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

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Hey, Sophie, did I already do the Himmler I Hardly Know Were bit?

Yeah.

Every day, every part.

Uh-huh.

Okay.

Well, you can't do it for a lot of the other Nazi leaders, you know?

So I feel like I got to get my money's worth, but I guess I already got my money's worth, and also I didn't pay any money.

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where I, Robert Evans, have recorded, I don't know, like a thousand episodes, and I still don't know how to do my job.

Um,

what other industry but podcasting could this be allowed and also

still make me qualify as a success?

Just podcasting.

That's the only industry where that works that way.

Podcasting.

Just podcasting.

Prop, Jason Petty, guest, back.

What's up?

Heimler, talk.

Henrik.

We've been talking about.

I'm her man.

I don't know.

These fucking episodes.

Unfortunately, Himmler's like, I don't know.

He might be my favorite Nazi in terms of like reading about.

That's a bad way to phrase it, but I'm fascinated by him.

I don't know if English has another another word for what we're trying to say right now.

This is like my special interest:

the different weirdos who lead the Nazi party.

And I do a lot of Himmler reading.

And I honestly, I don't know how to do this episode succinctly in any way, shape, or form.

Like, we're on, I'm 36 pages and 15,000 words into it, and I'm still not done writing.

So, this is a disaster.

This is just a fucking calamity for me.

Because, yeah,

yeah, it's just like there's a few people where every rabbit trail is actually

so fun.

Yeah.

Like, yeah, like, like you're like the one about

who's the guy that oh, von List.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, him.

Yeah.

Who's the dude that freaking ruined Cambodia?

Not the

Pol Pot.

Pol Pot, not him.

I'm talking about the American guy that ruined so many.

Oh, you mean him just Kissinger?

Kissinger, yeah.

Kissinger.

Yes.

Where I'm like, every rabbit hole on Kissinger is its own adventure, and you can't not say it.

Yeah, you got to keep going down.

And it's like with Himmler, we've got to talk about all of these different guys in the occult, right?

Like, they're just too many.

And then that's a whole story.

And you've got to talk about these other Nazi leaders who, you know, Himmler interfaced with and these other things.

Like, there's just so much to get into.

So I guess let's get into it still and keep talking about Heinrich Himmler.

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When we last left off, he had become Reichspeer of the SS by ratting on his boss for using a Jewish tailor.

Yes, yes.

By Takashi69.

This is like it's not a, I mean,

that's for me and you, Sophie.

Oh, I'm trying to figure out.

Robert has no idea what's going on.

Yeah, that was for me and you, Sophie.

Well, I'm also, I'm trying to figure out the joke here because you normally you'd say snitches get stitches, but in this case, he snitched about a tailor, and tailors literally make stitches.

I still, I like, how do I wear it?

Right.

Yeah, snitch.

Snitches about stitches.

I snitched on stitches.

There should be a more satisfying joke to make, but I didn't figure it out.

I got it.

It's Lilo and Snitch.

Bars.

See, it was there.

I don't think there was anything there.

It's in there.

I still like that.

There's something there.

I don't accept that.

I'm in pain, and that was really funny.

I don't accept that at all.

Anyway, snitches.

Who got accepted was Heinrich Himmler as Reichsführer of the SS, which is a really really petty reason to get to be the leader of the SS, but the SS ain't shit at this point.

That's very important that you understand, right?

There's a couple of hundred guys.

They're very much seen as, although they were formed as this elite, and obviously Hitler's bodyguard is a part of it.

They're kind of like this, the younger brother of the SA, and they're just, there's tens of thousands of people in the SA.

The SS is not much.

So the fact that Himmler isn't much himself doesn't seem weird because like, well, who gives a shit about who's in charge of the SS?

Like, it just doesn't matter that much at this point.

Now, Himmler's first order of business was to double down on some of the elite entry requirements while relaxing others.

He relaxes the rules around height.

You don't have to be as tall anymore to join the SS, right?

But he gets more emphatic about the Aryan pedigree, right?

Like, that we need to make sure that all of these people are like good, have good Nordic genes.

Only people who have like a clean racial background should be joining.

Now, at this point, they're not actually doing anything to prove that.

It's like, does he look right?

Yeah, okay.

You know, and obviously, does he look right is the kind of thing where part of what's going on is like, do I like him?

Because Himmler doesn't look right, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

Like he does not look like a Nordic, you know, traditional Nordic, you know, the idolized Nordic, you know, person.

So he's talking a big game about how we're very, you know, we're super, we don't want any slobs in here, right?

We don't want any Poles in here.

But they're also not doing very, they're not doing anything actually officially to make that the case.

It's just kind of rhetoric at this point.

Yeah.

And he sees his goal.

And the thing that he's going to be good at, the first thing he's going to be really good at, is expanding the SS as a power within the party, right?

While maintaining at least the image that they have strong standards, that they're elite, that we only take the best of the best.

They're not only taking the best of the best, quite the opposite.

But that image of exclusiveness, right?

Of exclusivity, that's key to why, like the fact that he, what he's really good at is propagandizing to the rest of the party that this is the organization for the best of us.

And soon, guys from the SA are like, well, shit, I can actually see that a lot of the guys are, I mean, like, drunken louts.

I don't want to be associated with them.

Hey, can I join the SS?

Like, you know, like they start poaching people.

That's how he's able to initially start rebuilding the SS is by,

and he's reaching for people like him who are not impressive, who are not successes, and who have kind of, in a lot of cases, been failures at everything outside of this, but they desperately want to feel special.

And that's what the SS offers them, right?

That's what the Nazi party offers in broad.

But then these guys who get into the party, wanting that, okay, this will finally make me feel like I belong somewhere.

I'm a real boy.

I still feel like kind of a fuck up and a failure.

Ah, the SS is there, right?

You know,

that'll fix it.

Listen, that's called the upsell right there.

That's the joining

the war room in,

you know, for Andrew Tate's thing.

You know what I mean?

You know what I'm saying?

You get to join the war room.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

And that's like, yeah, that's exactly what's, it's the same, it's the same play every time this happens, right?

You're reaching out to these people who

they personally feel like failures, and you're offering them like, if you join this group, if you belong here, you know, clearly you must be important.

You must be impressive.

Now, as early as 1927, Himmler is describing himself in letters to Marga, who, you know, they're not married in 1927.

He's describing himself as a knight, and he starts describing the SS in a similar way, not just as an elite military force, but specifically as a knightly order.

And it's one constructed in the image of a group that he had read obsessively about as a boy, the Knights Templar, right?

Like he is,

yeah, like he, he, he, this idea of this group that he views as these were these elite warriors protecting the faithful against the Muslim hordes.

Now, in reality, they're mostly bankers, right?

Like, there's the bulk of the Knights Templar.

But he's, and that's what he wants to make the SS into, right?

Is that is a new sort of Knights Templar dedicated instead of to Christianity, which he's falling away from, dedicated to protecting the Nordic race, you know?

That's it's instead of Christian pilgrims, it's protecting like the blood of the Nordic people.

That's what he increasingly, even though what's actually happening on the ground is he's sort of still treading water,

trying to separate this organization from the SA and trying to make it something that can stand on its own.

Do you think, do you think, I mean, this is obviously like, how do you reach back in the past and do this?

But I'm like, I wonder how much of this is a

personal self improvement project and how much of it is,

I

have finally found purpose and I'm really passionate about building this thing or is it just more for him?

You know what I'm saying?

Like, I just wonder, and obviously it's never that cut and dry, but like, I just wonder like, how much of this is really just like a self-aggrandizing project in his head?

I think that's, that's a, it's a hugely important point that he is tying his self-worth to this, right?

Yes.

That he feels like he should be, he feels like he should be special in a way that the world has not recognized.

But if he's able to forge the SS into this thing, this knightly order of his dreams, well, then he matters.

Then he's important.

Then he is like this legendary figure.

I'm the star I've always seen myself as.

Exactly.

Yeah.

His ego is entirely tied to the SS.

Okay, well, right.

And so he's going to throw his whole life into this because this is the thing that's offering him what he's always wanted and never had.

Can you see?

Can you see how I'm standing on business right now?

Yeah, that's another one.

That's that's another one for Sophie.

That's another one for Sophie.

It's a Justin Bieber clip.

So it's really one of the

he's got a lot in common with Justin Bieber.

I love it.

Okay, side note to everyone.

This does a piece of media, speaking to Daily Zy guys.

There was this clip of this guy who took who took a picture of Justin Bieber and how he looks now.

And he has, he was like, he has reached the

level of uni race race in the sense that he could pass for everything now.

Like that he kind of looks like he's half black.

He kind of looks black, but he kind of looks Latino, but you know he's a white boy.

It's like this fool might like take your lunch money and do your taxes.

Like, you know what I'm saying?

So it's just, so anyway, can you not stand up?

I'm standing on business right now.

Anyway, let's move on.

Well, and he's, you know, I wonder a lot with Himmler.

Because this is clearly the root of all this is that he never got to fight.

He never got to prove himself as a man.

So he's going to these increasingly elaborate lengths to prove himself as a man by creating this whole organization that, you know, is the most important and elite thing in the Nazi party, which is the world and is the savior of the race.

So I'm really saving humanity, the only part of humanity that matters.

If he had just gotten to go to the front line and fucking take some incoming fire, hear a bullet whiz past his head, maybe get wounded, would that have fixed him?

Like, I don't think I have to feel like

because, like I can tell you personally, just

being in combat doesn't fix insecurity.

It doesn't make you like like, but I think he feels that way, right?

I think this is all him making up for the fact that he never got his baptism of fire, right?

This is, this is, uh, I think a lot of it's rooted in that insecurity.

And obviously that insecurity starts elsewhere.

So it takes him about a year to go from joining the SS to commanding the whole organization.

And within that year, it goes from, again, it had been down to like maybe 300 guys to back up over a thousand.

He's pretty good at

like expanding this organization.

And he pictures it as a medieval institution immediately.

And this, he does, he can't instantly introduce all of these occult elements that he's obsessed with, but they're always in his head.

And I think everyone is casually aware of the fact that the Nazis got up to some occult shenanigans.

They were obsessed with ancient artifacts and the like.

This is a major factor in a bunch of popular media: the Hellboy comics and the Hellboy movies, the first one of which is really good.

Obviously, two out of three of the Indiana Jones trilogy movies are about the Nazis being obsessed with artifacts.

And there's numerous other fictional depictions of the Third Reich, which focus, including the Wolfenstein video games, right?

That these guys are like, that the Nazis were obsessed with like magic and like ancient artifacts and rituals and stuff.

stuff and none of those depictions are accurate but all of them are based in more real history than you'd expect right yeah like a surprising amount of the stuff in those movies has a direct historic analog yeah i want to give a caveat up top that that while those movies are rooted in the reality that these beliefs were very common particularly within heinrich himmler's ss they were not a mass they had no impact on the reich's performance in war they had no real impact on its crimes against humanity, and they had fairly little impact on Hitler himself.

We'll talk about this, but Hitler gets fed up with all of the woo-woo occult bullshit

like kind of midway through the process.

Heinrich Himmler never gets over this stuff.

And he is, after a point,

the last high-ranking Nazi who is super obsessed with the mysticism, you know?

And so, all of that stuff, all of like the shit in the those popular movies is more based in Himmler's actual factual history than Hitler's, which I find really interesting.

That's super interesting to think like, first of all,

that element of needing some sort of divine mandate has never left us to justify whatever atrocities or power that we're makes it easier.

Yeah, you know what I'm saying?

And then, you know, if you start with that, that already, that foundational premise that there is some sort of,

again,

supernatural mandate or reason that I'm supposed to be here, then you have to, then you have to reverse engineer it and then go find it, you know?

And the idea that like, like you said, like it don't always necessarily mean that the person actually in charge really gives a shit about any of it.

It's just this helps me stay, get in power, but the minute you get annoying, y'all might get jettisoned out.

I think about like the, the Doug Wilson of it all, like the, the, the Christian nationalists that like, and I think what's maybe it's not the same, it's obviously not the same.

There's never a one-to-one, but I feel like I don't believe that that movement gives a shit about Trump either.

You know what I'm saying?

Nor does Trump give a shit about them.

They're just like, we have a mutual need

that each of us fulfill.

Like you fulfill my need, I fulfill your need, but we really don't like each other.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, we don't have anything in common outside of this, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that, you know, that's, that's the case for a lot of these guys, which is why Hitler is, will jettison so many of them.

Yeah, right.

Like, we talked about the Strassers and the MAGA communists, right?

As soon as Hitler's done with the Strassers, once they're no longer useful, they get the bullet, right?

Like, at least they hit it.

I hate it when the worst people on earth do something relatable, you know?

Like, like, that's like Hitler being like, all right.

I'm done with you.

I'm dope.

These weirdos, like, do we still got to work with them?

Like, okay, relatable.

Yeah, I'm good, bro.

Like, Trump walking around the roof at the White House.

I was like, that's kind of relatable, homie.

Like, you're just like, I just need to walk, y'all.

Leave me alone for a second.

Yeah, it's great.

It's a lot of how, like, what he did with Bannon, right?

Yeah.

It's like you were useful up to a point, and now you're kind of a liability.

You know, I think Bannon, Bannon doesn't see himself that way, but I think if there's a, if our right has their knight of the long knives, there's a decent chance he gets it, you know?

Yes, exactly.

So,

as I've said, you know, the mysticism and the occult stuff, not a massive impact on what happens in the war, but it's hugely influential both to Himmler himself and how the SS

becomes what it is.

It does have a formative impact on how the SS is organized and like why Himmler does a lot of the things with it that he does.

So we're going to have to pull back in time a bit to discuss some other major figures in Germanic mysticism, right?

We talked earlier in the last couple episodes about Guido von List.

You know, he was kind of the first guy I wanted to get into the background.

He's channeling ghosts.

He's learning the secret history of these priests of Wotan, the Arminen, right?

Another influential mystic theorist who's like kind of coming up right around the same time as Guido, the two of them are peers, is

Jorg Lans von Liebenfels.

And that's a name.

Like Guido, he's not a real, that's not his real birth name.

He's not a Vaughan, you know?

Okay.

He's actually born Adolf Josef Lans in 1874.

And like von Liszt, he's an an Austrian from Vienna, which I think is interesting.

These two guys who are the two real founding fathers of like the Volkish occult movement are both Austrians from Vienna.

That's really interesting.

Also Hitler, Austrian, Austrian,

right?

Also Freud, Austrian from Vienna.

There's a lot of thinking about

There's a lot of guys who are all trying to like puzzle out why the world is the way it is in Vienna, who all come to some really wild conclusions.

And I think the fact that cocaine is like water at this period of time probably has an impact on that.

But I don't have any evidence that Lister Liebenfelds were on Blow.

I just really suspect they were.

You know?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cocaine really helps to convince you that the voices in your head are telling you the truth about yourself.

What just came out of your mouth is logical.

Yeah.

Like, yeah, yeah.

The consciousness that Blow gives you.

Just left a rap festival last weekend, and I'm like, like, I've talked to plenty of people that I was like, oh, you think what you said made sense.

Yeah, because you're snowblind, you know?

You are snowblind, bro.

And sometimes, you know, it can work or it can't, right?

We get it,

the book, because Stephen King took enough cocaine to feel like all of those weird scenes with the child orgy, like, this is a good idea.

I got to publish.

People are going to love this shit, right?

And we loved the other parts of that book, right?

On the whole, it worked out for him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Every once in a while it works.

Yeah.

Fucking Fleetwood Mac, thanks to cocaine, had the courage to be like, Should we just turn our whole breakup, all of our breakups into an album?

Yeah, let's fucking do it, right?

Unfortunately, sometimes you get Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which is

and all of this shit with Liebenfels and Liszt, which is just pure toxicity.

Yes, um, but we're talking about uh Adolph Joseph Lanz, born in 1874.

His parents, again, these are middle-class, upper-middle-class families.

Uh, his dad, like Himmler's dad, was a teacher.

And again, it's just really worth emphasizing that all of these people, Himmler and his wife, Liszt and Liebenfels, are like comfortable middle-class guys with like dads who do pretty well.

So the problem is middle-class white men.

Yeah, yeah.

Where they've got enough money that they're not worried about much, but they don't have very much to, they've got very little to do.

And they have this feeling that I'm special and I'm owed more than the world is giving me.

And that leads you into some weird places.

In the case of leadership,

this is a kind of nailed it, yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

I don't think it's just, it's not just white people, right?

Like,

it's this problem of, but white people are more represented in the upper middle class.

If you have people who, as kids, they've got like money, but they're bored as hell.

And then when they go up into the world, they expect things to go better for them than it does.

And they need an explanation for why.

Because obviously, I'm supposed to be more important and impressive than I wound up being.

What's wrong?

Whose fault is it, right?

Yeah.

So it's possible that Liebenfels' mother may have had some Jewish ancestry,

which is going to be relevant later.

But as a boy, he, like Himmler, he's obsessed with medieval history.

Although he's initially more interested in like the Arthurian myths than Germanic myths, right?

He's really, really into King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and all those stories.

He initially opts for a life of faith and he becomes a Cistercian monk in the 1890s and he takes up the name George.

But the life of a monk is boring as shit, so he is compensated by developing an obsession with astrology and medieval history.

One day in 1894, he stumbles upon a gravestone for a member of the Knights Templar.

And I think this gravestone

is probably like on the grounds of the monastery.

I'm not 100% sure, but we talked a little bit about them earlier.

The real Knights Templar were a Catholic militant order founded in the 1100s to defend religious pilgrims in the Holy Land during the Crusades.

In their early period, they were elite soldiers.

These are actual knights.

They're wearing the plate mail, you know, these are like, you know, fighting on horseback.

These are like the military elite of the Crusades for a brief period of time.

But the Knights Templar continue on for a couple hundred years, and the vast majority, like 10% of them, are soldiers, right?

The vast majority of the order are bankers.

And in fact, the first, there's an this is kind of one of the first examples of an international banking system is created by the Knights Templar because they build this network of bases from the Holy Land all the way into Europe that function as an early banking international banking system, where if you go to one of these places, they have the records and you can like pull your money out wherever you happen to be, right?

Like, and that's a very, that's a fairly new idea at this point in time.

There's some other stuff.

They're not the, they're not the first people to do something like this or the only ones, but they're among the very first people who are operating an internet, an intercontinental banking system.

That's a really wild thing to exist in the 1100s, 1200s, right?

Yeah.

Now,

This is legitimately impressive and it's a very, the history of the Knights Templar is fascinating, but the fact that they're the bankers for most of Christendom leads to problems for them because people don't like bankers, right?

Didn't know.

People don't like bankers in any period of time for the same reason, which is that they wind up in debt to those banks, right?

And in the 1300s, the king of France winds up owing a shitload of money to the Templars.

And if you're the king, and you owe a lot of money to these people, you know what solves your problem real easily?

Arresting them.

Declare them heretics and arrest these assholes who you owe money to, right?

Jesus, get rid of them.

The most logical.

Yeah.

Yes.

Now, that is so funny to me.

He charges them with like worshiping idols.

I think he's saying that they're basically like devil worshipers, and he also charges them with homosexual behavior, right?

Of course, which I'm sure is a lot of these are monks, basically, right?

Of course, of course, some of them are shtep at each other, right?

You know, that's part of why people become monks.

But these, these charges are bullshit.

He's making shit up so he has an excuse to arrest the Knights Templar and get rid of this debt problem that he's got.

So they take a bunch of these guys into custody in France and they torture the ever-living shit out of them until they confess to being, you know, worshiping false idols and engaging in gay orgies and all this stuff, right?

You know, you can get people to say anything if you cut enough pieces off of them.

So the king goes to the pope and he's like, look at what all of these guys admitted to doing under torture.

You should arrest the whole order all over the Christian world, right?

Because clearly they're all guilty.

This conspiracy goes all the way to the top.

And the Pope, being the Pope, is like, well, yeah, this is like, this is like a power center that's not me.

So I get some benefit in getting rid of these guys.

And I'm very much simplifying the story.

But this all ends with the Pope ordering all of the kings of Europe to arrest the Knights Templar, the whole order.

And they are expunged brutally, right?

That is the real history of the Knights Templar, in brief.

But guys like Liebenfels and Himmler, who are both Himmler and Liebenfels are obsessed with the Knights Templar from a young age, they're not interested in reality.

To them, the Templars are heroic, badass warriors fighting evil Muslims to protect the faithful.

This view was reinforced in Liebenfels when he comes upon this grave, because on this Templar grave that he finds, it's carved with a relief of a knight stomping on a monkey with his foot.

And I want to quote now from the book Hitler's Vienna by Brigitte Hamann.

Quote, Lance interpreted this as a reference to the need for aristocratic mastermen to subject monkey men, and from then on placed himself in the service of this idea, which had come to him in a dream.

So he sees this thing, and then he has a dream about it, and he becomes like, oh,

what the Knights Temple are trying to tell me, right?

Because he thinks this dream is like him, the spirits of these deceased knights speaking to him, is that there needs to be an aristocratic master race that can keep a foot on the monkey men.

And I don't think I need to tell you who the monkey men are.

Right.

Nope.

No.

Don't need to tell me.

To be clear, the kind of white supremacists that this guy is and these guys, it's not just non-white.

It's also other kinds of white people, right?

The Poles are just as

good as

you're trying to purge Polish blood out of you, then yeah, no,

you have really stretched your definition of white.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is just, it's, it's just, it's a different kind of white white supremacy a little bit than what we have today.

Not any less bad, just different.

You know what else is different?

The quality of advertisers that we have on this podcast, no one else has ever had advertisers as good as we have, you know?

We do it blindfolded.

Like we be getting these ad ad, we don't even know.

It's just, they just be good.

A lot of people don't know this.

Every single one of our advertisers has been approved as a saint by the Pope.

You know every one of them the chicago pope too that that's right a chicago means a double is good yep

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So we're back.

You know, we're enjoying our ads.

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all of whom are currently being tortured by the King of France.

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We wish you all the best of luck.

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They'd have really learned their lesson then.

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Maybe the king of France was on to something.

Yeah.

In 1899, Liebenfels is ordained to the priesthood.

The next year, he leaves the order due to what he described as a growing nervousness and instead founded a new order of his own, which he called the Order of the New Templars.

Now, unlike the Knights Templars, his new order is obsessed with the Holy Grail, which he has grown interested in because he's reading all these books on medieval myths.

And so, the New Templars, their three interests are the Holy Grail, men's rights, and race science.

Good

fucker.

God

shit.

God,

it's good stuff, huh?

What the fit?

The Holy Grail, men's rights, and race science.

Oh my God.

Oh,

man.

Yeah.

Like, like, you're already the worst human beings, and then you just had to add salsa on top of it.

Like,

you just added tapatillo on top of already being the worst human beings ever.

Just, God, I hate these dudes.

Yeah.

It's so funny.

The whole men's rights thing is always so, it's fascinating to me that that's every single time.

Every time.

Yeah.

And like, you're, you're angry about men's rights and the fucking 1902?

Like, what the fuck, man?

You owe it.

Women can't even vote most places.

Yes.

I'm like,

you're the only ones with rights.

Like,

what war are you fighting okay yeah yeah it's it's it's it's so frustrating it's it's magical so

libenfels starts recruiting men to his new templar order that he sees as natural rulers right he's trying to recruit the mastermen he wants to make he wants to make a knightly order and fill it with like natural leaders who can like take over as the the hierarchy of of germany right like that's that's what he's he wants to create here.

And his ideal candidate for the new Templars are independently wealthy, racially pure Aryan men who are honorable.

And honorable to him means that they're willing to give George von Liebenfels money.

And

a shocking number of people are down to do that.

And using their donations, he buys an old crumbling castle outside of Wachau to be their headquarters.

And the castle's name is Werferstein.

Okay.

Now, Wiener Schnitzel, got you.

If you played first-person shooters in the 90s, or more recently, you've heard of Wolfenstein, right?

Yeah.

Wolfenstein 3D, one of the very first first-person shooter games ever made.

I think

a very early game.

And obviously, there's been more modern adaptations.

And the basic plot is you're an allied soldier in a castle filled with like German occult bullshit.

And you've got to fight your way to the end where Hitler has a robot body and two chain guns for arms.

But there's a lot of occult weird bullshit.

There's like they're raising the dead.

There's magic and all sorts of stuff.

And the name of Castle Wolfenstein comes from Castle Werferstein, right?

Like this is and that's not the only, there's another castle that also inspired Wolfenstein.

But yeah, it's wild, right?

Yeah.

Like there is, it's one of those things, the amount of actual history that these games are based on is kind of surprising.

You would expect it to be basically none, but there is more than a little bit of real history here.

Obviously, the Nazis weren't really raising the dead.

Most historians agree Hitler did not have a robot body and chain gun arms, but that is still debated.

Listen, I was going to say it's still debated.

Still debated.

Yeah, I think Richard Evans's biography of Hitler really goes into the chain gun arms hypothesis, but it's argued, you know.

I think I read a book somewhere about it.

Yes.

So

in 1902, George, who's now going as Lanz von Liebenfels, adopts a fake identity complete with forged documents.

He now claimed to have been born in Messina, Italy, and he changed the name of his father from Johann Lanz to Baron Johann Lanz de Liebenfels.

Now, he claims that this invented father was a member of the Swabian nobility, right?

Which makes obviously Liebenfels a noble, which is why he starts going by Vaughan.

Now, both of his real parents are still alive.

You think, like, wait a second, you're lying about who your dad is while your real dad is alive, but he doesn't say this doesn't seem to have caused him any problems, right?

Ain't no internet.

So,

who's gonna call this up, right?

Yeah, yeah, you go

all the way into the countryside to go find my father.

Yeah, so he goes, he basically, like, yeah, starts claiming, like, no, I'm a, I'm an Italian, I'm a Swabian nobleman, you know, so you can call me Lans von liebenfels uh that's that's my name now um and he also gives himself a fake phd because if you're forging documents why stop it why i mean yeah why not bro like dude add the guacamole man upgrade to the exactly to the platinum package you're already you already changed your name you done already gave your yeah just upgrade the dude yeah man and then like why don't you throw in like throw in a couple ex-girlfriends you know what i mean like a couple couple supermodel ex-girlfriends why not not?

Yep.

So by this point, Liebenfels has become a follower of von Liszt, you know, who creates this Arminen theory about these priests of Wotan.

And Liszt adopts Liebenfels as kind of a protégé.

Like he sees this, oh, you changed your name too.

You're also pretending to come from an aristocratic noble background,

just like me, you know.

They kind of like, they're simpatico.

There's just like this natural alliance that they have because they're both the same kind of con man and they're the same kind of nerd, you know.

Again, in a modern era, fucking von Liszt would be the dungeon master and Liebenfels would be like the guy who always has time for a session, right?

Yes, yes.

And

von Liszt is aware that Liebenfels is like faking his ancestry because he creates a fake family tree for the von Liebenfels like family with a heraldic figure that includes imagery from Liszt's invented Arminin.

So he creates like a fake family tree and like a family crest using like the runes that those ghosts told him in a dream, you know, to help all to help out Liebenfelds, you know?

Yeah, I just feel like if you, if you're like sitting like four chairs down in like the office meeting, like, are you like, we got to take, we have to take him serious?

Like, I have to take this serious.

Like,

he just, you just made up your whole past, or do they not know that this is comically made made up?

I think outside of Liebenfelds and List, their followers don't.

And certainly the people who are just like reading, because they've got their followers who are actually showing up and doing rituals with them.

Both Liebenfels and List have their own organizations.

They've said like Liebenfels has like this Order of the New Templar.

Most of those guys don't know.

And it's hard for me not to think of Liebenfels and List.

I can imagine them as like me when I'm 10 with my friend as we're like inventing, you know, creating our own worlds for like D and D games or like creating our own space marine chapters for warmer and being like and this is this guy's backstory and he did all of these that's what i'm trying to say what they're doing right yeah that's what i'm trying to say but we grown ass men so that's what i mean by like it's fun if we know we're suspending reality but you literally went to the office to change your name to a and the the your dad is alive sir your your father simply is alive still like you know this is full of shit we know he's not that yeah that's the big question is right Does the fact that these guys know they are lying make them believe they're bullshit any less?

And I think the answer is no.

And I'm going to quote from Brigitte Haman again.

Quote, Later on, Lans would explain these manipulations by saying he wanted to avoid astrological checkups of himself.

However, the real reason was the Hoffenreich family's Jewish ancestry, which made Lans fail to meet his own racial criteria in the order of the new Templars.

He did succeed in sneaking these false facts into the city of Vienna's official registration files.

Thus, Adolph Lanz became the Aryan Baron Adolf George Lanz von Liebenfeld's PhD.

And so he justifies this when people find out, you know, anyone who finds out, he's like, oh, I didn't want anyone to be able to like do, like, astrologically.

like like spy on me so i i had to i had to fake some dates about my birth but that's the only reason he's actually doing this because he's got jewish family and list

again the fact that list is willing to help him disguise his jewish ancestry and i think it's because it lets List spread his bullshit even more because he gets to create a fake family tree and a fake family crest.

And he can go to, you don't think the Arminen are real?

Well, look, my friend who's a real noble and registered with the government, his family crest has these symbols that came to me in a dream.

Obviously, everything I'm saying is real, you know?

Yeah.

Now, like his mentor Liszt, Liebenfels makes his money as a journalist.

In pre-war Imperial Germany, a number of moneyed conservatives had subsidized the creation of pan-German newspapers, which existed to support the still new concept of German as an identity by pretending it had always been a thing.

So he's being paid by these right-wing conservatives who buy newspapers to have guys like this lie about the German identity, right?

Like, because nationalism, you know, is in their best financial interests.

Yeah.

And Liebenfels' patron is this guy, George Schönerer,

who's this, you know, he's this very rich dude who's a nationalist, and Liebenfels repays Schönerer by licking his boots in print.

Like he writes, you know, as he's writing about these ancient Aryans and the Volkish movement, he's writing about how great Schoenerer is, right?

Like this guy is the very model of

a Nordic, you know, superman, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now, as time goes on, Liebenfels gets more and more obsessed with Liszt's Armenian priests and the ancient Aryans.

And this causes him to break with the Catholic Church that he literally been a monk, right?

Yeah.

Now, part of why he breaks from the church is that his financial patron, Schönerer, had also created something called the away from Rome movement.

Now, this is part of a larger struggle.

We've talked about this in several episodes.

At the birth of the German nation of Imperial Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, Otto von Bismarck has this huge fight with the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church is a problem for the Kaiser.

It's a problem for Bismarck.

And it's going to be a problem for the Nazis because catholics don't just look at whoever's in charge of their country as a leader they've always also got the pope yeah and that's a second center of power that's an issue for you if you want to be a dictator right if you ain't first you're last baby you know exactly exactly yeah so schoenerer starts this away from rome movement and part of why he likes libenfels is libenfels' weird pagan

Even though Schoenerer maybe doesn't fully buy into the pagan stuff, it lets, it's, it's something that separates people from the church in Rome, you know?

Um, and Lanz's big innovation, in fact, is that he turns the away from Rome movement into the Aryan race movement.

The Aryan race movement gets started.

A lot of the initial impetus behind it is

people can be like anyone can be a Catholic, right?

Yeah.

You don't have to be white.

The Catholic Church is happy to have non-white people in it.

Obviously, still pretty racist, but non-white people can be Catholic.

Non-white people can go to heaven, right?

Yeah.

Jesus will save all of them.

You know, that's pretty cool.

That's a Catholic doctrine, right?

It may be white Jesus, but he'll still save a black person or, you know, someone who's brown and someone who's Native American, right?

They can all be Catholic.

And that's a huge issue for racists like Liebenfels and List and Schoenerer, right?

And so...

Hey, hold up.

That's another thought that never crossed my mind that like if you're a white supremacist that still believes in somewhat some version of the christian god that you like wait a minute now you telling me heaven is gonna have other races in it

it's not segregated like the water

that's a problem for me like you know

i i i never thought of that That's exactly what Liebenfels is saying.

And that's why, again, the birth of the Aryan race movement is in

wanting to come up with something to replace Catholicism in the minds of a lot of Germans and replace, because they're focused initially on Catholicism, but this is a problem that they have with all of Christianity, which is like the Protestant Reformation

too serious.

If you take your Christianity seriously, you have to accept that other races are loved by God and can be saved, right?

But if those other races aren't really human, that's the question.

You know,

there's some room to both be like, well, Jesus is an Aryan and God,

the only people who are fit for heaven are Aryans, right?

Yeah, that's the, that's the, yeah, the, the Jonathan Edwards, like, the sinners in the hands of angry God guy.

Like, he was like, dude, you know, if, if all people are made in the image of God, including the slaves and the savages, then we should give them the gospel.

I'm just not sure that they're human.

Right, right.

And that's what like Lee Ben Fels is trying to replace the Roman Catholic Church and to a larger extent, Christianity, with this worship of like the Aryan race and this idea of, no, no, no, what matters is not saving souls.

What matters is saving the Aryan race through selective breeding, right?

In order to fix the problems that race mixing has created, right?

Yeah.

And Liebenfels' argument is that everyone's,

every German's primary duty is to their race.

And so Aryan-descended people have to reject Rome in order to properly show race loyalty.

He writes, quote, the religious controversies of former times and the national wars of the most recent times are but the forerunners of a tremendous struggle among the races for global predominance.

Already, we see everywhere the signs of this most enormous of all battles appear.

The Mediterranean countries, Mongols, and Negroes are getting ready for their joint fight against the Germanic race.

Now, in this upcoming fight, Rome is the leader of the alliance of inferior races and, quote, quote, the Germans' most embittered enemy.

So he has turned this from like, no, no, everyone's loyalty should be to the race instead of the church to the Roman Catholic Church is the head of this evil alliance of non-white people that's going to destroy, you know, the Nordic race, the Germans.

You know, that's, that's, that's what he's selling.

So rather than feeling solidarity with all of the people that were conquered by the Roman Empire.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you already using this myth-making.

Well, you know, that's interesting because he is, there is, there is a line from like this obsession with Germany fighting against the Romans and like the victory in Turtleberg Forest and everything

and

his hatred of the Roman Catholic Church, right?

This is, there's a lot of Germans have always been defined by their resistance.

Rome has always been the enemy, right?

One way or the other.

That is very interesting, you know.

But what we have at this point is this has gone from these guys being like nerds and cooking up their own fake version of medieval history and wanting to feel like I'm descended from knights I'm the reincarnation of this you know ancient noble 12th century knight to there's a race war brewing and the Catholic Church is going to lead it and we need to get we need to convince our fellow Germans to reject Catholicism and worship this idea of the Aryan race this new and and and co and return to these old pagan beliefs that again we've largely created about woton and the fucking like right?

Like, that's what they're going for here.

So, Liszt and Lans cross-promoted each other's ideas and organizations.

And it's Liebenfels who first uses the swastika as a symbol of a far-right Aryan racist movement.

When he creates the new Templar coat of arms, he puts a swastika in it, right?

And so all of, and this is, you know, 1906 or so, we're at.

Hitler is just a fucking bum in Vienna.

And all of the pieces of Nazari there have come together in these occult mystic organizations, right?

That Liebenfels and List, they are the ones who create the basis of it, right?

This is where Hitler gets everything, and it's where Himmler gets everything, right?

That's crazy.

Obviously, there's some other guys, but they're all related to Liszt and Liebenfels.

You can draw a line between them.

We've talked about, you know, Madame Blavatsky is a part of this, but Liszt and Liebenfels are really, they're like the spiritual grandfathers of Nazism.

Yeah.

Speaking of the spiritual grandfathers of Nazism,

they would never buy the products and services that support this podcast.

It might be the spiritual grandchildren.

Who's to say?

Yeah.

I'm to say.

They're not.

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Live in the Bay Area long enough, and you know that this region is made up of many communities, each with its own people, stories, and local realities.

I'm Erica Cruz-Guevara, host of KQED's podcast, The Bay.

I sit down with reporters and the people who know this place best to connect the dots on why these stories matter to all of us.

Listen to The Bay, new episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back.

You can buy the ads too, you know?

Advertise on our podcast.

Pay us money.

We'll show whatever product you want.

Please give me money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Speaking of which, you know, we've got an ad here

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$30.

So we're talking about List and Lons.

They're cross-promoting each other's ideas and organizations.

Liebenfels uses, is the first to use the swastika.

And yeah.

It's also, you know, as important as it is to know that this is where Nazism and the SS come from.

This is their backstory.

And And millions of people die, partly as a result of like these nerds geeking out over their fucking

weird medieval obsession with the fucking Knights Templar and all this stuff.

It's also important to know that there's a lot of silly stuff in these beliefs, a lot of stuff that's just ridiculous, that doesn't even tie into like

what we know from the Nazis.

Like there's a lot of just absolute nonsense here.

And I want to quote from Hitler's Vienna again.

Quote, in 1906, Lance's most important work was published, Theozoology, or The News About the Little Sodom Monkeys and the God's Electron.

A member of his generation, which experienced electricity as an overwhelming phenomenon, Lanz ascribed to the Aryan gods electric powers and borrowed ideas from Karl von Rieckenbach's theories on magnetism and the breath of life.

The human brain, for example, was described as a breath accumulator.

He corroborated his obscure ideas with biblical sources and arrived at conclusions such as Christ proven to have been an electric human being during the tertiary.

Jesus was made out of electricity.

Electricity.

People are just

because it's new and it's cool.

Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, I get it.

I get it.

If you hit a switch and something lights up, like you, yeah, it's devilly magic.

And this is all very silly.

It's very, the fact that, like, the title of this book, Theozoology or the News About the Little Sodom Monkeys and the God's Electron.

It's all just like wildly ridiculous.

Yes.

But this is also tied directly to, this is a part of an ongoing trend that extends to the present day within fascism, which is fascism is always inextricably tied with futurism, right?

In Italy, the first fascists to name themselves such worshipped airplanes and automobiles as signs of modernity, right?

That's a huge deal for early fascism is like this worship of speed, right?

And fascism is an idea.

You know, people think about like, and we've been talking about these guys who are obsessed with the Middle Ages, but they're also obsessed with new technology.

And fascism is an ideology for the future.

That's for people who embrace action for the sake of action and speed for the sake of speed.

And Liebenfels is doing something similar here, right?

This kind of putting electricity into it, right?

You can and should draw a line from that, from what he's doing, from these Italian fascists who are in love with automobiles and race cars and stuff, to the embrace of AI aesthetics by the modern fascists.

That's what I was going to say.

That's why my, like, I know everybody don't be watching this, but like y'all that are watching, that's why my face is looking like this because I'm just like, oh, sh, why?

Oh my God.

You know, it's this, Lieben Fells convinces himself that like Christ must have been like this being of electricity because that's the sexy new technology.

And our modern fascists have convinced themselves that using AI, they're going to make a god out of LGBTI.

They're going to make a god out of AI.

Exactly.

Rule the future.

You know, it's the, the fact that all these Silicon Valley founders have gotten in bed with fascism isn't a deviation from the norm.

It's not weird.

This is a return to the bad old days.

They're so broke, dog, man.

It's like, it's, I hate, you can't use extreme words, but just like every answer.

Uh-huh.

Like every question we got already been answered.

Yeah.

Like, just, it's crazy that that's already, because that was an open question to me.

I was like, why y'all?

What is the thing?

Like, is this a hustle?

Like, is there a,

I don't see the play.

Like, with these tech bros, I was like, like, truly, I was like, I don't see the play.

Like, what is the play?

And now I see it.

It's, yeah, and a lot of this is rooted in this idea of if you're, if you're obsessed with modernity and these new ideas and new technologies, part of what you have to do is sweep away the old and democracy is old.

The idea that people deserve rights is old.

We don't have time for that, right?

The future, like, you know, whatever it is we're doing with this new technology is more important than these archaic ideas of human rights.

Yes, and that there has to be a great,

you know, the great men theory like of history.

Like there has to be a great man that steps in, a Christ-like figure, if you will, to like make it happen.

Precisely.

Yes.

Now, Lieben Fels, from this basis, formulates a view, a new view of morality that discards everything besides race, writing, quote, everything that is good for the superior race is moral, and everything that is harmful, immoral, right?

So ethics is based now entirely upon what is good for the Nordic race, for the Germanic race, right?

These words are kind of interchangeable here.

That's good.

And what brings us closer, it's again, it's like how a lot of these, we've talked about these different Silicon Valley cults like the Zizians.

everything that's good for bringing about the birth of this benevolent godlike ai the singularity that's the only thing that determines good and evil right what you do to people is is immaterial as long as you're taking us closer to birthing this ai god that's the only thing that matters conquers now the ultimate logical conclusion of this kind of thinking is that other races cannot coexist in germany because if you let other races survive within, you know, this heartland of these Germanic, the Nordic peoples, the remaining

Nordic peoples, race mixing will inevitably occur, right?

And quote, if they mingle with inferior races, then the divine in them will gradually disappear as well.

And I've talked about how Tolkien is writing his stories.

He's basing a lot of what he's writing on a lot of the same things these guys are.

They're interested in the same myths.

You know, Liebenfels is interested in the Arthurian myth.

That's a big thing for Tolkien.

We've talked a lot about the Nibelungen cycle, right?

Which Liebenfels and Liszt are both obsessed with.

Himmler is obsessed with as a boy.

That's one of the direct inspirations for the Lord of the Rings.

And the Nazis conceive of, and by the way, I'm not saying anything.

Tolkien was not.

In any way, not Nazi in any way, hated the Nazis, specifically rejected their anti-Semitism.

Obviously, he was a man of his time.

There's some problematic stuff in there, but he was not a, I don't think he was a bad person person at all.

The Nazis, though, do see the Nazi conception of the Aryans is a lot like how Tolkien conceives of the men of Numenor, right?

Which is, you know, Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings movies is supposed to be like 80-something, right?

Yeah, he transcended something.

Yeah.

Yeah, that he comes from a superior type of human beings who's...

who had lived, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years and were much more powerful and just better.

But over the thousands of years, the men men of Numenor are dying out, right?

Yes.

What the Nazis are doing, they see the Aryans as like the men of Numenor.

And the goal of Nazi eugenics is not just eliminating non-Aryans, which is kind of what people think today is like, oh, they wanted to wipe out everyone who wasn't an Aryan.

No, no, no, no, no.

They wanted to wipe out the non-Aryans because those people were watering down Aryan blood.

Return to their godlikeness.

Right.

They were trying to breed Nordic people together to recreate this mythical super-race, right?

To bring back the men of Numenor, so to speak.

Wow.

This belief started with Liszt and Liebenfels, the latter of whom wrote extensively about the need to, quote, refine and improve one's race through pure breeding, the only genuine and effective kind of repentance for the sin of intermingling.

Now, Liszt had prodded this issue, but Liebenfels makes it an obsession.

In 1905, he launched a magazine, Astara, which he described as the first and only publication dedicated to studying, quote, heroic racism and men's rights.

Men's rights.

I feel like, y'all, somebody, I feel like that's like them, them

when bills get announced that the Congress is finna vote on.

Yeah.

And then somebody just throws one at the end that ain't got nothing to do with what we're about to vote on.

And men's rights.

Men's rights.

What?

Why are we talking about that?

Well, let me explain why.

Because in the pages of Astara, Liebenfels extensively explored how concepts like the family, like what we call the nuclear family, and women's rights, which was still not...

not much at that period of time, had to be reformed and curtailed in order to save the race.

He advocated for the establishment of colonies in rural parts of Germany where, quote, brood mothers could be protected and isolated from inferior races and kept constantly pregnant by men with the blood of the Arminen in them.

Right.

And he's against, he's, he's, he's now increasingly against the idea of like marriage, right?

Because like the family, all of that limits how many Aryan kids you can pop out.

He writes, quote, we have protected our cattle against racial degeneration and contamination by way of cattle breeding tariffs, but we still render unprotected human beings to contamination and blood adulteration.

God.

Damn.

Yeah.

Okay.

Right.

We got to treat our people more like we treat our cows.

Sometimes I feel like

man, it'd be so great if, like, while in the middle of this, while this person is talking, you just pull out like the perfect, just like El Pastor taco and just be like, man, man, eat this, eat this.

Hold up, hold up, hold up.

We need to keep the periods from.

Just try that.

You've had literally nothing but sausage that's

sawdust your whole life.

Try this.

There's seasoning in it.

Yeah,

have this carney ass.

Here's a burrito.

We just need to keep the race from home.

Motherfucker, this is called Pad Thai.

Eat it.

Yes, yes, yes.

Here, here.

Try beat, bite.

This This is called a noodle.

Try to.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, lista.

Well, I don't know that that would have affected him.

No, not at all.

He starts advocating, in addition to all, like, because of all this, he starts advocating for polygamy to be legal, specifically for soldiers who have proved their racial worth in battle, right?

That, like, well, if, you know, a veteran comes back from the war, having proved himself to be a superior kind of man, he should be impregnating as many women as possible, right?

And weak men should be stopped from breeding.

In fact, we should sterilize the mentally ill and we should euthanize anyone that's unproductive, right?

He is one of the first, again, there's other people who's not the only guy having these ideas, but he's one of the first people writing these in an influential publication.

And we don't know because Hitler is a homeless bum in Vienna

living intermittently in like a men's hostel and like selling postcards, paint, his paintings as postcards, basically, a lot of the time, doing like sketches for money.

It's theorized that he read Astara.

He almost based, I mean, all of his biographers pretty much agree.

He almost certainly came across issues of this.

He read a good amount of it.

And he also would have read people are, there's a lot of what's going around are like cheaply.

put together pamphlets and tracts that are being sold on the street, a lot of which are like plagiarizing Astara too.

Right.

So we don't know, we don't have like a list that he's on as a subscriber, but he is definitely reading this stuff because he himself wrote that during this time, he came across countless hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of like different sort of like writing on racial theory and uh you know the the like all of this like Aryan race science and stuff.

So he's Hitler is actively reading this during the most like influenceable period of his life.

You know, I like, okay, so two thoughts here.

Just how much of

these weird sweeping,

full, like hitting the alamoth of just these like pithy ideas

somehow or another come back to, oh, you just want to fuck more girls.

Like how you doing all this just to be like you just trying to, you just trying to smash more.

You want a justification to smash whoever you want without any responsibility.

That's what you're trying to do.

Right.

And of course there might be more to it, but I'm just so surprised how often it just, oh,

you just want some girls.

Right.

You know,

you're angry that they have a choice in the matter.

And that, like,

that you you you show them who you are and they say no, thank you.

And then you think that was unjust.

Yeah.

And you're like, what do you mean it was?

Yeah.

So I think that yeah.

It's the same.

So much of it is that ego thing of like people not being able to take being told no, just like this is a bit different, but the fact that you can see with a lot of our the most prominent, like people like Elon Musk and Mark Andreessen of these like fascist ideologues we're dealing with today, the root of why they started making this far-right turn is they got on social media and people made fun of them.

People dragged them.

Yeah, when they would have a bad take, they would get like mocked.

And, you know, most of us, that happens to us, you know, very periodically.

Like someone will be a dick to you online.

And you just be like, yeah, you know, that happens.

But these guys,

their whole life outside of this, no one's ever talked shit to them.

No one's ever been mean to them.

Like the whole, their whole world on a daily basis is people agreeing with them, like reflexively.

And the fact that that doesn't happen online kills them.

Yes.

This is also a big factor in Himmler's childhood, or not childhood, but like early adulthood.

Astara is one of the magazines he is reading.

Yeah.

You know,

when, or as a kid, like he gets access to this and he gets access, more to the point when he's an adult, Astara is, I think, out of publication most of that time, but people are cribbing from it and plagiarizing it and rewriting it, right?

Like this is, it's like an Ur text of the Volkisch movement and all this stuff, you know?

So Liszt and Liebenfels are really the core of the ideology that obsesses both Hitler and Himmler.

Hitler is primarily going to be focused on

building the, like rebuilding the Aryan race and, you know, finding living space, which is another thing.

Liebenfels writes a lot about the need for living space, the need for expansion for Germany, for Germans to have more space to colonize, to breed.

So Hitler takes a lot of that.

Himmler also takes a lot of the magic stuff, right?

Like a lot more of it than Hitler does.

So when World War I rolls around, both Liszt and Liebenfels are really bullish on the war, right?

Because it's going to lead to the Germany's going to conquer a bunch of land, obviously, and then we'll have this space that we need.

You know, we'll defeat our racial enemies.

But the war doesn't go as well as they'd hoped.

And the privations of the war years forces Astara to stop publishing because paper gets very expensive.

Guido von Liszt probably dies partially as a result of the food shortages in the war.

He dies like right after it ends.

He's kind of old, but the fact that he had been starving like everyone else probably contributes to his ill health.

During the war years, Liebenne Fels refines his theozoology beliefs that he'd written that book about, about like electric Jesus and everything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he comes to the conclusion that like theozoology is kind of a shitty name.

Like, I gotta, I gotta rework this.

And by the time the war ends and the Weimar Republic comes into being, he has smoothed all of this out and come up with a new name for his belief system, Areosophy or Aryan mysticism, right?

And he is, this is, he's very like consciously aping Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy, right?

Like that's, that's part of what's going on here.

We've talked about this in our episodes on her.

But yeah, Areosophy is Aryan mysticism, and that is what Liebenfels is kind of selling once the war ends.

And once Heinrich Himmler starts really getting into this stuff, when he has his sick period where he's reading everything he can get his hands on, Areosophy, like that's how he comes into the ideas of Liszt and Liebenfels in a big way.

Yeah.

And it's here we return to Heinrich Himmler.

Bill Yin, in his book, Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts, describes young Himmler in his school days days as having a passing familiarity with Guido von Liszt.

He had some involvement in a Volkish group molded by Liszt's and Liebenfeld's theories, the Thule Society, which added to the growing corpus of Aryan fantasy the idea that the ancient homeland of the Aryans was an isolated Nordic island or continent in the Arctic named Ultima Thule.

And I'm saying Thule,

that's how it's pronounced, but it's spelled Thule, T-H-U-L-E.

Himmler would have become familiar with a German New Ager named Adam Glauer Glauer through his interest in the Thule Society.

Glauer was a disciple of Liszt and Liebenfeld, so much so that he actually changed his name and gave himself a Vaughan, going by Rudolf von Sabottendorf.

We know Himmler was familiar with Sabotendorf because one of the Freikorps units he joined in 1919 was founded and run by Sabatendorf.

Another prominent Thule Society member was Dietrich Eckert, an Areosophist who founded a political party, the German Workers' Party.

Now, all of this background is necessary to understand why Himmler did the things that he did once he took over the SS in 1929.

He was well familiar with the secret societies that Liszt and Liebenfels had created.

Thanks to their example, the far right was rife with such societies, including the Thule Society.

Himmler deliberately sought to make the SS something similar, but also something beyond what any of those men had ever dreamed, a state within a state.

Like Liebenfels, he used the Knights Templar, or at least his mental image of them, as a model.

His goal was to breed a new nobility, using the theories of of Liebenfeld as a guide.

Oh my God.

And that's where we're going to end for today.

And we still ain't done with this man.

Okay.

I know, I know.

There's a lot to get through.

You really want to understand why all of this happens the way it does, why Nazism becomes what it is, why Himmler does what he does

as leader of the SS.

You need all of this history.

There's so much to get through to really.

Are we even at the Third Reich?

No, no, no.

No, we're not in

this is this is we're in 1929 right we're in 1929 himmler is hitler's a few years away from power we're getting close to the nazis being in power but like no this is this is we're at the moment where the party that hitler joins just started that's like that's

i mean we finally we're beyond because we've gotten to him taking over the ss it's 1929 so we're about where i just had to i debated between just starting with all of the prehistory and then in episode like three getting to Himmler.

And I felt like we should explain Himmler's background and kind of, anyway, these are the choices I made.

I thought this was the best way to do it.

We'll see.

It's great.

If it's helpful to everyone, but yeah.

So we're going to end this episode.

It's 1929.

Himmler has succeeded in rebuilding the SS up to like a thousand men.

And he has this dream of turning it into a knightly order that is the new racial elite of Europe.

And in the next episodes, we're going to see how he goes about doing that and how it plays into the greatest, some of the greatest crimes against humanity ever committed.

But first, you know, what's not a crime against humanity is props podcast hood politics.

Yes, and my cold brew.

Yeah,

also not a crime against humanity.

Not a crime against humanity.

Yeah, hood politics with prop.

We're cooking, we're making,

we're talking, we're keykeying all the words.

It's in your same podcast feeds.

It's also on YouTube, just like this feed.

Terraform Cold Brew's back.

There's links all in all the things.

And I'm just deeply troubled with

all the things I'm learning right now.

Things for which you thought you knew.

Like you think you know what, you think you understand the Nazis in World War II, and then you learn something else and you're just like, oh, word.

Yeah.

No, no, no.

It's, it's, I, I mean, again,

it's one of those things when I try to tell people, oh, you're wrong about the Nazis, they interpret it as like, oh, you're trying to explain that they're not as bad or whatever.

It's like, no, no, no, I just want you to understand what they really were.

Yeah.

Right.

They're, they're as bad, if not much worse than you think they are.

But they are different than you think they are.

You don't fully like most people, you don't fully understand like what the Nazis believed.

And maybe

you don't necessarily, you don't need to to know that they were evil, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The Holocaust is enough.

Yeah, I got the big, yeah, I got the big themes here.

Learning all of this stuff, it does help you understand stuff like, oh, it's not weird that all these Silicon Valley oligarchs are getting involved in all this weird.

It's not weird that these, these guys like Elon Musk and all,

are, are, and Peter Thiel are obsessed with like birth rates and, you know,

like the white race being bred to extinction and, you know, wanting to, like, like all of these interests that they have, none of this is new.

All of this has happened before and all of it makes complete sense.

It's not at all surprising that they're doing the same thing again.

Yeah, it's the learning of this to me is like, it's the how and the why, because that's always the question is like, how y'all fall into this?

Like, how did y'all let this slide?

You know, why like, you know, rather than just the idea of like, well, yeah, well, they were monsters.

It's like, well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Like, understand this.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And And understand that, like, this is their, the only thing they're interested in because they don't have anything else.

These people are nothing.

They're complete failures.

Yeah.

Outside of this ideology they've created to make themselves important, right?

Yeah.

The people like Himmler.

And then at the top, the people, these like oligarchs, the guys who have the money, the guys like Schoenerer, who are funding guys like Liebenfels, they do have.

money, they do have power, and they want to keep it.

And they see, I want to build, I want to use my money to like build this ideological scaffolding that justifies me always being in power, right?

Yes, yes.

That's it.

The preserving

of

your way of life, not even in the Nazi way, I'm saying in the money way.

Like, I want to be able to, I need the, I need the line to keep going up.

And this is a way to secure that.

Yep.

Yep.

Anyway, that's the episode, everybody.

Have a good week.

Bye.

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