Part One: How Heinrich Himmler Went From Nerdy Boy To Master of the SS

Coolzone Media.

Oh wow, what time is it?

Oh my gosh, it's Bastards 30.

It's actually 1:17 in the afternoon.

Better known as my 8 a.m.

I am Robert Evans,

and I'm not good at getting up early, but you probably are.

I imagine you're listening to this podcast on your way to work at the medical factory or at the whatever else job you do.

I don't remember any other jobs but doctor.

The medical factory?

Yeah, where doctors work, Sophie.

Come on.

I know that.

I'm going to start telling my brother he works at the medical factory.

See how that goes.

Speaking of doctors, our guest today has a PhD

in performing.

I don't, that was supposed to like rhyme

something better than it didn't.

It didn't, whatever.

Ya prop, Jason Penny.

What's up, man?

Look, baptized, baptized in the fault.

You know what I'm saying?

I got a PhD in being me, H-Me, whatever that means.

Oh, see, that's so much better than the one I did.

Bars.

Wow.

Yeah, that was much better than how I did it.

Prop, you are the host of a show called Hood Politics, which you can find, the listener, on this exact podcast network.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I had the privilege of being the first offspring.

That's right.

That's right.

Of the network.

You feel me?

Independent, and we acquire.

You're the Instagram to our Facebook.

Wow.

Basically, I am the reels to, I am the stories

to your vine.

That's right.

That's right.

Ooh, boy, we probably shouldn't compare ourselves to Vine.

That's not going to go well.

No, no, no, no.

Prop.

How are you feeling today?

You good?

Feeling some, I mean, feeling the same low-level existential dread everybody else is feeling.

Before you got odd, Robert, I did warn him.

I was like, it's a biggie.

It's a biggie.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, but I feel like

you're about to ruin my day.

I feel like I'm about to ruin several of your days because this is going to take us a couple of weeks to go through prop.

We are, you know,

I try to vary the bastards and vary the level of bastardry to keep things interesting

for the widest variety of people.

But I got a list in my head of the heavy hitters, you know, the big guys.

A lot of big folks poked me.

It was like, oh, you haven't done Juan Peron yet.

You know, you haven't done Marcos yet.

You haven't done Mao yet.

Yeah.

And today, we're going back to the Nazi well

for reasons that should be obvious to people who watch the news.

That's extra relevant right now.

Yes.

And it's time for us to hit one of the big ones.

Today, and this week and next week, we're doing Heinrich Himmler.

Oh, shit.

Yeah, baby.

Yeah, baby.

The Scotty Pippin of Nazis.

The Scotty Pippin.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's not, you know, if Hitler, yeah, Hitler's the Jordan.

He's the Scotty Pippin.

Obviously, Herman Gohring is Shaq.

You know, everyone knows.

So Dumars.

Shaq's picking strays.

Dang.

I was like, Rick Fox, maybe.

Going is like...

Rick Fox,

Grey Callback.

He's not the worst of them.

So I guess that's nicer to Shaq than calling Scotty Pippin the Himbler of basketball.

God damn it, the Murphy Lee, fucking Lloyd Banks.

Yeah.

Who's the other second guy, Cuavo?

Like, you know what I'm saying?

The fucking offset of.

We're beyond my basketball knowledge now.

Oh, we're not even in basketball anymore.

We went to music there.

Himmler's, if we want to put it in the political terms, Himmler's the Dick Cheney of Nazism, right?

Do you know who Cuavo is?

Jose?

Yeah, Cuervo?

Yeah.

We've been to Cuavo for years.

I wish.

Yeah, we're going to need some for these.

No, I have no idea who Cuevo is.

We're talking the Migos.

Yeah, we're talking Ray Kwan and Ghostface to Method Man right now, dude.

Okay, no, there's no Ghostface and Method Man.

Yeah.

Well, the Method Man of Nazism is probably not Heinrich Himmler.

I'm not sure who he is.

No, no, no.

Maybe, hmm, yeah.

That's a good question.

I mean, Meth is like, you know, that's the leader.

Or is it Rizza?

Nah, let's go with Meth.

Anyway.

This is old head stuff.

Yeah.

I guess, yeah, Hitler's the method man of Naziism.

Although, you know, Rizza, I think it was Rizza who did the

soundtrack to Ghost Dog, which I don't think Hitler could have done.

No,

Hitler is Rizza.

Rizza is like...

So dumb.

They're so dumb.

I love it.

Rizza's actually a genius.

Yeah.

And Jizza, the genius, is actually a doctor.

Like he's an actual PhD.

But anyway.

Well, Heinrich Himmler was none of these things.

What he was is a man who believed himself the reincarnation of an old Germanic prince who died around the year 1000.

He was

the biggest nerd of the Nazis.

This is, and in fact, one of the books I have on this, Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts, which is about Heinrich Himmler and the occult, and we'll be talking a lot about that through these episodes, like basically describes Himmler and his kind of fellow travelers, the one who were really into this German occult stuff that's going to be a part of these stories, as like, these are, like, they would have been into D and D, you know, in a different period of time.

They would have been the really toxic nerds, right?

Like the guys who are like, damn it, threaten to murder people over fan fiction about Lord of the Rings or something.

Like, that's the kind of dude he is.

The guy that's going to argue that the little Ariel should be white because she's on the bottom of the ocean.

Yes.

Yes.

That dude.

Yes.

Okay.

He would have been writing so many fucking letters to Disney and Marvel about like worst reading stuff.

Yeah.

Himmler is the thatist guy of the Nazi high command.

The that is guy.

Okay.

And then you put him in charge.

Here we go.

Yeah.

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This is Matt Rogers from Las Cultureistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

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so if we were in a country where kids hadn't all been left behind since, you know, I was in high school,

I would be like, this is a guy who doesn't need introduction.

But obviously, he does need introduction, this being the United States.

Heinrich Himmler is the guy who, he didn't create the SS, like it exists and has a couple of leaders before him, but he's almost from the jump, the leader of the SS.

It has very little history before him, and he makes it into what it is.

And the SS, the Schutzstaffel,

initially starts as Hitler's bodyguard and several units of Hitler's bodyguard.

It's kind of the elite within the Nazi Party, and it turns into a state within a state.

The SS is handling a significant amount of, they're kind of like the FBI CIA.

Like there's a division of the SS, the SD, that is that for the Nazi state.

And they are also running all of the concentration camps, right?

Like the death's head units that have the famed skull and crossbones thing that the SS is famed for.

Those are the guys who are running the camps.

Those are the concentration camp guards.

They're manning the death camps.

They also, there are SS combat units, the Waffen-SS, which means the weapons SS.

There's like well over a million people in the SS at the height.

It is the elite of the party.

And these are the guys who are doing the bulk of the war crimes.

Not that the Wehrmacht doesn't, but like the SS is the war crimes organization.

And Himmler created them kind of, he wanted them to be a knightly order, right?

Like

he was very much inspired by the medieval, these some of these medieval orders, like the Knights Templar.

And his goal was to create a new aristocracy using the SS, which is why, and to a big part, they're the guys doing the very worst of the Holocaust.

And we have spent a lot of time talking about other SS men who are the implementation guys for the Holocaust, right?

We've talked about Reinhard Heydrich.

We've talked about Eichmann.

We've talked about the Einsitzgruppe and, you know, several of the people in that who are the units actually doing the direct shooting tens of thousands of Jews to death in the East.

And so in these episodes, one thing that people might find a little weird, we're not going to not talk about that, but we're not going to go into most of it.

We're not going to spend very much detail talking about the death camp stage of the system that the SS is a part of, because we have covered implementation, guys.

And these are people, Himmler hires Heydrich.

Himmler is talking to and giving orders to Eichmann, right?

So

we're mostly going to cover Himmler up until the point that like the war gets going and the SS is running and the camps are running to talk about how he got to where he did

and how he built the system that winds up doing the Holocaust.

We'll spend less time on the Hololo.

That's just because we have covered the implementation guides, right?

And

I also think this is like, like, this is...

the service that is needed at this moment because we all understand

there's been movies about find out.

Right.

There ain't been movies about fuck around.

Yes.

You know, and fuck around

is clearly where we're at.

And anybody who understands that find out comes after fuck around is going, guys,

hey,

this is fuck around.

This is around.

I think that's fine.

We're fucking around.

Yeah, like.

The flag don't get redder.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

So I feel like, and like you said, the child left behind thing is just like the, the ability to, to understand that four comes from two plus two is probably one of the most frustrating things that is happening, I think, in our political dialogue right now.

Like you, you, like, you want, like, you want a one-to-one.

You want this to be as neat as possible, you know.

Um,

and then people hide in that.

Like, for example, like people talk about like, well, ICE is like the Gustavo.

And it's like, well, okay, in vibe, like, it's got Gustavo vibe.

It's more like the secret police, but there's really no one-to-one.

It's more like the SS, right?

Yeah, the Gustavo is the Secret Police.

But like, yeah,

what they're trying to do with ICE is a lot more like

the SS.

I mean, but again, none of this crafts directly.

There are some things you can compare to the SA, the brown shirts.

And like, I don't want to,

we'll talk some about that as we go on, but, but this is important because number one, we're going to be talking a lot more than we usually do about Heinrich's early life and childhood because there's so much on him.

There's a tremendous amount of detail.

One of the things, we'll talk about one of the things that's unique about Himmler

of all of the Nazis is we have almost his entire life and diaries from the time he was a little kid.

Like he kept notes on most of his life.

Like we have

most of his daily life up to a certain point, which is very weird and very rare with someone, a historical figure like this.

And so I want to try and, I mean, this, the show is behind the bastards, right?

And

a lot of these guys, there's just not enough information on their childhood to really get that far behind.

But with Himmler, we will.

And we're going to spend a lot of time talking about how he came to believe some of these weird mystical beliefs that he believed and how they influence.

Because the SS is largely formed.

based on his occult beliefs.

Like a lot of how he organizes it and what he wants it to be is based on these esoteric things he believes about race and reincarnation.

And so we'll be talking about all of that in these episodes, but I should just dive in, you know?

Yeah.

See, I think too, like, it's something I've kind of been trying to think about, like, how to put into words for some upcoming episodes for Hood of Politics: is like the

actual

power and danger of

a really

smart, like

nerd that ain't afraid of you.

Right.

Like, there's like that combo is dangerous, whether it's they create a death cult, like you finna talk about, or you turn into like a Nipsey hustle.

Yeah.

Like, Nipsey is Nipsey, like some of the stories from his childhood was like when he wanted to first start recording, he just made a computer out of like scraps he found at a junkyard.

Like he built the first computer that he was, when he was a little boy, you know what I'm saying?

You got it, you got it, you got a rolling 60 crib talking about like assets and liabilities and investing his, you know what I'm saying?

So, like, somebody who's a nerd, but is like, I'm not afraid of jail.

Yeah.

You know what I'm saying?

Uh, can become

either the leader we all needed or Heydrich Himmler.

You know, yeah, and yeah, and Himmler, yes, and as we'll talk about, Himmler's, he doesn't have quite the courage to be

like, like, he doesn't want to get arrested.

Like, he's okay, yeah, but he also idolizes the guys who do, right?

He really wants to be them.

So, So

we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Let's just dive into this man's life.

Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was born on October 7th, 1900 in Munich, Germany.

His family are generally described as middle class in most kind of short summaries of his upbringing.

This undersells their level of comfort by a bit.

We might be more accurate to say that his parents came from something

had started out more working class, but had worked their way up to like the upper middle class by the time he's born.

They are, they are more comfortable than most middle class people, right?

They're taking vacations through most of World War I, right?

And that you, you have to be doing pretty well if you're able to still afford that in Germany in like 1916, right?

Um, his father was Gebhard Himmler, um, and he was the son of a civil servant in the Bavarian government.

Now, this is the early

1800s when Gebert is born, and that's before the unification of Germany.

Um, Johann Himmler, Heinrich's grandfather, his Gebhard's dad, was the son of peasants from Ansbach who trained him as a weaver.

So Heinrich's dad grows up being like taught to be like a peasant who's like weaving stuff.

But he manages to, this is as modernity is really kicking in around Germany.

And he manages to elevate himself up out of the peasantry by getting a job.

He joins the military first, and he's in the military.

He's travels around a couple of places in the military.

I think there's a period of time in which he's almost kind of working as like a soldier for hire.

And eventually, back in Germany, he gets a job as a police officer and he works his way up to sergeant.

They use a different word for the term sergeant in Germany, but that's what he is.

He's like a upper middle level kind of local police officer.

So by the time Gebart, Heinrich's dad, is born in 1865, Germany is five years away from becoming a country.

And Johann is retired, you know, when his kid is born, but he's still working for the local government.

He's one of these guys.

He retires with a pension from his police job, and then he gets a job basically on like the city council almost, that kind of thing.

So he's like a fairly important man in town, right?

Okay.

And fairly, so

the family is connected.

Yeah, this is this is Heinrich's grandfather.

Yeah.

Okay.

Right.

So this is Johan.

Okay.

Um, so Johan dies when Gebbert is seven, uh, which is normal for German kids of this area, era and this socioeconomic group.

If your dad is manages to make it up to be like a fairly, you know, middle or high-level local government functionary, he probably has kids later than a lot of a lot of other guys, and he's probably pretty old.

And a lot of this is kind of what happens to Hitler, too, right?

Like his dad is much older than his wife.

His dad is a mid-level functionary and dies when he's very young.

So as soon as Johan dies, his wife, Heinrich's grandmother, raises Gebhard, switches him from Protestant to Catholic.

We don't really know why.

This is very weird.

It doesn't happen a lot.

The opposite is more common in Germany because Germany is a more Protestant kind of Lutherans come from Germany.

Yeah, Martin Luther

is German.

So the opposite switch is kind of weird.

And we don't really fully know why, but

Heinrich Himmler's biographer, Peter Longrich, seems to suggest that her motivation may have partly been the idea that being Catholic would be better for her son's future career because where they are in Munich, more of the local government was Catholic.

And so maybe it would help, you know, if he was Catholic.

The reality of that's kind of unclear.

But Gebhardt grows up to be a school teacher.

And it's a mark of how different Germany is in this place and time to where we are now, that that's a big step up the ladder of social mobility.

Like a teacher's a good job.

right especially compared to like you know what his family their families had been doing previously.

So he gets a job at a grammar school as a teacher initially, but he's so good at the work.

He's a very good teacher.

Most people seem to agree.

There's some argument about this, but he's successful at least.

Enough so that after four years as a teacher, he gets kind of scouted for like the majors of being a teacher, which is...

being a private tutor for a member of the royal family.

Yeah, so I was going to say, yeah, you get a little comfy job.

Right.

You're not just at the public school teaching the riffraff.

He still teaches the riffraff, but he is also now private tutor for a prince of the Bavarian royal family, which is like a big deal, right?

Because among other things, you've got one-on-one connection with someone who is going to be very powerful and influential.

So this is a job, not only does it pay pretty well, but it connects you to the royal family.

Now, at this period of time, we're in Imperial Germany.

They're ruled by a Kaiser.

And people miss this a lot just because we don't talk a lot about how Imperial Germany worked.

Even under the Kaiser prior to World War I, Germany is not just a state in the way that we conceive of a state.

It's basically like, I think it's like four kingdoms that are lashed together, and they're all nominally under the rule of the Kaiser, who is the Prussian king.

But each kingdom has a technically, like the militaries are all independent, right?

Yeah.

When war comes around, they all have to, like, they're all unified.

Like, it's written in basically to the

constitution or whatever.

That's what they call it.

But, like, when there's war, everybody's under one central command.

But outside of war, like the Bavarian and the Prussian military, these are separate entities.

They have separate leaders, they have separate uniforms.

When World War I starts, I think there's something like 215 different official German military uniforms.

Like, it's nuts.

I do like sometimes mourn, and even finding it within myself, like just us living in the era where we're in where

we just honestly cannot imagine, like our brains can't fathom other ways to organize governments.

You know what I mean?

Like that, that like, well, they're not all what, well, governments, not even the right word.

You know what I'm saying?

Like, it's, you feel me, you know what I'm saying?

So it's like, it's hard to imagine them saying, well, yeah, this is all Prussia.

It's like, well, I thought it was Bavaria.

This is Prussia.

Yeah, no, no, it is.

They're all part of the same state, but also these are very different things.

Yeah, and it's not like a state, like as in California, it's like as in a nation, but it's not like a nation because there's no such thing as nations yet.

Yeah,

they're starting to become this is like this is while the modern idea of the nation state is being like worked out, right?

Like that's where this is all happening.

And yeah, it is, so it is a big deal.

You know, when I say his connection to the royal family is to the Bavarian royal family, so he's not connected to like the Kaiser's people, but he is his official charge, the kid he's teaching, starting as when this kid's like a teenager, is Prince Heinrich of Wittelsbach, right?

And he is the son of the Prince Regent of Bavaria.

The Prince Regent is the prince who's going to become the king.

Yeah.

And Prince Heydrich is not going to become, I mean, he could theoretically, but a lot of people would have to die, right?

He's not close to the throne, but he's still a prince, right?

So it's still a big deal.

And, you know, Gebard is the son of a cop who was himself the son of a peasant.

And so the fact that in two generations, they've gone from we're peasants and we're weavers or whatever to I am teaching a prince is a huge upgrade for the family's circumstances.

They have moved a lot.

There's a lot of upward mobility for the Himmler family.

And the fact that one of the ways this benefits him is that like shortly after becoming a private tutor to the prince, he gets a permanent job.

Basically, he gets the equivalent of like tenure teaching at a prestigious private grammar school, right?

So he goes from like teaching at a normal school to teaching at a really nice school because he's like, I think basically the, the royal family is like, hey, you should take this guy, you should hire this guy because we don't want the guy tutoring the prince to be working at like a normal school, right?

Like he need, he deserves a better position.

So they start making good money.

And it's not just about that they're making, you know, upper middle class money now, but they have connections now.

He can, I think it's the kind of thing where you don't want want to ask too much, but if you ask for a favor, you can probably get it.

And the fave,

a word in someone's ear from a member of the royal family of Bavaria can move things for you.

So now that he's established, he's got this prestigious job, he's got these connections.

It took him a while to get to this point, but now it's time for him to get married.

And as I said, he's going to get married later than is normal for people here.

He falls for, or at least decides to marry, I don't know how in love they were, a woman named Ana Maria Heider.

And this is Heinrich Himmler's mother.

Um, Anna's father was a successful local businessman, he had died years earlier, but she brings a sizable dowry to the marriage, right?

Enough that they probably might have been able to live off the dowry, right?

Like, like, that's how come I don't know if I'd say that they're rich, but they are upper-middle class.

That's a

score, man.

Yes, I gotta tell you, if there's if there's any, if there's any incredibly toxic things from the past

that I wish existed, it's like, oh, yeah, yeah.

Like, I already love this woman.

She's already choosing to marry me.

And I'm like, wait, but all

of you?

Wait, hold up.

Yeah.

I mean, it was mostly downsides, but yes, it would have been nice.

Getting, just getting money when you get married.

Yeah.

Obviously, there's a lot that's toxic about this for a lot of people, but not for the Himmlers, you know?

And part of what this shows you is, and this is something that Heinrich's, it kind of runs in the blood or whatever.

The Himmlers are really good social climbers.

That's primarily how Heinrich gets the way.

Like, he has good instincts for this is someone I need to meet and be friends with, and they're going to help me get a leg up.

And then this next person is who I need to meet and be friends with, and that'll help me get it.

Like, this is something his dad is clearly really good at.

The way the level to which his dad climbs and his grandfather had climbed show that there's just a degree to which Himmlers are really good at social climbing.

You know, they've just got whatever that thing is.

So Heinrich Himmler is born, as I said, in 1900.

He is the second child and the second son of the marriage.

They'll ultimately have three sons.

It's a mark of how well the Himmlers are doing that when Heinrich is born, Gebard asks his student, Prince Heinrich, if he'll be, who's like 16 at this point, if he'll be Heinrich's godfather.

I'm actually kind of surprised he's a middle child.

Yeah, he is a middle child.

That's surprising to me.

It has an influence on the guy he becomes.

And Prince Heinrich agrees again, which says that they have a really good relationship.

That's kind of a big ask from

a prince.

Like as, yeah, hey, will you be my kid's godfather?

But he says yes.

Yeah, you got to really like this fool.

Like, I've had like most time prince is like, wait, I'm sorry, what's your name again?

What's your name again?

You're the help.

Are you serious?

But he's waiting.

Which one are you?

Yeah.

They must have had a good thing.

How many people have asked you to be the godfather prop?

I feel like you're a lot of people's godfather.

I've been asked many times.

Yeah.

Oh, I'm godfather to like six kids.

I don't even know the kids.

Yeah.

I just godfather.

I'm a godfather for hire, baby.

You just send them money on their birthday, man.

They come over.

It's like, here's 20 bucks, kid.

No.

There's only like, there's two kids that I'm like actually active, one of which lives on our street.

So I'm like, okay, well, I'm her godfather.

She lives next door.

You're really getting into the godfathering.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're a good choice.

Yeah.

I think so.

You're a good choice.

Obviously, it comes natural to me, being a Robert Evans.

There's nothing more natural than being a godfather.

You are the godfather.

Uh-huh.

That's right, baby.

Speaking of the producer Robert Evans, you know what he liked?

Cocaine.

Maybe that's who sponsored this show.

Jesus Christ.

I couldn't even believe it was real.

Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Kennedy was killed.

Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

Drew Pinski, Corey Feldman, and more.

Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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I hope it was cocaine.

Did that blow your mind?

Exactly.

All right.

All right.

With the dad joke.

Hey, man, I'm a goddad.

Yeah, that's right.

We get to make it.

That means you get to make twice as many fucking dad jokes.

God level, you feel me?

Yeah.

God level dad jokes.

Yep.

That's awful.

So, as he comes into the world, the Heinrich Himmler, who would build the SS into one of the deadliest organizations in human history, is from the beginning a Nepo baby.

His parents put a lot of work.

work.

Again, they wait until their 30s to get married in part because they want to, you know, Gebert especially doesn't want to have kids until he can make sure they'll be Nepo babies because he is a climber.

And the whole plan that Gebert and Anna Maria have is that the family money that his mom brought in, that's like their, their cushion, is going to pay for a, you know, childhood for their kids of like prestigious schools.

And particularly for Heinrich, for whatever reason, it seems like they are setting Heinrich up more than anyone else for success because he's the one who has the prince as the godfather.

And, you know, they'll use the money to pay for him to get a really good education.

And then the connections they've got with the royal family, they'll use to get him a lucrative job as an adult.

And that will help the Himmler family ascend further towards the upper class, right?

Okay.

That, like, we made it to the upper middle class.

Heinrich is going to take us.

up to the fucking aristocracy almost, you know, like that's the plan.

Now, depending on who you ask, you'll get different opinions on Gebert Himmler as a father.

A 1971 article I found for the American Historical Review by Pete Loewenberg describes him as, quote, a pedantic and conscientious man.

Ernst Homfstangl, who is an early friend of Hitler and an upper-class German, an aristocrat who attended classes taught by Gebert at the private school, described him later as, quote, a terrible snob, favoring the young titled members of his class and bearing down contemptuously on the commoners.

And

I could see that.

It makes a lot of sense hearing other things about the guy.

Although it's also worth noting that Hanfstengel gives this account of Gepard after he's fled Germany and sat down with the OSS to gossip about Heinrich Himmler.

The first profile that the OSS, which becomes the CIA, gives about Himmler.

Ernst is a major source, as he is for a lot of these guys, because he knew them all and then he had to flee.

And

that's not perfectly trustworthy.

This guy who was Hitler's friend and a big Nazi until, you know, things went too far.

Yeah.

It's one of those things.

I don't, there's a lot of negative stories about like, yeah, Gebbert was an asshole.

He was like a bad teacher.

He was a that aren't entirely accurate because a lot of the first generation of historians work backwards from like, well, Himmler was obviously terrible.

So we, everything about his upbringing must have sucked, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And maybe that's not totally accurate.

And his, his most recent bio, or one of his most recent biographers, who's a major, his book is a big source for these episodes, Peter Longrich, takes a more reserved tone towards Gebert.

And he depicts him as actually a pretty good father for the time period.

Quote, and this is from his biography of Himmler.

As a father, he exercised his authority not through being unapproachable or through overbearing strictness, but rather through patient efforts with his sons.

They were subject to a system of rules and prohibitions, while their father monitored their obedience precisely and at times pedantically.

His strictness was designed to to have a lasting effect and seems to have been altogether compatible with kindness, love, and affection.

So,

dude, I think there's something here.

I think there's, which probably will play out later, which you'll probably correct me about, but like, I think there's something to the fact that, like, okay, this guy is not royal, Heinrich's dad, yeah.

But he was around royalty.

So I feel like he probably was able to see just what his, and he's a teacher.

So he's like, I wasn't poor.

I didn't get out, get it out the mud, but like

you were you're around probably very privileged people and you like, I definitely don't want my son to turn into this,

but also

I want to award him the types of like value.

Like he's a teacher.

So it's like the types of like sort of like hard work, value, you know, trustworthiness.

Like, you know, I'm saying you marry into this like pretty rather wealthy family.

You got no reason to be a hard ass.

You know what I'm saying?

Like, because, hey dude like it's like your needs are met like we got a good job you know what i'm saying like and i i i really think that like that

i wonder if that plays into him being like yeah i like our needs are met i don't have to like i'm not you know in a gulag somewhere like which i know i could be you feel me so i'm like i would much rather be like man let me spend some time with my kids you know i'm saying like i have been awarded this gift you know what i mean of being able to like spend time with my kids because i see what happens when you don't, right?

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

So I can imagine like that actually playing a role as to be like, yeah, he probably was a good dad.

And I think he was, he's also, you know, we used to, the, the phrase that a few years ago is that the book about like tiger moms, right?

Which is this term you get for like a lot of like like

Asian immigrant mothers who are like that super like into their kids' education and very hands-on to try to ensure their success.

That's how you might look at Geppard, right?

Yeah.

So he's very involved and he doesn't seem to be emotionally unavailable, like for the time, but he also is, he's obsessed with his kids' education and with their success, right?

That is his business, you know.

And so there is, to the degree that that's kind of like it can be a toxic thing, that's also present here, but it's not toxic.

He's not the kind of, he's not hitting his kids.

We don't really have any reports.

Yeah.

And I've read a couple from the old to the new biographies of Himmler.

None really seem to suggest that he was like abused in that way, but he is constantly, he is pressured from the beginning to succeed right to do really well in school right i could really see that because that's your be somebody yeah that's your ticket it's like you're not born you're not a born a prince you know what i mean and like this is how you're gonna do this you're not born a prince and i don't want you breaking up rocks yeah so like let's do this yeah and it's it's one of those things where you know a lot of these sources will kind of try to depict his father as being like oh yeah he was this really boring pedantic man who was like super shitty to anyone who wasn't rich and i don't think that that's not that that isn't doesn't clash necessarily with the and he was also very attentive and in a lot of ways a good dad like i think he was the evidence does suggest he was like very much a star fucker like if you were not of a good family if you didn't come from money i get he and he and anna will like police who their kids are allowed to hang out with to make sure that they are yeah they're helping basically like oh this kid's got to be at our level or above otherwise yeah you can't hang out with them so they are there is that degree of toxicity.

Running from the slums, man.

Right.

Yeah.

Where it's like, you are going to be somebody and I am going to make goddamn sure of it, you know?

Yeah.

Um, but also it's not like the kind of thing where his dad is like mentally abusing him or like hitting him or like fucking with his brain.

His dad is just bound and determined to make him a success.

Yeah.

It sounds like some like respectability kind of politics where it's just like, you know, you know, for us, it was like, hey, you know, keep your hair nice.

Don't be wearing hoodies.

Like, you know, speak clearly.

You know, don't be, don't be using Ada.

Don't be using slang.

Like, you know, just don't hang with them.

Like, exactly.

You won't, like, make these people respect you.

No, I get it.

Yeah.

So in February of 1903, when he's like a little kid, three, Heinrich falls seriously ill for the first time.

This has something to do with his lungs.

His older brother is also sick a bunch.

The family, I just think, isn't super.

It's not clear what's wrong.

It's always said it's like a lung problem.

I think it might be asthma.

Like he may have just had asthma.

It's not perfectly clear to me, but that would make sense.

The ailment is severe enough that his mother takes him and his siblings to the Alps for a few months as a cure.

Right.

Like, that's what you do.

You get him up and go get an air shit.

That your doctor literally prescribed to go be in the mountains with these people.

It's also at this time 1903.

Right.

So, like, what the fuck is asthma?

Like, what is that?

They don't know what the fuck they're doing.

We just figured out germs like a month ago.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

Like, yeah.

And everyone doesn't believe it.

We're still fighting to get the doctors washing their hands.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

Reusing smocks.

Yeah.

So Heinrich recovers, unfortunately.

But

moving to the mountains doesn't cure him, obviously.

But like

they think, anyway, he winds up coming back, but he's always a sickly kid and he has regular bouts of illness that will periodically, whenever he gets really sick, his parents focus on him again.

And he's the middle kid, right?

So, you know, once he has a younger brother, there's a kind of Longrich sort of suggests, and I like Longrich as a biographer, but he doesn't really provide evidence for this.

I think it's just one of those things where he's like, well, it makes sense.

Maybe as the middle kid, he savored.

the fact that when he was sick, he got all this attention, but he doesn't really provide us much of the way of evidence on this.

So this may just be kind of him inferring.

When Heinrich starts school in 1906, so you know, three years years later, he's still ill enough that he misses 150 days out of his first year of classes due to a variety of everything.

He gets measles, he gets the mumps, he gets pneumonia several times.

And his older brother had had a similar experience with school, but still gets really good grades, better than Heinrich, in fact.

And Longrich suggests that the fact that his brother

does better than him at school is something that frustrates Heinrich.

I don't, the evidence of this, there's not like direct evidence, but there's some reasons to believe that he is very competitive with Gebard and kind of has some insecurity over the fact that he never outdoes his brother in school.

One of my secondary sources for these episodes is a very old biographer of Himmler, just titled Himmler by Willie Frischauer.

And Longrich doesn't love Frischauer's book because

it's basically the first big biography of Himmler.

And so it's outdated.

I think it's written in the 50s.

And that is true.

I wouldn't use this as like the prime source because it is so old and historiography has moved beyond here.

But it's from the first generation of books on Himmler, right?

I was going to say, like, it's closer to when it happened.

It's closer to when it happened.

And more, I think, one of the reasons why I do find it worth reading is that it sets up, you see in Frischauer's book, where a lot of both misconceptions and myths about Himmler start because this is the first like big history.

And I think it is valuable for that, for understanding where some of these ideas come from.

And one thing that is interesting, as outdated as Frischauer's book is,

it's one of the only books of that first generation that kind of describes the Himmler family life the same way Longrich does, because other people writing about Himmler in that period really tried to emphasize the toxicity and the fact that Himmler grows up, you know, with this overbearing father and he's this like kind of psychopathic kid who has these, you know, and Frischauer's account of it really does jibe with Longriches in the fact that, like, no, his upbringing was reasonably good for the era.

Frischauer emphasizes the fact that Gebhard was a huge nerd for German history and like into archaeology, and that this has an impact on Heinrich.

Quote, As a little boy, Heinrich Himmler sat on his father's knee almost every evening, ear glued to the lips from which tales of wonderful adventure flowed in a rhythmic studied language.

Hero of the tales invariably was grandfather Johann Konrad Himmler, soldier of fortune who had hitched his star to any army that would have him, a rugged 19th-century warrior who had burst the narrow confines of his time and branched out into the wide world.

Grandfather's most glorious campaign had been fought in Greece.

He marched in the shadow of the Acropolis.

He had seen Thebes in the pass of Thermopylae and brought back to his own humble environment a breath of adventure and greatness.

Hmm.

See, to me, I feel like there's like

just for when you're just trying to understand a person, an era, a moment, there's like you, like you said, like a lot of this, a lot of maybe this particular book is outdated, but I do think just as a, it is, you know what I'm saying?

But I do think as a practice, like there's pros and cons to that.

Like, but the pro is to understand

their writing in a time and era.

And it's like, this is actually telling me what you thought was important in 1950 to point out.

You know what I'm saying?

Like, this is how you you thought about this you feel me um and like and that and that keys that keys in that keys into us like you know the the the you know the somehow or another the edward sharp and magnetic zeros like video resurface where we was like yo this song is trash like you know what i'm saying like people actually go i never actually and then we're thinking

you know, obviously us who was there.

It was like, well, it was a vibe.

You know what I'm saying?

Like, it sat.

It was a vibe.

It was a vibe.

It sat in a time of other just that was just the vibe you know what i'm saying like it's like yeah like the thought never crossed my mind to think about these lyrics you know or that they're from las felas which is like

you're from bro

you're from griffith park

like surprising

coming out here yeah i was like what by the griffith observatory guys like

like Yeah, but anyway.

And yeah, that's the kind of, you don't see this story repeated in a lot of of the modern historiography, which I

think this is kind of important to talk about this because, and this gets more in the books about Heinrich and the occult.

And none of the, I think the best of them is Himmler or Master of the Dark Arts, but it's not a great work of history, certainly not compared to Longrich's book, in part because all of the books that focus on Himmler and the occult need to, it's the same problem that like Blitz has with Hitler and drugs, where there's a lot of really good work and really useful original research done that I think the bigger biographies could stand to have more of.

But because you're focusing on the occult thing, you make it a bigger deal than it really was, right?

But I think this is important and it gets left out of a lot of the more modern accounts.

And it seems to be based on, as far as I can tell, Frischauer, one of his major sources, he talks to Gebhard Himmler, the

junior.

Heinrich's older brother is also named Gebhard.

And that's who's telling him about their childhood and about how they're raised.

And Gebhardt isn't an unproblematic source, right because he's heinrich's brother but i don't really see much reason to doubt the basics of this right you know there's some reason to doubt was himmler's grandfather did did his life really go that way but the fact that himmmer heinrich was raised with stories of his grandfather being this great warrior and you know that be like their ancestry being important and like german history being important

and this kind of like medieval

like these medieval stories of like knights and kingdoms.

You know, he, one of the things that obsesses as a kid, they traveled to this like medieval town that's still got its old walls, and Heinrich is like obsessed with these walls.

He has a big imagination, and it's always focused on almost these kinds of like the German equivalent of the Arthurian myths, right?

Like, that's that's what, as a kid, he is a huge, again, he'd be playing DD, you know, if it were today.

He loves magic and he loves knights and this

very much historically inaccurate but common picture of what medieval Germany was like, right?

And I think the fact that his dad is sitting them down and telling them these fanciful stories of like his own father and of old Germany, that's probably where this starts.

And Gebhardt also, senior, he's an amateur archaeologist, right?

He probably spent some time even digging for old artifacts.

He collects coins and he collects like some old weapons, whatever he can get his hands on, which is a hip hobby at the time, right?

Nationalism is a fairly new concept in the early 1900s, and it's sexy.

And a big part of German nationalism, because Germany is very new, the country had only come into being a couple of decades earlier.

There's a lot of focus and like official propaganda and it just becomes popular for archaeologists to find evidence of like...

the Germanic tribes, our ancestors, and we're going to pretend that they were a lot more united and that German identity was more of a thing for them than it really was.

You know, when the Romans talk about the Germans, they're not talking about the Germans as we know them.

Some of the tribes that they fought with are ancestors to modern Germans, but some of them were like Belgians or whatnot.

And they just all got kind of lumped together because the Romans aren't.

You know, we don't know what y'all are.

We don't know where you came from.

You're here and you're all kind of like, have some similarities.

So y'all are the fucking girls.

Yeah, they just meant y'all up there.

Yeah.

like,

yeah, exactly.

But they got hammered into being.

Germany has just been hammered into being by Otto von Bismarck.

And so, and you know, another thing that happens around this time is Heinrich Schliemann, I think was his name, finds the ruins of the city of Troy.

Well, he destroys the ruins of the city of Troy, digging to something older.

Anyway, but he finds where Troy probably was.

And that's a huge deal in Europe.

And it kind of ignites this whole, like, well, there's got to be other.

Let's find these ancient ruins of German civilization that prove that we're a great and ancient people, you know?

And Himmler gets carried away with this.

Gebhardt, his dad does, and

Heinrich and his older and younger brother both catch this bug, right?

They're Germany nerds.

They also get into stamp collecting.

Gebhardt's a big stamp collector.

Family of dweebs.

Family of dweebs.

Debbie's collecting stamps.

Yeah.

See, there is a role in culture that bullies are supposed to play.

You know what I'm saying?

And alas.

No, because it is one of those, if like Gebhard was raising Heinrich Himmler today, like Heinrich would be sitting on his lap as he sends like death threats to Disney for putting women in Star Wars.

Like that is the kind of dude.

That's the kind of family this is.

Speaking of sending death threats to Disney.

No.

Don't do that.

Legally, please, please don't do that.

Don't do that.

But you know,

send a death threat to yourself.

Keep yourself on your toes.

No, also don't do that.

Why not?

It's not illegal to threaten to kill.

Well, it might be, actually.

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So when Heinrich is a kid, his dad, one of the, like, again, his dad is very hands-on.

He's making his, when his kids are sick, he makes them like keep up with their schoolwork and whatnot.

On like the weekends, he's sitting down with them and they're going over what they went over in class.

He's super hands-on with this.

And one of the things he makes his kids do as part of his educational plan for them is from a very early age, when they're quite little still, not a toddler, but when they first learn to write, he teaches them stenography.

right so that they can write quickly and they write letters to each other but he also makes his kids keep a detailed diary and he checks the diary like this is homework he's giving his kids he's not checking it to like i want to make sure you're not you know doing something bad he's checking it to make sure that you are writing well right

And it's hey, yeah,

great in your essays.

Yeah.

Uh, Longrich writes that Gebhard quote encouraged them, his sons, to use school holidays to consolidate what they had been taught.

So they're spending their holidays going over their homework and whatnot, their schoolwork.

And he makes them keep these diaries.

And as a result, we have like most of Heinrich Himmler's, a lot of his childhood documented from a day-to-day, sometimes on an hourly basis in granular detail.

Yeah, now we're back to the tiger mom stuff.

You're right, dog.

It is.

Yeah.

And you won't be surprised to hear that once this fact comes to light post-war, once like people find out, you know, first the extent of the Holocaust and Heinrich's involvement, and then that he's got this childhood diary, all of these psychoanalysts, armchair and official ones, are like, oh, shit.

I'm going to make my career analyzing, finding the evidence of psychopathy in the diary of young Heinrich Himmler, right?

This has to be the key to his his madness, you know?

It's got to be in this because obviously you can always tell when someone's a kid if they're going to grow up to be a monster.

And yeah.

This is bad medical science and it's bad historiography, working backwards from, you know, someone, what they did as an adult and trying to be like, ah, the key must have been in this shit he wrote when he was seven.

It's bad.

And it's always re like,

there's every analysis that tries to look into his childhood from this standpoint that I've read is bad.

One of them, I don't know, it's the most detailed.

There's a lot of nonsense Freudian shit in it, but there's a paper I read called The Unsuccessful Adolescence of Heinrich Himmler, written in 1971 by Peter Lowenberg.

I mentioned it earlier.

He's an American psychoanalyst and a historian who my analysis of him is that as a young man, he discovered Freud and never looked back.

And there's a lot of, there's a lot that's good in this paper because he does go over all of the diary, which is not a thing I am able to do is in detail, read everything.

And there's a lot of interesting stuff stuff you get and it's also married to like and this is evidence of his anal fixation this is evidence of a schizoid personality that's like man none of this is real psych like we know this is all nonsense now and you also can't psychoanalyze a child from this diary that is no his diary is like most of it is not here are my thoughts and feelings that i'm pouring out it is you know monday woke up at x hour ate this for breakfast went to school it's very very just nuts and bolts yeah i'm like you're stretching the term diary here i'm like no this is my daddy's making me write this right exactly you know what i'm saying so like i'm not gonna put nothing deep about my soul in this yeah it's homework And there's, yeah, so I don't include a lot of his analysis of this just because he's going way too far.

But there are some really good things that he does make a note of, right, that are worth us quoting.

And one of this is something that he writes about Heinrich's opinion of his mother, Anna.

Quote, little is known about her.

Unlike Gebhard Himmler, she scarcely receives mention in her son's diary.

And I don't think this is, I don't see much evidence that he hated his mom.

I think it's just he doesn't think about his mom much as a person, right?

Like she is not,

this is, it says a lot about his attitude towards women, which is consistent for his life.

He's not all that interested in his mother, right?

Or her influence on him.

Yeah, that to me is like, if you like, if you want to do,

if you want to do fake science,

you actually miss what's really there.

You know what I mean?

What's actually really is interesting because it's not like this is not

this is useful, right?

It's useful, but you so looking for Oedipus and shit.

And then it gives them like

clear evidence of his psychopathies.

Yeah, it's like, no, that's not in there yet.

But here's what it is showing you.

This is interesting.

Yes, exactly.

So I'm trying to pull the stuff that is interesting out of this paper without including a lot of the Freudian shit that I think is going way too far.

But

so there are, again, a lot of interesting details in here.

And I'll quote another one.

Heinrich Himmler always maintained a high awareness of rank and titles.

He meticulously referred to the correct title and social status of anyone mentioned in his diary.

And this is both.

Obviously, he's being raised to do this by his father.

But this is an example of what I said.

His dad passes down, as I'm sure his granddad did to his dad,

the kind of things you need to do to be a social climber.

And one of them is always know who people are.

Know who you're talking to.

Yeah, exactly.

Know who you're talking to, how to refer to them, and who it's worth kind of getting in good with.

And Heinrich is going to be good at this.

And it's, I think, this is the start of his, how he's cultured to do this.

I was going to say, now that is useful.

Yeah.

It's somebody who understands, yeah, who's in the room and who I need to impress, who I don't need to impress.

Like that tells us something.

And you get a lot, people talk a lot about like, okay, like kids who come from poor families versus kids who come from rich families, what are the different, like, you know, rich parents raise kids in a way that make them understand money better and how to keep it better because the parents know how to do that.

Yeah.

And this is kind of the same sort of thing, right?

Like the fact that Heinrich is being a cultured to do this is evidence of how his dad is preparing him to be the kind of social climber that's able to get as far as he did in the Nazi party.

Now, another interesting fact from this diary is that we see in it very little evidence of anti-Semitism, right?

Which is not to say he is anti-Semitic as a little kid.

His family is anti-Semitic, but in a normal way for German Gentiles at the time, right?

There's not evidence as a little kid in the way that there is with like Hitler that he is really obsessed with this stuff, right?

That we don't really see.

And this comports what's in his diary, just because we always want secondary sources.

One of the people who talked about Heinrich after, you know, when the war started was a German who had fled to the United States to escape the Nazi regime named Hullgarden.

And Hullgarden

realizes as an adult when the the Nazis rise to power that Heinrich Himmler had been in school with him.

Like they were classmates.

Oh, shit.

They went through years of school together.

And so he gives us some interesting details on Himmler from someone, obviously not an unbiased source, but from someone who is...

observing him, you know, as a young kid.

He describes his appearance as, quote, a child of hardly average height who was unusually pale and physically very awkward, with hair cut fairly short and even then a pair of gold-rimmed glasses on his slightly pointed nose, and who was seen with a, quote, half-embarrassed, half-malicious smile on his face.

Now, Longrich continues to write in his biography of Himmler, quote, According to Hallgarden, Himmler had been a model pupil, liked by all the teachers.

Amongst the boys, he had been regarded as a swat and been only moderately popular.

Hallgarden had a particularly clear memory of the unhappy figure Himmler cut, much to the amusement of his fellows,

in gymnastics.

Hatred of the Jews, Hallgarden went on to say, was not something Himmler was at all associated with at the time.

On the other hand, he said he remembered Heinrich's radically anti-French outlook.

And so I think he was just like, he was just like a six.

He's a nerdy kid.

He looks, he's like a weird look.

He's not like a handsome kid.

And he's not physically.

He's awkward.

He does bad in gym.

You know, kids make fun of him for that.

But

yeah, he's the guy that like,

yeah, totally like your teacher who I was one for a while where you were just like, wait, this kid's in my class?

Like you just, like, you just miss him.

You know what I mean?

Because it's like, it's not, I mean, he turns in his homework.

He does good, but not that good.

He's at the top of the class.

He's in the upper 20%, probably, but not enough that, like, he super stands out.

But, like, the teachers like him because he doesn't cause problems.

And the other kids make fun of him because he's kind of a, he's kind of physically a, he's a, he's a dweeb.

He's a dweeb.

He's like look at a picture of Heinrich Himmler.

I'm not trying to be like

body shaming the Reichsfuhrer of the SS, but like he's a nerdy looking guy.

He's just a little dweeb, yeah.

He's not, he doesn't look like an Aryan Superman, right?

And this is, this is, this is relevant because it's going to have a lot of influence on how he, why the SS works the way it does and how he tries to present himself.

But it does, I think, Hallgarten's recollections, along with the diary, make a very solid case.

Heinrich is not particularly anti-Semitic as a kid.

And being anti-French matters a lot more to him as a kid than being anti-Semitic, right?

And the fact that you've got this guy who doesn't like him, who isn't biased, being like, yeah, I didn't see much evidence that he was super racist against the Jews as a kid.

That's probably the case, right?

Yeah.

Um, he ain't like the French, though.

He fucking hates the French.

Oh my god.

Fuck you, Frenchie.

He's inventing slurs for the French.

What a dork.

Now, thanks to his father's obsessive involvement in their education, the Himmler boys do very well in school.

Heinrich is not the standout of the family, though.

His grades are good, but they're never as good as his older brothers, and he never makes it to the very top of the class.

He doesn't stand out.

Heinrich's mother pushes the boys to be observant Catholics and is so insistent on this that Gebhardt actually has to force his wife to ease up on them.

With the, he's like, you're going way too hard on the Catholicism stuff.

We don't need to be.

Slow down, okay?

And they're, you know, they go to church every Sunday.

They're, they're diligent about it, but like, uh, she wants them to be, she's, she's way more into it than he is.

One of my favorite weird details from the Frischauer biography, which is that very older, much older biography, is that as a kid, Heinrich said his prayers in front of, quote, an ivory statue of Christ cut from one big elephant's tooth.

Just a sign of the era that that's a thing they've got.

Cool, I guess.

All right.

Yeah.

Frischauer claims that by age 10, Heinrich could, quote, reel off the dates of famous battles.

The saga of the Nibelungs were his bedtime stories.

The wars of the Middle Ages, fuel for his imagination.

And this is what Heinrich's into.

While the other, the normal thing for boys to be obsessed with is stories of Native Americans fighting like the U.S.

cavalry, right?

That is like,

we talk about this.

Hitler is hugely into cowboy novels, right?

This German con man named Carl May.

That is the big, that's the Harry Potter of its day.

It's the major thing that kids are into.

It's their fucking Dragon Ball Z or whatever.

If you're a kid who grew up when I did.

Heinrich is different in that he is a nerd for, you know, these Wagner operas, the Ring of the Nibbelungens, which is kind of a precursor to the Lord of the Rings.

The Lord of the Rings takes a lot from that saga and from like, you know, stories of the Crusades and these other battles and wars in the Middle Ages.

This is what he's obsessed with, right?

Dude, you know, like this, this also reminds me of like, as you're talking, like, just how recent this is.

Yes.

Like, this isn't, this is pretty, this kind of just happened.

Yeah.

No, for another example of how recent it is, as like an adolescent, I think from the time he's probably around like 10 or 11 to like his, you know,

maybe pre-teen or teenage years, he regularly attends jiu-jitsu classes.

He's into jiu-jitsu as a kid, right?

Because this is an upper-middle-class kid, and upper-middle-class Western kids have been going to karate for forever.

Yeah.

It's not literally karate.

We get it.

Shut up.

It's fine.

No, we get it.

Yeah.

Frischauer also claims, quote, for many months, the boy tortured himself with attempts to learn the piano, but his father soon realized that the awkward fingers would not follow the command of his overeager mind.

Most boys are relieved when their parents agree to liberate them from the attention of their music teachers.

To Heinrich Himmler, it was a sad day when he was told that his hopeless endeavors had come to an end.

For years afterwards, he would sit silently and listen to his elder brother extracting heavenly tunes from the selfsame piano which had defied him.

On Sundays, he'd accompanied his brother to the church where, to his envy, he was playing the organ for the congregation.

This is, I'm sorry, this is...

Two positive points in the dad bucket here again.

Just to have this, a lot of daddies ain't got that self-awareness to be like, son, son.

You're not going to make it as a piano player.

Stop, stop, stop.

You don't have to keep going.

Son, you don't have to keep playing this.

That's not your thing.

Look, you write the stories.

You into the novels.

I'm not judging you about it.

You a great student, son, but this piano, just leave that to your brother.

Yeah, leave that to you.

You know what I'm saying?

You doing jiu-jitsu.

He's better than you.

Look, son,

be good at what you're good at.

You do the jiu-jitsu.

Son, you are an amazing student, and I love you.

But stop hitting them keys, son.

Yeah, yeah, you're not.

This isn't that good.

This ain't your thing, baby boy.

And look, I don't need, I don't need you to do, don't do this for me, son.

Like, go find something you're good at.

If only someone had the same conversation with Ringo Starr.

Yes.

So,

yeah, that's coming in hot with some Ringo slander.

One of the many similarities between Ringo and Heinrich Himmler.

Sorry.

Or Ringo trying to get bars off in the do-it-your

songs.

Like, let them.

What Ringo do wrong?

I just, I just, yes, and you, and then it was like, wait.

I'm a Pete Best Stan.

Um, okay.

So now again, uh, Longrich cautions Frischauer's biography as a source.

And this is, again, not just because it's outdated, but because we're talking about like this passage really plays up that he is super jealous of his brother.

His brother's being much better than him at this.

And the source for this primarily is Heinrich's older brother, Gebbard, after Heinrich's death, talking about like, I was so good at the piano, and he was fucking.

He never got over the fact that I wasn't as good.

He wasn't, he could never be as good as me right right maybe there's a degree to which gebards but if that's the case if gebard is lying about this and either i mean heinrich did try to play the piano definitely and wound up it didn't work out but if he's lying about heinrich always you know being super jealous of his skill That's just as interesting an insight into the Himmler family dynamics.

Either way, if the story's true or if it's a lie Gebbard's telling, it's evidence that there's a lot of kind of competition and insecurity between the brothers, right?

Or yeah, yeah, or just how he felt about it.

Like, I feel like my little brother's jealous of me.

Like, that, as you said, that's, yeah, I mean, normal.

You know what I'm saying?

Normal, but it suggests something about the family and about Heinrich, right?

That there is this competitiveness between the brothers, and that is something that motivates him is his desire to compete.

and prove himself against his older brother.

Yeah.

Frischauer's book also goes into detail about the Himmler family's obsession with their ancestors, describes a shrine in the family apartment that Himmler later named the Osenzimmer or Ancestors Room.

He tries to get basically every family and certainly in the SS to have an ancestors room.

This is a thing later Heinrich makes a big deal about.

Longrich doesn't really talk about it in his biography and I think it's because

he later makes this into a shrine thing.

I don't think this is a shrine.

for his parents.

I think that's Himmler kind of working backwards and trying to say like, oh, my father established this practice that we should bring to the Reich of having an ancestor shrine.

The literal description of it is like, it's some pictures of like their grandfather and some things he'd owned and some things they've been sent over the years, mementos from family members.

It's a memento cupboard, right?

I was gonna say, yeah, it's like

I live in, you know, I live in East LA.

There's Ofrendas everywhere.

You know, you have your altars.

It's like, it's not like an altar altar.

No.

Yeah.

And Himmler gets super into the occult and will make this into.

And I think Himmler is exaggerating what this was.

This is just like a pretty normal thing for owls to have.

So by 1914, which is when the World War I is going to break out, Heinrich is a promising teenaged boy.

He's 13, 14 years old this year.

He's doing well in school, and he's just a couple of years away from entering the working world.

If he had been a poor kid, he would be functionally an adult working at this point in time, right?

And the plan is when he, in a couple of years, two or three more years, when he's ready, he'll use the influence of his godfather to secure him a place in a really good school.

And that'll that'll help him secure a really good job and he'll elevate the family, right?

Unfortunately for everyone, world events are going to conspire to stop this future from coming into existence.

When Archduke Franz Ferdinand was gunned down in Sarajevo by a crazed Bernard Montgomery Sanders, Heinrich Himmler was on vacation with his family on the Austrian border.

Look, Sophie, the truth has to get out.

You guys don't understand.

Someone has to stop him.

Listen, time travel has existed for a long time, and I'm telling you, Bernard Sanders has got around.

He's gotten around you know yeah he actually he was actually even the group that signed franz ferdinand yeah uh the band as well the band yeah they started he signed the band too every time there's a franz ferdinand in history bernie sanders is involved it's really bernie did he stab caesar you can't prove he didn't so he must have

um so the initial events when because heinrich's on vacation with his family when the archduke gets assassinated and like the chain of events that leads inevitably to war start off yeah he responds to this initial outbreak as just another, and like the beginning of the war, as like just kind of another part of the day.

His July 29th diary entry reads, Gebard's birthday, outbreak, and this is his brother, outbreak of war between Austria and Serbia, excursion to lake waging.

I mean, he's 19.

His brother's birthday, Austria and Serbia go to war, we go to the lake, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah, and I imagine like, yeah, like that war for him is as far away as like, you know know what I'm saying?

Like, it's initially like he doesn't know what it's going to be, right?

Yeah.

And long rich, especially because Austria and Serbia, like the Balkans, they're always, shit's always going down there, right?

You don't even know like what, yeah, what is, like, you don't know what they are.

What is Austria-Hungary?

Like, where's, where's the line at?

And obviously he knows, but he knows, but this is a little, for him, it's like, it's like you hearing like, oh, you know, Israel is exchanging missiles with Hamas.

That's what I'm trying to say.

Like prior to October 7th, right?

Now, obviously, things are much, like, everything's been escalated significantly, you know with the genocide and whatnot going on

But like five or six years ago, you heard there's another exchange of missiles.

Right, totally

I was at this event one time like way up in the mountains in Utah, right?

Yes

event with just these like people like fuck off money and like years ago, this was years ago.

And then there was this you remember at what was happening with the Kurds at the Syrian border, like maybe about like, you know, five, six years ago, maybe now seven years ago.

It would have been there almost seven years ago.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, he was actually there.

Now think about it.

Right.

So I was talking about it.

And like I said, I'm at this event with these very wealthy people.

And this lady who was clearly, like,

clearly from the region, you know what I mean?

Like, so we're talking about the situation.

And she was like, wait, what are you talking about?

I don't think I heard of that.

And in my head, I'm judging her.

Like, man, see, this is what happens, man.

You know what I'm saying?

You get wealthy.

She goes, oh, no, you don't understand.

I'm from Beirut.

Yeah.

I was like, oh,

she's like, I'm born and raised in Bay.

I went, like, you're like, your, your school bus was blown out.

Like, the windows are blown out because a martyr hit it yesterday.

You know what I'm saying?

So I'm like, oh, never mind.

I apologize.

Carry on.

Jokes on me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's kind of like this is, yeah, it's another, oh, these, these countries that like, you know, this place where there's always a conflict, there's a conflict.

However, he goes back kind of later once it, because I think probably within hours, maybe a couple of days, it becomes clear that this is more severe.

And he goes back to his initial entry and he like he erases some stuff and he underlines the announcement of the outbreak of war later in red.

And he writes the sentence, proclamation of a state of war, once Germany declares war.

So he goes back to his notes once it becomes clear

this is more severe.

And he writes, he lists out the things that are happening as they're happening.

Quote, number one, Germany mobilizes the 2nd Army Corps, even the Landström, which is like

their National guard type you know yes number two played in the garden in the morning afternoon as well 730 germany declares war on russia three attacks on the french and russian borders planes and spies we are packing up right away so you you get this this is what's so interesting you get this idea of like starts out we're playing in the garden and in the morning and the afternoon and then i hear that like germany has declared war and then like there's fighting on the borders already uh there's planes there's reports of spies we're packing up we're leaving we're ending our vacation early things have gotten bad very quickly.

You get that.

There's something about that.

That's, yeah, that's so modern.

Yeah.

That's like so close.

Like, you know, I live not even an eight-minute drive from the Alameda courthouse where the ICE people that have been tamed by ICE are like, I can, like, I hear when, like, the smoke, like, I can hear them.

You know what I mean?

And it's like, you're so i'm going, oh, made coffee, dropped soul off at school.

Oh, heard some martyrs, heard some bombs go off.

You know what I'm saying?

Oh, there's some helicopters.

You know what I'm saying?

And it's like, I should go pick up my daughter.

Like, you know, like,

me baby, grab her.

Yeah.

Let me go pick.

Let me go pick her up.

You feel me?

Like, and then it's like, you drop her off.

And then me and my wife are like, we're going to March.

Yeah, we're going to March.

So then we leave to go to, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

So just like, that's that reality of like, or yeah, like you're scrolling through your feed.

And yeah, there's a, there's a mass starvation on purpose happening.

And then the next one is some sort of joke about, you know, Edward Sharp.

You know what I'm saying?

It's the next thing you're looking at.

It's just something so real about him saying, yeah, like.

Yeah, it's super interesting.

You very rarely get that.

Yeah.

And this is the only member of the Nazi high command that we have this kind of granular detail on.

Like you get, there's pieces, like there's that famous picture of like Hitler in Berlin when the Kaiser declares war.

You can see him in the crowd.

Like you can literally find Hitler.

It's a thing he wrote about.

And like, that's really interesting.

For Heinrich, we've got almost like a minute-to-minute list of like what's happening to him as a kid as the the war breaks out.

That's so interesting.

And it's part of why these episodes, there's going to be so many of them.

We'll try to keep it to two weeks, but there might be more than four episodes in those two weeks because we've got to close this episode out now, Prop.

We're over an hour.

So, you know, you got any pluggables to plug down at the end, dear?

Yeah, dude.

Hood politics with prop, man.

We've been really trying to step our game up over here.

Tell me.

So we do a Friday tap-in, which are like, you know, 10-minute things that are,

yeah, just like little extra thoughts.

You know what I mean?

Some of them are,

you know, a little more about me.

I'm releasing a poetry album

about like the end of the world.

So

we're going to be talking about a lot of that on the tap in.

And

yeah, man, we've been doing that.

Terraform's back.

The cold brew's back.

It's not online yet, but it's back finally.

Praise be.

Praise be.

Praise be.

Finally, dog.

begin to do.

I learned a lot of business lessons.

Listen.

Yeah, yeah.

So the Colebrew's back.

I need it.

I need the energy.

Yeah.

And also, folks, we are currently raising money for the Portland Bail Fund.

If you Google Donor Box, one word, Defense Fund PDX fundraiser, you can find the fundraiser.

Yeah, that would help a lot if you want to donate money to the bail fund.

They help bail out primarily homeless people who, you know,

it helps them get out.

It helps them fight their case.

You're a lot less likely to go to prison if you're out on bail as opposed to locked up.

They do not, they bail out anyone with the exception of like domestic abuse clients, right?

So it's a good fundraiser.

They could use your help.

Donor Box, Defense Fund, PDX fundraiser.

Just Google that.

It'll take you right to it.

Thank you all so much.

Go to hell.

I love you.

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