Episode 642: Heinrich Himmler Part VI - Mein Cramps

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Speaker 1 There's no place to escape to this is the last podcast on the left.

Speaker 2 That's when the cannibalism started.

Speaker 2 What was that?

Speaker 1 I know we haven't even finished part six, but why don't we do seven?

Speaker 1 Honestly,

Speaker 1 this episode, because I got to kill so many Nazis with my words, I kind of got invigorated. I was like, I could do this fucking forever.

Speaker 1 I got like, I'm back in, I'm invigorated, I'm fucking ready to go. Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen.
My name is Marcus Barks. I'm here with Henry Zabrowski.

Speaker 1 Are you ready to kill some fucking Nazis, Henry? I'm always ready to kill some Nazis with kindness. Oh,

Speaker 1 that's the key. You always got to make them feel uncomfortable with being vulnerable.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Before we kill the Nazis, can we piss on them first?

Speaker 1 And we also have the urine-ready Ed Larson with us. I'm European.

Speaker 1 European.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we're here. We're at part six.
We are at the conclusion to our series on Heinrich Himmler. The first head of the Mount Rushmore of Evil is almost chiseled in stone completely.

Speaker 1 And I love that this one is probably not even the most unpleasant one. No, this is the most pleasant one.
Yeah, this is even.

Speaker 1 Dude, wait till we get to the other three. I think you're talking about, you're talking about the Mount Rushmore of evil.
Yeah. Some of those are going to be pretty upsetting.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 Hamlin? Oh, yeah, but

Speaker 1 different.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, different. Different.
Yeah, let's say different. Yeah, it's like we wanted to upset people in as many ways as we could.
Oh, that's the goal. Good, good, good.
Every way.

Speaker 1 Would the next guy be like a doctor?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 No, because doctors have high

Speaker 1 lawyers.

Speaker 1 You're a prosecutor.

Speaker 1 Those bastards always trying to tell me I can't smoke weed. You fucking prosecutor piece of shit.
I'm with you, buddy.

Speaker 1 I'm going to fucking pull your pants down and slap your tush because it looks like two Himmlers next to each other. Now we're in trouble.

Speaker 1 Let's get into this shit and let's put Himmler in the fucking ground. Oh, yes.

Speaker 1 So when we last left Heinrich Himmler, the scope of the Nazis' ambition concerning Liebensraum and the final solution was finally starting to catch up with them.

Speaker 1 See, by the end of 1941, the Nazis had spread across Europe like a disease, and it had been the SS and the Gestapo under Heinrich Kimmler's command that had kept the people of Europe in a state of constant terror, where anyone could be sent to a concentration camp or outright executed for standing up to Nazi rule.

Speaker 1 In the West, Germany had conquered and occupied the majority of continental Europe with the help of their fascist Italian allies.

Speaker 1 And in countries like France, Norway, and the Netherlands, the Nazis were using the Gestapo to root out and kill Jews wherever they found them.

Speaker 1 In the East, the Nazis had run riot over Poland, Czechoslovakia, and large swaths of the Soviet Union.

Speaker 1 And Himmler's Einsatzgruppen units had slaughtered millions in pursuit of the Nazi dream of Liebensraum.

Speaker 1 But the problem the Nazis had in 1941 was twofold. First, the invasion of the Soviet Union had been badly planned.
Oh, they were going to say it was an attitude problem.

Speaker 1 Continue. Yes, first of all, I do think that they were were sour.

Speaker 1 Way too much emphasis had been put on committing mass murder at the expense of working out the logistics of waging war in Russia during wintertime, which is, to say the least, a notoriously daunting task.

Speaker 1 Yeah, General January, General February. There you go.

Speaker 1 But perhaps the larger problem the Nazis had, or at least the more unexpected one, was that their other ally in World War II, Japan, they were going rogue and making decisions based on their own visions of imperial conquest.

Speaker 1 Too many cooks. Yep.
See, the Nazis could handle the Russians just so long as Stalin was forced to keep troops on the eastern border that Russia shared with China.

Speaker 1 Japan had a long-standing beef with Russia, and since Japan had spent the 1930s creating their own special version of hell in Manchuria, they were well capable of pushing on into the Soviet Union.

Speaker 1 But when Japan decided that they were going to declare war on the United States instead with a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor because of our oil embargoes and because they wanted the lands we controlled in the Pacific, Papa Joe Stalin could take all those Soviet troops stationed in the east and shove them right up the Nazis' asses.

Speaker 1 And that's why FDR jumped out of that chair and clicked his heels, knowing that that opportunity had finally fallen upon his numb as a sheet of metal lap.

Speaker 1 Hey, you boys went into Charleston?

Speaker 1 The thing was, Japan didn't even tell Hitler what they were doing.

Speaker 1 But while you'd think good old Adolf would be incredibly angry about being kept in the dark, because Japan had to keep this secret as tight as possible, that wasn't the case at all.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he was just like, thank you for anticipating me.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 That's what the good partner does.

Speaker 1 Are we allowed to call him sneaky?

Speaker 1 That's sneaky. We're not even talking to Hitler about killing American.
Super sneaky. That's sneaky.
It's the sneakiest you can get. And that's the biggest crime.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the lies.

Speaker 1 At least tell me the truth.

Speaker 1 While Hitler was certainly surprised after Pearl Harbor, he was ultimately pleased because he believed war with Japan would not only keep America busy and out of the European theater, but it would also, at the very least, slow down the aid that America had been giving to the UK since the beginning of their fight with the Nazis.

Speaker 1 Hitler, however, was a fucking idiot.

Speaker 1 The German generals who actually had a brain knew that all was lost for Germany the moment America entered the war because Japan had awoken a so-called sleeping giant with near unlimited resources and a hell of a taste for revenge.

Speaker 1 Come to America

Speaker 1 kicking him out. God, we love to kill.
It's like, come on, guys. I know we pretend to be good, but remember, we kill.
Give me a goddamn reason to kill. Give me a reason.
We do it many different ways.

Speaker 1 We do it with guns. We do it with drones.
We do it with disease. Give us a goddamn reason.

Speaker 1 It's almost good that when we have a war because then we don't kill our own people as much not as much yeah yeah yeah

Speaker 1 yeah ah yeah maybe it's all the bios

Speaker 1 So forces in Europe and around the world, some 26 governments in all, including America, they allied in 1942 to begin fighting back against the Axis powers with a specific eye towards stopping the incredibly destructive and murderous Nazi war machine.

Speaker 1 And I want to say thank you to everybody for understanding that we're doing all of the conflicts of World War II in one episode.

Speaker 1 Understand that it's just one episode. We're skipping the war, okay? Because you know what happened.
It's not a World War II series. It's a Himmler series.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 And we're not necessarily skipping the war. We're still talking about the war.
We're just not going into the battles necessarily because there are other podcasts who do that far better than we do.

Speaker 1 After you're done with this series, please go listen to the Hardcore History Series on the Eastern Front. It's fucking incredible.
But yeah, they know how to do military history.

Speaker 1 We know how to do shitheads. Yes.

Speaker 1 Well, as a result of these 26 countries coming together, the German people began to see that there were dire consequences for following a fascist leader like Adolf Hitler.

Speaker 1 In 1943, the Allies launched the appropriately named Operation Gomorrah, and over seven days of continued bombing, British and American forces showed the people of Hamburg the meaning of the word biblical.

Speaker 1 God's angry and he's Jewish.

Speaker 1 I mean, personally, I believe that the hamburgers should have been left alone.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 The firestorms generated by the Allies during the bombing of Hamburg spanned over eight square miles, creating flames a mile high.

Speaker 1 An estimated 30,000 German civilians were burned alive, and that was only a preview of the hell the German people were about to endure as a result of the hell that the Nazis had unleashed upon others.

Speaker 1 Now, that's not to say that we believe roasting civilians by the thousands was the right thing to do. No, it's the fun thing to do.
Yes, we know that. We know what's fun.

Speaker 1 There's a difference between what's right and what's fun. Yeah, and you cook hamburgers.
Everyone knows you cook a hamburger. Yeah, you can eat raw hamburger.
Got to get an intense sear on that.

Speaker 1 Get the Maillard effect.

Speaker 1 I mean, there were thousands of Germans who were decidedly anti-Nazi who died in these bombings.

Speaker 1 But it is nevertheless a sign that on this last episode of our series, we're finally going to put some of these Nazis into the fucking ground where they belong, including Adolf Hitler's number one special boy, Heinrich Himmler.

Speaker 1 Ah, he Himmler. And then it's going to be sad because Hitler's main struggle is going to be finding a good friend.

Speaker 1 Especially at the end. He can't have one.
Yeah, because he's got to watch all the families fuck each other in the bunker.

Speaker 1 One day we will do the last weeks of the bunker as its own episode series. The bunker is incredible.
Because it's that is truly my expertise in this whole thing. Oh, my God.
I watched Downfall.

Speaker 1 That movie fucking rocks. I love Downfall.
Downfall is so good. That guy's great as Hitler.
You know what I'm saying? Best Hitler ever.

Speaker 1 He is the best Hitler ever. You're right.

Speaker 1 He loves that. I love that show on VH1.
Whatever happened to it?

Speaker 1 Best Hitler ever. Michael Ian Black was hilarious in that.
He was great. Were you on that show? Yes.

Speaker 1 Yes. God, it was me.
It was me, Michael Ian Black, Carrot Top, Heinrich Himmler's grandson. Yeah, yeah, you got you got fired because your mustache was too wide.
Yeah, that's what they said.

Speaker 1 Jews linked. By the way, we totally fucked up by not getting this whole series sponsored by him.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, as we discussed in our series on the Manhattan Project, World War II wasn't just fought and won in the massive battles.

Speaker 1 Many of the most important operations were small covert affairs, and it was indeed a small affair that took down the creator of the Einsatzgruppen, Himmler's number two guy, Reinhard Heydrich.

Speaker 1 Now, unlike Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich actually got his hands dirty as Himmler's top man in the SS.

Speaker 1 Heydrich had been responsible for the invasion and the brutal occupation of Czechoslovakia, in which hundreds of Czechs were executed or sent to concentration camps on Heydrich's orders.

Speaker 1 Heydrich was so notorious that his actions in Czechoslovakia led the Czechs to call him the butcher of Prague.

Speaker 1 Now, the surviving members of the Czech government were operating in exile out of England after the Nazi takeover, and they wanted to make a big statement to the Germans and to the world at large that they weren't going to take the Nazi invasion lying down.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we take it ass up.

Speaker 1 Like how we like it, because our back hurts. Yeah, ass to ass.
Yeah, fuck me. Yeah, Nazi.
I love it. Yeah, stick it in.
Stick it in. I like it.
Look me in the eyes. Can we target this, please?

Speaker 1 I would love to have his first funeral.

Speaker 1 Hey, you're diet first.

Speaker 1 So the Czechs, working with British intelligence services, trained dozens of their own resistance agents in the ways of infiltration and assassination for an operation that came to be known as Operation Anthropoid.

Speaker 1 Yeah!

Speaker 1 Why was it called anthropoid?

Speaker 1 What does that term mean? They just choose names, you know? Sometimes they do. I feel like it's supposed to be random, and sometimes they have like inner hidden jokes, right?

Speaker 1 Maybe they think a squish-a-bug type of joint. Oh, resembling.
Oh, honestly, resembling a human being in form. Ah, yeah.
So it's, yeah. Reinhard Heydrich was not quite human.
I get it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it's incredible.
There's four movies made about Operation Anthropoid. Going back to the first movie was made in 1943, the year after it happened.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, we got to make a movie about this shit. Yeah, it just did, because it was the only one that really worked.
It was the only assassination plan, right? Of all the notes.

Speaker 1 I mean, I don't know, so I'm just talking out of my butt. I actually don't know either.
Yes. If it was the only one that actually worked.
They know Operation Valkyrie went after Hitler.

Speaker 1 That didn't work. Well, that's because it was a bunch of Nazis doing it.
You know what the fuck they're doing? Well, we'll get to that later.

Speaker 1 And Tom Cruise tried to learn the handbook as quickly as he could.

Speaker 1 Still, so tiny, too tiny to play that guy. But anyway.

Speaker 1 Well, two men were ultimately chosen for Operation Anthropoid to parachute directly into Nazi-occupied Prague in May of 1942.

Speaker 1 And they had only one purpose: put an end to Reinhard Heydrich, one of the Third Reich's most evil villains.

Speaker 1 The secret agents met Heydrich's car on the road to Prague and pulled out a couple of stenned submachine guns with the intention of murdering Heydrich like Sonny and the Godfather.

Speaker 1 Give me the loot, give me the loot! Yeah! Bucka, bucka, bucka, bucka! I mean, it is pretty fucking awesome. Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1 of a car just like,

Speaker 1 but it didn't work like that. Nope.
But since the stens were made fast and cheap, the guns jammed.

Speaker 1 Improvising, one of the Czech agents tried throwing an anti-tank grenade known as a thermos into the car's window, but his aim was off and the grenade exploded near the rear tire of Heydrich's car instead.

Speaker 1 Now, Heydrich was injured in the blast, but he was still able to open the door and fire a few shots at the Czech agents as they escaped.

Speaker 1 But even though the agents hadn't obliterated Heydrich on sight into a mush of hamburger meat, what they'd done instead was far more satisfying.

Speaker 1 The grenade blast had maimed Heydrich, injuring his spine, his legs, and spleen.

Speaker 1 And after he collapsed on the scene, he was taken to a hospital where he died a slow, painful death from sepsis over the next five days. I know we're supposed to save these, but

Speaker 1 that guy's good.

Speaker 1 It's good to get him.

Speaker 1 The agents were killed by the Gestapo three weeks later, but they had nevertheless managed to take Reinhard Heydrich off the board, which was a massive blow to Heinrich Himmler's plans with the SS.

Speaker 1 Yeah, man, you had to kill that motherfucker. He was brutal.

Speaker 1 He was the worst, probably the worst of all of them in a weird way, just because he loved doing it himself. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, and like he liked to be there holding the person as they died, but it was his own fucking piece of shit and cockiness that got him because he would always travel in the convertible all around the town that he had just destroyed.

Speaker 1 Like, as like a go fuck yourself type of situation and so they were able to and nazis are always like very like in like what organized you know and so they knew exactly when he was going to be showing up in that convertible and it was an easy kill yeah that that was the whole joke about uh the nazis making the trains run on time the whole thing what the nazis making the trains run on time did was it made the allies very easy to know exactly when to bomb the trains yeah you got to be unpredictable sometimes that's why that's why America works.

Speaker 1 We're chaos. Oh, yeah, you think we're zagging? We're zigging.
Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty good.

Speaker 1 Also, you wonder if in the sequence, like, you know, in God of Father, when the oranges fall, right, every single time one of them dies, do you think it's just a big, sloppery plate of bratwurst that slides out of the tits of a big German woman?

Speaker 1 Oh, my God, I'm a Zaglusi. That's simple.

Speaker 1 Now, even though Heinrich Himmler didn't trust Reinhardt Heydrich, he was still devastated by the death of his number two.

Speaker 1 I've been waiting for fucking so many episodes. I've said number two, Heinrich's number two so many times.
We've been waiting until the final episode. It's nice.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I gotta wait till he farts himself to fucking death and sepsis and fucking

Speaker 1 Dookie. You died a Dookie, you're a two.
You fucking turned off. But we cannot really overstate how dangerous he was.
We really can't.

Speaker 1 But, you know, Himmler was very upset, if only because it showed how vulnerable every top Nazi really was. Oh, they can get him.
Oh, yeah. Apparently, grenades do the trick.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you throw a grenade at a guy, he blows up.

Speaker 1 Now, Himmler might have been discouraged after the death of his top man, but he instead continued his expansion of the Holocaust into its final form when he unveiled the mass murder factory that was Auschwitz.

Speaker 1 In July of 1942, just a month after Heydrich's death, Himmler traveled to Poland to oversee a demonstration of the camp's first gas chamber, which naturally met his approval.

Speaker 1 The trains therefore began running to Auschwitz en masse with the goal of killing as many Jewish people as possible as fast as possible.

Speaker 1 But while Himmler's desire to wipe out all of the undesirables was only increasing by the day, the Nazis still needed slave labor to keep the Nazi war machine going.

Speaker 1 That was the whole thing with Nazi Germany, is that Nazi Germany could only grow if they took what they needed, if they stole what they needed. I need a factory, give it to me.

Speaker 1 I need people, give it to me. That was the only way Nazi Germany worked.

Speaker 1 That's why they had to constantly be on the move, why they always had to be conquering a new country, conquering a new territory. War was the only thing that drove them.

Speaker 1 Without war, the whole thing fell apart. They were literally

Speaker 1 hell. Yeah, and they were literally plundering.
And it's actually kind of similar to how their Germanic ancestors slowly carved their way against the Roman Empire, the original Roman Empire.

Speaker 1 Pirates. Yeah.
Vikings.

Speaker 1 Goths. Vandals.

Speaker 1 See, the prisoners being detained at the thousands of concentration camps across Europe, there's about

Speaker 1 at least, there's estimated like maybe like 40,000 concentration camps, like of like tiny size, depending on what you call concentration camps, but there were well over a thousand of the major ones.

Speaker 1 That's crazy. My mind is there's always like 12.
No, it's over a thousand.

Speaker 1 Is there like just like 12 like huge ones? Is that what it is? Do you have express ones you go into? You got the common drive through. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 some of them have a Taco Bell in them some are full service some are self-service the self-service ones are really fucking because that goes after the self-hating Jews

Speaker 1 the Jews for Jesus

Speaker 1 well these prisoners worked 60 hour weeks at least and the death rate due to disease malnutrition and executions had become so high that the slave labor mechanism that Nazi Germany needed to survive was grinding to a halt so Himmler issued an order across the camp system that the death rate had to be reduced.

Speaker 1 Although this is sort of the beginning of mixed messages from Himmler when it came to exactly what the Nazis were doing with the concentration camps. In other words, mass murder is complicated.

Speaker 1 It's a little complicated. And the plot was starting to get lost.

Speaker 1 See, by 1942, the perpetual motion of violence that had sprung from Himmler's furious hatred was too far gone to slow it down in any meaningful way.

Speaker 1 Even outside of straight extermination, Himmler treated his slave labor prisoners worse than animals. Hell, you treat your tools better than Himmler treated these people.
He didn't hate his tools.

Speaker 1 Yes. It was Himmler's policy that each and every prisoner be worked until they dropped dead.

Speaker 1 And if Himmler needed more slave labor, all he had to do was expand the parameters of what got you sent to the camps.

Speaker 1 The policy was extermination by default, either through working prisoners to death or immediately exterminating those who couldn't or wouldn't work.

Speaker 1 Prisoners who wouldn't work, by the way, were executed on Himmler's orders by other prisoners who happily hung their fellow inmates for the price of three cigarettes per hanging.

Speaker 1 I mean, happily might be a little.

Speaker 1 I mean, they were bought.

Speaker 1 You know what some people say, I do it for the cigarettes? No, I do it for the company.

Speaker 1 I mean, these guys. I love these guys.
These executioner guys, I

Speaker 1 love these guys.

Speaker 1 Well, these these guys in this, they were volunteers.

Speaker 1 They were guys like, yeah, who wants to? Because, you know, Himmler was trying to traumatize the least amount of SS men as possible. He's like, I will have the prisoners do it.

Speaker 1 Because, you know, the concentration camps, there were some true criminals there, some true psychopaths.

Speaker 1 I mean, remember, Oscar Derlewanger, like, recruited a lot of psychopaths from the concentration camps because at this point, Heinrich Himmler made a ruling, made a law that any German who got a prison sentence longer than 18 years was sent to the concentration camps.

Speaker 1 Okay, so they still had like prisons. Yeah, oh, yeah, they had straight up just other prisons, too.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so if you, you know, were convicted of murder in Nazi Germany, you got sent to a concentration camp.

Speaker 1 So you had plenty of amoral people there who were willing to kill whoever for a few cigarettes. Oh, okay.
Well, that's better.

Speaker 1 That's cleared up.

Speaker 1 Now, it might go without saying, but Himmler's need to exterminate the Jews became his all-consuming obsession as the years went by.

Speaker 1 To Himmler, the existence of a single Jew in Eastern Europe was personally offensive. But while this might sound weird, not every Nazi wanted every Jewish person dead.

Speaker 1 Or at the very least, they didn't, and this is probably more accurate, they didn't see the need to spend so much time and so many resources murdering every single one of them.

Speaker 1 They're in the middle of a war. Yeah, they are.
It's a distraction. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Himmler would actually get into arguments with other top Nazis about what he was doing, but he could always fall back on the claim that everything was being done on Hitler's orders, and the other Nazis would do well to not question the vision of the Führer.

Speaker 1 This, however, was not just a claim. It was the truth.
See, while Himmler was more loyal to Nazism than he was to Hitler personally, he still very much loved Hitler. It's so hard not to.

Speaker 1 Separate the art from the artist.

Speaker 1 He was still a big fan. Because aside from a few of the diehards, Hitler was the only other guy out there who hated Jewish people as badly as Himmler did.

Speaker 1 But there was also nobody else out there who was as scared of the Jews as Hitler was. You know, it's kind of like that guy who stands up the motorcycle for Rob Halford every night on Judas Priest.

Speaker 1 He keeps the dream alive. Like, yeah, we know it's on a track, but they pretend to wheel it out.

Speaker 1 They pretend to start it up for him.

Speaker 1 That's Heinrich Himmler. Oh, okay.
Yeah, it's the guy who makes the guitars spin for Zizi Top.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I got you.

Speaker 1 Is Is he ZZ Top if the guitars don't spin? Yes.

Speaker 1 Is Hitler Hitler without killing all the Jews? No, yeah, no. You can't just kill some of them once you start.
Yeah, but him. Do we also isolate that as well?

Speaker 1 There's several of these I want to do. We'll put the timestamp on that.
It's like third, 20 minutes. It is hard to make this kind of funny.

Speaker 1 I am doing everything I can by betraying my people.

Speaker 1 No, you're not betraying your people. You are participating in a long and beautiful beautiful tradition that goes all the way back to, it's springtime.
Time for Hitler and Germany.

Speaker 1 Wow, we're terrible. Yep.
Hey, man, we ain't going to Broadway. I don't need it, dude.

Speaker 1 Bloated, man.

Speaker 1 Arm of the Masab, dude. Well, the point here is that Himmler did have a lot of respect for Adolf Hitler.
By the early 1940s, Hitler and Himmler had known each other for 20 years. Oh, that's like us.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And Hitler believed that there was no Nazi more loyal than Heinrich Himmler. But aside from their shared love of Liebensraum, Himmler was actually loyal, yes.

Speaker 1 But it was mostly because Hitler was a super scary guy who actually frightened Himmler quite a bit.

Speaker 1 You might say that about it.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? You might call him a little bit of a scary guy. Yeah, he was intimidating.
Yeah, he had a lot going on there. And he got, you know, his whims were kind of hard to follow.

Speaker 1 When you yell every word you say, you know, it gets a little crazy. It's just hard, you know.
But people react the same way to me. Do we think think Hitler actually killed people with his own hands?

Speaker 1 He saw action. Yeah, I mean, he did see action, but he was a messenger.
He wasn't an actual soldier in World War I. He just ran messages between the trenches.
That last thing I saw was so crazy.

Speaker 1 I just saw the bloodiest shit ever. So I cry, oh, you want me to send your subscription in to best German ever?

Speaker 1 So sometimes you do have to kill the messenger. Sometimes, you would, if they were correct.
Yeah. No, there is actually a story that a British soldier told that he had the opportunity to kill Hitler.

Speaker 1 He remembered him and he had totally had the opportunity while Hitler was running messages during World War I and he decided to spare his life. Wow.

Speaker 1 Mistake. Yeah.
Fucking dumb-dumb. Never do that, guys.
Soldiers? Never do that. Honestly, I kill them all.

Speaker 1 Now, I know we're deep into something, but who had the hair cut first? Himmler or Hitler?

Speaker 1 You know what? I would say parallel thinking. Parallel thinking? It was the the zeitgeist.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 They killed him too, unfortunately.

Speaker 1 Well, for Hitler's part, he became attached to Heinrich Himmler, partly because one of the SS's main functions from the beginning was to protect Hitler from assassinations.

Speaker 1 So Himmler acted almost like a security blanket for the Führer.

Speaker 1 But more importantly, Hitler knew that Himmler's remarkable skills as an administrator and Himmler's dedication to Nazi Party doctrine meant that Himmler would carry out any order that Hitler gave him without objection, no matter how abominable it may be.

Speaker 1 And Himmler would probably add in a few ideas of his own to make it all that much worse. Just the idea of making Hitler go, like, damn Heinrich.

Speaker 1 Just expecting it wanted to get a handshake from Paul Hollywood.

Speaker 1 Man, and for all of you playing the Himmler drinking game at home, that was a tough,

Speaker 1 that was a tough, tough paragraph.

Speaker 1 Hammler knew that Hamler would hate Red

Speaker 2 Buy from North Wave.

Speaker 1 The year is 2012.

Speaker 1 The setting, New York City.

Speaker 1 There are a thousand stories in the naked city, and this one is about blood. Vampires are real.
They stalk the streets, feeding on the living. Nobody is safe.

Speaker 1 Join me, Henry Zabrowski, along with Jackie Zabrowski and veteran TRPG player Ross Bryant, for an actual play series set in the Vampire the Masquerade universe from the mind of game master Jared Looker.

Speaker 1 The show will premiere on the LPN TV YouTube channel starting on Wednesday, October 29th, and will release.

Speaker 1 People will die,

Speaker 1 then get back up and bite you. Will my character succumb to the beast within? Can Jackie navigate the Byzantine intrigues?

Speaker 1 The future is a mystery. All we know is it's gonna be a bloodbath.

Speaker 1 LPN RPG presents Bloodbath every Wednesday on the LPN TV YouTube channel. It all begins on October 29th.

Speaker 1 Enjoy the mysteries.

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Speaker 1 Now, the problem with being Adolf Hitler's main dude was that it came with a lot of responsibility. Because if anything defines a Nazi, it's being busy.

Speaker 1 But after Reinhard Heydrich was killed, Himmler had lost his most capable subordinate in carrying out Hitler's most diabolical orders.

Speaker 1 Because Hitler insisted on doing everything himself, he therefore carried the full burden of carrying out the policies of mass murder after Heydrich's death, and the resulting stress only exacerbated the lifelong health problems that were caused by Himmler's weak constitution.

Speaker 1 More dookie talk. I get it, man.

Speaker 1 I get it, man. Stress is the killer.
It's not concentration camps.

Speaker 1 See, Himmler was above all a very very nervous man, and his constant anxiety, paranoia, and hatred would cause intense stomach cramps. This was a lifelong problem.

Speaker 1 But eventually, Himmler found a solution in the form of an Estonian-born massage therapist from Finland named Felix Kirsten.

Speaker 1 Now, Felix Kirsten was said to be a mild-mannered man with kind eyes and a quote, sensual mouth.

Speaker 1 Yeah, God. Oh, yeah.
Kiss him. Yeah, Felix.
Yeah. Yeah, feel me, Felix.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Oh, God damn.
You kissed that pete as well. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Jesus. Gross.

Speaker 1 I hated that.

Speaker 1 I really didn't like any part of that. Yeah, I did.
Anyway. You don't want to get a sensual mouth.

Speaker 1 Well, Felix Kirsten had a gift. for easing the anxiety of even his most neurotic patients.
Wow. And he was therefore idolized by his clients.

Speaker 1 As such, Heinrich Himmler was so taken with Felix Kirsten's massage treatments that Felix became the most influential person in Heinrich Himmler's life following the death of Reinhard Heydrich.

Speaker 1 And as a result, this is true. Felix would play a surprisingly large role in the story of World War II.
Far larger than one would expect from any one masseur.

Speaker 1 Technically, this man, I would put this as Himmler's Mike Lindell.

Speaker 1 Right? If we're going to duke as my pillow guy,

Speaker 1 if Mike Lindell could have had a more positive influence earlier, right i can see this being him being like what i see you need here oh i see you just aren't sleeping right you need a new pillow right if he fixed everything with his pillows mike lindell would have the same effect here i actually see where you're going with you know i'm

Speaker 1 now as far as how felix kirsten became so good at massage that he ended up influencing the events of the most destructive war in history these two fingers

Speaker 1 he first became interested in the art when he was hospitalized for rheumatism while fighting in the trenches of World War I for the Germans.

Speaker 1 According to Felix, the doctor who treated him in the Helsinki Military Hospital remarked that Felix's strong, plump hands and broad, short fingers

Speaker 1 are ideally suited to massage. Oh, I could grip and rip, dude.
Yeah. So when Felix returned to Finland, he earned a degree in scientific massage, then moved to Berlin in 1922.

Speaker 1 I'd make Himmler fall asleep in seconds with these hands. Yeah? He is like, Himmler is like silly putty, but oh, yeah.
I guess irrational putty. I would say

Speaker 1 hateful putty.

Speaker 1 Well, in Berlin, Felix Kirsten claims he found a mentor who introduced him to a fragile old Chinese masseur named Dr.

Speaker 1 Ko, who had learned about the ancient art of massage in Heinrich Himmler's favorite Asian country, Tibet. I love that kind of Asian.

Speaker 1 Supposedly using Dr. Ko's techniques, Felix Kirsten began building a substantial client list in Berlin throughout the 1930s.

Speaker 1 These clients were mostly made up of upper and middle-class people who didn't really see why others were making such a big deal about this whole Nazi thing. And Felix felt the same way.

Speaker 1 Oh, Felix loved feeling him. He just likes a knot that he can unleash.

Speaker 1 See, Felix claimed again and again that he wasn't interested in politics, nor was he aware of anything quote-unquote political happening around him. Every masseuse has always been the same.

Speaker 1 They're all like, they're all such. They're all like this.
They all turned weirdly into fascists.

Speaker 1 It's all like this.

Speaker 1 Sound is not a bath.

Speaker 1 Well, sure. Felix said that he was shocked and offended by the anti-Semitism and by the Nazi police state.
Everything about it.

Speaker 1 But he said that he, quote, forced himself to not dwell on injustices he could personally do nothing about.

Speaker 1 Now, this might have just been Felix trying to avoid the trauma of the suffering he endured in the trenches of World War I.

Speaker 1 But Felix said that instead of focusing on the injustices of others, he dedicated himself to getting as much pleasure as he could out of life.

Speaker 1 And as such, Felix Kirsten is the closest thing to a character from Cabaret that we're going to get in this entire series. See.

Speaker 1 Now, Finland was cozy with the Nazis because both of them hated the Soviet Union. And Felix Kirsten, they weren't necessarily allies.

Speaker 1 They were what you would call co-belligerents. Okay.
And Felix Kirsten had earned a reputation amongst high-ranking officials in the Finnish government as a miracle worker. A squeeze is Christ.

Speaker 1 Apparently, a Finnish official had mentioned Felix's skills to Heinrich Himmler after Himmler had complained about his chronic stomach issues.

Speaker 1 So in March of 1939, Felix got a message that he was to travel to Berlin immediately to give Heinrich Himmler a massage. Oh, I must go and get on my lube.

Speaker 1 I must be sore slippery for the Fuhrers number two.

Speaker 1 Incredibly, as Felix's hands kneaded and pressed upon Himmler's horrible little body, Felix found the nerve centers that caused Himmler's stomach cramps.

Speaker 1 Himmler, meanwhile, jabbered on during the massage about how his stomach troubles robbed him of the energy that he needed to do his quote-unquote important work. Yeah, I can feel it right here.

Speaker 1 It's in the shoulder, in the right shoulder. Do you you write forms ordering gas with this side?

Speaker 1 I can feel it in here. Yeah, yeah.
Is it too much, you think?

Speaker 1 I'm kind of thinking that. Can you switch to stamps?

Speaker 1 Instead of writing it out, maybe you could switch to the left hand because I can feel on this side because this is more for, ooh, I feel this. This is your slap and juice side, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah,

Speaker 1 I can feel like the...

Speaker 1 Yeah, I can feel the joy here.

Speaker 1 It's over here. I can see that you're bunched up by schedules.
Too many schedules at all, right? Yes. let me get in there.

Speaker 1 Come over my belly.

Speaker 1 Now remember, this is early 1939. This is before the invasion of Poland.
It's before the Einsatzgruppen. It's before the worst of the Holocaust.
He had these ideas on the massage table?

Speaker 1 No, what I'm saying is that it's not like he had the ideas on the massage table, but Himmler was still a known quantity. He was known as the guy who hated Jews.

Speaker 1 But Felix knew nothing about Himmler's so-called important work work because Felix didn't care about politics.

Speaker 1 And sure enough, by the end of that first session, Felix had eased Himmler's pain for the first time in Himmler's miserable life, thereby enabling Himmler to fully focus on the task at hand.

Speaker 1 That task, of course, was the Holocaust.

Speaker 1 All better now.

Speaker 1 Ah, God. Oh, yeah, I could write write so many more forms now.
It's true. I know.
It's true. I'm just sitting here picturing this guy because his belly hurt.

Speaker 1 So I just picture him just rubbing his belly a bunch. Like, it's not even like a good massage.

Speaker 1 I'm making his belly talk.

Speaker 1 I want to Jews. He sounds like you.

Speaker 1 He sounds like you.

Speaker 1 Now, for Heinrich Himmler, Felix's massages were a confirmation of his beliefs regarding modern medicine.

Speaker 1 Nazis, on the whole, regarded 20th century medicine as a degenerate science because of the influence of Jewish doctors. So, Nazis were all about alternative medicine and homeopathic remedies.

Speaker 1 In fact, Felix Kirsten said that Hammler was fully intending to force his own personal medicinal beliefs on the entire Reich after the war.

Speaker 1 If Heinrich Himmler had his way, there would be no chemical treatments of any kind and definitely no vaccines.

Speaker 1 It sounds like a really great idea. I actually wonder what they'll actually hear

Speaker 1 some good ideas.

Speaker 1 I wonder what they're gonna do.

Speaker 1 So basically, if we had enough time, they would have just died off on their own. Eventually, yeah,

Speaker 1 mumps would have taken this whole bitch ass system out.

Speaker 1 Well, instead, the people under the Third Reich's boot would use herbs, crystals, and massage treatments to treat anything and everything, including broken bones and cancer. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Like many of today's homeopathic influencers, Himmler's philosophy was heal his way or die. It's like, say what you want about the Jews, but use the doctors.
You know, you know, use the doctors.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Just let it, you know, like, I mean, look at Kanye.

Speaker 1 You know, he hates the Jews and all this shit, but if he wasn't such a, if he didn't hate Jews so much, he would have been able to find a good Jewish doctor to give his mom that boob job. Disgusting.

Speaker 1 Disgusting.

Speaker 1 Now, because Felix Kirsten was able to treat Himmler's cramps, Himmler insisted Mein

Speaker 1 That was the name of his book.

Speaker 1 Mein Kramps!

Speaker 1 Himmler insisted that Felix remain in his exclusive service every day for as long as Himmler wished.

Speaker 1 As a carrot, Himmler even gave Felix the rank of colonel in the SS, complete with a uniform and salary, which had to have burned the asses of so many SS men.

Speaker 1 Also, it's not easy to massage people in one of those outfits. Yeah, all the jingling medals really

Speaker 1 could take me out of my Zen point.

Speaker 1 But as the months went by and Felix's techniques got even more in tune with Himmler's body, Himmler began to relax and he began to soften.

Speaker 1 Felix, therefore, basically became Heinrich Himmler's confessor, and Felix was suddenly privy to all of the horrible things that Heinrich Himmler was doing and planning.

Speaker 1 Just like Danny Aiello from Jacob's Ladder. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Interestingly, Felix noted that whenever Himmler got worked up about the Jews,

Speaker 1 that's when his pain and his cramps would be at their worst. Nobody understands me, Felix.
No, these Jews, they just get on top of you, they get in your head, you got the letter.

Speaker 1 Do you feel you hold your head and your Jews and your shoulders?

Speaker 1 Actually, Felix, sometimes he'd be like, He's like, you know what? I actually have some Jewish clients, they're actually very nice. And then Himmler would fucking flip out on him.

Speaker 1 And that's when he learned that, like, yeah, that's when he learned who Himmler was. Oh, he's just like, oh, you really don't like Jews.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But even so, Felix was always there to make Himmler's tummy feel better after the nasty Jews got him into a tizzy. So Himmler very often listened whenever Felix Kirsten talked.

Speaker 1 As such, Felix's role in the war is complicated, to say the least.

Speaker 1 While he did give the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany the peace and stability he needed to organize the Holocaust, Felix also did whatever he could to save lives once he realized that he had the power to do so.

Speaker 1 Felix used his influence on Himmler to have prisoners freed from the concentration camps whenever possible.

Speaker 1 And at the end of the war, Felix would play a pivotal role in slowing down the mass murder of the Jews, thereby saving the lives of an estimated tens of thousands of people. The masseur.

Speaker 1 And all it took was about,

Speaker 1 I would say, two dozen carefully placed happy endings.

Speaker 1 And that really shaped the end policies.

Speaker 1 Do you feel my band-aid?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, that's it.

Speaker 1 I'll tell you honestly: okay, if you drink eight ounces of water every 40 minutes,

Speaker 1 you'll stop hating those Jews by Wednesday.

Speaker 1 I don't want you anything!

Speaker 1 I gotta hit this ball.

Speaker 1 Now, while Felix Kirsten was tending to Heinrich Himmler's health in 1942, Adolf Hitler's bodily functions were nosediving, and Himmler was taking special note of every ailment.

Speaker 1 Couldn't help but notice you're sick!

Speaker 1 See, even though Himmler was terrified of Adolf Hitler, he still coveted the position of Führer.

Speaker 1 So, for Himmler, the path of least resistance towards that goal would be Hitler dying of natural causes, which seemed more and more likely as the war dragged on.

Speaker 1 See, by 1942, Adolf Hitler, by the way, Adolf Hitler had syphilis. Oh, we know, yeah, I did.
And it was untreated.

Speaker 1 Is it at all like because so many things said about him about his life and what in his health and shit, right? Like, there's many, many things said about it.

Speaker 1 The one ball is the one that I always think of. Yeah, yeah.
Is that true? As far as I know, I'm going to say it is. Hell yeah.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
That idea that I got bitten off by a Jewish goat.

Speaker 1 I don't know if that's true. I don't know how to get down living Jewish.
It depends on the goat's mother.

Speaker 1 There's a ton of stuff about Hitler.

Speaker 1 You know, there's also, you know, there's the fact that Hitler was a meth head and that he was constantly, you know, everyone's seen the footage of him at the Olympics, like just tweaking his ass off, rocking back and forth.

Speaker 1 We know he was on meth. We know that.
Purveton. He was on Purveton.
Like his, actually, his personal doctor was the guy who created Purveton,

Speaker 1 the meth that all of the Nazis were on.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 the doctor used to inject him with belladonna and strychnine because Hitler also had really bad stomach cramps. Sometimes he'd give him bull semen, like just whatever.
Oh, yeah. The old-fashioned way.

Speaker 1 And everyone was like, really, like, that's what it said is that Hitler's doctor was the best friend the Allies ever had. Oh, man.

Speaker 1 That's the one thing I know about bull semen and strychnine, not Jewish medicine.

Speaker 1 That's true. That sounds very Aryan.
Yeah. But also great tasting, great tasting menu there.
Have you ever been to bull semen and strychnine?

Speaker 1 It's amazing. I like bull semen.
It's one of the few semen you could fry up.

Speaker 1 No, Adolf Hitler's untreated syphilis began showing symptoms by 1942. Insomnia, dizziness, headaches, progressive paralysis.
And by 1943, Hitler was showing signs of Parkinson's disease.

Speaker 1 This could be seen clearly in the final footage that was shot of Hitler, where his hand is shaking like there's a motor attached to it while he was talking to a group of Hitler youth just before the bad day in the bunker.

Speaker 1 It's all that hiling. Yeah,

Speaker 1 too much hiling.

Speaker 1 Corporal Tunnell hike and strike and

Speaker 1 he waved at so many people he couldn't stop at the end.

Speaker 1 But as Hitler's health began to devolve alongside the Nazi war effort, with the Americans pushing into Italy from Africa, the British destroying city after city in bombing campaigns, and the Soviets standing strong in Stalingrad, Hitler retreated to the most nerdily named Nazi clubhouse yet.

Speaker 1 This military outpost, located in the forests of East Prussia, was called, without irony, the Wolfslayer. Yeah, the old tales wag when they see Hitler.

Speaker 1 It sounds like a furry club. It does.
It does. Sounds like it sounds like a place where you buy dice.
This is where my dogs sleep.

Speaker 1 Once Hitler retreated to the Wolfslayer, he didn't go outside, he didn't exercise, and he only received his ministers, trusted men like Göring, Goebbels, and of course, Himmler.

Speaker 1 Himmler, however, was not the only one who could see that the cheese was sliding off Hitler's cracker.

Speaker 1 Goring, in particular, was trying to position himself to take over his Führer, but Himmler remained cautious and did his best to stay out of the machinations of the other top Nazis whenever he visited the Wolf's lair.

Speaker 1 Now, as the Russian counterattack kept going badly for the Nazis on the Eastern Front, it became quite obvious that the Soviets were going to begin retaking land.

Speaker 1 Once retaken, the Soviets were going to very quickly discover what the Einsatzgruppen had done in the wake of the initial Nazi advance and in the years since the Nazis had occupied the land.

Speaker 1 And they're going to be like, great idea. Yeah, I was going to say, would they even care? No, no, no.
Well, they do bad. The Soviets? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 They killed everybody.

Speaker 1 It's the wanton killing of women and children. Yeah, they cared quite a bit.
And we'll show later on just how much they cared and how they showed their displeasure to the German people.

Speaker 1 The top Nazis began discussing how to remove any traces of the mass executions that had been carried out by the Einsatzgruppen between 1939 and 1943.

Speaker 1 And the best idea they had was dreamed up by a Nazi with the ridiculous name of Paul Bloebel.

Speaker 1 But in contrast to the hilarious name, Bloebel was actually one of the worst of Himmler's men. I actually don't know why you thought my name would make me better.

Speaker 1 I don't know why you thought all of the YouTube should raise your expectations for me. My name's Mr.
Blobart.

Speaker 1 I'm going to put some more blubber in your mouth here, Mr. Blob.
I'm honestly so sad, I don't know if I can commit atrocities today.

Speaker 1 I'm really not into it. I need to make a mental health break for my atrocities.

Speaker 1 Here, enjoy another fat worst. Thank you.

Speaker 1 I don't bite.

Speaker 1 Well, in addition to pioneering the use of the gas vans and organizing the massacre at Bobby Yar, that's, by the way, the worst single massacre in all of World War II. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Blobel had also developed the concentration camp gas chambers. Well, yeah, well, why don't you read all my credits?

Speaker 1 I actually don't have time to go through all the horrible things that Blobel did. I know.

Speaker 1 But since Blobel had made the mess, he was given the job of cleaning it up. Blobel's best idea was to just burn the millions of corpses in a series of ghastly bonfires.

Speaker 1 So he began stacking the corpses with railroad ties and soaking the piles in gasoline.

Speaker 1 But this open-air cremation system caused health problems for everyone involved, and the massive amount of bodily fluids leaking from the corpses seeped so deeply into the ground that it began to poison the water wells.

Speaker 1 Fucking idiots.

Speaker 1 Well, what are you going to do? You got to get rid of them. I see don't kill them in the first place.
You know, that would be better. Controversial.
That's me, though. I'm a pussy.

Speaker 1 Now, the Nazis very much needed a solution here because in February of 1943, the Nazis were at long last defeated in the Battle of Stalingrad, the bloodiest battle in human history.

Speaker 1 Stalingrad had consumed 1.8 million lives. Jesus fucking Christ.
But the Soviets had come out on top, and the Nazis were fully in retreat.

Speaker 1 Seeing the writing on the walls, Heinrich Himmler contacted Paul Bloebel and told him to redouble his efforts in destroying any evidence of genocide that had been committed by the Einsatzgruppen on Himmler's orders.

Speaker 1 So in August of 1943, Bloebel returned to the Babi Yah ravine in Kiev, where he began unearthing the mass graves and burning the bodies.

Speaker 1 Because after trying dynamite again to gruesome effect, I just keep trying. I'm sorry, it's kind of fun for me.
I just got all this dynamite I gotta move.

Speaker 1 Open air cremation was still the best idea any of them could come up with. Health hazards be damned.

Speaker 1 Blobel had a team of 64 people working around the clock to destroy the corpses that the Nazis had dumped in Babi Yar.

Speaker 1 And even though he managed to exhume and destroy an estimated 125,000 corpses, he didn't even come close to destroying all of the evidence of Einsatzgroup and activities by the time the Nazis retreated from Russia.

Speaker 1 Seriously, you guys got to sh calm down.

Speaker 1 You're wanting to do all this,

Speaker 1 he did have to call up Himmler and be like, oh, I'm really sorry. I just didn't get it done in time.
It's just like,

Speaker 1 it's a lot.

Speaker 1 It's a lot. The holidays are coming up.
Let me come back around. Let's catch up to this.
Let's

Speaker 1 circle around.

Speaker 1 You want to circle around.

Speaker 1 You want to circle around. Okay.

Speaker 1 Okay, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Send a message to mine assistant Zisha. She said, circle round.
I'll have my Booker reach out for that. We gotta circle back January Q1.

Speaker 1 Now Heinrich Himmler, meanwhile, was very much starting to realize that if anyone was going down for this whole Holocaust thing, it was going to be him.

Speaker 1 So in May of 1944, Himmler did what any good fascist criminal does when the walls are closing in. He made everyone else complicit.
Time for me to make like Mary Lou Retton and flip.

Speaker 1 Oh, he's not flipping yet. Not yet.

Speaker 1 He's already in there. He's prepared.
He's stretching the calves. Yeah, no.
He's stretching the calves. He's waiting.
He's trying to figure out how to flip. Yeah.

Speaker 1 See, while the Nazis did talk a lot in public about getting rid of the Jewish people, the final solution itself was not openly talked about very often.

Speaker 1 Because that would be make them all criminally liable. Yep.
And if it was, it was rarely discussed in explicit terms amongst the top Nazi brass. I mean, yeah, the Einsatzgruppen guys talked about it.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 the guys at Auschwitz, they talked about it. You could say that, like, that's just them daydreaming and having fun.

Speaker 1 But Heinrich Himmler gave a speech to all of the top Nazi officials in which he defended his decision to continue exterminating Jews no matter what, saying that all Nazis were, quote, forced to come to the grim decision that these people must be made to disappear from the face of the earth.

Speaker 1 But the point of this speech, really, was that there was now no top Nazi who could say that he didn't know exactly what Heinrich Kimmler had been doing in the name of the Nazi party.

Speaker 1 He's been killing Jews. Killing the Jews.

Speaker 1 I thought they went on a big field where they would just run and play. Sorry, when did we stop with the Madagascar plan? I thought that was the idea.
I thought that's the best event.

Speaker 1 Honestly, I just knew that the Lemurs were too fun for them to mix with the Jews. We didn't want them all singing songs and learning group dances.
Isfah, too.

Speaker 1 But in other words, it was now in every top Nazi's best interest to either help Himmler cover up what he'd done or do whatever they could to avoid defeat.

Speaker 1 Because the hidden message behind Himmler's speech was that if I'm going down,

Speaker 1 all you fuckers are going down with me. Oh, yeah, the ultimate Nazi.
Did we know what was happening at this point? Yeah. And we were just ignoring it?

Speaker 1 Or was it because I'm very like it's confusing to me because it's because I see certain things movies that are like, oh, apparently the Jew the Germans are killing Jews and no one had any idea until they actually showed up to a concentration camp.

Speaker 1 Watch the Kinburn series America and the Holocaust. It's like three parts.
It's really fucking devastating, but it is incredible and it will answer every question that you have.

Speaker 1 Because I know you haven't had enough. Yeah, no, I need another 12-hour series to really get the answers here.

Speaker 1 And this one's going to make you feel really bad about your own country, too. Yeah.
Instead of just humanity as a whole. Well, I know we turned them all away when they tried to come here.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, buddy. Now, the Soviets retaking territory after territory in the East was bad enough.
But on June 6th, 1944, time to feel good again. No, thank you.

Speaker 1 The Allies pulled off the largest single amphibious invasion in history, D-Day. And with the invasion of France, the Nazis were now fighting a war on two fronts.

Speaker 1 With that, the Nazis were well and truly fucked. And none of the top Nazis feared the Allied invasion more than Heinrich Himmler.
He had been, to say the least, a very bad boy.

Speaker 1 And he knew that the world just wasn't going to get what he was trying to accomplish. So Himmler basically began cleaning up for when company finally arrived.

Speaker 1 Because he knew someone was going to have to be in charge after all this shit goes down. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, somebody's got to be there to restart the German government.

Speaker 1 On July 29th, just after D-Day, Himmler decided to shut down his research institute, the Anunnerbe. And that must have really hurt for him.
It really did.

Speaker 1 See, while the Anunnerbe had started with archaeological digs and study groups dedicated to the Icelandic Edda, they had, by the end of the war, become deeply enmeshed in building a Jewish skeleton collection sourced from various human experiments that Himmler had overseen.

Speaker 1 They needed to better identify who was Jewish and who wasn't.

Speaker 1 Because they actually found that there were actually quite a few Jews who had blonde hair and blue eyes.

Speaker 1 So they were like, but we need to do, they actually said, like, we need to get 124 Jewish skulls, four skeletons,

Speaker 1 and we need them to be very pristine. And then we can figure out exactly how we can tell who's Jewish and who's not.
God, they just wasted so much fucking time.

Speaker 1 I know they did a lot of other horrible things, but I just like the... The rational part of me is like, what are you doing? Yes.

Speaker 1 Because hate blinds them. Hate blinds them.

Speaker 1 And you think it's like when you go record shopping where they don't want to just order any Jewish skeleton skeleton off the internet they want to find one they want to find a good one yeah yeah it's it's about it's about the hunt yeah yeah yeah and did they find anything was different um no of course not yeah as far as as far as i know uh yamaka dense yeah that's different that it's a whole that's that's another depends on what kind of jewish person you are well it was all based on phrenology you know the the fucking pseudoscience where it's like the shape of your head the shape of your skull predicts all of your behavior even predicts like what jobs you'll be good at that stupid Django unchained shit exactly yeah and the Nazis were full believers in that and the Jewish skeleton collection was an outcropping of phrenology but when Himmler had the Aneneraba evacuated he had his scientists hide all their research files in an actual cave called Little Devil's Hole near the village of Pottenstein for later retrieval because as we're about to find out Heinrich Himmler was nothing if not an optimist He fully believed that he could somehow weather the coming storm if only he could position everything in just the right light.

Speaker 1 And once he pulled that off, his scientists would be able to return to their so-called research once the heat had died down.

Speaker 1 Just him looking at the Holocaust, being like, you're going to get over this. Yeah,

Speaker 1 everybody's going to get over this. We're going to really move.
And then

Speaker 1 he was correct. That attitude, though, had gotten him where he was at this point.
Yeah. It had.

Speaker 1 Just keep pushing forward, no matter what. Just keep swimming.

Speaker 1 Now, most of the serious military minds in the Wehrmacht knew that the war was unwinnable after D-Day, and they saw absolutely no point in continuing the fight.

Speaker 1 But they also knew that the war was going to drag on for as long as Adolf Hitler was in power. Fighting to the death was actually kind of Hitler's dream anyway.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like if a pilot's always wanted to go crashing his plane.

Speaker 1 And that's why he refused to leave Berlin, right? Well, yeah, I mean, he went to Berlin because partly because he had nowhere else to go.

Speaker 1 And, you know, that's just, he knew that was the place of last resort. And he knew that the Russians would have to kill as many people as possible.

Speaker 1 If he was right in the center of Berlin, then they would have to kill everyone to get to Hitler.

Speaker 1 Because the big reason why so many Germans have believed that they were quote-unquote stabbed in the back with their surrender after World War I is because while the Great War seemed to be going well in the eyes of the average soldier on the ground in 1919, soldiers like Adolf Hitler himself, Germany's generals, had gamed out the whole thing and had rightfully seen that the Great War was unwinnable.

Speaker 1 So, rather than needlessly waste lives on pride, the Germans surrendered in 1919 to spare the German people the continuation of a war that would have destroyed all of Germany for no reason at all.

Speaker 1 Hitler, of course, was of the exact opposite mindset. Sequel's always worse.
Yep.

Speaker 1 If victory for Germany was impossible, then Hitler was going to take Germany all the way down to the depths of hell with him as he melted down.

Speaker 1 Because if fascist leaders are good at anything, it's temper tantrums. That's actually how they describe Hitler much of the time.

Speaker 1 He's got the temperament of a toddler.

Speaker 1 He throws tantrums constantly, and he's always been that way. Yeah, that's how he's depicted in most movies.

Speaker 1 And so, in order to try to spare the total destruction of Germany in World War War II, a group of senior Nazis decided to finally take Hitler out with a time bomb briefcase planted in the Wolfslayer in what came to be known as Operation Valkyrie.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, the briefcase, planted by a colonel named Klaus Philippe Maria Justinian Schenkraaf von Stauffenberg,

Speaker 1 concentrating on names by concentrating on assassinating Hitler. Yeah, you can't decide if you're Santa Claus.

Speaker 1 Start writing blueprints for how to kill Hitler. Are you Maria? Like, holy fucking shit.
Concentrate a little bit.

Speaker 1 The briefcase was tragically pushed away from Hitler completely by accident after von Stauffenberg set the timer.

Speaker 1 Another Nazi took the brunt of the blast, and Hitler came away with only minor injuries. It really is a quirk of history.

Speaker 1 There were 10 minutes between the time that he set the timer and the time that the bomb went off, and someone just, oh, this briefcase is in the way and moved it. That's so fucking annoying.

Speaker 1 It really is.

Speaker 1 Two suitcases.

Speaker 1 Six suitcases. Suitcases.

Speaker 1 You're gonna have to blow up the room you're in. Sorry, guys.

Speaker 1 Everybody's gotta go. Yeah, maybe just strap it to your chest.
I don't know. Sorry, guys.

Speaker 1 Heinrich Himmler, of course, was tasked with finding the assassins. Himmler learned the identities of the conspirators and had them arrested and executed the very next day.

Speaker 1 Hitler was characteristically furious, but the attempted assassination had only served to shrink the circle of people that Hitler trusted to an even smaller number.

Speaker 1 And didn't Hitler love von Stauffenberg? He did. Von Stauffenberg was one of the most respected soldiers in all of Germany.
Everyone loved von Stauffenberg.

Speaker 1 It really broke his heart.

Speaker 1 That is a guy he trusted. No, and that's the thing about Hitler is that, yeah, near the end, like he's just, why is everybody turning on me? Everybody's mad at me as if I started a war with the world.

Speaker 1 It's like the whole world is angry with me and my actions. Do you think that those Nazis weren't Nazis, or do you think that they were just trying to save face for when this all came crashing down?

Speaker 1 Can it all be one? The guys in Operation Valkyrie? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Complicated answer.

Speaker 1 Because there were a lot of Germans in the Wehrmacht

Speaker 1 who hated the Nazis, hated Hitler, but they kind of justified staying in the war because they said that they were fighting for the German people and they were doing everything they could to try to save as many German lives as possible.

Speaker 1 They said,

Speaker 1 if I abandoned my people, then all of these boys are going to die. But on the other hand, that also meant that they were fighting for Adolf Hitler at the end of the day.

Speaker 1 It's like the trainers at SeaWorld.

Speaker 1 Yes. Actually, it's almost exactly like that.
Yeah. It's like the people who build a bears at Bilderbear.

Speaker 1 Making these soulless autonomatons to go live life and then die and go to hell, but they'll never be saved by a lot of crap. They're starting to feel guilty.
selling all these bears.

Speaker 1 It's releasing them into the world to be tortured and then buried alive.

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Speaker 1 Now, outwardly, Himmler was still acting as if the Nazis would never be defeated. He began leaning hard on Wernher von Braun's V-2 rockets as Nazi Germany's savior.

Speaker 1 But while those designs would eventually take America to the moon after we scooped up von Braun in Operation Papercliffe, the V-2 rockets wouldn't do dick to help the Nazis win the war.

Speaker 1 Sure, it'd kill a lot of British people, but did not do anything to take and hold land. That's why I like those V-3 rockets.

Speaker 1 Well, Well, as such, the Allied forces kept gaining momentum.

Speaker 1 And as they took more land and began liberating more concentration camps, the machinery of Himmler's genocide was becoming more and more difficult to operate.

Speaker 1 See, it was obvious by spring of 1944 that the Allied forces were definitely going to find Auschwitz.

Speaker 1 And Himmler knew that once they discovered the full extent of that horror show, there was going to be no coming back for the Third Reich.

Speaker 1 Which one is left? Oh, that's that's fine. Oh, that one's fine.
Bugging Wald is fine. Darkhouse.

Speaker 1 Oh, no.

Speaker 1 You know, they say hindsight is 2020.

Speaker 1 Not for me, though. Yeah, you make that joke, but he kind of made that argument later on

Speaker 1 to a Jew.

Speaker 1 Himmler also

Speaker 1 knew that his name would be the first one given to Allied forces as the man who gave most of the direct orders for genocide. But Himmler was, as I said, an optimist.

Speaker 1 And at the end of the day, Himmler really just didn't want to die, whether it be by an enemy bullet or at the end of a noose. Yeah, he was a coward.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So even though he knew that the Third Reich was fucked, he convinced himself that a few goodwill gestures would be enough to rehabilitate his personal reputation, even though announcements had already been made that war crime trials were coming for all top Nazis as soon as the war was over.

Speaker 1 And it's at this point in the story that we see the return of Heinrich Himmler's masseur, Felix Kirsten. See, Felix really was an incredible massage therapist with high-powered clients.

Speaker 1 So he did actually have a lot of connections to officials and foreign governments.

Speaker 1 In fact, Felix Kirsten had been contacted by special American envoys on orders from none other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1943.

Speaker 1 Why does this feel like telling Kato Kalen to go kill Saddam Hussein? You know what I mean? Like, what are we doing here? Why are we involving this man? Because he is the one who has Himmler's ear.

Speaker 1 He's the only one who has a direct line to Himmler. And people know Himmler listens to Felix.
Yeah, and, you know, maybe FTR just was like, hey, maybe he could help with my scoliosis.

Speaker 1 It was polio.

Speaker 1 It was polio. And his favorite, actually, his favorite treatment for his polio was going down to the hot springs in Georgia.
And he actually founded a whole polio kind of getaway for kids down there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's where you get pegged.

Speaker 1 I thought that was Eleanor's girlfriend.

Speaker 1 Got her.

Speaker 1 Nope. Eleanor had her own cottage up in upstate New York.
Yeah, it was right next to FDR's house. You can actually see it from the other building.
Yeah, her pussy palace. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, the reason why FDR had sent this envoy is because he wanted to see if Heinrich Himmler wanted to negotiate the end of the Third Reich in 1943, when it became obvious that there was just no talking to this Hitler guy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and Himmler was just, oh, what a great guy. I guess that's the problem, too, is you do kind of, it's this normalization.

Speaker 1 Well, you're just going to still treat it like it's just some other government. Well, you're just trying anything you can at this point.

Speaker 1 Like he's really trying anything that he can. We give, we give, Eddie and I love to make fun of FDR, but he did do his best.
He did. He's one of our best presidents.
Yes. He is.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, it's like, of course.

Speaker 1 It's just fun to randomly attack him. Of course.
Yeah. He did some horrible things, but he also did some absolutely incredible things as well.
Yeah, and yeah, he's still a president. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, he's still a piece of shit because he became a president. Yeah.

Speaker 1 All of them are criminals. Yeah, anybody who's a president is a monster.

Speaker 1 Now, Heinrich Himmler had scoffed at the idea of negotiating with the Allies when Felix first approached him with it.

Speaker 1 But after Germany's last attempt at a Western offensive failed with the Battle of the Bulge, and as the Soviets inched ever closer to Berlin from the east, Heinrich Himmler decided decided that maybe it was time to revisit his Masseurs' connections in 1945.

Speaker 1 Now, Himmler was not the only top Nazi trying to negotiate with the Allied forces in the last year of the war. It's my favorite that they all ran to go to negotiate.
Quite a few of them did. And when

Speaker 1 I mean, at this point, yeah, like, you know, Rudolf Hess had already flown to Scotland to try to negotiate the end of the war. Like, you know, a lot of the guys would be like,

Speaker 1 I've always loved Scotland.

Speaker 1 Oh, the Highlands, Highlands, nothing to replace the Highlands.

Speaker 1 When word of these negotiations reached Hitler, Hitler announced that any German who helped the British, the Americans, or the Jews would be executed.

Speaker 1 But Himmler was far better at hiding his negotiations than others, or at least he was for the time being. He got real close.

Speaker 1 See, Hitler and Himmler had a little meeting at the Wolf's Layer just after Hitler heard that some of his men were negotiating. Come with me to the Cubhouse.

Speaker 1 You say the clubhouse.

Speaker 1 And Himmler immediately after gave the order that no concentration camp inmate in the southern half of Germany should fall into enemy hands alive.

Speaker 1 But while Hitler was obviously trying to just take as many people with him as he could as he possibly could, especially if they were Jewish, the Nazi fever was finally breaking.

Speaker 1 And many of the concentration camp commandants were finally realizing that they were about to be in a lot of trouble. No, we're really not supposed to be doing this, right?

Speaker 1 I'm going to say, honestly, since the very beginning of this whole thing, I felt weird.

Speaker 1 You know, this whole thing just seemed kind of off.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I didn't vote to say anything. Yeah, but it's hard to say because everyone's into it, but I now in hindsight, hindsight, hindsight,

Speaker 1 hindsight.

Speaker 1 Well, because these concentration camp commandants had seen what was coming, the concentration camp deaths had therefore begun to slow down considerably despite the kill-em-all order.

Speaker 1 And Himmler, likewise, decided that he was going to use the remaining 200,000 Jews still being held in concentration camps as bargaining chips to save his own skin.

Speaker 1 Now, this was where I'm confused, because I'm pretty sure that when they were...

Speaker 1 The concentration camps were shutting down, isn't that when the deaths march start, the death marches started and they just started killing everyone?

Speaker 1 It is highly complicated, and a lot of different things happen like many different things happen like many things can be true all at once like okay Himmler did want to use Jews as bargaining chips but there was also certain concentration camps like Auschwitz who's like empty out Auschwitz but they just put these people on death marches to other camps to move them away from where the the soldiers were coming yeah because they're because they're trying to hide them they're trying to hide the and it really is like and they're doing it in a panic because they're like i i don't know what the fuck you just did just take them somewhere else just take them somewhere else yeah and that's you know they're they're trying to what what they were trying to do is they were trying to hide them.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And it's basically, it also, it's like they're all witnesses.
Yes, they are all witnesses. And remember, there are thousands of concentration camps.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And every single concentration camp commandant is thinking, I'm probably on chopping block. But maybe mine's not the worst one.
Yeah. Well, that is, unfortunately, how it eventually worked out.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. But while Himmler was trying to formulate a plan to save himself, Adolf Hitler dropped just about the biggest pile of shit possible directly onto Heinrich Himmler's plate.
Number two. Yeah.

Speaker 1 With so many of Hitler's top military men either captured, dead, or in open negotiation with the Allies, Hitler gave direct command of the Air Force to Hermann Göring, while command of the ground forces were turned completely over to Heinrich Himmler.

Speaker 1 Now, Göring had actually been in the military in World War I.

Speaker 1 He was a hero pilot, but Heinrich Himmler had never served in the military in any capacity, aside from the scant training he'd received as a teenager.

Speaker 1 So his short reign as a military strategist was predictably disastrous. To try and make up for his lack of military expertise, Himmler enlisted a staff of SS men to advise him.

Speaker 1 But if you'll remember, the SS was a paramilitary force. Yeah, they're all faking it.
Yeah, so none of his advisors had any on-the-ground military experience either.

Speaker 1 It's all fucking theoretical to them. See, Heinrich Himmler was incredibly good at organizing mass murder.
He was very good at killing people.

Speaker 1 But according to soldiers under his command, he was incapable of keeping people alive, incapable of understanding the logistics of moving men and supplies, incapable of knowing how many men were needed to hold a position.

Speaker 1 Himmler's biggest fuck-up, for example, was his withdrawal of Nazi forces from the precise place where the Red Army was pushing through into Germany.

Speaker 1 These forces, the last remaining Nazis who could actually fight, were ordered to retreat to just outside of Berlin, or they were ordered to defend concentration camps that were likely to fall into into Allied hands.

Speaker 1 Again, to cover up for Himmler's crimes. And it's a way to look like he's trying to do the utmost to save Hitler at the very, very end.
Yep. He's such a fucking bitch.
Yeah. He is.

Speaker 1 The Nazis on the Red Army front were disastrously replaced with inexperienced cadets and members of the Volkssturm, the so-called People's Army, that was mostly made up of old men and children.

Speaker 1 These replacements were, of course, slaughtered by the Reds, who continued their unstoppable march towards Berlin.

Speaker 1 But even though Himmler was a terrible military commander, he was still the second most powerful man in the Third Reich.

Speaker 1 And while he was certainly doing his best to cover up his war crimes, just in case, he was still absolutely convinced, even in 1945, that he could pull off some miracle that would both win the war and put Himmler in the position of Führer.

Speaker 1 Is it just, yeah, it just, wow, they're so confident. Well, he's delusional.
And because he's been, you got to remember, this guy's guy's been delusional his entire life.

Speaker 1 It's always worked for him. Yeah, the way he sees that.
He's always seen the world in a way that nobody else sees it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's why he's such a bad farmer. Yeah.
Yeah. Got to use water.

Speaker 1 Can't use Gatorade. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so in the final months of the war, Himmler became obsessed with a scheme to build a bizarre electrical weapon based on the fantasies surrounding Norse mythology that had been nurtured by his bogus Ananerba research.

Speaker 1 All of this. God, this just makes me want to play Wolfenstein all over again.
Oh, yeah. It's like Doom, but with Nazis.
It's so much more fun. It's made by the same people.
Oh, that makes sense. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I love Wolfenstein so much.

Speaker 1 See, Heinrich Kimmler really did believe that the story of Thor's hammer, Mjolner, was an actual history involving a sophisticated piece of electrical engineering that the ancient Aryans had developed as a weapon.

Speaker 1 And this isn't like during the heady days of 1935 when everything is just sort of like theoretical. Like this is when Nazi Germany is rubble and he still believes in this shit.

Speaker 1 So Himmler ordered his staff to stop at nothing to build a modern version of Mjolner that would shut down all the electrical systems of the Allied forces, which admittedly wasn't the worst idea because this is actually possible with electromagnetic pulses, EMPs.

Speaker 1 Yeah, if you could figure that out. Yeah, but the company that Himmler tasked with building the modern Mjolner, a company called Elemag, they did not have the brains to pull it off.

Speaker 1 In what's probably the most Nazi scientist shit that I've ever heard, the Elemag engineers said that they could transform the Earth's atmosphere into a giant remote control that can turn off all of the Allies' electrical equipment.

Speaker 1 And then we will use the whole powerful rewind button. to push back the Allied advance

Speaker 1 and then we will use the pause button

Speaker 1 and then we will use the tracking button in order to possibly more clearly see where they are located.

Speaker 1 And then we use guns and bombs. They've gone full space balls at this point.
Yes.

Speaker 1 They went from sun to blue.

Speaker 1 Well, Elemag actually drew up blueprints for this idea. That's easy to do.
Yeah. I draw you fucking big old fucking remote control on a on a piece of white paper.
It's easy.

Speaker 1 And Himmler took Elemag's ideas to the SS technical office, who studied the blueprints for weeks. They eventually had to tell Himmler that it was all just a fantasy, but Himmler refused to accept it.

Speaker 1 He got a second opinion from an expert on electromagnetism who very gently, very, very gently told Heinrich Himmler that the Elemag engineers kissing his hands, kissing his wrists. Yes.

Speaker 1 I love you so much. I love your hate so much.
They very gently told Himmler that the Elemag engineers were basically talking out of their ass.

Speaker 1 So Himmler was forced to abandon his quest for Germany's Mjolner.

Speaker 1 Ironically, though, Himmler was rushing to engineer a doomsday weapon at the end of the war when it was Heinrich Himmler himself who had turned down Werner Heisenberg's plans to build an atomic bomb years earlier in 1942.

Speaker 1 This would be better than this stupid atomic bomb. It'll be better and bigger and more.
It's more impressive because it's electric powers.

Speaker 1 Like Thor had. We're unplugging the allies.
How cool is that? How cool is that to send a static shock like when one robs your feet on the carpet and you touch a balloon?

Speaker 1 How desperate and powerful would that? Powerful end of world weapon be! Every static electricity Zaha up to the skies of every ally force. I don't know, that sounds Jewish, Zoe.

Speaker 1 You heard of a Jufro, right? That just sounds like a big Jufro to me. Are you accusing me of being Jewish by saying that? You Jew? Someone needs to get Felix in here.

Speaker 1 By the end of March 1945, the Allied bombers had reduced both Berlin and Munich to rubble, and the Soviets were just 100 kilometers from Berlin.

Speaker 1 The Soviets had also been taking revenge along the way, committing unforgivable atrocities of their own as payback for what Hitler and the Einsatzgruppen had done in the East.

Speaker 1 There is a harrowing documentary called, I think it's called Berlin 1945, that is shocking.

Speaker 1 Adolf Hitler, of course, had now come to blame every bad thing that had happened directly on Heinrich Himmler. I mean, it's fun.
Yeah, I mean, well, finally.

Speaker 1 I mean, Himmler's been his bitching post for years, and so now he's become the focus point of Himmler's rage.

Speaker 1 Their relationship had quickly soured when it became obvious that Himmler was a terrible military commander, and Hitler, as a show of humiliation, had ordered that any forces under Himmler's command had to remove Hitler's name from their uniforms.

Speaker 1 I'm doing this shit, buddy.

Speaker 1 But while Hitler refused to capitulate no matter what terms were offered and was very much determined to drag Germany into hell no matter how deep it went, Heinrich Himmler still very much wanted to live.

Speaker 1 By this point, he thought that he could shorten the war himself and pivot to a solely anti-Soviet stance.

Speaker 1 Then he could position Germany, no longer Nazi, as a bulwark against the Russians with Himmler in charge. It's not a bad plan.
It's really not. I mean, I hate him, but it's a good plan.

Speaker 1 Well, the idea of thinking that we'd automatically be like, oh, sure, wasn't that far off either.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, well, Himmler sent this proposal to the Allies, but the Allies were by this point, well aware of what Himmler had done as commander of the SS.

Speaker 1 So the Allies basically said, are you fucking fucking kidding me? And promptly turned down Himmler's offer. Like, yeah, we might do that, but it ain't going to be with you.

Speaker 1 No, we're going to use far less effective Nazis to run your next government, and they're going to ruin everything by not even being good at being not very good Nazis.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, what they tried to do at first was to denazify everything. And they can't.

Speaker 1 But the problem was, is that when they tried to deal, they're like, oh, yeah, let's just take all the Nazis out of the system, and then, you know, we'll restart the government.

Speaker 1 And they looked around and said, like, oh, everyone was a Nazi. There's no one left to run.
So then there's no one left to actually run this country.

Speaker 1 And there's no one left who know, and the people who are left don't know how anything works. So we're going to have to start playing a game of how bad of a Nazi value

Speaker 1 and how much can we Weitwosh this? And that's how, you know, Germany kind of was able to forget.

Speaker 1 all the horrible things they'd done because so many people, so, so, so many people went unpunished after the war. Yeah, but I will say, like, instead of,

Speaker 1 it's like, it's almost worse that we, like, instead of like getting them to help us kill the Russians, we just gave half of them to Russia.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, well, I mean, Berlin, that's all East Germany, that's a whole different camera.

Speaker 1 All I know is that if I was in charge, I would have known exactly what to do, and they should have let me do it.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 1 Delete the country,

Speaker 1 blank space, fill it with various corporate entities, the entire thing, fast food nation. Give it to Nestle.
Give it to Nestle. They love water.
They love so much fresh water there.

Speaker 1 And so, as the curtain finally began to fall on Nazi Germany, Heinrich Himmler continued the job that Hitler had given him as commander-in-chief of what was left of the Nazi Wehrmacht.

Speaker 1 After retreating to his luxurious villa between Berlin and the now-destroyed city of Dresden, Himmler treated command almost casually. He'd wake up at 8 a.m.
and get a massage from Felix.

Speaker 1 He'd finally get around looking at the dreaded war reports around 11.

Speaker 1 And then about noon, he'd eat lunch and then he'd rest because he needs his rest. I get it, it's stressful.
And then he'd spend another hour, maybe two, on more war reports before dinner.

Speaker 1 And after dinner, he was reportedly in bed by 10 o'clock every night.

Speaker 1 And as one author put it, Himmler ensconced himself in his room like a terrified schoolboy attempting to escape the wrath of an authority that overwhelmed him.

Speaker 1 Hitler, meanwhile, was still focusing all of his wrath directly on Himmler, to the point where some of Hitler's staff said that they had never seen Hitler rage so violently.

Speaker 1 And that's saying something about Himmler. Near the end, Hitler would say things like,

Speaker 1 I do not like him. I do not want him around me.
Get him out of here. Everyone's like, yeah, we've been saying that for you.

Speaker 1 We've been bringing that up for a while. He sucks, dude.
Thank God. Because Hitler, man,

Speaker 1 you're cool.

Speaker 1 I don't care what he fucking says, dude. You're fucking awesome, dude.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Are you serious?

Speaker 1 You know, everyone says Heil Hitler, but never

Speaker 1 cool Hitler. Nobody says Heil Hitler.
Nobody says cool Hitler.

Speaker 1 Nobody says Hitler. Oh, my God, you're so rad.
Hitler, you know how to fuck me. No one ever said that

Speaker 1 Now, Heinrich Kimmler finally lost his military command on March 20th, 1945.

Speaker 1 But there really wasn't much left to command anyway.

Speaker 1 While the remaining Nazis had been ordered to stand their ground and fight to the death, no matter what, the hardened nationalists that had made up the Nazi Wehrmacht, they were fucking dead.

Speaker 1 And the army was mostly made up of foreign conscripts, schoolboys, old men, and convicts.

Speaker 1 And so, with his command taken away and the Allied forces moving ever closer to victory, Heinrich Himmler decided that it was probably in his best interest to abandon his dream of becoming the Fuhrer in favor of trying to backtrack the Holocaust as much as possible.

Speaker 1 Now, Himmler's masseur, Felix Kirsten, actually played an extremely important role here.

Speaker 1 He'd been working with Allied forces to arrange safe transport to Dutch, French, and Jewish prisoners out of the concentration camps, and he managed the release of some 20,000 prisoners. Holy shit.

Speaker 1 Felix actually claimed to have slowed down the entire mechanism of mass murder single-handedly at the end.

Speaker 1 He said that he was the one that convinced Himmler to stop killing prisoners, but that's debatable. Felix was a Felix liked to overblow.

Speaker 1 He did play a big role, but he'd like to say he played an even bigger one. He said,

Speaker 1 I saved every person in the Netherlands. I saved all of them.

Speaker 1 Because they were going to kill them. It's because he needed to, because he was massaging Himmler every day.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 All he had to do was stick his thumb right up Himmler's ass once.

Speaker 1 Just make him come by prostate once.

Speaker 1 What is he going to do?

Speaker 1 But whether it was Felix's idea or not, Himmler did order his concentration camp commandants in 1945 to halt all executions, surrender to the Allies, and freely give up their prisoners.

Speaker 1 Now, while Felix was doing his best to save as many concentration camp prisoners as possible, he also approached another Nazi general to try and convince him to team up with Himmler so they could convince Adolf one way or another to offer an armistice.

Speaker 1 God, it's just such a, you're just trying to relax, okay? It's the end of the war. Do we have to talk work while you're massaging me? Does it always have to be us teaming up against Hitler?

Speaker 1 But even with everything lost, Himmler was still terrified of Hitler because in the end, Himmler was quite simply a fucking coward in every way.

Speaker 1 Instead of standing up, Himmler assembled his staff, gave a nonsensical, rambling speech, and retired from all 11 of his commands. And you won't have Heinrich Himmler to kick around anymore.

Speaker 1 I'm going to Kesta being your leader.

Speaker 1 Himmler then decided to create a more positive paper trail for himself by issuing a death penalty order to all concentration camp commandants who had allowed neglect, death, and despair to fester in the camps.

Speaker 1 because Himmler was trying very much to frame it. Where none of this is my fault.
Like, I gave some orders, but these guys,

Speaker 1 Jesus.

Speaker 1 The camps had, in the words of Joseph Goebbels, and this is a bit of an understatement, they had all grown a bit above Himmler's head. Oh, sure, yeah.
Oh, yeah. Man, he's just like, what did you do?

Speaker 1 Are you kidding me? They're doing what?

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 They're doing what?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Good work. I can't believe you.

Speaker 1 You're awful! Good job.

Speaker 1 It's kind of crazy because I actually gave orders to make distraction camps.

Speaker 1 That's for Gnobito. It distracts the prisoners with fun times.

Speaker 1 Like roller hockey,

Speaker 1 all sorts of hockey, table hockey. I've been thinking about celebrating Hanukkah this year.
And Hanukkah hockey was actually developed by the Native Americans.

Speaker 1 A lot of people don't respect them. I do.

Speaker 1 Well, having issued the death penalty order, Himmler, in one of the ballsiest moves in human history, he had Felix Kirsten arrange a meeting with the Swedish representative of the World Jewish Congress.

Speaker 1 So Himmler could, in his own words, quote, bury the hatchet between us and the Jews. What I just want to make sure is that you don't hold any grudges.
Because grudges, they make us unhealthy.

Speaker 1 And it's a stress. You want to let his goal.
You remember, Felix? Release.

Speaker 1 You've got to try, Felix.

Speaker 1 It's a lot of massaging, even for Felix. It's a lot of massaging.

Speaker 1 Now, this meeting did lead to the release of 20,000 people, but Himmler also used the meeting to attempt a whitewashing of his role in the Holocaust.

Speaker 1 And he did this while speaking with the Jewish representative, a man named Norbert Masser. Nothing I love since my good buddy here, Watermensch.

Speaker 1 I love my guy, but it's just so nice. You could have a nasch, which is my best buddy and I.
If we sit here with kibbitz, and we just talk over here, it's so much fun to sit down and

Speaker 1 I got 20,000 Jews here coming to you. It's a real mitzvah.

Speaker 1 They vote we can schleps in here, zetze virtues.

Speaker 1 Now, Norbert, is that the Jewish name?

Speaker 1 I like it.

Speaker 1 Amongst other lies and half-hearted justifications, Himmler said said that the camp crematorium, big misunderstanding.

Speaker 1 Nobody gets what we're trying to do here. Those crematoriums, especially the ones at Birkenau, they're only there to burn the people who died from typhus.

Speaker 1 Yeah, when I heard crematorium, I said, yes, of course. And then next door to that, we can have the yogurt factory.

Speaker 1 Because, of course,

Speaker 1 there's a healthier yogurt cream. For some people, it's the whipped cream factory that

Speaker 1 shut up.

Speaker 1 Himmler also said that while horrible things had happened occasionally Himmler had punished those responsible everything that people had heard about the camps Himmler said it's just allied propaganda and all of it looked a lot worse than it really was like you get these guys a shower baby fine

Speaker 1 god Norbert Masser of course was astounded by Himmler's shallowness but nevertheless he endured two and a half hours of conversation with the architect of the Holocaust in order to save lives, and he did.

Speaker 1 Now, two days after Himmler's meeting with Norbert Masser, Himmler met with a Swedish Count, where Himmler insisted that Hitler would be dead within days.

Speaker 1 This wasn't a bad guess on Himmler's part, because this meeting took place just a week before Hitler bit the bullet in his bunker in Berlin.

Speaker 1 But the purpose of this meeting was so the Swedish Count could contact General Dwight D. Eisenhower to arrange for Germany's surrender to the Americans rather than the Soviet Union.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately for Himmler, though, the news of his attempt at brokering peace was made public. It hit the newspapers on April 28th.

Speaker 1 And when Hitler heard about it, he hit the fucking roof of that bunker. Oh, I could just see him hanging out of the ceiling, just his shoulders.

Speaker 1 It said that Hitler actually turned red when he found out about this, that his face became virtually unrecognizable in its fury, because Himmler was the one Nazi that Hitler had trusted most of all.

Speaker 1 Loyal Heinrich, he called him. And so Hitler gave all of Himmler's responsibilities to Hermann Göring, and he ordered Himmler's arrest.

Speaker 1 Himmler, however, wouldn't learn that Hitler knew of his betrayal until after Hitler's death, which came at long last with a suicidal bullet on April 30th, 1945, just 10 days after Hitler's 56th birthday.

Speaker 1 This is a saddest book. This is a saddest book.
Dude, he looked bad for 56. He looked really bad.
Well, I mean, he was a 56-year-old meth head. They don't look good.
But the other thing, too, is that

Speaker 1 he was in the last few weeks, he actually ran out of Purviton. So in Hitler's final days, he was also going through meth withdrawals on top of everything else.

Speaker 1 That's why he turned red. And he also had full-on like orgies.
All the families started like fucking each other.

Speaker 1 It was like really. Have you read about the.
No, this isn't true. That is true.
Honestly, there was a gigantic orgy amongst the soldiers

Speaker 1 who wasn't there. No, he couldn't fuck.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Bunker orgy.
Hitler. Yeah, this is the...

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was the orgy of this was all it was all the soldiers was when the Russians finally busted through.

Speaker 1 All the soldiers were like fucking and sucking each other while the families were there. And these families were murdered.

Speaker 1 Germany officially surrendered to the Allied forces on May 7th.

Speaker 1 And while Hitler and Goebbels had escaped the upcoming military tribunals to punish Germany's war criminals through suicide, Goebbels had also, of course, had his wife and all of his children commit suicide as well, most of the top Nazis were still at large.

Speaker 1 One of the biggest prizes, of course, was Heinrich Himmler. Now, Himmler was still fully delusional, but his delusions had shrunk with each passing day.

Speaker 1 Just after Hitler died, Himmler declared to his remaining staff that he was going to establish his own government to begin independent negotiations with the Allies.

Speaker 1 But when Germany surrendered without him, Himmler shaved his mustache, changed out of his trademark glasses, put an eye patch over his right eye, and used the ID of a police officer named Heinrich Hitzinger to travel around.

Speaker 1 I mean pretending to be a woman. No, no, no,

Speaker 1 I voiced a man.

Speaker 1 Just a bit of a high-voiced individual, so

Speaker 1 crime's here. Can't see him on the left side.

Speaker 1 He didn't even bother to change his name. Oh, you can't remember to answer to another name.
But they say that's actually actually what you want to do when you choose an alias.

Speaker 1 You want to choose somebody who has the same initials as you so you can keep your signature.

Speaker 1 And of course, if they have the same first name as you, then yes, it makes it easier to you will always still answer to Heinrich. It's just like there's many Heinrichs.
Oh, that makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 1 So he's HH, and that's, you know, he then became more famous, became the wrestler Triple H.

Speaker 1 That's when he graduated.

Speaker 1 It didn't make any sense at all.

Speaker 1 That's how you know, for years I thought that's what Triple H's name was.

Speaker 1 There we go.

Speaker 1 My name's Heinrich Hertzingen.

Speaker 1 Well, then, Heinrich Himmler, with his mistress Hedwig Pothast and their two children in tow, he laid low in the town of Flensberg for a couple of days while his staff regrouped.

Speaker 1 Many of Himmler's men had actually fled to the Alps, and from there, they had planned to launch a Nazi guerrilla movement, codenamed Werewolf. We're Team Jacob.

Speaker 1 Just be a guerrilla. Nope.
It's we're werewolves. We're werewolves.
Werewolf.

Speaker 1 Their castle.

Speaker 1 But after just 11 days on the run, Heinrich Himmler and his entourage were detained at a British checkpoint. Now, the British didn't recognize Himmler because he totally changed his appearance.

Speaker 1 Yes, and they have high voice now.

Speaker 1 Because he's not unmistakably looking at all. Yeah, not me.

Speaker 1 But they had orders to arrest all German officers, and Himmler's papers were suspicious. Himmler eventually landed in front of a British captain named Thomas Selvester.
Suffering succotech.

Speaker 1 And yes, it is Selvester, not Sylvester. Selves.
Thomas Selvester. Captain Thomas Selvester, at your service.

Speaker 1 He interrogated this small, sickly excuse for a human until he finally identified himself in a very meek tone as Heinrich Himmler. Yeah,

Speaker 1 I'm Heinrich Himmler. Sorry.

Speaker 1 You don't like my high voice?

Speaker 1 Don't you wish I was this guy?

Speaker 1 This is incredible. He again tried to save himself.

Speaker 1 He told Captain Sylvester, Himmler told Captain Sylvester that he could offer the services of code name werewolf as guerrilla fighters to get the battle against the Soviets going immediately.

Speaker 1 But he could only do it if you let me talk to Vincent Churchill personally. That's the only way.
That's the only way to do it. Me and him hanging out, cigars.

Speaker 1 You don't really just

Speaker 1 having a good time. Having a bully of a time.
Me and him going down there, having a nice one, keep calm. Carry on.
You know, I'm like, you're not the nation. But it has to be during a full moon.

Speaker 1 Now, Captain Sylvester wanted to make sure that this was indeed Heinek Himmler. So he had his prisoners sign his name so they could compare handwriting from their records.

Speaker 1 Himmler, however, thought that Captain Sylvester was a fan and only wanted an autograph as a souvenir. Fucking schmuck.
Himmler, however, should see my whole war crimes autograph book I have.

Speaker 1 Himmler, however, kept dodging responsibility until the very end.

Speaker 1 When he was shown pictures of the mountains of corpses discovered at the Buchenwald camp, Himmler just glanced at the pictures, shrugged, and asked, Am I responsible for the excesses of my subordinates?

Speaker 1 Just yes,

Speaker 1 yes,

Speaker 1 fucking work for you. This is the first time I'm hearing that, okay? And the very first time.
Okay?

Speaker 1 So you don't fucking act like I should know better the whole time when I should have known better, right? Maybe that's how they do it in Britain, but not in Germany.

Speaker 1 Ved you think you are, you fucking shithead fuck. You think I'm a micromanager?

Speaker 1 Now Himmler's British jailers had already searched him thoroughly for cyanide capsules when they figured out who he was, because they had just lost a different SS detainee who had killed himself by crushing a cyanide capsule between his teeth.

Speaker 1 They did not, however, search Himmler's mouth on the first go-round. I wouldn't either.
Yeah, get away from it.

Speaker 1 Working off a hunch, the British searched him again, but when they asked him to open his mouth, they saw a small black knob and a gap in Himmler's teeth.

Speaker 1 This, of course, was where Himmler had been hiding his cyanide capsule.

Speaker 1 And when the doctor examining Himmler reached for the vial, Himmler turned his head sharply and bit down on the doctor's finger, which, of course, crushed the vial as well.

Speaker 1 Wow, he must have been so excited to finally do some violence. Finally, yeah, but I just feel sad for the doctor, like, he bit me!

Speaker 1 Him bit me!

Speaker 1 Ow! Oh, no, am I gonna turn into a Mark could have turned into a Nazi? And if I moved ghosts, ow,

Speaker 1 he was so bad at violence, the only time he actually committed any of it, he killed himself. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The medics tried for 15 minutes afterward to resuscitate the world's worst war criminal. Dude, even go so far as to hold him upside down and shaking his body just so Hitler could see justice.

Speaker 1 Dude, this is the fucking when

Speaker 1 the father goes down,

Speaker 1 Papa Atreides. He bites the fake tooth and he sputs into the mouth of the Mentat.
Was this the proper time to insert a Dune reference?

Speaker 1 I felt that my place here

Speaker 1 needs to be

Speaker 1 celebrated. I needed to be seen.

Speaker 1 Himmler does look like a baby shy-halud. That's true.

Speaker 1 He did put the shy in shy halud. Cry-halud.
But in the end, the cyanide capsule enabled Himmler to escape justice into the cold embrace of death.

Speaker 1 And so, after Himmler's fetid corpse rotted for two days on the floor of the room where he died, a medic made plaster casts of Himmler's head and and removed his brain.

Speaker 1 Although we have no idea where the cast nor where Himmler's brain ended up or why they wanted them, they wanted it to hang out with JFK's brain, you know, because they need friends and Hitler's brain.

Speaker 1 They saved Hitler's brain. Angela Merkin's riding it.

Speaker 1 Maybe that's what.

Speaker 1 Markle, a Merkin is a pubic wave. Angela Merkin's fucking riding it.
Yeah, maybe that's what her breasts are made out of. Hitler and Himmler's brains.
Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 Yummy yum.

Speaker 1 Let's cut them off and see.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm starting to crack up. Yeah, we are.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we're falling away.

Speaker 1 But after the Allies got what they wanted, Himmler's corpse was wrapped in army blankets, driven into the wilderness, and buried in an unmarked grave somewhere outside the German town of Lundberg, where it presumably remains to this day.

Speaker 1 Now, it bears repeating that the toll for World War II was exceedingly high. The Soviet Union alone lost 26 million people.
That includes 15 million civilians.

Speaker 1 But out of the estimated 80 million who died worldwide, it was Heinrich Himmler who was personally responsible for more of those deaths than anyone else.

Speaker 1 Two million were killed in his concentration camps, while it's estimated that the 3,000 men who made up Himmler's Einsatzgruppen were responsible for the murders of up to 3.3 million people.

Speaker 1 On the high end of the estimates, that's 5.3 million people dead as a result of Heinrich Himmler's plans and orders.

Speaker 1 But the toll on the German people for believing the insane lies and ideas of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, that was extraordinarily high as well.

Speaker 1 And this this isn't, oh, think of the poor Germans. These are the consequences of fascism.

Speaker 1 On the low end, 2.2 million Nazi soldiers were killed during the war, although the number is sometimes estimated to be as high as 5.2 million. That, of course, doesn't even count the German civilians.

Speaker 1 Somewhere between 1.1 and 3.3 million German civilians were killed during World War II, with up to half a million dying in the Allied bombings alone.

Speaker 1 Additionally, some 1,600 German cities were partially destroyed, while up to 80% of the major cities like Berlin, Dresden, Cologne, and Hamburg were completely obliterated, absolutely beautiful cities, the likes of which we will never see again.

Speaker 1 And all of this death and destruction came because the German people gave in to their worst instincts after being fed lie after lie after lie.

Speaker 1 Now, as I said in the first episode, the current administration we have here in America, they're not Nazis.

Speaker 1 And it should be obvious after listening to the last couple of episodes that the scale of these idiots doesn't even approach Nazi Germany. But it is also a mistake to underestimate these people.

Speaker 1 Remember that Heinrich Himmler, the greatest mass murderer in history, was a small, mediocre, wholly inadequate man.

Speaker 1 His very appearance was so comical that Ed could roast him until the end of his days. Soft-boiled piece of shit.

Speaker 1 And Himmler was above all a coward to the core of his soul, but he was also a believer.

Speaker 1 He had, as one writer put it, a fanatical vision and energy, a drive that made him one of the masters of Europe in just 10 short years.

Speaker 1 And to that point, I do believe that our current administration, especially in this second term, is chock full of believers. And while they don't want us to say it, these believers are fascists.

Speaker 1 Even if they and the people who follow them don't even understand what the word actually means.

Speaker 1 I really don't think they do, because in my opinion, believing in the promise of America means that you are by definition anti-fascist. Now me, I'm just a podcast host.
Not me.

Speaker 1 When I asked Carolina what I could do in the face of all this, she told me to do as the people of Santa Poco did when faced with the threat of the infamous El Guapo in the three amigos. See?

Speaker 1 The people of Santa Poco could sew. And thus, everyone who worked on this series did what we could do by our version of sewing, which is showing the evidence and ringing the alarm.

Speaker 1 But as far as what you can do, remember Joseph Hartinger, the attorney in Munich who fought against the first deaths in the concentration camps, the man who pushed back and never gave up.

Speaker 1 As I said, historians believe that if there were just 100 men like Joseph Hartinger in Germany standing up for what was right, the Nazis would have been stopped long before World War II.

Speaker 1 So what I ask of you right now is to stand up and be like Joseph Hartinger. Be one of the 100.

Speaker 1 If you believe that what's happening in our country right now is wrong, then please stand up, especially if you're respected in your community, and say that it is wrong.

Speaker 1 Say it to your family, say it to your friends, because the bad people are coming whether you want them to or not. And like the German people, you will suffer even if you don't stand beside them.

Speaker 1 And if you changed your stance on this government and their agenda, welcome back. But if you have a friend or family member who's changed their minds too, welcome them back if you can.

Speaker 1 And let's all go take care of these motherfuckers together because it's going to take numbers to do it but I cannot stress enough that taking care of these motherfuckers does not mean using violence during the rise of the Nazis violence never did anything but give the Nazis more power every fucking time look at the examples we gave remember the Reichstag fire remember Kristallnacht violence only causes more pain and it gives the fascists the excuse they've been waiting for to bring down the boot that they're so casually hanging over the heads of every American so again I implore you, instead of being what they need you to be, be one of the 100 in your state, in your city, hell, in your fucking neighborhood, and stand up with whatever power you have against the things that you know in your heart are wrong.

Speaker 1 If enough of us do that day after day after day, then we just might have a chance because we are fucking Americans, and I still truly believe that we are smart enough and good enough to succeed where others in the past have failed.

Speaker 1 And all we have to do to make that happen is to stand the fuck up when it's our turn to stand. We did it.
We did it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You fucking did it. Good work.

Speaker 1 Good fucking work. Good work, Marcus.
This was beautiful. That was great.
Thank you. That was a very nice ending.
Feel strong.

Speaker 1 And if you want to see us kill 500 people at a time, come see Side Stories Live.

Speaker 1 Just go to lastpodcastontheleft.com and buy tickets. What a fucking series.

Speaker 1 I cannot believe

Speaker 1 we got to the end of it.

Speaker 1 You got to be careful there. Keep your head in a swivel.

Speaker 1 And also, thanks again to Carolina Dalgo for her help and associate producing these last few episodes. Thanks to our incredible research team, Joel in particular for making this happen.

Speaker 1 Joel really went above and beyond in the research on this one and gathering all this material and really putting himself through the fucking ringer to make this happen.

Speaker 1 He worked on this shit for months. He did.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, and Joel would also like us to point out that if you're looking for help in your community during these hard times, you can find resources at mutualaidhub.org.

Speaker 1 And he says that the book Mutual Aid by Dean Spade, available for free at anarchistlibrary.org, is a great resource for resisting fascism and keeping each other safe.

Speaker 1 I was going to remember you guys, because some of us, unfortunately, are still satanic capitalists, just like me. I am.

Speaker 1 And I'm against it as well. So you can be both.
You could be evil in your heart and actually against everything that's actually evil in meat space. It's important.

Speaker 1 It's important to do and it's important to hold the two together. And so thank you guys for listening.
Next week, we're going to do...

Speaker 1 I'm really excited to come back with the child emasculations of Brazil next week.

Speaker 1 I think you guys are going to really love that series. Don't worry.
It's only 19 emasculations.

Speaker 1 And we're just going to do that from the top. Each one's different.
So each time we talk about the different type of emasculation, we'll find different ways to go about it comedically.

Speaker 1 Next week, we're taking the week off. Yes.
We're going to be releasing two of our update episodes that were at one point

Speaker 1 Sirius XM exclusives, but we're going to be releasing them on the main feed for free because we and our staff need a break. And also because these two fellas are going to be on the seas next week.

Speaker 1 We're going to be on a cruise.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 that's the great way to get out of this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're going to Crime Wave at Z. All right.
It's not just

Speaker 1 what they wanted to do bringing the Jews to the Madagascar. This is us on an actual Royal Caribbean cruise.
We're going to be there.

Speaker 1 You can't even get tickets to it. It's already passed.
I think it's over. Yeah.
I think it's over. We had a great time.
Yeah, but

Speaker 1 if you want to, you can come see me this weekend in Orlando at Dead Man Tell Some Tales. And in two weeks, I'll be in San Diego at Mike Drop Comedy on a Sunday.
That is November 16th.

Speaker 1 And if you want to see last podcast on the left live we're coming all over the place right after thanksgiving we're going to be in akron ohio and then portland oregon two nights in december philadelphia austin indianapolis cincinnati pittsburgh grand rapids tulsa and oklahoma city all next year with our badass show that barely mentions nazis

Speaker 1 there's a couple of mentions

Speaker 1 we did actually there was a nazi section we ended up cutting uh during this series We have, we're doing plenty, yeah, yeah, we're doing plenty.

Speaker 1 They're in the news enough, they know what they're doing. Yeah, go and check out our brand new show, LPNRPG, presents bloodbath on LPN TV on YouTube.
Go check it out. We are having a blast over there.

Speaker 1 People are already loving it, which is good. Go check out our other content over on YouTube that's on LPN TV, someplace underneath.
LPN Romantic, The Foreign Report, No Dogs in Space.

Speaker 1 I think that's it.

Speaker 1 Right? Huh? Hail Satan. Oh, we lost Marcus.
Yeah, no, that's all right.

Speaker 1 I uh, yeah, I finished, I disassociated completely. How is um, have you used any of your Isen's grouping day uh gifts yet? You know what?

Speaker 1 I've actually been so busy, not yet, but this weekend cracking that.

Speaker 1 I'm really hoping this weekend I can put that shovel into some dirt. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, or into the chest of your enemy.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 thanks, everybody.

Speaker 1 See you in the next rush.

Speaker 1 Oh, um, Hale, private first class Murray Liff Schultz, my great uncle who liberated. He was a medic.

Speaker 1 He got the Silver Star and was nominated for the Medal of Honor, didn't get it, but he liberated the Flossenberg camp. Was that the one he lost to Jared Leto?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, hail him, man. Hail Murray.
Yeah, and

Speaker 1 hail my uncle Walter,

Speaker 1 who

Speaker 1 actually was in the Bataan Death March and survived. Wow.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, he was in the Pacific theater.

Speaker 1 My grandfather joined when the bomb struck, but he saw Sinatra in San Francisco, and that was really cool. Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 That's Pawpaw. That was his favorite story.

Speaker 1 Just beating the hell out of a hot dog vendor.

Speaker 1 Thanks, guys.

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