--:-- Marcus Parks: There's no place to escape to. This is the last hot cast. On the left.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's when the cannibalism started.
--:-- Ed Larson: Who's that?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Today's episode I want to dedicate to the Saudi Arabian royalty. And I want to dedicate it to them because we've been working so hard and I just want to make them laugh so bad. And I feel like this series... I want to make all 12 people in that audience laugh.
--:-- Ed Larson: No, no, there was several thousand. They were put there. They were placed there at gunpoint.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: These guys, what's nice is that maybe if we show them this series, they'll like... I don't know. To honor the Saudi Arabians, I just destroyed a bunch of solar panels.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, wow!
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's actually a really good idea. I do plan to spray some gasoline on the street later on.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Welcome to the last podcast on the left. My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with the highly ambitious Henry Zebrowski.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Very ambitious. Invite me, royal family. I can't wait to dance in a cage for you.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And I would say the equally ambitious Ed Larson.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yes, Arabian Nights, I'm ready for you.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Before we begin today, Marcus, I wanted to pitch this thing at you, please, which is a thought I've been having. We've been watching hours and hours and hours and hours of Nazi footage.
--:-- Marcus Parks: You want to get slaves deep into it?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, no, honestly, what a hassle. I don't even know what to tell our employees to do, man. Yeah, but I was thinking about this, about how I feel like a lot of all of this could have been stopped by one well-placed older black woman named Hermler that could be insinuated in these various circumstances and just say like, "Oh no." Like, to the Nazis. And I think that if there was a withering look of an L, I think the withered look of an older black woman at Himmler going like, "Have you ever had collard greens?" Like, at him and he would just be like, "I have never tried something's most beautiful delicious food in all of my lives."
--:-- Marcus Parks: So you thought about it, but not very hard.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, I mean, no. Just drop her in there. I've been playing Himmler every single time I watch one of these documentaries. I just go, "Oh, child." Every single time Himmler says something, I go, "No, no, no."
--:-- Ed Larson: By the end there, he didn't have any hair for her to run her fingers through or anything, so it might not have worked on him.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Himmler does not exist in a world that contains biscuits and gravy.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, no, the gravy you can't have. The biscuits you could have.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Soul food changes Nazi Germany.
--:-- Marcus Parks: All right. It's the worst take I've ever heard, but let's move on. Hey, why don't we just keep rolling with that Himmler goodness? So when we last left Heinrich Himmler, the year was 1924.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, so nice.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, 1924 seems like a fun year. Adolf Hitler's attempted coup to take control of the Bavarian government with 3,000 of the Nazis had failed. And as a result, Hitler had been sentenced to a meager sentence of five years in jail, and Germany's Weimar Republic had explicitly banned the Nazi party.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, they were cancelled!
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yes. Now, after the failed putsch, Heinrich Himmler's life was at its lowest point thus far. His supposed destiny of becoming a military officer fighting for Germany's glory seemed as if it would not come to pass, because Germany would never return to its former military dominance as long as the Weimar Republic was the law of the land. And of course, if there was no military to clear away the so-called undesirables of Eastern Europe, then Himmler's dreams of being a warrior farmer settler in a faraway land, a fantasy inspired by various extreme right-wing Volkisch rioters, that would not come to pass either. As it was, Himmler was just another unemployed Weimar Germany goon in his mid-twenties that nobody would hire because he was a hateful person with demonstrable and public connections to odious organizations. Organizations who were already responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people through gang violence.
--:-- Ed Larson: What a bunch of pushies.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's funny. It's one of the few German words that I just can't say for some reason. Putscht. Putscht. Putscht. But you know, it's just hard because he's organized.
--:-- Ed Larson: Doesn't that mean anything?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, it does.
--:-- Ed Larson: Doesn't that mean anything in this fucking country? Of course they fucking love paperwork.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, it's true. You know what also I realized about the Vulkish movement that I forgot about? Was all the nudism.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: They were super. They loved it. All the Vulkish writers a part of it with the getting back to the country or getting back to this old pastoral view of the former Germanic lifestyle, a lot of it involved sun rituals, which was like getting naked and showing your butthole, not even, this is not even a joke, showing your butthole to the sun as like a part of a magical reason. And like, that's all they were doing. So he was just flipping through magazines of fat men, dick out in canoes, just like being like, "That's the life."
--:-- Ed Larson: But have you tried it?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, I mean, I haven't. I don't want to get splinters. And, you know, and that stuff, like, it's weird how these things, these little things show up again and again throughout, like, the Nazi reign, like in certain parts of their propaganda. Like, you know, Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will. You know, Triumph of the Will was her massive propaganda film about the Nuremberg rallies. But she also did a film about the 1936 Olympics. Was it 36? Called like Olympia or Olympiad or something like that. And it's just full of these like nudes of German men, German women. Actually, she herself appears nude in the movie.
--:-- Ed Larson: But yeah, it's all about this.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, I know. I jerked off to it.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Henry Zebrowski going on record saying, "I've masturbated to Leni Riefenstahl."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It was an experiment. I was researching for the show.
--:-- Ed Larson: Jarkinov is also in the movie as well.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, yeah!
--:-- Marcus Parks: Even though the Nazi party was explicitly banned from participating in German politics, Himmler continued working for them by acting as a courier between Nazi members.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, he became like a fucking PA.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah. Himmler also fell deeper into the aforementioned Völkisch movement, who held a lot of power in the local Bavarian government. As a member of the Völkisch street team, so to speak, Himmler gave public speeches in which he preached the movement's ethno-nationalist beliefs, and he openly pontificated in the foulest ways possible about the so-called Jewish question. But because he was unemployed, Himmler was forced to move back in with his parents in Munich.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Which honestly happens a lot after public speeches is about the Jewish question.
--:-- Ed Larson: I thought the Jewish question was, "Are you going to finish that?"
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah!
--:-- Ed Larson: And the answer is, "Of course I am. Where can I get a good nosh?" That's the Jewish question.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: "Have you met my son Isaac? You didn't keep the receipt?" Again, we must say Edward is Jewish. He allowed and we all part of this.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, after he moved in with his parents, he joined a small Nazi group in Lower Bavaria that was, for lack of a better term, keeping the dream alive while Hitler was in jail. Isolated and humiliated, Himmler fell into a paranoid depression, believing that people were opening his mail. He became increasingly arrogant and irritated at the entire world, convinced that he was the only person who knew the quote-unquote right way of doing things. Bored and angry, Himmler began sticking his nose into the affairs of others without invitation. This, of course, only further ostracized him from polite society, which pushed Himmler more and more to the arms of his fellow socially inept Nazi buddies who had many of the same complaints about how the world worked as Himmler.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You know what these guys needed? PewDiePie. This is a big thing I feel like. Nazis, another thing that really could have... I don't know where would have taken them, but they would have loved YouTube.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh my god, they would have loved it.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I mean, the parallels we'll get into it here in a bit, but the parallels between the rabbit holes that Heinrich Himmler fell down and the rabbit holes that people today fall down, Anders Breivik, it's the same fucking shit. It's the same ideas, it's just delivered in a different medium. And that's the thing. While we think about Himmler as some sort of mastermind from the very beginning, he actually joined the Nazi party from pretty much the same station as many of the other early members.
--:-- Ed Larson: Started from the bottom, now we're here.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Started from the bottom, now all the Nazis are here.
--:-- Marcus Parks: I think I did that in the last time with this.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I think you did. I think it's the same joke. I think that's when that song was new.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's offensive because Drake is Jewish.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: He's a lot of others.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, Himmler, like many early Nazis, was a young man who couldn't find work, which is a legitimate complaint that really does affect one's quality of life and one's self-esteem. But the special sauce that made these young men into Nazis is that they chose a path where someone had to be blamed and someone had to be hated for their lot in life. So when a movement is founded on hate and blame, it becomes baked into every decision that movement makes. Furthermore, the hate becomes exponentially larger and more intense as time goes on. Basically, this is how we get from, "Hey, why is that brown person using food stamps when they have an iPhone," to alligator Alcatraz.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Ugh, man, I fucking hate the term alligator Alcatraz. It's too cool.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's the Everglades camp.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I know, like, you have to tell people so they understand, but alligator, it's like, if they're selling T-shirts of it, it can go fuck itself.
--:-- Ed Larson: It doesn't matter. It's an empty fucking swamp right now that they just get to fill.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, they're filling it back up, bro. Don't worry about it.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, I know.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, it's so... I mean, it's not like Himmler was selling dick out shirts.
--:-- Ed Larson: Hey, but hey, he's definitely left money on the table. Nazis love merch.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: They do. Don't even talk. Nazis love merch. Merch is one of those things that, this is one of the, when we talk about occultism too later on in this episode, this is like, it sounds like a bit, but the idea of creating a group iconography is so powerful.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And it's hard to describe how powerful it is because you don't really, those of us that are not in that don't understand it.
--:-- Ed Larson: Also, like the overhead on our bands is very low.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Super low. You can make a lot of money on those.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yes. Tell me about it. Honestly. Rob. Write it down. L-P-O-T-L-R-B-A-N-D-E.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, we need some pentagram arm bands. If we could, thank you so much.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yes. Even though Heinrich Himmler was in his loser era, he did briefly become engaged to the daughter of a banker while he was still living with his parents. The relationship, however, inevitably crumbled because of Heinrich Himmler's entirely unreasonable and strict rules for proper living, which sounds like the world's worst self-help book.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Come to my signings this Saturday for Heinrich Himmler's entirely unreasonable and strict rules for proper living. Excellent. I'm an unreasonable person, and I hate living without rules. Then you must come and meet and have fun. Rule me, thank you.
--:-- Ed Larson: How many rules do you have to have to chase away a banker's daughter?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Supple, big-titted banker's daughter. You know how they make them. Old money bags.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, they fucking make those old girls.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, Himmler placed all the blame for the relationship's failure on his fiancée because she was apparently too friendly towards another man. Himmler declared that she had, in his words, failed the test.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You want the weakest link.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Making the matter even more embarrassing is that Himmler was too chicken shit to break off the engagement himself. Instead, Himmler had his father write a letter to his fiancé's parents telling them to tell her that the engagement was off.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: [In a whiny voice] And you make sure that you put in there that I think that she was rude and crude and lewd and I just... Oh, I hate her, Daddy. I hate that there are six. Why do they always lie to us, Dedems?
--:-- Marcus Parks: But even after Himmler broke it off, he still couldn't let it go. He was determined to find damaging material that would further prove his point that she was unsuitable. So he actually hired a private detective to follow his now ex-fiancée. The PI, of course, found nothing. But when word got out that Himmler was harassing this poor woman, it only served to ostracize him further from normal society. Himmler, of course, blamed this further isolation on his ex-fiancee. Because it seems like the central personality trait of a fascist is to blame everyone but yourself for your problems.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, because you know why? If you're the problem, that means you gotta fix you.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And the thing is, is that it's super hard. But it's much easier to just attack people randomly.
--:-- Ed Larson: It really is.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's so much easier to just attack and attack and attack and attack.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, just give in to the anger and let that take you away.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You just got to not feel anything. As long as you don't have any feelings, then it's actually a great way to live. And it always works because nobody wants to deal with you. And so a lot of times they just push you along and a lot more than often push you up.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, get out of here.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But for Himmler, he would have to get someone to attack for him because he would probably lose the fight to the woman.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, yes.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, a woman would have beaten him to death.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yes.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And so, what's an unemployed loser who lives with his parents to do after a relationship goes bad? Well, like many others, Heinrich Himmler dove down twin rabbit holes that are still warping the brains of young men today. He, of course, tripled down on the right-wing extremist ideology, but he alternated the anti-Semitic and highly nationalist dogma being spewed by so many Germans at the time with what else but the occult. In short order, Himmler began saturating himself with books about astrology, hypnosis, spiritualism, and telepathy amongst other topics. Now, Himmler's occult obsessions are an interesting wrinkle in the Nazi story. Some historians have made the occult Nazi angle the focus of everything.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh yeah, because that's interesting.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's Indiana Jones.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Of course.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, well, it's how you sell books. Like, if you say the motivations for the founding of the party to the military decisions Hitler made during World War II, if you say all of that was because they were doing rituals and castles and it was all this secret, it makes for a very cool story.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, with the Spear of Destiny.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: The Spear of Destiny. Trevor Ravenscroft was the big guy who was into it. But I actually find that a very interesting smokescreen for why they did what they did. I feel like, well, talk about it here, too, because you say it's true. Then some people just don't talk about it at all.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah. Others treat it as if even mentioning the occult is going to lose them any and all credibility.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, it makes you not, quote unquote, not serious.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yes, it makes you not serious. So they ignore the occult angle completely. They claim that it had nothing to do with Nazi Germany. But the truth is, of course, somewhere in between. Because while Adolf Hitler may not have been on the quest for the spear of destiny, many of Heinrich Himmler's decisions and beliefs were informed by his occult studies.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's not even just his decisions and beliefs. It's literally what he realized you needed to build. This is universe building. This is about universe. It's world building. The whole point of this is to create a body of work that stands behind Nazism that appears to be outside of Nazism that happens to validate what's inside of Nazism very much. And then you use that as a line from the beginning of your new culture because Germany at the time is a new coalescing national culture. Yeah, and you're trying to find out what's the vibe.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You know what I mean? Like, what's the vibe? So a bunch of guys that are in there at the very beginning of this are all talking about what's the vibe here, what are we doing here, what are we going to be? We're going to be nomadic warriors. Germanic people were hunted back and forth by the Christian state, right? Like they were literally the entire Holy Roman Empire after the fact, like just fuck them up again and again and again.
--:-- Ed Larson: They sunk our cities.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yes, they hate Christianity.
--:-- Ed Larson: They sunk our cities.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: They deeply, deeply hate Christianity, but they still know you need something with that kind of skeletal frame that needs to be there for people to believe in you. So they wanted to believe in, they wanted to, Himmler started to understand we have to create something that is our Christianity.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And he's not just creating it for other people to believe in. He's creating it for himself to believe in and for the country to believe in.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah. But the important thing to know about Himmler's occult studies is that he wasn't studying right path magic and performing rituals to summon entities like Aleister Crowley or Jack Parsons, which I think is where everyone's mind goes when they hear the word occult. Instead, Himmler's occult studies were more in the realm of pseudohistory and pseudoscience. Put into modern terms, Himmler would have been far more interested in watching fucking ancient aliens and following influencers who have wild, vague theories about mysterious energies than he would in doing anything practical. Like, he wouldn't join a Wiccan study group at a local occult bookstore, for example.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, because honestly, because a lot of times they'll celebrate Hanukkah. You know what I mean? They do a lot of stuff. Wiccans, it's always like a, oh, we celebrate. You know, they always teach everybody everything. I mean, he's on the very dark side of this stuff, you know? It's not. Give me my time.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, it's like the ancient alien stuff. It's, you know, the complaint about the ancient alien stuff has always been... It's deeply racist. It's deeply racist because it's saying like, well, these people couldn't possibly have done this on their own. And you don't realize that if you throw thousands of artisans and artisan slaves at something and you don't have any sort of like workers' rights or any form of like kind of unions or anything like that in that way, then it's much easier to build those giant things.
--:-- Ed Larson: They also had thousands of years to do it.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, they had a very long time to do it. And also, it's not like they needed to go home and catch the latest episode of 90 Day Fiancé.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, though. God, I wish they had that. [Shouting] 90 Day! 90 Day! 90 Day! Calm down! Calm down!
--:-- Marcus Parks: But even so, with Himmler, it's not like he would watch Ancient Aliens and think it's aliens. He would watch Ancient Aliens and think, oh, that's white people that did that. For example, Himmler was absolutely obsessed with the Great Pyramid of Egypt because he believed that it contained all forms of occult knowledge from various ancient civilizations. Civilizations that were all begun by the Aryan race. Basically, Himmler believed that the proof for all of his wacky theories about Aryan domination, these were always just out of reach. They were always in the next place.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, yeah, oh yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, and if he could just read enough books and eventually investigate enough locations, he would finally discover that secret that's out there somewhere that would finally confirm all of his beliefs.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Dude, it's so Indiana Jones.
--:-- Marcus Parks: It is!
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, yeah, but I love how much... He did his homework. Another thing I noticed like is such a nerd side thing, but like, Raven's Cross, the guy who like did the Spear of Destiny thing. Mary, that's supposed to be Marion's father, no, because she's Marion's Ravenwood. And so like, and then and that's why he's looking for the spear of destiny and stuff like that. So like it's like they just change the end of the name a little bit.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh my god, fascinating.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Because no, but that's true, but it works because it gives them extra, it gives them an extra edge, it gives them something to be frightened of. If the Nazis are powered by ancient unrecognizable German gods, then you can't beat them, right? That's the idea.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah. Now Himmler was certainly not alone in his beliefs that the Aryan race had created all of civilization. In fact, spirituality in general was incredibly confused and confusing in Germany during the mid to late 1920s. See, one of the interesting things about German and Nordic people when it comes to Christianity is that a lot of them never quite bought into the religion in the way that, say, the Italians or the English did.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Like, you never heard of it. Like, have you ever heard of it? Like, "Oh, I'm German Catholic." That doesn't fucking exist.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And all you have to do, if you want to see how the Nordic people never quite got into Christianity, look at the fucking murderous Norwegian black metal scene in the early 90s. That's what all that was about. Burning down churches in order to bring back the Nordic gods.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And they got a lot of followers. All they remembered about Christianity is how you fucking chased us around the woods for hundreds of years.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, and drowned us and all that.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But the reason why Christianity never fully caught on is because the Germanic people hadn't quite let go of their pagan roots. They once had a whole pantheon of powerful gods, and many Germans saw their medieval ancestors as almost godlike themselves. They talked to their ancestors, they were close with their ancestors, and they viewed that as their own, like families almost had their own personal religiosity.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Sure. You know what I mean, where it was like almost like your line was way more important than an exterior god or heaven.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Very much so. So when writers like Alfred Rosenberg of the aforementioned Thule Society began releasing books that rewrote history from an exclusively white person perspective, a lot of Germans like Heinrich Himmler saw it as a confirmation of what they already secretly suspected and they therefore added these claims to their own view of the universe.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's all creating things that look like they're accidentally there. It's like this idea that, no, it was always validated.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yep. Now, in his best-selling book, The Myth of the 20th Century, Alfred Rosenberg claimed that the origins of Christianity were simply a philosophical interpretation of the eternal laws of the Aryans. Those laws predated all other religions.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Who wrote those laws then?
--:-- Marcus Parks: The Aryans.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: But before them?
--:-- Marcus Parks: I don't know.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Who did it before? What happened then?
--:-- Marcus Parks: The Aryans were the first.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: The Aryans were the first. Someone had to be the first. And this guy said the Aryans were the first. So I'm just asking questions.
--:-- Marcus Parks: By Rosenberg's reading of history, Jesus was either Syrian or Roman. Anything but Jewish.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, no way he ever said that. Being a rabbi or anything.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But that didn't really even matter because every bit of Christian dogma had been stolen from Eastern religions anyway and melded with evil black magic. But besides the pseudo-history, Rosenberg also suffused his book with philosophy. He only reinforced Heinrich Himmler's ideas that humanism was a dead end, preaching that life was nothing more than an internal battle between the manly honor of a knight and the effeminate weakness of love.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I ain't heard no lies yet.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, I know how that fucking dog walks.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, that's you all over. Gallantry, knighthood, constantly fighting the two wolves in me. Is that the knight that fights for honor and the evil wicked poet that yearns for love? Fucking stupid ass. Hit that guy. I want to fight.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But while Himmler was immersing himself in books about occult pseudo-history at his parents' house...
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: [In a whiny voice] Shut up, I'm trying to read. Mom, you're listening to the clock, it's still too loud. Don't you know that we come from the ancient gods of the Orient? Not going to be able to figure out where Atlantis is if the cocoa clock keeps going off every ten hours.
--:-- Marcus Parks: [In a motherly voice] Heinrich, I just want to say we are so happy to have you home, and it's been so wonderful, but we do wish, me and your father wish, that you would go get a job.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: [In a whiny voice] I do have a job, Mom! I'm a researcher!
--:-- Marcus Parks: [In a motherly voice] I know that you're very important, very important, but if you could do something that was real. You know, right now you're starting to look like the potato salad.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: [In a whiny voice] So far as I realize, you look like a prairie dog covered in shit. I'm going to send my mother to the concentration camp. I'm going to be the first one in the next one.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, while he was doing all that, Adolf Hitler was in jail writing a book of his own, a book that would incorporate many of the same ideas, but in a far subtler way.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I can see him writing loudly.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, he's just yelling while he writes.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's written in all caps.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, technically, there was a rumor for many years that he would dictate it and someone would write it. But now we're like, no, no, no. He wrote it himself. See, after the coup, Hitler wasn't sent to prison for five years so much as he was held in a building for nine months.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Jeffrey Epstein.
--:-- Marcus Parks: The cushy treatment he received from Nazi sympathizers enabled him to write the foundational text of Nazism, the infamous Mein Kampf, or in English, My Struggles.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: My Struggles. [In a whiny voice] Oh no, I was trying to get out of the bath, but I'm too slippery for mommy's soap. Another one of my struggles. Is a regular Adolf Mandela. Oh, I was trying to put my pants on earlier, but my hands are numb. I guess it was because my shirt's too tight. Another struggle of mine. They took away my second pillow.
--:-- Ed Larson: Actually, you know what else I have learned too? Mine. Like that?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yep.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, it sounds like a silencer.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It is.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, My Struggle is an incredibly whiny title. My Struggle.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Every time I have a problem shitting, I'm like, "My cunt." My Struggle. Oh, I didn't drink enough water yesterday, and now my poop's too hard and big. My Struggle.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But it's far better than what Hitler originally wanted to call it. He wanted to call it... Which is... Not a snappy title. Okay, yeah, it's like fucking whatever. Hitler's publisher, however, a Nazi named Max Amon. Think about that. He had a fucking publisher and an editor. They all like Hitler.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You don't even like having to deal with him?
--:-- Marcus Parks: This guy, he also operated as the Nazis' first business manager. He's also the guy that's telling Hitler, "Really, the overhead on armbands is a little higher than you think it is. Do we really need two custom Mercedes? What if we just made it 1S? Think about how much we'll save."
--:-- Ed Larson: Think about how much we'll save.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's just one rude. That's one rude. The rude mark is insane right now.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, he talked Hitler into the much snappier title that we know today, Mein Kampf.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Kampf.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And of course, one of the people who absolutely adored Mein Kampf...
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Mein Kampf.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Was Heinrich Himmler. But not because Hitler was saying anything new. Personally, I think Himmler loved it because it was proof that there were plenty of other people out there who thought exactly the same way that Himmler did. He was just looking for the other ones.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. And that was the thing. We talked about this. He's not inspired by Hitler. He was already there.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: He was there long before. I, too, also struggle. Just as I like to hear, I do not like things to be reason. I do not like things to be not a hassle. It's just, you know, when you go through life with a head like this potato head, you just, you don't think it's a struggle. It's got to be.
--:-- Ed Larson: The more you point out to a potato-like head, the more I realized that the Aryan plot in you is thin.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: The struggle was getting out of the lederhosen. Every time. It's leather, dude. Have you ever been in real lederhosen?
--:-- Ed Larson: No, I haven't. I know you have.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: They're hard to wear. They're heavy. It's like being inside of a boa constrictor. They should be made for... They should be, honestly, more giving. Because it's for big gutted men and big titted women. Any other thoughts?
--:-- Ed Larson: I don't know. It's just my podcast.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Sounds like it's your struggle.
--:-- Ed Larson: My struggle.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Even though the publisher of Mein Kampf was a Nazi, he had still expected a racy personal story from Hitler when he offered to publish his book. That's the thing.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: He literally thought, I love this breakdown, he thought that Hitler was going to write a spicy insider's view of the beer hall putsch.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: He thought he was at the very least going to dish, like, what's the inside story? How did it all go down? Tell me. What were you wearing that night? You know, like stuff like that. They literally thought it was going to be all because they never thought that the Nazis were gonna come back.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, thought it was over.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: They thought this whole thing was done, but I mean this guy was still a Nazi, like he was a Nazi Nazi. But at this point they're still super uncomfortable with being the bad news bears, right?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: They're super like, "We are underdogs and everybody roots for the underdog."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: "We're a fun band of rapscallions."
--:-- Marcus Parks: But Hitler didn't either. He didn't even mention the very thing he was in prison for doing, the thing that had made him infamous. Instead, *Mein Kampf* is more about how Hitler used to be a totally reasonable dude.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Someone you might even call him a liberal.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, yeah, you dead guy. Hitler, when I first met him, I thought he was from San Francisco.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, what happened?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: The Jews.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, it's that great.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Fucking die, we should never let them in San Francisco. He ran afoul of the Jews.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Covering a wide range of topics that nobody but other Nazis would find interesting, Hitler ranted for nearly 800 pages about imagined Jewish and communist global conspiracies, along with the need to destroy France and the Soviet Union so Germany had room to grow.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Lebensraum.
--:-- Ed Larson: Lebensraum.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Fucking 800 pages of horse shit. 800. I've never tried to read it.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Why would I do that? I have no reason to read my comics.
--:-- Marcus Parks: You know what's funny is that I got a feeling I know what's in there.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Dude, the centerfold?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Nice. Ava Braun. I'd read it. Nipples out.
--:-- Ed Larson: I'd read it.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: But it got spoiled for me.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I have all the spoilers.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now Himmler, of course, loved all the shit about the global conspiracies and the Lebensraum. But the parts that really caught his attention were all of Hitler's nods to the pseudo-histories that Himmler was reading about how ancient Aryans were responsible for everything modern humankind enjoyed and that all humanity forever lay in their debt.
--:-- But what's important about this is that Hitler is not coming out and saying this stuff so explicitly, and he's not going into all the theory. He's just saying it. He's just putting the ideas out there. Because he doesn't really know.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Hitler, we have to remember, was he reading the same books as Himmler?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And actually Himmler was like, "What is Hitler's reading list? I want that." And he actually did get a copy of Hitler's reading list and he read all the same books that Hitler did.
--:-- Ed Larson: Was it on his Patreon?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Because we have ours on our Patreon. Go to patreon.com/lastpodcast11, and you can get your own *Mein Kampf* reading list.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But no, Hitler, I still feel like, again, it's why we're now realizing that Himmler is the Nazi of all Nazis.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: He is. He's top Nazi.
--:-- Marcus Parks: There had to be one. Even Hitler had an idea of like, we got to set the scene.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: We got to set the scene. This whole thing's about presentation. We can't immediately do this. We can't immediately go into all this folklore.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And so he's just kind of like the way a certain someone does, where it just kind of says something that he's vaguely familiar with because he knows it rings true with a bunch of people.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, you let other people pick it up.
--:-- Ed Larson: And I fucking messed up. You know, I feel bad. Can you ask me if I read *Mein Kampf* again?
--:-- Ed Larson: Have you read *Mein Kampf*? I struggle to get through it. You've been thinking about this this whole fucking time. Didn't listen to a goddamn one. I can check back in to you now. Where are we at?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Nice struggles.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, the idea that Hitler was putting forth that Aryans were responsible for everything that modern humankind enjoyed, this is exactly the same line of thinking used by certain right-wing commentators today. The ones who maintain that white people built modern society. It's the exact same myopic shit Hitler was spewing in 1925. It's just dressed up in a more acceptable package.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Is it? I actually don't think it is.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, I mean, acceptable enough.
--:-- Ed Larson: I guess.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Do they have the part with the white people killing all the dinosaurs? I wish. Is that where the feet of the dinosaurs?
--:-- Ed Larson: But now that I think about it. Wait a second. Is this rabbiosaurus?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Now think about it. The uncircumcised penis of the devilic brontosaurus.
--:-- Ed Larson: Brontosaurus.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You know, if there were dinosaurs running around, we wouldn't get anything done.
--:-- Ed Larson: You're right, you're right. I'd be chasing them.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now another concept that Himmler loved in *Mein Kampf* was the idea of the Third Reich. See, according to Hitler, the first Reich was the medieval Holy Roman Empire, which lasted from the year 800 until 1806.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's a big Reich. It's the biggest Reich.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's the biggest Reich. Thus far.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, we know that is like the idea of where all the great guys came from, right?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, I mean, this is where Frederick Barbarossa comes from. This is also where Richard Wagner, Hitler's favorite composer, it's where he got a lot of his characters, like Parzival the Knight, and the villain Klingzor, who becomes a hero just by virtue of being a villain in a Wagner opera. Am I not allowed to like Wagner anymore?
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, you didn't know this about Wagner? Ugh. Oh my god. You like Wagner specifically?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I'm a big fan of Potclips now.
--:-- Ed Larson: Well, yeah, but he got me into it. Objectively, the music is incredible. It's amazing. It's classic music. It's just know what it means.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: He just tried it. He was a super nationalist. He was a big old German nationalist, World War I style. Massive anti-Semite. Huge, huge anti-Semite.
--:-- Ed Larson: Alright, I'll have to sell my records back.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, I mean, no, I will say, I don't think that's like, how do we put this? This isn't like Woody Allen movies. You know what I mean? Like, this is classical music of Wagner's style is a part of history, right?
--:-- Marcus Parks: You just don't play it at a bar mitzvah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yes.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Just don't play it at Hanukkah. Don't play it at, you know, just, it's Yom Kippur today.
--:-- Ed Larson: All right, I'll take it off the list.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, honestly, yeah, that's the thing is I was listening to it this morning and then I realized, I heard the news that it was Yom Kippur, so then I did switch it over.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, it's a good idea.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, switch it over. Don't even tell me anything about Karl Orff.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Actually, I know nothing about him.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Good.
--:-- Marcus Parks: So maybe we're fine.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: All right. But yeah, the Wagner, yeah. Pretty iffy.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's iffy.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah.
--:-- Ed Larson: Okay. I can't believe you're a huge Wagner fan. That's the surprise of the episode.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I used to be into classical music, and then I got out of it. It's not that big of a surprise. He likes music of all kinds.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's the idea that he's like specifically said out loud into a camera. He's like, "Wagner's? There's problems with Wagner? Hey."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Which I've never even, I didn't even know. You know what I mean?
--:-- Ed Larson: Please don't say anything bad about Copeland.
--:-- Marcus Parks: I know nothing.
--:-- Marcus Parks: I know nothing! Go ahead.
--:-- Marcus Parks: The second Reich was started in 1871 by Otto von Bismarck, who unified Germany into the country we know it as today. And he became Germany's first chancellor. This Reich was, in Hitler's view, disgustingly and dishonorably ended by the Weimar Republic and the Jews, which had erased Himmler's beloved aristocracy. What Hitler was offering in *Mein Kampf*, however, was a Third Reich. A Reich that would last for 1,000 years.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That is a very, very long time!
--:-- Marcus Parks: The Third Reich would do what else but make Germany great again. And while Hitler never used that as a campaign slogan, he certainly used the phrase in quite a few speeches.
--:-- Ed Larson: In goring?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Did? Definitely. Absolutely did.
--:-- Marcus Parks: They did not. It was not an actual slogan, but it was used over and over and over again in speeches.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: A good slogan would have been, "When you're right, you're right." But they got rid of all the Jews. So they couldn't figure out who. No one could write that. And so, but it's true. Like, that was like, hoo, hoo.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah. Sends a shiver up my spine.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, I think it is extraordinarily important to note that the Nazis were not the only Germans who desired a return to the past. Many average Germans still held up Otto von Bismarck as an authoritarian hero because he ignored the law of other German states to do what he thought was best. They wanted a strong leader to come in and tell them what's what.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: In fact, author William Shearer argues that the ideals of democracy, the will of the people, and a parliamentary system of government, these never quite took hold in Germany with the Weimar Republic. And of course, because it never really took hold, that was a new thing to them, it made the Germans far more amenable to Hitler simply seizing power later on.
--:-- This, of course, is one of the major differences between then and now, because in America, these concepts of freedom are so ingrained in our DNA that I'm only just now waking up to the extent of how much we take them for granted. This, however, is why I truly do believe that if a big power grab is ever made in this country, and I do mean big.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, the big one.
--:-- Marcus Parks: It will not work. Most Americans won't stand for it because that sort of shit, it tends to raise our hackles instinctively. I'm actually going to go ahead and say as a moment of hope here that after all the shit this administration just pulled with ABC and Jimmy Kimmel, people I know personally who are a little on the fence about everything, they're finally starting to wake the fuck up after 10 goddamn years.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's because they know they say a lot of fucked up shit too. And if they can't say their fuck, if they just start coming after him, they all know that was piddly shit. That was nothing. That was nothing. So they're like, "Oh man, I say a lot worse stuff than that."
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, buddy.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, buddy. Those little jokes of yours are going to end up coming around biting you in the ass, and we'll see how that goes.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, after Heiner Kimmler read *Mein Kampf*, where all of his own beliefs and ideas were mirrored back to him so perfectly, he became fully convinced that the Aryans were the creators of human civilization, and therefore the only ones capable of keeping it going.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Now, I also wonder whether or not he believed it, or if he understood that's the line.
--:-- Marcus Parks: He believed it. Himmler, in the end, he does, for me, I'll always talk about this. I always like the idea of how much of a foot in and how much of a foot out these guys have. Himmler is standing fully within. Himmler is a romantic. Hitler is far more of a cynic than Himmler is. But Himmler also knows. Even Goebbels is more of a cynic.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Not to mention Gorin.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yes. But what Himmler knows is that history has to win.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: History has to be written. History has to come in. So he also kind of, because he's a true believer, he understands that unless it becomes real, it never happened. So he has to make it all real.
--:-- Well, here might be a good place then to talk about where the idea of Aryans actually came from, because it was not, as is often supposed, Madame Helena Blavatsky, the famous American occultist who first popularized the term. See, if you made it through our series on HPB, and thank you very much if you did, you'll remember...
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It was worth it!
--:-- Marcus Parks: God, we worked so hard on that.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I read a quarter of *The Secret Doctrine*. You have any idea what it's like fighting your way through that horseshit?
--:-- Ed Larson: It's not that secret if you put a book out.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Exactly. But if you made it through that series, you'll remember that while Blavatsky certainly had some foul racial beliefs, she used the term Aryan to simply classify the current iteration of mankind. For her, Aryans weren't better or worse. They were simply next. They were the fifth iteration of humanity out of six, if I remember correctly.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: The key here is we can't entirely not blame HPB. She did write it into *The Secret Doctrine*. But there were people that helped this.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, there were many other people who talked about it long before she did and in far worse ways. *The Secret Doctrine* was just this little idea. She was trying to run her own grift.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: HPB was *The Secret Doctrine* was her take on a world theory that she was trying to bring forward. That was her proprietary storyline that she ripped off from the Hindus.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Exactly. That's what grifters do. But the problem is other grifters started to arise. So a part of this Völkisch movement, when that really started, there was a guy by the name of Guido von List.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Who was far more to blame for the Aryan thing than HPB. He's a funny looking guy. Have you seen him?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You remember that he looks like, kind of like Dr. John slash the guy. He has like a beret on. He looks like what was that French chef, Prudhomme? He kind of looks like Paul Prudhomme. And he wrote these series of novels and books attaching these thoughts, like this idea of the within *The Secret Doctrine* to this idea of naming Aryans. And he plucked the Aryans out and he said the way he bridges it is that yes, Aryan doesn't mean white necessarily or Germanic necessarily, but the Germanic white people have the most Aryan blood within them. So that's the bridge. That's the jump off point that begins all of the rest of the thought, which is very interesting because it just took one guy. It's like, "It's white people." And everyone's like, "Cool."
--:-- Marcus Parks: It's just basically because they can handle the cold.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Maybe. I mean, I do feel like they always talk about that. The problem is then they always bump up against this thing of the main issue with all of the greatest, biggest works of humankind is that they're all built in these super hot places by brown people. And so they keep having to figure out, "Well, what do we do about this? How do we get white people from here to there?" That's the biggest question. It's like, "How do we make it where white people are the sole proprietors of all humanity?" And you know how he did that? Tied it to Tibet.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Because that's the thing is that Blavatsky, the only connection she has to the Nazis is that she's the reason why the Nazis later became obsessed with Tibet. If you'll remember, the swastika is a Buddhist symbol, and Blavatsky claimed that the Aryan race had its origins in East Asia.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: So, since the Nazis took a piece of everything that even mentioned Aryans and added it to their own belief system, Blavatsky got lumped in with all of the purely repellent writers who used the term Aryan. Those men were, of course, mostly homegrown white supremacists. Also, they talked about this idea of, which I think is funny, that the original Asians were white.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: They became Asian somehow, but the white people there first, they built everything, then became Asian. Then they got super lazy.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Understand when you start breaking down the ideas granularly that what they amount to always is this how they were able to rationalize becoming allies with the Japanese partly.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh yeah, because literally they are taught that "used to be us."
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, that's part of it.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, no, and also they just were fun guys and they got along real well. And they really got along very well.
--:-- Marcus Parks: As far as origins go, the concept of Aryans as blue-eyed, blonde-haired Germans had been invented in the 1700s by two men with oddly similar names, Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Very Jewish names. Every Gottfried and Gottlieb I've ever met is extremely Jewish.
--:-- Ed Larson: Which is because they were German Jew.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Who?
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, the guys, Edward knows, yeah. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.
--:-- Marcus Parks: No, these guys were not. See, the two Johans had noticed some linguistic similarities between contemporary Germanic languages and ancient Persian languages.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: They both use letters. How about a coincidence? You ever notice how they all use the sound?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, my God. Everyone's right.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, both being extreme nationalists, the two Johans greatly extrapolated from that coincidence by claiming that northern white Europeans had been the creators of all civilization. And the classification they gave to these Europeans was the Aryans.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: [In a Southern accent] Oh, sit down, child. What you mean you're talking about? What you talking about on this horse? You making all this stuff up about white people? Have a piece of pie, child. Oh, you look so thin. You just look so pale.
--:-- Ed Larson: I suppose maybe I could just have some pie.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You just want some sweet tea?
--:-- Ed Larson: I have been working very hard.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That does sound like, actually sounds like a very nice treat.
--:-- Ed Larson: Now you sit down here.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Now let me fix that jacket of yours.
--:-- Ed Larson: Most of the time I spend mending.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Okay. Thank you. You ever heard of Little Richard?
--:-- Ed Larson: I have not, but he sounds very nice.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Wap-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wap-bam-boom. You're going to love Little Richard.
--:-- Ed Larson: Little Richard!
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Sounds very manly.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, you'd be surprised. You'd be surprised.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, of course, all of this begs the question as to why it isn't common knowledge that the Aryans created everything. Why everybody doesn't know that white people were the start of every single aspect of civilization.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, why not?
--:-- Marcus Parks: I mean why has this earth fact been buried over millennia?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And more importantly, who?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, Marcus, I don't know if I want to know the answer to that.
--:-- Marcus Parks: It's the Jews!
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, actually, I did know. Always. The answer to everything.
--:-- Ed Larson: Everyone.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Because honestly, how easy is that for them?
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, it is.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: They do make the Jews sound extremely successful.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Actually, we're going to get into that later. Jews are both the most powerful cabal that run everything, and they're slimy, pestilent rats that need to be destroyed. There is an absolute reason behind that, which we're going to get into later on. And we're going to isolate that and ruin Henry's life.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: If we could, yeah.
--:-- Ed Larson: If we could put that "Henry's of Bratwick" as a quote, that'd be great.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I'd say thank you.
--:-- Ed Larson: If we could send that to our agents, that'd be great. And make sure they knew he said it on Yom Kippur.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yes, yes. I am trying.
--:-- Marcus Parks: The Aryan idea was reawakened in 1919 by the writer Hans Gunther, the author we spoke of last episode who wrote one of Himmler's favorite books, *The Night, Death, and the Devil*. Gunther came up with five human races based on physical, intellectual, and emotional traits, and he placed the Aryans on top. Gunther was also a staunch conservative who despised the Weimar Republic, and he believed that the Aryan race was so advanced that they might as well be their own species. Like, you wouldn't let a dog be president and expect him to do a good job, would you?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Wait a second. So why would you do that, Mr. Jew? Is he guessing about my Air Bud president script that I just wrote? Where everybody in the government dies except for Air Bud? And he has to be president of the United States of America? And then he goes to war with Iran? But then the guy finds out he's a good boy? And then everybody hangs out and it's fine? And then Iran gets a cat? And then they fall in love?
--:-- Ed Larson: Brilliant. Have you sent that off yet?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, mostly it's on old notebook paper. I wrote it in my dookie. Copyright! I say copyright! I got it! It's mine! I say copyright! I say copyright!
--:-- Ed Larson: My struggle!
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Another struggle!
--:-- Ed Larson: Golden Retrievers, also the Aryans of Doth.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Fuck!
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Who's the Jew of the dog world? I'm not going to answer that. I'm not. I have no excuse to answer that.
--:-- Ed Larson: Stop the Irish setter.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, Gunther's books and other romantic tomes in the Völkisch vein were runaway bestsellers. Many used the central idea that the so-called sick and impure races had to be exterminated, while the remaining pure-blooded Nordic stock must exclusively procreate with each other. It is, I think, important to note that these books outsold *Mein Kampf* by incredibly large margins. Meaning that there were a lot of people in Germany who dug this stuff even before Hitler amplified it. Heinrich Himmler, however, was the one person in Germany who read all this garbage and began giving serious thought as to how one could actually pull all this off. And he started thinking about it long before the Nazis rose to the full height of their powers.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Did Himmler ever write a book?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Those who can't do, teach.
--:-- Marcus Parks: He had his diary. He had his copiously kept diary.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh man, you got a diary now.
--:-- Ed Larson: I have a little journal.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: The poop diary.
--:-- Ed Larson: I do, I am on it. I'm dealing with a doctor right now in which I'm trying to figure out stuff about my diet. And I have to keep a diary of my bowel movements. And I have to describe them. So like stuff like two paragraphs, three. I'm shooting for longer. I'm shooting for page two page stuff like, "I sat down to poop. It was just a pee. Be back soon. Be back soon. Love you. I love you. Good night." And then doing it. P.S. Ed was so mean to me today. Ed was mean to me. My poop looked like a bunch of raisins.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Thank you. I never liked having any instinct to read anyone's diary, but I would love to get my hands on that. "Dearest Dr. Chrysanthemum, how does my poop find you today? I hope well. The brown today was most surprising. A serene mahogany. Like an old woman's chair."
--:-- Ed Larson: You know, I know exactly the poop you're talking about. And I feel good every time I see it. Serene mahogany is the perfect color.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Ah, yes, delicious. It looks like a chocolate mare.
--:-- Ed Larson: Well, with a head full of ideas.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Heinrich Himmler rejoined the main Nazi party officially in August of 1925, just weeks after the publication of *Mein Kampf*. Himmler brought the lower Bavarian Nazis he'd been hanging out with while Hitler had been in prison, so he essentially came bearing gifts.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Whoa, it was a bringer!
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah. But by the time Himmler joined back up, Hitler had been out and about for a while after spending only nine months in so-called jail. The ban on the Nazi party had been lifted, and two brothers named Gregor and Otto Strasser were doing everything they could to reconstruct the Nazis into a functioning political party. See, Hitler and his fellow Nazis had realized after the failed coup that the path to power was not through sheer brute force. In order to destroy democracy, they had to first use democracy. And Heinrich Himmler was just the type of stooge to help do it.
--:-- Once he rejoined the Nazis, Himmler began working as a secretary and assistant to Gregor and Otto Strasser. They took a shine to Himmler because, one, he owned a motorbike, which was super cool and useful.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, it's fine.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah. And he could type a lot of words a minute.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, he could.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But more importantly, Gregor and Otto Strasser recognized Himmler's frustrated ambitions to be a soldier, which was certainly something they could use to the party's advantage.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I want to go boom boom. I want to go bing bang boom. Shoot, shoot, drop and bell. Oh, I wish I could fight. Oh, my struggles.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But in 1925, Himmler became briefly distracted by his old fantasy of being a warrior farmer. That year, Himmler resigned as Gregor and Otto's secretary to devote time to his brand new chicken farm.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: This is what, when people describe Himmler in derogatory terms, it's like, "Oh, the chicken farmer." This is what they're talking about. What was it called? Cluckow? Put it on top of the wire. All ye who enter here abandon all eggs.
--:-- Ed Larson: I actually weirdly think, I mean this is really fucked up, but I do weirdly think that being a chicken farmer is actually quite similar to the way he viewed human beings.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Possibly.
--:-- Ed Larson: I mean at least viewed human beings that he didn't consider to be Aryan, which is everybody.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, 1925 is the year that many Nazis found, for lack of a better term, their groove.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's groove tonight. It's a Nazi night.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And around now they're starting to get their groove back.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Let groove tonight. It a Nazi night. We on this time.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Future propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels found his talent as a speaker. And since Goebbels was an up, he ended up replacing Heinrich Himmler as Gregor and Otto Strasser's secretary, which put Goebbels in the position to truly shape the Nazi party's politics.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Now that guy sucked.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But as it was with the farming apprenticeship, Himmler discovered that being a chicken farmer kind of fucking sucked.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: What?
--:-- Marcus Parks: And Himmler had no instincts for agriculture, despite having a degree in the subject.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: None of these chickens respect me. Not a one will salute. And they all know what they're supposed to do. You're supposed to stick your little wing up. Stick your wing up.
--:-- Ed Larson: All of his chickens only had right wings.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's hilarious.
--:-- Marcus Parks: So, Himmler's attention slowly began to return to the Nazi party. Before long, it was discovered that Heiner Kimmler had an almost uncanny talent for mundane administrative activities and desk work, i.e. the shit that nobody else wanted to do.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Because what did he realize? That hate ain't hitting the table unless somebody fills out the Excel sheets.
--:-- Marcus Parks: That's right. Now, this admittedly doesn't sound like an exciting turn of events, but it was this talent that enabled Heiner Kimmler to conceptualize, organize, and carry out the Holocaust. It can't be overstated that it was as organized as it could possibly be.
--:-- Marcus Parks: That's the reason why we know so much about it, is because even though they spent weeks trying to get rid of all the documentation, weeks upon weeks trying to get rid of it, but the thing about something like the Holocaust is that it requires a lot of paperwork. A lot of it. And you're not going to get rid of all of it. Supplies moving around, concrete, and making rail lines, and building all the buildings. Work orders. And then that's just the non-human side of it. What about the six to ten million people that went missing?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: How do we not know how many people were actually killed if they kept such accurate records? It's because there was so many killed. And some was official and some was off the books.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, and they also didn't necessarily keep records of like, "This is how many people were killed." It didn't go that far necessarily. Not always.
--:-- Marcus Parks: No, because once they were dead, they were dead. Unfortunately, they didn't treat them like people. The idea was that it was really all about capacities. What we know is stuff like the fuel that had to go to run the crematoriums. That's how we know how often they're running. How much Zyklon B they had to order.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, and then how many people can fit in by how long were they running them. That's how they have to figure that out.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, and then when you start going into Eastern Europe, like when we start getting the Einsatzgruppen, it's like, "Okay, how many bullets are they ordering?" And they can actually go there and dig up some of the mass graves and maybe count some of the corpses.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: If you're really a fun person.
--:-- Marcus Parks: If you're super curious.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I mean, we could go to Poland, buddy, and we could fucking do it with a shovel.
--:-- Ed Larson: We need to go.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, you really do. Poland's incredible.
--:-- Ed Larson: No, I want to go. I want to go. I can't wait to go to Krakow.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, I could be wrong about this because I'm still very much learning about Heinrich Himmler. But when they captured his home in his safe, wasn't it just filled with paperwork?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yes. And not money. Yes. We'll get to all of that. Well, Himmler putting together the Holocaust, this was, of course, in addition to Himmler's construction of a network of terror and brutality that tormented, intimidated, and oppressed the whole of Europe. It didn't matter if you were Jew, Gentile, or even a fellow Nazi. You were scared of Heinrich Himmler and his people. He now knows, too. He understands that the most powerful fear is the stuff from inside the party. Yes.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Now, eventually, Himmler's ambitious diligence was noticed by Adolf Hitler, who made the decision to make Himmler second in command of a small corps of men known as the Schutzstaffel, which in English roughly translates to the Protection Squad. Basically, these men began as security guards, the ones who tried to prevent assassinations and attacks carried out against Nazi leaders. History, however, knows them better as the administrators, guards, and executioners of the concentration camps, the dreaded SS. The SS was only 200 men strong when Himmler was put second in command.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But while he was half-assing it at his chicken farm, he was also spreading his occult beliefs throughout the SS, which basically made the SS an occult organization.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's so hard to get all those chickens to sit at a round table. They don't even understand what a grail is unless you fill it with feed.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I can't believe he was bad at it. I mean, he already looks like an egg.
--:-- Ed Larson: I know, but that's the problem.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I actually think that that—
--:-- Ed Larson: Yesterday I was potato, today I'm egg. It's funny to make a decision.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: But the chickens look at you being like, no, just a baby.
--:-- Marcus Parks: The point of the SS was the occult angle because it was an exact opposite vibe of the stormtroopers.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, yes. Which we're going to get into.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah. So the idea was that he made the SS specifically to house this philosophical viewpoint.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, yes, which we're going to get into.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, so the idea was that he made the SS specifically to house this philosophical viewpoint.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yes, indeed. And I didn't know it was Schutzstaffel. I always thought it was shitsuckers.
--:-- Ed Larson: They are. That is actually how it's pronounced in Detroit.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, as far as the SS being an occult organization, Himmler did his level best to spread his beliefs into every single man who became an SS member. See, Himmler had cobbled together a Nazi-approved version of history that began with the Aryans living their best lives in a mythical land called Hyperborea, which was supposedly located in the far north of Europe and sounds quite a bit like Atlantis.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No! But it's cold!
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yes. See, like Atlantis, Hyperborea sank or disappeared. But there were survivors. Supposedly, the survivors were made up of the ancestors of Aryans, Jews, and the Romani, who often get overlooked when we talk about the Nazis. See, the Romani played a central role in the Nazi myth, acting as the evil turncoats who had betrayed the Aryans on Hyperborea. Himmler taught his SS men that the Romani were deeply antisocial, treasonous, and ultimately responsible for the flood that had destroyed most of the earth 12,000 years earlier.
--:-- Ed Larson: Honestly, Romani just mostly have some of the most entertaining weddings I've ever seen in television history.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Indeed. This myth was the justification behind the murder of between 300,000 and 1.5 million Romani during World War II. These murders were perpetrated by the Nazis and specifically Himmler's SS, either by simply executing them where they stood in their homelands or later by shipping them off to be killed or work to death in Himmler's concentration camps.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: 300,000 to 1.5 million is a huge gap.
--:-- Marcus Parks: I mean, that's how it is with every single number in World War II. Unless you have— because the records didn't necessarily exist in the way they do today. Unless it's like a military operation. Like military, every military knows exactly how many men they lost. But when it just comes to people, you don't really know exactly how many Romani were out there. You have an idea. And then not only that, you don't know some of these people. Some of them might have just moved somewhere else. They might have just ran away and got away.
--:-- Ed Larson: Or they could be at the bottom of a fucking pit. You just don't know.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Also the key here is to remember the SS is a paramilitary group. So it's another interesting factor that Hitler did, that he understood to separate things from the main body of the official governorship and the official military of Germany. So a paramilitary group doesn't necessarily have to follow all the same regulations and all this kind of same thing as the military, and they can go do a bunch more off the books.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, I mean, they're just guys.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: They're just guys. Like, they're not soldiers. They're just men in uniform.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, they're just guys. Seriously, the SS are guys that Heinrich Himmler, who himself is just a guy, they say, like, you look good. Come on. Yeah, you're tall. You've got a scary look. You've got blue eyes.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But according to Himmler's myth, the Romanis' treachery on Hyperborea was nothing compared to that of the Jews. See, the central tenet of the Nazi story, the thing that answers the seeming contradiction between the Jews being simultaneously all-powerful and subhuman, was that the Jews and the Aryans were locked in a never-ending battle of domination over the earth that could only be won if the Jews were exterminated and their religion destroyed. It's not that the Jews were necessary. That's the thing. It's not that they were not. It's not that they didn't have power. The whole point was like, no, they're very powerful. They're just evil. And they must be eliminated. But this was not necessarily just so the Nazis could spend all their time as warrior farmers, because one of the little spoken of aspects of Nazism is that it was ultimately an apocalypse cult. They believed that another great cataclysm like the Great Flood was coming, and the reason why they had to sweep away all of their rivals for earthly supremacy was so the Aryans could survive to lead human evolution to the next level.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Again, the worst villains of history believe they are heroes. Himmler believed that putting all of this together was going to save the world.
--:-- Ed Larson: The greater good. Always about the greater good.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Interestingly, though—
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: But at that point, on to that level, I don't think he believed in that. I believed he was just like, once the Nazis are in power, we'll see. I feel like once we've achieved world domination, there's no ceiling. There is no ceiling, we can do whatever we want.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Interestingly, Himmler did not keep his historical fantasies to just Germanic origins. Just like it was portrayed in the movies, Heinrich Himmler really was obsessed with finding the Holy Grail.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's still white people shit.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah. He believed that the inevitable war for domination over Europe would lead to the acquisition of the Grail, and once found, it would be placed in a castle where it would be guarded by Himmler's modern medieval knights. These knights, of course, would be the men of the SS. Now, Himmler made a name for himself throughout 1925 in the Nazi Party by fundraising and organizing, but he also gave dozens of speeches at various regional Nazi headquarters across Germany.
--:-- Ed Larson: God, how sad it must be to be a regional Nazi headquarters. Being out there in the middle, just being like, "I'm the leader of Heidelberg. I'm the most evil man in Heidelberg. You want a shoe?" You know what I mean? They're all having to deal with all these idiots.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, the topics of his speeches were, of course, all anti-Semitic.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No way.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, well, that's the thing. Himmler sort of became known as the guy who really didn't like the Jews. He's the guy that other Nazis would be like, all right, like, calm down a bit. But then, when they did that to him, he'd know, oh, you'll be on the list as well. In speeches that were often over two hours long, Himmler would openly complain that if Germany had gassed more Jews during the Great War, then maybe Germany would be in a better position than they currently were. But judging from Himmler's speeches, top Nazi Joseph Goebbels took notice of the 26-year-old hate bug. Before long, Goebbels had made Himmler the deputy Reich propaganda chief, writing, quote, "Himmler's a good fellow. Very intelligent. I like him."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: First time anyone had ever written that about Himmler. "I like him." I guess it was. Joseph Goebbels. That's who likes you.
--:-- Ed Larson: But then again, you're Heinrich Himmler.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, exactly. It's fucking 26. 26. It makes me so crazy. And he looks 45 when he's 26.
--:-- Ed Larson: He didn't moisturize.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But one thing that set Himmler apart from the other Nazis was that Himmler was not brought into Nazi leadership through Adolf Hitler's charisma like so many others. In fact, Himmler never spoke about Hitler directly in his speeches because Himmler was playing a different game than most other Nazis. See, many Germans were swayed far more by Hitler's promise to return Germany to its former glory than they were by all the Jewish stuff. In fact, the race talk was sort of waved off. Much like that sort of thing is waved off today. Like, "Ah, fucking so what? Hitler, he might say some stuff about the Jews that goes further than I might, but you know, Hitler just says stuff, you know? He just says whatever comes to his mind. He's crazy like that. I love him for that."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And they all like— and again, it sounds familiar in that way where they like, "He's just fucking spouting off. He's just trying to get attention. It's all just his personality. He's just playing to his base." And it's the more important thing is that Hitler is going to give us jobs. He's going to take care of the farmers again. And also, aren't Jews kind of annoying anyway? Like, don't you kind of think that— you said, like, a little bit annoying? Like, you can admit it to me. You can, because we're not Jewish, you can say it to me.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, it's kind of—
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Why would you say that?
--:-- Ed Larson: Are you calling Gilbert Gottfried annoying?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Himmler, by contrast—
--:-- Ed Larson: Honestly, God help us, then, if they had met Gilbert Gottfried.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: God help us. Or would they be turned? Would he be like, "I love this little angry man"? I feel like they could literally be like, he is fucking hilarious. I can see that.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, like, obviously, we all know all the stories about Hitler bringing Jewish entertainers into the castles. He was obsessed with Jewish singers and comedians, and he would play movies like Wizard of Oz and all that shit. It's always— everybody's, again, hypocrites.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yes. And is there anything worse?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Himmler, by contrast, he came to the Nazis with his beliefs fully formed. The Nazis were simply the ones who were saying in public what he'd already been saying in private for years. And Himmler saw in the Nazis, and therefore in Hitler, a path towards actually making his horrid dreams a reality.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: The key is, remember, he's not here to make Hitler in charge. He wants to make Hitler in charge only because it's going to give him license to spread his hatred on everyone.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, once the Nazis really started cooking in the mid-1920s, Himmler immediately saw how he could rise in the ranks. He would sit back and watch the other Nazis rip each other to shreds. And when one Nazi fell, Himmler would pick up the responsibilities left behind. He was sort of a power scavenger. Himmler also knew how to leverage his comrades to get support from Hitler indirectly. By concerning himself with organizational matters, communication and propaganda, and endless reports, Himmler made sure that when people spoke about him to Hitler, it was only to say how amazing and capable Himmler was at everything he did.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It also shows that Hitler was like— it's more just him seeing all this paperwork and going like, "Oh, he's very busy." It's like, he's just not— it's all of this. It's all— says von Zeng, I love it! It's a busy bee! And they're all just— that's the thing. It's all surface level. They're all lying to each other.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But the other side of Himmler's rise to power was that he knew how to set up the rules so that other people would be sure to break them. And when they did break them, he gained only further opportunities to gain influence. Once Himmler got a little more responsibility and trust within the party, he put together a pamphlet which laid out guidelines for all Nazi administrators. This was basically the beginning of Himmler practicing for the day when the Nazis were in power and his view of morality could be forced upon the whole of Germany. Keeping with the strict guidelines set out by his father when he was a child, Himmler wrote that failure to keep deadlines would result in a stern warning, and when necessary, these failures would be reported directly to the Führer.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You don't want me to tell Daddy, do you?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, this may not sound like such a big deal, but remember that the Nazis were, at this point, basically a bunch of dudes in their early to mid-20s. That's a fact that is often forgotten by history. Heinrich Himmler himself was only 26 years old at this point, so he knew that placing extreme importance on deadlines was going to get a lot of Nazis in trouble with Hitler, who ironically was himself famously lazy.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I don't think it's ironic. I think it's built in. I think the idea is that he can be lazy. He's in charge. He's the Führer. He can be lazy. The rest of them can't. The rest of them, God forbid, they're lazy.
--:-- Ed Larson: Himmler does have resting tattletale face.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: He does. Well, then again, Himmler was working when Hitler wasn't working. Himmler knew. I like the idea of power. Hitler was never working.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And I love the concept of power scavenger.
--:-- Ed Larson: Because it's a corporate thought. It's a way these guys—
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, it's how fascism works. Why do you think we have David Zaslav, who's never made a fucking movie in his life, in charge of one of the most important show business pillars right now, economically? Because he's good at all the other dumb shit except for making movies. And someone likes that. There's somebody they understood at some point, "Oh, we're sitting here all day making movies when we should be making money," and that's how you find yourself with a corporate idiot running everything. This guy is just great at the corporate edge, and that's exactly how the Nazis are going to make it to the top.
--:-- Ed Larson: All I know is someone who got a Kickstarter for their movie shouldn't be talking shit about David Zaslav. UFO.movie, honestly, if you can check it out. I just got— obviously, I'm not going to Marvel. All right, so if you could.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But within this pamphlet, Himmler also began giving explicit instructions on how Nazis could purposefully target Jews. He wrote that it was a Nazi's duty to document all relevant information about any Jew that a Nazi might come upon, information like ages, jobs, and addresses. Any person who refused to work with the Nazis' collection of data was to be fined, imprisoned, or, when deemed necessary, killed. This was all before the Nazis had any actual governmental power at all. Because at this point, the Nazis were more like a street gang. They're more like something like the Proud Boys than they were an actual political party.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: So they're actually killing people at this point?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Very much so. Yes. They've been killing people since the 20s or since the early 20s. They are an extraordinarily violent street gang.
--:-- Marcus Parks: I mean, yeah, they actually killed enough people where— I think I mentioned it last episode— it was a plot line in Downton Abbey, where one of the girl's boyfriends goes to Germany and he is killed in 1924 by this horrid man, Adolf Hitler? I believe it's his name. I don't think that's the last we'll be hearing of him.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I hate that fucking shit. That shit makes me so angry.
--:-- Ed Larson: I love it so much. You're not going to go see the wedding one in the theater? I love it. I love it so much. I'm going to make it a red wedding.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Perhaps because the Nazis gave Heinrich Himmler a bit of street cred, he was, in 1927, finally able to convince a woman to marry him.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Wow, yeah.
--:-- Ed Larson: Because, you know, because that's exactly— she's like, honey, you need to get a job.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Himmler's bride was a large, humorless, divorced woman with a noticeable facial tic, eight years older than Himmler, named Marga.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Hello! Handsome name.
--:-- Ed Larson: I don't get the full name of Margaret because she was already so big.
--:-- Marcus Parks: As far as we know, Marga was the first woman to ever take a serious interest in Heinrich Himmler, who had little, if any, sexual experience. He may not have even kissed a woman before Marga.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, I honestly don't think he did.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Himmler was the soul of prudishness, and Marga was a domineering woman who did all the seducing for him.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Show me your pickle! Now make pickle big! Oh, I show you how to make pickle big! Now put the milk in my craft. Put the milk in me, you little bitch. Okay. Put the fucking evil milk filled with your little squids in my fucking craft.
--:-- Ed Larson: This sounds very, very dirty.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Fuck my horse. Fuck my horse. He probably couldn't kiss with the little lips.
--:-- Ed Larson: Which he thought were very nice. He loved little lips. He loved thin lips.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Teeth just keep hurting you.
--:-- Marcus Parks: According to Himmler's diaries, he was terrified to take Marga home to his father, writing that he would rather clear a hall of a thousand communists single-handedly than try to get approval for a marriage to an older Protestant divorcee. But in the end, Professor Himmler said, fine, whatever, because Heinrich and Marga seemed to be a good match.
--:-- Ed Larson: He's just like, get him out of my fucking house.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, he's out by this point. I mean, just do whatever you want. I don't fucking care. Please have sex with my son. Fuck my son.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Both of them worshipped efficiency, thrift, and rigorous neatness, and Marga would call Himmler her, quote, "naughty darling."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Man, she also called him Heine.
--:-- Ed Larson: Heine's cute, which is the Jewish name for ass. Heine. Heine, oh my naughty little darling.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, she also— she was just barely a human being.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, she was the owner of a homeopathic health clinic.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, very vulgish. Which shows you that, well, not just vulgish, but it shows you that the whole natural healing phenomenon touches tips with fascism quite a bit. Always. It always has. It's so funny. It's so strange.
--:-- Ed Larson: Are you calling her a vindictive bitch? I don't think I can stand for that.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I know. I'm just saying when someone's really into crystals, there is a better than not chance that they might be a Nazi. It's weird. It happens. It always about— if they have crystals and a bra, they might be a Nazi. I view it that way.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Heinrich and Marga were married in July of 1928 and shortly after took out a mortgage on a small chicken farm outside of Munich where they kept 50 chickens and grew produce. The next year, Marga gave birth to their only child, a daughter named Gudrun. True to Himmler's nerd nature, his daughter Gudrun was named after the wife of the Germanic folk hero Siegfried.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's like the modern equivalent. If you named your daughter, like, Katniss or Hermione today, it's the same fucking thing.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, I could see Himmler deep in Funko. He would love Funko Pops.
--:-- Ed Larson: But to show you that all these dudes hung out—
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I've got to drive to drive. There is a limited edition female Silver Surfer from Fantastic Four First Steps. I must acquire my Doctor Who Funko Pop or there will be vengeance.
--:-- Ed Larson: He was kind of like his own Funko Pop.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, he was.
--:-- Ed Larson: Tiny big-headed piece of shit.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But to show you that all these dudes hung out together and formed their own little world bit by bit, the man who delivered Gudrun Himmler was one of the great villains of Nazi Germany, Dr. Victor Brack.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Aww.
--:-- Marcus Parks: About a decade after delivering Himmler's daughter, Dr. Brack would lead Himmler's euthanasia program.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, nice. Keeping it in the family.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You know who'd be great for this? You remember that guy who delivered Gudrun? Yeah, he would be great at annihilating the Jewish race.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, actually, Brack was in charge of Action T4, in which the Nazis murdered 300,000 people with disabilities and supposed mental illness. In essence, Dr. Brack oversaw the dry run for the Holocaust. Like, Action T4 was like, let's try this out and see what people think of it.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Just so you know, it's the industry. We call it tech week, but we call it hell week. And actually, that was a good run.
--:-- Ed Larson: Good run.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, when Gudrun was born in 1928, the Nazis had made some slight gains in Germany's parliament, known as the Reichstag. They held 12 seats, just 2% of the vote, and Hitler had no official standing. In other words, they were not popular, and it seemed like the Nazis might peter out.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I think that's what people thought in general. It's 100% what most people thought. They're like, okay, he had a moment.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But as we mentioned last episode, the Great Depression swept through Germany in 1929 and erased any economic gains the Weimar Republic had made since the years of hyperinflation. Hitler and the Nazis therefore leveraged the economic turmoil into massive support amongst people who were looking for simple and comforting answers to complicated questions. As such, the Nazis took 107 seats in the next election, giving them 18% of the vote. This made them the second largest party in the Reichstag, although Hitler still held no official position. While Hitler had no power in government, he was still making moves within the Nazi party to prepare for the day when he did seize power. In 1929, Adolf Hitler made the fateful decision to appoint Heinrich Himmler as the sole commander of the entire SS.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: So how did Hitler fit in if he had no position? Was he just like a mouthpiece?
--:-- Ed Larson: Like a Tucker Carlson.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, he's just the guy. He's the guy behind the guy. He's the guy that's selling you— we're here, we're getting there, we're gonna take you where you need to go. Vote my people into power. I need to get there eventually, but vote my people into power.
--:-- Ed Larson: You put this correctly last time. It kind of feels like he's like LeBron James of the Nazi party. All these other guys, they're waiting because they know he's not going to be some little guy. He's the team captain.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You don't put him as a Reichstag member. He's too big for that. He's too important for that. They're aiming for him to be Chancellor, which is their version of the Prime Minister.
--:-- Ed Larson: And it's more Jordan because of the tiny mustache.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yes. Well, that's after the fact. That's what they really are. That was that Hanes commercial where he was trying stuff out. If there was one man that is allowed to take back the Hitler mustache, it is the true goddamn American Michael Jordan. He tried. He's allowed to try. He tried and he failed.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yes. But he's allowed to try.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And he took that personally. Fly from your grave.
--:-- Ed Larson: You know what's really hard about keeping a bowel movement there and all this— I'm starting to realize how many times I really shit.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Did you write that down in your log? The one you just took?
--:-- Ed Larson: I looked at it.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, it's funny that it is a log.
--:-- Ed Larson: A log log. It's a log log. I looked at it. I noted it.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Nice.
--:-- Ed Larson: It was solid. It had frayed edges. I would say it was more towards a ceramic tan.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: In the days of the camera phone, isn't it far easier to just take a picture of it and text it to your doctor than it is to describe it with words? It seems that this woman doesn't want that. Pictures of your feces.
--:-- Ed Larson: It seems that she'd prefer my attempt at explaining them. I'm going to just start taking pictures, so when we have the one-on-one, I can show her.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Maybe the problem is that she would get so many pictures of feces that she would lose track of whose was whose.
--:-- Ed Larson: Whose was whose.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: So you should probably start writing your name down and the date and taking a picture of that.
--:-- Ed Larson: Or let's put a little clown face at the edge of your toilet so she knows it's you.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Have Sanries.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Back to Himmler. Now, even though Adolf Hitler was famously lazy and spent much of his time when he did finally get into office reading right-wing newspapers instead of listening to briefings or actually governing—
--:-- Ed Larson: God, who does that remind me of? I'm just so fucking stupid.
--:-- Marcus Parks: He did have a knack for placing people where they could operate at maximum efficiency, which, fortunately, is not a skill that the current administration has. He really was, unfortunately, super good at delegating authority.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: He was.
--:-- Ed Larson: He's like a Chili's manager.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yes. Especially like the one in Toledo by the 145. That's a high volume.
--:-- Marcus Parks: See, Hitler recognized Himmler's incredible administrative skills, his perfectionism, and his self-discipline.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: His willingness to do all the fucking shit work that nobody else wants to do.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But more importantly, Hitler recognized Himmler's military ambitions. And since Himmler had so desperately wanted to play army his whole life, Hitler figured that Himmler was the right guy to turn around the SS. See, at the time, the SS was sort of the disappointing younger brother of the SA, the stormtroopers. The SA, they'd been causing havoc all over Germany. They were doing fucking great.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: At least when it came to the Nazis. But they were scruffy and there were tens of thousands of them and they were very, very dangerous. But the vibe was distinctly one way.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: What was the street gang vibe? Street gang, young guys, high energy, lots of violence. But largely they were sort of like kids. They kind of feel like Droogies. They remind me of Clockwork Orange where they're running around doing chaos for chaos' sake. Less drugs, though.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And that's exactly what it was. And the SA were starting to become completely out of control. People were starting to complain. Like, you created this monster. You need to get a handle on this shit, Mr. Hitler. And they're all like, oh. He's like, my thing is I don't really get to handle on things unless I'm killing it in a mass state.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: So Himmler's 26 at this point, or like 30 maybe. He's about— this is, we're at 1930 now. Is Hitler the same age?
--:-- Marcus Parks: No, Hitler's a few years older.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Okay.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Hitler died in his 50s, so he wasn't that old either. He didn't look good, buddy. He didn't look good at all. He was about 41 at 1930.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Right.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Because the SA had been causing so much havoc, Hitler called up the corpulent, openly gay World War I veteran known as Ernst Röhm.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yay!
--:-- Marcus Parks: Röhm had actually been absent from Germany for the previous six years, which is kind of how the SA had gotten out of hand, because he'd been spending his time as an advisor to the Bolivian military in South America.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And you'd think there'd be like a massive story there. There ain't. He just hung out in South America for six years, kind of doing stuff, kind of not. Had very little impact on the affairs of South America.
--:-- Ed Larson: But it does seem like it's a little eerie in the fact that they all went to South America. So there must have been like not anything, but there must have been like that idea at some point must have at least been like tacked on a wall somewhere in a Nazi idea of like retire to Bolivia. It just started with one guy who was like, you remember Ernst? And before we killed him, you remember he said Bolivia was really nice?
--:-- Ed Larson: He said it was very cool for us. Very cool for us. And the pork was unbelievable, honestly.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, when Adolf Hitler called Röhm and asked him to return to Germany to run the SA once again in 1930, Röhm came running.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Now, Hitler knew that as soon as he was put in charge of the SS, that he was going to have to break...
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, so please, prancing.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But Himmler knew that as soon as he was put in charge of the SS that he was going to have to break away from the SA eventually. At this point the SS was a part of the SA, which meant that Himmler was beholden to Ernst Röhm. Himmler, of course, saw Röhm as a filthy degenerate due to his homosexuality.
--:-- Himmler believed that he could transform the disappointing SS into the pride of the Nazi party. So he imposed his own brand of discipline and order onto the group while also passing down his techniques for gaining power. See, Himmler thrived on information. So he instructed the SS to gather information not just on prominent Jews, but on the leaders of rival political movements in addition to well-known Freemasons, because Himmler was nothing if not a conspiracy theorist.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, Freemasons, we talked a little about it last time, it's the same groups of people that these secret society places became hubs of international espionage. So he viewed that as, because he knew it was going on inside of the Thule Society.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's like, so he just, again, like all Nazis, they commit crimes against people committing their same crimes.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Indeed. But once Himmler was fully given the SS, he lost all enthusiasm for his wife Marga and their chicken farm, which was failing just as badly as every other agricultural pursuit Himmler had ever attempted.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: With my husband all I have is all these feathers. I wish my husband would come and fill my graves again.
--:-- Ed Larson: Anish, your neck is getting very big. Very big. I can't keep coming home to this fucking neck. I'm sick of your talking.
--:-- Marcus Parks: See, Himmler had been appointed a spot in the Reichstag, a position that paid far better than chicken farming. Himmler was the type of guy that you put in the Reichstag. You don't put Hitler in the Reichstag. So Himmler, therefore, all but abandoned his family and his farm to devote himself fully to remaking his section of the Nazi party in his own image.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Ew.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, right? What an image. Now with the SS, Himmler could truly bring his fantasies to life. As opposed to the street gang vibe of Ernst Röhm's SA, Himmler saw the SS as an elite band of warriors who would eventually become Hitler's knights at arms.
--:-- Following this line of gallantry, Himmler demanded that every SS leader follow and enforce Himmler's brand of strict discipline. SS men could not drink alcohol, they were required to get plenty of sleep, drink plenty of water, and their clothes were required to be clean and properly ironed at all times.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I do believe there's a little bit of this, this sentiment I keep coming across, of this idea of civilized ways of doing things.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And this is a civil way of doing things. We're doing these things...
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Right, proper way of doing things. And you can see that that's what he did with the SS, where he started understanding, like, we will make them a fearsome group of serial killers. They will be very neat, so that people will at first think they're official and they're real.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, they'll look up to them.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, in other words, Himmler demanded that everyone beneath him be as exact, scrupulous, and pedantic as he was in all respects. This meant that Himmler's great obsession was the elevation of his men. So he had little to do with the day-to-day strategy of the Nazi party. He wasn't in the meetings with Hitler and Goering and Goebbels.
--:-- To build out the ranks of the SS, the most Nazi of the Nazis, Himmler purposefully sought out disaffected middle and upper middle class young men like himself, as well as the sons of former nobility. These were the men who had a specific nut against the Weimar Republic and the communists, and bonus points were awarded to those who had formerly served other paramilitary organizations or had served in World War I, unlike Himmler.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Because you know it's nice. Don't got to train them.
--:-- Ed Larson: Nope. And they can actually tell you what should be done.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yes.
--:-- Ed Larson: And then you can make it seem like it's your idea.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Because that's what Himmler was doing, because he had no idea what he was fucking doing.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, I mean, he'd gone through officer training school. He knew everything from an academic perspective. Everything.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: But again, it's also an example of somebody that is still largely, he's not a professional soldier.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: He's an amateur.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And he is put in charge of an extremely important part of the government.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: He's a super fan.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, he is a super fan.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But at this point, he's not in charge of, he's just, the SS is still not a part of the government.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, it's just its own crew. There's still a bunch of guys. Now, a somewhat underrated aspect of the SS in terms of importance is their now infamous uniforms, which, contrary to popular belief, were not designed by Hugo Boss.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: What?
--:-- Marcus Parks: They were manufactured by Hugo Boss.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: The seamstresses worked at Hugo Boss.
--:-- Ed Larson: No, Hugo Boss did make them. They took the contracts to make the SS uniforms.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Okay, so I could still be mad at them.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, yeah, of course.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But the designer of the uniforms was none other than Heinrich Himmler.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, you know what's nice about that guy?
--:-- Ed Larson: What a multi...
--:-- Marcus Parks: To further separate the SS from the SA, Himmler designed a uniform consisting of a brown shirt, an SS armband showcasing their goofy double lightning bolt, a black tie, black pants, black shoes, and a black belt. See, Himmler actually knew the power of branding, and especially the power of conformity. And he became so obsessed with the SS uniform that one could be dismissed from the SS, or even the Nazi party itself, for wearing the uniform outside of Himmler's exacting standards.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: This has a psychological effect as well.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Like this idea of making these rules that you almost can barely follow. It's a way to keep you on the line.
--:-- Ed Larson: Right. It's the same with all the other stuff. It makes you feel like you are a part of an elite group.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. And it's also the idea of knowing like I gave you all this. I put you in this position and I can take it away for the tiniest reason. So be on your fucking toes.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now once Himmler got the look under control, he began implementing his foul racial theories by crafting policies within the SS itself in anticipation of one day implementing these rules worldwide. In 1931, Himmler formed the Race and Settlement Office. In German, that's called Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt. But we'll call it RuSHA.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, I thought they were against them.
--:-- Marcus Parks: RuSHA developed a racial grading system that weeded out men who would not serve Himmler's vision of the SS or his vision of Germany's future. Because remember, they're one and the same. By investigating the physical characteristics of each applicant and grading them on a five-point scale from pure Nordic to suspected non-European blood components, Himmler whittled down applicants to construct a group of perfect physical Nazis. Amongst the most sought-after characteristics were long heads, narrow faces, flat foreheads, angular chins, thin lips, tall slender bodies, blue eyes, and fair hair.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Whatever, man.
--:-- Ed Larson: So, I mean, I've got like, you know, four out of six, four out of eight there.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's just because you're mostly British, but your hair and honestly your eyes.
--:-- Ed Larson: Well, I got the angular chin. I got the thin lips.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Thin lips.
--:-- Ed Larson: I got the slender body, tall slender body.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Nope, not blue eyes, kind of. I don't know. If I was similar I still might just shoot you in the head.
--:-- Ed Larson: I'm not certain. I got to think about this.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Think about it.
--:-- Ed Larson: Hey, let me think about this.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Think about it. Let me think about it.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But didn't they need everybody?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, that's the thing. This is the SS. And that's a really important thing to remember. And that's a really important distinction. This is not the army. This is the elite group of Nazis within the Nazis itself. This is the most Nazi of Nazis. And this is before they became the Nazis that ran Germany. This is the beginnings of all of this.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's like they're marines? I'm just trying to equate it to something I understand.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Dude, it's like their royal guard. It's like the Pope's guard, like the Swiss guard. It's like that, but for Hitler. And then he's going to turn them, but he's going to expand it.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, because right now these are supposed to be Hitler's guards. They're knights. Think of them as knights. You have a king and the king has his knights. The SS are supposed to be the knights. That's how Himmler sees them, at least. But then his goal probably is to turn the SS into the actual government.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, once inspected and deemed worthy, Himmler would keep a so-called stud record of the SS officer, proving that the man had what it took to breed Germany into Aryan superiority.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, they were obsessed with babies.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But the great irony here is that everyone who worked at RuSHA knew that Heinrich Himmler himself did not in any way qualify as pure-blooded Nordic. In contrast to the ideal, Himmler had a small, pigeon-chested body, a round face, sallow skin, dark hair, and a receding chin, which were all signs of so-called non-European blood. After the war, one RuSHA examiner finally let his frustrations fly by openly saying that Himmler was, quote, "an unassimilated half-breed, unfit to be even a member of the organization that Adolf Hitler, another obvious non-Aryan, had actually put him in charge of."
--:-- But while Himmler was still alive, no one dared say anything about this to his face, save for one man. Dr. Werner Best, eventual organizer of the Einsatzgruppen and the creator of the Jewish registry in Germany. He did actually confront Himmler about his non-Nordic appearance. Himmler, however, was completely unfazed. He already knew he didn't fit the mold, but he had an answer all ready to go. While he didn't have an Aryan body, Himmler said, he did have, quote, "a Nordic brain."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, his brain was Nordic. See? You can't check that. Fuck you.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's like a lot of people would assume I'm white. A lot of people assume just by looking at me I'm white.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: So what is your brain?
--:-- Ed Larson: No, I'm Polish. Well, my brain is white. But my body is Polish.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, I got you. You see that's the thing. Again, I'd be in a concentration camp.
--:-- Ed Larson: No, you wouldn't.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, they would.
--:-- Ed Larson: No. Simply because I'm too great.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, because you couldn't keep your mouth shut. That's why. Not because you're Polish.
--:-- Ed Larson: I mean, they would have been happy about it. They're the worst in my family. You would have been higher on the list than me.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah.
--:-- Ed Larson: So half my family's Jewish, half my family's Catholic, and the only person in my family that went to a concentration camp was a Polish Catholic.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Interesting. Wow. What for?
--:-- Ed Larson: I think she was hiding Jews.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Ed Larson: I was really afraid you were going to be like, "She was catering."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: She worked there? She cleaned on like Mondays and Fridays?
--:-- Ed Larson: That's my dad's old, that's an old dad joke. It's been like his grandfather died in Auschwitz.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, he fell off one of the gun towers.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now Himmler wormed his way into the lives of the men of the SS in far more ways than just examining their physical characteristics. In an attempt to control every aspect of their lives, Himmler decreed that the potential wives of any SS officer had to also undergo racial screenings and medical examinations. Incredibly, these women, who today would be put into the trad wife category, were fully willing to submit to these tests because Nazism had, by this point, begun to move from the lonely loser space into mainstream German society.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's when you really have to watch out, when the ladies are starting to say, "OK, I'll do it, too."
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, they're also, remember, because they're white ladies and they're getting the same privileges. And they also know this is actually kind of in this. For me, it's in the function of why people have sex with serial killers, like why they are attracted to that style of thing. There are a lot of these ladies who are starting to see the very cynical writing on the wall of, "Oh, I better catch some gunk for some Nazis because that's gonna keep me fed in a really nice lifestyle. My life won't change. Nothing about my life will change. I actually maybe will live like a normal life in this world."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, there's certainly some of that, but you're really also just pure hate. Yeah, that's the thing. You can't discount the fact that there are also plenty of women who are just filled with hate, just as much as men are.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, there's a bunch of them, man.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: There's a bunch of them. You ladies. You ladies. You guys got it.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You guys know what's going on.
--:-- Marcus Parks: So before this, they all looked like Marga, but then they started looking a little better.
--:-- Marcus Parks: The SS ones specifically.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, because the SS guys are supposed to be handsome. So they're getting more handsome ladies as well.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, this is the beginning of also their views on, this is a vaguely eugenics-like program.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's not vaguely. It is 100% inspired by eugenics.
--:-- Marcus Parks: The eugenics, because eugenics, that's an American creation.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, really?
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: They were inspired by that. Yeah, eugenics is an American creation. It was created here. It was developed here. And the Nazis, Himmler and Hitler both loved eugenics. They thought it was incredible.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. Hitler was actually kind of surprised. He always expected America to come around. He's like, "They'll get into it eventually. Come on. I mean, the manifest destiny. Love that. Based my entire Lebensraum on that. That's awesome. You know, eugenics. They're super into that. I'm super into that."
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, to be honest, that's what we'll, once we get later on in the series, we'll talk about that. But I do think that that is one of the weird hitches in all this, is that these guys really do believe on some level that when we get the Third Reich up and running, the rest of the world is going to be into it. Like, there is this kind of almost thought of, like, once we get it all set, the rest of the world's going to be like, "Okay. Yeah, that looks cool. I want that."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, you fucked up by not telling Japan.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah.
--:-- Ed Larson: It just turned out that what's really probably good to hear is that a lot of these ideas aren't super popular across the world. And eventually you're going to end up in a trench covered in gasoline on fire.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Concerning Himmler's search for the perfect Aryan bride, if any fault was found in a potential wife for an SS member, Himmler had the power to deem the woman unsuitable for marriage. And if Himmler thought the woman was offensively unsuitable, he reserved the right to kick the man who brought her out of the SS altogether, for even suggesting her as a potential mate. But once the woman was deemed suitable, Himmler would put her through so-called bride schools of his own design. These taught future SS wives the principles of both tradwifery and the principles that needed to be taught to their children to ensure that they were brought up in the proper Nazi fashion.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Because the Nazis were very invested in children.
--:-- Ed Larson: Very much so.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: They had that four. Yeah, that was the rule, right?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And eventually it got to be where children in Nazi Germany were the most terrifying people of all. Watch *The White Ribbon*.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yes, because the children were the ones who were telling on their parents. They were completely out of control, and parents everywhere in Germany were absolutely terrified of what was going to happen.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Likewise, the men were told not to drink, fight, or have sex in excess, even with their own wives. Every SS man had to be extremely disciplined in every way, because Himmler believed that it was that discipline that made them good Aryan examples for the German people.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Or as a good excuse for him not to fuck his own wife. I mean...
--:-- Ed Larson: No, no, no, you see, the rules.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: A real man.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's the rules.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: A real man only has sex once a month.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, and I made the rules.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yes, I made the rules, but there's still the rules that I can't have sex with you, Marga. I'm with that, Nick!
--:-- Ed Larson: Do you think that was Marga or was Himmler gay?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Sometimes I really wonder how much focus he puts on handsome, broad-chested, tall men and measuring their bodies and taking pictures of their naked bodies and making sure they're fucking right and eating right. And all he's doing is watching these big alpha Germans that are taller than him, wider than him, stronger than him, and he's getting, like, lured over them and, like, look at their piss and shit.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's an interesting theory.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's possible. But I think that... Honestly, I think Himmler was asexual.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I mean, he's a Nazi first.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yes, he's a Nazi first.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And a lover third.
--:-- Ed Larson: Administrator second.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, I don't think Himmler really had, if he did have sexual feelings, he didn't like them, and he didn't really want them. Like, sex to him was useless. It was a nuisance. It's kind of like how I look at eating, you know? It's like, it's a pain in the ass.
--:-- Ed Larson: I get it. That's how I look at, honestly, no, I'm pretty, I'm full *joie de vivre*.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, what Himmler put the men of the SS through in order to be a part of his medieval knight revival society was just the start. Essentially, what Himmler was doing with the SS was merely a blueprint that he planned to use for all society. He and he alone would decide who the ideal human should be. And while he knew that the creation of that ideal human would cause suffering on an unimaginable scale, he believed that any sacrifice was justified in the pursuit of that goal.
--:-- In incredibly short order, though, Himmler's obsessions would catch on first in the Nazi party and then throughout Germany, to the point where if you wanted to be a part of society, you had no choice but to believe in or at least accept the same things that Heinrich Himmler believed.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It sounds like a silly term, but it's called Nazification.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And they say it a lot in historical context. And I did not know that that actually really was that. And they talk about it. They talk about the idea that like the boiling frog allegory, like this idea that you don't really understand quite how fast it's going. And then everything becomes Nazified. The judges become, every single layer becomes infused with this fake thing. Everybody has to walk through to, like, you know, all of the ritualistic behavioral, the *Sieg Heil*ing and the things you have to do. And it keeps people like locked in. And it just becomes a part of society.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's like it wasn't, but it wasn't necessarily illegal to not *Sieg Heil* people.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, but it was frowned upon.
--:-- Ed Larson: Well, you would get the shit beat out of you.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You could be beaten half to death for not *Sieg Heil*ing someone. And probably get beat to shit by a lot of things. Many, many things.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: There's so many. Like, that's the thing. They created a whole new system of faux pas and a whole new system of things they could get pissed off about.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, basically, Himmler was creating a new aristocracy from the peasantry, the aristocracy of the Third Reich. And it's a part of the egalitarian nature of the Nazis, which is very true. They understood a little bit about the class war stuff that Russia was talking about. And they understood that if we make this a workers, if we make this about the quote unquote little people in the beginning. The *Volk*. That was the whole point. It's all about *der Volk*. The people.
--:-- In the existing aristocracy of Germany, however, the wealthiest people in the country, they believed that they could use the Nazis for their own personal gain.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh.
--:-- Marcus Parks: This same thing is happening with rich men today. Men like Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg changed his entire personality to better fit in with this administration. There is no Mark Zuckerberg.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Grilling these meats.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, there is no Mark Zuckerberg. There is no Peter Thiel.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Smoke these meats.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, they're all, literally, I'm starting to almost believe that they believe that. Do you know that a big thing with Peter Thiel right now is that he believes that AI is God? But he's saying this because he knows he's going to be in charge of it.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: So this is a new thing that they're doing, is acquiring Christianity. This whole, like, creating frameworks around Christian thought because they're reacting to our current government.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. I mean, it's all about molding to fit into the government. So you can get what you want. You can get your law pushed through. You can get your favors. You can get whatever you want.
--:-- Marcus Parks: I guess what Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg also think is they're smarter than everybody else. That everybody's going to fall in line with whatever it is that they do. But the problem with pretending to be a monster is that both the pretender and the believer end up in the exact same spot in the end.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yes, be careful of what you pretend to be.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, while Himmler was constructing his racial hierarchy within the SS, he met what could essentially be described as mini-Himmler in terms of brutality and cruelty. A man who doesn't quite reach the heights of the Mount Rushmore of evil, but certainly has an honorable mention. That man who joined the SS in 1931 was Reinhard Heydrich.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Isn't this the guy we were originally going to do the series about?
--:-- Marcus Parks: No. Oskar Dirlewanger.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, this started with Oskar Dirlewanger and turned into Himmler.
--:-- Ed Larson: Okay, cool.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: All right, all right.
--:-- Marcus Parks: See, Reinhard Heydrich was damn near Himmler's physical idea of what a Nazi should be. Heydrich was tall and blonde-haired, with a muddled physique and piercing, hypnotic blue eyes.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: God, Himmler just wants to be fucking ass-full of that guy.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Heydrich, however, wasn't perfect. He also had very wide, very feminine hips. His voice was far too high for a man. And he spoke in a nervous staccato.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Men with big butts are weird.
--:-- Ed Larson: I have a big butt.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, but big butts.
--:-- Ed Larson: You got a bubble butt.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I got a bubble butt.
--:-- Ed Larson: You have a nice butt.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I'm talking about big butts.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Big wide butts.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I like my big wide ass.
--:-- Ed Larson: You're talking about a grimace butt.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. But Reinhard Heydrich. He was alert, filled with nervous energy, hard working, and above all, extremely intolerant to anyone who wasn't just like him.
--:-- Marcus Parks: That's what you call a perfect Nazi.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I've got to say to you, Heydrich, I love your tolerance for intolerance. You only like people that are just like me. If you're not like me, then I don't like them. That's your attitude I like. You, you, you're not like me, but just like me. People that are just like me. If you're not like me, then I don't like you. That's your attitude I like. You, you, you not like me, but you like me. Okay, I'm already annoyed by you. Now waggle your fat ass out of this room, please.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, you like it when I leave, but you love to watch me go.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, shite. I can, I can, I can, I want to put my strudel in that car. Fucking click, clack, clack. Oh, I dropped my pencil. I just dropped my pencil.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Personality-wise, Heydrich was the perfect match for Himmler's cunning, an astute and calculating Nazi who surrounded himself with men who compensated for his failings while remaining subservient.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: But the problem is, he was constantly knocking things over with his big old butt. That is like a thing that doesn't allow you to go to management.
--:-- Marcus Parks: See, Heydrich was the one who came up with the idea that the SS should have an intelligence service specifically to secretly investigate other members of the Nazi party. Every member of the Nazi party. And any Nazi whose ambitions didn't line up with Hitler's, Himmler's, or Heydrich's would be identified and eliminated at the proper time.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I will kick them out! We will get these bad Nazis! The bad Nazis for being not bad enough! I will kick them out!
--:-- Marcus Parks: Mostly it came down to, like, do you believe that Adolf Hitler is the one and only Führer? And if the answer was anything other than absolutely, or just the idea that any Jewish person could be saved.
--:-- Marcus Parks: These sorts of ideas created a mutual respect between Himmler and Heydrich over the next ten years. Until, of course, Heydrich was killed in 1942 while he was plotting to surpass Himmler and even Adolf Hitler himself.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And that's the key. That's Himmler in a nutshell. Because Himmler knows that he also wants to do the same thing.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: But a guy like Heydrich, he just doesn't do it right.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Himmler knows you gotta be very patient.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You gotta wait for just the right moment. And even when he had his moment, he was still too fucking stupid to notice. That's what happens with being a fucking Nazi. Apparently it means that you're not super good at many things.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But even though Heydrich was close to the Aryan ideal, many of the other men that Himmler chose as leaders in the SS weren't. Rather than enforce extreme strictness when choosing leaders, Himmler chose men who would be loyal to him. Although that wasn't the main requirement. Perhaps even more important than loyalty was an inability to live in German society as it existed. Same problem that Heinrich Himmler had himself.
--:-- See, many of the SS leaders had served in World War I, and they had not adjusted back to civilian life at all, and others were just dickheads like Heinrich Himmler. Himmler, therefore, chose men who otherwise would not have been able to hold positions of real power, like, say, make it a podcast host, the deputy director of the FBI. And it was the elevation that created the loyalty that Himmler needed so badly.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I also think it serves as a function when somebody doesn't know quite what they're doing and they're put in a really perilous situation that requires a lot of attention. And then you can get quite a lot out of that person.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, you can.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: So you kill them?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Or until something bad happens to them.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, or they self-destruct.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, while it sounds like the SS was nobody's idea of a good or even tolerable time, Himmler's ideas were attractive to a lot of young Germans. See, when Himmler took control of the SS in 1929, he commanded only 280 men. By 1932, though, the SS numbered 30,000.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Fuck.
--:-- Marcus Parks: 280 to 30,000 in three years, and this is entirely under Heinrich Himmler's control.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Hard worker.
--:-- Marcus Parks: They had specialist departments. They had administration, training, discipline, intelligence. But even though Himmler was extremely important within the party itself, he somewhat operated outside of everyone else. Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler never built an intimate relationship with each other, like, say, Hitler and Goebbels or Hitler and Goering. Those guys, they all stayed over at each other's houses, at big Nazi slumber parties all the time.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Aw, that's so cute.
--:-- Ed Larson: Very cute.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Them, like, doing makeup and playing, like, that dating game with the phone.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, that's a mystery date.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's a mystery date.
--:-- Ed Larson: That's me.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, let's go to the mall.
--:-- Ed Larson: In the Rainbow Game?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No. You know when they all wear different kinds of lipstick?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Lipstick and they're blowing the one guy. But Himmler was always sort of the cheese that stood alone. Instead, Himmler made connections with everyone around Hitler, which kept his name in good standing with the Fuhrer. And it kept Himmler out of Hitler's crosshairs when something went wrong. This also kept Himmler in the perfect position to scavenge power when a fellow Nazi fucked up.
--:-- Ed Larson: And the perfect position to scavenge power for even if Hitler fucks up.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yes. Because then you're right. You're not right next to him when that man eventually goes down.
--:-- Ed Larson: Well, that Hitler is the ultimate carcass. That's the big one that he was waiting for.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, yeah. As it turned out, Himmler had backed the right horse when he chose the Nazis. At least when it came to power. The party did not, when it comes to like, the idea of hanging out, yeah, creativity, yeah, the parties, yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: The Nazis did even better in the election of 1932, doubling their wins to 37.4% of the overall vote.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And that doesn't sound like a whole lot in our two-party system. That's more than what Trump won with. That's like literally the amount of people that abstained from the vote.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, but that was a massive show of support from the people in a parliamentary system like Germany's. As such, the day after those elections, both Rohm's SA and Himmler's SS launched a series of bombings against Nazi opponents in the city of Konigsberg. Several elected communist officials were straight up murdered, and socialist newspaper editors were injured in a campaign that had been masterminded by Heinrich Himmler himself.
--:-- But within the government, Himmler was simultaneously working alongside Hitler and the German vice chancellor, a sniveling little fucking weasel. He's one of history's great villains, Franz von Papen.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: His lack of cowardice is like his lack of strength. Yes. That's the exact reason why.
--:-- Ed Larson: And like, that's the thing. He's why Hitler got into power. He's the guy who opened the door for Hitler.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Because together, these three men formulated a plan to fully integrate the Nazis into government, even though Franz von Papen knew that the Nazis were dangerous. He just thought that he was smarter.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, they also knew that the Nazis wouldn't be able to be the governmental body that they need to be. Right. Because that's the other thing, too, is that when the Nazis come together like this, this is the type of thing where they have to build a coalition government. They have to build a government out. It's very complicated. So these guys don't have any administrative experience at all. And so these guys all think, "Well, we're going to ride these Nazis and then we're going to ditch them."
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah. Now, when they killed all these communists, did they just replace them with Nazis?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, they just died. Everybody just died. It's all happening so fast.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, I mean, it does happen very, very fast. Now, von Papen was not the only conservative who believed he could use Hitler for his own purposes. Everybody thought. Everyone thought that they could use Hitler. See, after the Great Depression, the Nazis became the most popular conservative alternative to the communist and social democratic parties, and the capitalist conservatives of Germany wanted to do anything to keep the left wing out. So seeing how popular the Nazis were, and thinking that Hitler was sort of a useful idiot, the conservatives began machinations to install Hitler as Germany's chancellor, which was the highest position of power in Germany, right under the president.
--:-- They think, "All right, we get Hitler in there, we can ride this fucker until the wheels fall off, just so long as we don't get anybody in government that might actually, I don't know, tax us or help people or anything like that. Fuck that. We want to keep all of our money. Put Hitler in. We can handle it."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Make a chancellor out of Adolf Hitler.
--:-- Ed Larson: Wow, you should have been there.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, when you're right, you're right. Dude, they needed you then. Oh, my God, if they had just let one Jew in, you would have been the perfect one for Hitler. God, he needed you.
--:-- Marcus Parks: To the detriment of the entire world, those machinations became a reality in January of 1933, when Adolf Hitler, having never actually been elected to office, was appointed Chancellor of Germany under the elderly, barely cognizant president, Paul von Hindenburg.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, what a great name, right?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yes, I know. But also, I will say, this is one of those things where we can't get into the nuts and bolts of how it happened. But just understand that they all negotiated a way to create a coalition government. They needed the Nazis to create a coalition conservative government. And it involved all these guys negotiating. And one of the final negotiating points was like, "OK, we just give him the chance." He was like a co-chancellor. He was in the thing that was like him and von Papen, kind of. They were like, "Well, he's just in there nominally." It's very complicated.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But they did. The point is that they all thought that they could control him.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. And von Hindenburg at this point, he's in his 80s. He's barely there. And he's also very tired. And they're all telling him that the other parties are going to destroy the concept of the aristocracy and they're going to pull these things. And he's like, "I can't have that happen." And then he also was having problems with war outside of Germany. And they said, "What if we give you the stormtroopers as German soldiers?"
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, and so he was like, "All right."
--:-- Marcus Parks: No one said he was made Chancellor. His man Hermann Goering was immediately placed in charge of the police forces. Goering ordered about 35,000 SA and SS men to supplement the Nazi actions to come, and in short order, massive acts of violence and terror became the norm, where leftists were murdered by Nazis en masse.
--:-- And then, in the midst of the chaos, came the Reichstag fire. On February 27th, 1933, the German parliament, aka the Reichstag, was engulfed in flames, burning half the building down. The blame, conveniently, was placed on a Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe. Now, Hitler immediately declared that the fire had been a communist conspiracy, where leftists had been working in tandem to destroy all of Germany. In reality, though, Marinus van der Lubbe was a half-witted bricklayer who simply had a passion for arson and by all evidence and accounts acted alone.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: This is a big question I had that I actually didn't understand. I guess for a long time, we keep saying this idea that the Reichstag fire was this inside job, but I guess it really wasn't, right?
--:-- Marcus Parks: It wasn't. It was twisted. It was spun.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, it was taken advantage of. I just didn't know. It was like one of those where I was like, I always assumed in my head that the Reichstag fire was an inside job, but now it just seems like he did just happen to set fire to the Reichstag. And then he's like, "Great."
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, kind of. Sort of like, I mean, who knows? I don't know.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I didn't realize that.
--:-- Marcus Parks: I'm about to tell you.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I just didn't realize that Luba was flammable.
--:-- Ed Larson: You got to go fast enough.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, all Luba had to start this massive fire was his own shirt. But half the Reichstag was on fire within just two minutes. And expert witnesses testified that the fire was ignited by vast amounts of chemicals and gasoline.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Maybe the shirt was made out of polyester.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, what actually happened was that days before, some Nazis had overheard Luba in a bar bragging that he was going to set fire to several public buildings, and the Reichstag was next in line. So, seizing the opportunity, the Nazis set the Reichstag on fire themselves. Then they used Luba and by extension all communists as scapegoats. So it's both. Luba did start the fire, but the Nazis helped. And they made it bigger and far larger than it was going to be if Luba would have done it on his own.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, so they're kind of like the great white.
--:-- Ed Larson: I was just surprised that Nazis would lie.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, right. Now, the Reichstag fire was truly the beginning of the end for Germany. Hitler pressured the ailing President von Hindenburg into declaring a state of emergency to, quote unquote, "protect the people" because the communists were out of control. And the people let it happen because they believed Hitler's lies about the danger that leftists posed.
--:-- Again, Hitler was telling everybody that the leftists are coming for you. They're going to destroy us all. They're here to destroy the country. So you need to give me all of the power so I can protect you against the leftists. And the Nazis claimed that they had found documents, which those documents have never been seen. But the Nazis said that the communists were planning to burn down government buildings, museums and mansions. Women and children were going to be executed. And the communists were not going to stop until every wealthy German was dead.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, thank God they stopped those communists.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Using President von Hindenburg's powers, Hitler suspended all constitutional civil liberties the day after the Reichstag fire, which meant that anyone could be arrested without trial. This was very good news for Heinrich Himmler and the brand new prison he just built outside of his hometown of Munich. History knows this pit of despair as Dachau, the first concentration camp. And that's where we'll pick back up next week for part three of our series on Heinrich Himmler.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I got a question about the Dachau episode. Can I skip it?
--:-- Ed Larson: No, buddy. You gotta check it out, buddy.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. Fun thing is, is that it's not even gonna be the worst one. Not even close.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, dude. Cool.
--:-- Marcus Parks: That one was for, actually, Newark. What a fucking script, dude. Really fucking good. We're really... I think it's good history. And we're going to go.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I hope so. I'm also going to tell you this right now. We're going farther than that other series that went a certain distance about Heinrich Himmler. We're going farther and longer. We're going to be covering the entire life and crimes of Heinrich Himmler throughout the entire Reich. And we're going to be covering his untimely death. Whether you like it or not.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But this is important. And also, we're going to keep having fun with it. And just go out there and if you see anything like standing next to a Nazi flag or having a Nazi flag, throw up at them. Yeah. Patreon.com slash Last Podcast on the Left. Watch us do this live. Go and see us every Tuesday night, 6 p.m. Pacific for Last Stream on the Left live. You can join the chat. It's a lot of fun and we have a lot of good times with engaging with you.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And don't forget to check out all of our live shows. We got a shitload coming up and we about to announce 2026. And we're coming to some really cool, really fun places next year. And our Cleveland show is now in Akron.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: So go get your tickets to that. We're going to be at the Goodyear Theater. That's on November 29th. But don't forget, we're also going to be in Oakland on October 25th and in Portland December 12th and 13th. And then, you know, can we say some of the cities we're going to go to? Not quite yet. Not yet, not yet, not yet. But come to the Mateel Center. The community center me and Eddie are doing.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, yeah. October 24th.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yes, October 24th. Come to the Mateel Community Center. Eddie and I will be doing Side Stories live with our good friend Billy Wayne Davis. And then we're doing a Halloween costume contest.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, so come dressed up. And I know you guys. Not everyone can dress as weed, but if you do, we'll smoke you.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Also, October 12th, I'm going to be in Madison with my good buddy Logan Metz. It's going to be a lot of fun. And then on November 16th, I'm going to be in San Diego at Mic Drop Comedy with Amber Nelson, Ashley Book Roberts, and my wife, Julie Rosen.
--:-- Ed Larson: I just had a really good time with your wife yesterday.
--:-- Marcus Parks: What the fuck? What were you doing with my wife?
--:-- Ed Larson: I had a wonderful time with your wife yesterday.
--:-- Marcus Parks: The fuck are you talking about?
--:-- Ed Larson: You know, I just entertained her.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah? Yeah. Alright, maybe I'll have a nice time with your wife.
--:-- Ed Larson: Maybe you would. See, that sounds kind of nice.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Maybe I will! Maybe I will!
--:-- Ed Larson: I think you should!
--:-- Marcus Parks: No, we actually, we were filming Hoop-A-Goo Part 2.
--:-- Ed Larson: That's right.
--:-- Marcus Parks: It was a lot of fun. You got to be, but we're having fun. That was a blast. Hail Satan.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Hail Dean.
--:-- Ed Larson: Hail Natalie.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, I hail your wife.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Okay.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, you hear that?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Okay, I'll hail you.
--:-- Ed Larson: You talk to my... No, no, no.
--:-- Marcus Parks: You just got to hail Natalie.
--:-- Ed Larson: No, no, no. Take it back.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Nope.
--:-- Ed Larson: Take it back.
--:-- Marcus Parks: I can't.
--:-- Ed Larson: I can't.
--:-- Marcus Parks: None of this is going to end well.
--:-- Ed Larson: Love your wife.
