Episode 390 - The Auschwitz Sonderkommando Revolt

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Hey everyone, welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe.
With me is Tom and Nate. Guys, listeners, I'm sure you could tell from the title of this episode, we do not have a cold open today.

How are you guys doing? I'm okay. I'm in a country that has absolutely no questions to answer about its conduct in the Second World War.
I think all three of us can say that.

That if the question comes up, they'll be like, sadly, the documentation is missing. No one will ever know.
And that's the end.

Like I said to the guys, before we started recording, I hit the gym way too hard on Sunday, and now my ankles feel like they've exploded.

And I am walking around the house like Jar Jar Binks doing a crip walk. If it makes you feel any better, Tom, the weather was so nice.

On Sunday, I went for a 15-kilometer bike ride, and it was gorgeous. And unfortunately, I was wearing not particularly thick padding on the seat part of my exercise clothing.

So I basically feel as though someone has done like a really precise Dalsim fucking yoga arm stretch just to my ass.

And normally you have to go to Berlin for that. Yeah, no joke, right? The Berlin Street Fighter fisting you like he's throwing a Hadouken.

Yeah, the hardest part of like doing the Tour de France is doing all the poppers beforehand.

I hate having to do the Tour de France on the fucking elliptical bike that Mac invents and it's always funny.

I mean, I've seen it before with footage of Tour de France stuff where like, you know, like the team medics and stuff will cycle up to someone while they're cycling and they can basically spray like anti-irritant spray on their ass from like saddle rash.

It's like reverse poppers in a way. It's like typically you don't apply it to your ass,

but you know,

your asshole tire.

My Gucci cabin pain. All right, so that's basically the big laugh we get to have at the beginning before we talk about the what the title has already revealed, what we're going to talk about today.

Yeah. Yeah, I have to bring us all down for about the next two hours.

So we unfortunately talk about a lot of horrible shit on this show. It kind of comes with the territory when you cover history, if you cover it well, in my opinion.

And to make matters worse, because of my background, we talk about genocides a lot. We're huge fans of the light topics, clearly.

And while I'm pretty sure once upon a time, I probably said something like, we're never going to do a series about the entire history of the Holocaust or the entirety of the native genocides of North America.

I think we all know by now not to trust me when I say shit like that.

So, you know, maybe one day. But that brings us to our topic today, the Sonder Commando and the Auschwitz uprising of 1944.
But first, the unfortunate context.

We have to understand quite a few things at play here.

Namely, how did the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex work, what the Sonderkommando was, and how one day they undertook an assured suicide mission to try to bring the killing to an end.

Now, this is not an exhaustive history of the Nazis' genocidal campaign against Europe's Jewish, Roma, gay, Jehovah's Witness, and other populations during the events that have come to be known as the Holocaust.

But I think you do need to understand. how the Nazis' largest death camp actually functioned to understand the context of this episode.
Have you guys heard of the Auschwitz uprising?

It's, they actually made a movie about it with David Arquette, of all people.

Yeah.

I have heard it mentioned, obviously, a little more familiar with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and also the breakout attempt of Sobey Bowl, but I have heard it discussed.

I don't really know much about it. I think...

For my own background, I think that like there's a degree to which I've learned a lot about the Holocaust, but haven't really chosen to, I don't know, maybe it's a position of privilege here, haven't really chosen to like really dig deep into specific aspects, I suppose.

Um, other than like in books I've read that are, you know, about people involved, having read Thomas Keneally Schindler's Arc and things like that.

I know a little bit about, for example, the Austrian part of the Nazi, you know, war effort, war machine, but I don't really know that much about it. So I know, I know it happened, but that's it.

I weirdly and spiritually prefigured this episode happening, despite the fact we didn't know where I didn't know we were going to do it because I went to see the Lee Miller exhibition in Tate Britain recently.

And obviously, Lee Miller, towards the end of the war, went to Europe and like photographed a lot of troop movements and stuff.

And just soul-crushing photographs from inside the camps post-liberation.

But also, I've been reading, well, I finished reading Susan Sontag's photographing the pain of others, and like the parts about World War ii and the camps is just harrowing so i am spiritually prepared for this you accidentally got prepared uh which is the worst kind of prepared arguably i hate doing work when i don't know i don't know that i need to do it for starters when i say auschwitz-birken out it's not a single camp it is an absolutely massive camp complex it's kind of hard to understand the size of it without A, seeing parts of it or B, reading in depth about it, but it included 40 different camps, concentration camps, forced labor camps, death camps, and other sub-camps, because these are all different.

Not every concentration camp was a death camp. However, obviously, the long-term goal was always the same, whether it be through forced work, disease, starvation, or gas chamber.

There are three main camps, Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II, Birkenau, and Auschwitz III Manowitz. Auschwitz I, think of that as your administrative center.
That's where your command structure is.

It's paperwork, effectively. Auschwitz II Birkenau is the main killing and disposal center.
It's the beating heart of the Nazi industrial murder machine.

And Auschwitz III, Manowitz, is a forced labor camp, which was attached to a very large slave-driven factory for IG Farben. Now, they still largely exist today.

And back then, they were one of the largest companies in Europe and were the main producers for war material for the Nazis.

This included everything from rubber to gunpowder to Zyklon B, the gas used in the death camp chambers. Everything was IG Farben.
We did an episode a while ago about a lot of these companies.

It's also not exhaustive, but yeah, IG Farben plays a big role.

Yeah, if you want to learn a little bit more about the failures of denazification in Germany and how these companies still exist, maybe listen to the first episode of the Red Army Faction series.

Yeah.

For a small flavor of some of the history on this and going forward, Simons, the appliance manufacturer, once upon a time, well, Simons themselves helped the Nazis, and they once attempted to patent an oven called the Zyklon.

Oh.

I mean, obviously, Siemens is still around. Yeah.
They are still around. They're a huge consumer and industrial producer now.

Bayer, Bayer, as we say in America, the drug manufacturer, was also involved. Obviously, we know we've talked a little bit about Volkswagen or Volkswagen in America.
All these companies, obviously,

I mean, to be honest with you, there's a, I won't go in an aside here, but there's a significant number of other institutions, organizations, companies, et cetera, that would have done more if the countries that they were in hadn't been invaded and occupied because they were beforehand.

That is one thing about World War II, about World War II in Europe, about Nazis that I think gets swept under the rug or just kind of politely ignored, which is that a significant amount of some of the things that we will point out that the industrial and sort of social economic infrastructure cooperating with the Nazis, facilitating the Nazis in Germany and in certain other countries, a lot more countries were willing to do that with Hitler until Hitler invaded.

And obviously, there wasn't a reason to anymore because the Nazis took over the country and so on and so forth.

A lot of those countries did execute collaborators quite enthusiastically, but the same thing. Some would argue not enthusiastically enough.
Right, right, right, right, right.

I mean, quite frankly, yes, I agree. I'm not saying I'm saying that, but the camp complex did not start off like this.

When the Nazis rocked up into town, just outside of Krakow, Poland, in 1940, the original buildings were, you know, mostly for a Polish army barracks that was not exactly in the best shape.

And a short time later, prisoners began being transported there from other concentration camps that were already established in Germany.

The first people brought there were considered career criminals by the Nazis. And in the world of the concentration camp, they wore the green triangle badge.

Because remember, at the beginning, concentration camps were for criminals, as well as political dissidents, opponents, anyone the Nazis really didn't like.

But at this period, they would serve a period of time before being released. Sometimes.

Mostly involved a whole lot of torture, signing a piece of paperwork, saying you'd say out of political activities, and then you'd be released. But this was not in general a one-way trip yet.

In some cases, if you were a racial minority, forced sterilization was also a condition of being released. Also, yeah.
I mean,

depending on what your minority was, what category you fell into, your end point would vary. But in the beginning, this was not always a one-way trip.

Of course, concentration camps are always horrible. So death was always frequent, whether it be through disease,

you know, starvation on purpose, it could have been through outright murder. But they were not death camps.
yet.

In general, it was a very, very high percentage of people who were interned in concentration camps in Germany. And I need to make this very clear: in Germany, who were German citizens, survived.

And if you go outside of Germany, once the war begins and the sort of, you know, Reichskommand Ost begins, everything, the sort of purification, in their words, the mass extermination and genocide in Central and Eastern Europe, you flip that fraction and a very small percentage survive.

Well, it's because in the beginning, the vast majority of the prisoners in the concentration camp were German criminals or political dissidents. Yeah.

Once the, let's say, phases change, your experience may vary.

Of course, all of this would change. And the Nazis would have to think of something to do with this population of hardened, violent criminals within the camp's walls.

And to be clear, throughout all of the history of the Holocaust, these criminals kept being sent to camps. That never stopped.

But they also needed to try to save German money, manpower, and resources. So.
The Nazis turned these people into something called capos.

This is a position that was first deployed in Dachau in the 1930s.

Capos were prison functionaries, and they augmented the strength of the SS Totem Kampsverband, the camp guards, for lack of a better term.

They tended to be, at the beginning, brutally violent criminals, and they were largely allowed to do whatever they wanted to prisoners in exchange for small privileges around the camp, like access to alcohol, cigarettes, women, better sanitation and quarters.

things of that nature. They were put in charge of forced labor groups and given strict quotas to reach.

If their work groups failed to reach them, there's a very good chance that they were going to lose their status and be put back into the ranks of normal prisoners, which the Nazis knew meant they were probably going to be murdered by their fellow prisoners.

Or failing that later in the war, but once the war started and later in the process, they could find themselves in a gas chamber.

So capos were, let's say, encouraged to make sure their quotas were met.

Now, one thing you need to make clear, too, is that the the word CAPO or CAPO gets used kind of thrown as a slur, typically by Jewish people to other Jewish people who are seen as betraying whatever the cause identified that, you know, is being discussed.

Typically, you see this a lot in discourse around Israel and around Zionism, but in general, it's not something that's been unfamiliar

since the war. However, it's very important to bear this in mind that what Joe just said, which is that Capos were not explicitly Jewish so much as they were prisoners.

And that when you think about who the Nazis imprisoned, who the Nazis targeted, who the Nazis sought to exterminate, it could come from any group of prisoners.

Obviously, this is a different situation earlier in the war and earlier in the Holocaust versus later on. Yeah, that would change.

Obviously, when you think about

the fact that the largest single group targeted by the Nazis during the Holocaust were Jewish people, it does make sense why that term would be tied to the idea of a sort of like collaborator amongst Jewish prisoners, if that makes sense.

But that's not explicitly what it is. I just say that because people have probably heard that word.

And if you're not familiar, you may not realize that it actually was a thing that was tied to, it was tied to the prison system within the Holocaust, within the Nazi camps, not explicitly just Jewish people.

Yeah. And interestingly, nobody knows where the name Capo actually comes from.
It was just kind of adopted.

Some people think it comes from the French for caparelle or adopted from mafia ties, but nobody's actually entirely sure. A lot of people don't realize that Gestapo is Geheimstazpolitzi.

It's one of the weird German acronyms where they do like the first syllables of everything. So, you know, sometimes it just is a thing, and now no one knows where it came from.

That's just the word they use. Yeah, like Nate said, Capos were not always Jewish.
They had no set ethnic background at all.

A camp's population, though, the Nazis did make a lot of efforts to make sure whoever the Capos were selected were not one of the majority of the camp, whether it be from their nation of origin or ethnicity, because, of course, the goal was always to send any kind of resistance or murderous intent or rebellion inward.

It was to divide and conquer. So if they could make the the population of the camp incredibly pissed off at capos, good.
They're fine with that.

Capos, like we said, started off as violent prisoners, career criminals, but as the camp populations begin to blow up, because concentration camp populations Obviously, as the Holocaust switches into Holocaust mode, the camp population balloons and the career criminals, there's just not enough of them to be capos anymore.

Over time, capos could be anyone and, like we said, are not always Jewish, but they were selected for a certain trait, which was the Nazis believed that they would do their job, which authorized them.

to use violence to make sure their job got done. And sometimes it wasn't just an authorization.
It was an expectation that you would rule through brutality.

It's like the figure of the cop, the er cop within each of us. Some people have a more pronounced er cop, and the Nazis were like, I think I see something in you.

However, this was not a universal thing. Not every capo was a bloodthirsty asshole.

A lot of them used their privileges as a way to protect and save fellow prisoners, knowing if they were caught, they were going to die.

There were other camp functionaries as well, like doctors and nurses, who were virtually always prisoners forced into the rule. And that goes for capos as well.
None of these people are volunteers.

Other prisoners with skills that the camps needed were conscripted into service as well, because the Nazis' goal was to make these quote-unquote self-sustained prisons.

The prisoners policed themselves, the prisoners did their own repairs, etc., etc., etc., because it makes it cheaper for the Nazis to administer.

The first crematory at the camps was built at Camp 1 in 1940, though not originally for the disposal of gas chamber victims, as the chambers were not built yet.

Bunstad meant to burn the corpses of any prisoner who died in the camp for the countless reason that concentration camp had a very high body count.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in 1940, we are well before the advent of gas chambers and it's more mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen and mass suffocations or mass asphyxiations with the exhaust trucks.

If I'm not sure, yeah, at first comes the Holocaust by Bullets in the East, as it's known, which is the Einsensegruppen, the SS Sonder Commando, more on them later. Yep.

All sorts of other stuff like that. And mass graves, ditches, riverine.

And then the first use of gas was during the T4 action euthanasia program, where they just used carbon monoxide gas pumped directly from a car engine. We'll talk more about that in a bit, though.

Yeah, and obviously by 1940, they had not yet invaded the Soviet Union. Yeah, yeah, all that's coming.

Camp Deputy Commander Carl Friesch told the first mass transport of prisoners into the camp, quote, there is no way out other than through the chimney. And this is before this is a death camp.

That's just because, again, concentration camps are horrible places, even when death was not the ultimate outcome. There was a very good chance you were not going to leave, which again was by design.

I cannot stress that enough. Just because that some prisoners got released did not mean the Nazis thought every prisoner was going to be released at this stage.

As 1940 turned to 1941, the Holocaust by bullets begins. This is conducted by members of the German army, the Einsetzgruppen, the Order Police, and other groups of collaborators.

However, this process had innate problems built right into it from the perspective of the perpetrators.

For example, the men doing the killing were having mental breakdowns, turning into alcoholics, and in a lot of cases committing suicide, all of which was very bad for Nazi morale.

And to Heinrich Himmler, one of the chief engineers of the Holocaust, the killing was also, for a lack of a better term, icky.

He viewed one mass killing and it made him physically sick when blood splashed on his uniform. He thought the murders were too messy and too damaging.

He wanted a more humane way to commit a genocide, and by humane, I mean for the killers.

He wanted a mechanical way of death that allowed the person doing the killing to be separate from the act of killing itself.

It's the same reason today that when we have capital punishment, It is rigged up in a way where the person doing the killing is not exactly pulling the trigger, even though they know that the mechanism that they're using is going to end in human death, if that makes sense.

It's like kind of distributing it, abstracting it so that it doesn't, in the same way that, as I understand it, there is at least, there have at least in the past been traditions where firing squads, for example, not every fire has actual live rounds.

That's still used today when the firing squad is used.

And for our non-American listeners, that is still used in America in some states for capital punishment, despite the fact anybody who's ever used a gun knows a blank feels differently. But 100%.

It's all part of the kabuki theater to make killers feel better.

Previous to this, the Nazis had used rudimentary gas chambers, especially part of the T4 euthanasia program and after the initial invasion of Poland.

At first, this was done through carbon monoxide poisoning. Quite literally, they just hooked a tube up to a car exhaust and into an enclosed space.

Sometimes they used purpose-built killing vans, which is exactly what it sounds like, and they eventually evolved into using pure carbon monoxide gas from a can.

However, this did not work as well as they wanted it to. People survived this quite frequently.
Yeah, they would be very, very ill, but they would survive. Yep.

Infamously, the Nazis would settle on the cyanide pesticide and disinfectant, Zyklon B. It was cheap.
readily available, and easy to use.

According to virtually all known accounts, the first use of Zyklon B for murder in the context of the Holocaust was during an experiment done in the basement of Auschwitz 1 in September 1941 at the direction of Freesch, with the first victims being a group of Soviet POWs.

There's not a lot of bright spots in this episode if you haven't picked up on this, but I'll give someone a little glimmer. Friesch was arrested by the SS for corruption.

demoted and sent to the front line in the east where he died. He was like embezzling from the death camp.
And he's actually not the only camp commandant or deputy commander that went down like that.

Sometimes there's something you can nod and understand that, yeah, this guy kind of got what he deserved eventually. Yeah, it's uh at least I got one of them.

Talking about this and like talking about the evolution from the carbon monoxide trucks, because I remember when I was in Prague a couple of years ago, they have part of the memorial museum they have there is they have like a display with photos of the trucks and it's like it's really grim.

But I think the thing that I'd say probably most people struggle with when like thinking about this stuff is that like, yeah, it was like the switch to Cyclone B was like partially like, oh, a scalability question of like, how can we kill more people more efficiently?

But like when you think about like, oh, we need to do this more efficiently because lining up soldiers to shoot people just. isn't efficient enough because it causes them emotional distress.

And like just trying to grapple with that thing in your mind is like so hard.

it's like oh we have to like spare the feelings of the executioners and we need to do this more efficiently to kill more people yep what's weird is that i don't even necessarily know if it was sparing the feelings so much as it was just the fact that there's something incontrovertible about killing other human beings that will damage someone's psyche and so it's like it's not i guess to me it's like i know what you're saying joe but to me it's just sort of like right but they still pulled the trigger they still did it yeah um it's like yes it does it does take a toll on people and it did take a toll and then eventually people like you said became substance addicted, committed suicide.

But like, I don't know a ton, and I'll admit that my knowledge of this is just based typically on summary and not in history books and not specifically about this topic, like specifically about the psychological impact of the perpetrators.

But to me, it feels like what I know of it, and correct me if I'm wrong here, is that what you're describing is absolutely an observed phenomenon, but instances of insubordination against it are far less common.

Well, there's a very good book written about that entire subject by Christopher Browning called Ordinary Men that focuses on the Order Police.

And you are correct in that insubordination was virtually unheard of. To take part in the killings themselves was completely voluntary.

They could ask to be switched to another unit without any kind of impact on their career. And overwhelmingly, people did not do this.

There's a lot of reasons for this that Browning goes into very, very well.

But it boils down to kind of a collective organizational, for a lack of a better term, sprit de corps in a lot of ways, because these guys in the Order of Police were generally not party members.

They were not anyone that you could consider fanatics, hence the title of the book and why it's so scary. But yeah, I mean, you are right.

There was not really a lot of insubordination or even a lot of people that refused to do it. There's a lot of people that were given orders to do something and they did it.

And to be completely clear, to further their career, because the Order of Police was generally made up of people who were not going to get other good state jobs that paid them decently.

Most of them were excused from military service. It was like we've talked about in every genocide we've ever covered on the show.

One of the main driving forces for every individual act of genocide was furthering themselves and furthering their life conditions. It was not ideal.
It was not ideology. It wasn't even racism.

It was nothing like that. It was quite literally securing their personal bag that goes from Rwanda, that goes for Cambodia, that goes for Armenia.

And another added little sprinkle on top of that is the repercussions if you don't. Obviously, in Cambodia and Rwanda, a lot of people were forced to do this under fear of death.
Most, if not all.

If you did not directly take part, you were dead. The Holocaust was not quite that, but it was the implication of, what if I don't? What if I do lose my career? What if my family does suffer for this?

What if, what if, what if, what if? However, as we know from the documents, that was not the case.

They did it because they were ordered to do it and because they directly benefited from the act of organized killing.

And this goes all the way back to the beginning of the Holocaust when Jewish businesses were taken away and

belongings were taken away and people went along with it because where were those belongings and businesses going? Yeah. Right into your hands, you know? So this is not always an ideology thing.

And I know a lot of people are not going to want to hear this, but most people who commit genocide are not die-hard ideologues.

They're people who wanted to improve their lives through an incredibly fucked up process and they were given the means to.

I guess I just, to close this out, the reason I heightened that is because you're correct in the sense that like they did this, one of the motivations was to spare the psychological damage that it was causing.

And it's not a criticism of you. It's just more when you say, oh, to spare their feelings, to me, it's like that kind of pings an alarm bell for me because it's like, well, right.

But it wasn't as if they were like, oh, you know i'm morally conflicted about what i'm doing it's just that seeing and perpetrating mass murder over and over and over again no matter who you are breaks you psychologically even not participating just witnessing it does it to you that's just how the human brain functions and so they realized that it was going to harm their resources more if they continued And so they said, like you just described about the gas chamber and many other approaches with capital punishment, it's like distribute responsibility so that people aren't just bothered by it.

And from here, the Nazis built the camp's first purpose-built gas chamber. Kind of.

They converted a morgue in Auschwitz 1 that could fit around 800 people at a time, which was quickly put to use after the Nazis outlined their final solution and mass deportation programs in 1942.

Now, unfortunately, we have to talk about this process and how it worked. Sorry.
In general, but not always, the killing process worked like this. A train load of Jews would arrive at a camp.

From there, SS doctors in charge of selection would select people they considered useful. This could be anything from people who had skills, like musicians and painters or technical workers.

And in the context of the medical experiments going on at Auschwitz, anyone who fit that parameter. However, this episode is not about Mengele's medical experiments, but that is also part of it.

Or in the case of Auschwitz with its detached force labor contingent, anyone who looked strong enough to work.

These people were stripped, their belongings were taken by the SS, their heads were shaved, and they were tattooed with a prisoner number, and they were given a uniform.

Then, due to the limitations of the first gas chamber, the Nazis would only select the people they thought were completely useless for whatever they needed.

These were the very old, the very young, mothers with young children, the sick, and the injured.

They'd be led into the room by the SS, told to undress, their belongings were taken from them, they would have their heads shaved, they were informed that they'd be disinfected and given a shower.

Some death camps even had fake shower heads installed installed in the gas chambers to better sell this lie.

From there, they'd be locked inside the gas chamber and Zyklon B pellets would be lit and dumped into the room overhead. This would off-gas into cyanide.

Normally, this took about 30 minutes and everybody inside would be dead. This group was never processed into the camp as prisoners.

The selection process between temporary life and immediate death took only a few seconds.

Their selection was oftentimes uneven and they were given quotas to hit between the two groups, especially once more gas chambers were built.

On average, 80% of everyone who arrived at Auschwitz was marked for immediate death, though the death rate for those 20% who made it past this point was still half, meaning at best, 10%,

give or take of the people who passed through Auschwitz would survive.

In order to make this process quicker, and again, not take as many actual SS men, The Nazis created a new camp functionary, the Sonderkommando.

But before we move on, we have to make a few things clear. There were death camp Sonderkommando.
Sonderkommando was just a Nazi term for a special task group.

This is a specialized group to do any task. Sonderkommando was used quite a few times by the Nazis.
Yeah, it just literally means special command in German.

In the death camp, Jewish men were selected under the threat of death to do a job. They literally did not know what it was until they were confronted with it.
There was also the SS Sonderkommando.

As the name says, these are uniformed SS men. Absolutely no connection with the death camp Sonder Commando at all.
I cannot stress enough that these two people have nothing to do with one another.

The SS Sonder Commando, again, special task group, were set up to conduct mass murder or to facilitate mass deportation towards the camps.

So many of these were made up SS Sonderkommandos throughout the war, there's a very good chance that Nazi high command did not even know how many there were.

These were oftentimes temporary to be given a certain task, at which point they would go back to whatever their normal job was.

Again, these are actual members of the SS, not prisoners in the camp, despite the name.

So to summarize, what you're saying is that Auschwitz Sonderkommando would be prisoners forced into this role, whereas SS Sonderkommando would be SS members basically detailed to a different task force.

The SS Sonderkommander weren't even in the camps. They were, you know, for example, expediating the deportation of, say, Hungary's Jewish population.
That would be their special task.

And then once that was done, they'd go back to their units or that Sonderkommando would be moved somewhere else. Sometimes the death camp Sonderkommando were known as

work Jews for Arbiten-Juden, I believe, was the term. But like, yeah, these two things are not related whatsoever.
It was just a term that the Nazis used for a lot of different shit.

The Nazis loved their own weird special etymology and neologisms. Like, that's one thing to bear in mind.
Oh, they loved it.

They had their, they might as well invented their own fucking language for various different working groups who fell under other working groups, who fell under this ministry, that fell under that ministry.

And also, I think, just as a quick aside, the fact that commando means something different in the English language sometimes gives people an impression.

But, like, the Nazi high command was, if I'm not mistaken, I believe it was Oba Commando. So, like literally, the high command, literally, that's it.

So, it's just bearing that that word doesn't necessarily mean the same.

It rings differently in English, but like, yeah, the definition is very important here because otherwise you can find yourself thinking you're reading or learning about a different group.

You could end up going down a road thinking that there is Jewish uniform members of the SS committing the Holocaust, which is not the case. Woo boy.
Yeah, don't end up there.

Now, the death camp Sonder commando men were selected just like anyone else. They didn't have any special skills other than they simply looked strong enough for manual labor.

They were led away from everyone else, and at least officially, they were not to speak to any other prisoners ever again. They were what the Nazis considered bearers of secrets.
They knew the truth.

They knew too much. They had to be sequestered and when they were done with, eliminated.
They did not know what their job was until an SS man forced them to open gas chamber doors.

Because Sonder Commander were broken down into different teams as well. Men who worked in the gas chamber, men who worked at the crematoria, men who scattered the ashes, men who handled the property.

So that would be the first time a lot of these people figured out what the fuck their job was.

Put on a gas mask, grab a big metal hook, and start dragging the corpses of the gas chamber, or getting stashed into a crematoria, and then bodies start showing up.

Most of the time, the first corpses that the Sonder Commando disposed of were the last group of Sonder Commando. Jesus Christ.

This is because there was an official policy that was not always followed by camp administrators that Sonder Commando had a work and therefore lifespan of three months, at which point they would need to be wiped out and replaced.

There's no way to quit or resign or refuse the job. The choice was clear, do the job or die.
And then also do the job and die. Also that, yeah.

The Nazis treated Sonderkommando pretty much the same way they treated Capos. They were given better, cleaner quarters, more food, and allowed to drink and smoke.

However, the Sonderkommando lived in virtually isolation from the rest of the camp world, in barracks that were directly attached to the crematoria.

As the Holocaust expanded, the camps expanded and the concentration guard cadre expanded. More and more collaborators were brought in to act as guards.

The Nazis saw these foreign collaborators as inherently untrustworthy and it wasn't actually uncommon for them to be pretty corrupt.

So in the case of the Sonderkommando, only German SS men were ever allowed to guard them. It was too risky if one of them broke out.

Now the Sonderkommando's access to better, cleaner quarters, and better food meant they survived in camp much larger than your average prisoner.

An average Auschwitz prisoner had a lifespan of only a few weeks beyond selection, for countless reasons.

If a Sonderkommando man could do the job, he would survive almost without fail until the end of his term, only to be sent to a gas chamber, or simply shot.

Others were killed due to mental breakdowns after seeing so much horror, they were simply unable to go on with the job. Many men selected for the job didn't even last a day.

They saw what the job was and could not do it, and they were executed. However, this three-month cycle was not always followed, especially in Auschwitz, weirdly enough.

Many Sondrik Kamano survived for years, from some were selected in 42 and made it till 44. Some survived the war.
We'll get to that point though.

A lot of that has to do with bribes, favors, or simply having some kind of skill the Nazis thought they might need.

Though sometimes Sondrikomano's survival was a simple matter of the Nazis not wanting to bother to go through the process of getting a new group of men.

After all, if the pace of murder slowed down, the Nazis would get in trouble. That being said, the Sonder Kamita were the first ones to die the second anything went sideways.

Owing to that, they knew the Nazis could not allow them to survive and leave. And if that wasn't enough, the SS made sure to remind them constantly.
If the camps ever threatened, you're dead.

If the camps ever moved, you're dead. If an, you know, the Soviet army gets close, you're the first ones dead.
It was their policy to make sure they didn't survive.

That meant even though they survived longer than anyone else, they had absolutely the lowest overall survival rate of anyone.

So over the history of Auschwitz, about 2,000 men rotated through to act as Sonder commandos. Fewer than 20 are known to have survived.
Jesus Christ.

We know virtually nothing about these men thanks this. Normal camp prisoners knew nothing about them.
After all, if you saw them, well, you were not long for this world.

But much of what we we know about the Sonder Commando comes from the men themselves. Despite the fact that almost all of them were killed, they had a tendency to write memoirs, diaries, notes.

They even kept detailed notes of how many people were killed and when, when deportation trains came in and how many people were on them, and buried it on the campgrounds where they were recovered after liberation.

We have most of this in detail information to thank because they scrolled it out on scraps of paper and buried it literally right next to the crematoria.

At first, the crematoria were not used to dispose the thousands of victims that were coming out of the gas chambers.

Rather, Sonderkomeno were tasked with dragging the bodies out of the gas chamber, loading them onto wagons, wheeling them out to the edge of camp, and burying them in mass graves.

For many Sonderkomeno, this would be the last time they ever saw their family because they were burying them. Though the job of the Sonderkomeno was about to get much, much worse.

As the genocidal campaign against the Nazis ramped up and more more territory was taken, more deportations were ordered and more people ended up being sent to Auschwitz.

In order to cope with this new influx of people, purpose-built gas chambers that could fit up to 2,000 people at a time were built in Birkenau.

And with them, four crematoria complexes, with one already existing, making for a total of five, each with five furnaces and three kilns.

And when operating at full capacity, which they often were, they could burn 5,000 bodies per day, and they mostly did.

The gas chambers in crematorium were connected via hoists and tracks, one leading to the other.

And remember, the Sonder Commandos live in barracks connected to them, meaning they had created an assembly line of genocide. Manning this from beginning to end would be the Sonder Commando.

Before, the numbers of people the Nazis were killed as manageable for their Totenkopsverbahn to handle.

Now with thousands being forced into the gas chamber at a time per day, they needed to deploy new methods.

The Sonder Commando would now lead the condemned to death into the gas chambers, instructing them what to do the whole way.

Oftentimes they'd say not to worry about the cold because there's hot tea waiting for them on the other side. If they went faster, tea would still be hot when they got to it.

The Nazis themselves would do the killing with the gas, and then the Sonder Commando would wait about a half hour, don gas masks, and begin to pull the bodies out, pausing at this moment to search each body for any last piece of jewelry someone might be hiding on themselves, or gold teeth in their mouths, which they were forced to pry out.

I should point out that failing to do any of this would result in their immediate death.

Though, some Sonder Commando men stole these valuables and kept them to themselves, later to be used to bribe the guards.

The corpses were then loaded into the crematoria, and when that process was done, another team of Sonder Commando would load the ashes up and scatter them in the nearby woodline and river.

You might be wondering, how in the fuck could a person do this job? How could they keep calm? and lie to people's faces as they're about to be ushered to a fate that only you truly knew.

Well, we actually know. As one Sandra Commando man put it, he didn't see the point of telling them.
He thought it would be cruel because they were all going to die anyway.

And to be clear here, the men knew that they were all going in that chamber in the end as well. They knew this fate waited for all of them.

And for many of them, at least with the ones testimonies that we know about, forcing the poor people to panic by telling them would only add to their misery.

One Sandra Commando survivor, Leon Cohen, put it thusly, Are you out of your mind to tell people such a thing? How could I tell people they're about to be murdered?

It was impossible to tell this terrible truth to anybody. You have to realize that the system was too sophisticated for us to interfere with in any way.

The people were doomed to die, and I couldn't do a thing about it, so why tell them?

The Nazis' tendency to not follow their own rules regarding the three-month Sandra Commando lifespan meant that over time, some of the men were able to build up a decent stockpile of stolen goods to bribe and barter with their guards.

And this is how they would eventually make contact with other prisoners, namely, as 1944 rolled around, the resistance within the camp. We talked about this before.

The Polish Resistance had been active members of Auschwitz since the very beginning. In fact, they were some of the first people sent there.

But alongside the Polish Resistance, there's also the Kampfgruppe Auschwitz, made up of anyone who wasn't Polish to staff a different parallel resistance movement.

If you remember back to our Wittold Pilecki series, one of the main goals of the Resistance was to get word out of what was happening to the outside world.

The resistance was less an underground guerrilla movement, like people like to envision a resistance, and more of like a rumor and news network.

Resistance from the outside of the camp would smuggle in current events, and then they would pass them throughout the camp, and then they would pass word of what was happening in the camp out of the resistance outside the wire, and they would pass it to the outside world.

Polish resistance members would compile news of the killings and deportations into the camp and smuggle them out for the wider world.

In some cases, literally breaking out of and back into Auschwitz on multiple occasions to do this. Unfortunately, they're largely ignored, but these men are fucking heroes nonetheless.

It made sense that eventually elements of the Polish resistance and the Kampf group came together and eventually making contact through the one group of camp functionary that both they and the Sonder Commando would have to talk to from time to time, camp medical staff.

The first act of resistance the Sonder Commando undertook was saving their extra food, their allotted soap and other small luxuries, wrapping them in bits of shirt, and throwing them over the fence into the women's camp, which is the closest camp to them.

This might not sound like much, but the Sonderkommando knew if they got caught, they'd be shot.

One of the main leaders of the resistance within the Sonderkommando was a Polish Jew, son of a rabbi, and a counterclerk, Zolman Gradowski. He had been sent to Auschwitz in 1942.

where virtually his entire family was killed and he was assigned to the Sonderkommando. He knows they died because he burned their bodies.

At first, the Polish Resistance did not trust the Sonder Commando. They didn't understand what they were necessarily.
They didn't realize what they were going through, what the reality was.

They kind of equated them to being Capos at first. And to be fair, several members of the Capo were also in the Resistance.
So it was kind of like a feeling out moment.

And all this makes sense because think of how unknown the Sonder Commando would be to everyone else in camp. Nobody ever saw them.
Nobody ever spoke to them.

They were just weird ghosts that flitted through the buildings whenever the chimneys started smoking.

But as they passed letters back and forth, it quickly became clear that not only were these men as doomed and hopeless as anyone else in the camp, they were just as desperate to get evidence of the horrors into the hands of people outside.

Now, as is common knowledge now, one of the main sources of information about the Holocaust are the Nazis themselves, right? They took detailed notes.

And in the case of the Holocaust by bullets, they took photographic proof of their crimes.

This was for their files and in some cases, men gloating about what they did, but it was evidence nonetheless, right? It's very easy to see that. This is not the case when it came to the death camps.

The Nazis still took photos of the camps. There's plenty to see, to include really weird ones about like their families chilling out in their gardens and things like that.

But they did not take photos of the murder and disposal process. It was strictly banned.
And that makes sense. Remember what the Nazis' message at the time was.
They weren't killing anyone.

People were being resettled elsewhere. They couldn't publish this.
The Resistance was desperate to get the truth out, and not just testimonials. They had plenty of those, but real functional details.

You know, this saying goes, the devil's in the details. It's hard to disprove what's going on if you have pictures and diagrams and numbers.

And it goes without saying that a normal camp inmate would not be able to get anywhere near this stuff.

So the Resistance began compiling information from the Sonder Commando, mainly from a man named Philip Mueller.

Mueller and other Sonder Commando began to make detailed sketches of the gas chambers in Crematoria. They even managed to pass on a label from a can of Zyklon B.

From there, they were smuggled back into the hands of the Resistance, who in turn handed them off to two Resistance members, Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Verba, who were then charged with breaking out of Auschwitz and getting the information to the hands of the resistance at large.

And this worked. It's known as the Verba Wetzler report.
It's insanely detailed. And what's interesting is people were questioning it at first, thinking it was some kind of misinformation or a lie.

And it's sometimes noted by modern day Holocaust deniers that the sketches are inaccurate, but it's pretty easy for the sketches to be inaccurate when it came to how things function because then the people making them were engineers, but they make the mistakes that you would like if you told me to accurately sketch the inside of a building.

I don't know how to do an engineering sketch, but I can write what it looks like.

This is the most detailed report report about what was happening in Auschwitz to get into the wider world, and it needed to be. Rumors and stories had been circulating for quite some time.

The more detailed a piece of information, the harder it is to ignore or explain away.

And this episode isn't really the place to go into, but there's a lot of arguments about the report in general, with Verba himself blaming the Jewish World Council for not spreading his report into Hungary fast enough because the mass deportation in Hungary had not quite started yet.

And he believed if more people knew about it, they would resist deportation. Because remember, most people didn't realize what was happening.

And he thought if they dispense with it quicker, people would be more informed and resist it more. He accuses them of costing delays, which costs lives.
This isn't really the place for that.

There's a lot of details into that, but this is not the only bit of resistance happening within the Sonder Commando. Like I said, they and the resistance wanted photographic evidence.

But how the fuck do you get a camera into Auschwitz? Think of how big a camera is in the 40s.

I was about to jump in and talk about cameras in the 1940s generally were either kind of rolyflex style accordion cameras or like big medium format box cameras.

There were a handful of like parallax based range finder cameras, but like you're getting either something that folds up kind of like a notebook or you're getting like a little tiny range finder camera that is hard enough to conceal.

Yeah. Well, there's also the question of some of the keepsake photographs that have appeared in historical record as things traded by Nazi soldiers or collected by Nazi soldiers.

There's one in particular. There's a photo that's kind of informally titled The Last Jew in Venice.

And the thing about that is that that photo was reproduced because it was a Nazi soldiers treated this as kind of a keepsake. It was popular among them, but it wasn't a soldier's personal photograph.

It was taken by a photographer, most likely with a camera on a tripod because it was meant to be that kind of an exhibition of what they were doing for themselves.

And that was during the Holocaust by bullets. Correct.
Which, and a lot of times, they use those photographs as effectively progress reports, for a lack of a better term. Yeah.

But I bring it up because the notion of finding, you know, people, there have been instances of, for example, stories of people finding photos like this on the bodies of German soldiers, but these were not photos that they had personally taken.

They were is in it is just as macabre in my mind.

These are photos that, because of what they depicted, were popular as kind of like souvenirs and keepsakes, and thus multiple copies were made and they were sold or traded, which is not that different than how Americans treated photos of lynchings, except that they were actually sold and commercially produced as postcards because America.

And just think of like how crazy it is that they were willing to reproduce some of these photos, but and how seriously they took no photos of the gas chamber, no photos of the crematorium.

That's how different these two situations are. And that brings us back to the camera.
So a German Leica camera is smuggled into Auschwitz, which would be a rangefinder, correct, Tom?

Yeah, it'd be a rangefinder. Also, I don't know if you're going to mention it, Joe, and maybe we'll cover it in a future episode.

Ernst Leitz II

was involved in like a freedom train kind of operation to save both Jewish workers for the Leica company. and other Jewish people from the Holocaust.

A lot of people make a thing about Leica supplying cameras to the Nazis. It was like they kind of had to, was the thing.
Yeah. I mean, same thing could be said for Oscar Schindler.

He was still an active war profiteer who was saving lives.

That's really the best you could hope for from those guys.

So through a chain of custody going from the Polish resistance outside the camp to the inside, a German Leica camera was smuggled into Auschwitz-Birkenau, namely through a resistance member named Stanislaw Klodinski, and then they were also able to get film as well.

This was passed on to the Sonderkommando to try to get pictures of the actual killing process of Auschwitz.

Operating as a team from within one of the gas chambers, a group of Sonderkommando, Alex Arrera, Alter Faisenberg, and the Drogon brothers Shlomo and Josek were able to get the only known pictures to exist of the Auschwitz gas chambers and crematoria in action.

The four pictures, now known as the Sonder Commando Photographs, take over the course of about 30 minutes, depict the naked woman being led to the chambers and the burning of their bodies afterwards.

The pictures are all very blurry and out of focus, and this is because you can actually see SS guards in some of them.

The man taking the photos from all accounts is a guy named Alex Arrera, who is a Greek-Jewish man slash resistance fighter/slash communist.

He couldn't actually aim the camera because that would be too obvious.

You can see in some of the photos, there is a black border around it because he is literally hiding inside of an unused gas chamber at the time and taking a picture out of one of the venting windows and doing it by just like holding the camera to his chest real fast.

And that's why one of the pictures is straight up like up in the air taking a picture of a tree. He couldn't aim at all.

To explain for anyone curious how cameras at this time worked, the cameras that you see now are SLR cameras or digital SLR cameras, a single lens reflex, which essentially acts like a periscope where you're viewing through the viewfinder.

It goes down onto another mirror that's looking directly through the lens. That flips up, takes a photo.

At this time, what was essentially you had parallax view where you had to like, I have some of those cameras, like they're really hard to get in focus.

So if you're a Sonder Commando hiding in an unused gas chamber trying to capture a photo, it is impossible.

It's amazing they actually managed to get four photos that showed anything at all. Yep.

The film was then taken out of the camera, stuffed into an empty tube of toothpaste, and smuggled out of the camp. They then buried the camera, never to be used again.

That brings us to the actual uprising, though, because amongst the Sonder Commando of Auschwitz and the resistance in the camp at large, it was known that things were changing within the camp.

As early as March 1944, the number of deportations going towards Auschwitz was beginning to decrease.

Without so many people to murder and dispose of immediately, the Nazis didn't actually need so many Sonderkommando anymore.

So for the first time in a very long time, at least in the timeline of Auschwitz, because remember, all this is only happening in a few years, 200 men from the Auschwitz Sonderkommando were sent to Majdanek and executed.

The Sonderkommando and the Polish Resistance came to the conclusion that it was only a matter of time before the rest of the Sonderkommando went with them and a new batch was brought in, meaning all the resistance contacts would be gone.

Or maybe this was a hint that all of Auschwitz is about to be liquidated. So a plan began to be formed.

The Sonder Commander was seen as a core in any general revolt by the Resistance, both the Polish and the Kampf group.

In the context of the prisoners in the death camp, they were healthier, better fed, and stronger.

Not to mention, as the plan began to develop, they were the only ones who had a hope of striking out at the tools of murder, the gas chamber and the crematoria.

They knew that any breakout that they attempted or any uprising they tried to launch was not going to be 100% 100% successful.

They hoped that some people might be able to get out, but at minimum, they hoped to disable the camp's purpose.

So as the other resistance members planned their part of the uprising, the Sondra Commando planned theirs with the aim of launching them to overwhelm the camp guards, steal guns, use those guns to break into the armory where they could take even more guns and just kind of distribute them amongst prisoners as they went.

kill as many SS as possible, blow up the crematoria, and if they were still alive, try to get out. But it should be clear here, they pretty much all expected to die.

They knew in the event of any camp uprising, the SS would kill them first.

According to the original plans, all of this was meant to be launched in July of 1944 to aid the ongoing Soviet Operation Bagration.

We aren't entirely sure how the Sonder Command of Resistance got in contact with the women prisoners who worked in the munitions factory, but we do know that they did.

The women working with gunpowder would sneak away tiny amounts, and I literally mean tiny, only like a teaspoon per day, hidden within bits of cloth and then concealed on their bodies.

From there, they would smuggle it to another woman, the ringleader of the women's camp resistance, Rosa Robata, who worked in the Effectin Lager, which is the office where all Jewish property was sorted that was stolen from the dead.

Now, normally people like the Sonder Commando and Rosa would never be allowed to interact.

The Sonder Commando did handle property taken from the victims of the gas chamber, but they were sealed into a container and given to an SS man who would carry it to the infectant logger.

However, despite the camp administration's best efforts, corruption within the SS guards was rampant.

According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, this corruption was virtually foundational to the relationship between the two men.

For example, a Sonder commando man would tell an SS guard, ah, your uniform looks like it needs to be pressed. Like,

your shit's all fucked up. It was code.
He had jewelry or other stolen goods that he had taken from the dead.

The SS man would then agree that, you know what, my uniform does need some attention, meaning he was down for the deal.

He would then hand his jacket to the Sonder Commando man who would take it away, out of eyesight, fill its pockets with whatever he had, and then give it back to the SS man, not cleaned or pressed.

The man would then inspect his uniform, meaning the stolen goods, and compliment the Sonder Commando on his good cleaning job. That meant, yeah, the deal is done.
Go do whatever you need.

So the Sonder Commando would then go about this process in order to get into the infecting logger. From there, they'd get to meet with Rosa.

Obviously, the other SS men probably thought the Sonder Commander were meeting a girlfriend or their wife or something like that. Not smuggling black powder into the Sonder Commando barracks.

And this took a very long time. A teaspoon of black powder, at best, per day.
But over the months, black powder piled up, and the Sonder Commander began fashioning it into homemade bombs.

This was an incredibly slow process, and as they continued to stockpile black powder, the Sondor Commando also realized, this is going to be a fight.

If we want guns, we're going to have to kill these guys. So they began making prison shivs.
But then as July got closer, the Polish resistance wanted to postpone the uprising.

The reason for this was because Operation Bagration had kind of got bogged down.

So now, to them, the uprising would just be a waste without Soviet forces nearby to support them, or otherwise distract the Nazi response to a camp revolt. They thought it'd be a suicide mission.

Eventually, by August, the Polish resistance and by extension the Kampfgruppe came to the conclusion that any uprising was becoming more and more pointless.

The Soviets were marching again, and they were getting closer and closer to Auschwitz. So they figured, why bother? There was no way that they would be successful.

That would cause a break out of everyone. It would get a lot of them killed.

And not to mention, those who didn't take part in the uprising would be facing the consequences in the form of horrible reprisals, something that everybody in the camp was familiar with thanks to earlier escapes.

So for them, it was safer to just sit back and wait to be liberated by the Soviets. Now, obviously, since we know how the liberation works out, this is a very bad idea.

But to them, it seems like it makes sense. For the Sonder Commando, this was simply not an option.
They knew even liberation for everyone else meant death for them.

There was no way the Nazis were going to let them live.

And even if the Nazis abandoned the camp and fled a Soviet advance, their standing orders was to make sure that not a single one of them was alive before the SS abandoned the camp.

Then things began to get worse. First in August, Alex Herrera, the cameraman, was out with a group of Sondar Commando disposing of ashes in a nearby river.
And then he attempted to escape.

This is not part of any other broadly reaching plan. He simply jumped into the river and tried to go for it.

Now, this is sometimes set it was because, you know, the contacts within the resistance kind of led him to believe the Soviets were very close by and they really actually weren't.

But either way, we don't know for sure. He could have just saw an opening and gone for it.
He was only out for two days. He was captured, tortured, and executed.

A short time later, the capo for the Sonder Commando, a man named Shimon Kaminsky, was grabbed by the SS, tortured, and executed.

Kaminsky was not a career criminal, was not a capo volunteer, if any of those ever existed.

Like DeSander Commando, he was forced to do his job under threat of immediate death, and he was a co-conspirator in the uprising. So two co-conspirators tortured and executed.

The other resistance members, Sonder, Commando, and otherwise, thought that, fuck, the SS might be on to us. These guys probably talked, which is not a slight against them.

The amount of shit that was done to these guys, anybody's gonna talk. This is only supported by another mass killing of Sonder Commando men in September, this time another 230.

And interestingly enough, the SS took great efforts to conceal these murders from the rest of the Sonder Commando, something they never bothered to do before.

They were led away and gassed by the SS personally.

Their bodies were taken away and burned in the crematoria by the SS men themselves, rather than using the Sonder Commando men, as they had done virtually every other time a so-called, quote, generation.

of Sonder Commando was wiped out. But, you know, the SS men, they weren't exactly super familiar with what to do.
So they just left the ashes of the Sonder Commando inside the crematoria.

And the rest of the Sonder Commando, when they went to work, realized what happened. They put two and two together, understanding that we're going to be next.
Like something is changing.

We're all going to be killed. Knowing that their time is coming to an end, the Sonder Commando men decided, amongst themselves, to launch the uprising without the help of the rest of the resistance.

They didn't have a set date, at least not from what we can tell. Instead, something seemed to force their hand.

On October 6th, 1944, a Sonder Commando man described only as a Soviet POW got into a fistfight with an SS guard while working crematoria number three.

This is something most people probably assume actually happened quite frequently. I mean, after all, look what they're being forced to do.

But despite being doomed men from the start working what might be the worst job in human history, This kind of confrontation was unheard of. SS men did not carry weapons around the Sonder Commando.

They didn't see the point. The Sonder Commando did not fight them.
When Henrik Tauber, one of the other survivors, was asked why didn't they kill the guards, he said they didn't see the point.

Sure, they could have overpowered a guard and killed them really whenever they wanted to, but it wouldn't do anything to stop the camp or slow down the killing. It'd be pointless.

It would just get a whole bunch of people killed in reprisals.

Yeah, I mean, like, in the grander scheme of things, it's like, yeah, you can fight back for 15 minutes, but you have a certain death, whether it's after that 15 minutes or in a week or two weeks or a month afterwards.

Yeah, if you're a Sonder Commando and you take it amongst yourself to, you know, stab the shit out of an SS guard, good for you.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but you certainly condemned everyone else around you to die.

A lot of guys who are not in on the stabbing, which is part of the security, you know, it's part of the conditioning that goes with living in these concentration camps.

But something caused an argument between the Sonder Commando and the SS, ending with the SS man to get decked. The SS man retreated, went and grabbed another SS man who had a gun on them.

They returned and shot the guy dead. Then the SS men announced to the other guys that all the Soviet POWs getting transferred tomorrow.
And they knew what that meant for them.

The others feared that this was just cover, maybe, to move all of them, to get rid of all of the Sonder Commando all at once. But you can see how this is all kind of thrown together.

An argument between the Sonder Commando erupts. They need to launch their attack as soon as possible, but they settled for the next day, October 7th.

But they needed needed to create an opportunity for people to escape. The best time for that would be at night.
That way there'd be the cover of darkness when they, you know, run through the woods.

They have better chance of evading SS patrols. But others argued if they did that, well, that would be after the transport of the Soviet POW Sonder Commando.

So it was decided that they would have to attack before they left. At around 1 p.m., the SS ordered the Sonderkommando crews of Crematoria 4 and 5 to gather in the workplaces.

Then they began to hold a roll call. Anyone who was called to be getting sent to their deaths.
Suddenly, in the middle of all of it, the Sondra Commando stopped following orders.

As the SS stood there yelling at them, confused as to why the men weren't listening to them for the first time seemingly in ever, the Sonder Commando launched themselves at the camp guards, armed with homemade knives, hammers, wrenches, and fire stokers, while others ran.

Now, unfortunately for the Sonderkommando, since a little blow up the day before, the SS were now carrying pistols and submachine guns.

As the hammer versus submachine gun fight broke out, the men who ran had other jobs to do.

Some ran into the barracks, setting their straw mattresses on fire, hoping that the black smoke would be something of a signal for everyone else, because different groups of Sonder Commando can't talk to one another.

Several men were shot while trying to run from the burning building, while others in Crematoria 4 stayed inside the burning building as it came down on their heads.

But the fire quickly spread to Crematoria 5 at some point. and the flames reached the stores of gunpowder and detonated.
Or maybe the men inside had enough time to plant their bombs into the furnaces.

We honestly have no idea.

Either way, the building came down on their heads on the Sonder Commando inside, who purposely stayed behind, armed with knives and hammers, to make sure the SS could not try to put the fire out.

The SS called in the camp fire brigade to put out the fire that was consuming the crematoria. The fire brigade was also, surprise, surprise, made up of prisoners.

And as the fire brigade unrolled their hoses, And, you know, they reached out to the barracks that are hooking it up to the water pump, they just stopped working.

They refused to continue, standing there and watching the barracks burn. The fire brigade leader then got in a screaming match with the SS, telling them that they were not going to work.

It was only when he was held at gunpoint that he finally did, though, after the fire was put out, the fire brigade was forced to strip naked, lay down on the ground next to the crematoria, and they were executed at random via gunshot to the back of the head.

Now, if you couldn't tell how all of this is unfolding in like a piecemeal fashion, the men of crematoria 4 and 5 had no communication with the Sonder Commando in the other crematoria.

It was only when they heard the gunshots, the screaming, and the smoke they knew something was kicking off.

Then they saw SS reinforcements coming to the area and assumed they were coming to kill them. We don't know if that was true, but it probably was.

Or they could have been there to contain in them to make sure it didn't spread into that barracks.

Acting immediately, the Sonder Commando turned and stabbed their capo, a guy simply known as Topher, and shoved him still alive into the crematoria furnace.

If you couldn't guess,

Topher was a bit of an asshole. Fucking hell.
Yeah. You have to really hate a guy to put him out like that.
So whatever the reason is, I'm trusting the Saunder Commando on this one.

Yeah, to be honest, it's like, look, you know, shove him in the furnace, let God deal with them. Yep.

Then the men in crematorias two and three began trying to lure SS men into the building, like calling for help. This might seem weird, but remember, they only have some knives and shit.

They really want want their hands on those guns. So they're hoping to lure them into the building to stab the shit out of them and steal their rifles, pistols, and submachine guns.

But the SS were already sporting a couple hammer-related injuries and were too afraid to fall for the fake calls coming from the crematorias.

The uprising between the two groups wasn't coordinated at all. And the crematoria were separate.
And there's no way for them to talk to one another with the SS around.

According to one man, they did try to send like a runner back and forth, but he was shot. According to other accounts, it didn't happen.

It's kind of fractured in a lot of ways. Also, remember, virtually none of these people survive.
So it's really hard to piece this story together. How far apart were the crematoria? Not very.

Very, very close, actually. But, you know, when you have 100 dudes with submachine guns, that distance might as well be a marathon.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the Sonder Commando Crematoria 2 and 3 said, well, regardless of whatever is happening and what happens next, they're going to kill us all. It's time to go.

A few men, maybe three, according to some tellings of the story, volunteered to stay behind, plant their homemade explosives, and sit in the crematory guarding them until they went off, while several hundred more would break out, run south, and try to get out of the camp.

Their testimony would be evidence that they could bring with them to the outside world.

On the way, they would cut as many power lines as they could due to the fact that Auschwitz had electric fences, and they would cut a hole in the adjoining women's camp to try to give them a path to escape.

They chose the south of Birkenau because it was the only realistic pathway. There wasn't some massive wrought iron fence like you're probably imagining.
Remember, these guys, they had to spread ashes.

They had to dig bodies up.

They had to put bodies in the ground first and dig them back up and put them in the crematoria. They needed access to the outside world, for lack of a better term.

They were under heavy guard, of course, but they had a way out.

Instead of this massive big fence, like it would make sense that it would exist, it was only a couple scattered guard towers made out of wood and smaller fences and things like that.

Not to mention the men in those guard towers had orders to shoot anyone who passed by. But not all of the towers were manned all the time.

Something that the Sondra Commando knew because they were out there pretty frequently.

So as the hundreds of men ran towards the towers, the furnaces exploding behind them, fires kicking off, you hear gunshots and screams and whatever.

The lone SS man on duty panicked, dropped his rifle, and ran. I think also as well as worth mentioning, for those who don't know, like, Auschwitz was big.

Like, it was a big fucking area. And, like, yeah, it was truly fucking massive.
Again, 40 camps.

And it's not as simple as like cutting a hole in the fence, running, climbing through it, and like running away in the space of five minutes.

It's like you have a decent amount of ground to cover to actually get out. There's also the fact that there were lots of interlocking fences.
Things were sectioned off from each other.

There were gates. Their main camp fence was not like the area.
That was not the border, the barrier between most prisoners because they actually were in like the, there was the penal barracks.

There were a bunch of different places where people would be under even further guard. So it was sort of like interlocking layers of stuff to get in.

And that's not to mention nothing but like dead ground outside of it. This entire area is patrolled by SS.
They know where the nearest villages are.

If someone gets out, they have an idea of where you're going.

You know, from here, the Sonder Commando hid in the woods, eventually coming across a perimeter patrol of three SS men, jumped them, beat them to death, and stabbed the shit out of them before running into a nearby village.

Unfortunately, like I just explained, in the case of any prison break, concentration camp or otherwise, the first town is going to be the first place that the responding forces check.

So the SS had laid a trap for them. SS soldiers armed with rifles and machine guns waited.

We aren't entirely sure of how this chapter of the story plays out, precisely, but it's thought that most of the Sonder Commando are killed here via gunshot, whether caught in the ambush or executed shortly afterward.

While a group managed to get away from this and hide in a grain silo, which the SS then set on fire, nobody survived. Meanwhile in the camp, a mass execution of the Sonder Commando was underway.

They're forced to strip naked, they lie face down on the ground, and were executed via a gunshot to the back of the head.

By the time they were done, Out of the 650 Sonder Commando who manned the killing machines of Auschwitz, only 105 remained. But their suicidal uprising was shockingly effective.

Only a single crematoria, five, was still functional. Crematoria 4 was so damaged, it was never put back into service.
And the SS launched an investigation of just how this could have happened.

They happened to find several of the homemade bombs on the escapees and still others that went unused inside the crematoria. This, of course, led them back to the munitions factory.

Several Sonder Commando were kept alive just long enough to be tortured and get the names of the women who helped them.

Rosa Robata and the others were quickly captured and tortured in an effort to get more names of those involved in the plot.

Despite being literally torn apart for weeks, they only named Sonder Commando men they knew were already dead, which is why any of these men survived at all.

Eventually they are brought in front of the camp population to be executed via hanging. Robata, standing in the gallows, screamed, Sisters, revenge before she was killed.

The uprising of the Sondra Commandos of Auschwitz is not the only one of its kind. One happened at Treblinka and it was arguably more successful as 100 people were able to get away and stay away.

But the story of the Auschwitz uprising is different. Their main goal was to destroy the thing the Nazis forced them to do.

They undertook what they knew to be a suicide mission to try to destroy the methods of mass murder.

Sonder Kommendo for a very long time were considered collaborators and they still are to a certain number of people who either do not understand their history or are simply mistaken.

Maybe they got them confused with the SS Sonder Commando or something. I don't know.
I'm not sure how someone would do that.

I think the collaborationist view is an incredibly simplistic one, made by people who could never understand what people are forced to do in some of the darkest portions of history.

A lot of this got started because of the testimony of one Dr. Myklos Milesy, who wrote one of the earliest books to touch on them, Auschwitz, a doctor's eyewitness account.

In this book, he writes that the Sonder Commando were eating banquets slit with chandeliers and were, quote, fat while everyone everyone else starved.

The thing is, we have pictures of Sandra Commando, and you would never consider any of them people overweight.

At best, they looked slightly better than the rest of the camp population, which is still quite bad.

Also, the doctor had been helping Joseph Mengele in his experiments, which were taking place in the camp. The doctor was also forced to do these things, that's no doubt.

But if you happen to be the guy who helps Joseph Mengele, it's probably bad form to accuse someone else of being a collaborator.

Also, every description that the doctor gives of the crematory or how it worked was inaccurate, bringing into question just how much he saw or what he understood of the Sonderkommando at all.

To me, it seems like a classic example of deflection to make himself seem better.

This account being very popular at the time of publication was still used in a lot of histories in Auschwitz, and it benefited from the fact that very few Sonderkommandos survived the war, and even fewer survived Auschwitz, and the ones who did were not exactly keen to go around telling their stories.

Hell, one of the very first major English language films showing the Sonder Commando uprising, the Grey Zone, depicts a Sonderkommando played by, again, David Arquette of all people, beating a fellow prisoner to death, something that is not known to have ever happened.

This popular narrative of the Sandra Commando being irredeemable collaborators has been something that has bothered me for a really long time.

Yeah, Sonder Commando men did have a certain amount of power over their prisoners when they arrived at the death camps. There's no questioning that.

But it's not a power they asked for, tried to obtain, or volunteered for. History Lawrence Langer puts it much better than I do.

Quote, behavior in the camp cannot be viewed through the same lens that we use to view normal human behavior, since the rules of law and morality and the choices available for human decisions were not permitted in these camps for extermination.

He probably best describes what the Sonder Commando faced as, quote, a choiceless choice. The

end.

I think the thing with the

doctor accusing them of being collaborators is, I think, yeah, the way I look at it is like, you are chosen to live a finite living death for however long you're useful, and then you get a bullet in the back of the head and your body burns to ash.

And it's like, what choice do you make? It's not like, if I work with you, I'll survive. They knew they were going to die.
Yeah, they could just hope maybe that they wouldn't be the one, you know?

I think it's very easy for people to discredit others when it comes to the lengths that human beings will go to survive.

Even if that survival is three months, you know, even if a Sander Commando knew they were going to die in three months, that three months is better than zero months.

I think the argument behind the Sonder Commando, the argument with the Capo is similar to some extent, is Everyone wants to believe that they would not do these things if pressed.

That's just like Langer puts it. You cannot view these decisions through the normal lens of morality.
Morality Morality did not exist. It's hence the term the gray zone.

People do what they need to do in order to survive. And like the Sonder Commando Cohen put it, he did what he needed to do to survive.
He did not kill those people, you know?

Yes, he did not tell them they were going to die either, but again, he saw it as a cruelty. They were all going to die no matter what.
Because that was their reality in the camp. Why would he do that?

One Sonder Commando man, Philip Mueller, who we talked about, attempted to kill himself by simply walking into a gas chamber with the crowd one time. He was stopped.

Some people argue if that story ever happened at all, but suicide amongst the Sonder Commando was not unheard of for obvious fucking reasons.

I think the argument to call them collaborators is very black and white in a place where black and white does exist. Don't get me wrong.
And for some people at play, but not them.

I feel like in order to be a collaborator, you have to want to do that. You have to have some personal benefit.
You have to want that power to attempt to obtain it.

It's, you know, like people who were volunteering for the SS during World War II, who are not from Germany, they're collaborators. I don't care what their political ideology behind it was.

This could be the people from the Armenian Legion. This could be people from Russia.
This could be people from fucking Austria. It doesn't matter.
You are actually a collaborator.

You attempted to use Nazi power to further your own political goals or personal goals. The Sonder commando men were forced to do this under pain of death.
And with eventual death being certainty.

Yeah, it was a choice between death now and death later.

Whereas, like you were describing, I mean, for example, what the Germans called Hilsvilling, like Eastern people from Soviet citizens who volunteered to fight with the Wehrmacht or with the SS.

Very different situation. I don't know, man.
I mean, this is like the quietest I've been on an episode in a really long time, if perhaps ever.

And I guess to me, it just feels like everything you've described is the total annihilation of the human spirit.

And it's really, really, really affecting, but also it's difficult to take it in and not just feel this incredible sense of despair.

And it's weird because I was thinking while you were talking, and there was a line that came to mind. I don't know if you're familiar with.

There's a Soviet fiction author named Vasily Grossman who wrote a book mostly about, in a lot of ways, about the Battle of Stalingrad, but in general about the Soviet war experience called Life and Fate.

And there's a line in that book that immediately came to mind.

And I had to go look, find the wording so I didn't mess mess it up when reading it, but I'm just going to read as a very brief quote: Man and fascism cannot coexist.

If fascism conquers, man will cease to exist, and there will only remain man-like creatures that have undergone an internal transformation.

But if man, man who is endowed with reason and kindness, should conquer, then fascism must perish, and those who have submitted to it will once again become people. Yeah.

I feel as though hearing about the impossibility of the choices facing these people fills me with such incredible despair because because at every juncture you think, what would you do?

What would I do? What could I do? What would anybody do?

And it's like you can see how these little brief moments of resistance might help document it, even if these people knew they were going to die, might allow some people to escape, might allow some people to survive who would have otherwise starved.

And yet, at every juncture, when you were describing what a day in the life of the Saunder Commando entailed, all I could think of was like, I would say, kill me.

I would absolutely say, I want you to kill me now. I will not do this.
And a lot of people did.

And that's the thing is that like, I can't begrudge anyone amongst this group their decision because I don't think that any of us can comprehend what it was actually like to be facing something so impossible.

And think of it this way. When someone was selected during the selection process, which again took a few seconds, it's not like they said, you're going to be a Sauner Commando.
This is your job.

They'd say, go over there, follow this man.

And your job would start, and you would learn what that job is when the door opened and you were standing in front of a pile of human bodies that need to go into that furnace.

I mean, you and I have plenty of times been in situations where we were pulled out of a formation because they needed a detail and you didn't get told what it was. You just got taken.

You said, you go there, stand there. And it's hard to describe the, and this is all on purpose, I should point out.

When people arrive at the camps, when they were deported, they had not been fed, they have not gotten water, they have not slept for sometimes days.

They are completely confused, they are like discombobulated, they're in shock, and then they're thrust into this. If you are selected, you know, think of what people do when they are in shock.

And to get to this point, they've already undergone just a catastrophic amount of trauma mentally that some people just start working. They go into autopilot.

They don't really put two and two together what exactly they're doing. Some people don't and they get killed.
Some people people refuse, and they get killed.

Some people who were going to refuse see that happen, and they're, fuck, I have to work. You know, it's, it's really hard to understand, you know, what Langer calls this choiceless choice.

You know, um,

it's, I think it's incredibly simplistic and unfair to consider these men collaborationists, especially because we wouldn't know half as much as we do about the process without them.

And if they were truly collaborationists, why would they do that?

I think as well, there's a like trying to speak about a situation that like you will never find yourself in with a level of kind of moral profundity is just it's pointless like none of us and barely anyone who's like listening will be forced into a situation where it's you get a bullet in your head now or in a day or two days or a week or three weeks.

It's impossible to, I think, kind of put yourself in that position.

You can, yeah, we can all say it's like we would prefer one thing or another, but I think to cast a judgment on the actions of these people who, you know, were in a situation that will, is completely impossible to relate to, I think is, it's, it's impossible.

I think it's immoral, genuinely think it's immoral to look at that and say, I'm going to pronounce a judgment.

I mean, I'll pronounce judgment all fucking day long on the people who are active personality. Yeah, we do that all the time.

Yes, if you have a fucking conscience, that's what you're you're supposed to do. But in this situation, these specific circumstances, there really was no choice.
There really was no option.

It was, it was, you got to choose to some extent the condensed timeline of when you were going to die. And that's it.
At best, that's all you got to choose.

I mean, as, again, choiceless choice. Are you really choosing anything?

And if you look at, you know, the grand scope of collaborationists of the Nazi regime, look at the people who actually did collaborate.

Most of them, not all, but most, will have some rationale of why they did it.

Whether it be, oh, you know, I'm not a fascist, but, you know, I wanted to save my country from Soviet domination or whatever the fuck it might be, right?

Or I'm not a fascist, but, you know, I was really dedicated to self-determination and, you know,

whatever the bullshit reason is, they have a reason. Not a single one of these Sandra commandos has that because they didn't have a fucking choice.

The difference between a collaborationist and effectively a victim is having a choice. But this is this is the thing that I always, when people

use Hannah Arentz, like the banana of evil,

in my opinion, in the wrong context, people are like, oh, you know, it's that

these people did these horrible things. And it's like, for the most part, there is very, very petty justifications, like you said, Joe, of like small personal gains.

This isn't necessarily that, like, oh, I'm going to survive, I'm going to escape. It's like these small personal gains that people can garner from engaging with an objective evil.

Like that, that is it. And it's that like ordinary people and ordinary men will do inherently evil and torturous things to others for what? An extra piece of gold in their pocket or an extra $5

or whatever. Yes.
I mean, go back to our Rwandan genocide series. Look what some of those people were doing to steal from their neighbors.

You know, people in Germany and conquered states were doing a lot of the same.

But also, I mean, I understand why people would make the argument, why people would ask the question, why did you not tell these people they were about to be killed?

And I absolutely understand entirely why the response was, that's an insane thing to even think of. Yeah, it's cruelty upon cruelty.
And not to mention, if they did, they would die too.

And nothing was going to change. Yeah.

The scale of what was up against them was such that it... it wouldn't have made a difference either way.
And that feels cynical. I understand the instinctive revulsion to that.
That feels cynical.

But I guess that judgment or attempted judgment of seeing it as cynical stems from a place of believing there's such a thing as eternal hope.

And I feel as though these people confronted a situation where there was no hope. There was no eternal hope.
Yeah.

Some of them were fortunate and survived, but in general, that wasn't a moral judgment. That wasn't a statement of their actions.
That was just chance. That was just the law of average's distribution.

And nobody has more right to be the most cynical person and hopeless person on earth than one of these guys.

I mean, it goes back to one of the timeless things that was etched into one of the walls of the concentration camp.

Like, if God exists, he needs to add me, he needs to ask me for forgiveness, you know?

Of course, these guys would think that the entire world is hopeless. I mean, even if they only survived for three months within the camp, again, that was longer than virtually anyone else.

And think of all of the other things they saw to make it that far. Of course, they would think everything is hopeless.

And not only that, too, but I think we all have within us kind of animal brain instinct that wants to survive, that wants to live.

Even we don't necessarily always feel that way, but when your life is actually threatened quite often, even in my least happy periods, when I was in something where I thought I might be at risk, when I had a quick jump scare, where I actually, you know, just dodged something that was going to fall on me, when I had guns pointed at me, when I got shot at, you have an urge to survive.

You have an urge to live. You want to live.
Your brain wants to live. Your body wants to live.
It's just what makes us human.

And thus, you also, regardless of my own reaction earlier, what I said, you cannot also obligate these people retrospectively to say, you should have just accepted instant death. No one should.

Yeah, that's an insane thing.

That's also an insane thing to say. I personally do not think that I could have stared it in the face and said, I'm willing to do this to do the best that I can to try to help.

I would have wanted to die. I think.
Many people did from what you said. Many people took that choice.
That's the choice I think I would have taken. I do not.

I would not in a million years say that the fact that I feel pretty certain of that grants me the right to judge the people people who didn't take that because I will never, God willing, never experience anything within the same, within a fraction of the same fucking universe as what these people experienced.

And not to mention going off of some of the scraps, memoirs, diaries that these guys left behind, a lot of them wanted to die as well. And yeah, I mean, it's a lot.
I think that this story is...

is hugely important for people to understand

history better.

Of course, I'm going to say that I am the one who decided to study genocides, but I think that these more intricate parts of this major part of history that people, I think, don't understand as completely as maybe they could or should.

I think those are very important.

Nothing to do with

current events. But like I said, that this idea of Sandra Commandos being collaborationists has bothered me for quite some time.

And I just decided to inflict all of you with it. So thank you, Joe.
My bad. Now I hate you as much as I hate that book by Hannah Arendt.

Eichmann was evil. I disagree with Hannah Arendt's assessment of Eichmann.

I mean, I think the thing is, is that it's entirely true to say that the people who committed acts like this and who have throughout history were not binary in the sense that they weren't just like, they didn't just exist as permanent.

inflictors of cruelty and violence and evil. They've probably loved their children or their parents to some extent.
Some of them might change to Hitler loved dogs.

Hitler loved dogs and was a vegetarian. If Hitler was alive today, he would be listening to the Smiths in Depeche Bode because that's one of the lines.
Hitler was a sensitive man.

Yeah, I remember his song.

Look, what I'm saying is that I understand the argument, too, about the lack of an objective ontological binary evil in terms of the individual actors.

Not every single facet of them was necessarily always that way throughout their lives. And not every single one of them was that way, even if some of them most certainly were.

The The act itself, the collective action, the contribution that they made to this larger whole, that there is no question.

What you just described is one of the most horrific things I've ever heard in my life. And I have read about this and studied to some extent.

I have read histories of this, but I have never, I have intentionally shied away from getting into the details of what the day-to-day was like for people, as opposed to understanding a lot of, you know, especially growing up in even in some capacity in Reformed Judaism in America, you hear a lot about survivor stories and the stories of the people that they lost, but I've never heard the Sander Commando story ever.

I just didn't seek it out. I'll be perfectly honest.
Didn't know anything about it. I didn't assume they were the same as

direct collaborators, but I guess sort of assumed it was one of those things of like, yeah, that sounds horrible. And I chose to not learn about it.
I mean, I don't blame anybody who hasn't done

their personal reading. I don't blame anybody who sees the title of this episode and nopes the fuck out for the week.

It's just my personal school of history is look evil in the eye and learn about it. And so if you made it, what, almost two hours in, whoever this ends up being after it's been finished,

thank you. I hope you, the rest of your day is significantly better.
But fellas, that's a podcast episode.

Before we go, we do have something that might lighten all of this for people who have made it this far, and that's questions from the Legion.

If you'd like to ask us a question, support the show on Patreon. For the entire month of December, it's going to be on sale.
You can do that for yourself or give it to someone else.

Then you can log into Discord and and/atreon or

itself and send us a question, and we'll answer it. And today's question is: you get to do a live show at any venue in the world.
What venue are you picking? The sphere. The sphere.

Yes, lines of my doggies at the sphere, but it's just like a mad, insane fisheye lens pointing up at us, and then we're projected on the sphere.

I can't wait to see the bootleg Ava intro broadcast across all of Vegas.

No, a serious answer would be, and it is one of my favorite venues in London. And I was there last night, and I love it because it sounds really good.

There isn't as much seating as I would like, but it is electric in Brixton. Best sounding venue in all of London.
I have two, I suppose. First one is a serious answer.

Literally anywhere in the United States. Yeah, true.
In a future where we don't have to worry about Tom being detained.

And my personal answer is,

so in Armenia, there is a puppet theater. Now,

this puppet theater venue is, of course, built in Soviet times and was used for what the name entails.

It's still called the Puppet Theater, but for some reason, it is the venue where all like death metal bands go to perform in Yerevan. I want us to perform at the Puppet Theater.

My joke answer is Atu Station, which is in the Aleutian Islands. It's so far west that it's in the Eastern hemisphere.

There's a Coast Guard station, population 20, because I know that at least one of our fans, and I'm not going to name you, will be there because they're always at all of our live shows.

I was going to say CBGBs, I was like, no, fuck CBGBs. They made it into a Jean Varvedo store.
ABC No Rio. Now it's probably closed now, too.

But ABC No Rio, if you're not familiar, Tom probably knows it. Insane DIY hardcore club in the Lower East Side that managed to stick around a lot longer.

than a lot of places, but I'm pretty sure it's closed. I haven't been back in New York in forever, so I don't know.

Yeah, but Nate, honestly, like knowing us and the codery of people that love to come to our live shows, we more than likely will be instead in Maxis, Kansas City. Yeah, that's true.

Or I was thinking St. Vitus in Brooklyn is another one, too.

RIP St. Vitus, St.
Vitus is closed. No,

I went to St. Vitus and saw this horrible doom metal band.
They were so loud, I had to leave after 20 minutes, and I had had hearing protection. It was so fucking loud, I was like, I'm going to die.

Or alternatively, we could do my favorite recent venue, aka the

Bridge in Hackney underneath.

I was going to say that, like under the overpass. Yeah.

I can't think of anything more on brand that if we did a live show under an overpass in like February with burning barrels everywhere. But fellas,

I think that is a good place to wrap it up here.

You all host other shows. Plug those shows.
Trash Sucher. What a hell of a way to dad kill James Bond.
Listen to them.

They're funny. They're not harrowing.
Not like us. We're funny too, normally.
Normally. And normally my waveform doesn't look like fucking somebody died and you've got an EKG hooked up to them.

They all have free feeds as well as Patreon. So if you do like them, you can subscribe and get even more.

Similar to this theme, I produce a show called Blood Work, which is about the economy of violence.

After we were done recording this, I have to go put sound drops of Foghorn, Leghorn, and EDM into an episode about Dick Cheney.

Listen to Beneath Skin show about the history of everything, told her the history of tattooing. And you can find my photography work on Instagram at scam golden.
G-O-L-D-I-N.

This is the only show that I host. Like I said, you can support us on Patreon for the entire month of December.
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