--:-- Marcus: There's no place to escape to. This is the Last on the Left.
--:-- Henry: That's when the cannibalism started.
--:-- Marcus: So today's episode, you don't want me to play every member of the Einsatzgruppen, because I had a couple of guys locked and loaded.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, there was the guy that went like, "Over there, there's more over there." And there was the guy that...
--:-- Ed: The Mexican one?
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would have been great.
--:-- Ed: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
--:-- Marcus: And then the Mumblemouth one? Did you have a Borat one?
--:-- Henry: Yeah, well, he's different. He's the funny victim.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, he's the funny guy. Oh, forget it.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, yeah.
--:-- Henry: And then you have the Mumblemouth guy. It's all like... you know that guy?
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, yeah, that guy. They always have that guy, but I'm not doing that.
--:-- Marcus: I thought not.
--:-- Marcus: Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with the oddly reserved Henry Zebrowski.
--:-- Henry: Historically accurate Henry Zebrowski.
--:-- Marcus: Today is going to be a difficult episode. There's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of horror in today's episode. This is the worst episode of the Heinrich Himmler series. But I want to say there is a silver lining to all of the horrible things that you're about to hear.
--:-- Henry: Let's hear it. What is the silver lining, Henry?
--:-- Henry: We also have Ed Larson. How you doing?
--:-- Ed: Yeah, I've been watching these fucking movies. What's the silver lining?
--:-- Henry: Is that this is a big day for Marcus.
--:-- Henry: And he's been wanting to tell this story for a long time, since the beginning of Last Podcast on the Left.
--:-- Marcus: It is. You know, as a little boy growing up in Texas, you hope this day's going to come, but you just never know. You don't know until it's actually here, until it actually happens. And it's here. It's here. So today, we want to say Happy Einsatzgruppen Day to Marcus Parks. And we just want to, first of all, let's give him some gifts right up top.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, we brought gifts for you for whenever it gets too hard today, because I know how much this has been on you.
--:-- Marcus: No, no, this has been an extraordinarily difficult week.
--:-- Henry: So here's the first one I got. It's very cute. It's a pin of a pigeon, and it says, "I poop on fascists."
--:-- Marcus: See? That's wonderful, and especially because Heinrich Himmler famously had the pigeon's chest. There you go. Thank you.
--:-- Ed: That's very sweet. Eddie, and I bought you this pickaxe.
--:-- Ed: For your garden. When it gets too rough, you know, you got to break up the rocks.
--:-- Marcus: Actually, this is extraordinarily useful. Thank you. Do you have something like that?
--:-- Ed: Not in handheld. Not like one that I can use.
--:-- Marcus: I have a pickaxe that I use with both hands, but not one with one hand.
--:-- Henry: Because you get excited. You pull it back too fast, right in the eyeball.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah. No, I know. Yeah.
--:-- Henry: Okay, good. So we'll set the tone. We're gonna send it positive right up top.
--:-- Ed: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
--:-- Henry: And if it gets too stressful, you just grab the piss pickaxe and...
--:-- Marcus: Pissaxe? Pickaxe.
--:-- Henry: Pickaxe, and you just hold it and you feel good about yourself.
--:-- Marcus: I might just hold on to it. It's really nice. For the camera, you know, I like to fiddle with things.
--:-- Henry: No, I know. Well, I might have made a mistake. What do you say? What do you see? What you got coming later, man? You got some... it's very exciting day.
--:-- Ed: Yeah, we'll see. I was doing a little research myself this week. I watched a film, *Unfinished*... very funny. And then it's kind of crazy when they do that whole breakdance rap battle.
--:-- Ed: It seemed unnecessary for the propaganda, but ahead of its time. And then I also watched *Triumph of the Will*, which is Hitler's movie, which he is a producer.
--:-- Ed: I know. That's why he has a higher IMDB rating than me. Have you seen it? *Triumph of the Will*?
--:-- Ed: No, I mostly watched it. There was like a jerk-off booth he used to go to. So I've only seen it in sections.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
--:-- Henry: You didn't have enough quarters to finish it.
--:-- Ed: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I've been watching it. I rented it from the rental store.
--:-- Ed: And as soon as I rented it, I was like, "Oh, fuck, that's on my file, huh?"
--:-- Ed: Just wait for the "You May Likes" that are coming in your future. But yeah, no, it's really... if you haven't seen *Triumph of the Will*, let me save you some time. It's like 80% waving.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, dude.
--:-- Ed: It's just them waving at each other. The first half hour is just heils.
--:-- Ed: And, you know, Hitler, very feminine heil.
--:-- Henry: Well, that's the thing. He does the backwards heil because he's receiving. He's the bottom. He is to be receiving heils.
--:-- Marcus: He really does it. He's very flippant with his heils. I would expect him to be stricter.
--:-- Henry: He works his shoulder. He's flippant with it because he had to do so many of them. Imagine every single person you come across all day long, you have to do it again. Like, whatever. 100,000 heils. This is a lot of people there.
--:-- Marcus: Absolutely, but that's the Malcolm Gladwell expertise that he had at it.
--:-- Ed: Yeah. I can wait for my next viewing.
--:-- Marcus: So when we last left Heinrich Himmler, the Nazis had expanded their borders eastward with the annexations of Austria and Czechoslovakia. And because the great nations of Europe were doing anything and everything to avoid a repeat of the Great War, Hitler had managed to nab both countries without resorting to open warfare.
--:-- Henry: Of course, but Hitler also wanted to go to war. He was very disappointed when England gave Czechoslovakia over. He wanted to go to war.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, because this is the idea of asking to be punched in the face. But while England and France had basically given Hitler whatever he wanted in order to ostensibly avoid bloodshed, they could not have imagined the pure hell that Heinrich Himmler was about to unleash upon Eastern Europe, all in the name of making so-called living space for his fictional Aryan brethren.
--:-- Now, as I mentioned last episode, Austria believed that they would become an equal part of the Reich after they were annexed. But the Austrians very quickly fell under the boot of the Nazis, just like everyone who ever threw in their lot with Hitler. See, since Adolf Hitler's economic policies were so incredibly nonsensical, Germany had to steal what they needed to fund and fuel the coming war. And Austria's food resources were rich. But in order to take what they needed, Germany had to use Heinrich Himmler's SS to take control of Austria's government.
--:-- Henry: I know it's not true, but why do I just view all Austrian food as like big, cream-filled pastries and thick sausages?
--:-- Ed: There's lots of strudels and kudels and oodles and noodles.
--:-- Henry: Right? They're heavy meals, yeah.
--:-- Marcus: Whatever the case, the master delegator Himmler gave the job of bringing Austria under total German control to his second-in-command, Reinhard Heydrich, who was just as evil as Himmler himself. Using men from the Gestapo, Heydrich formed a new kind of unit that would operate within newly annexed countries to secure government buildings and documents, grill senior civil servants for information, and arrest communists. Now, in English, the name of Heydrich's new unit loosely translated to "Action Group."
--:-- Henry: Hey, I'm part of the Action Group. It is cute. Hey, look at me, I'm part of the Action Group. I jump, I skip, all sorts of actions. Oh, what am I supposed to do? Oh, no. That's hard to do on a skateboard.
--:-- Marcus: But as the Nazis continued their conquest of Europe and marched further east, Heydrich's Action Group would evolve to become one of Himmler's most effective tools for carrying out his long plans surrounding Lebensraum and the Final Solution. As a result, the Action Group would bear the weight of being the most brutal, cruel, and murderous gang of men to ever walk the earth. History, of course, would remember them better by their German name. They called them the Einsatzgruppen.
--:-- Henry: Yay! Back, Jack, do it again. Why does it feel like that?
--:-- Marcus: Alright, now we're settling to the easy, groovy tunes of the Einsatzgruppen.
--:-- Henry: Steely Dan really would have helped them out a lot.
--:-- Ed: Well, you know who would have helped them a lot?
--:-- Ed: Old Himmler. We'll get there.
--:-- Henry: God, I'm waiting, guys. I am waiting for her more. I don't know when it can be useful in this episode, but I need her.
--:-- Marcus: Since the original purpose of the Einsatzgruppen was to act beyond Germany's borders, they were somewhat put on ice after Austria and Czechoslovakia came under full Nazi control. They were, after all, an action group. And the action to come for the Nazis lay in the inevitable invasion of Poland and the enactment of the Final Solution. But before the Nazis could begin exterminating every Jewish person on earth, Heinrich Himmler had to answer the so-called Jewish question within the borders of Germany itself. And as the march to war got ever closer, attacks on Germany's Jewish population only got worse.
--:-- Now, the pogroms on Germany's Jews came in fits and starts, so as to not upset the middle-class Germans too much. But Himmler's quest to rid Germany of its Jewish population was not without its practical considerations. Remember, fascists are essentially criminal gangs, mobs even. And starting in 1938, Heinrich Himmler began taking wealthy Jews hostage so the SS could acquire their property and riches, partly to fund the upcoming war with the rest of Europe and partly to make it look like the Nazis knew what they were doing economically.
--:-- Henry: You just can't fuck with doctors like that. You need doctors.
--:-- Marcus: It's... well, that was actually one of the things that enabled the Nazis to gain more power. Because the Jewish doctors and the Jewish lawyers were very, very, very good. So when the Jewish doctors and lawyers got taken off the board, all the German lawyers and doctors were raised up and got all of their clients. We kind of talked about this last time. It's a mediocrity machine. The whole thing is, that's like what the brain drain is, right?
--:-- Now there would be public outcries in response to actions like the ransoming of Germany's Jews. But the Nazis had a very keen eye for just how much the public could take. If the heat got too high, the Nazis would strategically pause their attacks on Jews until the public lost interest. Then, once people moved on from the plight of the Jews, the Nazis would restart the whole process. And doing this over and over again gradually got the people of Germany used to the idea of pogroms. Eventually, it almost became routine.
--:-- Henry: Like, "Ah, jeez, here's another pogrom. Close the fucking window."
--:-- Ed: It did get very loud.
--:-- Henry: Just wait for it to pass and be fine. I don't know the word "pogrom." This is a very funny thing because Marcus and I... not pogroms... but it's a very funny concept. Because Marcus and I had this very conversation this morning. Because I was in the bath watching my Nazi documentaries, as you do. Literally had to go dry off the bubbles. I need those fudges. I literally had to go and type in "fudges pogrom." And then I'm on YouTube just watching clips of what is a pogrom mixed with Hank the Angry Dwarf. I almost texted you and you'd be like, "You misspelled 'program' a lot, you idiot. You fucking idiot."
--:-- Marcus: It's very simple. A pogrom is a concentrated attack on a Jewish population made by a group of people. It's one of those things where concentrated attacks on Jews became so normal and happened so often that they needed to create a word for it. It's a word that shouldn't exist.
--:-- Henry: Yes, exactly.
--:-- Marcus: Yes, exactly. Like, a genocide is made up of pogroms. Many pogroms make up a genocide.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, and they were also the people who founded America. Thanksgiving's coming up.
--:-- Marcus: Hit him with the pickaxe.
--:-- Henry: That's why I got you that weapon.
--:-- Marcus: But just as we saw recently with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Nazis were given an excuse to openly wage war on the Jewish population of Germany when a single act of violence was perpetrated by a Jew who was upset about what the Nazis were doing. On November 7th, 1938, a 17-year-old German refugee who had been banished to France walked into the German embassy in Paris with the intent of murdering the German ambassador. Instead, the refugee shot and killed a minor German diplomat. He was immediately captured, but the Nazis found a note in the refugee's pocket saying that he'd committed the murder as an act of protest against Germany's treatment of its Jews.
--:-- Now, while the refugee's intentions were, I mean, I guess good, the act of violence he perpetrated did absolutely nothing to help him or the Jews in Germany.
--:-- Henry: You're dealing with an army and a legion of serial killers.
--:-- Marcus: Yes. In fact, it gave the Nazis the perfect excuse to say, "Look, the Jews are dangerous. They are coming to kill us all, and something must finally be done." As a result, the Nazis organized their first state-sponsored pogrom within just two days of the diplomat's murder. This brutal night in which the gloves were finally taken off came to be known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of the Broken Glass.
--:-- Henry: Some of their names are great. You know, like "Action Group" is fucking stupid. But again, there's something in the childishness of it that makes it extra scary. Like Proud Boy.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, yeah.
--:-- Henry: Well, I think they're not scary. They're not. Don't even try to compare the Proud Boys to the Action Group. They would fucking draw and quarter them. Those Proud Boys wish they were the Action Group.
--:-- Ed: Yeah, the Proud Boys were allowed to be fat.
--:-- Marcus: I actually think "Kristallnacht" came from the Jews. I don't think it was a Nazi creation. I think it came from the people who suffered. Great writers.
--:-- Henry: And honestly, it would absolutely go on to inspire Debbie Harry with her first rap classic. We all know that is one of the biggest missteps of World War II.
--:-- Marcus: On one single night of horror, some 7,500 Jewish shops were destroyed and set on fire, along with hundreds of synagogues and Jewish homes, while dozens of Jews were shot dead while trying to escape the burning buildings. It was called Kristallnacht because all of the glass had been broken in all of the shops. Once the night was over, Joseph Goebbels' propaganda machine went into full effect by claiming that the pogrom had been a spontaneous demonstration by the German people. Later, of course, secret documents would prove that Kristallnacht had been fully organized by Heinrich Himmler's Gestapo and his number two man, Reinhard Heydrich.
--:-- Henry: Man, that fucked up. Because like, you know, my Jewish family, if you got even close to the curio cabinet, they would freak out. You got anywhere near the Schwartzky crystals, you're fucked.
--:-- Ed: Did you have the room you couldn't enter?
--:-- Henry: Oh, my God, I had two. I don't know why. I don't know why our grandparents thought of that. The idea that there was one sacred room that I guess we're waiting for the president to come to the house.
--:-- Ed: The room that we had, the room we couldn't go in, was like it only housed the Christmas tree. So like 11 months of the year, we never used the room. And then the other room that we had was so my father could call his mistresses.
--:-- Henry: Oh, hey, he pays the bills.
--:-- Marcus: Now, after Goebbels' propaganda network used the murder of the German diplomat to justify and even openly encourage violence against Jews, at long last, pogroms became Nazi state policy. And it was all because an act of violence had given the Nazis the opportunity they had been waiting for. They knew something like this would happen. But the worst immediate consequence of Kristallnacht was that some 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps during the chaos. Almost 11,000 Jews landed in Dachau, and there the so-called Dachau spirit was taken to the next level.
--:-- See, in the SS, in the continued evolution of Dachau's frat boy atmosphere, they'd come across a new game called "Dance, Jew." In this... I really don't know how else to fucking deliver that, but that's what it's called. That's the fact, yeah. In this, a stake was driven into the ground and Jewish prisoners were forced at gunpoint to dance around the stake until they got dizzy. But if they stumbled too close to the guards, they would be shot and killed.
--:-- Henry: And that's the funny part of the game, right? That's what you're saying is the funny part of the game.
--:-- Marcus: According to Himmler's SS, yes, that is the funny part of the game.
--:-- Henry: Comedy is subjective. It is.
--:-- Ed: You know, I can't help but think, with all their reckless killing of Jews, like, did they ever miss and accidentally hit a Nazi?
--:-- Marcus: All the time. That actually happened quite often.
--:-- Ed: Well, you know, good.
--:-- Marcus: Another Jewish prisoner sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht was forced to eat his own feces, which led him to hanging himself that night. Another prisoner took a break during a long work day, so the SS punished him by throwing him into a cement mixer until the constant tumbling finally killed him, probably down to a broken neck.
--:-- Henry: That literally would have happened to Mr. Magoo. But we haven't seen David Fincher's *Mr. Magoo*. And I do think that that's the IP that we're looking for.
--:-- Henry: The bumbling, iron-hearted blind man.
--:-- Ed: You know, this is actually one of the trainings they would do in *Cobra Kai*. In the show *Cobra Kai*.
--:-- Ed: Yeah, Johnny threw the kids in a cement mixer.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, dude. Don't do that. Don't do that. Do you realize? And he looks like a Nazi. He literally had no idea what they were referencing.
--:-- Marcus: Now, from Heinrich Himmler's perspective, things could not have been going better. After Kristallnacht and the following pogroms...
--:-- Henry: Everything's coming up Himmler!
--:-- Marcus: Himmler could see that while not all of Germany had been turned into bloodthirsty beasts, there were more than enough Germans on Himmler's wavelength to move forward with his plans of Lebensraum. Hitler, of course, saw the same. And in January of 1939, he gave a speech at the Reichstag declaring that the Nazis were ready to declare a world war—those were Hitler's words—against international Jewry. And thus the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe could commence. This, of course, meant that the time to begin the march east was nigh. And it was all set to begin with the invasion of the country with which Germany shared their eastern border: the long-suffering Poland.
--:-- Even though the British and the French had given away Czechoslovakia in an attempt to appease Hitler, praying that he would stop there, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain finally drew a line with Poland.
--:-- Henry: You won't go anywhere near those villains, people.
--:-- Marcus: Neville Chamberlain was just the worst.
--:-- Henry: I would say a misunderstood character of history. He was the worst and he also wasn't the worst at the same time. Because he was inundated with letters from so many people just saying, "I don't do this. Please don't do this." He thought that after the Munich Conference, in which he gave away Czechoslovakia—or gave away the Sudetenland, to be technically correct—he was met with tears and cries. Everyone, America, Canada, wants to fight. No one wants to do that shit again. It just happened.
--:-- Henry: And they all thought that he'd done a great job. And the way he had described Czechoslovakia, what was the famous line? He said it was "a quarrel in a faraway land between people of whom we know nothing. Why would we restart World War I for that?"
--:-- Ed: When you come for the pierogies, that's too much.
--:-- Marcus: Exactly, dude.
--:-- Henry: Everybody loves pierogies. That is what binds every society. Has a pierogie. And I actually believe that the pierogie was the first of all... yeah, sure, Asia, whatever. Boiled bread. And it's great. It's wonderful, yeah.
--:-- Marcus: But with Poland, you know, Germany had their eye on the free city of Danzig.
--:-- Henry: Mother! That's what they said when the Nazis arrived.
--:-- Marcus: Neville Chamberlain said, "Hey, if you do anything with Poland, if you cross the Polish border, Britain is going to respond with force." In reply to Chamberlain's declaration, Hitler flew into a rage against the British and in private was reported to have shouted, quote, "I will cook them a stew they will choke on!"
--:-- Henry: Yeah. It's almost nice. Very thick stew, Adolf. Thank you very much. A very hotty meal in the middle of the wind.
--:-- Henry: Yes, it's filled with rocks.
--:-- Ed: Then you must have braised this for a very long time, because these rocks are indeed succulent and can separate with a fork.
--:-- Marcus: And so by June of 1939, all of the Third Reich's ministers had come together to formulate a plan for total war against Poland. Hermann Goering drafted 7 million Germans for his labor needs, while Heinrich Himmler leaned on the slave labor of the concentration camps for his part of the plan. Himmler, of course, aimed to increase the amount of slave labor in the future by capturing and enslaving anyone in Eastern Europe that he wasn't planning on killing immediately, meaning that the more lands the Nazis conquered, the more powerful they would become.
--:-- Totally in secret, though, Hitler had begun talks with the Soviet Union's dictator, Joseph Stalin. See, even though the communists were the Nazis' most hated enemies outside of the Jews, Hitler still made a non-aggression pact with Stalin in August of 1939. In this pact, the two dictators agreed to divide Poland in half. Germany gets the west, Russia gets the east. This, of course, gave Hitler some breathing room for the Nazis' ultimate plan. In its logical conclusion, Lebensraum was to include the entirety of the Soviet Union, whose population was set to be either enslaved or murdered.
--:-- Henry: Hey! That's a big job. That's a hard job, Marcus.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, it's incredibly hard and it's incredibly big. But the thing is that Heinrich Himmler in 1939, the plans are already in motion to actually make it happen. He believes that he can make it happen. And throughout the summer of 1939, Adolf Hitler gave speeches in which he began whipping up the German people against Poland, just like he turned them against the Jews with Kristallnacht and the communists with the Reichstag fire. Turning Germany against Poland was a necessity because a significant number of German civilians and German generals, many people within the Wehrmacht, they did not want the sort of war that the Nazis wanted. Hitler, however, needed the people on his side if he was going to succeed in conquering not just Poland, but eventually the Soviet Union and all of Europe.
--:-- Henry: Poland's hard, you know. They're tough.
--:-- Ed: Yeah, they're tough boys. They could take some hits.
--:-- Henry: That's the thing with Poland. The most conquered people in history.
--:-- Ed: I know. We just kind of like it in a way. You know what I mean? We're just kind of like, "Eh."
--:-- Henry: But they fight.
--:-- Henry: I just think they like it.
--:-- Henry: They like to fight.
--:-- Ed: Oh, I thought you were just victim-blaming the Polish.
--:-- Henry: No, no, no. Never, no. We're the victims. But yeah, as a person who has been in a couple of fights, you know, we can take punches.
--:-- Ed: You really can. I lived in Greenpoint for five years, a Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn, and I saw some Poles take some fucking hits.
--:-- Ed: They like to fall down and hit their foreheads against the city street, fueled by alcohol.
--:-- Marcus: Now, over the course of the summer of '39, a plan was formulated to convince the German people that the Polish were planning to attack them. And the operation they created was named after the man behind it. As a result, World War II, the most destructive war in history, was kicked off with a plan called Operation Himmler.
--:-- Henry: I knew one day I would see my name in light.
--:-- Marcus: In Operation Himmler, the Nazis planned dozens of false flag attacks on the German-Polish border at radio, railway, communications, and customs stations. To make the claim convincing, though, they needed photographic evidence, so Himmler ordered the Gestapo to dress concentration camp prisoners in Polish military uniforms before killing them and mutilating their faces so they couldn't be identified. These corpses were then left behind at the supposed sites of Polish aggression to make it look as if Polish saboteurs had been responsible for acts of terrorism that had actually been perpetrated by who else but the Nazis themselves. And as it went time and again, the German people totally fell for it.
--:-- And once Hitler felt he had the support of the German people at large, or at least enough of them, the Nazis launched the brutal Blitzkrieg invasion of Poland on September 1st, 1939. The UK quickly made good on their previous promises to back Poland, and when France joined in against the Nazis as well, the European theater of World War II was open for business.
--:-- Henry: And they're shooting into the woods! We love a musical. It helps with the donors.
--:-- Ed: I want to know, when did the Nazis start the process of doing the meth?
--:-- Marcus: Oh, that was before. Way before the invasion of Poland. So this is all fueled by meth, too.
--:-- Ed: I was just watching an interview with that guy from *Blitzed*, and he would talk about how he got some of the old Nazi meth. And he took it and he was like, "Still works." He said he found it, he went searching for it, and he said it's not as powerful. But he sat with a buddy on a roof and they both... he ate one and he was like, "I didn't really feel anything." Then he ate two, then he ate three. And then all of a sudden he was like... they were watching the river, they were in Amsterdam, and they were watching boats go along the river. He's like, "I began to feel the surge, the power within me. I connected with the boats and the water. I was one with them." And he's like, "That's the Nazi army."
--:-- Henry: He just got Predator vision. They were all given Predator vision. They were so incredibly focused on "the war must go on, we must push as far as possible."
--:-- Ed: I like... I know I'm not exactly sure how much it was used in Poland, but I do know that meth was how the Nazis were able to take France. Like, how they were able to just fucking keep going and going and going because it was all meth. They were all messed out.
--:-- Henry: But then again, it shows about work-life balance because they got burnout.
--:-- Henry: Was meth illegal?
--:-- Marcus: No, absolutely not.
--:-- Henry: No, no, it was...
--:-- Marcus: Everyone in Nazi Germany was on meth. But it wasn't like... it wasn't like the meth we have today. It wasn't necessarily crystal meth, but it was very, very close. It was sold in stores. It was manufactured by... I don't know if it was IG Farben who manufactured it exactly, but it was manufactured in plants all across Germany, and they had mechanisms to ensure that the speed didn't stop. The funny thing is that Himmler, actually, he was one of the few people who wasn't on speed. He was very smart. Himmler actually preferred herbs, like natural herbs that were grown at Dachau. He planted an herb garden at Dachau and had the concentration camp prisoners farm it.
--:-- Henry: How nerdy is that fucking bitch shit?
--:-- Marcus: Well, he never gave up farming. He just kept farming until he died. And he failed at it.
--:-- Henry: You can literally just be like, "I finally have grown... self-portrait. Bon potato." But he didn't even do it. He had concentration camp prisoners do it. You know their hearts are not in it.
--:-- Marcus: Fly from your grave.
--:-- Now, once the invasion of Poland was well underway, Adolf Hitler gathered the heads of Himmler's SS and gave them an hours-long speech in which he basically said that Poland was not going to be merely occupied, but destroyed. While the German military would be tasked with taking and holding land in Eastern Europe, Himmler's SS were going to be the men who would finally take the twisted fantasies that Germany's extreme right wing had been talking about for decades and make them a reality.
--:-- Working off Hitler's direct orders, Heinrich Himmler got to work organizing the expulsion of more than 8 million non-Germans from Western Poland to make living space for people of a more Germanic and or Aryan descent. And this was a month after they invaded. The entire railway network of the western half of the country was put to work transporting primarily Jews and Poles out of Nazi-occupied areas. This was an extremely reckless move because the Nazis were simultaneously trying to balance the production of the war itself. But while the generals took care of the war, Heinrich Himmler was taking care of Lebensraum.
--:-- These expelled Poles and Jews were transported to lands within Poland where the coming winter was sure to starve or freeze them to death. And by the end of the season, a hundred thousand people had perished as a result of this action alone.
--:-- Henry: I wonder how much farther all of the Nazi army would have gone if they weren't so concerned with wanton murder.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, I mean, it is really a great question of history. If they were not, like, if there wasn't so many logistics that were going into just the murder.
--:-- Marcus: I mean, that's going to be one of the questions we're going to ask and talk about as this episode goes on. It shows you where the priorities were. And you know what?
--:-- Marcus: They were all messed up.
--:-- Marcus: These Nazis' priorities are just fucking out of whack.
--:-- Henry: Out of whack. Yeah. Also, you look at it after the war, Germany and Japan became nice places.
--:-- Marcus: Well, that's because we hit them with a goddamn newspaper. And with the other one, we hit them twice. It's almost like when you stop trying to kill people all the time, where you live is nice.
--:-- Henry: Yeah. Germany's beautiful. They're both beautiful, wonderful countries.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah. Now at this point, I think it would be helpful to separate Heinrich Himmler and what he was doing from what the German military was doing. The German military, of course, also known as the Wehrmacht. See, while the Wehrmacht was supposedly loyal to the German people and it had plenty of men who hated what the Nazis had done to Germany, Himmler's SS answered solely to the Nazis. In effect, Himmler had created a second army to carry out his and Hitler's personal goals and dreams. On the battlefield, Himmler's bloodthirsty pack of psychopaths were known as the Waffen-SS. But even though the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht were two separate entities, the Wehrmacht often committed war crimes hand-in-hand with Himmler's SS. And this was especially true during the invasion of Poland.
--:-- Henry: Is this still trying to create a form of plausible deniability for the top brass? Is that the idea of making two armies to do two different things?
--:-- Marcus: There's a couple of different reasons. It's "we need two different armies to do two different things," but it's also because it's known that Himmler might have some ambitions towards taking Hitler's spot. So you want to make sure that Himmler is nowhere near the Wehrmacht.
--:-- Henry: Yes. And also, the generals in the Wehrmacht want nothing to do with Himmler because Himmler's not a military man at all. He's just doing mass executions with the worst of the worst. He's just some dickhead.
--:-- Marcus: And the generals are also very displeased that so many resources that could be going towards fighting the actual war are instead going to Heinrich Himmler and all this Lebensraum bullshit.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, there's a weird idealist Nazi stripe that could have come through that said, "We need prisoners for work. We need this." We're killing... that's what we'll get to eventually. It's like, we should be using some of these people. Why are we just killing everyone?
--:-- Marcus: They eventually got to that.
--:-- Marcus: When the SS didn't exist because Germany couldn't have its own huge army? Or by this point are they like, "Fuck it"?
--:-- Henry: Oh, they were long past that. But it was a part of that. Because of the Versailles Treaty, Germany couldn't have a military of any more than 100,000 men. So the SS were a paramilitary group. They could do Hitler and Himmler's bidding, but were not trained militarily and were not recognized as a military force.
--:-- Marcus: In the first few weeks of the invasion, some 50,000 Polish civilians were murdered by the Nazis at large. Over 500 villages and towns were burned as the Wehrmacht marched east, and every captured Polish soldier and police officer was killed in a series of 714 mass executions. In one particularly baffling case, the Nazis rounded up a group of Polish Boy Scouts in the town of Bidaszk, and they had a local priest give the Boy Scouts their last rites, without any explanation as to why or what was going on.
--:-- Henry: The priest was like, "Yep, can't wait, thank you. I never get to do this. I guess it's practice."
--:-- Marcus: Once the priest was done, the Nazis mowed down every last boy scout with a machine gun, and then, to top it off, they shot the fucking priest.
--:-- Henry: Who gave him last rites? Can't give it to yourself.
--:-- Marcus: The Nazis then rounded up all the prominent merchants and tradesmen in town, herded them into the town square, and again, opened fire with their machine guns, without explanation or justification. In contrast to how many Poles were killed—that's 50,000—Germany only lost 5,000 soldiers in those first few weeks. The Nazi propaganda machine, however, used those Nazi deaths to portray the Polish people as vicious murderers standing in the way of Germany's destiny.
--:-- Now, after just three weeks of the sort of killing we just discussed, the Wehrmacht decided that they were maybe not so stoked on directly participating in the wholesale murder of innocent men, women, and children in the pursuit of Lebensraum. It was like, "Hey, can you find somebody else to do this? I don't really like it."
--:-- Henry: It was really fucking with the guys.
--:-- Henry: Because they were doing it one by one by one. People get PTSD for accidentally killing someone in a car accident. I can only imagine what killing a thousand people's like.
--:-- Marcus: Well, for a while, you believe you're serving some greater purpose. But then eventually it starts to be like, "I don't know what us mass killing a bunch of boy scouts is really doing. I don't see how those boy scouts were a direct enemy." And eventually that does begin to wear away at your brain.
--:-- Henry: Yeah. And not just that, but the Wehrmacht is also like, "There's a bridge to take over there. We should be taking that bridge. We should not be concerned. We should be fortifying. We should be moving ahead like we're supposed to. We should be thinking about the economy. Aren't we trying to occupy this land? Why are we destroying all these buildings? Why are we burning all the villages down? Where are we going to go? Where's the Lebensraum going to be?"
--:-- Marcus: Are they sparing the Aryan-looking Polacks?
--:-- Henry: Sometimes, but mostly not. If they were children, then they would usually kill the parents, kidnap the children, and send them back to Germany, where the child's name would be changed and all trace of their ancestry was erased. We actually have no idea how many kids they did that to, just because the records weren't kept. But they did it thousands upon thousands of times.
--:-- Marcus: One day, somehow, one Taylor Swiftenstein made her way into our...
--:-- Henry: And I know that Nazi goddess is trying to destroy this country from the inside out by turning Travis Kelce weak.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, one member of the Kansas City Chiefs. That's the last thing standing in America's way.
--:-- Henry: It will fall! The Union is fragile!
--:-- Marcus: Well, because the Wehrmacht said that they didn't want to participate in the mass killings directly anymore, or at least they didn't want it on their list of jobs to do, Hitler tapped Heinrich Himmler to figure out a better way to achieve Lebensraum. Himmler went to his top generals in the Waffen-SS, and after some discussion, Himmler's second-in-command, Reinhard Heydrich, had an idea. Heydrich remembered how well his ad hoc unit of Gestapo men had performed in bringing Austria to heel after the annexation. So, after some discussion, it was decided that they would resurrect the Einsatzgruppen as a full-time extermination squad.
--:-- Now, the official stated purpose of the Einsatzgruppen was to follow the Wehrmacht and secure the rear areas from resistance fighters and saboteurs. And while they certainly did do that, their true purpose was straight-up murder. The Einsatzgruppen were ordered to find and kill every career politician, every member of the communist party, and every Jew who held anti-views, which in effect was every Jew in existence.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, I want to meet a couple of the pro-Jews. What was that like? That takes a fucking series of mental gymnastics.
--:-- Marcus: I know that there had to have been some...
--:-- Henry: Well, there were plenty of guys that helped out in the ghettos and shit, but sometimes it's because they were also under pressure. Those are people that I don't necessarily blame. When you're put in this whole society of murderers...
--:-- Marcus: Oh, I could see you being fucked up. The Sonderkommandos, though—those guys were pieces of shit.
--:-- Henry: I'm talking about just in general. How do you even find that?
--:-- Marcus: There were people who flipped and saved them, and you're like, "I'm gonna save myself, and I'm gonna turn over as many people as possible." Especially in the ghettos. You wanted to stay away from Sonderkommandos in the ghettos and in the concentration camps as well.
--:-- Marcus: Now, a month after the invasion, Himmler decided that he could use the chaos of the war to enact every aspect of his ultimate plan for purification. So he tasked the Einsatzgruppen with the mass executions of mentally and physically disabled Germans, starting with the children. This extermination came to be known as Action T4, and since the Einsatzgruppen was established as a unit that operated outside of Germany's borders, the victims of Action T4 were transported from Germany by train to occupied Poland, where the Einsatzgruppen could murder them without worrying about German law.
--:-- There was, of course, the matter of what to do with the bodies, because the Germans were still years away from the crematoriums. As it was with everything in Nazi Germany, the process of body disposal evolved as the years went by. For Action T4, for example, an SS officer tasked thousands of Waffen-SS soldiers with sweeping Polish towns for political prisoners. Once captured, those political prisoners were forced to dig mass graves for the disabled and so-called mentally ill victims of Action T4. After the pits were dug out in the wilds of Poland, the Einsatzgruppen lined up 3,500 German citizens in front of the pits and shot them. All so the bodies could easily fall backward into the mass grave the Polish prisoners had dug.
--:-- Henry: That's more than 9/11.
--:-- Marcus: Yes, it is. By about 500.
--:-- Henry: That's crazy.
--:-- Marcus: And that's just one day.
--:-- Marcus: Well, 9/11 was just a couple hours.
--:-- Henry: Thank you. You're right. 114 minutes.
--:-- Marcus: Yes, yes, yes, we all know. One beautiful Tuesday morning. To keep the men on the ground stoked on all this mass murder, Himmler and the other Nazi leaders again and again emphasized the concept of hardness. Hardness, they said, was a virtue. One that officers and soldiers had to maintain so that Germany and its Aryan bloodlines could survive.
--:-- Henry: That's what Himmler kept saying to his awful wife back home. He kept saying the idea of "it's hard work" and "it's a hard process" and "it's all hard." Everything's hard except for my penis.
--:-- Marcus: German soldiers were conditioned to believe that Jews, communists, Romani—pretty much anyone who wasn't Aryan—they were all a relentless threat to Germany. The criminals, the rapists, etc. But if the Nazis could truly believe that the threat was not only real but existential, then the perpetrators of mass murder would have license to interpret their own violence as purely defensive. If it was defensive, the violence was not only justified, but in their minds, unavoidable.
--:-- This mindset created a refrain that was repeated over and over again in the Nuremberg trials, in which some, but not anywhere near enough, Nazis answered for their crimes. But rather than "we were just following orders"—which is the one that everyone always comes back to with the Nazis—a more common response from the Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg trials as to why they did what they did was, "It was the only thing we could do." They said that over and over again.
--:-- Henry: It was the only thing we could do. There's a bake sale, there's a fucking talent show, there's a repertory company.
--:-- Marcus: They've been conditioned to believe that they had no choice but to commit mass murder in order to survive. They truly believed that they were all coming for them.
--:-- Henry: It's wild that everyone was just so ready to give up their own people. Because invading Poland or Czechoslovakia or Austria is another country—you can almost get behind that. But when you start just killing the guy bagging groceries, how do you get behind that shit?
--:-- Marcus: What they have successfully done is attach your blood to the country. They have attached those two. So in some way in your brain, you do begin to believe that those that are within your country that are not of Aryan blood are people from another country. They don't belong in this society.
--:-- Henry: Not just that, but Hitler said again and again, and the propaganda said, that the Jews are a people without a country. They merely come in and they're parasites.
--:-- Marcus: I'm more thinking of the handicapped right now, to be honest with you. It's just crazy to me. As a society, as human beings, we've always kind of had issues with handling people with handicaps. So this was, sadly, a more digestible beginning for this because there's a little of "these unfortunates." And there were a lot of people in Germany that were like, "This is fucked up. Don't do it. Stop doing this. That's my little brother."
--:-- Henry: Yeah. Her lore was just like, "No, Chad, you want to take him to the playground, Chad." She was so upset. She was watching so many kids—49 kids, each one with different legs. But then the Nazis would do what they always did and they would pull back just a little bit. "Alright, alright, we won't do it anymore." But then once people weren't looking, they started killing more and more. For example, Irmin Schmidt—pretty much the man behind the krautrock band Can—his mother was killed in Action T4.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, and that definitely fucked him up. Just like Nazi Germany fucked up every member of Can in one way or another. They never got over it.
--:-- Marcus: They actually didn't. You can hear it in that.
--:-- Henry: Not every fucking experimental song just sounds like...
--:-- Marcus: Because that's what you do every time and it's not even close. There's not a single Can song that sounds anything like that.
--:-- Henry: It's so funny because Marcus actually made me listen to Can a bunch in college.
--:-- Marcus: I love Can.
--:-- Marcus: There's no problem. I'm a huge fan. And of course, if you want to know more about Can, go listen to our series on No Dogs in Space. Also, if you want to find out how post-war Germany kind of went down and how the culture was created out of the ashes of Nazi Germany.
--:-- Henry: And did you see that Benicio Del Toro said that he built his whole character on Can? He became obsessed with Can and started to listen to it, and that's how he developed the character for one battle after another.
--:-- Marcus: Oh, really?
--:-- Henry: He gave that whole sequence to Paul Thomas Anderson.
--:-- Marcus: That's amazing.
--:-- Henry: Clearing out Poland and Germany of the Nazis' undesirables was all well and good, but for Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler, the ultimate prize was Russia. As such, Himmler had plans to murder as many as 30 million citizens of the Soviet Union in the pursuit of Lebensraum. This number actually came from one of Heinrich Himmler's friends, Hans Johst. Johst was a Nazi poet and playwright known unofficially as the Bard of the SS. And for all you Mission of Burma fans out there, Johst was actually the source of an infamous line often misattributed to Himmler.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, the phrase was actually a corruption of a line from one of Johst's plays. But what survived was a chilling distillation of Nazi thought. That line was: "When I hear the word culture, that's when I reach for my revolver."
--:-- Marcus: That's when I reach for my revolver! I love Mission of Burma.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, that's where that line comes from.
--:-- Marcus: I just can't believe that anyone ever wanted Russia.
--:-- Henry: Well, it's beautiful and it's filled with natural, very important natural resources.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, bears. I love bears.
--:-- Marcus: And that's just the fat man.
--:-- Henry: Well, what the Nazis were after was the oil. There was a lot of oil in Soviet Russia. Later on, quite a bit of plutonium as well. But concerning the Nazis' lust for the Soviet Union's land, remember that they had signed a secret non-aggression pact with Stalin. And even though almost everyone in the Soviet army was none too sold on this Adolf Hitler guy, Joseph Stalin, for some reason, trusted Hitler.
--:-- Marcus: I like him. I think if there was one guy who'd like Hitler, it would be Stalin.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, but all the other generals, like Zhukov, don't trust him. He's like, "I like him. Give him a chance. Just give him a chance. I like him. My mustache is bigger than his."
--:-- Marcus: Seriously. So much bigger.
--:-- Henry: I watched this documentary called, I think it's called 24 Hours. And what they do is they go into one horrible historical figure's life for their day. And it was Joseph Stalin's death day, the day that he died.
--:-- Marcus: And they're the same type of weirdo.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, they absolutely were. I think they would have hung out well. They kind of had a respect for each other, but they of course hated each other because one was communist and one was fascist.
--:-- Marcus: And it was just... you know what they needed? One kiss. That's all it would have been.
--:-- Henry: Those hopes were shattered on June 28th, 1941, when Nazi Germany launched the nerdily named Operation Barbarossa, which was named after one of Hitler and Himmler's favorite historical Germanic figures.
--:-- Marcus: It's like naming something "Operation Rambo."
--:-- Henry: Reportedly, though, the betrayal absolutely crushed poor Joe Stalin. "Hitler? Of all the people who'd lie to me? I expect this from Churchill. Maybe even Mussolini, but Hitler? Not Hitler."
--:-- Marcus: Even though it seemed like things were already bad with the invasion of Poland, and they were, it was with Operation Barbarossa that the true horrors of the European theater of World War II would begin. The Nazis' war with the Soviet Union alone would consume 40 million lives, counting for about half of the estimated 80 million people who died as a result of World War II, the most destructive war in history.
--:-- Henry: 80 million people. God damn.
--:-- Marcus: And welcome to A&E's Last Podcast on the Left presents Operation Barbarossa. Absolutely wonderful four hours to fall asleep to as you hear about atrocities over and over again.
--:-- Henry: Try our Barbarossa tacos. That's Tuesday, everybody. I love a Barbarossa. It's buttery with rosa.
--:-- Marcus: Also a great Willie Nelson movie.
--:-- Marcus: Barbarossa. It's Willie Nelson and Gary Busey.
--:-- Henry: Is it about this? Is he a Nazi?
--:-- Marcus: No. Does Willie Nelson play Heinrich Himmler? Oh, that's a play right there, dude. No, it's a Western.
--:-- Henry: Barbarossa means red hair.
--:-- Marcus: Whoever. Funny or my way.
--:-- Henry: I think it means red hair. Red something. Maybe it means red beard.
--:-- Marcus: Oh, red beard, yes.
--:-- Henry: Just beard and rose.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. There we go.
--:-- Henry: Now once the German Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union and began spreading across the Soviet states of Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, the Einsatzgruppen followed in their wake with the express purpose of extermination. Within a month of Operation Barbarossa's launch, Heinrich Himmler gave a radio speech to the SS commanders in the field, giving them express orders that all male Jews in Belarus must be shot while the Jewish women were to be, quote, "driven into the swamps," which Himmler meant literally. Ukrainian Jews, meanwhile, were all to be shot except those who could be used for labor. In other words, the order had finally been given to enact the final solution, although it is still a great mystery of history as to who gave the exact order and when.
--:-- Marcus: The view that the final solution was the result of a single order from Hitler—like, "Okay, now we kill the Jews"—that's a total oversimplification of all the factors and situations that led to the decision. There was actually a consensus amongst the leadership within the Third Reich and amongst the governments of the people they conquered that the final solution to the Jewish question was always going to involve murder, long before the order was given.
--:-- Henry: The fact that there was a question meant that the solution has to equal out the question. It's the terminology. It means it's seeking an end. "What are we gonna do about these Jews?" You know where it's gonna end. It always ends the same place. But it's also open-ended enough that every single bad actor that will ever exist will use the same exact version of this counter-view, this subterfuge. They will use this again and again. "We didn't mean it."
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, well, asking the questions also gives them opportunity to pretend like they're reasonable people. "We considered it. We considered it so much, and we came up with plan after plan, but really the only thing we could do was murder them. It's all we could do."
--:-- Henry: But there's lots of stuff you could do. Baseball teams, volleyball teams, a lot of stuff to keep people busy.
--:-- Marcus: Well, I mean, they're not great at sports.
--:-- Henry: That's what I said. If we start them young enough and earlier... bobsled. Great Jewish sport.
--:-- Marcus: But it's also important to remember that the final solution did not just involve the Jews. From the beginning, the final solution had included Romani, communists, Russians. But concerning the origin of all this, if we face facts, the concept of Lebensraum did not solely spring from the brains of Germany's extreme right-wing politicians and authors. See, the Nazis saw absolutely no difference between what they were doing in Eastern Europe and what the United States had done to the Native Americans. And they openly used the genocide that birthed America, as well as our enslavement of Africans, as a model for their conquest of Eastern Europe.
--:-- Both Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler believed that Germany was owed a colonial empire similar to the ones that France, England, and the United States had established in Africa, India, and the American West. The difference was that while France, England, and the United States had established their empires by slaughtering brown people, the Germans were going to get theirs by killing white Eastern Europeans. The other difference was that Germany was going to commit their genocides far faster than anyone else in history, because why fuck around?
--:-- To make matters even more uncomfortable, whenever Himmler finally began feeling any sort of inner turmoil whilst enacting the final solution, he reminded himself that just as the Americans had exterminated their indigenous population, so too must the Germans wipe out the Jews.
--:-- Marcus: I mean, it's fucking true. Enjoy baseball! It's playoff season!
--:-- Henry: I honestly don't know if I could win that argument against a Nazi. If he were to say, "Well, what about what America does?"
--:-- Marcus: Well, it's also about... it doesn't make it right. I get your point. It doesn't make it right. You did right, Nazi boy.
--:-- Henry: Also, is there not a way to say, "Yes, we had concentrated genocides of indigenous people here. We killed Native Americans on purpose. It's the worst genocide this world's ever seen, in my opinion, because they effectively are gone." But the genocide that the Nazis did had such organized, unilateral, corporate murder.
--:-- Marcus: Well, we got something. Obviously, it's a whole thing. I'm not trying to say one's better than the other. I'm just trying to say the Nazis had a little exercise special.
--:-- Henry: Well, it was never as naked as the Nazis did it. With the Trail of Tears, Andrew Jackson could always say, "No, no, we're doing this for their own good. We're moving them here." It's a whole validation game.
--:-- Marcus: And we could always fall back on smallpox, because smallpox killed more indigenous Americans than anything else.
--:-- Henry: But we also... even though we gave it to them.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, even though we gave it to them and spread it amongst them purposefully. But really, the big difference was that it happened over hundreds of years, the genocide of the Native Americans. And the Nazis were trying to do theirs in a matter of months. They were trying to do it because they had 20th century technology. That was the big difference. America's genocide happened in the 18th century, 19th century, 17th century. We don't have the mechanization that the Nazis had. They had incredible technology. The more advanced technology got, the better people got at killing one another.
--:-- Henry: I was talking to Marcus about this before the show. And I honestly feel like if the Nazis would have slowed down and took their time, they would have been way harder to beat.
--:-- Marcus: They would have been. But they didn't have any money.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, they didn't have a Himmler to be like, "Child, you need to pace yourself. Take a nap, child. Don't you just want to sit down and have a nice sweet tea?"
--:-- Marcus: It was the money. It was more the money. Maybe Himmler could have helped. No, but it was the money.
--:-- Henry: Also, it's just... the speed as well. It has diminishing returns, Marcus. I think the mass wanton murder in the end doesn't work.
--:-- Marcus: No, it does not. It never has, and it never will. Because it comes back. Because guess what we're doing now?
--:-- Marcus: Dealing with the sins of the past. Yep.
--:-- Henry: Now, four million Jewish people lived in the western states of the Soviet Union alone. So exterminating all of the Jews in the Soviet Union was going to be no small task. Especially because, like I said, they didn't have smallpox to lean on like we did.
--:-- Marcus: So, after the Wehrmacht would clear the way, the Einsatzgruppen was ordered to follow behind and carry out Himmler's orders to kill as many people as possible as fast as possible by using 20th century technology.
--:-- Henry: Now, because the Einsatzgruppen's murder directives were so wide, entire towns could lose half their population in a matter of days. As such, the Eastern Front, as it came to be known, was so horrible and brutal that even members of the Waffen-SS were taken aback by the scale of the slaughter.
--:-- Marcus: According to the recollections of one SS man, tens of thousands of Russian corpses, civilians and soldiers, lay everywhere one looked in Eastern Europe. The piles of interlaced bodies were stacked up to a yard high in some places, as if machine guns had cut down wave after wave of people. The worst part, though, was that at the hottest part of the day, gases would expel from the corpses. As the SS man put it, this caused the most horrible and unbelievable gurgling sounds.
--:-- Henry: And that, by the way, that's just a consequence of the war, never mind the actions of the Einsatzgruppen.
--:-- Marcus: Now, even though Himmler believed that what he was ordering his men to do was morally correct, he was still smart enough to know that most humans are going to react badly when it comes to actually murdering millions of people face-to-face, especially when it came to killing women and children.
--:-- Henry: Because you can dehumanize them as much as you want until they're right in front of you.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, until they're right in front of you and they remind you of your niece or your nephew or your mother.
--:-- Henry: Because they're literally people that you could have known.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, and you have to kill everyone. Like, you can't leave the children because they would kill you. The argument they would use is that you can't leave the children alive. They would call it the Avenger argument. The kids are just going to grow up to become an enemy later on. So whether you kill him now as an eight-year-old or you kill him in 10 years as an enemy, there's no difference to just kill them all.
--:-- Henry: Well, because a traumatized soldier was useless in Himmler's view, he tasked various Nazi scientists with finding 20th century solutions in order to kill the most amount of people while traumatizing the least amount of Nazis. Now, we all know how this ended, Auschwitz. But the industrialization of mass murder truly was born on the Eastern Front, and it was midwifed by a chemist named Albert Widman.
--:-- Marcus: Working out of Minsk, Widman began conducting experiments in mass murder, thinking first that perhaps the answer lay in dynamite. To test his theory, Widman filled a reinforced concrete dugout known as a pillbox with explosives. Then he locked a bunch of kidnapped Russian mental patients inside and detonated the payload.
--:-- Henry: Ooh, that's...
--:-- Marcus: Yeah. The problem was that while the result was indeed deadly, they did all die. The concrete dugout was also destroyed, and the explosion sent concrete shards and body parts flying in every direction.
--:-- Henry: That's not going to work. Everybody's mad with the splatter, which is why we've decided to change tacks. I have built this giant foot that will step down upon them. They need to lay down so that the foot can apply equal pressure. We have to stop blowing them up.
--:-- Marcus: Undeterred, Albert Widman decided that his next instrument of death was carbon monoxide. Widman and his team rigged a car engine with a hose to fill the interior cab with carbon monoxide, and he found that the victims inside fell unconscious within 10 minutes and died shortly thereafter. Encouraged by these results, Widman converted a series of vans and put mobile gas chambers into production. These were the first gas chambers in the Nazi state. And these gas vans were presented to the Einsatzgruppen for use across Eastern Europe in September of 1941.
--:-- Henry: The Nazis would cram as many people as they could fit inside and gas them. But the problem here was that the bodies inside the van would become so embraced in one another and contorted so badly that the Einsatzgruppen would have to dismember the bodies just to be able to carry them to the mass graves.
--:-- Marcus: Even so, it's estimated that between December of 1941 and June of 1942, up to 87,000 Jewish people were killed in these gas vans. The Einsatzgruppen, however, eventually stopped using the gas vans, not because it was too brutal, but because of how often the vans broke down and they instead returned to their tried and true method of stripping victims naked and simply shooting them en masse.
--:-- Henry: I think I see a problem here. It seems as if this van has been sold to us by Ford.
--:-- Marcus: Obviously, you all know what it means to stand for Fixed Or Repaired Daily.
--:-- Henry: I remember that, yeah.
--:-- Marcus: This older shit's bumming me out.
--:-- Henry: He's got a lot of good ideas, though.
--:-- Marcus: I was going to say, Ford, he's got a lot of ideas.
--:-- Henry: Vans have always been creepy.
--:-- Henry: It's not fair to vans. Because then I think about the lobotomy vans.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, the lobotomy vans.
--:-- Henry: The kidnap me, the hillside stranglers vans. There's something about a mobile space that's really dangerous for humans to have. And it turns like influencers crazy.
--:-- Marcus: It does. When they become small house people.
--:-- Henry: No, no, no. Bad things happen when humans can put isolation on wheels.
--:-- Marcus: The Einsatzgruppen were designed to operate independently, both on the war front and behind enemy lines if necessary. But while they were independent, they also had the full logistical support of the Wehrmacht to ensure they were always well supplied. As far as how many Einsatzgruppen there were, the numbers varied throughout the war, but at any given time between 1939 and 1945, there were between 2,500 and 3,500 individuals participating in mass murder every single day. It did not stop.
--:-- Henry: Isn't it crazy? I actually thought it'd be more. The more numbers of the Einsatzgruppen.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, you would think it'd be more, and the fact that it's so few is far more disturbing.
--:-- Henry: Yeah. That it's only between 2,500 and 3,500. But you also got to remember they're also rotating out constantly because guys don't last a long time. It had a high turnover rate, and it was used as a punishment.
--:-- Marcus: When it reached the full height of its power, the Einsatzgruppen was split into seven Einsatzgruppe of 500 men each. And these groups were divided into several Einsatzkommandos of anywhere between 100 and 150 men, depending on the mission. So you basically had band after band of about 100 psychopaths just constantly roaming Eastern Europe for years and murdering entire towns full of people.
--:-- Henry: Dude, I just went in a horrible little rabbit hole over all the different leaders of all the separate Einsatzgruppen.
--:-- Marcus: Einsatzgruppen.
--:-- Henry: Einsatzgruppen. And I got to Friedrich Jeckeln, who did a bunch of bad stuff. And man, he's a real jerk.
--:-- Marcus: He is. He is.
--:-- Henry: That's what happens when you don't go by Frederick.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, seriously, dude. Freddy.
--:-- Marcus: Well, the largest group was Einsatzgruppen A, which included 990 SS personnel, complete with drivers, administrators, police, secretaries, interpreters, radio operators. It really cannot be stressed how organized all of this was.
--:-- Henry: They probably had like a chef.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, but to show you the priorities of the Nazi regime, the Einsatzgruppen were fully motorized at a time when the Wehrmacht artillery was still horse-drawn. The Einsatzgruppen's resources, of course, were due to Heinrich Himmler's clever administration. And since the Einsatzgruppen were so well-equipped, just one unit operating in Poland was able to murder 90,000 men, women, and children in a matter of weeks.
--:-- Henry: But the important thing to remember was that the Einsatzgruppen always looked at the violence they committed as civilized, and they conducted themselves in what they believed was a civilized manner. For example, at the end of an operation, after an Einsatzkommando had killed hundreds, if not thousands of people in a single day, they would be served schnapps and appetizers as both a reward and as a way to make the action feel official, as if it was some sort of occasion to be celebrated.
--:-- Marcus: Now, incredibly, the Einsatzgruppen were not the only band of SS psychopaths roaming Eastern Europe during World War II.
--:-- Henry: Great. Wow. Good.
--:-- Marcus: In particular, Heinrich Himmler had recruited an absolute psychopath named Oskar Dirlewanger as a supplemental force to the Einsatzgruppen.
--:-- Henry: Like a one-man Einzelgruppen?
--:-- Marcus: No, like, he thought, okay, the Einsatzgruppen, yeah, they're great, but what if I had one group that was worse? The worst, worst, worst one. And this was the guy that we were going to actually cover.
--:-- Marcus: And we got to Himmler because of this guy.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, yeah, yeah, because there's a fair amount of information out about him, but there's a biography coming out, I think. It's just about to come out in, like, January about Oskar Dirlewanger. He was in World War I. He was heavily involved in the Warsaw Uprising. Evil, evil, evil motherfucker. But he's also one of those evil motherfuckers that kill people by hand.
--:-- Henry: Oskar Dirlewanger is no Himmler. He's no even Hitler. He's a fucker. He's a real fucking killer.
--:-- Marcus: You know how many people you can gas in the Oscar Dirlewanger mobile?
--:-- Henry: Are they laying down?
--:-- Marcus: Seemingly, Oskar Dirlewanger's command was a sort of experiment.
--:-- Henry: I was sitting on this the whole fucking time.
--:-- Marcus: I know you've been sitting on that since the van discussion.
--:-- Henry: And you've been waiting. He said all these horrible things. And you've been sitting on that Dirlewanger mobile joke this whole time.
--:-- Marcus: Feeder special. Feeder special.
--:-- Henry: Well, Dirlewanger and Himmler had collaborated in searching through the concentration camps to find the most violent, despicable men contained therein. Men willing to carry out absolute atrocities with glee. Think of it like the Suicide Squad, but with Nazis.
--:-- Marcus: Oh, like if they weren't using the Suicide Squad for good?
--:-- Henry: Yeah, if they were using it for bad. For Lebensraum, you know. Himmler then put these psychopaths in Dirlewanger's command and set them loose on Eastern Europe to be as absolutely depraved as they wanted to be.
--:-- Marcus: It's almost like a graduated version of the Stormtroopers.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, it is. Let's just see what happens. It's basically unleashing a storm of psychopathy across a land. And let's see what happens and see what they do.
--:-- Marcus: The end of Blazing Saddles. Just like it.
--:-- Henry: Actually, it really, yeah, it totally is.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah. Told you to wash your hands.
--:-- Henry: Amongst other atrocities, Dirlewanger and his crew would round up thousands of civilians and cram them into barns before opening fire. Or they set the barn on fire and shoot anyone who tried to escape, all while they laughed to their heart's content. These sorts of actions made Dirlewanger notorious for his unsurpassed methods of viciousness and depravity, to the point where even other SS leaders were disgusted by Dirlewanger's reputation.
--:-- Marcus: The Nazis did briefly consider a plan to simply deport the millions of Jews in Eastern Europe to the Asian country of Madagascar.
--:-- Henry: Let's all just put them on an island. Let nature take its course. See what happens.
--:-- Marcus: Was Madagascar not a part of Africa back then?
--:-- Henry: No, it was French territory at that point.
--:-- Marcus: Oh, okay. And they have all the lemurs.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, it's cute. It's cute. I've seen the movie.
--:-- Marcus: Man, we've got a lot of very interesting reggae.
--:-- Henry: Really would have. Yeah. Dude, that Madagascar-Africa album is fucking awesome. It's good.
--:-- Marcus: Hitler, however, abandoned this plan when he realized that he would have to compete with the British Navy in order to ferry all of these Jews by boat. So Hitler told Himmler, just keep the Einsatzgruppen on their mission and just tell them, keep shooting every Jewish person you find. The final solution, therefore, kicked into a higher gear. And in the spring of 1941, several thousand Nazi soldiers were ordered to the small German town of Pretsch, where they were told that they were about to undergo training to expand the Einsatzgruppen.
--:-- Henry: And so, with the extermination force embiggened, the Einsatzgruppen began the next phase of mass murder. On June 23, 1941, the Wehrmacht captured the Lithuanian city of Kaunas. Kaunas was home to 120,000 people, 35,000 of which were Jews.
--:-- Marcus: And just to let everyone know, this is when it gets bad.
--:-- Henry: This is when it gets bad.
--:-- Marcus: This is the bad part.
--:-- Henry: Well, this is when it begins. This is where the escalation has reached. We've already killed like a million. Fair amount, but this is when the people get involved.
--:-- Henry: Once the city of Kaunas was captured, Einsatzgruppen A got to their business, but they did not do their dirty work alone. See, anti-Semitism was not a German creation, so wherever the SS went in Eastern Europe, they found plenty of willing collaborators amongst the civilian population. These collaborators were either people who had long-standing anti-Semitic beliefs, people who were trying to ingratiate themselves to the invading force that was the Nazis, or they were simple psychopaths who saw an opening to commit horrific atrocities in public without consequence.
--:-- Marcus: In Kaunas, for example, a group of 600 Lithuanians organized to aid the Einsatzgruppen, and that group of 600 civilians burned down synagogues and Jewish homes all while they were rounding up their Jewish neighbors to beat them to death in the city square. The Nazis even opened the prisons so the prisoners could join in on the pogrom, and after the inmates armed themselves with clubs, they were set on the task of finding and killing every Jew in town.
--:-- Henry: On the first night, 1,500 Jews were murdered, and another 2,300 followed the next day. Men with crowbars beat Jews to death in the streets, and after the bodies were dragged away from the town square, there was so much blood that the town had to bring out the hoses to wash it away.
--:-- Marcus: Similar scenes broke out all across Lithuania as soon as the Nazis entered, and as the mountains of corpses piled up, eager collaborators would grab accordions and play the Lithuanian national anthem next to the mounds of dead bodies, because the Nazis were not alone in seeing the Jews as an existential threat.
--:-- Henry: Once time came for disposal, though, the Einsatzgruppen organized the Jews they hadn't killed yet into a burial team. The prisoners were forced to dig mass graves and drag the dead into the pits. And once they were done, the grave diggers themselves were shot as well.
--:-- Marcus: The Lithuanians, you know, they use this tie-dye to make themselves look all cuddly.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, they really do.
--:-- Marcus: But I think this is a really good time.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, the Grateful Dead basketball.
--:-- Marcus: Actually, that was the same thing that I thought.
--:-- Henry: I just want to say thank you to Marcus for all your hard work, and here's a little levity moment where I'm going to give Marcus another one of his Einsatzgruppen day presents.
--:-- Marcus: Okay, yes. Fantastic. Thank you so much.
--:-- Henry: Yes, this one I think he's going to like because I think this is really going to help alleviate some of the tension. It's going to cut some of the...
--:-- Marcus: Good to see. They're still good in humanity. People still give each other gifts on Einsatzgruppen day. Friendship still exists.
--:-- Henry: Yes. And that is your commemorative AI-designed St. Jeremy Allen White candle.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, it's the guy from The Bear, who I am told I look quite a bit like.
--:-- Marcus: You do look somewhat. I guess you do look a little like him.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, somewhat like him. I see him often at the farmer's market.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, and he's always on the little train looking grumpy.
--:-- Henry: Oh. Well, his last name is White and he's on a train. He should be happy. Thank you very much, Henry. This is very sweet. Enjoy.
--:-- Marcus: Should I give Marcus?
--:-- Henry: No, well, we have more.
--:-- Marcus: Okay, good, because my gift seemed inappropriate at this moment.
--:-- Henry: And this one was?
--:-- Marcus: Sir Jeremy Allen White.
--:-- Henry: Yes. Is that what this is? Do you see him there? Do you see? Honestly, he could play Oskar Dirlewanger.
--:-- Marcus: Oh, my God. He really could.
--:-- Henry: Oh, right now he's playing Bruce Springsteen.
--:-- Marcus: Ah, well. So similar.
--:-- Henry: Now, even though the Einsatzgruppen were technically the creation of Reinhard Heydrich, they were still under Heinrich Himmler's direct control, because Himmler was in possession of a secret that ensured Heydrich would do whatever Himmler wanted.
--:-- Marcus: See, during the standard investigation into Heydrich's ancestry, the investigation that was required for all SS men, Himmler had discovered that Heydrich had Jewish blood.
--:-- Henry: And it wasn't just on his hands. It was also in his little vial.
--:-- Marcus: He actually had a little, like...
--:-- Henry: Yeah, he drank it.
--:-- Marcus: And Himmler used this knowledge as leverage any time he felt that the balance of power was shifting too much in Heydrich's direction.
--:-- Henry: Can you imagine that meeting? "Well, well, well." Can you just fucking imagine walking in, you get called in? Because, you know, he probably was like, "Oh, I've had to talk to you for a minute in the office." Like, it was probably like the way a Nazi would do it, where you sit down and he just flapping it down on the table being like, "We found something interesting, Heydrich."
--:-- Henry: I mean, like, I could just see the smile on his face. "Your 23andMe results are very puzzling, Mr. Heydrich."
--:-- Marcus: Well, I'm sure it was present from the very beginning because Himmler did that investigation anytime someone joined the SS. But he saw something in Heydrich. He saw, "I can use this man." He saw how self-loathing he was and he saw that he could use that hatred to get what he wanted.
--:-- Henry: Oh, yeah. He's a highly vulnerable second in command.
--:-- Marcus: So he had more than three grandparents of Jewish blood. He just had some Jewish blood. And someone who's in Himmler's inner circle, he's in charge of the Einsatzgruppen. He better not be.
--:-- Henry: Or he was the creator of the Einsatzgruppen. Story by.
--:-- Marcus: But Himmler probably did too, man. He had that fucking dark hair and shit like that. He just looked like a fucking piece. He just was ugly and gross and it was nothing but recessive genes.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, just a recessive mutt.
--:-- Marcus: Would probably be a really good way of describing Himmler. Recessive gene, European mutt.
--:-- Henry: But Himmler, he didn't just think of himself as a mere administrator. He believed himself to be an educator. And he was therefore meticulously involved in the lives of those who served under him. But his meddling did not go both ways. While he did think of himself as their educator, Himmler also mistrusted everyone beneath him. While every other top Nazi had a trusted staff, Goebbels had his guys, Göring had his guys, Himmler insisted on handling all the details of delegating his tasks himself, which meant that he was well aware of everything the Einsatzgruppen was doing.
--:-- Marcus: It's almost like Himmler was the only real Nazi. You know, in some ways.
--:-- Henry: No, I would, Goebbels was a real Nazi.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, I'm just saying.
--:-- Henry: I mean, come on.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, sure, you're right, I'm sorry. I'm just saying, like, Himmler just, like, just the fact that he was just centered in his lane, knew he had to take care of what he had to take care of. You can't trust all these guys, all these fucking busybodies. No one knows what to do. It's like I said in the first episode. There has to be the most Nazi Nazi, and it's Himmler.
--:-- Henry: See, Himmler thought of himself as a man always on the move. This is also what made him the Nazi's Nazi. He thought that he was a guy making important decisions on the fly. He's constantly driving his mission forward. And Himmler would even personally intervene to sort out problems between SS members. And his meddling would even extend to the diets of his men. For example, Himmler had a 22-point list about the rules for making toast, so as to make the toast most easily digested. Himmler also insisted that his men only eat specific foods like apples, pears, nuts, and oat flakes, very Germanic foods.
--:-- Marcus: I know that he also believes that these are healthy and these are things to do, but also remember, like all good cult leaders, if you create a set of very distinct rules to follow, you get really used to following ornate sets of rules.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, but how boring do you have to be to write a book on toast? You have to be the most Nazi of all Nazis.
--:-- Marcus: Himmler also expected his leaders to keep their men well fed. And if Himmler thought that any of his SS units were suffering from malnutrition, he would send their leader to an actual place that he created called the House of Poor Nourishment. There, Himmler would force SS leaders to eat food that was overcooked or badly prepared. That was the whole point of it. You have to go to the House of Poor Nourishment for a month and eat canned peaches and overcooked fish until I decide you've been punished.
--:-- Henry: Today we call that the Cracker Barrel.
--:-- Marcus: Someone said I just see a 1940s Guy Fieri just popping up and like, "Hey, what's going on, you fucking bitches?" and then putting each one like Dick's Last Resort.
--:-- Henry: "My butt stinks."
--:-- Marcus: Diners, drive-ins, and trains.
--:-- Henry: Himmler also had rules involving his men's personalities, arbitrary rules that were up to Himmler's personal discretion.
--:-- Marcus: He has no right to talk about personality.
--:-- Henry: That's exactly why.
--:-- Henry: He could deem a man too vain or too ambitious or too addicted to reading newspapers. And if Himmler believed the offense was bad enough, and this is really what it was all about, if he thought that a guy was more trouble than he was worth, Himmler had enough rules where he could say, "All right, you're dead. Kill him. He's broken too many rules."
--:-- Marcus: He really is the mob.
--:-- Henry: But Himmler also might punish an SS man for being afraid of breaking the rules.
--:-- Marcus: You're not breaking enough rules.
--:-- Henry: Or he might punish a man for being afraid of punishment. In other words, Himmler was merciless, even with his own men, to the point where he would punish the families of SS men who died by suicide, making sure that their so-called shame was noted at their graves.
--:-- Marcus: Himmler, however, could flip rule breakers if he saw an opportunity. If an SS officer was bad with money and needed a loan, or if he violated the SS's strict laws concerning copulation with non-Aryans, and by the way, that rule was broken more and more often with the more lands the Nazis conquered, Himmler could blackmail the officer into participating in the assignments that few men volunteered for. These assignments, of course, could involve being assigned to the Einsatzgruppen, especially as the killing reached new heights and scenes like the aforementioned pogrom in Kaunas played out in countless towns and cities across Eastern Europe.
--:-- Henry: It's like a pimp, you know, he just uses anything he can against you. Whether it's for him or against him, it doesn't matter. Because he understands that movement, it's like a shark. Nazis have to be on the move, constantly on the defense, because he's right. Himmler knows that everybody's trying to kill him. Everybody's trying to be in charge of the SS and the Einsatzgruppen. And when you're in charge of all these murderers, you staff murderers. And nothing like having a lot of strings on somebody.
--:-- Marcus: And if you stay in one place for too long, people rise up. If you stay on the move, people are like, "Oh, thank God they're gone." And then also, oh, then things fall to shit. Then you upscale guys go like, "We need to send Himmler back there because he's the only one who knows what's going on." So then Himmler goes back. He proves himself to be very valuable.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, but at the same time, it's around this period that Heydrich starts believing that not only can he do a better job than Himmler, he can do a better job than Hitler. And Heydrich is actually starting to make plans to depose even Hitler. That's how much backbiting is going on.
--:-- Marcus: Well, Heydrich's the only guy who's actually getting his hands dirty.
--:-- Marcus: Now, if you are wondering why the civilians in these pogroms didn't fight back, it's because the mass killing of civilians by the Nazis was an operation that was planned out and executed with extraordinary precision, and it was backed by a massive amount of organization and support.
--:-- Henry: On your average operational day, an Einsatzgruppen unit would surprise towns in the early morning hours when it was still dark, accompanied by vicious attack dogs who would maul any civilian who got out of line. The able-bodied males were killed quickly with advanced weaponry, machine pistols and machine guns, while the only weapons the civilians might have to fight back with were farm implements.
--:-- Marcus: Later, the Nazis would even use power shovels to dig mass grave pits a few miles outside of the villages before they even went in, so the civilians wouldn't see what was coming until it was far too late.
--:-- Henry: But of all the mass graves across Eastern Europe, none were deeper nor filled with more bodies than the Babi Yar ravine in Ukraine. This ravine, which runs straight through the city of Kiev, is known as the Babushka ravine, and it is so massive that if you stood on one side and shouted, you would not be heard by someone on the other side.
--:-- Marcus: But unfortunately for the people of Kiev, when the Einsatzgruppen arrived, they immediately saw Babi Yar as one massive pre-dug grave.
--:-- Henry: You know it's so textbook. You kill the people who can fight the hardest first. And so everyone's like, "Why didn't they rise up?" It's because the most powerful guys we got just got fucking killed immediately within the first hour.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, but the question is, is this what it's called when you paint with all the colors of the wind? They're using the land itself. Did he learn another horrible lesson from Pocahontas? To use the land?
--:-- Henry: The land is there. At least the Einsatzgruppen did when they saw it.
--:-- Marcus: Oh, that song is going to bum me out next time I sing that naked in the pool.
--:-- Henry: Yes, he puts the hauntus in Pocahontas.
--:-- Henry: So on September 26th, 1941, Einsatzgruppen C ordered all the Jews in the city of Kiev to appear near a cemetery at the edge of Babi Yar ravine in three days' time. They were told to arrive with all their documents, money, and valuables, because the Nazis claimed that they were simply going to resettle them elsewhere.
--:-- Marcus: But when Kiev's Jews arrived to the cemetery on September 29th, the Einsatzgruppen and their collaborators spent two full days murdering Kiev's 33,771 Jewish civilians, making Babi Yar the single worst massacre of the entire war.
--:-- Henry: That day, the attacks began without explanation, as brutal blows rained down on the collected Jews from all directions. The Nazis and their collaborators did so happily, laughing as if, in the words of one author, they were merely watching a circus act. People began collapsing to the ground where the Nazi dogs ripped them to shreds, and it was said that the victims' screams mixed with the sounds of Nazi joy in a sort of symphony of confusion.
--:-- Marcus: Now, panicked civilians did try running away, but in the end, they were only crushing each other. And finally, the Einsatzgruppen brought the group back under control. The Jews were then ordered to strip, and if they didn't do so fast enough, the Nazis tore their clothing off and beat them with clubs and brass knuckles. All the clothing and valuables belonging to the Jews were, of course, loaded onto trucks as Nazi plunder to further fund the war effort.
--:-- Henry: But once the Jews were naked, they were forced to walk down to the bottom of the Babi Yar ravine upon pathways that the Nazis had cut into the side of a steep canyon. Once the first group was at the bottom of the ravine, they were ordered to lie down and a squad of 12 Einsatzgruppen soldiers opened fire with submachine guns.
--:-- Marcus: After the first group was killed, the Nazis forced group after group after group of men, women, and children to lie down on top of the previous layers of corpses so they could be mowed down just like the one that came before. The piles were eventually hundreds of feet long down the Babi Yar ravine, and layers piled several bodies high.
--:-- Henry: The Nazis, however, had already predicted that the Jews would not march directly to their deaths if they knew that it was a certainty, so the pathway they had cut into the ravine had a sharp right turn just before the corpse pile began. That way, the victims wouldn't know until the very last second exactly what was happening. Although the screams and constant machine gun fire, which only paused every four hours to switch out a new squad, it probably gave them an idea of what was coming.
--:-- Marcus: But on the other hand, you're naked, and where else are you going to go? What are you going to do?
--:-- Marcus: But in order to keep the assembly line of murder going, a so-called packer was assigned to stand at the sharp turn, and this packer would push victims into the line of fire so the machine gunners would not have to aim. In all, the entire operation was set up to be mechanical, soulless, and constant, and the only survivors of Babi Yar were those who managed to avoid the guns of the other Einsatzgruppen, who were assigned to constantly hover around the piles of corpses, looking for people amongst the bodies to shoot again.
--:-- Henry: Happy Einsatzgruppen Day to Marcus. What a wonderful day it is that we're having.
--:-- Marcus: I have another gift for you. This was a very powerful moment, and it was very hard. So I imagine it was very hard to write.
--:-- Henry: It was. Thank you.
--:-- Marcus: This is from us.
--:-- Ed: Yeah, next time you have to write something like this, maybe you can even use this right now, to be honest with you.
--:-- Henry: It's very nice.
--:-- Ed: Yeah, you're welcome. This will kind of help you deal with all this.
--:-- Henry: It's squarish. I think this will help.
--:-- Ed: I can feel it's a square.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, you're right. This is good for him. This is good for right now.
--:-- Marcus: A tile of some kind? A coaster?
--:-- Ed: You're right. It's a coaster with a kitty on it that says, "Don't stress me out."
--:-- Henry: See, that's really important.
--:-- Ed: Meow. Don't stress me out.
--:-- Henry: Go on, guys. Don't stress me out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
--:-- Marcus: So you know this right now, I mean, this was very stressful. Happy Einsatzgruppen Day.
--:-- Henry: Thank you. Thank you. Both very sweet.
--:-- Ed: No problem. I'm still looking for a time to give this one gift away, and I haven't. It just seems very inappropriate. You should have talked me out of it.
--:-- Henry: There's the other one. There's another one of those.
--:-- Marcus: Now, the initial two-day massacre at Babi Yar. You're not using the coaster.
--:-- Henry: Well, I mean, I'm using the coaster. I'm using the... If you want to... You're stressing me out. I'm using it as something to fiddle with.
--:-- Henry: I'm rubbing it. Yeah, I'm using it as a little stem thing.
--:-- Henry: It's good because I like the corners on it. Just to stress me out.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah. Now, the initial two-day massacre at Babi Yar resulted in the murder of almost 34,000 Jewish civilians, but the ravine was far too useful to be left alone. As the Nazis purged the city of Kiev of communists and Romani while it was still under their control, they dumped the bodies of the dead in Babi Yar on a schedule. Every Tuesday and Friday was Corpse Day. That meant that by the time the Soviet Red Army liberated Kiev in November of 1943, there were somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 corpses rotting in the Babi Yar ravine. We have no idea exactly how many. It's just an estimate.
--:-- Henry: Heinrich Himmler, meanwhile, was back in Berlin, having a grand old time with his secretary, Hedwig, if we may take a short break from the Holocaust.
--:-- Marcus: Oh, wow, yeah, we're going to date time.
--:-- Ed: Now, is this where TGIF comes from?
--:-- Henry: I do believe that is true, yes. Well, Himmler's secretary, Hedwig Potthast, had started working for Himmler in 1936 at the impressionable age of 23. But within two years, Hedwig had become Himmler's mistress. Incredibly, Hedwig seemed to have quite the effect on the usually taciturn administrator. And it was noted by friends that Himmler became a different man as a result of his love affair.
--:-- Marcus: What is this, a fucking Meryl Streep movie? It's turned into fucking, just all of a sudden he's over there. He's Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson. This is what's happening while Babi Yar is occurring in Ukraine. This is what's happening in Berlin with Heinrich Himmler. This is what Heinrich Himmler is doing with his day, doing with his time. While people are being killed by the thousands, Himmler is giving a pet name to his secretary. He called her Hushen, meaning little bunny.
--:-- Henry: And Hedwig even convinced Himmler to get a haircut that was, quote, "less severe."
--:-- Marcus: I agree with her. You know, I was thinking, you know what you'd look good on? And I saw this thing the other day. Have you ever heard of cornrows? Very cool, very new. You could look good with some cornrows. I could see it.
--:-- Ed: Yeah. See, as you get older, the hair on the top of your head goes away, so let's try growing some of the stuff on the bottom.
--:-- Ed: Yeah, you gotta lose the butt head.
--:-- Henry: But since Hedwig was Himmler's mistress, she naturally shared his enthusiasm for mass murder. Because you can't share a bed with Heinrich Himmler without sharing his beliefs.
--:-- Marcus: Isn't there like some kind of in and out about whether or not she really knew anything? It seems like they did see each other, but we have no idea what their fucking...
--:-- Henry: Well, I mean, according to one of Hedwig's friends, she knew. And she was very, very involved. Himmler's real into it.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah. I'm certain you talk... How much does Carolina now know about Himmler? How much does Natalie have to know about UFOs? You mean to tell me these people aren't going to talk?
--:-- Henry: Well, Carolina knows quite a bit because she helped with the story editing and much of the production on this episode. Thank you very much, Carolina, for your help on this. And she's always there on the couch. In the 10 years that we've been together, she's always there when I'm, quote, watching my Nazi shows at night, you know, winding down.
--:-- Henry: So, yeah, she knows quite a bit.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah. And, you know, like Natalie, you know, she, you know, Hedwig, you know, had a partner who was like a pillow.
--:-- Ed: Oh, that's cute.
--:-- Marcus: Oh, that's nice. I'm a source of comfort.
--:-- Henry: Well, it seems like once the Einsatzgruppen really got going, Himmler began living in his own twisted version of civilized society with Hedwig as his partner. They actually lived in a luxurious home in Hitler's neighborhood.
--:-- Marcus: Oh, whoa, that's crazy. How'd they get that? You never think about that. Hitler had a neighborhood.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, yeah, he had a... Hitler's favorite restaurant. We probably ate at it.
--:-- Henry: It was actually quite good.
--:-- Marcus: Ooh, that pork knuckle was so fucking good. We went to this place in Berlin. It's the oldest restaurant in the entire city. It's one of the oldest restaurants in Europe and the world.
--:-- Ed: Amazing food. They have all of these luminaries. Beethoven ate there. Every member of all German society.
--:-- Marcus: The dog or the musician?
--:-- Ed: They got both. But then there's almost like a sense that there's pictures missing.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, there's a period missing. Possibly between 1933 and 1945. It's like nobody went to the restaurant.
--:-- Ed: I mean, the thing is, the food's good. Food's incredible.
--:-- Henry: Well, according to one of Hedwig's friends, Hedwig knew, because the friend claims that Hedwig and Himmler's house featured chairs made from human body parts. One chair was supposedly made from the polished bones of a human pelvic girdle, while the other was made from human legs and feet.
--:-- Marcus: No health inspector, huh?
--:-- Henry: Himmler and Hedwig also reportedly owned a copy of Mein Kampf that had a cover made from human skin. Supposedly, it was a gift that Hitler gave to all of the top Nazis. But it must be said that the existence of these items has never been confirmed, nor were they found after the Allies defeated Germany. If Hitler did give a bunch of copies of Mein Kampf bound in human skin to all the top Nazis, we would have found one. There's no way there's not one around.
--:-- Marcus: No, yeah, if they ever existed, which I don't think they did.
--:-- Ed: They turned it into a football.
--:-- Marcus: But I feel like that's a part of the legend. There's more legends in here, too, where I wonder whether or not, like, I got some flack by even thinking about Himmler as an asexual person, even though he had this extended affair. But honestly, who's to say he was hypersexual versus somebody just hanging out with you? Finally have a younger woman that's paying attention to you, that eats up everything that you say, and then maybe you just play house with this person.
--:-- Ed: I don't see him as a big kisser.
--:-- Ed: No. Especially with that chin. His teeth are going to fall out of his mouth.
--:-- Marcus: But I guess she...
--:-- Ed: But without the chin, she does have a good like nuzzle spot.
--:-- Ed: She does. She's very comfortable.
--:-- Marcus: But the Adam's apple is going to get in the way.
--:-- Ed: She's frightening looking.
--:-- Marcus: Hers or his?
--:-- Ed: Hedwig Potthast is frightening looking. Jesus Christ. She looks like a character from The Strangers.
--:-- Ed: You know what she looks like? She looks like the girl from The Frighteners.
--:-- Ed: When she was young. What's her last name? I want to see her now.
--:-- Marcus: Potthast. P-O-T-T-H-A-S-T.
--:-- Ed: Pie Hedwig, pot has... Ah! Yeah. Scary.
--:-- Marcus: Oh, man. Deep eyes.
--:-- Ed: Yeah. Oh yeah. She looks like someone who would love Himmler.
--:-- Ed: She like, yeah, she very Sherry Moon zombie.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, right.
--:-- Henry: But whether or not Himmler and Hedwig were living in an Ed Gein fever dream or not, the happy couple were actually having sex with each other. And just a few months after the Babi Yar Massacre, Hedwig gave birth to Himmler's second child, a boy named Helga. Eventually, she would give birth to two children from Himmler. Now, Himmler was still married to his horrible wife, Marga. But in his eyes, he'd done something to be proud of in having a child with another woman. In Himmler's view, he was merely practicing what he preached, because Himmler's obsession with breeding the master race had only gotten stronger as the war went on. See, not too long after Himmler had his second child, he signed an order declaring that all quote-unquote seductions of women and girls by SS men, they all needed to be reported to him personally, so he could keep an eye on how Aryan blood was spreading across Europe. Hypocritically, Himmler would even involve himself in cases of adultery within the SS, reviewing each case personally to see which couples should be forced to stay together and procreate and which couples should be sent to the camps.
--:-- Marcus: So he sent Nazis who were adulterers to the camps?
--:-- Henry: Let's be honest. He sent Nazis' wives who were adulterers to the camps.
--:-- Marcus: Yes, Nazis were fine. It was all the women.
--:-- Henry: Now, if we may return to the Holocaust, you guys mind?
--:-- Marcus: Oh, great! Oh, I almost forgot! What else are we doing here?
--:-- Henry: Not every location in which the Einsatzgruppen operated had a Babi Yar ravine ready to be filled with bodies. Therefore, the main logistical problems that faced Himmler's men in the Einsatzgruppen was what are we going to do with all these bodies? Because leaving them out in the open was a gruesome health hazard. The obvious answer, of course, was to dig mass graves. And for a while, that's exactly what they did. But the pits became their own sort of extraordinarily traumatizing horror shows for everyone involved. See, once these grave pits were filled with dozens, if not hundreds of victims and covered in dirt, the ground would move as if it was breathing.
--:-- Henry: Because many of those who had been shot by the Einsatzgruppen before the dirt was thrown on top, they had not died before the burying began. The living would often dig themselves out, exhausted and covered in blood. Many died just a few yards from the pits, but those that didn't die were simply shot again by the Einsatzgruppen and left to rot where they lay. The Nazis also experimented with quicklime to speed up the decomposition process, but again the problem was with the living. When the quicklime hit the skin of those thrown into the pits, those who had not yet died, the chemicals would boil them alive as their skin sloughed off the bone. According to some survivors, the screams of those being chemically eaten away by the quicklime was worse than the burns caused by the quicklime itself, and the screams would only get louder as layer after layer of humans were marched to the mass graves, shot, and dumped on the melting mass of flesh.
--:-- Marcus: All right, so I didn't know that this was the script, you know, when I got this gift.
--:-- Marcus: Now it's another wonderful moment for a Happy Einsatzgruppen Day.
--:-- Henry: Happy Einsatzgruppen Day. Just make sure you're celebrating at home every single time you hear some sort of unearthly, ungodly horror.
--:-- Ed: Take a shot. I don't know. I don't know what you're supposed to do. Give a gift to yourself. You know, maybe it's...
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, maybe give a gift to yourself. Give a gift to someone you love. You know what it is? Let's make it a... you give a gift to a friend. That's what it is. On the 9th of... and we're recording this on October 23rd, so it's Einsatzgruppen Day.
--:-- Henry: Einsatzgruppen Day is a day when you try to replace the horrors committed by the Einsatzgruppen with the power of friendship.
--:-- Henry: And then since like, and like I know that this could be insensitive, but I just have to mention again, I got this because I know who you are personally. It has nothing to do with the script. It's a really nice shovel.
--:-- Marcus: Oh my god, this is incredible!
--:-- Henry: It's a brand new shovel.
--:-- Marcus: It's got a good handle. It's a nice short...
--:-- Ed: We did debate. He's got a new garden! I don't know what the fuck to do! We debated because of the mass grave element.
--:-- Henry: We know that, but he likes shovels. It's got nothing to do with graves. It just shovels.
--:-- Marcus: I enjoy digging. I have since I was a child. I enjoy digging. I enjoy dirt. And the fact that the two of you gave me two digging implements shows that you know me very well. And I appreciate both of you. May this shovel bring you life.
--:-- Marcus: Oh, beautiful.
--:-- Marcus: I will use the shovel to create life.
--:-- Marcus: Vegetables, maybe.
--:-- Marcus: Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Food!
--:-- Ed: I think you do with the shovel, you know?
--:-- Marcus: If you can...
--:-- Ed: Food! Food! I think you do with a shovel, you know?
--:-- Ed: Pit body! If you can avoid it. But if it happens, you gotta shovel. If it's the only thing that you can do.
--:-- Marcus: I do. This is so nice, thank you. I can fiddle with it, too. It's small enough to fiddle with.
--:-- Henry: Exactly, it's like a sitting cane.
--:-- Marcus: And I will say, the one weird thing I should have known better, because when I was watching Triumph of the Will, when all the Nazis were lined up, they were all holding shovels.
--:-- Marcus: Why not guns?
--:-- Henry: Because they wanted to show that, you know, remember, it's all about agriculture.
--:-- Henry: And it's all about, you know, warrior farmers.
--:-- Marcus: They were such a fucking nerd with the farming.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, that was also, but that was also Goebbels. Like, Nuremberg was Goebbels' baby.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, because, you know, he had a, I think he had a theater degree. Like, I think he had a theater tech degree. I don't remember the... Like, he had studied, like, Goebbels had studied theater.
--:-- Marcus: Is daylight savings their fault?
--:-- Henry: No, that's ours. Benjamin Franklin.
--:-- Ed: I had an idea. I was reading a thing about Nuremberg about how they had this thing where he had set up 151 aircraft detective lights around the Nuremberg rallies in order to create this column of light. It's like godly column of light. And the most like literally on the nose thing at the very top of the converging would create this point of light where it's converging. They said that during Nuremberg rallies, birds would fall from the sky as they got caught in the orb of light and they would die. They would literally fly until they died.
--:-- Marcus: You know what I want? A Nuremberger.
--:-- Ed: Well, it's because we're hungry.
--:-- Marcus: Let's wait.
--:-- Ed: Yeah, let's put sauerkraut on a burger.
--:-- Henry: As it was, the Einsatzgruppen had plenty of reasons to dig pits. There was an unimaginable number of bodies to dispose of, because once they got started killing at a full clip, each of the seven Einsatzgruppen could easily be responsible for 20,000 murders per month. But eventually the mass murder began to wear on Himmler's men. You can't kill millions upon millions of people without it starting to fuck with you a little bit. But while there were certainly Nazis in the Waffen-SS and the Einsatzgruppen who were traumatized by the atrocities they committed, there was a significant core who were eager and enthusiastic killers who did not need any sort of gradual brutalization to get them accustomed to mass murder. By the end of 1941, all seven Einsatzgruppen units developed their own tactics for mass murder, and each group tweaked their methods depending on the unit leader's style and on what direction the unit's sadism leaned. In Minsk, for example, one Einsatzgruppen leader would arrange for the youngest and prettiest of the Jewish girls in the city to march to a cemetery in a mock beauty contest. Once they were amongst the graves, they were forced to strip naked before being shot one by one. The last to survive, the winner, so to speak, would be raped by the Einsatzgruppen leader, who would subsequently murder her himself.
--:-- Marcus: Happy Einsatzgruppen Day. One last little gift for the wonderful dead. One last gift to bring a positive edge. You're looking for the silver lining. This is the last one. This is the biggest gift. It's a three-parter, and it's all music-based. First is Danny Bedrosian's new book, Make My Funk the P-Funk.
--:-- Henry: That's a really good plug. Thank you so much. It's awesome. Especially in the middle of Himmler.
--:-- Marcus: Middle of my first group of names. He loves that. Danny loves that. He really loves it. And then Marcus likes rare music. P-Funk's a little too popular for you. So here we have Larry Mullen's album, who is the drummer for the Bad Seeds.
--:-- Marcus: Thank you. That's awesome. Thank you. That's as good as money.
--:-- Ed: Yeah, that's as good as money. You saved that one. A lot of people say, you know, you don't need to give the drummer an album, but not Larry Mullen.
--:-- Marcus: No, no. I got to shut up. Because all it is.
--:-- Ed: Yeah, it's like Radiohead, but without the radio or the head.
--:-- Marcus: And then also this one is I think the best one. It's a cassette of the Repo Man soundtrack. But it's not the Repo Man soundtrack. It's a tribute to the Repo Man soundtrack. So it's covers of all of the Repo Man songs.
--:-- Henry: Oh, thank you so much. That's awesome. Hold on to that one.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, yeah. Oh, Mike Watt.
--:-- Henry: Mike Watt. Yeah, I love it.
--:-- Marcus: Also the first song, the Repo Man theme song, is done by Those Darlings.
--:-- Henry: I love Those Darlings. It's really good. I'm sure they love the plug here as well.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, right in the middle of Himmler, man. Hell yeah.
--:-- Henry: But it does help us escape from Himmler.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, Jesse Zazu unfortunately died of cancer. So there's no more of those Star Wars shows.
--:-- Ed: Well now I'm angry. Mike Watt's still around. Mike Watt and the Second Man, they're doing great.
--:-- Marcus: Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're doing great.
--:-- Ed: And plug to them on Einsatzgruppen.
--:-- Marcus: Oh, happy Einsatzgruppen. Thank you very much. It's a very thoughtful gift.
--:-- Henry: No problem. Now, back to the Einsatzgruppen.
--:-- Henry: Sure. The insane brutality was not the case across the board. In order to deal with the murder of innocent men, women, and children, some Einsatzgruppen leaders engaged in games of pretend, where they would tell themselves that they were actually killing criminals or resistance fighters. But when the justification stopped working, some Einsatzgruppen would find themselves overcome with uncontrollable fits of crying. Come out of nowhere. Others began suffering from impotence. Multiple times, Einsatzgruppen soldiers completely lost all sense of reality, and they would begin shooting wildly, killing and wounding their fellow SS men. Eventually, the SS came to recognize when this was about to happen, and the men for whom it was all too much would be sent home to either die by suicide or drink themselves into oblivion.
--:-- Henry: Number two was the more common one, but many, many, many Einsatzgruppen members killed themselves pretty soon after coming home.
--:-- Marcus: Bye! See you in hell! It's so rare that I'm like, ah, suicide sounds right. That's good. Get out of here. Honestly. Get out of here. You ruined it. You ruined it and you got to go. You got to go.
--:-- Henry: Himmler, however, eventually recognized that the Einsatzgruppen was not a long-term solution, which, of course, is when he got the idea to begin using the concentration camps to fully industrialize and, more importantly, depersonalize the Holocaust. But in October of 1941, hope for the people of Eastern Europe finally arrived. That month, Japan sent word that they would remain neutral in the German-Russian war. This meant that Stalin could transfer all the troops he'd been keeping on Russia's far east borders straight to Moscow for a counterattack. And because the Nazis had paid so much attention to slaughter in the name of Lebensraum rather than focusing on long-term logistics, the Nazis took heavy losses immediately. But the reason why Japan was staying out of the eastern front was because they already had their eye on a different enemy. And on December 7th, 1941, a day that will live in infamy, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Finally, we at the... And it with the awakening of the sleeping giant that is America that we return next week to conclude our series on Heinrich Himmler.
--:-- Marcus: And don't worry, ladies and gentlemen, the Nazis start dying immediately.
--:-- Henry: Yeah, then we can start getting into it next week because this has been sad.
--:-- Marcus: It's actually going to be fun to finally kill some Nazis. This is a really good, like, it's just important that we said this, because normally with every episode, as soon as I learn everything, I delete it, right? I delete so much stuff. But apparently, it seems like with this series, there's a lot of lessons we're supposed to know. It's like lessons. And I think one of those lessons is, Einsatzgruppen Day. It's an awesome concept. And we're going to Hallmark. Every October 23rd, that's Einsatzgruppen Day. It's for friends. It's replacing the power of hate with the power of friendship. Just remember that. Plant some vegetables on Einsatzgruppen Day. Buy a Jewish guy some pizza. Honestly, Jews fucking love pizza. They do. Buy him a pizza and a hip hop album. Honestly, just please. My Jewish family, we did this great pizza thing. I came into town, I was like, hey, I'd like to see everyone. And they got everyone together and we all like pizza. You know, so what we did was, everyone brought one pizza from their favorite pizza place. And so, and they all showed up at the same time, we had seven fresh pizzas from seven different delicious pizza spots.
--:-- Henry: Great Jewish tradition.
--:-- Marcus: That's incredible.
--:-- Ed: We did that once. Remember we had that pizza?
--:-- Marcus: And those would all be New Jersey's pizza spots, right?
--:-- Ed: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
--:-- Marcus: Nothing beats New Jersey pizza, these fucking Chicago, Detroit, New York idiots. I said it. Jersey's got the pizza, you fucks.
--:-- Henry: Apparently it's Connecticut. Who knew?
--:-- Marcus: I've never had it.
--:-- Henry: Never had that New Haven pizza. I want to try it. You know, actually, last night, to kind of cleanse the palate a little bit, as soon as I finished writing this script last night, I went and met Eddie and some of our friends at the Red Lion Tavern for Hino Karaoke Night.
--:-- Marcus: Oh, my God.
--:-- Henry: It was so much fun. I had bratwurst and sauerkraut and a Bitburger to remind myself, no, there's some good stuff in Germany. There's some great stuff. There's a lot of really great stuff. Angela Merkel's tits.
--:-- Marcus: You're obsessed with them?
--:-- Henry: I mean, they're there.
--:-- Ed: We'll keep that train rolling.
--:-- Henry: They're there. German breasts are nice.
--:-- Ed: You're obsessed with them? You're obsessed with them?
--:-- Henry: I mean, they're there.
--:-- Ed: We'll keep that train rolling.
--:-- Henry: They're there. German breasts are nice.
--:-- Marcus: Patreon.com slash Last Podcast of the Left. Make sure you give Ed money to describe other races' breasts. If you could, he does it very often, and my God, is he accurate. And you can go to Ed Elpe on the left for all of your social media needs, and they should be none. Come see us on tour at live podcast on the left.com. Buy those tickets. We're out there flapping our gums for you.
--:-- Henry: That's right. We're going to Akron, Portland, Philadelphia, Austin, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Tulsa, and Oklahoma City. Go to our website to find out when those days are and come see us on the road. You fuckers.
--:-- Henry: Yeah. Come see us. It's fun.
--:-- Henry: It's not like today's episode. I mean, you know, it's kind of brutal.
--:-- Marcus: Our live show?
--:-- Marcus: Sorry, I just switched off.
--:-- Henry: You're allowed. He's just seeing the Einsatzgruppen and he's waving goodbye. What a wonderful Einsatzgruppen Day. See you next year.
--:-- Marcus: Bye, Hail Satan.
--:-- Henry: Oh, you know, Hail Friendship. I don't feel, Ryan Murphy kind of, if I'm going to be frank, kind of ruined Hail Gein for me a little bit.
--:-- Marcus: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Please be Marcus. Take it back.
--:-- Henry: I'm just saying. I'm going to have to give it a little bit of time. But in the meantime, hail friendship, hail digging implements.
--:-- Marcus: Hail friendship and digging implements and Angela Merkel's tits. Thank you.
--:-- Ed: This is a really good weapon too. This little shovel. That pickaxe, you're going to kill somebody with that, it'll be awesome.
