isn't your first time.

Like, otherwise, why would you be listening to it this way?

To answer that question, our guest, Dana Schwartz.

Dana.

Just listening to part two as like a challenge to be like, maybe I'll just figure it out on the way.

Yeah, they're like second acting a podcast.

Yeah.

It's Gen Z.

It's the new trend that Gen Z's love.

They call it second acting.

That's right.

That's right.

And another thing that the Gen Zs love is your podcast, Noble Blood, and your podcast, Hoax, you know, with an exclamation point.

You know,

you want to plug.

Plug them right before we get in?

Yes.

Please.

Noble Blood is a scripted podcast about historical royals and the usually murderous shenanigans they get into and hoax is a story about is a podcast about stories about historical hoaxes uh and they're both really fun listen to hoax because it's brand new it could use uh new listeners to rate review subscribe all the above i think you'll like it i have a great time making it Yes, definitely check that out.

You will enjoy it.

And you'll also enjoy the continuing shenanigans of Alexander Villaplan.

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So at this point, you know, we kind of ended last episode when he wins a France cap, which is some sort of football.

And by football, we mean soccer for my mostly American listener base award

in a game against Belgium in 1926.

He becomes the captain of his team in Nîmes.

And yeah, he's just on top of the world in the late 20s.

In 1929, Villeplan is recruited by the racing club de Paris, which is striving to become the premier French football club in an era in which the whole concept of the sport is still kind of new, right?

Football is still getting its legs as a big thing.

So it's kind of an open question, who's going to be like the French, you know, A team, right?

And, you know, the racing club of Paris wants to be that A team.

And Villeplan is the best ball header.

He's one of the best passers.

You got to have him, right?

So the new club president makes signing Villeplan a priority.

Again, at this point, he's still an amateur and is working for free in the strictest legal sense of the word.

But he's been handed so many jobs and businesses at this point that he is a wealthy man.

He is very comfortable.

And he has no real job outside of soccer.

So he gets to spend all of his free time that he's not playing out at bars and nightclubs doing those, you know, if you've seen Moulin Rouge, he's doing shit like that.

He's going to these fancy live theater events and burlesque shows.

He's gambling uncontrollably at racetracks, right?

He has everything he needs to be set up for life, but he absolutely has no control of himself outside of the field, right?

Like he is just, he's one of these guys.

He's burning money as fast as he can spend it, just lighting it on fire at the racetrack, right?

And he's also, while he's still in his early 20s, the fact that he spends all of his free time partying and drinking, you can get away with it because your body is very forgiving.

That's not going to be the case forever, right?

So he makes his first contacts with organized crime during this period of time when he's in his early 20s and his star is ascendant because he's repeatedly getting into debt with different shady underworld characters to continue his gambling habit.

Now, initially, this isn't a problem, right?

Nobody in the underworld is going to like break his leg.

For one thing, they care about how the team performs.

And for another thing, they know he'll keep making money.

He needs his legs.

The whole country needs his legs.

You're not going to break them, right?

And also, you know that as long as he's playing soccer at this level, he'll be good for it eventually, even if it takes him a while.

Like the money's coming in.

So you want to kind of keep this big, this whale, like on

the hook, right?

People don't fish for whales with hooks.

It's a harpoon, but that doesn't sound as good.

So

in 1930, just three years after moving to Paris, I think his team wins its way to the very first World Cup, right?

So he's with this

club de Paris, and they win admission to the first, very first Football World Cup, right?

This is, again, kind of the birthdays of the sport.

And the first World Cup is going to be held in Montevideo, Uruguay, right?

Now, the Algerian, as he was known sometimes in the sports press, is going to be the team captain leading France before the entire world at this first World Cup, right?

This is, you know, the inaugural FIFA World Cup event.

Actually, I'm not sure if it's FIFA even at this point, but this is what becomes the FIFA World Cup, right?

So this is held in 1930, and Villaplan is the head of France's team.

He's considered the best midfielder in the country at this point and one of the best passers.

His team wins their first game against Mexico at the World Cup.

And at this point, this is the most significant event in the history of French football because there's not a lot of French football history, right?

But he leads them to a victory at the World Cup.

That's a huge deal.

There's photos of Villeplan at the time that show this.

He is is just exultant, right?

He is the star at the peak of his abilities.

He's gleeful.

You can just see it on his face.

He tells interviewers on the day, this is the most beautiful day of my life, right?

So this is his peak moment, you know, and things are only going to get worse from here.

Unfortunately for him and for a lot of other people, everything after this first World Cup game is downhill.

Now, because the World Cup isn't a normal God-fearing sporting event like the Super Bowl or whatever it is we do for hockey, the cup itself is actually a bunch of different games, right?

It's not just like one thing, you know?

And so after defeating Mexico, Villaplan leads his team into two more matches, which they lose both games, I think, one to zero,

which is close in football terms.

And they're forced out of the running.

So, you know, France, they win one game at the World Cup, but it's, it's not, his, his chief moment is still not even like that great, right?

A performance,

which is kind of a bummer.

So, his team returns back to Paris, and like they've technically been defeated, but also this is literally the first ever World Cup.

So, people are still really psyched that they won a game, right?

The whole football-playing world is there, and France did okay, is kind of the way they're feeling.

And so, like, this is like an this is like a big moment for them.

Um, Alexander returns home a national hero.

Unfortunately, he's also coming back to Europe in like 1931.

Things aren't looking great for European politics at that point.

But 1931, everything's not up.

Not a good time.

You know, the stock market, they're not good really for much of anywhere in the world, but the stock markets crashed in 1929 in New York.

And things moved a little slower back then, right?

So like the Europe, France doesn't feel the repercussions as immediately as like they would today.

But by the time the team is on their way back from Uruguay, the global economy is in what might be politely termed a state of cascading collapse.

The end of World War I had brought this economic boom, particularly to the victorious Western powers, but that was now proved to have been a bubble, right?

This like period of post-war prosperity comes to an end very rapidly.

In his book, The King of Nazi Paris, Christopher Authan writes, France held out until 1931, but then started to struggle.

On street benches and at metro entrances, groups of exhausted and starving young men would be trying not to die, wrote Breton journalist Morván Lebesque.

I don't know how many never came round.

I can only say what I saw.

In the Rue Madame one day, I saw a child drop a sweet which someone trod on, and the man behind bent down and picked it up, wiped it, and ate it.

That's a succinct description of how bad shit is.

Bro, that makes me sad.

Yeah.

And they're not, I don't think they're eating it just because they're jonesing for sugar.

They're just like, oh, calories.

Fuck yeah.

This is my only opportunity.

This is my only way to avoid dying.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah, it's great stuff.

So Alexander is at first insulated from the broader calamity by his wealth.

For the next two years, he continues to be a star player as money kind of trickles in, right?

Like he's going to be one of the later people to suffer.

But part of the problem is that his salary is not from football, right?

If his salary had just been from literally a traditional working salary, he might have done better, but his salary is like these fake businesses that he's been given, these turnkey businesses and like fake jobs and like the nightclub that he owns does a lot worse once the economy collapses right so this hits him more than it might hit like a professional footballer today

um and problems are compounded in 1932 things get even more complex because french football turns professional right so france you know you players are now being paid directly for their work which like initially helps Villeplan, right?

Like the fact that they're actually allowed to like take the money.

He quits his position at RC Paris to sign on to a new team, which is fighting to make a place for itself in the sports world, Olympique d'Antibes.

But the new club doesn't have money to pay him what he's worth, right?

So he gets this new, this is, he should have been doing better once it transitions to professional, but he takes a lower paid job with this, this club in Antibes

because he's able to have an ownership stake in it, right?

And he thinks this club might have the chance to be the big French club.

They might be bigger than RC Paris.

And if I get it on the ground floor and I own part of the club, it'll be worth a lot more money in the long run, right?

So that's his attempt, or that's at least on paper what he's trying to do.

But what's also going on here is that he is in the middle of a massive sports betting scheme, right?

Like he and part of why he wants ownership of this is that he and his friends are going to like basically start rigging matches and throwing games and whatnot whatnot in order to make a lot of money on sports gambling, right?

And he seems to be the, we don't entirely know, but it's most of the historic, of the historians I've read suggest that he was the mastermind of this.

Like, he is the guy strong-arming everyone.

He is the guy with the connections to the underworld.

And so he gives-this is allowed, right?

This is just like legal efforts.

No, no, no, no, no.

This is totally illegal.

Yes.

I agree.

Massively illegal.

So he convinces several of his comrades from RC Paris to join as well.

And the thought of this is that, like, yeah, this is a struggling small team.

If we bring some ringers in, we can put money on games and make a fortune, right?

And for a while, this seems to be working.

And the club's first season goes surprisingly well.

But Villaplan isn't just sort of like fixing matches.

He's also using his money and the money of others to bribe opposing teams to throw matches, right?

So it's not just we've got these ringers and they don't know how good we are.

It's like, I am, we are paying people or ordering our own people to throw games in order to, which is the, that's the really illegal part.

So they get caught during this first season.

They don't even make it a full season.

They get caught fixing games and it causes a huge scandal.

Per write-up in The Guardian, quote, at that time, the championship was divided into southern and northern sections, with the winners of each playing off for the title of champions.

And Tib won the southern section and then beat SC5's Lil as in the decider, only for it to emerge that the match had been fixed.

And Teeb were stripped of their title, and the team's manager banned, although it was widely believed he was a scapegoat.

Villaplan and two teammates with whom he had previously played were suspected of being the real plotters.

All three players were soon let go, right?

So

the team manager gets banned forever.

He gets shit canned with two of his colleagues, but they're not banned from the sport, I think, because he's, you know, that the kind of shine off of leading the team in the World Cup is still on him a little bit.

So

he's generally agreed to have been the mastermind of this scheme, but he doesn't pay as much of a price as the team manager does.

He's still a top player after this.

And so after Antib collapses, like this club collapses, he gets pulled in by Nisa's team, right?

And however, by this point in the early 1930s, Villaplan is no longer in his prime.

He's getting older.

He's basically taking his calories are nothing but hard liquor, right?

With like brothels for dessert you know like he's not eating food he's eating liquor and brothel and he's engaging in yeah

brothels like that's his entire diet um and he's also gambling uncontrollably and burning all of his money that he's not really sleeping it has an impact on his ability on the court you know um so his next few years as a as a footballer are notably less impressive than the previous ones had been he misses regular training sessions because he's hungover right?

He'll just be absent when he's supposed to be practicing with the team because he's, you know, or in a lot of cases, he's still drunk from the night before.

Sometimes he's even still drinking.

A lot of times, it's a combination of all three.

When he makes it to practice, he's often still kind of wasted and just not able to function.

And he makes it, you know, when he is well enough to actually play in games and he's not, you know, spacing out of that, he's noted by sports writers for seeming to be out of shape and barely able to to focus on the game itself.

And after a few seasons, Nice lets him go, right?

They're like,

you're not really worth paying.

And now we actually have to pay you, right?

And this marks the first time when he gets shit canned by Nice.

This is the first time that he leaves a team without choosing to do so to get better pay somewhere else.

Right.

So that's kind of noteworthy.

This is functionally the end of his career in football.

Although he continues, he goes to

another team, a second division team in Bordeaux,

who are kind of willing to take this guy because they're not as good a team.

So, you know, he's still an upgrade for them.

But they only really like the Bordeaux only condescends to hire him because they're being managed by his former mentor, that Scotsman Gibson.

And even in this situation where his mentor is running the team and he's got an end, he can only last three months before he gets fired for refusing to turn up to training sessions and games, right?

He just won't do the job.

He sounds like a fun time.

Yeah, he's fucking great.

Like, you had it all, man.

Like, you could have easily kept going for at least a few more years, but yeah, he's just not able to sober up to make the game.

You know who else can't sober up to do their jobs?

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Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about football, the soccer of sports.

So by the mid-1930s, Villeplan's career in pro football is over.

And he transitions, I have to say, very seamlessly to what has become his true passion.

You know, he's over football.

He's getting into a new line of work.

gambling badly.

He is now a professional gambler and he sucks at it, right?

He's horrible at this job.

And he can't stop getting caught from doing, he's doing like really high stakes bad gambling.

Like it's not enough to like lose at the horse tracks or like, you know, lose money playing fucking blackjack or whatever.

He is constantly getting in trouble for trying to fix different sporting events, which is like the one way as a rich guy to get in trouble for gambling outside of just losing your money, you know?

Um,

so uh, in 1935, he gets caught fixing horse races both in Paris and Côte d'Azur.

And before, you know, his charm and his fame as a beloved sports hero had been enough that when he got caught doing shit like this, like the last time, he avoided the most serious trouble, right?

Because he's beloved and he's charming.

He's not that anymore.

He is a washed up, alcoholic, degenerate gambler who is no longer good at football.

So he gets sent to prison after this time in 1935.

And he does some time, right?

Not a lot of time, but you know, enough that it's been made clear, you do not enjoy the same kind of

benefit of the doubt that had previously accompanied you in your sporting career and your life.

So this is not the last time he's going to be locked up for gambling-related crimes.

It's going to happen to him periodically over the next few years before World War II.

And he spends the remainder of the pre-war years cheating on his several wives.

He has a couple of divorces, I think three during this period of time.

And it's always because he's cheating constantly.

And he becomes a, he does some more time in jail.

He gets caught, you know, doing other gambling crimes.

He becomes a figure of minimal note in the world of Parisian organized crime, right?

He's kind of in part due to his debts.

He's like working.

I think he's basically being muscle sometimes for some of these like gangsters and whatnot because he owes them and he doesn't really have any other skills,

but he's fit or, you know, he's in better shape than most people, right?

So he could beat someone up maybe.

So war clouds start to gather above Western Europe, and Alexander shows no interest whatsoever, either in joining the fascists or in fighting them to protect his home country, right?

Again, because he doesn't consider France his home country.

This is part of why also, because he's Algerian, he's, I think he does, I think he has citizenship technically, but he still doesn't consider himself French.

in the way that like people born on the mainland do.

And he's also, because he's Algerian, he's got this kind of inroads because a lot of the organized crime world are people who are on the margins, right?

They're people who don't benefit from citizenship.

They're people who, you know, are in a more marginal place.

And so they wind up kind of associating with organized crime because they don't, they never benefit from like a legal position in society.

And, you know, because of his stardom, he had and he had that opportunity, but he still identifies more with that side of things, which is part of why this kind of is the direction he takes.

So when the, it becomes clear, when Germany and the USSR invade Poland, it becomes clear that France and Germany are going to have them a war.

And France starts, you know, hoovering up all of the young men they can because they're like, well, we got to throw some boys at the Germans again.

We might have another couple of years of that.

And Alexander wants no part of this.

His biographer, Luc Briand, writes, Alex would have liked to stay away from the march towards war that was leading Europe to disaster.

He was easily satisfied with this life of gambling, women, and petty trafficking, but it was impossible to escape.

From June 1939, France began recalling its reservists.

Villeplan was one of them, and joined the 416th Pioneer Regiment, based in the Jura.

Far from any possible front, this unit was primarily intended to accompany the movement of the combatant regiments by digging trenches for them and setting up cantonments.

No machine guns or tanks.

Here, the men's only weapons are shovels, picks, and a few vague Lebel rifles.

Right?

So

he gets

called up.

He's He's not with a combat unit.

They're like combat engineers, basically.

And he's not even going to really do that.

Right.

France's war with the Germans winds up being brief, or at least the kind of much like, again, this is a mirror of what happens in Algeria.

The war on the ground is very brief.

Obviously, France puts up more of a, you know, more of a military fight than Algeria does, like the casualties that Germany suffers pretty significant casualties, which we often kind of gloss over.

Like this is not a total cakewalk for them, but it is over very quickly, right?

And it's going to be a situation like in Algeria, where the actual sort of open conflict is over shortly, and then we transition to this more insurgent warfare, which lasts a lot longer, right?

And I do think it's really interesting how these things mirror each other and how, you know, the side that Villaplan is going to find himself on in this case.

So Paris falls to the Nazis in June of 1940, and Villaplan happily ends ends his service in a defeated military.

He might have been happy to return to his life of debauchery, you know, to return to the women and the gambling and the petty crime if a better opportunity hadn't presented itself.

And it very quickly does.

So the Nazis are occupying Paris herself at this point, right?

And so you've got all these foreign officers, these Germans and Austrians, who, I mean, they're all technically Germans for our purposes, but they're new to France and they don't know know the lay of the land.

But number one,

they're corrupt as hell.

Like the Nazi regime is a gangster regime, especially all of these SS guys who are in the country are just gangsters by mindset, in a lot of cases by background.

And also, they're just like military officers who are occupying any country in any point in history.

They want luxuries that they're not supposed to have, that they're not being provided by their government, and that are hard to come by in wartime, right?

Respectable French citizens, number one, often don't have access to this stuff either because they're respectable French citizens.

So when the nice stuff is harder to come by because there's a war on, they don't have it.

So the people who have access to the luxuries and who are willing to sell them to the occupiers are the criminals, right?

And it's these members of the underworld who, in their attitude, again, a lot of these people are not French citizens.

They're living in France, but they're, you know, in a lot of cases, Algerians or members of like other, you know, immigrant populations.

They've never had a legal status or their legal status has been questionable and they're also working in a criminal enterprise.

So their attitude is like, look, it does it matter if we're breaking the law under the French Republic or the German Reich?

Like whatever, we're criminals either way.

Who gives a shit?

You know?

So they have this very, and they're, you know, to an extent, especially if you're an Algerian, why would you immediately assume the Nazis are any worse than the French Republic, given what they've done to your people, right?

It just doesn't make a lot of sense that that you'd be particularly pissed at the Nazis in 1940, right?

So a lot of these

black market guys, these smugglers and whatnot, are only too happy to serve whoever's got cash on hand.

And I want to quote from an article in The Blizzard, quote, as soon as the armistice was signed on June 1940, Villaplan tried his hand at racketeering and blackmail, his preferred targets being black marketeers and Jews.

He was immediately arrested for handling hot goods.

However, and it was in jail that he was approached by Henry Lafont, one of the most reviled figures of the collaboration.

To many, a psychopath, a sadist, but first and foremost, an opportunist who convinced the occupier that he was someone they could do business with by leading them to the destruction of a whole Belgian resistance network.

And so, you know, Villaplan is immediately like, okay, the Nazis are in charge.

Oh, I can really fuck over.

like Jewish French people, right?

Like nobody's going to come after me, right?

And nobody's going to be paying attention to my petty crimes, but he's really bad at petty crimes.

And so he's still mad.

He gets in trouble in nazi paris for like scamming jewish people like that's hard you have to be bad as a scammer oh god

so he gets locked up and there's this this mafia figure henry lafant right who had been an organized crime figure who once the germans take over he basically uses his connections to help them destroy this resistance network in belgium and is the the ss is like hey you're useful can you put together a team of like locals who we can rely on to do stuff like what you just did to this Belgian network, right?

Like we're having some trouble with the French resistance.

Can you get us some local criminals who know the lay of the land and can help us dismantle these developing resistance networks?

And LaFont is like, of course I can, baby.

Like, I'm a piece of shit.

I'm so down for this job, right?

Henri Lafont is described by The Guardian as an illiterate orphan turned rampant ne'er-do-well,

which is just a charming thing.

Nerd do-well?

Doesn't do well?

Ner.

Ner, ne'er, ne'er.

And it's, it's funny to describe a guy who winds up working for the SS to dismantle resistant networks as a ne'er-do-well.

We're a little beyond ne'er-doing well, right?

Um,

he is as shady a character as they come.

And Lafont rubs a lot of people.

He has a mixed relationship with these different Germans, right?

Because a lot of the German military guys who are responsible for the occupation of Paris are

Prussians, right?

They're these old Prussian military, you know, in a lot of cases, members of the nobility.

They have these very old-fashioned attitudes about the right way and the wrong way to do things and about honor.

And they don't like.

all of the criminals that they're associating with to try to win this developing insurgent war.

But then you've got the SS,

who are basically gangsters, like the Nazis are a gangster regime and the SS are basically gangsters themselves.

And the SS is really down to work with these guys, right?

Because they're, you know, we're all the same kind of asshole, more or less.

So the SS sees potential in a man like Lafont, a man with no loyalties towards anything but himself and the promise of a payday and a deep well of knowledge about how things are done, you know, in the underground.

And the SS gives LaFont a choice.

Work for us and help us round up Jews and crack down on the growing resistance, and you get a place in the new order.

And Lafont is like, fucking hell yeah.

I want to quote from Doyle's book.

The more Lafont's influence grew, the more he recruited.

He toured the Parisian prisons, arranging the release of old associates and anyone who could help consolidate his powerful place in the perverted new social order.

Pierre Bonny, once the most famous police officer in France, before being disgraced and jailed for corruption, became his right-hand man.

At some point, they hooked up with Villa Plan, whose assorted activities now included gold smuggling.

The gang set up their headquarters at 93, Rue L'Ariston, probably the most infamous address in Parisian history, the home of the gang that became known as the French Gestapo,

right?

Wow.

So Lafont partners with this corrupt French police officer who got fired by the Republic, and then, you know, the Nazis bring back, and they start hooking up with Villaplan, right?

And initially, he's their driver.

He's like their chauffeur, but obviously driver for these guys.

You're doing bodyguard work.

You're acting as muscle, right?

right?

And their goal is to make money.

These guys are with the SS.

They are going to be wearing SS uniforms.

They're not ideologically in love with Hitler.

I doubt they've read Mein Kampf.

They're anti-Semitic, but like the normal kind of French anti-Semitic where they're like, oh, we can fuck with these people now.

I always hate it.

Let's rob them.

You know, I never liked them.

We can take their stuff now.

Yeah.

See what side their bread is buttered on.

Right.

It's like a more like cynical Nazism.

yes yes their pre-existing biases are compatible with nazism because they are racist against jewish people but that's not like the primary motivation right the primary motivation is there's money in this right um and so you know they start tracking down you know uh jewish refugees and people who have like gone into the underground to try to avoid the ss dragnet that's growing in this period so they're tracking down jews for the ss they're tracking down resistance fighters and helping to bust resistance cells.

They're helping in general for the SS to police the enemies of the Reich.

And from their headquarters in 93 Rue Lauriston, they are torturing hundreds of people, right?

They're murdering people.

There's a lot of like executions and whatnot, but there's also just a lot of, you know, pulling out of fingernails, just torture, torture, right?

Like it's, it's, it's gnarly shit.

So better known as the Carlinque, the French Gestapo saw the new order as an opportunity for personal wealth and power.

Villeplan had known Laurent

because for years they'd both kind of been involved in similar aspects of the underworld together.

And as I said, he's brought in as a chauffeur for higher-ranking criminals who made a place for themselves in the Carlinque at first.

But he exhibits the same kind of work ethic and skill at social manipulation that had previously served him so well in football, right?

This is the kind of thing he'd gotten sort of burnt out on football, but now that he's got a chance to be in the SS, it's like his career, he gets a second lease on life, right?

Like, oh, this is what I wanted to be doing the whole time.

Perfect for me.

Um, so in short order, Dean Kane joining ICE, right, right.

He's, he's a D, he's Dean Kane joining ICE, where he's like, ah, you know, my Superman years are behind me, but my Aryan Superman years may not be behind me, even though I'm out of the way.

My Ubermensch years, my ubermensch years are still ahead of me, right?

And again, this is a kind of thing,

there's a lot of misconceptions people have about the way Nazism's white supremacy and like racial supremacy worked, where we say, like, well, they're Nazis, they're obviously white supremacists.

That doesn't mean that they were white supremacist in a way that translates totally directly to the way a lot of white supremacists are racist today, right?

Nazi racism is a little different from a lot, like OG Nazi racism is a lot different from even like the way the KKK was racist, because this is not straight up white supremacy in the, in the area, like being white is not what matters most, right?

For one thing, their whole attitude is that being Aryan and kind of bringing back through breeding, you know, we've got the kind of the Norwegians, the Nordic peoples, and the Germans are closest to this Aryan race, right?

And so we want to, through eugenics and whatnot, and through careful like breeding of our population,

recreate this Aryan race, but we're working towards it.

So that's a difference from just, well, we're white and we're superior to everybody, right?

There's a difference there.

And there's other differences in that there's there's this belief in kind of a global hierarchy of races that is more fluid than you get with kind of a lot of modern white supremacists.

For one thing, the Germans are working with the Japanese, right?

And Hitler's attitude, Hitler's goal is not, I want Germany to rule the entire world.

It's Germany is going to be in control.

of Europe, you know, stretching basically almost into China, right?

All across the Russian steppes.

And there will be spheres of influence, right?

And Japan will control this other sphere of influence, right?

And it's not that they don't consider themselves superior to the Japanese, but it's not quite as simplistic as a lot of racism is today.

And so as a result, there is room within this Nazi movement for people who are not white and who are not Christian.

And one of the examples of this is As the SS, as Lafance

starts working for the SS, in collaboration with the SS, he creates a unit called the BNA, which roughly translates to the North African Brigade.

And this is made up of, I think, 50 to 100 Algerian French residents that the SS decides they can trust to crack down on the French resistance.

And a lot of these guys, obviously, Villa Plan is a European Algerian or European-descended Algerian, but a lot of these BNA guys are Arab and they're Muslim, right?

And part of why the SS decides they're trustworthy is that because of all of the shit that France had done to Algeria and the genocide that basically had been carried out in, you know, over the decades, right?

With around 2 million people killed, including a mass amount of starvation.

Because of that, the SS is very astutely like, well, these people aren't loyal to France.

They're certainly not loyal to the regular French population.

We can use them.

right um and so hitler had started in the early 40s right when germany takes over france funding an Arabic-language French newspaper, which was geared towards recruiting and radicalizing Muslims who had immigrated to France from colonized nations.

And the paper described Hitler as almost a Mahdi-like figure.

The Mahdi is this, I mean, it's both this figure in kind of Islamic theology, but also there had been a guy in North Africa.

called the Mahdi who had led this rebellion against the British, right?

And

Hitler is describing himself in these propaganda papers to the Arab population of France France as this messianic figure who is bent on Hitler's goal is to free colonized people from the shackles of their Western oppressors and put an end to colonialism and communism, right?

That's how Hitler is portraying himself to this community because he's like, look, I don't care about India.

Free India?

Sure, free India, right?

Like, because that'll hurt the British, right?

That's what I care about the war with.

India is so far outside of my like area of giving a shit.

Of course you can be free.

I'm an anti-colonialist hero.

Me, adolf hitler right yeah beautifully beneficial yeah like he's just he's fine with this right and it's he's also hitler is insanely jealous of great britain and the united states and there's a reason there's an a degree to which his his the thing he's angry about is like kind of fair is the wrong word but like he's pissed because like well they got to do a genocide genocides and steal everyone's land and no one's pissed at them why can't germany why why don't i get to do this right like

And that is like a major thing for Hitler.

So the fact that it often gets left out of our discussions of Nazism, but part of Hitler's propaganda is to portray himself as, you know, this kind of anti-colonial figure to certain groups of people.

And in fact, the BNA, this North African SS group that's going to be trying to cut down the resistance in France is not the only instance in which non-white soldiers were admitted to the SS, which this is a little bit of a side story, story, but it's one of my favorite weird side stories from the Second World War.

There was a unit in the SS called the Indish or Indian Legion that was made up entirely of Muslim and Hindu Indian soldiers in the SS.

Hey everyone, Robert here.

Just wanted to clarify: the Indish Legion was initially started as part of the Wehrmacht, and then it was absorbed by the Waffen-SS later in the war.

So it was ultimately part of the SS, but it started as a project with the Wehrmacht.

That explains the discrepancy in the quote I read.

Anyway, I just wanted to make a note of that.

Per a study by Bhaijalanti Roy, published by Oxford Academic, quote: Set up jointly by Subhas Chandra Bose, who is an Indian independence leader, and the Wehrmacht in 1941, the Legion composed about 3,500 volunteers from the Indian POWs who belonged to the British Imperial Army that had fought the Germans in Africa.

In order to integrate the newly formed legion, the Indian soldiers needed to be provided proper training by the German military personnel.

An important element of this training was ideological indoctrination into the Nazi worldview.

Several India experts who were not all academic specialists on India were called on to mediate between the German army and the Indian soldiers, not only as interpreters, but also as propagandists of Nazi ideology, right?

And so to propagandize this very peculiar unit in the Nazi military, Urdu and Hindu-speaking authors are brought in to write a magazine edited by Germans called Baiband.

And the overall project is a failure, right?

These guys do briefly see combat in France, actually, after the Normandy landings, but they don't, they like basically roll over immediately.

They see which way the war is going.

They're like, we're not going to die for the fucking,

the third Reich.

Are you kidding me?

So this doesn't have much of an impact on the war.

And this has very little.

The hope had been that if Indians over in India see, you know, liberated, you know, Muslim and Hindu soldiers fighting together against the British, that it'll spark a rebellion in India, basically.

That doesn't work at all, right?

Jesus Christ.

Um, it is not, this is not one of the more successful Nazi uh plans.

But speaking of successful Nazi, nope, uh, here's

Jesus Christ.

Yeah, probably shouldn't do that.

Listen to some ads, forget what I just said.

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We're back to Alexander Villaplan.

So, Villaplan, as the BNA, is created, this North African unit that's going to be helping to destroy the resistance.

And Villaplan is made Obersturmfuhrer, or lieutenant, of a unit unit of around 100 men.

And it's possible, if not likely, that his status as a white Frenchman, essentially, close enough, helped him secure this place, but it's likelier that he'd simply done a good job of making himself useful already.

The guardian writes of the the BNA's crimes.

In Philippe Aziz's authoritative 1970 book on the Lafontaine Bonnie gang, the following story is told.

Following a tip-off from a source in the Paris Gestapo, Alex and three of his men burst into the home of Jean-Vive Lenard, accused of harboring a Jew.

They ransack the house.

Alex seizes the 59-year-old mother of six by the hair.

Where is your Jew?

He shouts.

The lady refuses to answer.

Alex picks her up brutally, pushes her into a neighboring farm, hitting her with his rifle butt on the way, and there he forces her to watch an appalling scene.

Men from the BNA torture two peasants in front of her.

After being beaten and set ablaze, the two peasants were machine-gunned from close range.

Alex laughs.

During his time, some other men from the BNA had located the Jew, Antoine Bachmann.

They bring him to the farm.

Alex hits him and then arrests him.

He then orders Jean-Vive Lenard to give him 200,000 francs.

So

we've broken bad.

That's pretty hideous.

Like, yeah,

that's real, just evil.

Yeah.

He is effectively, he's that character from Inglorious Bastards.

He's the real version, right?

Where there's no charm.

There's no point at which he's like, oh, he's evil, but he's like this like evil genius who's like cruel, but there's this degree of like, you just want to keep watching him, right?

No, this is the real version of that guy, right?

Where he is just beating a 59-year-old woman with a fucking pistol bud.

He's having people lit on fire and then actually just random peasants machine gunned after being lit on fire.

Like this is the real version of that character, you know?

So over the last year or so of the war, which France, or at least the last year that France spends under

German dominance during the war, Villeplan and his men are responsible for dozens of executions and turning over countless Jews to the Gestapo.

And he makes a fortune during this period of time.

By some accounts, he becomes as wealthy or wealthier than he'd ever been during the height of his football career because he's taking shitloads of bribes, right?

And a lot of times he's taking bribes and he's turning these people, these Jews, these resistance figures in any way.

We'll talk about the other things that he's getting bribed for in a sec, but he and the BNA become notorious and they earn a nickname among the resistance.

And this nickname is, of course, based in the racism that was quite common even among the Frenchmen fighting the Nazis.

They called them the SS Mohammed, right?

Again,

there's no non-racist side

in this conflict.

Yeah, no, this is

just flat bat.

Yeah, this is just all pretty ugly, right?

Obviously, the resistance is the right side, but that doesn't mean these guys, that number one, a lot of people who fought in the resistance had been unapologetic colonialist bigots prior to the German occupation and continued being after.

And just also, war doesn't make anyone a better person, right?

So they had other nicknames.

The non-racist members of the resistance would call them the phalange, which is a term that gets used around a lot of different fascist groups.

So like that's just kind of.

calling them what you would call like the Spanish, you know, the Falanges is like a term,

it's a

term that a lot of different European fascist groups used.

So that that one's fine.

Some locals also called them lesbique, which is a colonial slur for non-white denizens of French possessions.

Author Robert Pike describes, they were a strange-looking bunch at best, dressed in a combination of sheepskin jackets with baggy blue boiler suits and berets.

They wore thick leather belts with a Waffen-SS buckle and were armed with machine guns and grenades.

So weird-looking uniforms on these guys.

One of the stranger units in World War II, the BNA.

They receive combat training from the SS, but these guys are thugs and gangsters first, right?

So they don't, they avoid direct combat with the resistance whenever possible because they're not good at that, right?

And the resistance is getting, as the war comes to a close in France, increasingly competent and well-armed because more stuff's getting through from the Allies.

And as a result, the BNA, they're avoiding, they want to avoid fighting directly with the resistance, which means when the resistance carries out a successful attack, they're not going in in and attacking the resistance.

They're just massacring civilians with the goal of forcing the resistance to make difficult choices, right?

Basically, we're going to try and stop them from carrying out attacks because they know that we'll massacre villagers when they do.

We're not even trying to fight them, right?

Because

we'll be bad at that.

Right.

Yes.

This is all awful.

I mean, it's the calculus of war for the resistance.

And this is how a lot of counterinsurgency actually winds up in practice, whether it's the Nazis or the Americans doing it, where, you know, even if you're not supposed to, it's a lot easier to do reprisals against unarmed civilians.

So that's what you do.

Much of this, much of these reprisals, all these like reprisal attacks against civilian populations are being done on the orders of Michael Hambrecht, who is the Gestapo head of Dordogne.

And he used the BNA as his dedicated war crimes unit in support of the 11th Panzer Division of the Wehrmacht.

One of the things this does is it lets, there's this myth that comes up post-war that, like, well, the SS was bad, but the Wehrmacht was mostly clean, right?

There was like a clean branch of the German army, and there wasn't.

The Wehrmacht are involved in a lot of war crimes.

And part of how some of these units avoid more direct things is like, well, the Wehrmacht, when they need to move in to fight a resistance cell, we'll send the Wehrmacht in.

But we have the Algerians massacring civilians on our behalf, right?

Because they're doing these war crimes to try to roll up these networks or get, you know, they'll torture citizens to get them to like give up the locations of different resistance cells, right?

So we've, we're outsourcing our war crimes, right, to these, to these, this Algerian unit.

The BNA was so successful at this, at least in the eyes of the occupiers, that they soon get seconded in addition to this Wehrmacht unit to the 2nd SS Panzer Division as well.

Robert Pike writes, Official records are scarce, but those available, as well as the many eyewitness accounts and reports by the judicial police, tell of pillage, rape, plundering, and burning of property, extortion, and profiteering.

However, this was just the tip of the iceberg.

Arrests, deportations, or summary murders of civilians and executions of suspects took place on an almost daily basis.

As an auxiliary police force to the Gestapo, its members held carte blanche to do as they pleased.

They were hardly accountable to anyone, but the massacres were on a different scale.

These were ordered by the Germans and executed by the Falange.

In March, the town of Brantome was the first to feel the full force, with 25 hostages bust in to be executed in a show of force designed to persuade the local population to inform on resistance activity.

The following day, in Saint-Marie-de-Chinaque, a further 25 hostages, mainly Jews, were executed.

Both were in retaliation for resistance ambushes.

Many other towns and villages suffered losses of innocent inhabitants as well as resistance sympathizers, Jews or refugees.

The events of 11th of June 1944, by which time it is likely that Alexandre Villeplan was replaced by the even more brutal Raymond Manang, are perhaps most striking of all.

On that day, in the town of Moussedon, 20 kilometers west of Paris, had its name etched into the history of Nazi barbarity.

An armored train heading from Paris to Montpan was attacked by the resistance.

13 Germans were killed in the firefight, and a further 10 were taken prisoner.

Consequently, the entire male population of the town and surrounding hamlets were rounded up and questioned, many tortured.

Michael Hambrecht arrived in the town late in the afternoon, along with 30 members of the Falange.

Already visibly drunk, he had been told to personally select 50 men for execution.

Of those under 60 years of age that had been retained, he chose 48 who were then led to a nearby alleyway overlooking farmland.

Along the way, they passed the line of men that had just been released.

There they stood in two rows for more than two hours until they were mown down by machine guns, operated by Falange members, who then finished off survivors with handguns.

Later, the mayor and his adjutant were tortured and killed while two other men were killed in the street, taking the death toll that day to 52.

All the bodies were left where they fell.

Miraculously, two men survived the massacre.

The town was then pillaged.

And there's debate, was Vilikron there?

Was he not?

Was he just there in the massacres heading up to this?

I've heard sources that say he was there at Musedan.

Some that say he actually pulled the trigger and shot people directly during that day, which was not.

He didn't like to get his hands dirty.

But some of the stories at least say that he did that day.

It's a little long.

I don't have perfect evidence on it.

But if he wasn't there in Musedan, he was there other days where similar massacres were carried out.

We just talked about him having people lit on fire and machine gunned.

But

as the war comes to an end, he's not stupid.

He's aware that the Nazis aren't winning and that Vichy France's days are numbered.

And Alexander, he's never been a true believer.

So he starts to hedge his bets as soon as he realizes which way the wind is blowing.

So during this later period of time, while he's carrying out these massacres, he starts pretending to be a resistance double agent.

And so he'll let captives go if they can pay.

He'll be like, you know, hey, I'm with the resistance, but like, also, I need some cash, right?

Oh, God.

He's like the worst sort of person.

He's the worst sort of person.

He can't even commit to pretending to be a double agent.

One eyewitness describes him arriving in a village one day and saying to a group of prisoners, Oh, in what times we live.

Ours is a terrible era.

To what harsh extremes I am reduced.

Me, a Frenchman, compelled to wear a German uniform.

Have you seen, my brave people, what terrible atrocities these savages have committed?

I cannot be held responsible for them.

I am not their master.

They are going to kill you, but I will try to save you at the risk of my own life.

I've already saved many people.

54, to be precise.

You will be the 55th if you give me 400,000 francs.

He's such bullshit.

He's such a piece of shit.

He sucks so bad.

He sucks so bad.

He's so awful.

I hate him.

Yeah, that's just, yeah, that's that's a special kind of evil.

I'm excited.

I'm excited to hear about how he dies.

Yeah.

I know.

I was like, I didn't know this guy existed, and now I hate him so much.

He sucks so bad.

Yeah.

That's what we do here.

So by the end of summer of 1944, the jig was well and truly up.

Paris was liberated with French colonial troops, including a lot of Africans, being some of the first soldiers to enter the city.

This was a bloody period of time for those who had suffered under years of Nazi occupation, beat, tortured, and sometimes murdered their fellow citizens who had acted as collaborators, right?

There's a lot of...

ugliness, some of it understandable, where there's some people who had done horrible things under the Nazis and they get their just desserts.

And there's also uglier things where like women who had, you know, been dating quote unquote members of the German military, who knows how often they had a choice in the matter, right?

They get like their hair shaved and get beaten in public.

Like, there's a lot of ugly stuff that happens during this period of time, too, because not everyone who had been a quote unquote collaborator really had a full choice in the matter, right?

But some of the people who are going to get their just desserts are the French Gestapo.

The at, you know, from the time that it's, you know, they're planning retaking Paris, the French government in exile, all these people know, we're not going to leave these folks up to the populace to take their vengeance on.

These people we need to make a public example on.

And, you know, Alexander, he tries to hold on to his uniform as much as possible.

He attempts to, as Paris falls, he attempts to use his position with the SS to commit one last robbery to fund his escape into Germany.

He tries to scam a man out of $900, an Armenian man out of $900 in a gold ring in return for giving him back valuables that he'd stolen from this Armenian man.

But he gets overtaken by events.

And on August of 24th, 1944, he gets caught by a resistance agent with a gun and a fake police identity card.

Villaplan is put on trial and declared to be a con man and a murderer by a French judge.

He pleased desperately that I'd been working for the resistance all along.

No, I was really on your side.

I was a good guy the whole time.

Does not work.

Avails him nothing.

This judge is like, no, you're a con man and a monster.

And on the day after Christmas, 1944, he is executed by firing squad along with seven of his colleagues.

Yeah.

So we have a happy ending.

Yeah.

It seems like the thing to do to that sort of person.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So yeah, that's the story.

Oh,

God, I'm not going out there.

I just like, yeah.

Oh, what a bad person.

What a bad person.

What an interesting boomerang around from you're kind of born in this mix between colonizer and colonized, at least as you see it, right?

We're like, you know, we might see it more accurately as a colonizer, but his attitude on it is a little more mixed than that as a young man, certainly his dad's attitude.

And certainly influenced in his willingness,

the colonial brutality of the French in Algeria, I think definitely does impact how willing to, like, like what happens, especially with these like North African units in France and, and why they're willing to do some of the things that they're willing to do, right?

Um, Because, like, you know, they've seen it before, they've endured it before, right?

Um, so yeah,

bad, bad times all around, bad times, all around.

I guess the uh, justice, justice won out in the end, sort of, he gets killed, you know, that's good.

This is one of our for behind the bastards.

This is like as happy a story as we get.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah,

yeah.

Anyway, you want to plug your pluggables?

Yeah, yeah, please listen to Noble Blood, a podcast about historical royals, and Hoax, a podcast about hoaxes throughout history that I host with my friend Lizzie Logan.

Fewer Nazis, I can promise you.

Fewer Nazis.

No, that's always

not.

Not zero.

Yeah, because, you know, especially the British royal family, there's a few.

Oh, they're Nazis.

And also, just like Nazis are popping up in history.

They tend to do that.

It's like the number one thing Nazis do is pop up.

Yeah,

they're like a bad taco restaurant.

I want to say this was a delight.

This was an education.

Yeah, there we go.

Well, the talking with you is a delight.

Yeah, talking with you has been a delight too.

Listen to noble blood.

Listen to hoax, exclamation point.

And yeah, you know, keep listening to Behind the Bastards.

We'll be back next week with a guy who may or may not be a Nazi, but definitely sucked.

Or maybe a lady.

Sometimes it's a lady.

Not often, but sometimes.

Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

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Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/slash at behind the bastards.

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