Behind the Bastards

There’s a reason the History Channel has produced hundreds of documentaries about Hitler but only a few about Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bad guys (and gals) are eternally fascinating. Behind the Bastards dives in past the Cliffs Notes of the worst humans in history and exposes the bizarre realities of their lives. Listeners will learn about the young adult novels that helped Hitler form his monstrous ideology, the founder of Blackwater’s insane quest to build his own Air Force, the bizarre lives of the sons and daughters of dictators and Saddam Hussein’s side career as a trashy romance novelist.

Part Two: How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible

Part Two: How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 10:00

Part Two: How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible

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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. OK, welcome back to the podcast that this is, which is not the podcast that this isn't. Which is to say that this is behind the ********. Yeah. Family. What was that? Come on, come on. I was being very specific. Sophie fell in love with God. We talk about the worst people in all of history. OK? That's what we do. That's our, that's our milieu. Is the worst people bad ones? Yes. And and one and one. Sometimes those a bad people. There's dead babies. We always have this wonderful lady on. Yeah, Sophia, Alexandria is here today to talk with us about some dead babies. Whoa, Robert, what did I say? I said stop only inviting me to dead baby things. Can you break it up with some adult murder every once in awhile? I mean, yeah, there was some adult murder in the last one, come on, remember? But that doesn't count. If Part 2 is baby murder, that negates part one. I don't know that it does. I think it just makes for more murdered people. I think that we do one baby murder episode, we do one other people murder episode and that. Is a healthy balance for our relationship. You know what? I respect that and I accept it. OK. Alright, well, good. See, This is why communication is so critical. Can you feel I'm hugging you through the zoom? Yeah. Thank you so much, Sophie, I'm hugging you to talk. Yeah. Ohh. Yes. Alright. For having me. You're welcome. You're welcome. So this is part two of our episode. You know about Nazis and stuff, right? Actually, introduce me, you fool. OK, I did. I said you're Sophia Alexandria, who we talk about. Well, you're also a comedian in a podcast. My name. First of all, pronounce her last name. Right. Sophia. Alexandria. No. What? Alexandra. Sorry. Jesus Christ. How many ******* times ******* I was thinking about princesses? I have literally spent hundreds of hours with you. I know I was thinking of princesses. I too think of royalty when I think of Sophia, but I know how to pronounce her last name. Oh, good at making him look like ****. I mean, why about you? This is an episode about Nazis and I'm looking worse than the Nazis right now. I wouldn't need not worse than not after this episode. I'm not. Jesus, what with all the baby killing. Alright, let's let's get to it. Come on. All right. So you know when, when, when, when? One of the nice things Sophia about studying the old Nazis as opposed to studying? Days fascists is that we we we do know how things ended with the old ones, right? Like, you know, they don't win in the end. And we're all, we don't know that about our fascists, right? We're all still living through this. And there's a, there's a there's a pretty good chance they'll wind up, they'll wind up taking home the trophy, you know? Even if even us. Yeah, I do believe in us. But it's certainly the game is not, the game is not ended. The game is certainly still afoot. Yeah. And I think we all have to get used to the idea, like one of the frustrating things. I think there's this, like, especially if you have friends and family members who kind of went, went Trump and have been getting increasingly. At least far right, if not explicitly fashi over the last few years. Is that like, you want some sort of emotional closure where they're like, ah, I ****** **. I was wrong. Like I I made a bad call. That's never going to happen. It's never going to happen. And one of the things that I think is most interesting about Meier's book, they thought they were free is that, like, he he talks to like former Nazis about that. And these guys are, you would think if anyone can be like, Oh yeah, that was the wrong horse to back. It would be guys living in Germany and, like, 1946. But like, no, like, they they don't. Like, even those people weren't like, oh, you know what? This was a bad call. My kids are dead and my house got burned down in a bombing raid. Probably voted for the wrong guy. That's not what I wanted. Sure. There was some unfortunate mistakes. Yeah. But overall, it's been a pretty good couple years. That's exactly what they said. I know. It's a it's amazing. These guys, these little Nazis. And again, these are not the guys who got rich under Nazism. Like, these are not the venting Nazis. No, they're just merely tall. Yeah. Is. Yeah. Yeah. Tall. Which, again, in Starbucks and Nazi terminology, means short. Exactly. So yeah. It's it's it's fascinating. Rather than turning against Hitler, these little Nazis, the guys that Meyer, you know, befriended, they looked back on the Nazi time and power as like a golden age, and they blamed the fuhrer's failures on everyone but him. Only one of Meier's 10 friends was actually willing to condemn large aspects of the Nazi system. As for the others, quote, the other nine decent, hardworking, ordinarily intelligent and honest men did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 45. That it was evil and they do not know it now. None of them ever knew or knows now Nazism as we knew it and know it, and they lived under it, served it, and indeed made it. These nine ordinary Germans knew it absolutely otherwise, and they still know it otherwise. If our view of National Socialism is a little simple, so is theirs an autocracy? Yes, of course, an autocracy, as in the fabled days of the golden time our parents knew, but a tyranny, as you Americans used the term. Nonsense when I asked her wedekind the Baker why he had believed in National Socialism. He said because it promised to solve the unemployment problem and it did, but I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did. I thought I had struck paydirt and I said, what do you mean what? It would lead to war, he said nobody ever imagined that it would lead to war. And that's interesting. They talk about what it led to. They're not talking about the Holocaust. They're not talking about the deportations. They're not talking about the murder of a of the Roma. They're not talking about the murder of, you know, Hitler's political enemies. They're talking about the thing that ****** them up personally. That's what they didn't realize it would lead to. But you know what? That Baker has the kind of vibes where he would not bake a cake for a gay couple. Definitely not. And hearing reading that quote reminds me of the perennially relevant tweet by Adrian Bott. I never thought leopards would eat my face, sobs woman who voted for the leopards eating people's faces party. But like also reminds me of a Simpsons line. I'm sure Nazis have made some mistakes in the past, but that's why pencils have erasers. Yeah, it's it's. It's very funny. I think though, if we actually want to understand what happened Nazi Germany, and understand our own times better as a result, we do have to understand that. Like when these little Nazis say they had no way of knowing that that Hitler was going to lead Germany into a war. They're not lying. It seems like, like, obviously, how could you not know German Hitler wanted war. But a lot of his early appeal to the little Nazis was the fact that he was a wounded war veteran and that he'd been a private right, that he'd been a very low ranking war veteran. One of the things he would say is that, like, of course. They don't want war. I know better than anybody how bad war is. I've been in the middle of 1. Why would I want something like that? Like that was that was one of the lines that he took. Now, it was transparent nonsense, and it was obvious to people at the time who really, who were intelligent, who paid attention. Like, for example, have you heard that Hitler was a Nobel Prize nominee? That's like a thing people talk about, right? That's pretty well known, isn't it? Are you? I'm sorry. I didn't know if it was rhetorical or. No. No, he was. Yeah. Yeah. That that that's a thing that gets brought up from time to time, that he was nominated for the Nobel Prize. That was you were doing a thing where you're like. So we all know this. Right. And then I was waiting for you, and then you were just waiting for me to say something. And I was like, did you know that on the same page? Because I thought that was. Yeah. I don't think that it's something that people talk about as much as him being a vegetarian or whatever. Yeah. Or maybe not. Or I I read a lot of Hitler. So I'm, I'm. I'm probably off on what's common knowledge. Sure. You're a big Hitler head. We all know that. Yeah. He was a Hitler, Stan. Yeah. He was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. But the nomination was a joke. It was a satire. This Swedish anti fascist politician who was like being like sit like, it's absurd because this guy clearly wants to pull the world into war. So obviously like a lot of people who anyone who paid attention and who was modestly intelligent knew what Hitler was going to do. I'm not saying that like it was hidden in any real way, but it was hidden to these little Nazis. Not because like Hitler obscured it particularly well, but because the only media they paid attention to was essentially a like either. Completely idiotic. Or complete propaganda. They lived in a media bubble, right? And that we we see that today. As Meyer wrote quote, remember, none of these nine Germans had ever travelled abroad. None of them had ever known or talked with a foreigner or read the foreign press. None ever wanted to listen to the foreign radio when it was legal to do so. None. Except, oddly enough, the policeman listen to it when it was illegal. They were as uninterested in the outside world as their contemporaries in France or America. And, you know, Meyer gets it. Right. You you can see reading this book, he doesn't talk a lot about American fascism, but you can see in the way he writes the book, like he knew we were vulnerable, too, like, because these people are everywhere. Yeah. I don't know how you feeling, Sofia. Just, you know, real positive, waiting for the babies to get here. Yeah, we're just waiting for them to come on. Yeah. And then to leave immediately and to leave a pair of shoes behind, a pair of baby shoes, never worn. Yeah. Baby shoes. See myself out? Yeah. So thank you for the Hemingway joke. I've always said you're the Hemingway of this podcast, mainly because of the amount of time you spend shirtless firing a shotgun. I mean, people gotta get a load of these ******* I always say. Big way 15. Yeah, yeah, that that's the, that's the jacket quote for hills like white elephants. People gotta get a look at these cities. That is different way. So that is also the tagline for my *******. Hmm. A lot of similarities. You also spent a period of time in Havana, if I'm not mistaken, my ******* are there right now. So yeah, uh. Yeah, Meyer points out that, like, for his Nazi friends who lived in small towns and away from like, a lot of where a lot of the violence the Nazis did occurred, like the the negative things the Nazis did, the negative press about them was drowned out by things like the strength through joy program, which enabled working Germans to visit places like Norway and Spain at very little cost. These little Nazis and those like them were concerned with the economy, and again, that meant not starving in those days, and a lot of that appeared to get better under Hitler. Some of this was illusory and a great deal of it. Driven by what's called Aryanization, which is the process of stealing Jewish businesses and property and giving them to Germans or to to Arian Germans. But Myers friends felt like immunization is like a really clean name for that. Yeah, it is. And there's a there's a very good movie about it called that was made in the Soviet Union in, like the 60s called the shop on Main Street. That's about like one like Russian peasant in an occupied village who is given this old Jewish woman's. I think it's like. It it sounds like buttons and sewing equipment shop. UM. And she and he become friends and it's it's it's it's a very, it's an interesting movie because like all of the people acting in it were like peasants on the Russian steps when the Germans invaded and they lived in villages that the Nazis took over and then like turned like a lot of them turned in their their own Jews. So, like, the actors aren't like just acting, they're like remembering. It's a fascinating film. I really recommend it. I'm going to see it. Yeah, it's a, it's a very, very good movie. A very, I mean very dark movie. Because it's about Russia in World War Two, I was gonna say. What do you mean? Yeah, it's kind of sounded like a light hearted romp to me. Yeah, compared to talk about Love Actually. In part one. And and you knew a name of an actor. I was like, so eventually, of course. Hugh Grant. Yeah. I was just impressed by your disposal. Drainage. Yeah. Is he what? Yeah, he's, he's in and he plays the Prime Minister of England or something, right. He's the sketchy politician. Yeah, he's the one that, like, makes. An insane number of like body shaming fat jokes during it. Ohh does he? I don't remember a word of that movie so ****** ** but the only thing I remember is that Liam Neeson is in it. Yeah, woman, that's a supermodel, but not a Superman. Like, she's not supposed to be a supermodel, but she is. And the joke, he just keeps talking about how. Oh, like. The only person I'd marry is Claudia Schiffer or whatever the ****. And then this Claudia Schiffer shows up or you know what? It doesn't matter. That's not a good retelling of the movie, but it's partially true. But you know what ties that back into our our episodes? How are you going to do this is so impressed. Well, you were, you were, you were just telling me that Liam Neeson is in Love Actually because of when Love Actually was made. We're talking about, we're talking about what's that Holocaust movie with the red dress, Schindler's list. Or a Liam Neeson. Bam, bam. Back to we're back to World War Two. Perfect degrees of Hitler. Ohhh. Yeah. Well, that's amazing. *** ** * *****. Yeah, I know, I know, I know. You know, I'm only three degrees away from him. I mean like like genetically or no, no, no, just in terms of like direct handshakes. OK, yeah, I should hang out with. I shook hands with a guy who at age 8, like the Nazis came to power, and he was a member of the Hitler Youth, and they did a lot of meat, like meet and greet, gathering stuff with Nazi high brass. And he shook Herman Gerring's hand and obviously Herman Gerring by obviously by Nazi. Yeah. Transitive property. Yeah. You have shaken Hitler's hand. I basically shook Hitler's hand. Yeah. It's wild what we're talking about. Yeah. The thing that's crazier about it to me is that that dude's grandpa. Had fought with a sword on horseback as a cavalryman and like that that it's that recently that people were doing that. Like, yeah, this dude fought in the 1871 with like a ******* sword on horseback. And I, like, shook hands with his grandson. And as advanced as we are, we're that close to like, people stabbing each other while riding horses. That's so crazy. It's wild, right? Is that when you got into machetes? No, I've always been in machetes. OK. So yeah, yeah. Sorry, we. We got off on a little bit of a tangent here, but kind of what we're talking about. Most of this is for you, but a little bit of this is for me, OK? OK. It can't be just Hitler, Hitler, Hitler 100% of the time. Give me 2% of Hitler related. It just hit Hitler adjacent. And yeah we're we're talking about a lot of Hitler adjacent little Nazis here and and these folks were able to kind of get on board because they were in you know, distracted by a lot of the benefits of Nazis. And they didn't see, they didn't go looking for the ugly stuff even though they knew some of it was there because the stuff that was positive was like way more in their faces and that's really all they cared about and that's why. Even though the Nazis never had an electoral majority, almost every German got on board with Nazism, even if they didn't join the party during the years in which Hitler was succeeding. Right? Because people back a winner. And that's what gets it. That's what scares me most about imagining the United States sliding into fascism. And it's not it's not the midnight raids, the abduction and execution of dissidents, the slow clamp down on resistance. It's the idea that most Americans that like people I know and I'm friendly with, would find ways to pretend none of it. Is happening well, like people I love and maybe me are disappearing and being murdered. That's the scariest thing about it, right? Like that is so much more frightening than imagining, than thinking about the actual fascists doing the killing. It's like the people that I've, I've hung out and played video games with, like turning and turning away while it happened. Anyway, I'm gonna read another quote from Meyers book that's exactly on this topic. None of the horrors impinged upon the day-to-day lives of my 10 friends or was ever called to their attention. There was some sort of trouble on the streets as one or another of my friends was passing by on a couple of occasions, but the police dispersed the crowd and there was nothing in the local paper. You and I leave some sort of trouble on the streets to the police. So did my friends. And it's the police who are disappearing the Jews in this. Right? That's what's happening along with all the political dissidents. And Mayer actually presented his friends with an article from their local newspaper from back in 1938 about a group of local Jews who were taken into protective custody by the police. And Meyer writes none of them, including the teacher, the anti Nazi teacher, remembered ever having seen it or anything like it. And maybe they're lying. Maybe that's just our brains are that good at when we're really hate reality, closing it out if we're able to escape it. If we're safe enough to escape reality. I don't know. I mean, people's memories of events are so unreliable, incredibly so in general. Much less when you, like, really want to forget that you were a Nazi. Yeah, yeah. Or or just don't want to remember that you knew what? Being a Nazi. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. Now, the cold, hard reality is that most of the Germans who lived in the Third Reich knew what was being done to the Jews. Not every detail, for sure, but like, they knew enough, right? The the gas chambers, the death camps were tremendously widely known, but the fact that the Jews were being disappeared and that something terrible was happening, you were everyone was aware. This has not been kind of historical consensus for long. In 2001 Robert Professor Robert gladly, who we we quoted from earlier, conducted a massive survey of German mainstream media, newspapers and magazines from 1933 on, and he started down this path of research when he was looking through old German papers and he found a report of a woman. Who had been sent to the Gestapo for looking Jewish and having sex with a neighbor now at the time, and this is like the late 1990s when he came across this article, conventional academic wisdom held that the majority of Nazi atrocities had happened without the knowledge of most Germans. Gladly noted. For decades my generation had been told that so much of the terror had been carried out in complete secrecy. So coming up upon that report openly in a major German newspaper made him wonder if this was true. And so he decided to look into the matter, into the way that academics. Very, very in a very like methodical way. And I'm going to quote now from a guardian write up on the study he conducted as a result of this. His media troll with a research assistant found that as early as 1933 local papers reported the killing of 12 prisoners by guards at Dachau, the first to be set up as a model concentration camp, initially for communists. On May 23rd the Dachauer Zeitung, which is the the Dachau newspaper, said that the camp was Germany's most famous place and brought New Hope to the Dachau business world, which obviously there's a town also next to the camp. By 1934 the main and widely read Nazi owned paper Voca Shibao Bacter. Was reporting on a widening of policy to other political criminals, including Jews accused of race defilement. By 1936, communist prisoners were no longer mentioned in a photo essay in the US paper Dash Schwartz Corp. The Dark Core emphasized the campuses places for people for race, defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates, and habitual criminals. That's interesting to me that that's how they're that's how the Nazis spun the concentration camps first, not as a place for Jews in specific, but as a place for race defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates, and habitual criminals. And that process continued through the years of the regime short life. In 1937, Heinrich Himmler made public announcements that still more camps would be needed for those with hydrocephalus, cross eyed, deformed half Jews, and a whole series of racially inferior types. In 1938, after Kristallnacht, gerbils made a widely purported. Public announcement that the final answer to the Jewish problem would occur via government decree. So far from being unaware of the Holocaust, the little Germans were well informed about a lot was going on. They knew their government was looking to a final answer to the Jewish question, and they knew what that meant, more or less. So. Yeah. Not only were the Nazi atrocities well known as they occurred, but the desire of little Nazis to pretend ignorance at the crimes that were enabling was also really obvious to outside and inside observers at the time. There's a quote that I think is really useful from Peter Viereck, who was a German American scholar, and he wrote this in 1940, well publicized among Germans already before Hitler came to power and during a period when he still depended on their consent rather than coercion where the many actual deeds of butchery. Someday the same Germans now cheering Hitler strut into Paris will say to their American friends and to their brave German anti Nazi friends, we did not know what went on, we did not know. And when that day of no nothing comes, there will be laughter in hell. And there's a lot to say about the forgetting that happened after the war. And some of it was because we wanted the Germans as allies against the Communists. the US government was very much willing to to let people forget. And it was not a unified thing. Like one of the things Eisenhower did that I think was really laudable was forced Germans who lived near the concentration camps to tour them, where there were like still corpses lying out and stuff like that. But but for the most part, this was allowed to be the mainstream belief for you. You go find old documentaries. About the Holocaust and stuff like this was a very widespread belief that most Germans hadn't known because it was politically dangerous in the period when those same Germans were still running Germany. To admit that they'd known and that they'd at least let it happen. And that's. I mean. It's a real bummer. It, yeah. It also makes me think of, like, the fact that there's so many reminders of what happened in Germany and, like, all these monuments and stuff and how that's really important. Also for reckoning with something that is like a big historical event that most people would like to forget their country was a part of. Yeah, they actually put a lot of, if you go to any of like the any of the concentration camps that are actually in Germany, like in order to be a guide at one of those places, like there's a certain level of education you have to have and and the people there are extremely knowledgeable about the Holocaust. And it's something that the German Government does now put a lot of importance in because you you have to people want to forget that. When people want to forget, it's not that just they don't want to remember. A bad episode from history. They want to forget that they might do that, right? They probably wouldn't be Nazis, but they would let the Nazis do what the Nazis did, and nobody wants to remember that. Nobody wants to think about that. But it also just makes you think about how much Wilder it is that people fight for Confederate monuments here because they're the opposite of of. Those kind of monuments that you are trying to remember the people that were for something horrible and not the people that fought against them. So it's it would be like if you want to Nazi Germany and all of the monuments instead of being too like the Germans being Nazis were like, let's not. This is so we don't forget that there were Nazis. Here's hanrick. There's a statue, oh, it's right next to, you know, Hitler and Hitler's garden. It's just like that's, I mean, and that's something that has been taken for granted in America for so long that like, yeah, Confederate monuments, of course. And on that side. It's time for an ad break so that we can all take some deep breaths off mic. 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Was it cruel to animals, like, was it factory farmed? Is it cheap because of unfair wages paid to people? And so alleviating poverty is tremendously important. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Woo, I like it when we can be more playful, Robert say. Welcome back. I say woo, everything's fine in the world. So. Yeah. So I think it's interesting. I think it's important to note because there's very little nuance in our education of the concentration camps that they started as a place to put criminals right, sexual deviants, you know, child molesters, right, the, the, the that that that's what the Nazis, that's not what who they were putting there, but that's how the Nazis justified it. And you can look at things like who Q Anon suggest going after and whatnot and. See some see some lines there. But also like what a crazy coincidence that like. All the people that are the murderers and therapists and whatever are Jewish and gay and Roma and communist and political dissidents. It's such a wild coincidence, yeah, but it is like you. You see shades of that in our own fascist, this idea that, like everybody who is opposed, who is actively opposed to the regime, is a criminal, you know? And they're not just criminals because they're breaking laws and they're protest, but they're they. They all have like they have to be, like part of some pedophile. The ball they're doing like they're they're, they're they're all like it. It's it's this, it's in. The reason they do that, right? The reason they do that is because it stops normal people from caring, because normal people don't give a **** if a criminal gets murdered by the cops because that's supposed to happen, you know, normal people care when someone they see as a good person gets hurt. They don't care about criminals because. There's a lot that's ****** ** in our society. But the Nazis were taking advantage of that same thing, too, you know, you you you don't you don't say we're cracking down on political dissidents. It's we're arresting criminals and then everybody's fine with it. Yeah. I'm going to read a quote from a book called backing Hitler by Robert. Gladly. We were just talking about. And it's a very good book. And it talks about sort of how how the images that the Nazi regime put out to justify the people they were locking away. The social reception of the images that were projected no doubt varied enormously. At one end of the scale, these published accounts had a terrorizing or deterrent effect on potential opponents of Nazism and those who were officially stigmatized. Certainly, many people in the country would have seen through the propaganda. However, for good citizens who wanted to return to an idealized version of German law and order, these images help to ease the appearance of even the terroristic sides of Hitler's regime. They could read in the press that those who suffered at the hands of the new system were other people, communists and various. Social Outsiders and the Jews, good citizens, were invited to see the camps as educative institutions and as a corrective and a warning to those described as social rabble, that is, men and women who are habitual criminals, the chronically unemployed, beggars, Alcoholics, homosexuals and repeat sex offenders. Totally different now. The amount of signing in this podcast, it's like Robert says something and then and then I was just like, yeah. So one thing about Robert and eyes chemistry, that's not really Robert and my chemistry, that's not really popping off over. Long. What is this? Zoom calls. We're on zoom now? Yeah, yeah, thank you. Because I feel like you paused for me to say something when I have nothing to say and I'm just defeated by the content. And then when I do have something to say, you're like, I'm in the middle of my thoughts and I'm like, you're right, you're right. My thing was stupid. And that's what's happening. Podcasting. Yay. You know, maybe delete that. They don't need to know how the sausage is made. No, I like it. Needs to stop saying that. Yeah, so. Jesus, what a what a time to be alive. So I could go through and link excerpts from articles that kind of make that point about, like, Trump topping up talking about violent criminals and like, you know, camps at the border and all the christofascists paranoia about trans people using bathrooms, which when they talk about the Nazis arresting sex criminals, that's who they were arresting. It's not rapists. It was people who had sex they thought was criminal. Yeah, or we could talk about Q. Anon's obsession with mythical child sex traffickers. But like you, we've all been through the same news cycles. I'm sure you see the parallels. And a read through of Professor Galatoire's book, which I do recommend reveal several of them. Quote, Orick Herbert recently suggested that during the Nazi years there was a growing lack of moral concern in German society for human rights and the protection of minorities, which grew rapidly during the years of the dictatorship, and which led to a profound moral brutalization. In Germany, that's familiar right growing lack of concern for human rights and protection of minorities in this society, leading to brutalization. Yeah, gladly himself uses the term desensitization to refer to the impact the Nazis years long drum beat of like news articles about the people they were arresting and sending away and killing the impact that had on people desensitization. Again we're experiencing a version of that ourselves with all of the hundreds of thousands of deaths from from, from COVID-19 with the violence in the streets with like these these this constant drum beat of police murders like. The end and just, you know, not even from like stories about death, but just like the sheer amount of horrible things happening, it just numbs you after a while. That was going on then too. Another thing we don't talk about enough. So what? We're talking about desensitization and genocide? We should probably talk a little bit about some of the little Nazis who wound up as cogs in the machine of death that actually made the Holocaust happen. This is the dead baby section, Sophia. Finally it took you to earn my keep here. Jesus, I had a ******* prologue in this sumbitch. So I wanna quote now from an article in Der Spiegel titled Everyday Murder, Nazi atrocities committed by ordinary people. Quote perpetrators included both committed Nazis and people who had nothing to do with the Nazis. The murderers and their assistants included Catholics and Protestants, the old and the young, people with double doctorates and poorly educated members of the working class. And the percentage of psychopaths was not higher than the average in society as a whole. One thing you have to accept if you really want to understand the Holocaust is that most of the people involved were what we would describe as mentally healthy. There were not people who could have been diagnosed with any sort of. Of of mental illness, which again, like this. This is why I push back whenever people talk about the Nazis is being crazy or Hitler is being crazy. Like, no, these were rational people taking rational action that happened to be the worst thing you can imagine, and that's so much scarier. Now, in the early 1990s, so it didn't. They put mentally ill people in. They sure did. Amps. So that's the first people that they executed in a lot of yeah. That's the biggest than most horrible irony to call people that were just like, yeah, willingly being agents of fascism, yeah, I'm comparing them. And to people that are actually mentally ill. It's very it. It is, it's sick. And it's wrong because it ignore it. It it completely ignores what was actually going down. And that's, that's very important. Like the very first, you know, the gas chambers before the gas chambers they were actually using like like trucks that they would hook up, uh, carbon monoxide gas to and pump into the trucks and they fill them with people and the people they experimented on 1st, the first people the Nazis killed with any kind of poison gas were mentally handicapped folks. Yep, that's how it started. I think it was the T4 euthanasia program, maybe getting things a little bit wrong there, but yeah. So in the early 1990s, a large group of researchers and historians began the long plotting work of digging through mountains of the Third Reich surviving records, and their goal was to put together for the first time. And again, this is right around the time that they're starting to understand that, like, actually most Germans were complicit to some degree. So they're starting to understand this, and they're trying to put together a comprehensive list of actual active perpetrators in the Holocaust for the first time, not just the leadership. In everyone who pulled the trigger or the equivalent, the people who loaded Jewish folks in the train cars, the people who manned gas chambers, everybody. And at present the number of active participants that they have listed. These are all individual people, include more than 200,000 Germans and another 200,000 Ukrainians, Estonians, Lithuanians and members of other occupied countries, including Frenchmen now. One of the little Germans who pulled a lot of triggers was Walter Mattner. And Walter was a police secretary from Vienna who had been just kind of a functionary in the Viennese police and then joined the US when the war started and became an administrative officer. And we have a lot of his letters to his wife back at home. And from those we learned quite a bit about the man. And I'm going to have a link to just like a sheet that has all of his letters home on it because it's very compelling stuff on September 22nd, 1941, right after his first. Entry into the conquered territories of the Soviet Union after the invasion started, he wrote. If I were not already a national socialist, the first day of my wartime deployment would have turned me into one through and through. No, not that long after. On 29th of September, about a week later, he wrote a letter in which he assured his wife that he and his fellow men of the s s were not committing war crimes against the Jews of Eastern Europe. He insisted at the most we arrange things, IE everything is taken away from the Jews. But just a few days later, like three or four days later, on October 2nd, 1941, he wrote this. This is again a letter to his wife. I should have already turned in. It's already 9:00 PM, and I volunteered for a special operation. Tomorrow, revalee is at 4:30 AM, and we're moving off at 5:30 AM tomorrow. I'll also have the first opportunity to use my pistol. I'm taking 28 rounds with me. Probably won't be enough, but another comrade will lend me his pistol or carbine. I don't even know if I'm being permitted to tell you this, but that the Jews are our misfortune. That's something you've known for a long time, and it's something we saw again and again on our journey to Warsaw and on to here. Just how many comrades are already resting in the cool Earth? And this is how many young men are sleeping, single and married, the prime of our German nation, to protect our home from the monsters we have gotten to know here. It is simply dreadful to have to look at these Asiatic hordes. What we Europeans feel when seeing this, you can understand bitterness that takes a hold of me and which everyone here feels when thinking of our home and our great fateful struggle which we have to wrestle through here for our people. What are 1200 Jews who are too many and yet another city and have to be bumped off? As the saying goes, it is only the just punishment for all the suffering they have inflicted and continue to inflict on us Germans until I arrive home. I shall tell you nice things, but enough for today. Otherwise you'll believe that I'm bloodthirsty. Wow. On October 7th, Walter and his comrades traveled to a village named Magliola V in Belarus. There they gathered up 2273 Jewish people. They stripped them of everything but the clothes on their backs, lined them up beside an open pit, and shot every single one of them to death at close range. Walter Mattner, mild mannered police secretary, wrote this home to his wife for the first truckload. My hand trembled slightly when shooting, but one gets used to it by the time the 10th truck arrived. Was already aiming steadily and fired surely at the many women, children and infants. Bear in mind that I also have two babies at home to whom these hordes would do the same, if not 10 times worse. The death we gave them was a nice short death compared to the hellish torture meted out to thousands upon thousands in the dungeons of the GPU. Infants flew in a wide arc through the air and we blew them away while still in flight before they then fell into the pit and the water. Let's get rid of this brood, which has plunged the whole of Europe into war and is still mongering in America until it drags them into the war. As well, Hitler's words are coming true. What he once said before the war began. If Jewry believes it'll be able to incite a war in Europe again, it won't be the Jews who will triumph, but it will herald the end of jewelry. In Europe, maglev has now lost a number with three zeros, but that's of no consequence here. I'm already looking forward to it, and many here are saying that when we return home, it's the turn of our local Jews. This is probably a cool time to mention that my grandma's family was shot to death. Yeah, by the Nazis. So it's bringing back some real fond memories. Yeah. Yeah. These are the people who do that and it it. It happened to a tremendous degree. The guys who did this, for the most part, were groups called the Einsatz Group and which was like, it means Special Task Unit. And it was, it was a lot of S like, it was like the folks that they recruited for this, a lot of them had been local police officers before, and these were folks who were willing who they this was kind of the first attempt at carrying out a genocide and mass. And they did it with gunfire. And they realized very quickly that this was not, Umm, yeah, it was. Not efficient, and we'll talk about that a little bit later, but but reading about mattner's crimes in particular brought to mind a passage from Meier's book that I find rather striking. And I'm going to I'm going to read that passage now. The German language, like every other, has some glorious epithets untranslatable and will go weirdness. Spice Burger is one of them. It means, very roughly, little men gone wild. I think about that a lot when I think about us. When I think about some of the things I've seen in the streets. Little men gone wild. That's some powerful **** yeah. So as it turned out, Mattner obviously former police officer killing people in Belarus for the Third Reich, and his fellow police back home in Germany were hard at work on that same task, and they thought they were free. Meyer notes that his friend at the sensitive politician Hoffmeister quote did his duty in 1938 when he was ordered to arrest Jews for being Jews. One of those he arrested, the Taylor Marowitz, and this guy survived the war, calls him a decent man, which. I have trouble getting into that guy's head too. But it's a it's a shade of genocide that we don't see enough. I think that is important to tell people about. Yeah, definitely. One of the most bitter and ****** ** realities of the Holocaust is that a lot of the killing was done by folks who would otherwise be described as decent men. People who were good husbands and good fathers and friendly, positive members of their community. Nice people. People who would have smiled at you as you passed them on the street when they were old men, and people who also played an active role in the extermination of millions of people, like, for example, major trap of reserve police, Battalion 101. And I'm going to quote from the Guardian. To tell you about major trap, according to witness testimony, Major Trap was in tears when he ordered the shooting of 1500 women, children and elderly Jews near Warsaw, all the while saying an order is an order. In July 1942, his men drove the victims out of their homes, loaded them into trucks and took them to a remote clearing to be executed. They shot them in the head or in the back of the neck and in the evening the soldiers uniform was recovered with bone fragments, brain matter and blood stains. And that's like. That's I think almost a more useful picture of what. It means to commit genocide. Is this man weeping? And going through with it anyway, because. It's an order. That's just so ******* frightening to me. I think anytime you justify. Anything with it's an order. It's a frightening thing because it just completely takes away like the humanity. Yeah, a decision all the way. Yeah, and it's why we decided at Nuremberg that, like, being under orders was not an excuse to commit genocide, because it's not. But it is precisely because of that guy. Now, you may have noticed that a lot of the folks were talking about in this segment about people who actually committed genocide by pulling triggers themselves. A lot of those people were cops. A strange, weird wonder what the connection is there, huh? Yeah. The Nazi state was adept at using regular police to round up Jews and other undesirables, and overwhelmingly German police officers who were not members of the Nazi Party previously agreed to do this work without complaint. Timothy Snyder, a Holocaust scholar and one of the world's great experts on fascism, one of your must reads if you want to understand what happened, notes in his book Black Earth that regular police were a key resource for the Nazis. Quote after its triumph in the night of Long Knives, the US implemented Hitler's fourth innovation, the hybridization of institutions. Crime was redefined, racial and state organizations were merged, and cadres were rotated back and forth. In 1935, in a significant reform, Himmler explicitly redefined the S and the police apparatus as a single organ of racial protection. Himmler, who served a racial movement rather than a traditional state, personally directed both the S and the German police from 1936. The Investigative service of the S proposed a new definition of political crime. It was not a crime against the state. The state had validity only insofar as it represented the race. Since politics was nothing but biology, political crime was a crime against the German race. Now, later on in that same book, Snyder continues the Einsatz group, and we're also hybrid organizations mixing S members and others. The police forces themselves were hybridized from within as police officers were recruited to the s s, while s s officers were assigned to the police. The secret state police, the detectives of the criminal police, and even the regular uniformed order police were to become Himmler's racial warriors and. Police are tools of the state they are. They are. And if we're talking about hybridization of the police with, shall we say, federal forces. Can we say armored vehicles or, I don't know, yeah, or deputized cops who get federal arresting powers or what's been happening with ice for the last four years? I'm going to quote from a Pro Publica article here. In the year after President Trump took office, state and local police officers across Pennsylvania swept carloads of Hispanic immigrants into ISIS net. In the process, they helped the agency's regional field off tales office tally more than at more at larger arrests of undocumented immigrants without criminal convictions. Than any of the 23 other field offices in the country. These are immigrants picked up in communities not at local jails and prisons. Last year, five states, New York, California, Illinois, Oregon and Washington, limited how police can question immigrants about their legal status or hold them for ice without a warrant. Separately, more than 400 counties restricted their engagement with ice and forcement, according to a national survey. On the other hand, 59 local agencies in 17 states have partnerships with ICE to train and deputize their officers to enforce immigration laws. Hybridization. Baby. Strong and evil. Yeah, and it makes you wonder how many major traps exist on our police forces today. Men who might be friendly and polite, but who would stand there with tears in their eyes and shoot dissidents if that's what they were supposed to do. Popular history likes to focus on outrageous villains like, you know, Hitler. But I I think these guys are. Are are are more important to study the, the, the, these otherwise decent, normal people who completely fail the thing that turns out to be the greatest moral test of their lives. Ice agents, anyone who's running any of the detention facilities, absolutely abusing children in those facilities, any any of those things, but also, in a way, all of us who live with it. Everyone who's able to live with it, you know, that brings me back to the littlest of the little Nazis, these guys, these men and women who lived in quiet small towns and villages and suburbs, you know, and and most of these people were people of conscience. They didn't vote for Hitler when they had a chance to vote for Hitler. And, you know, to the extent that they were aware of what was going on, a lot of them probably wondered, what can I do? How can I keep this from happening? And part of why they let it happen, part of why they sat back while their camps were killing people, were sterilizing people, is because they were just overwhelmed by daily life. Like, if you read these people's interviews, that's the thing you'll hear a lot, is that there was just so much going on, right? There was so much happening in the world and so many different, like, things occurring. I didn't know what to do, and I was just. Exhausted all the time. It's a great excuse, isn't it? Like, yeah, there's a there's so, so in his book, Meyer talks to one of his German colleagues, and this isn't one of the friends that he was studying because those guys were all members of the Nazi Party. This man was not a Nazi, but he was a German who lived in Germany when the Nazis were in power. He was a linguistics expert and an academic who was obsessed with the study of Middle High German. So he was, he had his field of study that he loved and was tried to kind of pour himself into while the Nazis rose to power, he told Meyer quote. What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little to being governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret. To believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. Now, we've talked to eerie. Yeah. And we've talked a lot about Trump in this, but that's not Trump. That's Obama. That's W Bush. That's Bill Clinton, that's Bush senior. That's in increasing thing that's been happening in America under all of the good presidents that have led us to this point is the habituation of people to being governed by surprise, you know? Yeah. Speaking of being governed by surprise, I'm going to tell you to take an ad break right now. Surprise ***** goods and services. Nailed it. Good to know that our comedic timing is still unemployed. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Sophie. Me and you're better than ever. Yeah. Rising to the occasion. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. 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Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. Thing, particularly young children out into nature so that they can experience it and take time off from this virtual world of being always on your cell phones and so on. And get the feel of nature so that you come to be fascinated, then you come to want to understand it, and then you come to love it and at that point you want to protect it. And then we'll come to the sort of healthy world that I envision as a good future for us. And the rest of life on this planet. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. So for most ordinary people, the extraordinary degree of trust that they had in Hitler, and there was a tremendous amount of that, especially as he starts to win these victories, he starts to achieve things that had seemed impossible, you know, the retaking the Sudetenland, rebuilding the German military, concrete ******* France. People had faith in him. And so that was one reason a lot of them were able to ignore the disappearances in the night. But that wasn't a factor for the people who weren't Nazis. The people who never converted for them, the thing that stopped them from doing more was not just personal fear. It was the exhaustion and burnout they had from living in a society like this. And I'm going to quote again from that linguist. This is him talking to Meyer. You will understand me when I say that my middle high German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then suddenly I was plunged into all the new activity as the university was drawn into the new situation, that new situation being fascism. Meetings, conferences, interview ceremonies, and above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires, and on top of that, where the demands in the community, the things want in which one had to one was expected to participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigamarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was then not to think about fundamental things. One had no time. Those, Meyer said in response. Are the words of my friend the Baker one had no time to think there was so much going on. Your friend the Baker was right, said my colleague. The dictatorship and the whole process of its coming into being was above all, diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your little men, your Baker, and so on. I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you, most of us did not want to think about the fundamental things and never had. There was no need to Naziism gave us some dreadful fundamental. Things to think about. We were decent people and kept so busy with continuous changes in crises and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the national enemies without. And within that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing little by little all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose we were grateful. Who wants to think? Wow. Damn. Yeah, I did. That's real. I didn't like that. But yeah, yeah, I see myself in this photo and I don't like it. That's how if you really study the Nazis, you should see yourself more and more with everything you learn in them. And if you don't, you're not studying them right. That's what's scary about them. That's what's scary about the Holocaust. They thought they were free as a chilling book, but I don't think there's any competition for the most frightening passage in the whole work. It comes when Meyer sits down, sat down with one of his colleagues, a chemical engineer, and again, this is another non Nazi and this is more depressing than the one you just read. Yeah, yeah, yes. This is the bleakest thing I may ever have read. So he sits down with this anti Nazi colleague of his, a chemical engineer who lived through the Reich, and he asks him one day, tell me now, how was the world lost? And this is his colleagues response. The world was lost one day in 1935 here in Germany. It was I who lost it. And I will tell you how I was employed in the defense plant, a war plant, of course, but they were always called defense plants. That was the year of the National Defense Law, the law of total conscription. Under the law I was required to take the oath of Fidelity. I said I would not. I opposed it in conscience. I was given 24 hours to think it over in those 24 hours. I lost the world, yes, I said. And this is Meyer speaking, you see, his friend responded. Refusal would have meant the loss of my job, of course, not prison or anything like hours. To think it over in those 24 hours I lost the world, yes, I said. And this is Meyer speaking, you see, his friend responded. Refusal would have meant the loss of my job, of course, not prison or anything like that. Later on, the penalty was worse. But this was only 1935. Losing my job would have meant that I could not get another wherever I went. I should be asked why I left the job I had. And when I said why I should certainly have been refused employment. Nobody would hire A Bolshevik. Of course I was not a Bolshevik, but you understand what I mean. Yes, Meyer said. I try not to think of myself or my family. We might have gotten out of the country in any case, and I could have got a job in an industry or education somewhere else. What I tried to think of was the people to whom I might be some help later on if things got worse and. As I believe they would. I had a wide friendship in scientific and academic circles, including many Jews and Aryans too, who might be in trouble. If I took the oath and held my job, I might be of help somehow, as things went on. If I refused to take the oath, I would certainly be useless to my friends. Even if I remained in the country. I myself would be in their situation the next day. After thinking it over, I said I would take the oath with the mental reservation that by the words with which the oath began, I swear by God I understood that no human being. No government had the right to override my conscience. My mental reservations did not interest the official who administered the oath. He said. Do you take the oath? And I took it that day. The world was lost, and it was I who will lost it. Do I understand, Meyer said that you think you should not have taken the oath. Yes. But Meyer said you did save many lives. Later on, you were of greater use to your friends than you ever dreamed you might be. His friend's apartment was, until his arrest and imprisonment in 1943, a hideout for fugitives. This man. Kid people from the Nazis for the sake of argument, he said. I will agree that I saved many lives later on, yes, which you would not have done if you had refused to take the oath in 1935. Yes, of course I must explain. First of all, there is the problem of the lesser evil. Taking the oath was not so evil as being unable to help my friends later on would have been. But the evil of the oath was certain and immediate, and the helping of my friends was in the future and therefore uncertain. I had to commit a positive evil. There and then, in the hope of a possible good later on. The good outweighed the evil, but the good was only a hope. The evil effect there, then, is my point. If I had refused to take the oath of Fidelity, I would have saved all three million. He says 3,000,000. He's talking about all of the 11 million people we now know died in the Holocaust. This was before they had a full count. You are joking, Meyer said. No. You don't mean to tell me that your refusal would have overthrown the regime in 1935? No. Or that others would have followed your example? No, I don't understand. You are an American, he said, again smiling. I will explain. There I was in 1935, a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all of his advantages in birth and education and in position rules or might easily rule in any country if I had refused to take the oath in 1935. Would have meant that thousands and live meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands like me in Germany were also unprepared. And each one of these hundreds of thousands was, like me, a man of great influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost. You were serious, Meyer said. Completely, he said. These hundred lives I've saved, or 1000, or 10, as you will. What do they represent? A little something out of the whole terrible evil, when if my faith had been strong enough in 1935, I could have prevented the whole evil. Your faith? Mayer asked. My faith. I did not believe that I could remove mountains. The day I said no, I had faith in the process of thinking it over in the next 24 hours, my faith failed me. So in the next 10 years I was able to remove only anthills, not mountains. How might your faith on that first day have been sustained? Meyer asked. I don't know. I don't know, he said. Do you? I am an American, I said. My friend smiled. Therefore, you believe in education? Yes, Meyer said. My education did not help me. And I had a broader and better education than most men have had or ever will have. All it did, in the end, was enable me to rationalize my failure of faith more easily than I might have done if I had been ignorant. And so it was, I think, among educated men generally in that time in Germany. Their resistance was no greater than other men's. When do you think the day was? Lost here. I don't know that it has been. But I know that. If I just mean in terms of, yeah. How far? Like that we could have imagined so far that, like we, we didn't know that Trump's presidency. Uh. Whatever resulted in all of the things that it did, even though we did know that it would be terrible. So yeah, when do you think was the moment that that mass miscalculation happened for the people that were not like active Trump supporters, but that went along and voted for him? I mean, I guess you could say when they cast a ballot. Now there's an element of which obviously the thing that had happened in Germany that this person's talking about has not happened to us yet. There's no regime making us take loyal to you. No, no, no, of course not. But that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying it's a one to one. I'm just saying that. But. As pessimistic as I was, yeah, Trump got elected. I couldn't have even imagined that it's been so much worse. So yeah, so it just makes me wonder at what point. People who voted for him. While, you know, quote UN quote holding their nose or whatever, at what moment it was lost for them when they decided that, you know what? I'll just ******* vote for him. Yeah, I mean it. Yeah, it's got to be. It can't be the emails. Like what was the straw? I don't know. That's a question I go with all of the time. And and some of it is that as it was then. You know the the. The thing that I think this fellow is talking about that that we we have not hit yet, is that the time at which. Decent people completely surrender to the regime, but it is a thing that will happen if the regime gains enough power, because decent people are always scared of dying. And. I think the folks who have crossed the line already. We're neither decent nor educated. You have to have had a failure of education or decency to have voted for Trump. And in a it's not. It's not the people who vote for him that scare me the most. It's it's again the people who. Didn't vote for him. But if it meant the difference between their lives or not would let the camps on the border where there's four sticks, directories occurring and babies being put in cages would let those turn into full death camps. Because the alternative would be would be their own. Not even loss of life, but loss of comfort and prestige. Like that's the that's the thing. That's the thing. Like the the lesson that this guy's trying to get across to people is that. It is not the fascists decision to let the fascists win. They don't make the final call. We do. They only win if we consent to their victory, as millions of decent people consented to the victory of the Nazis. Mic drop, yeah. You want to plug your plugable. Then **** yourself. Sorry. I I was. I'm on the edge of tears, so I'm trying to. Oh, I know. I know. I feel that I felt that energy this whole time. I was on the verge of tears earlier. You know? It's the kind of life we're living, my man. Yep. Cool time. So, you know, guys, follow it out. Yeah, I'm just. You don't want to do this. Hit us up on the gram. If you wanna not kill yourself, I guess maybe listen to my comedy album Father's Day, available wherever you listen to things. Can I just, can I just say that when I press shuffle on my like music library and it's you and you come up like after like a really somber song. It's so great. All of a sudden it's just you being just your radiant self and it just like makes my day every time so lovely. Thank you, Sophie. If you guys want to find my podcasts that are not about dead babies, we're learning some of great transitions from Robert. You can catch me talking about 90 day fiance on 420 day fiance with miles Gray from the daily zeitgeist and. Private parts Unknown, my podcast with Courtney Kosak about love and sex. Yeah and yeah, let's fight fascism real quick. Yeah, real quick. Just for a second. Just doesn't treat couple of minutes, yeah. Podcasts. Happy Trump COVID day, oht. Ohh comment, not a single comment was given. Good stuff. That's the podcast. There's the damn. Sorry it was so depressing. Yeah. Damn. Thanks. I guess. All right. Well, sorry, Sophia. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is brought to youbyjbl.com now. Our friends at JBL understand the power of tuning in to the real U. From true wireless headphones to pulsing party boxes, you can dare to vibe your way with the wide and colorful range of JBL products. Catch your favorite podcasts like this one unfiltered the JBL podcast on the Go. Play your music. Never wherever and live in the moment, your moment. Be unfiltered at jbl.com.