--:-- Marcus Parks: There's no place to escape to. This is the last podcast. On the left. Right on your glade.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's when the cannibalism started.
--:-- Ed Larson: Who's that?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Oh yeah! It's a serious topic. It's a serious day. Thank God you got two wacky guys here today. Some of the funniest things that you can find this side of Dachau. What a great comedy show. We're going to present for you today, Eddie. Give him a big one.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You know what I've been doing to get into the mood is I've been downloading pictures of Ernst Röhm and masturbating furiously. And I don't know if that's good or bad. I know Himmler would hate it, but Röhm would like it. And I just don't know where I'd stand if it's a good thing or a bad thing. It's like so open.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah. It comes all the way back around. You know what I mean? Like if you only allow yourself to be gay for Nazis, what kind of hate is that?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. It's like love and hate together. I've changed the word "coming" to "roaming" and my cell phone package hates it. It really hates it. Verizon's been real upset about it. But otherwise, I've been roaming days now.
--:-- Ed Larson: Actually, I love the idea of the concept of roaming is cutting your nose off and jerking off on a man's chest.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Please, it's roaming.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with the man who's trying to bring a little bit of levity. His name's Henry Zebrowski.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Hey everybody, I hope everybody likes super long lines for death.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And of course the man who's been roaming all over Los Angeles, it's Ed Larson.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah man, earlier I roamed and I let it come out. I let the roam come out and it just went on the table and I put a little mustache on it, it looked just like Himmler.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, cute.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, a little cummler.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Actually, I do like calling cum "Rome." I've got like a big, oh, I've got Rome all over my pants.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah. I roamed in my pants.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: But the worst is going to be... It's in my nose. I roamed in my nose somehow. You know every once in a while, though, with your wife, you're going to pull out and then one time you're going to be like "Rome" as you shoot it all over her and she's going to be like "I guess I made a bunch of Lebensborn all over you" and she's going to leave you.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, that's not going to happen. Not to me.
--:-- Marcus Parks: We're three episodes deep, maybe nine episodes of Himmler. So when it comes down to it, you better start getting with the program, buddy, and getting hard for Himmler.
--:-- Ed Larson: Honestly, Julie's last name is Rosen. She's very German and I'm a little disappointed in how little she cares about this. Her silence is deafening.
--:-- Marcus Parks: So when we last left Heinrich Himmler, the Nazis were finally in power. By manipulating conservative figures in the German government who thought they were manipulating Hitler, the Nazis managed to get good old Adolf appointed as Chancellor, which was the highest position of power in government right under President von Hindenburg. Within just months of being in power, the Nazis false flagged their way into a full authoritarian regime by starting the infamous Reichstag fire, in which Germany's parliament building was burned down and left-wing politicians and activists were used as the scapegoat.
--:-- In the weeks following the Reichstag fire, Nazi flags began appearing everywhere in the streets of Germany. You couldn't escape the swastika. It was an overbearing presence. It's sort of like how you feel when you go to a conservative town and there's MAGA shit everywhere. It's designed to make you feel hopeless and outnumbered. But one by one, Germany's most powerful institutions surrendered to Hitler and his goons because the alternative was to face the violence being perpetrated by either the SA under Ernst Röhm or the SS under Heinrich Himmler.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And now we see what it means to be inside of a fascist fantasy land, because what has to happen within fascism, especially within Nazi Germany, is that everybody has to accept the reality they're in, because if not, they get murdered.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, they get murdered or you just can't deal with it.
--:-- Marcus Parks: There's a lot of debate as to how fully the German people accepted Nazism into their lives. But that's the thing about a fascist government. The more you're exposed to these totalitarian ideas, the more you break down and accept it. Because you're trapped within it.
--:-- Ed Larson: You're in it. No way out.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: When you talk about the Nazi flag, it was good marketing.
--:-- Ed Larson: It is. It's a good symbol. I hate to compliment them, but they knew what they were doing. I learned about this today. I didn't realize there was one that was just red, white, and black with stripes like the actual Germany flag, and then they changed it to the swastika flag in '35 because it tested better. It was off-center a little bit too, which tripped me out. It wasn't perfectly centered, the actual swastika on the flag.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: So you're not there yet because you don't know enough about World War II until when you close your eyes you just see two swastikas.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Or like when a woman takes off her shirt, instead of breasts...
--:-- Ed Larson: Every time I go, "You get out! You get out, you villain! You get out!"
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: They make wonderful booby tassels. I've seen a couple of those films.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now much of the worst violence began with who else but the Jews. In April of 1933, just a month or two after the Nazis seized total power, Hitler declared a nationwide boycott on all Jewish-owned shops. Soon after, tens of thousands of Jews were robbed, beaten, or murdered by Röhm's SA and Himmler's SS. Laws were passed that banned Jews from public service, university positions, and various other professions.
--:-- But the point we're going to come back to again and again in this series is that the Jews weren't even close to the only targets in Nazi Germany and beyond when it came to detention, harassment, and mass murder. After the Reichstag fire was blamed on a non-existent cabal of communists, which is exactly what our government is doing today with the non-existent Antifa.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's not a group. It's a concept.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: But they've got the girlfriend.
--:-- Ed Larson: I know. Tell me about it.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And I see Greta Thunberg every day defying me with her bangs. Those bangs are a wall of hate.
--:-- Marcus Parks: After the blame was placed on this non-existent cabal of communists, left-wing political party leaders in Germany stepped down or they were arrested along with labor leaders. This destroyed the unions. But those on the right wing, even those who weren't Nazis, were largely fine with the crackdown. Conservatives in big business and finance, the aristocracy, and the landlords were given free rein to do whatever they wanted. This came at a great human cost.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: What do you mean?
--:-- Ed Larson: Landlords? Wait a second. Landlords don't do anything ever wrong.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, I can't.
--:-- Ed Larson: Why do we... Any job that has the word "lord."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Hey, except when I applied to be Goon Lord for my local county. It's actually getting nice. I'm second in line to be Goon Lord of LA County.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, congratulations. That's great.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: The key is to roam, but never arrive.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Any autonomy that people may have had to live their lives the way they wanted to, as they did in Weimar Germany before the Third Reich, was swiftly squashed by the Nazis. The people on the right lost freedoms along with everyone else. Even if they didn't care about that, even if they were like, "If you don't do anything wrong, you don't have anything to hide," those people paid dire consequences later on when Germany was utterly destroyed because of the actions of the Nazis.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's going to come back to bite you in the ass one way or another. Just know that the check's in the mail.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I think mostly it's because of how little respect they had for V's. Like, why are they... I know W looks like two V's, but we don't need to do that shit. I learned that the hard way when I was in Greenpoint one time. I went to a super Polish bodega and the man didn't want to serve me. Then he saw my license and he was like, "Zabrowski?" and he hit me. I was like, "Sir, I do not have the father's tongue," and he hit me like I was a despicable rat.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, that's how they do. They start speaking Polish to you and when you can't answer, they hate it. They get real angry. When I was in Greenpoint for many years, I was often confused for Polish. Anytime someone would speak to me in Polish and I'd say, "Sorry, not Polish," I always got a dirty look and they'd walk away. It was always, "Bats!"
--:-- Marcus Parks: But before World War II even started, the Nazis worked hard and fast on establishing an atmosphere in which the average German had to live their life in a way that was largely prescribed and dreamed up by Heinrich Himmler and his ilk. After the Nazi party took over Germany, Himmler's insane ideas about racial hierarchies and social mores were seen by the average German as more and more reasonable, even necessary, to Germany's continued existence. In other words, as the country became fully Nazified, Heinrich Himmler's entirely unreasonable and strict rules for proper living became not only normal, but essential if you wanted to survive the Third Reich.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's kind of like a chicken and the egg. The rules beget the lifestyle, and then now you have the rules set in place, and they have the power. Once they have the power, those rules become a giant whacking stick.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, the most effective action the Nazis took when it came to seizing and holding power within Germany was their takeover of the police. The power to arrest German citizens was given to Ernst Röhm's SA and Heinrich Himmler's SS. Since neither group was actually a part of the government itself, they could act independently and extrajudicially. They could arrest or even kill anyone that could be a possible threat to Nazi rule. This produced a wide net, and as a result, Nazi detention in 1933 was unpredictable and confusing. Just the suspicion of an illegal act was enough to detain someone, and mass arrests were used to destroy any possibility of organizing a counteraction.
--:-- Nazi propaganda maintained that the entire process was legal and well organized. In reality, the Nazis were basically kidnapping people with only the slightest veneer of bureaucracy, doing it with just enough officialdom where people who were only half paying attention might say, "Sure, sounds okay."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's like how today people will say, "Well, ISIS is just arresting criminals, right?" Because they're not paying enough attention to see the stories of the incredible amount of innocent people who are being detained and disappeared along with the criminals. All these people who are half paying attention see is photos of scary looking dudes, which is good enough for them. You fucking piece of shit. Do you understand what elote and tamales have done to the waistlines of the United States? Of the good American citizens? And those people out there cutting into the money of our wonderful government, selling that tamale outside of the U.S. taxation system? I say string them up.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, I for one support our ISIS group. I'm just going to screw up.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And really, this is how the Nazis kept getting away with it and how the German people allowed all this to happen. The frenzy of arrests and street violence after the Reichstag fire had badly frightened millions of middle-class German voters. But instead of believing their own eyes as to what the Nazis were doing to their friends and neighbors, Germans listened to what Hitler was saying about how the Bolsheviks would take over and kill them all if the Germans didn't vote for the Nazis again. When the next election came in May of 1933, the people listened to Hitler and their own fears instead of trusting what they saw with their own eyes. The Nazis' share of power only increased.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Do you think it's also a show of power that helps them believe the problem is big and ever-present?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yes, of course. When you have all this chaos going on, when that fear hits you, you don't want to think something bad is happening. You want to think something good is happening.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, the government's got to be busy doing something good. This has to be good. That person can't be innocent. I elected him. I said yes to this, so therefore this action that's going on must be good. It has to be good because that's how they feel better about themselves. People have a very hard time changing their minds when they've fucked up.
--:-- Marcus Parks: We talk about sunk cost fallacy when it comes to cults. We talk about this on those extreme ends. What people sometimes don't understand is that a lot of these people within Germany weren't asking for this. But when the cult builds up around you, you might want to figure out how to get out. If you start to see the bricks building around you, it's time to start bugging out.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah. It's time to get out of there.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Speaking of democracy, the Nazis soon began arresting democratically elected communist members of the Reichstag and over 4,000 left-wing officials. Not just communists, but social democrats and liberals. They were arrested without evidence as enemies of the state, even though it was the Nazis causing 95% of the trouble. Truckloads of Röhm's stormtroopers openly roared through the streets of Germany, where they broke into homes and rounded up not just Jewish leaders, but communists, socialists, and very importantly, journalists who had been critical of the Nazi regime. The German people largely accepted it because many were overcome by the fear that a non-existent left-wing conspiracy was lurking just outside their door, waiting for the right moment to destroy them all.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's the same shit. And they're all fucking poor. They're all just so desperate and sad and they don't see where their next meal's coming from, so they're like, "If you're doing anything, I'm with you." And if you're dressing me in Hugo Boss, I'm there. I absolutely love it. I also want to tell the audience, I pitched to Marcus before this, adding a running joke to this episode that we would kind of come back to for some humor.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Back and forth. But he said this isn't even the bad episode.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I just want you to know that. I'm going to save that for when we get to the quote unquote bad episode. This isn't even close to the worst one we're going to get to in this series.
--:-- Ed Larson: Cool. Wait! Make sure you let me know ahead of time so I can bring my armband.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's for his blood pressure.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But with the Nazis arresting so many people, the prisons soon ran out of room. They briefly held the overflow of political prisoners in SA barracks around the country, but the Nazis finally realized a better solution was needed. That solution was the concentration camps. And the person Hitler chose to build and run this vast network of facilities was his number one fussy boy, the one who had the patience and dedication to make it all work: Heinrich Luitpold Himmler.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, snot-wurst himself. Honestly, it's good he kept him busy.
--:-- Marcus Parks: No, it's not good that he kept him busy. It made the Holocaust.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, you're right. He was pretty busy. I take it back.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, contrarians like to say that the Nazis weren't any more brutal in their practices than their contemporary oppressors in Europe.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You know, Marcus, the Nazis weren't more brutal than the practices of their contemporary oppressors in Europe? You know what I was really thinking when I read this script? What the contrarians might say. They actually say that a lot of the other people are worse, or just as bad.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's what contrarians might say. Yeah, Stalin. Chairman Mao. He did all that kind of stuff. Mao killed more people.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Mussolini was just as bad.
--:-- Ed Larson: And he was a carb whore.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, because all the pasta, because he's Italian, because you're racist.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, I am. Against them.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But the way I see it, what puts the Nazis above everyone else really is Heinrich Himmler and everything that he brought to the table.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: [In a mocking voice] Thank you. I can hear him somewhere. Somewhere he's smiling, knowing that I made one man happy.
--:-- Marcus Parks: It's not making me happy. I'm just saying it's what made the Nazis worse.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: [In a mocking voice] He loves the attention. Does it matter if it's good or bad? I just like to be seen. How many parts is my series? That's fresh, boy. That's amazing. What an honor. No one ever chose me to be the most evil. It was always Hitler this, Göring that.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Under Himmler's meticulous guidance and administration, the Nazis created, as one writer put it, "the most complete record of torture, destruction, and despair that has ever been compiled in human history." That same writer wrote that the Nazis utilized Himmler's "punitive administration of sadism." I love that quote.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I do.
--:-- Marcus Parks: No other regime in history achieved such horrors with as much cold and deliberate precision as the Nazis. The big thing is that the Nazis made their anti-Semitism, the murder and extermination, an actual function of the state itself. An official function of the state itself. A stated goal of the state itself.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Even a lot of other dictators had this sort of style to pretend or disguise that they were doing one thing, but then they would do another. They would play to this idea of, "I still want to keep my power here. There's a beloved contingent I want to keep." But the Nazis were unique in that level of detail they allowed themselves. All the rest of them knew, to be honest, "We don't need all this evidence. We could kill them more indiscriminately." The Nazis really decided to do it with real panache.
--:-- Ed Larson: Didn't Hitler's inner circle have a meeting where they were like, "All right, how Jewish does someone have to be for us to kill them?"
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Always.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, concerts. That was a meeting. That was a moving needle. Because they were like, "Oh, half isn't enough." I think it was like three grandparents was what they settled on or something.
--:-- Marcus Parks: They had many, many discussions about this. It's damn near the only thing they talked about.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, they weren't talking about feeding people. They weren't talking about the economy and they weren't talking about rebuilding. The only goal was to kill as many Jewish people and Jewish-aligned people as possible.
--:-- Marcus Parks: The reason why the Nazis specifically had this, and the reason why Nazism doesn't work without the idea that individual morality does not matter, is because you're talking about racial morality. You're talking about doing this for the good of the race, for the good of humanity. That's the only thing that matters. Individuals don't matter at all. When you look at everything from that perspective, you're going to do some horrible shit.
--:-- Furthermore, the Nazis looked at everything from the perspective of the law of nature. Everything was about nature. The Nazis not only saw other people as animals, they saw themselves as animals. Everything was animalistic and survival of the fittest, a complete misunderstanding of it. But still, it was survival of the fittest. If you see yourself as an animal and everybody as an animal and everything is nature, you are going to do some horrible shit. The problem is that monkeys may kill each other, but monkeys are not as clever as man. They really don't have the ability to make the engines of death and destruction that we can make.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I would love to see the connections to stuff like Schopenhauer and all those other really dour racist philosophers that were around in Germany in the late 1800s. I was reading Thomas Ligotti's *The Conspiracy Against the Human Race* and he breaks down all of these philosophers. His idea is that consciousness is a burden placed upon those that are born. Human consciousness was a tragic misstep in human evolution. He's a horror writer and he decided to write a horror version of a philosophy book. It's great. But there's a lot of German thought in the 1800s that involves this long stretch of life is a purposeless clock, we are meat machines, this idea that we are self-conscious nothings in a chaos eating itself. I wonder if any of that trickled into Nazism at all.
--:-- Marcus Parks: I would say from my understanding of Nazism, Nazism would be a reaction to that sort of thing. Because Nazism is about doing something about it. It's about purpose. It's about acting. Even Stalin sometimes would go, "Okay, we can let the status quo go for a little bit. We can relax for a bit." But Hitler and Himmler and all of his people, no. It was always go, go, go. We always have to be doing something. We always have to be accomplishing something. There's always got to be another goal, another thing to do. That manic energy powered the Third Reich, empowered the Holocaust, empowered 30 million people dead.
--:-- Now, Adolf Hitler chose Himmler for the concentration camps not only because he was well organized, but also because Hitler believed that Himmler worshipped him. Himmler, however, was playing his own game. He quite possibly may have done some pretty nefarious shit to even Hitler behind the Führer's back when the Nazis were coming up.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's my Nazi. That's how you're the worst Nazi, that you even fuck over Hitler.
--:-- Marcus Parks: In the early 1930s, Hitler had a girlfriend by the name of Geli Raubal.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, what if she could have just kissed him to smiles? She didn't. Because he... Hitler. Oh wow, weird.
--:-- Marcus Parks: A girlfriend is all well and good, but the problem was not just that Geli Raubal was 20 years younger than Adolf Hitler.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, because who's Hitler? Leonardo DiCaprio?
--:-- Marcus Parks: The big problem was that Geli was Hitler's niece.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Is Hitler some kind of Leonardo DiCaprio?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, technically she was his half-niece.
--:-- Ed Larson: Honestly, yeah, fuck her then. Yeah, absolutely, fuck her.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I always check. You guys gotta make sure. It's a dipping stick that you stick in her pussy and it comes out, and if it hits the two marks, you can fuck her.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, great.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Glad you weighed in on that one.
--:-- Ed Larson: So are you agreeing with it?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Let's start a new podcast that I think would be great for a 42-year-old man to start called *You Can Fuck Her*.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, yeah. Isn't that like what Tom Segura and Bert Kreischer are doing right now? Are they hiring a girl? They're becoming a pimp to OnlyFans girls.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: What I'm saying is we don't want to do that.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I'm pitching that ironically to you.
--:-- Ed Larson: No, but it's already a show. You're making a lot of money on it.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Boy, that's sad, huh?
--:-- Ed Larson: God fucking damn it.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Okay. Kreischer!
--:-- Marcus Parks: As far as Hitler as a boyfriend went, he was what you'd call a bit possessive. As the Nazis gained more power, Geli effectively became Hitler's prisoner. Rather than spend a life as Hitler's plaything, Geli died by suicide in 1931.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Smartest thing she's ever done.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Or at least, that's the historically accepted story. Rumors exist, without direct evidence, mind you, that Heinrich Himmler actually ordered Geli's death behind Hitler's back to eliminate a possibly embarrassing situation that could have kept Hitler out of power and completely fucked up Himmler's personal goals.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Gossip. I really, honestly, I find it really irresponsible that you would spread gossip like this. I sit without evidence. This is called misinformation.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I think that you should be deplatformed.
--:-- Marcus Parks: No, no. If you're open with how it's just a rumor, which I was, and I wouldn't entertain this rumor if it involved anyone else in the Nazi party. But if any of those fucks had the power to make this happen, and more importantly, keep it a secret from Hitler, it would have been Heinrich Himmler.
--:-- Ed Larson: They're absolutely going to kill his super sad niece that he's having sex with. To be honest, they're going to kill her. Because guess what? That is a liability. A massive liability.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: But didn't everyone hate Himmler? Like, how was he able to convince people to do this and keep it a secret?
--:-- Marcus Parks: They were afraid of Himmler.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, the blackmail.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And it wasn't to say that people hate.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, see, that's the thing. Regular people hated Himmler. Like, normal people who were just trying to live their lives, they didn't like Himmler. Nazis, they liked what Himmler had to say. They liked what he could accomplish. They liked what he was capable of. They liked his ideas. But you also think that one thing I seem to get more and more I research about Himmler, the reason why he was so smart is that he knew to not make his presence too overwhelming.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And he knew when to go in and out. And to be honest, it seemed like a lot of what Himmler did was kind of off on his own. And he'd come back in and they wouldn't even know what he was necessarily up to. And then he'd fill everybody in and they would do stuff like that. So Himmler was in the office. Like, Goring was the personality hire. Goebbels is the funny one. The three of them are all hanging out, playing grab ass all day, doing all this shit, hanging out with Nazis. Himmler doesn't hang like that.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, but he's in the inner circle, but he leaves a lot. He's too cool for it.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, yeah. He's definitely in the, he's, he's, he is the big, one of the big three. Like the big three is Goebbels, Himmler, and Goring.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, rumors around having his girlfriend murdered notwithstanding, Hitler ultimately chose Himmler to organize and run the concentration camps. But Himmler was not the sole creator. Hermann Goring, one of the big three. He had first established the first concentration camps in the German state of Prussia. When Goring was heading the German secret police, a.k.a. the Gestapo.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I got into a little bit of a Goring hole the other day and I didn't realize it was all the stuff.
--:-- Marcus Parks: That's a big hole to dig into.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, yeah. So he's another one that was probably gay. That's one of those things that they circle around.
--:-- Marcus Parks: He was definitely fat.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, yeah. But he was one of those where they said that because the thing with Goring was with all the makeup. He would cover himself in very obvious makeup. He would be very fabulous everywhere he went. And he was always in fantastic clothes, and he'd have long, panting parties with his men.
--:-- Marcus Parks: He was. Now, there was one quote from one of Mussolini's men when the Nazis went to go visit the Italian fascists, and he said...
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: He was. He was.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, there was one quote from one of Mussolini's men when the Nazis went to go visit the Italian fascists. And he said, "What is this like? Dakota did a gording a war. He wear a coat like a prostitute. He is seeming like a prostitute. That is the type of coat he wear."
--:-- Ed Larson: Are you saying Mussolini tears these guys to shreds?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Oh, over and over again. And it's all about their fashion, too.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, it's very Italian.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's just so funny because he's such a clown. And all these terrifying Nazis come to meet him, and he's just being like, "You look like shit."
--:-- Ed Larson: It's so funny.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: "You fly all the way to Italy, you can't even comb your hair? Hey, look at you, eh? Put on a little cologne. What the heck can you put on? A little cologne? That outfit is gory."
--:-- Marcus Parks: Going off of Goring's example, Himmler established his own concentration camp, completely under his control. "I'll make my own concentration camp, so I'll be in charge of all the pain."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And we're going to think so hard. Have you ever seen the book? There is actually a really good book called Concentration Camp. It's about psychic children put into it. They have to do stuff for the government.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Is that Magneto's story?
--:-- Marcus Parks: No. Well, this concentration camp was established just outside of Himmler's hometown of Munich. And it was the first camp run solely by the SS. This most enduring of Nazi concentration camps was very soon known to the German people as Dachau.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's the way you bring it up. It sounds like it's the Simpsons.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, this most enduring character, Mo Sislak, was one of the most loved and enduring. It's important to establish right up top that when the German people claimed that they didn't know anything about the concentration camps or that they didn't know how bad the camps really were, they were trying to feed the world a very large load of revisionist horseshit.
--:-- Marcus Parks: The lie that they didn't know came about mostly because of an autobiography published in the 1970s by Hitler's architect and Hitler's best friend, Albert Speer.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: [as Speer] "You are my best friend. I can just sit here and talk to you about big, ugly blocks of stone for hours. But also, you know what I like? Is that also sometimes we can just sit in the comfortable silence of the concentration camp."
--:-- Ed Larson: That true?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: [as Speer] "Are you serious right now? Although it not really silent because of all the screaming. I don even hear it. I fall asleep to it."
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, Albert Speer claimed in his autobiography that he'd known nothing about what was going on in the camps.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: [as Speer] "I know nothing!"
--:-- Marcus Parks: And this is after he had spent 20 years in prison after the Nuremberg trials.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: [as Speer] "Let me just throw my brain or not. I've just done so much that they don't know. Are you talking about the time I worked on that Dave Woundbusters? Is that what you mean, the Dave Woundbusters?"
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, his claim that he knew nothing about the concentration camps was a demonstrable lie because Albert Speer helped design some of the camps as an architect. He nailed up the signs. But this book, written decades after the war, it gave the German people an out. They can say, "Well, if Hitler's closest advisor knew nothing, how could I know? How could I, as an average German, know more than Albert Speer?" And so, for many surviving Germans, the camps basically became memory holes. You could say, "I didn't know anything," even though you very much did.
--:-- Ed Larson: Do you think they might have known not everything?
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, they didn't know every single detail, of course. But they knew that they were...
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Were they allowed to visit the camps?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: The citizens?
--:-- Ed Larson: Well, then also started to understand where they started to put the camps.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah.
--:-- Ed Larson: Right? Because eventually it began to be outsourced out, right?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah. It was moving farther and farther away from Germany in order to hide it. Eventually. Yes. But Dachau was 12 miles outside of Munich.
--:-- Ed Larson: No, no. It was there. It was not that far.
--:-- Marcus Parks: No, you can literally...
--:-- Ed Larson: You can walk there.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's a sad walk.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: They could put something in there, like a water fountain or a couple of hot wings places, but they don't.
--:-- Marcus Parks: In reality, the existence of the camps was spoken of in newspapers as early as May of 1933, just months after the Reichstag fire, in the context that people were being held in Dachau under so-called protective custody. In other words, see, it wasn't hidden at all by the Third Reich that leftists and Jewish leaders were being sent to Dachau. In fact, Dachau was such a known quantity in Germany that people had a cautionary verse about it, almost a prayer. It went like this: "Please, oh Lord, make me dumb so I won't to Dachau come."
--:-- Ed Larson: Jesus Christ.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, it something people would say. So yeah, you have known something. But this again, you do have an explanation. You do know kind of why, which is that people were getting mass arrested and they had to figure out, quote unquote, "this was the solution of where we put all these people we're arresting."
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And at first they weren't... they were just putting them there. They weren't like killing them, right?
--:-- Ed Larson: Not in the way, not weren't exterminating them. They would die like malnourished and they would die, like get beaten to death by a prison guard. But it wasn't like a line them up and shoot them, put them in the gas chamber.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Some guys were getting shot, but shot again.
--:-- Marcus Parks: It was before they got real organized.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, we're going to get to that here in a bit.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But yeah, most of that started after the war.
--:-- Ed Larson: Okay. Yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, Dachau was established soon after Hitler became chancellor in 1933. But by the time Hitler put a bullet in his own brain in 1945, 27 concentration camps and 1,100 satellite camps had been created.
--:-- Ed Larson: Wow, that's the worst 27 club of them all.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Satellite. That's what that song's about, right? It's about the ones, you know, around Birkenau. It's not Birkenau.
--:-- Marcus Parks: These camps were utilized for everything from slave labor to simple extermination. The camps did, however, open and close according to need. But whether by necessity or some strange sense of twisted sentimentality, the only camp that was open and functioning for the entirety of the Third Reich was Dachau. Now, the Third Reich was not flush with cash. People were fighting in streets over butter for fuck's sake. So the first concentration camps utilized infrastructure that was already built. Workhouses, vacant hotels, sports grounds, castles, and even restaurants were used to imprison the enemies of the Third Reich. Likewise, Nazi torture dens also appeared all over Germany, to the point where no village or even city quarter was not home to at least one private room where the Nazis could quickly torment and abuse their enemies without having to travel too far.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I just wish I could get one. You know what I mean? It would be fun to do to just randomly attack comedians in various cities just for the sake of just like keeping them on their toes.
--:-- Ed Larson: Put them in restaurants?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. As they're hiding them?
--:-- Ed Larson: Ooh, delicious, and you have a little back room.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's what we should do with all the closed-down Hooters.
--:-- Ed Larson: That's a great idea!
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's exclusively to torture and kidnap local open mic comedians?
--:-- Ed Larson: The green room. Which are also about Nazis. Yes. Wow. Weird.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, it probably wasn't on purpose, but the utilization of existing structures as concentration camps actually helped the German people to accept their existence as a reasonable solution to their imagined problems. This was especially true of the workhouses, because Germany already had a large number of them before the Third Reich due to their cultural tradition of performing manual labor as both punishment and rehabilitation. Where do you think "Arbeit macht frei" comes from?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I thought it was a commercial jingle.
--:-- Marcus Parks: "Arbeit macht frei."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: "Arbeit macht frei, with WeWork."
--:-- Marcus Parks: See, many Germans believed that a strict work ethic could cure so-called deviants of their degenerate instincts. And even social welfare in Germany prior to the Third Reich was based on the concept of performing hard work in exchange for social services. So for the German people, the concentration camps, as they were in the beginning, they were more or less an extension of what they were already doing as a country. Basically, the average German could look at a concentration camp and say, "I suppose it's fine. Like it'll be good for them in the long run. And who cares as long as I can get a job and stop feeling like a loser."
--:-- Ed Larson: Would you also say that they did kind of create jobs in the constructions of these things, too?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, they were already, most of them were already built. It wasn't what they created jobs with. Actually, that's what I'm about to get to right now.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, just like it's been across humanity, German citizens believed that the oppression of other people would somehow benefit them economically. Trickle down slave labor, as it were. And as it was, some people did benefit. Each concentration camp basically became a town unto itself with its own tailors, blacksmiths, shoemakers and bakers. And some farmers even used the excrement of prisoners as free fertilizer.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: God, can you imagine lining up with a smile for your monthly allotted share of prisoner feces?
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, God, human shit potatoes.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I will say.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yes, no wonder they were so angry.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You know those things, right? Where they say, like, you know, you could get to that point where a bad smell, they go like, "Smells like money."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You know, like that thing where it's...
--:-- Marcus Parks: But in the end, as it always goes, the only people who really made massive profits on the concentration camps were the big corporations, like the chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate IG Farben, who double dipped on the concentration camps in the worst way possible.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Bayer!
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah. IG Farben used slave labor from concentration camps at their factories, but they also manufactured and distributed the infamous chemical Zyklon B, which was used to kill over a million concentration camp prisoners once the final solution became an integral part of the concentration camp system in the early 40s. It is important to note, however, that the majority of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust were not murdered in concentration camps, as it's often assumed. Where and how they were killed will be covered extensively in a later episode.
--:-- Ed Larson: That would be the aforementioned worst one.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: How exciting!
--:-- Ed Larson: Yay! What a tease!
--:-- Marcus Parks: But for this episode, we must remember that the concentration camps targeted a wide variety of people, including leftists, gay men, trans people, Roma, and basically anyone who might have given the Nazis a hard time.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You know what I learned is it was weird is the Nazis, of course, they hated gay men, but not because they were necessarily homophobic. It was because you shouldn't be having sex with other men. You should be having sex with a woman. To make a baby. So you can make a baby. But they also had really had no... they actually came out and said they had no problem with lesbians because they said that lesbians were merely... go. And it's fucked up how they put it. But they said that they were... I can't remember the exact term they use, but they said they were not enough men in Germany for all the women because of World War One. And so these women like some sort of like they were needing to go.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, they were needing comfort.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: So they were turning to each other. But of course, the plan was like once we do have enough men in Germany, then, yeah, we're going to start killing the lesbians, too. But until then, let's just kill the gay guys. I think they killed somewhere. It was 15,000 or 15,000 gay men were murdered. Most of them were castrated chemically or physically. And then you look at somebody like Goering or Rome.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: They're all part of the actual function of the Nazi government that were largely living out loud gay. And I think that why that works is because there's something about it's different because he's a chosen one.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: There's something that's like a different one where it's like that's about subjugating other men.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, he's contributing otherwise.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yes. Like he doing his part.
--:-- Ed Larson: Now, weren't other countries in Europe also like chemically castrating gay people during this time?
--:-- Marcus Parks: I don't know about that necessarily. I do know that other countries in Europe at this time were also incredibly anti-Semitic.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I mean, I was getting, I think they get chemically, like, blown up.
--:-- Ed Larson: I was, because I was a member of the Imitation Game. I remember they chemically castrated that guy.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, yeah, that was he, because I think, but also, I think that was in the UK, yeah.
--:-- Ed Larson: That was in the UK, yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Ed Larson: That's why I brought it up.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Oh, yeah. I mean, it's not, yeah, it's not, it's frowned upon, Eddie.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, it was going real bad for gay men during this time period.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, really, really badly. Now, under Heinrich Himmler's exacting guidance, the concentration camp system of the Third Reich had its own organization, rules, staff, and even its own acronym for easy reference in Nazi paperwork. In official documents, camps were referred to as KLs, from the German Konzentrationslager.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, you're going to want to abbreviate that.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, it's a long one.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But since there was so much paperwork, we're able to see how the concentration camps constantly evolved and overlapped, as opposed to how it's normally thought of, that concentration camps were just there to kill Jews. See, in the early to mid-30s, where we're at now in this story, concentration camps were more used as deterrent threats, reformatories, slave labor centers, and straight-up torture chambers. It was only towards the end that they became used more for human experimentation and genocide. It is necessary, however, to discuss the evolution, because the elements that were needed to get the camps to their endgame were present from the very beginning when Heinrich Himmler was building and establishing Dachau. Now, when Heinrich Himmler was deciding who should staff Dachau, he figured that it would be best to use not just the SS, but SS officers who volunteered for the position, or at least SS officers who understood that it would be in their best interest to volunteer. As far as who those volunteers were, the average age of a Nazi concentration camp trooper was 23.
--:-- Ed Larson: I mean, think about that.
--:-- Marcus Parks: I mean, that's how...
--:-- Ed Larson: It's the only ones you could get, I imagine.
--:-- Marcus Parks: I mean, they're more or less the age of a recent college graduate.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And you're stupid at that age. No offense to our listeners that are 23, but you're going to get smarter. You just don't understand yet what you might be involved in and what that all is and what you're doing.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I did some really stupid, fucked up shit at that age.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But still, you know, it's still hard to...
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's hard to forgive a Nazi.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, I mean, you weren't ever a concentration camp guard.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, I know.
--:-- Ed Larson: You sold drugs.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yes, for sure.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yes, but I just saying even if you become a better person at that age you really make some bad decisions.
--:-- Marcus Parks: You do.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I will say, though, Eddie, what about the time you and I burnt Grenada?
--:-- Ed Larson: Well, that was one of our hardest, most immature.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Burnt Grenada?
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, me and Eddie did a two-person assault against this town in Spain called Grenada.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: We burnt it down. We attacked all the women. We killed the children and we arrested all the men.
--:-- Ed Larson: Hold on.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I went to the island.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, we were like, but we were 23.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, yeah, I get it. I get it.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Dying. Now, most of these guys were middle class and most had not fought in World War I due to their age. They had, however, been radicalized by years of right-wing propaganda that had made them terrified of communists and furious towards Jews for supposedly losing World War I and making their lives miserable. That's the thing I want to correct, is for you guys to understand that a lot of these Nazis didn't serve in World War I. Many of them did not.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I think a lot of these, I think a lot of people assume that the Nazis were these war-destroyed, World War I disaffected.
--:-- Marcus Parks: That's what I thought legitimately when I was first getting into this. That there would be a lot of World War I disaffected German soldiers that would want to be a part of this. But we realize now, that was like 25 years between the two.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, they'd be in their 50s.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And so everyone that said, it's like, they weren't World War I officers. These were angry children.
--:-- Ed Larson: Well, not just that, but what the World War I officers did is they came back. Like, Germany was one of the very few countries that looked upon World War I with a sort of romance.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yes, and they thought they wanted to do it all over again.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, they looked at it, and the younger kids are like, "If only I could get there. If only I could do that." Where in every other in France and England and America, like every World War One veterans. "I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to, I don't want to talk about it. Please don't let's just let never talk about it again. Let's please never mentioned and let us do every single thing we possibly can. I don't care what to make sure that we never have to do that ever again."
--:-- Marcus Parks: We've done very little touchings on World War One. World War One was bad.
--:-- Marcus Parks: World War One was bad dude.
--:-- Ed Larson: If you get, it was like, it was rough.
--:-- Marcus Parks: I saw all those fake faces in Edinburgh.
--:-- Marcus Parks: I saw all those of the search, all the things that they had to do to replace everybody's cheekbones, put a piece of porcelain in your face, and you go, "I just want to say so nice that I had an opportunity to be a part of the government."
--:-- Ed Larson: You mean like it was bad. It was so incredibly bad. And that was part of how the Germans got as powerful as they did. And part of why they were able to get to the point where they could invade Czechoslovakia. Because every other country in Europe was saying like, "We've got to do everything, anything. I don't care what, we're not going to war again." And Germany's like, "We're going to war again. We're doing it. We're going. Like, try and stop us."
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now back to the SS.
--:-- Marcus Parks: While one had to be of a certain temperament to even think about joining, new members still had to undergo a full regimen of brainwashing once they signed up, which included weekly exams on Mein Kampf and quizzes on the works of Heinrich Himmler's favorite occult and right-wing authors.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, we could get deep into that.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, hell yeah.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's kind of like what you make me do.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I'm the Himmler of this podcast. I'm keeping the lore straight.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Oh yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I love that. I'm watching 31 horror movies and nothing but Holocaust footage.
--:-- Ed Larson: The water's fine.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: All I know is I got sad watching the Nazis. And that was one of my struggles.
--:-- Marcus Parks: I never requested you to watch any Holocaust footage.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Thank you.
--:-- Marcus Parks: You didn't have to.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I appreciate it.
--:-- Ed Larson: I've just been sending it to him on TikTok. That's my algorithm right now. I'm on Costalk right now.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Nice.
--:-- Ed Larson: You ever found yourself on hashtag Kostok?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I've not. I've never been on Kostok.
--:-- Ed Larson: It sounds bleak.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It is.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, out of his new SS recruits, Himmler began singling out individuals who could look upon Jews and communists with no humanity whatsoever. And these were the guys recruited to run and guard the concentration camps. These units came to be known as Der Totenkopf, or as they're better known, the Death's Head. Now, with the Death's Head, Himmler upped the uniform game from the simple brown shirt and black pants uniform of your average SS member. The Death's Head units had the full black uniforms, the classic SS look, the classic Nazi look. But the piece de resistance was the skull and crossbone badges that the Death's Head proudly and openly wore on their caps. Now, yeah, we all think about that Mitchell and Webb sketch here. "Are we the baddies?" and all that. But the German military had been using the Totenkopf as far back as the year 1740. The skull and crossbones were revived by the German army in World War I, and its use was continued by various right-wing paramilitary groups after the war during their battle against the Weimar Republic. In other words, the skull and crossbones were something that the Germans were very much used to. Now, out of the early recruits at Dachau, two stars of the SS!
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, wow!
--:-- Marcus Parks: You're joining us on the right, government! The stars of the SS! They rose to the top of the Death's Head pile. These two men were Adolf Eichmann, who eventually managed the deportation of Jews to extermination camps, and Rudolf Huss, who you may remember from Zone of Interest as the top man at Auschwitz.
--:-- Ed Larson: Very nervous man.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Mm-hmm. These two men were amongst many SS officers who went to great lengths to export what was called the Dachauer Geist, or the Dachau Spirit.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, wow!
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's like, oh, is that like one of the knights? Is that a theme knight in Dachau? Spirit night.
--:-- Ed Larson: Give me that old Dachau spirit.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: We're going to fight. We're going to push every Jew into a trench. We're going to fight. We're going to push.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, no, they really did. They worked to export this to concentration camps all over Europe. Dachau was the model for every camp to come. And the man who set the tone for the whole thing was Heinrich Himmler.
--:-- Ed Larson: They would seriously ask, like, "This new place, this Birkenau, does it have Dachau Geist?"
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's got a lot. You better believe it, mein Franken.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: So Himmler did have hoes in different area codes.
--:-- Marcus Parks: He did. Before the war, the present population of Dachau would vary depending on which community was being most villainized by the Nazis at that time. The one that was most useful as far as who could be blamed for Germany's problems. This is very much like how our current administration switches between groups like MS-13, the non-existent Antifa, and trans people as their boogeymen.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Hold on. My Antifa badge isn't real?
--:-- Marcus Parks: No, buddy.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: What are you talking about? I paid $30 for my Antifa badge.
--:-- Marcus Parks: You got conned.
--:-- Ed Larson: You got conned.
--:-- Marcus Parks: You got conned by a Ruski agent.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: God damn it!
--:-- Ed Larson: That's just somebody on Etsy.
--:-- Marcus Parks: That's it.
--:-- Ed Larson: That's just some guy on Etsy.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Stop talking to septum rings.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Sometimes, just like the Nazis did with the Jews and the communists, this administration will mush their bogeymen together, like this recent trans nonsense that we keep hearing about.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, yeah, honestly, I did have to avoid a roving band of trans the other day because it was so hard getting around all zero of them. It was so hard to just deal with that phantom area where there was no one there.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's interesting because the Klan are the ones wearing dresses.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah.
--:-- Ed Larson: Interesting. In the table clubs, okay? And I'll tell you this, I've seen a lot more Klan members in my lifetime.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah.
--:-- Ed Larson: Many, many more. In person. With my own eyes.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Ed Larson: Very much so.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Was it at dinner?
--:-- Ed Larson: No. No. It was when I was a kid coming back from a basketball game. The Klan was having a meeting in a field right off of the road. And it was in a bus with a bunch of other kids. And they were burning a cross on the side of the road. And it was pretty pointed towards our school. We had black kids in our school, which not many schools at that time did. But they filed their permits and it's allowed.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah.
--:-- Ed Larson: And in Throckmorton, Texas, it's very much allowed.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, all this, of course, depends on what's going on in the news and what can scare people who are half-hanging attention the most. But in Germany, that meant that while Dachau could certainly be majority Jewish, it was at times majority homosexual, majority homeless, Catholic, communist, and so on and so forth. Now, most of these people would not be held indefinitely in Dachau, nor were they killed in the camp. A lot of prisoners came in and out of Dachau in the years before the war. Because remember, the Nazis were fucking up Germany for a full five years before they invaded Czechoslovakia. But after Hitler kicked off World War II, Germany needed as much slave labor as it could get to maintain the war machine. Because Germany's economy under Hitler was backwards, idiotic, and totally nonsensical. But that's all to say that the Nazis' military accomplishments are much like the pyramids, and that you can really get a lot of shit done if you're willing to kill a lot of people in the pursuit of your goal. But the necessity of slave labor meant that very few prisoners were released from Dachau after the war began. And since Germany didn't have the means to feed even their own citizens, the most common release from Dachau after 1939 was through death. And once Dachau began filling up with Jews, leftists...
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, all the funny people.
--:-- Ed Larson: All the funny people.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Roberto Benigni.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, all the people with class, honestly.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Roberto Benigni, the only one I agree with this murder.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's the only time the Nazis were right.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: He was very good in Down by Law. You gotta admit, he was very good in that movie.
--:-- Ed Larson: Do you really not like Life is Beautiful?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I hate that film.
--:-- Ed Larson: Life is Beautiful is phenomenal.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I hate that film. This is one of his contrarian things. I'm allowed to hate Roberto Benigni. I'm allowed to hate him.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, after Dachau began filling up, the SS guards began torturing the prisoners as a matter of course. Inmates were beaten with hands, fists, and an array of weapons like truncheons, whips, and sticks. Their skin would be slashed, their organs ruptured, and their bones broken. And this was without killing them. Taking a page from the Italian fascist, the Nazis would also force-feed prisoners castor oil, which can cause both diarrhea and constipation, depending on the person. But once the river began flowing, so to speak, the prisoners were also forced to eat those feces and drink urine.
--:-- Ed Larson: What's that supposed to do? Castor oil? No, I mean in terms of eating all the poo-poo and the pee-pee.
--:-- Marcus Parks: It's torture.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's torture.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Oh, oh.
--:-- Ed Larson: What do you mean, what's it supposed to do? Would you think it was supposed to, like, I don't know, make them run real fast? I don't know. Or maybe it was one of those things they thought would make them more honest.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You know, the Olympics are coming up. We need a good shot for the...
--:-- Ed Larson: You just never know. You just never know. I just always like to know. I'm curious. Why?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Because it's horrible.
--:-- Ed Larson: You would have made a great baker in Dachau.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Why?
--:-- Ed Larson: That's a big question. Why?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Sexual abuse was also far more common in the early camps when compared to the later SS camp system. And a lot more random. Because, you know, later the Nazis set up brothels at concentration camps called Freudenabteilungen. That roughly translates in English to Joy Division, which is where the band gets its name.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: So please listen to our four-part series that me and Carolina did in No Dogs in Space about Joy Division for the full context on that, because that really does take a lot of context.
--:-- Ed Larson: It does.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: But honestly, good plug.
--:-- Ed Larson: Is that why they're so sad?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Partly. Yeah. I mean, that's got to be the least horny place in the world. A Joy Division concert?
--:-- Marcus Parks: But in Dachau, while the female prisoners were certainly raped and abused, the more specific sexual abuse was mostly directed towards the men. In some cases their naked genitals were thwacked with sticks and truncheons and some were even forced to masturbate each other.
--:-- Ed Larson: The only person in my family was a female on the Catholic side was raped at a concentration camp, got pregnant from the SS officer that did it, made it through, came to America with the child, and then my entire family, apparently, from what I heard from my mother, shunned them because she had a Nazi child.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, my God. Eddie, is this a part of your new hour? Where's the punchline on that?
--:-- Ed Larson: You know, it's my, you know, the Catholics.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Not everything he says has to have a punchline.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Marcus, I was trying to make his extremely brutal story funny. Okay? I was trying to bail us out of an extremely brutal story.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Sometimes, Henry, you can just let it sit.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I'm sick of it. Everything sits. You just let it sit. My comedy stands.
--:-- Ed Larson: Quote, unquote, comedy.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. Thank you.
--:-- Ed Larson: Is it comedy if it doesn't land?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, okay. Jokes are jokes.
--:-- Ed Larson: Even if they're not good?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. Unfortunately.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Just like people.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah. Exactly.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I never judge a joke.
--:-- Marcus Parks: The so-called Dachau spirit featured a few elements that were deemed by the SS as necessary for an effective concentration camp. First, the camp had to be sealed off from the outside world to prevent escapes and to engender a feeling of hopelessness. This also created jobs, because it meant that the concentration camps had to basically become towns under themselves.
--:-- Ed Larson: I actually heard that the Luxor took quite a bit from Dachau.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. I thought they took from the pyramids.
--:-- Ed Larson: Jewish slaves. Either way.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Second, the guards and the commandant had to stay separated to keep the idea of hierarchy firmly at the forefront of everyone's mind. Third, it had to feature work details from the prisoners, because the camps solely dedicated to extermination, camps like Treblinka, those were technically outside of the KL system, because a KL is supposed to serve a purpose. But perhaps the thing that gave the concentration camps the most Dachau spirit was Himmler's contribution of a set of strict rules that had to be enforced through a uniform set of punishments. Now that was, of course, the idea. But in reality, each camp was ultimately ruled by what one writer called an arbitrary terror, in which each prisoner lived in continual fear of their lives. This fear was, of course, warranted because the killing of prisoners began extremely early in both the existence of Dachau and the reign of the Third Reich. See, before the SS, Dachau had been staffed by 70 members of the Bavarian police force.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And they're just mostly arresting chocolate so they can eat it for a fucking lunch. I put arrest on the Strudel and on the Eclair. I don't care if it's French. I know I'm supposed to hate the French, but I love the Eclair.
--:-- Marcus Parks: For the use of these sentences, death unknown. But in April 1933, a month or two after the Nazis seized power, Himmler replaced the police at Dachau and put the camp under full SS control. Figuring that they needed to set the tone, SS officers premeditatively murdered four inmates the day after they arrived to demonstrate how things were going to be from then on. Those inmates were, of course, all Jewish. But while two of the victims were local political activists, the other two were of no particular political importance. This basically showed the so-called political agitators what would happen if they didn't keep their mouth shut. But it also showed the Jews that they could be killed just for being Jewish.
--:-- Ed Larson: Were they killed in front of everybody? Or do you know? I know it's a gross detail to ask.
--:-- Marcus Parks: No, it's not a gross detail. We don't know.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. That actually is not known at all.
--:-- Ed Larson: I was curious how much of a statement it was meant to be.
--:-- Marcus Parks: It was, I think, enough of a statement where word could spread. You know, like these four guys ain't around anymore.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's a good point.
--:-- Ed Larson: Fly from your grave.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But once the SS men in Dachau began the killing, they found it very difficult to stop, especially after it became obvious that there wasn't going to be any real consequences for murdering prisoners. See, when the first four people were killed in Dachau—this is the first four people killed in any Nazi concentration camp—a prosecutor in Munich was actually called out to the camp by the Nazis. Because the Nazis were, I suppose, still trying to at least pretend like they respected any law other than their own. In the early days of the Third Reich, it was still the law that if any person died in state custody from anything other than natural causes, the death had to be reported and investigated by a local prosecutor. So the guy called out to Dachau, a principled decent man named Joseph Hartinger, who is kind of a hero of mine, drove out to the camp and was immediately shocked when he noticed that the entire place was staffed by SS men. This was still early days and the SS were not, again, a part of the government, and they had no actual legal authority to detain people in this manner. Hartinger was even more disturbed when he was shown the bodies of the four victims, who had been simply tossed in a storage shed to rot. The SS claimed that all four men had died while trying to escape, but seeing as how they'd all been shot at the base of their skull in the same spot, the more obvious conclusion here was murder. Joseph Hartinger didn't roll over. When more and more deaths were reported, so-called suicides in which the victims were obviously beaten before dying, Hartinger got to work trying to figure out any and every way that he could personally stop what the Nazis were doing. After compiling a mountain of evidence with the local medical examiner, Joseph Hartinger issued a murder indictment for the Camp Commandant at great risk to his own safety. And he did achieve a few small victories merely by pushing back against the Nazis when everyone else was too afraid to do so. In fact, it's been said that if there had been just a hundred men like Joseph Hartinger pushing back in all of Germany—and a hundred in Germany, we're not talking about Munich, we're just talking about Germany—then the Nazis could have been stopped even after the Reichstag fire. And Hartinger, by the way, survived the war and never gave up hope throughout. He bravely kept all of the records from his investigation throughout the Third Reich's 12-year rule hidden away. Papers that would have gotten him sent to a concentration camp and killed. He was saving it for the day when the Nazis would inevitably lose power and he might have the opportunity to prosecute those murders. And while he did not prosecute those murders directly, the evidence that Joseph Hartinger gathered was used in the Nuremberg trials.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Wow. Weirdly enough, these very scary individuals, it seems, are affected by even the smallest amounts of pushback.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Very much so.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You just have to do it. And then it does take you sacrificing yourself to do it. And it's very, very difficult to make the choice.
--:-- Ed Larson: I mean, not even necessarily. He didn't. But then it was because it wasn't too late yet.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, the thing is, too, is that you got to know who has the power to be able to do it. Because Joseph Hartinger was not Jewish. If Joseph Hart was Jewish, then yeah, they would have killed him. Because there were lawyers and people and prosecutors who pushed back against Hitler hard who were killed for doing it. But Joseph Hart, and that the lesson is that you got to know when you're the guy who can say fuck you, the one who can stand up and say no, I'm not going to go along with this. You're out there. You exist. They have always existed. You can't pay off an entire country to kill us all. Like, that's kind of what this is about. Like, you can't just pay us off and think that we're just going to walk away from what's happening inside the country. But there just wasn't enough of him.
--:-- Ed Larson: How did he get away with not getting killed? Did he hide?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's because he was white. He was a fucking Aryan, German, card-carrying member of the fucking society. Basically, they swept him aside because the Nazis, when they could just sweep someone aside, especially if it's just a regular-ass white dude named Josef, when they could sweep him aside, that's what happened. Basically, the files were sent off and it went to this person and that person. The whole case was basically killed. So when they could do that, they did. If they could avoid outright murdering someone, they would. Just because it was messy. And they would have to deal with push. People say, oh, why did you kill Joseph? I like Joseph.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah. You know?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, the biggest consequence of Joseph Hartinger's pushback against what was happening in Dachau was that the killings did temporarily stop. And to avoid any heat from the ever-sensitive middle class, the camp commandant who was indicted for the murder was replaced. But unfortunately for everyone who ever went to Dachau afterward, Himmler replaced that commandant with a super Nazi named Theodor Eicke, who had joined the Nazi party in 1928 and had been a member of Himmler's SS since 1930.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Ja, I can't even leave skid marks on my underwear. Because you're such a good Nazi. Ja.
--:-- Ed Larson: Have you tried?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's very difficult to fix my diet.
--:-- Ed Larson: What's your diet?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Viennese schnitzel and beers. Big, long polenos. Big, delicious half of icings. Delicious broth versions. More delicious frankfurters. Delicious little ones. And I get filled with evil brown substance. And I wish that I could do anything to make my shit white.
--:-- Ed Larson: You know, if you eat chalk, maybe.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Good idea, Jew. Good idea, Juices of Cames!
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, like many of Himmler's top men, Theodor Eicke was yet another crackpot that Himmler had put into a position of power. And this was after Eicke, of course, proved that he could not succeed or even exist in a civilized society. See, after Eicke had become a full SS man, he was arrested just before the Nazis came into power for constructing a bomb at the IG Farben plant where he worked. And the intent was to use the bomb against the police. But Eicke had become, as one writer put it, one of Himmler's most trusted adherents on racial matters. As such, Himmler was able to pull some strings to get Eicke released because there were already plenty of Nazis in positions of power. But Himmler told Eicke that he'd only be set free if he promised to never do anything like that ever again.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Never do that! Never! Never! Never. You never do that again. Don't do the bomb. Stop with the bomb. You're out of my special secret medieval nightclub. No. No. I've been eating chocolate. Look at my boobs. I made some cream. Good job. Good effort. But still no bomb.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Eicke said yes and was sent to Italy to train their Nazis on how to be effective terrorists.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That tells you what Eicke is good for. You know, like, go train people to be terrorists. You'd be good at that. Don't stay here in Germany. Honestly, thank you. It's the only thing I've ever wanted.
--:-- Ed Larson: Would you like another hard-boiled egg?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I don't even like the fact it's a mid-range yellow. Or Himmler would call a self-portrait.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Eicke returned to Germany in March of 1933, after Himmler came to power. That's how much he sucked. He had to wait until Hitler was in charge before he could come back. But upon his return—this is, again, how much further he sucked—he immediately got into a fight with a local Nazi leader that was so intense that the other Nazi was able to arrange to have Eicke committed to a mental asylum.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I cannot believe you went on vacation and got a 10! You are not allowed! I will not allow you to live!
--:-- Ed Larson: So it sounds like this guy's a bit crazy. He's overblowing everything.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, Himmler, this had meant that Eicke had broken his word. He'd gotten in trouble again. So Eicke was kicked out of the SS. But after the asylum's director informed Himmler that Eicke was not mentally unbalanced by his standards, Himmler apologized, got Eicke released, reinstated him in the SS, and gave him a promotion. Even gave 200 Reichsmarks to his family.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I've got to say, honestly, it was kind of even fun being in jail because I got to hate new things. I met new types of things to hate and it's just, it's crazy. So honestly, thank you for the opportunity to learn how to learn all the terrible people.
--:-- Marcus Parks: See, this was right around the time that Dachau's first commandant was under fire from the whole prisoner murder thing. So Himmler figured that since he'd saved Eicke twice, and since Eicke had the right points of view, who better to run Dachau? This, again, is the elevation for loyalty exchange we were talking about. And since Eicke had the same insane racial and societal beliefs as Himmler, Himmler knew that Eicke would have no problem whatsoever in executing Himmler's vision.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I mean, I'm just pissed.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, you don't like Nazis?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: What's wrong with them?
--:-- Ed Larson: You're right, it's not giving me heartburn or anything.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, Eicke thrived almost immediately. Upon taking over operations at Dachau, the young guards at the camp reportedly adored him and even began affectionately referring to him as Papa Eicke.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, cute.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And so, since Eicke was doing such a bang-up job at Dachau, Himmler elevated him once again and made him the top man in charge of the SS Death's Head units, even going so far as to share in the recruitment process of potential Death's Head members.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: This is the most emotional day I've ever had. I never knew that my hate could take me so far. I knew as a hateful little boy that one day I was hoping that I could hate my way to the hate Olympics. And it's just been, it's been a pleasure. I know this song was written by a Jew, a Jewess, but do you really also have enmity by way? Sometimes the Jews are just as horrible. I hate them, but the allegory is so incredible.
--:-- Ed Larson: Unfortunately, a Jew also wrote White Christmas.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, wow.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: What?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Both Eicke and Himmler agreed that younger recruits would be the best fit for the Death's Head. They called them Blutjung, which translates roughly to those in the first flush of youth. It literally translates as young blood.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, literally like young blood.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, the musician. Oh, this is all coming back to me. It's all coming back to Youngblood and his talentless waist, his thin stupid talentless torso. Just switch over to the Image comic Youngblood. That's funny.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, oh, that's better.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It is funny how much you don't like Youngblood and you just keep talking about it. And I know that your phone is listening to you and then giving you Youngblood material. So you just start hating him more and more and more. Youngblood had to go on three different interviews to explain that he did have a relationship with Ozzy Osbourne. And when they finally got to the nut of it, it turns out he met him 20 minutes before a concert a year ago. And then all of a sudden now, still again, I believe Ozzy Osbourne thought he was a hot woman.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's so funny because how much you hate Youngblood is making me like him.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Ah, God.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, back to the Blutjung.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You need to be first against the wall when Henry Zebrowski's in charge.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, eventually, many of the Death's Head guards were handpicked directly out of the Hitler Youth. So by 1938, the average age of a Death's Head guard at a concentration camp had dropped to just 20 years old.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Big balls? Does it remind you of anything? Right? It gets kind of funny in a way. You need young, dumb men to do quite a bit of this. You really do. Because they're driven. They got nothing else to do. Literally, they're filled with come, and if they're not making Aryan babies, most of the other people probably don't want to touch them. It's just anger. They're just full of so much anger. And they need purpose. They really, they crave it. They want it. And the Nazis were very good at giving people purpose.
--:-- Ed Larson: And we are looking for a part-time person here at the Last Podcast on the Left too, so you could send that over to sidestorieslpotl at gmail.com. We're actually looking for young blood ourselves.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's true.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, these young men had, according to Himmler, a balance of malleability and resilience not found in the older recruits. Himmler also found that the enthusiasm of the young recruits tended to spread to the older ones, which was needed because the older Death's Head members came with their own set of problems. See, older SS guards tended to become far more sadistic and corrupted by power, harder to control. These are your guards who were nicknamed like The Beast or The Bone Breaker. Although one interesting nickname I found amongst the list of infamous concentration camp guards was Handsome Tony.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Hey, it me. Hey, I'm from the old neighborhood. You got a problem, man? Listen, you look a little kind of skinny. You want some mousse, though? Yeah, it's a joke. I'm not giving you nothing. I'm a Nazi. Technically, I'm from Coney Island, but I grew up in Bensonhurst. Yeah, absolutely. Look at me.
--:-- Ed Larson: So was he like the only Italian in the SS?
--:-- Marcus Parks: No, no, no. He was very much German.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh yeah, he's a death's head SS man.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, he was very much a death's head SS man. He was convicted for beating a hundred prisoners to death in the terrorism camp.
--:-- Marcus Parks: In 2002, at the age of 90, he was one of those later Nazis that they caught and prosecuted.
--:-- Ed Larson: I'm glad we got him.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. I say, people always do this. We always find like some 95-year-old Nazi and everyone's like, oh, what did he do? If there's any left, fucking hang them.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's fun to do. We should literally get the old shit out. We should get all the old stuff, set up an old-fashioned fucking hanging gulag-style thing and fucking string them up.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, it's not a bad idea.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You know what's interesting? It's just like Handsome Tony is the most infamous of all these guys. The other ones like Beast and Bonebreaker, they needed the bad name to make them scary.
--:-- Ed Larson: Of course.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Handsome Tony. That's the true fear.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, buddy. Oh, no, I'm so much more afraid of the fucking Handsome Tony than the Bone Breaker. Oh, yeah. It's like if you say, the Bone Breaker's coming. I'm like, all right, fine. I guess he's going to break my bones. Like, you know he's coming to visit you. Nice Frank. No! No! Nice Frank! Beautiful Philip.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But the other problem with older Death's Head guards is that some could get a little tender-hearted with the prisoners and would even begin to sympathize with them if given enough time.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, this is the Hogan's Heroes type stuff.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, yeah.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, they begin to because it's almost like they forget that everybody's people or whatever and that's fucking, you know, a waste of Nazi energy.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah. And also, hey, Jews are charming.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. I like it. I like it. You want to hear a joke? Yeah, it's going to be a lot of like, hey, you want to hear a song? You want to hear a joke? Why do you think it took so long to kick Woody Allen out of the business? Yeah, and not all communists are just like super annoying and bad at parties. No, yeah, a lot of them are very fun. Some of them can be very fun, yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And you know, with older guys, the older you are, the more experienced you are, the more you might be reminded of somebody. You also soften. Most people naturally soften as they get older if you are a good person trying to change.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, but with younger people, you could just tell them, hey, this is how it is, that person's evil, and they'll go, okay, and then do whatever you want.
--:-- Ed Larson: Well, they just don't care. They like having the hat and the uniform and the gun. Like, really, when it comes down to it, you can impress a 20-year-old very easily by giving them a hat and a gun.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, the sympathy was especially true in Dachau, where Death's Head sentries were in far closer contact with prisoners than in the more expansive camps like Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But for the young bucks, the close proximity in Dachau, that just gave them more opportunities for cruelty. Being young, they were often bored and looking for status, and acts of violence could both alleviate the tedium and make them more popular amongst the other guards. As such, cruelty to prisoners was often seen by other Nazis as a boyish joke.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Jocular humor. Yes.
--:-- Marcus Parks: For example, a guard might yell at a prisoner to get him to jump. The prisoner gets frightened and he jumps, makes the other guards laugh. Young man sees this, yells again, gets the guy to jump again. But when that joke gets old, you got to keep up in the stakes. If you want to keep gaining that social currency, you got to keep making people laugh. And they're not going to laugh if you keep doing the same thing over and over again.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It sets a vibe. It sets a tone.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah. It's that Dachau spirit.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That it is. And now that I think about it, this whole thing has like this weird frat-like atmosphere. I mean, like prisoners when they, like they shaved off all their body hair, which seems like a prank. And in one case, a prisoner actually died after an SS officer inserted a hose into his rectum and opened up a high pressure water tap.
--:-- Ed Larson: Didn't a frat boy like die from that? Like fairly recently?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, that's why I think that there's an overt function and a subtle function of these young men altogether, because they really are. That's what it is. Well, we talked about with QAnon specifically or any conspiracy thing that radicalizes young men. One of the things it definitely does is tell young men, you're OK, you're correct. We're going to support you no matter what you do. We're in. This is unconditional love. This is your new version of unconditional love. We actually want you to be the worst version of yourself because we love you, because we want to support you. And it permeates this. It's a fake love that permeates it all the way through. It's like in frats, the fake love comes from buying your way in, right? Like you buy in. You have to fit in whatever this area. And in here, it's a, are you nasty enough? Are you mean enough to be in the club?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. It's a bunch of guys who can't make friends all become friends.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And they could also maybe want to—this is also would be the same pool that would normally be in the German army. And so it's kind of then at some point you begin to, I bet as a young person, you begin to almost even forget the veneer of the costume and what you're doing and all this kind of shit. And it does begin to feel like boys being boys playing pranks on other men and boys and doing some weird jocular fucked up thing. Because, again, also, we're on the other side. And also at this point, like if these kids, if they really do want to be a part of, like feel like they're a part of that World War One spirit and to have a uniform. Like at this point, the German army is limited to 100,000 members because of the Treaty of Versailles. They legally can't have over 100,000 people. So if a young kid wants to join the army, he most likely can't.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: But he can get a uniform if he joins the SS. Or the stormtroopers or one of those things. But the SS, it seems to be really aimed towards the people. I honestly do think that that's what Himmler understood about the uniform. Kind of like what L. Ron Hubbard understood about the uniform, which is that it gives an instant character. All of a sudden you are in, when you are in head to toe, black SS with the skull's head and all the kind of shit, it changes a person from the outside in.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, as far as the people who were sent to Dachau in the early days went, the best story involves a World War I veteran and dedicated communist named Hans Beimler. See, Beimler had participated in the Bavarian Socialist Revolution of 1919, but he had been falsely accused by the Nazis of participating in the execution of 10 people during the uprising, including a Bavarian countess. It did happen but Beimler had nothing to do with it. This mass execution was used by the Nazis to demonstrate the communist threat over and over and over again. It was one of the few cases of real left-wing violence, so of course it was all they fucking talked about, and Beimler was used as a scapegoat for the event because he had become a prominent Reichstag politician in Weimar Germany in the years afterward. Beimler was actually quite confrontational, and when the Nazis came to power in 1933, he was known to rally crowds with the phrase, "We meet again in Dachau, motherfuckers." Okay, he didn't say motherfuckers, but you get it.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's how I felt when I said it.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, that was very powerful.
--:-- Marcus Parks: This, of course, made Beimler quite the prized prisoner. And when he was, in fact, sent to Dachau, he was forced to wear a welcome sign around his neck upon arrival.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Welcome, please.
--:-- Ed Larson: You're right. Actually, it would have said Willkommen, yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Beimler was immediately singled out for torture, beaten thoroughly, and thrown into a cell with the corpse of a fellow communist. The SS then told Beimler that the communist had killed himself, and if Beimler didn't do the same, the SS would do it for him. But the SS was not the entirely loyal organization that Heinrich Himmler had envisioned. Two rogue SS men saw the light and actually helped Beimler escape just hours before his scheduled execution, and Beimler spent months evading the SS in Munich.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's how charming he was, yeah. He must have been hilarious. He had to have been.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, listen to this. He eventually escaped to Czechoslovakia, and from there he mailed a postcard to Dachau telling the SS to kiss my fucking ass.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Beimler, however, would soon after die doing what he loved in 1936, fighting the fascists in Spain. But interestingly, Hans Beimler's grandson would go on to write an impressive number of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine episodes, including, ironically, all the big Ferengi episodes. Like "The Magnificent Ferengi," the one with Iggy Pop as the Vorta.
--:-- Ed Larson: No idea.
--:-- Marcus Parks: He also wrote the much-maligned "Profit and Lace," considered by most to be the worst episode of Deep Space Nine.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: So is that good or bad?
--:-- Marcus Parks: He also wrote "Improbable Cause." That's a really good episode. And he was a producer for, I think, most of Deep Space Nine. But yeah, it's weird because the Ferengi episodes are all about capitalism because it's the Ferengi, the most capitalist species to ever exist, when his grandfather was an inveterate communist. But I think it kind of makes those episodes make more sense because he thinks that it's really funny, like "Profit and Lace" is supposed to be funny, and it's not.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, well, you know, what are you going to do? He made it.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I don't think I've ever thought this before, but can we please get back to the Nazis?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: So now that we've painted a picture of the early days in Dachau, let's return to Germany at large. See, Weimar Germany had existed as eight semi-states, but Hitler immediately moved to illegally unify all of them after he became chancellor.
--:-- Marcus Parks: This was partly symbolic, a further step towards Hitler's dream of unifying Germany, Austria, and its bordering lands. But it was also a practical decision. If power was totally centralized under Hitler, then Himmler and Goering could establish a unified police state far more easily, and Himmler could force local governments to subsidize SS units and concentration camps. Resistance to unification was, of course, met with extortion, torture, and murder.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And this is where our mini-Himmler comes back into play.
--:-- Ed Larson: Aww, yeah!
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Reinhard Heydrich. Hello!
--:-- Ed Larson: That's the Stephen Miller.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, no, well, maybe, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'd say that. He looks like it.
--:-- Ed Larson: He looks just like Stephen Miller.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, he looks like an Easter Island statue.
--:-- Ed Larson: Fuck the Proclaimer.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. He does. He looked like if Spuds McKenzie became a person and then got AIDS.
--:-- Ed Larson: Dolph Lundgren, yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: He was ultimately such an awful person that he had more nicknames than Mengele. He was called the Hangman, the Blonde Beast, Old Schnitzel Ears, Himmler's Evil Genius.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: They call me Scheissemann.
--:-- Marcus Parks: The Butcher of Prague, and most hyperbolically, the Young Evil God of Death. That's a long nickname.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, he was fucked up. He was like, because he had the same ideals as Himmler, but he also was strong enough to actually follow through with it himself. He actually was a badass in a bad way.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, no, he went and fought. He would go and participate in the raids and shit like that. Yeah, that's how he got the nickname the Butcher of Prague.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now acting as Himmler's top man in the SS, Reinhard Heydrich coordinated the police under a centralized authority by claiming that there were still, even after all the mass arrests, a widespread communist plot operating in Germany.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It has to be.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Then, in an example of how these people lie to even each other to get what they want, Himmler took Heydrich's claims to Hitler and said that if Hitler truly wanted the communists gone out of Germany, then he should probably give Himmler complete control over the state police.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And so on Hitler's birthday in 1934. You know what day that is?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. The fucking 420.
--:-- Ed Larson: Fuck yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now on that 420, Himmler was given formal control over one of the most feared and terrifying secret police forces in history, the dreaded Gestapo.
--:-- Ed Larson: Bummer, man. Fucking frickity hell, dude. What's wrong with you, dude? Why are you talking about this right now, man? What the fuck, dude? Bro, it's actually one of the darkest days in European history. What the fuck, dude? What are you doing this for? Stop talking about it. You guys want to watch the fucking Columbine footage?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Actually, yeah. I fucking missed that day. It's cool.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, with the SS, the concentration camps, and the secret police under his control, Himmler was perfectly positioned to gather even more information on his and Hitler's enemies. With Reinhard Heydrich as his top deputy, Himmler established a meticulous system that gathered information on all opponents of the Nazi party. Dossiers that included business affairs, finances, lovers, family secrets, character flaws, daily habits, as well as more practical information like addresses, recent photos, and the addresses of all of their relatives and their girlfriends and their phone numbers.
--:-- Ed Larson: That's actually one of those things that the CIA would learn to do too. That was one of those things that we almost, we probably learned from them.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, now we got Zuckerberg for it.
--:-- Ed Larson: Well, now we just give it up.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And once the information was gathered, it was written down on cards and filed into different categories like Jews, Freemasons, political Catholics, bourgeois conservatives, and nobility hostile to national socialism. And all of this was just saved to be used when the Nazis saw fit.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: What would be my tag? Where am I?
--:-- Ed Larson: Asshole.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. Okay. I would say...
--:-- Ed Larson: What's my tag? I gotta think of it. Degenerate entertainer.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, cool, cool, cool. You're skinny know-it-all.
--:-- Ed Larson: Do me, do me, do me.
--:-- Marcus Parks: I'm sorry, Eddie. You just get Jew.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, big ol' ham-filled Jew. Well, apparently I'd be okay because I only got two Jewish grandparents.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But if I was the Nazi deciding, I'd still kill you.
--:-- Ed Larson: Thank you. Thank you.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But since Himmler was coming up in the world once again with his takeover of the Gestapo, he completely abandoned his farm and his horrible wife, Marga.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Poor Marga.
--:-- Ed Larson: Poor Marga.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You gotta say it right. Marga.
--:-- Marcus Parks: When Himmler permanently moved to Berlin to be at the center of the action. Apparently, Himmler did not have strong feelings for Marga.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I feel like he didn't have any feelings towards anything.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No ladies.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And while they did not formally separate, their relationship was reduced to a cold exchange of formal letters in which Marga gave Himmler harvest tallies and asked for money. Marga's letters were also full of complaints that chastised Himmler for spending all his time during his infrequent visits to the farm either working or reading "your stupid books."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's a good thing because he was busy working. What do you want from him, Marga? He's working. You're only two towns away and you can't come say hi to Marga?
--:-- Ed Larson: Do you know how hard it is to orchestrate the Holocaust?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, you and Gundun, me and Gundun are here. I would pay more attention to you if Ise von der Wuh was the systematic destruction of the Jews.
--:-- Ed Larson: All right, von der Wuh is the systematic destruction of the Jews. Send you come and then I'll maybe want to spend more time with you.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And Himmler had a side piece, too.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, we'll talk about her in an upcoming episode.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, in the end, Himmler was just not very proud of his wife.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, she's gross.
--:-- Marcus Parks: As is evidenced by Marga's frequent request to be present at the great Nazi events like the Nuremberg rallies. Like, Magda Goebbels gets to go. Emmy Goering gets to go. Why can't Marga Himmler be a part of the master race?
--:-- Ed Larson: Because they knew how to dress. They knew how to dress and they were in a fucking big stupid dump every single time we went everywhere. They say funny things, they make impressions, and they do good things. You just sit here and talk about chickens and you smell like chicken shit.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I like chickens.
--:-- Ed Larson: I know, me too. But we shouldn't be bringing up every dinner, especially when we are in the middle of eating chicken.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Do you know why the chicken crossed the road?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I don't know. I was asking.
--:-- Ed Larson: Hopefully it was done at gunpoint because the chicken was a Jew.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You are funny, my husband.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And even though Himmler was riding high as the leader of the SS and the Gestapo, there was still one man standing in not only his way, but in the way of Nazism as Himmler envisioned it. That man was Ernst Röhm, whose charisma had helped swell the ranks of the SA street thugs to 4 million men by 1934.
--:-- Ed Larson: Isn't that just because they'll take anybody and they're just grabbing packs of dudes, right?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, totally, yeah.
--:-- Ed Larson: And they're like, here you go, here's a stick. You can go beat the fuck out of anybody you want and they're just grabbing people, right?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Very much so, yeah. Because it's not like the way the SS were disciplined. No, quite the opposite, in fact. And yes, these millions of men were loyal to Hitler, and many had joined because of that. But they were also very loyal to Röhm himself. And the sheer size of the SA meant that Röhm could be a little mouthier and a little pushier with Hitler than anyone else.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, because he had his own, he was supplanting the German army with them, too. That's what he wanted.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah. Because, I mean, since Röhm was a military man, he was pressuring Hitler. Just like, hey, merge, we've got 4.5 million guys. Make it a part of the army and then give me control of the army.
--:-- Ed Larson: That's like 8% of the population. It's a lot of people.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yes, but then Hitler knew not to make this man in charge of that much power. Because Hitler knew that these are just dudes. He doesn't want to piss off the military at this point because Hitler needed the military on his side for his future plans of conquest.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And Hitler also knows that if Hitler hadn't gotten into power, the what-if scenarios of history is that if Hitler hadn't gotten into power, then it's likely that Germany probably, after the Weimar Republic, probably would have become a military dictatorship at some point. So it wouldn't necessarily be a Nazi in power, but definitely right-wing fascist military, just not as bad. And Hitler knows this. He knows that the military is breathing down my neck and one of these guys can pull the trigger at any fucking time.
--:-- Ed Larson: But we do know that Germany was also farther along than any other country in being spoken to and having communist thought points layered throughout their society, too. So that was what a lot of they're talking about. They kind of thought that Berlin would fall before Moscow, before the whole Russian revolution. They assumed that the communist revolution would come out of Germany. So that was also right there waiting.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, it was. Hitler was also pissed off with Röhm because Hitler wanted to merge the SA with Himmler's SS. He wanted the SA to be more like the SS. But Röhm wanted absolutely nothing to do with Himmler's nerdy wannabe medieval knight fashion plates who were also ironically extremely homophobic. But perhaps most importantly, when it came to Hitler winning over the German people in the early days of Nazi rule, Röhm's SA had become a liability and an embarrassment to Hitler. The SA's numbers, their ages, and their beliefs had made them an extraordinarily dangerous and impulsive group who basically made wandering around and fucking shit up their hobby. And when you got 4.5 million dudes doing that, it's going to be a problem. In other words, no middle class German would ever feel like their country was approaching stability as long as Röhm's SA was roaming the streets, beating people up, and sometimes killing them for no reason at all. Just because they felt like it.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, yeah. Well, then it's because he created a monster.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, he did.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's amazing they didn't get along. If they would have just talked for a little bit longer, they would have been buddies.
--:-- Ed Larson: Röhm and Hitler?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And Himmler.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, and Himmler?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No. No, because Röhm was gay. He was openly gay and unapologetically gay. And that's the thing about Himmler is that, remember, he's the real Nazi here. If you break one of Himmler's rules, you're done. At least one of his big rules. If you weren't loyal to him, he might forgive a couple of things if you kissed his ass and if he saw that he could use you for something. He might look past a thing or two. But if you were in any way antagonistic towards him or if you weren't completely subservient to him, one rule, you're gone.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Additionally, Röhm was still working with Gregor and Otto Strasser, the two early Nazis who had discovered Heinrich Himmler's incredible talent for administrative action. But while both the Strasser brothers and Himmler believed in Nazism more than they believed in Hitler, the Strassers knew that Hitler would inevitably fuck it up. In fact, Gregor and Otto Strasser had broken away from the Nazis in 1930. They'd spent years trying to draw Nazis away from Hitler's influence.
--:-- Ed Larson: Isn't that amazing, this concept of, well, we all like Nazism. We all like the hate. But this guy is just going to fuck it up, so we're not going to be able to hate as long and as powerful as we want to hate.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, it wasn't about the hate for them. It was more about the economics.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, taking control of the country, taking control of the army.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And they actually were those. The problem was that Hitler was like, it's too much hate. The focus, we need to refocus on the jobs and possibly these other things. The hate is getting out of hand.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, but he's like, but the hate's the point.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, that was Himmler's point of view. Because the Strasser brothers were calling for a second Nazi revolution without Hitler. But as opposed to the Strasser brothers, Heinrich Himmler believed that Adolf was the guy who could make his version of Nazism work. While the Strasser brothers were more into the economics of Nazism, Himmler was into the fantasy. See, I'm sure by this point, Himmler saw that Hitler was lazy enough and filled with just the right amount of hate that he would basically let Himmler do whatever he wanted, just so long as Himmler stayed in his good graces. That, of course, meant that anyone who might stand in Hitler's way in any respect had to go, which put Ernst Röhm and the SA firmly within Himmler's crosshairs. Without Hitler even asking, Himmler had his man, Reinhard Heydrich, gather dirt on various SA leaders. Then, Himmler began spreading rumors that Röhm and the SA were plotting a coup to overthrow Hitler, a claim for which no evidence exists. Himmler's actions ultimately culminated in an orgy of murder orchestrated by Himmler and Heydrich that came to be known to history as the Night of the Long Knives.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Wow, we made it! Yay!
--:-- Ed Larson: I can't believe the war hasn't started yet.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, buddy. Sorry to tell you this, bud, but we're five years from the war starting.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, we haven't gotten there, buddy.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's all right. At least some Nazis are going to die anyway right now.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, at least that's the thing. Even if they had long knives, at least Nazis were also killed. They just happened to be the reasonable Nazis.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You know you didn't have them, right?
--:-- Ed Larson: Let's put that relatively reasonable.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's what I mean.
--:-- Ed Larson: Is that what I'm saying? Those words.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, because no Nazi is reasonable.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now interestingly, the Night of the Long Knives may have come about as a result of Hitler's bruised ego. See, in June of 1934, Hitler flew to Italy to take a meeting with Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. We gave a little bit of a preview of what this meeting was like earlier. It went very poorly.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's so funny because the immaculately dressed Mussolini pretty much spent their whole time together just making fun of Hitler's uniform and his overall shitty appearance. "You're the bad and white. I look at you and I see somebody. You're a bad and white guy. Where is the fucking guy even a door in? You need a bigger hat. You need a sash. There's no Gucci."
--:-- Ed Larson: No massage. You ever seen how Mussolini dresses?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. He's ludicrous.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah. I just, one day we'll do. Like, that's the problem is that Mussolini would be on the Mount Rushmore of evil, but if it was like comedic evil. Like, Mussolini's such a funny character.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. I mean, he was also extraordinarily evil and fucking out of his mind.
--:-- Ed Larson: Well, he invented fascism.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, he did.
--:-- Ed Larson: Fashionism.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, yeah. Just the whole time, just like, "Oh, man, why are you looking so much like shit? Let me ask you a question. Why are you looking like so much shit? Because it's you. I'm just curious. I just want to know why you want to look like so much shit all the time."
--:-- Ed Larson: But it's fascinating because that is a real direct line of this style of thought. Like, I don't even know what's just fascist. It's like this idea of a style and representation that you're supposed to uphold, and it's an outward appearance thing that has to always be upheld. I just find it interesting because the Nazis were the ultimate in all of that and then they were all in looking like shit.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Well, I mean, it's not that they necessarily look like shit. It's just like, Mussolini just didn't like the style.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, of course.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And Hitler did also look like shit most of the time. Hitler just wore a shitty little jacket. He always wore kind of the same thing and he'd go and do, like he wasn't-
--:-- Ed Larson: His hair was always fucked up.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, Hitler returned to Germany from his meeting with Mussolini with a big chip on his shoulder, and he immediately called a meeting to assess the so-called critical situation regarding Ernst Röhm and the rumors of the supposed coup of the SA, rumors that Himmler had totally made up. That, however, wasn't the only impetus behind the upcoming purge. The same day Hitler called the Röhm meeting, the conservative who had put Hitler into power, Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, he gave a speech in which he showed a bit of buyer's remorse.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh yeah, he was like, well this is just getting to be a lot.
--:-- Marcus Parks: After a year and a half of Nazi rule, Papen saw that he had quite simply made a very big boo-boo in elevating Adolf Hitler. In his speech, Papen called for an end to the daily terrorism being perpetrated by the SA and for the restoration of some of the freedoms that had been taken away in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's kind of like you remember when Lindsey Graham went up right after January 6 and he's like, "I'm done. I am done."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, yeah. He kind of admitted that he fucked up in bending the knee, but then of course went right back to bending the knee.
--:-- Ed Larson: Well yeah, because he always bent on his knees.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But this is sort of like that. And Papen's speech greatly angered Hitler, who ordered all copies of the speech destroyed. Papen, however, decided to keep the fight going and threatened to tattle on Hitler to President von Hindenburg, who was very near the end of his life. Remember, at this point, Hitler still technically has to answer to this old fossil who's hanging out in his country estate.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, and he's kind of dying, right?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, he's dying. They're kind of just sitting there waiting for him to do anything.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, he's very much dying.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Trying to head the crisis off himself, Hitler went directly to Hindenburg in late June, before von Papen. But Hitler was headed off by a general who told Hitler that if he couldn't get his SA shitheads under control, President Hindenburg was going to declare martial law and turn control of the country over to the military. Hindenburg was no great Hitler fan. He had to be turned to accept Hitler. So in order to stay in power, Hitler had to do something big, something splashy. And luckily for him, Heinrich Himmler already had a plan ready to go.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And this is another reason why Himmler is on the Mount Rushmore of evil, because he's the one who keeps Hitler there. This is another turning point in history. Without Himmler, this is when Hitler goes.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, because they're already all there. They're already about to kick him out. And he understands it.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: But it's amazing. I wonder how long he had the plan. I wonder how long he thought about this idea that one day this was going to be the transition.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Months at least, if not longer.
--:-- Ed Larson: It went smoothly, right?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, it did exactly as it was intended. Well, to push Hitler into action, Himmler and Goering allegedly concocted a pair of urgent messages on June 29th, saying that the SA had assembled in Berlin and Munich to finally enact the coup d'etat. None of this was true, but these messages inspired Hitler to pull the trigger on the Nazi purge known as the Night of the Long Knives.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Swords.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah. Exactly. Jake said the same thing earlier today. He's like, isn't a long knife a sword?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, it's as different as how it comes out of its leash. It's a sword during the day, but at night it's a long knife.
--:-- Ed Larson: They said, Mr. Jung, that sounds like a bit of a Jewish joke. Or sounds like we need to have a bit of an investigation of your background.
--:-- Marcus Parks: I suppose considering how they'd known each other for over a decade, Hitler wanted to confront Ernst Röhm himself on the Night of the Long Knives. On the night of the Great Purge, Hitler and Goebbels flew to a spa town where Röhm was, quote, "vacationing" with his, quote, "guards."
--:-- Ed Larson: Hell yeah. Yeah, he is. Fucking blowjob weekend with the boys. Roaming all over that spa town. Do not come knocking if the Nazi is rocking. He is ready to come, ready to shoot. Who wants to see my long knife? It looks like you lost some of the edge there, a little bit of the tip was falling off.
--:-- Marcus Parks: But that fun weekend ended suddenly when Hitler burst into Röhm's room at 2 a.m. He arrested the guy Röhm was in bed with, and he began screaming at Röhm for all of his supposed transgressions. Every account talks about how much spittle was thrown and flicked while Hitler screamed at Röhm.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Röhm was then taken to a prison in Munich, where a pistol was left in his cell so he could, quote-unquote, do the honorable thing. Instead, Röhm essentially said, fuck Hitler. If he wants me dead, let him do it himself.
--:-- Ed Larson: I dare you.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Hitler, of course, didn't do it, and instead ordered two of Röhm's own SA officers to murder him with their revolvers at point-blank range. And that was the end of Ernst Röhm.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Bye! Have fun not smelling things in hell!
--:-- Marcus Parks: Röhm, however, was not even close to the only person killed that night. The upper estimate of murder victims during the Night of the Long Knives is around 1,000.
--:-- Ed Larson: Jesus! I had no idea it was that many.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, I mean, that's the upper estimate, because it's thought that some Nazis may have settled personal scores that night as well. "Let's throw in a guy. I don't like this guy. Let me kill him too in the midst of all this." On the low end, they say 116 were officially confirmed, but what's most likely is probably around 400 to 500. But that's still 400 to 500 people all killed in one night by Himmler's SS goons.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Isn't this kind of like a coup?
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, yeah, it's the opposite. It's kind of a reverse coup.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, it's cuckoo. It's cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, it's trying to prevent it, like a preemptive strike. It's like when we went into Iraq. "We think they're planning on attacking us, so we're going to attack them before they attack us." But just like Iraq, they weren't planning any sort of coup. It was just Himmler seeing a political opportunity and seeing the opportunity to get rid of all these people all at once. See, just amongst the SA, Himmler and Goering had 150 SA leaders rounded up and quickly executed by Himmler's SS and Gestapo firing squads. But the Nazi SA were not the only ones on the enemy's list who were taken care of that night. For instance, a squad of SS men visited the home of General Kurt von Schleicher, who had also helped Hitler into power, but had ultimately regretted his decision.
--:-- Ed Larson: Did he say "oy vey"?
--:-- Marcus Parks: No. But von Schleicher was also another shitty conservative. He was one of the ones that thought that they could control Hitler. Useful idiot. He was actually chancellor right before Hitler. He's like, let's let this Hitler guy do it. He seems to have the ear of the people. But he had, of course, in the time since said, ah, this is a bad idea. We got to get this Hitler guy out of here. So when General von Schleicher opened his door that night, both he and his wife were immediately gunned down by Himmler's SS goons. Other generals who opposed Hitler were killed the same way. Gregor Strasser, one of the Strasser brothers, he was given a relatively dignified death, again by firing squad. But they're taking care of fucking everybody.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: But surprisingly, Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen was spared.
--:-- Marcus Parks: His secretary and two of his associates were killed, and yes, the rest of his staff were sent to concentration camp. But that's what they're there for. There's no point in having them if we're not going to use them. But I suppose for Hitler, killing the number three man in government was probably going too far. You could kill a former chancellor, but you couldn't kill the current vice chancellor.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: He only ever did things not because he didn't want to. You know what I mean?
--:-- Ed Larson: Who, Papen?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: No, Hitler and all these guys. They would have absolutely killed him if they felt they needed to, but I guess they felt like it would bring too much heat.
--:-- Ed Larson: I don't really understand how you can kill 400 to 500 other people in one night and then decide that guy is going to cause us too much fucking grief.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It really depends on the size of the person.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You know, it depends on how big they are.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, instead, Papen was made ambassador to Austria and shipped off where he could cause no more trouble. And Hitler didn't really care about ambassador to Austria anyway, because in his mind, Austria was only a couple years away from being a part of Germany.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh, yes.
--:-- Marcus Parks: These men, however, had it the easiest during the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler's true enemies were given brutal, showy deaths. And Hitler took this opportunity to settle long-standing scores. For example, the man who had given the speech in the beer hall when Hitler attempted his failed coup a decade earlier, he was found in a swamp near Dachau, hacked to death by pickaxes, even though he'd long since retired from politics.
--:-- Ed Larson: Seems like these guys really know how to hold a grudge.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Sent a message, too.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Even former allies were killed. They murdered the guy who helped edit Mein Kampf.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, spelling errors?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. Don't you fucking dare me. Zare, Zare, and Zare are going to be however I spell it. It's a forever. I choose to spare them. My struggle, I sound like a bitch. I'm the old name. The long one. I like the long one. It loses the context. But you just bring it down to my struggle. None of you get anything that I do. None of you appreciate my energy.
--:-- Marcus Parks: The actual reason why Hitler had this man killed was because this guy was going around telling people that he knew the real reason why Hitler's lover and niece had died by suicide.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: That's not something you say.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, no, that's the thing. He's getting rid of gossips. And for that, this guy was found dead in a forest with his neck broken and three bullets in his heart.
--:-- Ed Larson: There might have been something to that gossip.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. The Night of the Long Knives was so... yeah, that's the thing. Sounds like there might have been something that maybe Hitler actually did kill her. Because that's one of the other theories, is that Hitler flew into a rage one night and murdered her, and they covered it up.
--:-- Ed Larson: I don't know, Marcus. It doesn't sound like him. I can't even imagine. I can't even see him doing that.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, the Night of the Long Knives was so violent and reckless that some people actually ended up dying by accident. A music critic for a Munich paper, for example, was taken away by SS men, and the critic's body was returned to his home four days later in a coffin. This was highly confusing to his family, because the victim was not in any way political. As it turned out, the critic simply had the same name as an SA leader who had been marked for death. But the SA guy had already been killed by another SS squad by the time the critic was murdered.
--:-- Ed Larson: Honestly, I'm not even that angry. He only gave two stars to "A Visit from the Goon Squad." He only gave two stars and that's the fucking travesty. He says that Judy Garland was uninspired. Un-fucking-believable.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: To the camps. He wrote "Oopsie strudel" on his casket. Oopsie strudel.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Now, even though the Night of the Long Knives was messy, it was ingeniously used by Hitler once he worked up the nerve. See, at first, Hitler was terrified that he'd gone too far and he spent days refusing to address the Reichstag. But when he finally did go to the public, he fully admitted to ordering the murders of dozens of men saying, "It's my bad. It's on me. If you want to blame anyone, blame me. I told him to do it." But he said he did it for the good of Germany. It's like, you hated the SA, right? Were you scared of those guys? They sucked, you know? So you know what I did?
--:-- Marcus Parks: I did you all a favor, and I took care of them for you.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, and everyone was like, "In a while. Wow. Well, okay, wow. Holy shit."
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Like, "Oh my God. Thank Christ we don't have to worry about all those Nazis anymore."
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, like maybe now that you've done—
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: But the Nazis got rid of the Nazis.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, you broke this to me, and I had no idea, because I thought that he came out and proudly proclaimed that we got rid of the communist threat. I didn't realize that everyone thought that he had killed all the really bad Nazis.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah. And now there would only be the quote unquote "fake reasonable Nazis."
--:-- Marcus Parks: That's what won over the majority. It's like the— what is it, the bomb? You know, when you're talking about negotiations, like tell someone something really bad and then bring it back.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And that's what Hitler did. Make things really awful. That's actually what a lot of these people do— you make things really awful in the country, within the country itself. You create chaos. You create division. You create it. And everyone's looking around saying, "Why is all this happening? What's going on here?" And then you solve the problem that you created. And then people go, "Oh my God, look at him. He's so wonderful. He solved all of our problems." No, he created the problems. And then he murdered a bunch of people and did a bunch of illegal shit in order to take those problems away. We would have been much better off if you never would have voted him in office in the first place.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: I will say it does remind me a lot of like— you know, like you bat into a country— but it's an extremely good way of getting out of a long dead relationship with a girl. If you got to get out of there, you just make it hostile. You make it bad in the relationship and then she leaves. Eventually.
--:-- Ed Larson: Eventually, yeah. We all know that's the case.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Oh yeah. People don't stay in marriages for decades upon decades until death.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, just waiting.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Honestly, this can be used in that fact as well. Like someone who beats somebody and beats him and beats him and beats him and then gives him an ice pack and says, "Oh, I helped you get better."
--:-- Marcus Parks: Exactly. Exactly.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Mine was more of the idea of not going and not being fun on vacation.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah. That's what I meant.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And incredibly, it worked. It worked fucking perfectly. The German people breathed a sigh of relief. "We don't have to worry about the Nazis anymore. Thank Christ." And they were even more relieved when Hitler officially disbanded the SA. They're like, "Smooth sailing from here on out. We're going to finally get on track. Things are going to finally start happening around here."
--:-- But little did the German people know that what Hitler was replacing the SA with was far worse. As a reward for a job well done with the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler made the SS completely independent, with Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich leading it. These two men were answerable to only Hitler himself. And since Hitler was very lazy and didn't like to read briefings or go over shit, Heinrich Himmler pretty much had total freedom to carry out his most heinous policies. From that point forward, Dachau was used as the model concentration camp for mass expansion, and nearly a hundred more would be established over the next five years. Before the war even started, there were a hundred concentration camps in Germany.
--:-- Himmler, meanwhile, was as proud and as happy as he could be. He had his 35th birthday party at Dachau.
--:-- Ed Larson: God damn.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Do you think that there's— do you get like free pizza?
--:-- Marcus Parks: Well, they did actually. Gudrun was talking about the gifts that she got when she went there and stuff like that.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, how much she loved Dachau.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Again, we've used *The Zone of Interest*. They try to make it real comfortable.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, those kids had a great time until, of course, the jawbones start floating down the river when you're having a nice schwimm.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Himmler's ultimate vision, however, was not just about extermination. It was also about the creation of Germany's own myth, a Nazi religion.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yay.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And it's with the lengths that Himmler went to in order to establish that religion that we return next week, with all of the horrific things that happened as a result.
--:-- Ed Larson: That's where I get to talk a lot.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Excited to start talking about that. Wewelsburg.
--:-- Ed Larson: I got a visit.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, you can. I want to go. It's open.
--:-- Ed Larson: Wewelsburg?
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Wewelsburg. It's right here.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, no, buddy, buddy. We'll get into Wewelsburg next week.
--:-- Marcus Parks: The Ahnenerbe, the expeditions, all of Himmler's wonderful, wonderful ideas and how they shaped Germany over basically the next five years and the lead up to war. So I hope you guys enjoyed that laugh a minute. That was the last podcast of the live. We're coming back next week with a little bit more Himmler. But until then, you go to patreon.com slash lastpodcastontheleft and you can watch— just yak and chop it up about Himmler for the rest of your life. LPOTL for all the socials. Are you going to YouTube for all the other rest of the horseshit someplace underneath? LPN Romantasy, The Foreign Report, No Dogs in Space, and LPN TV. Look out for— we have several gigantic announcements coming.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: You're going to have— I'm just going to just tease that there might be a second season of *Hoop-A-Goo* on the scene.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, and it might be coursing over the horizon very, very soon.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Just so you know, we got a lot of stuff coming out of the Laugh Factory and we want to say thank you for everything you've given over the years. And if you want to watch this podcast in video form, go to patreon.com slash lastpodcastontheleft, where you can also watch our stream every Tuesday at 6 p.m. PST. You can watch it live and actually interact on the chat and you can tell us things.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: And Henry might read them. I do. If they're funny.
--:-- Ed Larson: If they're funny enough to get past the screenings.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, if they're funny enough to get past Gurney, they get to me.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And then lastpodcastandleft.com, we have a bunch of new dates.
--:-- Ed Larson: Yeah, we do. Oh, shit.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, next week we're going to be in Oakland. Come out. That's going to be a fucking shit ton of fun. I can't wait for Oakland. I never got to party there. I'm very excited to go to the Fox Theater. It's truly a beautiful theater.
--:-- Ed Larson: Awesome city.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Yeah, this is going to be October 25th. That's next week. And then also, of course, Akron, Ohio. Not Cleveland, on November 29th. We're going to be at the Goodyear Theater. And then Portland on December 13th and 12th.
--:-- Ed Larson: Again, remember that Cleveland? Remember that Cleveland? You're fucked! We're going to Akron!
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: It's not Cleveland! Not Cleveland on November 29th. Not Cleveland on November 29th. We're going to be at the Goodyear Theater. And then Portland on December 13th and 12th. Again, remember that Cleveland? Remember that Cleveland? You're fucked. We're going to Akron.
--:-- Ed Larson: Everybody loves Akron. It's your own fault.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: We're going to the home of the Kraps.
--:-- Ed Larson: Hey! That's where the Kraps are from. That's right.
--:-- Marcus Parks: And tickets are now available for all our 2026 dates. We got January 31st, Philadelphia. February 28th, Austin, Texas. March 13th, Indianapolis. April 25th, Cincinnati, Ohio. The Taft Theatre.
--:-- Ed Larson: Oh, it's such a fat theater.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Then we got May 29th, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. June 27th, Grand Rapids, Michigan. July 17th, Tulsa, Oklahoma. And July 18th, Oklahoma City.
--:-- Ed Larson: And you know where that is? Oklahoma.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yep. And I can't wait to be there because we're going to go down to those honky-tonks just like we did the last time, Marcus. And we're going to start a fight with a couple of cowboys.
--:-- Ed Larson: I think I'm just going to hang out with my buddy Tommy this time.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Nah, dude. We went out. We almost got into a bit of a dust up.
--:-- Ed Larson: Well, I'm going to go and I'm going to kiss them all.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, dude. I'm going to roam them. I'm going to roam all over these Oklahomans. We're going to suck you cowboys until you're fun. Oklahoma, you know what I'm saying.
--:-- Ed Larson: I just want to hang out with Tommy.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah, we're going to suck them. We're going to fuck our way through OKC. So see you there.
--:-- Ed Larson: And we're starting with Tommy.
--:-- Marcus Parks: Hail Satan, everyone. Again. Hail Josef Hartinger.
--:-- Ed Larson: Also know that Heinrich Himmler's birthday was October 7th. If that makes you feel like anything.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: Yeah. That's nice. It's interesting. So happy birthday.
--:-- Ed Larson: It's not his birthday. He's dead.
--:-- Henry Zebrowski: When did he die? That's the day I want to celebrate.
--:-- Ed Larson: Not soon enough.
