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

Call Zone Media.

Hey everyone, Robert Evans here, and on Thursday, September 25th at 8 p.m., Behind the Bastards is doing a live show.

The show itself is in Portland, Oregon, but all of the in-person seats have sold out.

However, there are live stream tickets available.

If you go to Alberta Rose Theater, T-H-E-A-T-R-E, Behind the Bastards, just type that into Google or whatever search engine you use, Alberta Rose Theater Behind the Bastards, you can find a link to buy tickets for the live show.

This is to benefit the Portland Defense Fund, which helps bail people out who don't have resources of their own.

So it's a good cause.

Tickets are $25 for the live stream version of the show.

So please go to Alberta Rose Theater Behind the Bastards and pick up a live stream show to check it out on Thursday, September 25th at 8 p.m.

Oh, wow.

Is it already Behind the Bastards 30?

My goodness, my clock must be off.

I'm that's not a very good start to a podcast either.

Yeah, Sophie.

That was dumb.

How many episodes of this have we?

We started in fucking 2018, like 50 episodes a year, something like that.

I can tell you

350 episodes, generally two parts each.

I can tell you how many clips it says we have in Omni.

I think some of them

I think some of them are like imports and some of them are

like trailers, but it says 882.

We've done too many episodes of podcasts, right?

This should, this should, you could, you should get immediately 51.50, but the permanent version, if you've done this many episodes of a podcast, yeah, there's definitely a

yeah, there's definitely a

groundhog day effect with this where I'm like, oh shit, I gotta do this next week.

Yeah, yeah, and every other week forever.

And every other week.

I mean, like, as jobs go, it's like upper tier, but also I do feel like a little infinite.

It's a little infinite.

It does make me want to do like a reverse Ronald Reagan where I become president just to lock myself up in a mental institution.

Like, just to be like, no one like me.

And Joe, get Joe.

For goddamn sure, lock him up.

Like, because if my brain is fried, like, that motherfuckers was melted long ago.

Out of here.

Like,

he hit that point fucking 10 years back.

Get us all off.

Get us all off the streets.

Oh, I mean, if I'm not going to be able to do that.

So many times, so many times, I think, why do y'all listen to me?

Uh-huh.

What are we doing here?

I would be so tired of me.

Yeah.

This is, that's it, Prop.

You and me are running, and we're going to be the first people to run on a ticket of get us off the streets.

Just top guests.

Just don't listen to us.

Do not listen to us, guys.

Yeah.

After making us president, because we got some plans.

We got some plans.

First six weeks is going to be crazy.

Yo.

Speaking of people whose first six weeks in power were crazy, that actually does segue to the reality pretty well.

You actually nailed that one.

Yeah, that one worked out well.

Accidental perfect.

That's a real swish, first down.

Wow.

Touchback situation.

Please.

It was very funny when people, the soccer episodes,

I fucked up whatever a cap is, and people are like, I can't believe Robert got soccer facts wrong.

I was like, guys.

You're not coming to this for my knowledge of soccer.

You're coming to this to hear about a fucked up guy who became a member of the SS.

I I told you up at the top, the soccer stuff is not going to be high-fidelity soccer facts.

Let me number one.

And here's the thing: like, I don't know if you know, but we're American.

And

he's a Texas American.

Football the whole time was a step.

Step.

And you're a Texas American.

Y'all don't stop.

Y'all stop talking about soccer after third grade.

So that's

illegal.

That's illegal.

Yeah, like you can't talk about soccer after third grade.

They'll put you in prison.

You'll do a hard time for talking about soccer in Texas.

Yeah.

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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.

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Speaking of hard time, most of the Nazis really didn't wind up doing doing it because the Weimar authorities kind of let them off the hook until they were in power.

So, we ended our last episodes.

I mean, this is a winding story, but we talked about the establishment of the Tula Society.

We talked about like the birth of all of these different weird Nazi occult things, like organizations, these secret societies that were going to inspire how Himmler wanted his SS to work, particularly

the Knights Templar.

Ghost Alphabet.

His von Liebenfeld.

Yeah, the Ghost Alphabet.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So before Heinrich Himmler could truly lean into his personal vision of what the SS could be, this like knightly order built on these mystical ideas of both crafting like a perfect race and returning to these, you know, these medieval values and whatnot, Himmler was going to have to solidify his position as head of the organization, of a moderate political organization first, right?

Before you can, you can do the weird occult Nazi shit of your dreams, you have to make sure that you stay in power.

Now, by September of 1930, which is the first year in which the Nazi Party achieved, they have a major electoral upset.

And a lot of Nazis, Himmler included, get admitted to the Reichstag, right?

Because they're running.

like different prominent members as Reichstag candidates.

Himmler has gotten enough trust that he gets in.

This is a big deal for him because it brings a degree of immunity to prosecution, right?

Like there's certain things he can't get in trouble for now, which is great because he's going to be one of the party's crime guys in their period of time before power.

It's very helpful for him.

Um, but you know, even once they've got this big win, they get a bunch of people into what is effectively Congress.

You know, when we're talking about the Reichstag, it's more of like a parliament, but right, like in the U.S., that kind of roughly translates to a Congress.

Um, so you've, you've, you've got your party in political power for the first time, but it's not total power.

You're not the majority party, you're not, you know, you're still needing to compromise with people, which is not something the Nazis want to do.

So you can't really rest on your laurels because you don't know if the next election is going to kick a bunch of your guys out and if you're going to cross that threshold into actually taking total power.

And while this is going on, Himmler's primary concern, where his eyes are focused and where the eyes of the SS are focused, are not outside at the communists and the social democrats.

They're inside and they're facing the SA, right?

Because the SS is still subordinate to the SA.

And that's where all of the problems and all of the big conflicts had occurred, right?

You know, the SS has gotten started because Hitler doesn't trust this large street fighting organization because there's too many other people who control it.

There's too many local leaders who their group of guys are loyal to them, you know, more than they are to Hitler, right?

And so that's why the SS gets power in the first place.

And in this first year that Himmler's in power, his predecessors have each lasted about a year or so.

And he doesn't know that he has no guarantee that he's going to keep the job forever, right?

So

he's got this dual job of trying to make sure he stays in charge of this organization.

Otherwise, he can't do any of the cool stuff with it that he wants to do.

And the way to stay in charge is to continually make himself useful against other guys inside the party.

Now, the leaders of the SA at the time, these different brown shirts, because Rome is still out of the country.

So there's not like one guy who's running the SA.

There's a bunch of local leaders who have differing amounts of power.

And they'd all been snubbed by the the party and the Reichstag elections.

These guys had wanted seats too, but they're wisely seen by the Nazis in charge as like, okay, these guys are useful, but they're all like drunk assholes.

It's the same way that like Enrique Tario is being treated right now.

Yeah.

We're like.

Even now that Trump is in charge, the government's pushing him back against his January 6th lawsuit.

They clearly, they don't want to disavow him entirely.

There's still some use to those groups, but also people don't want them that close to you, right?

Like, because they're dangerous and kind of unpredictable.

And a lot of these guys are like violent criminals in a way that the kind of bougie money people that you're courting now as the Nazis don't really like.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so that's that's the issue, right?

Yeah.

So I

think that, like, I, I, I think Enrique Tario is the perfect example of this to where it's just like, it's that

favor you really shouldn't call in.

Right.

Because,

like, there's a in that the interest rate on this favor is higher than I'm willing to accept.

And I really don't want to be seen with you in public.

No.

You know what I'm saying?

But like, but I do like the fact that you're down for dirty work.

Like, yeah, they're the perfect example of that.

Yeah.

I can't think of any like any close friend of mine who doesn't have a that guy.

Right.

Where it's like, yeah,

I know I could lean on you for certain things, but there's a cost.

Yeah.

There's a cost to this.

Yeah.

Like there's if you pressed hard enough where it's like, this is the nuke.

Like this is bringing in the dragons.

Yeah.

Like if I were to do this, and I don't know, man, you

really ain't rider of a dragon.

That dragon is done with you when it's ready.

Yeah.

No, that's right.

And a good example of that is kind of right after these 1930 Reichstag elections, one of the SA guys who's pissed because he got snubbed.

He didn't get a Reichstag position is this local SA leader named Stenz.

And Stenz launches an SA rebellion in which he's like, my guys, my street fighters aren't going to back up the party.

And in fact, he sends his stormtroopers to take over the Berlin Nazi Party office, which is itself guarded by an SS unit.

And they have a street fight over this, which ends when the SS calls the cops who intervene on their side, right?

And this is probably less a result of law enforcement like picking one specific side for ideological reasons and more SS guys are like sober.

They tend to be better dressed and more affluent.

And they actually have property law behind them.

Whereas all of the SA guys are a bunch of drunk petty criminals trying to break into a building.

So like, of course, the cops do what the SS says, right?

Yes, totally.

And like every clash between the SA and the SS, this is really a clash between Hitler and anyone in the party who felt like there ought to be a power center that isn't Hitler in the Nazi party.

That's what the conflict is, right?

Broadly speaking, because there's a number of different guys who have, who launch these little internal rebellions, but it's all over the same thing where they're like, I don't see why Hitler Hitler should be the only person people listen to.

And Hitler's like, No, no, no, that's the point of being a Nazi.

Yeah, I don't think you get it.

Like, yeah, maybe you may have missed what we're doing here at Nazi.

Maybe

we weren't clear.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, this is the one time I'll say in Hitler's defense, but I think he was pretty clear.

I thought it was pretty clear.

I feel like they weren't.

I thought it was pretty clear that he was in charge.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The print is actually in 24 final

was a thousand-page book Hitler Gets to Decide Everything.

Yes.

So, in the end, obviously, Hitler wins, and Hitler wins in large part due to Himmler's help because Himmler is operating this elite SS unit that's kind of able to head off and beat the SA ultimately in every one of these crucial power struggles.

This ends with Hitler taking direct, nominal direct leadership.

So, he's not actually in charge of either organization, but nominally, they pledge loyalty to him of both the SS and the SA.

And he gets declarations of loyalty from members of both organizations.

This wasn't really a change for the SS because they were already doing that.

But individual SA chapters were all basically independent orgs with independent leaders, right?

And so now they've made declarations of loyalty, but that fact hasn't changed.

They still have not gotten complete control of the SA.

So conflicts keep breaking out between these local chapters and local parties, and often they will culminate in a fight over a physical party office.

This keeps happening in different states.

During one such eruption, Himmler has to travel to Augsburg to stop an SA unit from literally demolishing the local party headquarters.

And this happens repeatedly, and Himmler's SS is always the shield

for power in the Nazi Party against the SA.

From 1930 until the seizure of power in 1932, then, there developed an idea, coaxed by Himmler, within the SS and within the party leadership, that the men of the SA were simple, good-hearted oaths being manipulated by evil local leaders in it for themselves, right?

These, the basic rank and file, you know, they're not couth.

We can't have them in polite company, but they're loyal basically.

It's these leaders that are leading them astray.

And Himmler positions himself and his SS as the only counter to the madness of the SA leaders.

Hitler is so happy with how the SS performs and how Himmler performs that he awards the SS a motto, your honor means loyalty, which obviously I'm not going to try to say in German, but in the future, like the SS knives and stuff all have this on the blade.

They've got this all like they, the SS releaches a lot of merch, and this is on most of them, right?

It's their like catchphrase, right?

Your honor, say it again?

Your honor means loyalty.

Your honor means loyalty.

Yeah.

Damn.

Yeah.

That's unfortunately very catchy.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, no.

You can, you can, I mean, it's, it's, it's the same in any gang, right?

And that's why you are talking about just kind of two different competing ideas of how to have a gang.

Yeah.

And the SS is a much more,

it's smaller, but it's more loyal.

And so

you have tighter comms, you have tighter control over how people operate, you have more efficient logistics.

And so, as a result, the organization is better in this kind of a fight.

I don't think the SS on its own would have been able to win the street war against the left.

The SA was necessary for that.

The SS wins the war within the party, right?

Yeah.

For the next several years, Himmler would work to gain complete independence for the SS from the SA, but but this was a slow process.

And

this period of time in which they're struggling against the inside of the party becomes known as the time of struggle within the SS.

Because even kind of once they're in power, even once the war starts, he can't talk openly about a lot of what the SS does during this period because they're fucking over a lot of other Nazi party members.

And so it's just sort of referred to colloquially as the time of struggle.

And this is what makes the SS, the reason ultimately why there is an SS that becomes a state within a state that has these independent military units and is running all of the concentration camps and is running Reich internal security and has all of the power that the SS does.

The reason why the SS does the Holocaust ultimately is because of how they perform during this time of struggle.

It's because they're able to beat the other side of the Nazi party in a war, right?

Like that's effectively what brings the SS to prominence.

Getting independence is a slow process, and it's hampered by the fact that Ernst Röhm in the early 30s returns from Bolivia, and Hitler appoints him SA chief again.

Now, Himmler helps to get Rome back.

He writes letters because, again, he and Rome, they have like a mentor-mentee relationship, and Himmler's like, We need you so bad.

I've based all of my SS training for my new guys on the stuff you taught me.

You know, you're so influential here, we can't really get by without you.

You've got to come back.

And he comes back, and immediately,

as soon as he gets back and he gets this job, newspapers publish proof that he's gay.

Oh, Lord.

Hit him with the hay, big head.

Right.

No, he did.

It was like, I made this nigga gay.

Oh, man.

And

it's the kind of thing where, again, this is still hushable for a while, but now it's, and everyone had known it.

Most people had known it.

But now Himmler does.

And he's able to use, while he's still kind of praising Rome and pretending like, yeah, we're friends, we're tight.

He's going behind his back and going to like the best guys in the SA, the dudes who are competent and who are good organizers, and he's saying, Hey, do you want to be in an organization run by a degenerate, right?

Or do you want to work with the real professionals over in the SA?

And

yeah, and there's a big fight.

Rome gets Hitler to ban him officially from poaching SA members.

Now, Himmler keeps doing it, but like, there's a big issue over this, right?

I will say, as a side note,

just more of a cultural touch point that probably me, Sophie, and

the seven melanated people that listen to this know.

Is

sorry, so

I'm sorry, y'all.

I just like picking on you.

I know, y'all, I just like picking on you.

I'm just playing, but for some reason, I don't like, like, you know, with the whole, when the whole Diddy thing happened, like, it seems like, as far as like hip-hop culture, the only lesson they learned about this was they was grossed out by his gayness.

Like, they missed all the point.

You missed the whole point, you know what I'm saying?

Of why Diddy was a villain, you know?

So, uh with the so then the slang around like oh yeah no no diddy like no diddy like like replacing paws and um just all the homophobic stuff but what i think i keep running into with a lot of these young men especially and i love that this this is a point is because it's like

you assume

It's the dumbest assumption that just because this man is gay, that he can't beat your ass.

Like,

first of all, that gay man is still still a man number one and number two these are brawlers so you it's just it's just it's more like a modern issue right now like

dudes be like hey hey man i just got jumped by these gay dudes they beat my ass i'm like yes because there's there's they're still men like you know saying like what the are you talking about like have you look like you have have you been to a gym have you ever been to a gym the gay dudes in the gym are lifting way heavier than you

he gonna beat your ass so it just reminds me of this moment like he you know he finally brings a guy back in he goes hey this nigga gay and it's like oh and

it beats your ass uh-huh yeah that's that's the ernstrom that's the ernstrom story in general and and that's yeah the story of like how the nazis were willing to use they were happy giving this guy a pass while they needed him his and his street fighting skills organizing this war it's once they're in power that they're going to, that they're going to murder him, right?

Which is always the case with like the useful members of minority groups to fascist movements, right?

That's how they work, you know?

Yeah.

Like, yeah, when you're useful, we'll be nice to you.

Yeah.

And it's unclear to me, and this is kind of where I can get conspiratorial a little.

Does Himmler help Rome convince Rome to come back because he just knows Hitler wants Rome back and he's trying to make Hitler happy?

Is it because he does like the guy and thinks maybe it'll be easier to work alongside the SA if my friend is back in charge?

Or does he know Rome is fundamentally untrustworthy?

Rome is always someone who is going to be in it for his own power and who Hitler can't, as long as he's in charge of the SA, Hitler won't sleep easy.

And that will provide more inspiration.

That will, that will provide more fuel for him to like back the SS, right?

That Hitler will be more supportive of the SS if this dangerous guy is back in charge of the SA.

And maybe that's why Himmler tries to convince him to come back, right?

Is a little bit of that Machiavelli shit.

Yeah.

He gives a speech near the end of 1931, Himmler, where he lays out his vision for the SS.

Well, the SA are the regiments of the line, right?

In military terms, they're like the normal infantry.

The SS were the guards.

And this is a reference to, you know, in a...

the previous era leading up to World War I, you didn't have special forces, right?

But you had units of like horse guards in every European monarchy.

And this is to this day, there's like a unit of horse guards or whatnot that traditionally is the king's or the prince's unit in like the UK military, right?

Okay.

This is like every, like it was the Tsar's palace horse guards who were supposed to be his bodyguard.

And they're on paper your most elite unit.

I think at one point in time they had been.

By kind of the time World War I rolls around, they're just another unit of guys with fancier uniforms, right?

But like when he's saying that the SS will be the guards, he's saying they will be the elite bodyguard unit of this monarchy.

Specialty, right?

Okay.

Yeah.

To be this elite, Himmler said, quote, the SS must become a force that includes the best human material we still possess in Germany.

The SS must be held together by the shared community of blood.

He envisioned an apocalyptic conflict coming between the Nordic community and Bolshevism.

And that conflict could only be won if the Nordic race was prevented from dying out through selective breeding.

He saw the military conflict being something the next generation would have to fight.

His role was to win the racial war by selecting the racially best people for the SS SS and breeding them, right?

So it's important to note that at this early point, Himmler's not like, I think that I am going to be in charge of the SS while we're fighting a world war.

He assumes he'll be dead for that.

That, like, that that's in the future still, right?

Like, what I've got to do is get our human capital ready, breed us up an army of unstoppable Aryans, right?

Like, that's my job at this stage once we get to power.

But he's not thinking, and obviously, in like less than 10 years, we'll be invading Russia, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's not on his, that's not on his Himmler's.

Yeah, you know, I think Hitler had that desire for quite a while.

That's not on Himmler's radar at this point.

He's still, he's too worried about the space ghosts, the space, the yes, yeah.

He's too busy learning how to channel his dead relatives into shit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that year, Himmler also sets up an intelligence service within the SS, which would come to be known as the SD.

And he puts a guy we've talked about on this podcast called Reinhard Heydrich in charge of it.

Heydrich is the guy who will host the Von Seg conference and be the organizer of the Holocaust, right?

The high-level organizer, right?

Wait, okay, let's get our essays together.

So we got SS, SA, and SD.

Yeah, and the SD is the intelligence service within the SS, right?

The SS has its own CIA, basically.

Okay, so San Antonio, San Diego, and Saint something.

What is that?

San.

San Salvador?

San Salvador.

Okay, there there we go.

There we go.

There we go.

All right, found out.

I don't know how helpful this is to the audience.

Just think of different things.

It's helpful for me.

Yeah.

So there's this subset of the SS that's taking over security.

And right now, they're like intelligence for the party.

So they're trying to, you know, are our events safe?

Is there anyone plotting to carry out an attack against Hitler?

That's what they're doing at this stage.

And Himmler puts Reinhard Heydrich in charge of it.

And Heydrich had just gotten fired from the Navy because he had broken off an engagement and been found dishonorable.

He was engaged to, I think, an admiral's daughter or something.

I forget the exact story, but he's fucking around and he gets cashiered out of the Navy for fucking around in a way that they think is unbecoming of an officer.

So he broke it off.

He broke it off because he was trying to like spread the seeds, not like it just wasn't working out.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think it was a, he was cheating, right?

Okay.

That's the gist of it, which is conduct unbecoming of an officer.

So when he and Himmler meet, Heydrich had told him, like, oh, yeah, I was an information officer in the Navy, right?

And Himmler, not knowing much about the military, because he was never really a soldier, but really feeling like he'd been a soldier,

pretends that, like, decides that means spy, right?

That like, oh, he was an information officer.

He must have been a spy.

I've got a real army spy heading up my totally real spy network that I invented, right?

And he gives Heydrich the job.

Although, in reality, Heydrich had been an information officer, but he was a signals officer, which means he had an expertise in like using, you know, how they use like those different signals on boats when they can't communicate by radio or whatever.

Yeah, like, like, that's what he knows how to do.

He's not like a spy, he knows like which signs that you hold up will tell a boat what to do.

So that's super valid for this.

He's not like a, he's not like fucking James Bond.

And that's kind of what Himmler thinks he's getting.

But again, Himmler doesn't know anything about the army, right?

Or the Navy.

Oh man, I love that.

I love that.

So he's like, you're basically a spy.

And Heydrich's like, yeah,

definitely.

Pretty much a spy.

Yes.

All right, child.

That's what you get for lying on your race.

That was scary.

As 1931 ended, the SS had grown to more than 10,000 members.

So again, in the first two years, they go from a few hundred to more than 10,000.

So he's, you know,

he's done very well on this side of things.

Yeah.

Now,

Himmler talks a lot about how we're only hiring racially the best, but the racial qualifications at this point are just based on vibes, right?

Himmler would later explain this is kind of what they're thinking when they're evaluating someone for membership Because the candidate's face revealed clear traces of foreign blood, such as excessively protruding cheekbones.

So you just kind of, do they look like they're Nordic or do they look like that?

Do I see some slav in your face or whatever?

That is so funny to me.

You white if you kind of look white.

Right.

Like you just got to look you I know I know you look white, but you don't look like white white.

Yeah, you don't look like the right kind of white.

I think you're some Italian.

I'm not kind of white, homie.

Yeah, you guys were born too near the Alps.

Can't trust you.

Man, some of you modern, uh, some of you modern right-wing Nazis, boy, y'all wouldn't have made the cut, homie.

Like,

you ain't white enough for your wife.

Heinrich Himmler shouldn't have made the cut.

Look at him.

Look at him.

You ain't.

Yeah,

literally.

Speaking of people who are racially pure.

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We're back and we're talking about Heinrich Himmler and how well he does or does not meet the

beauty standards.

Yeah, the beauty standards that you would expect of someone who talks racially about the shit he talks about.

And there are jokes in the Third Reich that are like,

you know, the ideal Aryan is as

blonde as Hitler and like, oh,

yeah, he's as blue as Himmler's and all this kind of stuff, right?

So a little self-awareness.

People are joking about this, right?

Like that, like, yeah, that this is kind of bullshit, right?

Like, that, that a lot of the, but like, you know, again, it's in the same way as most people, even most people who voted for Trump are aware that like

he is not as healthy as he pretends to be.

He has not lived the kind of life that they think is good.

They just,

he hurts the people they don't like.

And so they're willing to pretend that stuff isn't obvious, but they are aware of it, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're just not willing to say they're for.

It just doesn't matter to them.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

So.

uh the fact that himmler so again himmler's not there's not yet a formal actual scientific way of keeping the SS racially pure.

It's just based kind of on vibes.

And part of this, the reason why is that like Himmler needs bodies, right?

And it's not, and so it's not until the end of 1931 that he feels secure enough in the membership they've gained and the size they are that he announces a new stricter set of rules.

And at the end of 31, he makes it the SS rule that all members of the organization now had to secure permission to get married and their potential wives would have to be assessed by the racial office that he just established in the SS before they could get married.

Peter Longrich, in his biography of Himmler, writes: Himmler was fully aware of the fact that his marriage order would be met with incomprehension, indeed ridicule outside his organization.

He even anticipated the reaction.

The SS is convinced that with this order, it has taken a step of great significance.

Derision, scorn, and incomprehension will not sway us.

The future is ours.

So, like, we know people are going to be cool with this, but, like, what are you going to do about it?

We're in charge now.

And you voted to be a Nazi.

The head of the new racial office was a guy in the SS, was a guy named Walter Darr.

And like Himmler, Darr had been a farm worker, although he had been a farm worker for real as opposed to for the season.

He'd written a book titled The Peasantry as the Life Source of the Nordic Race.

And he was one of the first Nazi intellectuals to make the argument that the Nordic race had a lower birth rate than other races, which, if not corrected, would lead to extinction.

Now, like Himmler, Darr had become a believer in the Arteman theory of this like ancient warrior priests of Wotan, and the two had first met through their interest in mysticism.

They're both big, why don't we get away from Christianity and adopt Wotan worship again, guys?

In 1932, the SS adopted its now infamous double lightning bolt symbol, right?

And these are actually, this is, you know, you can close your eyes and picture the SS.

It's a very successful logo.

These are actually a pair, they're not S's, they're a pair of sig runes from the Armin and runic alphabet that Guido von List created.

So that's what that symbol comes from.

It's from this fake alphabet that's got its roots.

He kind of was inspired by some actual runes, but he mostly dreams them.

That Guido Von List is.

That's a great art project, man.

Yeah.

That's a very successful art project.

Very successful.

It's quite a logo.

That's, you know, you hate to say it, but like, again, the design aesthetic.

It worked.

It worked.

Goddamn.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They had some good marketers on the team.

Now, List argued that the runes, the S, the SIG runes mean victory.

So it literally is like victory, victory.

That's what that symbol means.

By April of 1932, the SS had swollen their ranks to more than 25,000 people, and they'd break 40,000 members in June of 1932.

Himmler's success in this remarkable task owed a lot to the explosion of the Nazi Party and its electoral victories.

Tons of conservatives and otherwise apolitical rich people saw which way the wind was blowing.

Now, for some of them, just joining the party is enough, but some of them are like, I think I want to be, if I just join the party, that's going to be the norm soon.

And I'm comfortable being an elite.

And the SS offers these guys a ready-made way to set themselves apart as members of the elite in this new order.

Oh, you want to stay elite?

Well, just join the SS, baby.

As long as your background's pure Nordic, we'll take you.

And then you're automatically in the upper echelon of the new society that we're building, right?

Word.

And, you know, if maybe your background isn't as racially tidy as Himmler might normally want, you know, that could be a problem.

Or the SS always has benefit funds that can use donations, right?

Oh, my God.

Maybe you give some donations, and maybe the SS, maybe we find that your racial history is better than we thought it was, right?

We've always been movable on this.

You heard the story of guys like von Witz just deciding to become nobles and whatnot, right?

Yeah, maybe that Dane blood is not so Daney, you know?

Maybe that Celt blood is a little bit more Nordic, you know?

Yeah.

So while the tie to history certainly helps Himmler out in expanding the SS's size, I don't want to ignore his actual talents as an organizer because those are integral to the SS's success.

Heinrich is not a passive figure in this recruitment boom.

He has particular skill at finding a certain type of young man in the party and actively grooming and recruiting him for the SS.

Heinrich's ideal recruits are fuck-ups, right?

These are guys who have, they generally come from his echelonist society, middle class, class upper middle class but they haven't succeeded right and so they've got very little going on but a burning need to feel important this feeling that i am owed more in society and guys like this himmler realizes will be fantastically loyal to any organization that plucks them out of obscurity and promises to make them important right If you can find guys like this and put them somewhere and say, now you matter, they'll do anything for you.

Because what matters most to them is having status.

Longrich provides several examples of the kind of people Himmler's recruiting in his biography of Himmler.

One local SS leader is a guy named Kurt Witgee, who's a former Reichswehr officer.

That's the army after the war, but who gets shit canned from his army job for homosexual activities.

Now, he hides that he's been discharged for this when he joins the SS, but Himmler finds out about it.

And he's fine to take this guy because the fact that this man is like a capable organizer and whatnot, who has a shame that he wants to keep hidden.

That means Himmler can trust this guy, right?

Because Himmler's got something hanging over his head.

Yeah.

Another recruit was Friedrich Jeklin, who is a World War I veteran who had married a rich woman, but her father had cut him off from the family money.

This led Jeklin to conclude that the family he'd married into had Jewish blood, based on nothing,

which starts to alienate his wife.

He begins drinking heavily.

They get divorced, and he winds up bankrupt and desperate.

So he joins the Nazis in 1929.

He joins the SS in 1930 after Himmler finds him and is like, I think this guy's got some potential.

For an idea of what a piece of shit this guy is, in 1930, he tells his wife he'll be able to pay her alimony, quote, only when Germany is free.

So these are the kind of dudes Himmler's gathering.

As Peter Logrich summarizes, Himmler had gathered around himself a group of men who, although they no more matched the high ideals of the SS than he did himself, were nevertheless men on whose loyalty he could rely.

Many of them were dependent on him for their very material existence, a situation which, when necessary, he knew how to exploit.

And this is just, this is just gang shit, right?

How you run a criminal organization?

That's a criminal organization.

This is gang shit.

Uh-huh.

Yes, this is gang shit.

Yeah.

Period.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You get fucking shooters around you who you can trust in part because you know you all have compromising info on each other, right?

You all have compromising info on each other and you haven't, there is no other place you can go because any other, any other place you would run to would report to me that that you ran over there, right?

And because they scared of me too.

And then, lastly, how you gonna make money?

Nigga, where?

So, yeah, stage.

Yeah, who else is having you?

Who else is having you?

You can't get no job.

You know what I'm saying?

You ain't gonna do shit.

Just, man, go burn down that

tavern right there.

I'll talk to you later.

Yeah,

that's basically how it's going.

Yeah.

And men who meet Himmler during this period tended to describe him as cold, anxious to seem like someone with power, and deeply insecure underneath it all.

He compensated for this insecurity by wearing an elaborate military-style uniform and only associating with men who owed him everything and would play into his image as the tough knightly warrior of the Nordic race.

Ernst Hompstangle, Hitler's friend, who shared an office with Heinrich during this period, would later recall that Himmler's military haircut and mustache failed to disguise his, quote, pale, whey face, receding chin, and blank expression.

Another Nazi, Albert Krebs, described Himmler in a similar way, saying he quote behaved coarsely and showed off by adopting the manners of a freebooter and expressing anti-bourgeoisie views, though in doing so, he was only trying to disguise his innate insecurity and awkwardness.

Krebs complained during a train ride that Himmler inundated him with stupid and endless prattle, a peculiar mix of warlike bombast, the saloon bar views of a petty bourgeoisie, and the enthusiastic prophecies of a sectarian preacher.

Right?

Okay.

Like, he is

just very much this kind of guy where he's, it's this mix of talking about how tough he is and how totally he would fight in a civil war if he had to and he'd be the best at it.

And like this kind of gutter racism that makes him sound like that's not like that's not like rich, like sophisticated racism.

Right.

It's the racism of like a used car salesman.

Right.

Got it.

And then, yeah, like these kind of apocalyptic political prophecies based on these mystical tracks and all this Hitler shit that he believes about this coming race war.

And it's important to note that other Nazis really don't like him.

You know, they find him kind of like off-putting.

He's just like this weird Nazi, this guy for whom Nazism is a nerd, like a nerdy thing.

Like he's a, he is a folkish nerd, as opposed to someone who's like, well, this is useful because I want to be in power, right?

And that's kind of off-putting to these guys who are more or less in it for the power, right?

But his unlike of, and Himmler is aware of this side of himself.

He writes in his diary about how unhappy he is when he goes on these rants.

And he's like, I should have kept my mouth shut.

I shouldn't have said my weird, this weird shit about like my belief about reincarnation during the serious business meeting.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

Why do I do this?

Like, he gets so inside.

Yeah, there's a secret tryhard just buried inside of him.

Yeah.

Why did I do that?

Shut up.

Yeah.

And this is all, though, part of why he succeeds because

Hitler's not unaware of this fact.

And there's people close to Hitler who like Himmler.

I don't know, kind of a weird, weird dweeb.

Like he kind of seems off-putting to me.

But that's a plus to Hitler because nobody's, Himmler's not going to take power from you.

Himmler may think Himmler's the next Hitler, but as Hitler, you're not worried about him becoming the next Hitler, right?

Yeah, believe me, you don't have to hide your daughters, buddy.

Right.

We're good.

He doesn't look like he's trying to advance himself at the

cost to the Führer or the party, right?

He's reliable when shit gets ugly,

as it gets in August of 1932, the day after that year's Reichstag election, the Nazis are certain that final victory is imminent, but this is, again, not the very last election, right?

There's still a long period of politicking before which Hitler is going to become the chancellor.

And the SANSS kind of jumped the gun, and they start a bombing and murdering spree, killing their political opponents in Konigsberg.

Himmler himself seems to be the guy who orchestrates this terror campaign.

So it's him that is jumping the gun, right?

He has his goons kill the the editor of a left-wing paper.

They kill a communist city official.

They murder several other people that had been listed as public enemies of the party, but they go too early.

The Nazis are not in charge yet.

There's still something of an independent media, and there's a public backlash, right?

Because the public,

they're going to, you know, be supportive of the Nazis taking power, but they don't want it to look like this.

This is scary, right?

Even getting bombed in the street is messy, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

We want you guys to deport everybody, but not.

We don't want it to look like this.

This makes me worry that I might get targeted.

Yeah.

So Himmler has to shut up his own involvement.

He has to pretend he didn't do this.

And he does that so successfully that there was debate until pretty recently as to how involved he was in all of this.

But the fact that he reliably organized the shedding of blood for the movement and then shut up about it afterwards raises his image in Hitler's eye.

Because again, this is just a gang, right?

Like he's able to go out and kill some fuckers and

he doesn't brag about it afterwards so hitler that makes hitler like i can trust this this guy's rider die yeah yeah i was like that's the perfect type of rider die that's like i don't need no credit man i'm here for the culture you feel me like dang yeah he's a little off putting and weird but like that's not what i give a about is hitler right now you know i can trust him wow yeah there's a there's a piece of me that's like

not that shit but the shit that's that's relatable in the sense like all of us in our own ways have to learn how to like tamp down our nerdery.

Yeah.

Like I was just hanging out with some guys and they actually, I mean, they asked me questions about like autocrats and

borders and like the urge for me to just be like,

I actually don't believe in borders at all.

And I, so I'm like a child, like, I'm like, I think that they're only enforced by violence.

And I just can't think of any time in history where putting a dude in charge has worked.

So I'm like, wait.

Yeah, like having to like catch myself to be like, don't let that part out

is something that is a little bit relatable.

The problem is, I mean, the difference, obviously, with this dude is like, what he does let out is the racist murder.

Well, yeah, it's like, you know,

what I don't want to let out is I don't need, there's certain people that don't need to know too much about how much I like Warhammer 40,000.

And

the thing that he's trying not to let out is that he believes he's the reincarnation of a dead prince from the year 1000.

And these guys were like, I just wanted to kill communists.

Was there more to it than that?

Were we all on this weird, this weird magic shit?

Yeah, because I right now could rattle off.

Sophie right now could rattle off the statistics of summer league for the Lakers.

And I'm like,

I want to know that.

Oh, get her talking about Twilight.

Jesus.

You want to give her a Heinler-Kimmler moment?

Yeah.

Come on now.

But you know better, is the point.

It's like, you're like, nobody wants to know this.

Like, it's fine.

And Himmler doesn't have that filter in his head, right?

And he just kind of assumes at a certain point that anyone high up in the party is into this shit, and they aren't all.

Yeah.

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So, it's a few months later, after this bombing campaign where the SS and SA go off a little early, that the Nazis finally achieve their goal and Hitler becomes Chancellor.

This does not bring total power, right?

For the next couple of years, the Nazis are engaged in a kind of dangerous dance because the military could still overthrow them, especially if the conservative elites and the military had gotten on the same page.

Obviously, that doesn't happen.

And from this point forward in the story, Himmler and the SS are no longer paramilitaries.

They are now increasingly part of the state.

And it's not, it wasn't a guarantee that the SS would become a part of the state.

The SA,

I think, I mean, they think there's a degree to which they're made an official part, but they're never, the SA under Rome wanted to replace the army.

That was Rome's goal.

Okay.

So, yeah, they are now part of the state.

And it wasn't a guarantee because the SA doesn't really become part of the state in the way they had wanted to.

They don't get to become part of the military.

The SS is going to have military divisions with tanks and artillery and shit.

And also, it's going to be part of the security service.

They're running the concentration camps eventually.

That wasn't a guarantee when the Nazis came to power.

It was guaranteed there were going to be camps for their enemies, but not that the SS would run them.

This is where Himmler's politicking, again, this is part of where you see his genius for politics come into play, because he is going to have to fight against a lot of people in order to make the SS what they become.

And his situation here is buoyed by a few factors.

One of them is that his previous mentors, Rome and Strasser, were rapidly falling out of favor, right?

Once in power, he doesn't have to worry about either of them because it's clear, you know, Strasser's out and Rome is on the outs with Hitler.

So his main rival is Hermann Gehring, right?

And Gehring...

He's on paper someone you got to be really concerned about.

He's a war hero.

He took over the Red Baron's fighter squadron after the Red Baron Baron got killed in World War I.

Like he was a and he's famous.

Like he's a celebrity

for being such a good pilot.

And he was there.

He got badly wounded and went into hiding after the Munich beer hall putsch.

Like he's a hero for the party too.

So on paper, he's this guy, this is a formidable guy and he is Hitler makes he's Hitler's picked successor.

On paper, if Hitler were to die, Gehring is the one who's supposed to take over.

And he is initially given control of the Gestapo, the secret police in Prussia, the largest German state.

And he's basically in charge of policing in Prussia, which is a massive deal, right?

And so Himmler is going to be fighting to take all of this away from him.

Now, ultimately, this works for Himmler, and there's a couple of reasons.

One of them is that Goering always has other guys that he is fighting with over this who are themselves fighting for control of the Gestapo, of the different state police.

And Himmler is periodic

on several occasions going to seem like the lesser of two evils.

Like, well, if I back him in this, he'll get more power, but this guy I think is more my enemy will lose power.

And again, Himmler's the lowest threat, right?

Yeah.

Some of Gehring's judgment in this is thrown off by the fact that Gohing is a painkiller addict at this point.

He's popping oxies, their equivalent of oxies.

He is badly addicted and will be throughout the whole period the Reich is in power.

He goes on and off and stuff, but he doesn't get sober until Nuremberg.

I did not know that.

He is, so he is, and that's one of those things.

By the time they get in power, he's been a very competent member of the party up to this point.

He's old.

He's got a serious injury.

He's got chronic pain.

And he kind of just wants to fuck off and relax and enjoy being in power.

And so to an extent, that's why, because Himmler is purely focused on winning this struggle.

And it's never existential for Goering.

Going knows he's not going to wind up getting kicked out.

He's not going to get long knived.

He's not going to be iced out of power totally.

He just won't be in charge of the cops.

And he's got other shit in his portfolio, right?

He's got the Luftwaffe, you know?

Yeah.

So it's this kind of thing.

Himmler feels like, or Gehring feels like, I can afford to lose to Himmler, and I don't want to lose to some of these other guys that Himmler's positioned himself as a counter to.

And so through over this period of like a year and a half, two years, the first, you know, almost a little less than two years the Nazis are in power, Hitler over and over again takes over these different state police agencies that Gehring and other people had been in charge of.

And he's kind of methodically, when he can't take direct control of a police agency, he'll work and use his political

connections to appoint a member of the SS to head a local police force, right?

And then that police force isn't under the SS, but the guy heading it is my man.

And so I can still effectively order this group around, right?

Yeah.

One of Himmler's question.

I'm still trying to think like, okay, what's the cost benefit here?

Like the pros and cons

of being the crew that runs the camps?

Like, well, that's a good question.

What do you mean?

Yeah.

There's a couple of things that you gain from being the guys who run the camps.

And we'll talk, we're talking, because I wanted to introduce how the camps got started.

Wow.

Okay.

But the gist of it is that.

And this is with any organization, and this is actually my best, again, my best career advice is try to find a company doing something or like an organization doing something that you want to be doing that's new.

Yeah.

And then figure out what they're not doing yet and volunteer to do it.

Like stick yourself in and create a job for yourself.

And this is concentration camps are new.

Germany had not had a massive network of concentration camps for political prisoners, certainly not for racial prisoners during the Weimar era.

They'd had prisons, which is kind of where some of the first camps arise out of.

But the system is new.

And so there's going to be a bunch of people starting camps at the beginning.

The first concentration camps in Germany arise within days of Hitler taking power.

And they have a multitude of fathers.

Some camps are a local SA chapter.

We'll be like, time to round up the Jews we don't like and the communists we don't like in this city, right?

And we'll, you know, there's this old school that no one's operating.

We'll just break in, we'll throw them in there, we'll board it up and lock it up and we'll like beat and murder a bunch of them.

We'll keep them in there for a couple of weeks or whatever, right?

That's a wild concentration camp.

Those are what they're called.

So they're not, they're often not, not all of them are officially part of the government.

Because again, some of them are just the SA is doing it.

Yeah, so those are the indie bands.

All right.

Yes.

Yeah.

Those are the indie bands of concentration camps.

And some of them are created by local police.

There's these police agencies and, you know, they wind up or had already been run by Nazis.

And once Hitler's in power, they're able to be like, all right, let's start rounding up people and we'll take over these buildings, these old government buildings or whatnot that we weren't using or, you know, whatever, wherever we're putting them, we'll put people in a camp.

We'll murder some of them.

We'll torture the others.

And the SS creates some wild concentration camps of their own in this period using, you know, they've got the SD, this intelligence service.

So Heydrich's saying, we should grab these people in this state.

And they're doing it.

And so you've kind of got the SA and the local police and the SS all running some camps of their own, but none of them super official.

And Himmler knows we're going to keep doing camps and we can't keep doing it this way.

The Nazi state can't just have random wild concentration camps run by whoever.

That's just not acceptable.

We're going to need an organized system to destroy our enemies.

And the SS needs to have total control of that system, right?

And this is, he sees this as within the SS's purview because they're a knightly order with the goal of birthing a purified Aryan race.

And part of doing that is going to be getting rid of the people who should not be breeding, right?

And a camp's a great way to do that.

The bones of what become the official camp system start in police institutions established by the liberal Weimar government.

One such organ was the Munich political police, who had been ordered during the Weimar era to combat political extremism.

And because they're cops, that just meant fighting communists, right?

And so when the Nazis take over, Heinrich puts Reinhard Heydrich in charge of the Munich political police.

And they start arresting people, social democrats and communists and other leftists.

This is primarily political at first, and they use what they call protective custody, which is a legal term that allows them to arrest their political enemies and intern them in camps under the guise of keeping them safe, right?

Dachau is established as the first formal concentration camp in order to hold people in protective custody.

Himmler explained the term in a press conference.

I have made quite extensive use of protective custody.

I felt compelled to do this because in many parts of the city, there has been so much agitation that it has been impossible for me to guarantee the safety of those particular individuals who have provoked it.

I must emphasize one point in particular.

For us, a citizen of the Jewish faith is as much a citizen as someone who is not of the Jewish faith, and his life and property are subject to the same protection.

We make no distinction in this respect.

So you see, they still got to pretend, no, no, Jews are still citizens.

Wow.

Because a lot of these, because a lot of the leftists and whatnot they're going after are Jewish, right?

They're not targeting people primarily just because they're not randomly grabbing random Jews off the street for the most part.

That does happen.

They're mainly focusing on people who are politically opposed to them.

But if you're Jewish and a political enemy, that'll get you to the front of the line.

And you'll get in a, you'll be a lot more likely to get murdered, obviously.

But he's saying, like, no, no, no, we're not, we're arresting these guys because they're political agitators, but we want to keep them safe.

You know, we have a responsibility to these people.

So we got to lock up the Dachau for their own good.

Oh, yes.

Dachau begins operating in March of 1933.

This is very soon after Hitler takes power.

It is operated at first by the Munich police, but in April, using his authority as head of the Bavarian political police, Himmler gives the camp to the SS, right?

So he puts Heydrich in charge.

Dachau is established as a Munich police concentration camp.

And then in April of 33, Himmler gives the camp to the SS.

Lowerich writes that, quote, immediately after taking over the camp, the SS indulged in an orgy of violence, which cost four Jewish prisoners their lives.

Subsequent investigations revealed that the camp commandant, Hilmar Wackerl, had issued special regulations, according to which martial law was to prevail over the camp.

There was a camp court over which he presided and which could even pass death sentences.

So the SS takes over.

They immediately just start executing Jews.

And this commandant Wackerl is like, well, it's, you know, we had a court.

We just, I'm the court.

And I said they could do it.

Listen, we have a process and the process is asking me.

Yeah.

And I said he wouldn't be dying.

I said it's cool.

Again.

Taking power is a process.

There's still a media and there's still public opinion you have to deal with.

And this outrages Germans, right?

Near Dachau, especially that, like, oh, you're just murdering people?

That's not what we thought we were getting, right?

And so, state investigators demand Himmler explain why the murdered Juice has been killed.

And Himmler doesn't do this, he doesn't really take much action other than he replaces this commandant, right?

In order to smooth things over, he's like, Oh, obviously, this guy was just kind of a little out of pocket.

I'm going to put, don't worry, I got a new guy to put in.

Everything's going to be fine.

How do you like this disgraced and broken psychopath who owes everything to me?

Does that seem like a better picture?

Don't worry.

He'll do what I tell him.

Doc Al?

He'll do what I tell him.

This broken psychopath's name is Theodore Ike.

Ike had been, and he was a veteran in the military.

He'd been a paymaster, and he had tried in the Weimar era to become a police officer and repeatedly failed the entrance exam.

So we're already off to a great start.

Damn, when it when the police in Germany in the 20s is like, hey, fan.

Nah, man, nah.

Nah, gee.

You seem like too much of a crazy racist for us.

Yeah.

So the best he can manage, he's such a stereotype.

All he can manage is to become a security guard, right?

And frustrated at his failures, he joins the Nazi Party in 1928 and the SS soon after.

In 1932, he gets arrested after being caught building a bomb badly and he gets fired from his job.

Ike claims that he'd been set up by enemies inside the Nazi party, but was given a two-year prison sentence.

Now, because then and now, Nazis get treated with kids' gloves, even when they are arrested, Ike was allowed to leave prison when he claimed to be sick.

He's like, ah, go home for the weekend, you know, rest up.

And he just escapes to Italy during this period.

But he comes back in February of 33 because Hitler's in power and he's like, obviously, I won't go to prison now.

Oh, yeah, we're good now.

Yeah.

So Himmler invites him to Munich and he makes Ike promise to clean up his act.

But Ike gets into a brawl with the cops right after this and he gets arrested and they're like, oh, this guy's got a warrant.

So they send him to prison and he goes on a hunger strike, which gets him sent to a mental hospital.

And Himmler's like, oh, fuck this guy, removes him from the SS ranks for breaking his vow to stay out of trouble.

Now, luckily for Ike, the director of this clinic, this mental hospital that he winds up in, is a Nazi.

He would later help run the T4 euthanasia program.

And this Nazi murderer declares Ike sane.

So Himmler's like, well, if you're sane, welcome back to the SS.

How would you like to be commandant of Dachau?

We're good.

Yeah, the doc said we're good.

Wow.

Yeah.

And Ike later wrote of Himmler, if my Führer had not achieved power in Germany, I would have spent all of my life going to prison and would never have been able to take up public office.

Like, he writes this to Himmler, where he's like, I owe everything to this party.

That's the kind of guy the SS is recruiting.

What a sentence.

Yeah.

Hey, man.

I would have been nothing without Hitler.

Hey, man.

I'd have been in jail forever, but instead, I run the shit.

Wow, dog.

Yeah.

He knows

what side of his toast is buttered on.

Now, Ike proves to have a genius for the work.

He establishes guidelines along which all future camps will be created.

This is called the Dachau model, right?

That's what Eich establishes.

He's formalizing how camps are going to work in Germany.

Peter Longrich writes, among the essential elements of this system were the sealing off of the camp from the outside world, in particular the determination to prevent escapes, the separation of the guards from the commandant's office, the introduction of work details for the prisoners, systematized use of force through the introduction of a uniform set of punishments, the disciplinary and punishment code, as well as strict discipline for the guards, who were subject to a specific disciplinary code.

The aim of creating the impression that the old arbitrary regime had now been replaced by one that was strict but nevertheless bound by certain rules was an additional aspect of this new system.

In actual fact, the camp was ruled by arbitrary terror.

The prisoners lived in continual fear for their lives.

Ike was concerned, above all, to prevent arbitrary murders by the guards.

The right to kill prisoners should be confined solely to the camp authorities.

Now, this is never the case in practice.

Guards continue to murder prisoners through the entirety of of the KZ system, right?

That's the concentration camp system.

But by removing regular police from being involved at all and isolating the camps from the rest of German culture, Himmler and Ike create a fiction that the camps operate according to a rule of law because they're claiming they do and no one else gets to see inside, right?

So we're pretending these aren't just monuments to compulsive cruelty.

And this makes normal conservative German citizens feel safe and like justice is being done to their enemies.

Wow.

In roughly a year, Himmler, using the system Ike develops, births a system of camps for enemies of the Reich, owned and operated entirely by the SS, which he runs as a personal fiefdom, right?

And he gets, basically, they do so well at this that it's made the rule that any camps like this are going to be run by the SS.

There are a few erratic attempts by outside officials to investigate murders and enforce some accountability, but all of these fail.

And Himmler's most effective strategy is simply one of delay.

He'd use his friendship with other authorities to get hostile officials transferred or gummuff investigations until his foes leave office, right?

Yeah.

And then no one will, you know, nobody's, it's nobody's main job to be focused on the camps, right?

Like,

and this is, this is a massive coup, right?

You've gone from, well, this is like basically a club that people could join if they want to that doesn't have any real power outside of Hitler likes us to now we are officially running the secret prison force and are in charge of most of the law enforcement agencies in Germany

Space of like 18 months, that's how far they've gone.

Okay, yeah.

Question answered.

I'm like, okay, now I get it.

Now you need me.

And

yeah, now that, yeah, man, those tables are turning.

If were someone to feel froggy enough to be like,

I mean, obviously this couldn't have happened, but like.

I mean, if you run, if you in charge of all the goons and you're executing the whole plan, at some point, you could look at Hitler and be like, hey, bro,

I'm going to need you to stay in line.

I don't like the shit you're doing.

Like, you could do that if you weren't such a nerd involved in, you know, dream letters.

Right.

And that's, that's kind of the thing where there's this open, because Himmler saw himself at a certain point as like being, he really wanted to be the,

like the successor to Hitler.

Yeah.

And,

but I don't know that he ever would have, unless until I think maybe if Hitler had lived longer and gotten sick, you know, maybe something would have happened there.

But that's that's, you know, will have to remain kind of like a theory thing as to like, would he have ever been able to, did he, would he have had the juice to seize power if he'd tried?

But yeah, I don't, yeah, I don't, and he clearly, he ain't like, he not built for that.

Like, he ain't got that metal.

Yeah, you know what I'm saying?

You ain't, yeah, you're too light in a booty, dog.

You wasn't, you're not willing to.

Yeah.

Nope.

So the catalyzing moment for Himmler's personal power came during the night of long knives in June of 1934.

He'd succeeded in becoming probably the most powerful man in German law enforcement by this point, and in the spree of killing that followed, he'd helped eliminate not only his former mentors, Strasser and Rome, but dozens, probably hundreds, of other Nazis and conservative political and military leaders, right?

This is when, oh, all you guys who like thought you were kind of on our side, but you weren't totally bought into the whole Hitler thing, we'll just get rid of you if we think you might cause a problem, right?

And I want to quote from a summary in the private Heinrich Himmler.

The perpetrators of these murders came from the ranks of the SS.

They emerged stronger from this power struggle, finally separated themselves from the SA, and were designated by Hitler as an independent organization, especially obligated to him through their fidelity to the Führer.

Himmler was proud of the intimidation tactics of the SS.

In November 1935, he stated in a speech: There are many people in Germany who are sickened when they see this black uniform.

We understand that, and we do not expect to be loved by very many.

Oh, yeah, that's that's a badge of honor right there to be like that.

You know what I'm saying?

I know we got a lot of haters.

I know, you know what I'm saying?

Everybody ain't built like us.

Man, what?

Yeah.

But like, but you need to be scared because, like, that's our job now.

We were always the internal guard against the party, against people in the party who might be critical of Hitler.

Yeah.

And so you should be scared of us, motherfucker.

That's why we have power.

Yeah.

In 1936, Himmler is appointed chief of all German police directly by Hitler himself.

Now, this was a product of how deftly he'd maneuvered the SS as an instrument for internally policing party members.

Because the SS had proven so reliable, Hitler allowed him to begin establishing armed SS units in different cities.

The initial justification was always the need to protect Hitler from the enemy within.

We've got to have standing armed units ready in key locations in case there's an internal coup or whatnot, and we need to mobilize guys to protect Hitler right away.

Himmler is obviously so weak and unthreatening that most of the men like Goering, who should have treated him as a rival, considered him a useful idiot, right?

Someone, well, again, I can let this guy win some power.

He's not that dangerous.

And then eventually this guy winds up with a lot of power.

Yeah.

Himmler also succeeded by never ruffling the boss's feathers or making himself too much of a character in the media.

One of his occult mentors, von Liebenfels, fell out with Hitler for the simple reason that he'd written about a lot of Hitler's favorite racial theories before Hitler did, right?

We just walked out how, like, Hitler and Himmler were both inspired by this guy's nonsense.

And Hitler can't have that guy around once he's in power because then people are going to be like, well, these ideas were someone else's before they were Hitler's.

And that's simply not acceptable, right?

Another guy, one of the guys we've talked about, a Nazi mystic who fucked up, was Sabatendorf, the founder of the Tula Society, right?

This is the guy who founds the organization that Dietrich Eckart, founder of the Nazi Party, is in, this group, which is how Himmler first gets really tied to a lot of these people.

Sabotendorf becomes persona non-grata in January of 1933 because he publishes a book about the Nazi Party before Hitler.

Because Sabotendorf is there when Eckert is creating the original party.

And he's like, oh, people will be interested in the fact that there was a Nazi party before Hitler.

And Hitler's like, they absolutely won't.

No, they just

won't.

I'm banning your book, right?

Yeah.

Absolutely not, bro.

Yeah.

And so when word gets out to the Führer about this book, it's banned across the Reich.

And Sabottendorf has to flee the country to avoid winding up in Dachau himself.

Yeah, once again.

I was just going to say, yeah, like once again, like we talked about in the beginning of this show, I feel like this fine print is not very fine.

Like this was, this is in 52 size point font.

Yes.

What I say is what it is.

So

you should have, there's no way you didn't know that this book was not going to fly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

And so by the mid-30s, Heinrich Himmler, he's the top cop in Germany, but he's also one of very few high-ranking Nazis who are serious believers in the occult and these like weird mystical trappings that had once dominated the Volkish movement.

A lot of that has been pruned off as they reach mainstream power where they're like, maybe we don't need as much of this weird shit that like a lot of these bankers think it's kind of odd.

People seem to get weird.

They cool with all the murder and the

power shit.

But the magic, they don't like the magic.

Jeez,

I thought that was the fun part.

We're going to be wizards too.

Did you guys not get that memo?

Yeah, like

it's like...

Like, you know, it's like wizard.

Oh, no.

Nobody?

You don't like the wizard stuff, huh?

Okay, got it.

Got it.

Basically, the only occultist at a similar level of power, kind of in this period, is Rudolf Hess, who's the deputy leader of the Nazi Party.

And he's Hitler's, he and Hitler are cellmates.

He like co-writes Mein Kop with Hitler.

And Hess had been in the Tula Society and he's very, he's closer to Hitler personally than basically anyone.

We'll talk about what happens to him because he's going to wind up being a big part of why Hitler gets way less tolerant for the weird occult stuff in the future.

But at this point, in the mid-30s, Himmler is top of the world.

And it's just really him and Hess that are are like the weird magic guys in the Nazi party, in the higher echelons of the highest echelons of the Nazi Party.

So we are going to talk about what comes next in part fucking six, I guess.

So many episodes.

Gosh darn it.

I'm sorry.

You know what, though, but you need, we needed this.

We needed to understand.

There's a lot of Himmler to explain.

Yeah.

I feel like how this guy works and how he succeeded is really important for people to know as we like watch kind of what's shaking out with the first attempts of the different people around Trump to establish a new order.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then like the people who get like jettisoned out and like where they went wrong.

Like one thing I thought of right now is like, you know, where Elon screwed up was like, you like the camera too much.

You can't be on the camera.

You can't be two fears, man.

You can't be too fears over like, you know, yeah.

Nah, you see it.

Yeah, it's the, it's the problem that, like, yeah, it's too many Nazi syndrome, right?

Yeah.

Yeah,

that's the eternal issue.

So, folks, uh, this has been uh Behind the Bastards.

If you're looking to help out a charity, we're trying to help the Portland Defense Fund, which is an abolitionist organization that helps to bail people out of jail, primarily people who are going to need public defenders and have no money for bail or for legal assistance themselves.

You can go to donor box, just type in donor box defense fund PDX or go to at defense fund PDX on Venmo and send them a donation via Venmo.

They are an actual 501c

charitable organization, C3 charitable organization.

So, you know, it's tax deductible, all that good stuff.

Please help them out at Defense Fund PDX on Venmo.

Donor Box Defense Fund PDX.

And then a prop, obviously.

You got a pluggables to plug?

I do, man.

By the time this came out, I think

the thing I'm pushing now is i did i don't know if it's a surprise album as much as it's i just didn't do any pre promotions but it's it's a poetry album i finally made like a whole album of poetry it's called the beautiful endling and

it's kind of around you know a lot of the missions of coolzone where it's like okay look dude we're at the end of something like something is dying right now but what can come from this can be beautiful so like that's kind of what this poetry is about.

I realize that you and Sophie don't know that either.

So, like, wait, I need to send y'all the poetry album.

Yes, please.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, that's kind of what I'm pushing now.

Um, you know, and also Terraforms back, the cold coffee, please order that.

That's on my website, and everything's at prop hip hop.

Excellent.

All right, check out prop and check out the remainder of this series, which is somehow still going on, still going, still Himmlering, baby.

Jesus Christ.

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