Part Two: Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself
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Calls are media. I don't know why. It's behind the bastards. We're back. This is part two. Adolf Eichmann. You know, the Eichmann. No. Oh. No. Maybe he's the Eich from Mike and Eichs. That's right. He's the Eichmann. Yeah. Mike and Eichs. Mike Badano and Adolf Eichmann. Together at last in a candy.

Oh, no, not Mike Modano. I heard he was a nice guy. Well, I know nothing about him. He was the only famous Mike I could come up with on a short order. Anyway, how you doing, Joe?

I'm good. Any big changes in life in the last, like, ten minutes? No. I got up, walked around a bit, came back. Turns out Adolf Eichmann's still a piece of shit. Yes. He has not become less of one. Yeah. Vented candy while I was gone. Yeah. Well, yes, the candy stuff is new. A lot of researchers aren't aware of that yet because it's a lie. We have the forbidden knowledge. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, Nazism is based on the big lie, which, you know, it's very funny to me. I get it more if you're German, right? Because the German Imperial Army at the start of World War I, almost certainly the best army in the world, and really comes within a hair's breadth of pulling it off, right? Yeah. It's not like World War II where it's like, well, past a very certain point, this was fucked. Right.

Like, they were in the fight right up until the last year there, you know? But if you're Austrian, it's just like, ugh. You were fucked from the jump. Come on, man. This is why they all had to become German nationalists. It's like, yeah, we tried our thing. Didn't work out. Turns out we don't deserve it. We immediately got pantsed by both the Russians and the Serbians because the Hungarians were just like...

You think Germany's strapped to a corpse? Boy, we're going to go limp as fuck. I'm going to go hang out at this place called Asanzo for a very long time. Let's be worse than the Italians at 20th century war. It's not easy. So...

Anyway, it's always funny to me that like, yeah, so many Austrians got hung up on the big lie. It's like, guys, you didn't need anyone else to explain your defeat. Neither did the Germans, really. But there's just a little bit more to it with the Germans. Starting a political party that's just anti-Austrian while I'm also Austrian because it's like, we don't deserve it. We don't deserve it. It would have made more sense for them to get really pissed at the Hungarians. Yeah, it's true. This is an iHeart Podcast.

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So by mid-1932, Adolf Eichmann has joined the Nazi Party. He starts reading their newspapers before he officially becomes a member. He gets kind of involved in the fan fiction expanded Nazi universe before he takes the plunge itself. His favorite paper is Volkisch Beobachter, which is the official Nazi Party newspaper edited by Alfred Rosenberg, friend of the pod. He's not a friend of the pod. He was... I...

Friendship with Alfred Rosenberg over. Yeah, we're not going to have him on the show anymore. It was a mistake in the first place to bring him on. I just wanted to know his opinions on Idi Amin. They were bad. Oh, we didn't run that episode for a reason. This is why you lost your Spotify deal. Yeah.

Anyway, Cesar Rene reports that he was drawn in at first by these lurid stories that were printed in Nazi papers of these grand street battles between the brown shirts and the SS and communists and other anti-fascists in Berlin, right? Because that was a major part of Nazi propaganda in kind of the early 30s is these like heroic street battles that are winning us the country. And you get the sense that

And Eichmann never writes this, but you get the sense that he wants, like a lot of young men do, some play in that martial glory, right? He wants to feel like he's got a part in it, right? Even if he didn't before, I imagine he got that kind of beaten into a skull by the Junior Veterans Association. Right, right. Like, you really need to be in a fight to be a man. Yeah. Now...

What's interesting is he'd taken no real part in the urban combat that had existed between right and left in Austria up to this point, right? For the last five or six years, there'd been a ton of it. He had plenty of opportunities to get involved in like these kind of street fights, and he had chosen not to. Solid choice, I must say. Yeah, which is, you know, shows some judgment.

But he clearly is like feeling it by this point, right? Like the fact that he's spent all this time on his social life and his career instead of becoming a hero to fascists. So what finally tips him over the edge into joining? Well, the answer seems to be simple ego. The Austrian Nazi Party had been founded by a war veteran named Alfred Proksch, who was close friends to a guy named Bolek, who himself was the Gauleiter or leader of the Linz Nazi Party.

Bolek was friends with Eichmann's dad, which again goes to his politics, right? Oh my God, this keeps coming back to his dad. He is such a nepo baby. He is the Nazi nepo baby of all Nazi nepo babies, right? So another family friend and colleague of his father was the father of Ernst Kaltenbrunner. And if you know your Nazi war criminals, Kaltenbrunner is a big one.

He will go on to be an Austrian SS member who becomes director of the Reich Security Main Office, the RSS, right? Like it's the organization that fucking Heydrich is running for a while, right? Kaltenbrunner is a major member of the SS. But at this point, he's a young member of the SS, which is itself a fairly new organization. And it's just starting trying to like spread in Austria because Hitler's already got the Anschluss planned here, right? Yeah.

So the younger Eichmann and Kaltenbrunner had known each other for most of their lives. And when Eichmann shows up at this Nazi party meeting, Ernst embraces him and addresses him using the familiar do form of greeting, which is a German way of basically talking to somebody like they're a close friend or a member of the family. A lot of hierarchy of where you actually stood in the Nazi state.

had less to do sometimes with your actual rank and more to do with like, can you call Hitler do right? Can you use this intimate form of greeting with the Fuhrer? If so, or can you use this intimate form of greeting with Himmler, you know, or with Goering or whatever, right? With somebody who's part of the high command. If so, you've got clout, right? Maybe more than someone who technically outranks you.

And of course, after do, you have to finish it with the formal hast. Right, right, right. Yes, as Rammstein reminds us all. So I commend... I'm sorry, that wasn't a good one. I'm ashamed. I don't know if it's a good one either. I don't know German. I just know every book about Hitler talks about the people who are allowed to call him that, right? It was a big deal.

Eichmann would later recall that he was kind of drawn in to the Nazi party and to the SS as much by anything, by how good Kaltenbrunner's uniform looks. He's like, damn, those SS uniforms are slick, right? I want to look like that, you know? He fell for the fucking dumbest thing. So many guys did. Yeah, I know.

He was impressed by the rapid growth of the Nazis, their ascendance in Germany, how well they marched, and how good their branding was. Then Kaltenbrunner told him, you, you belong to us. And Eichmann decided, yes, yes, he did. Now, at first, he was a bit of an oddity at party gatherings. Unemployment is soaring in Austria right now, and most of the far-right street fighters are either out of work or working irregularly.

Eichmann's first impression on his colleagues is that he has money, right? He can afford to buy beer and bread for everybody. And a lot of them can't, right? So that's kind of, and again, that makes him sort of an oddity in this organization in this period is that like he's Mr. Moneybags to them.

So is he a guy that gets invited to the party because he brings beer? That's both nepotism and that he has money for beer. And one has to assume cigarettes. Okay. We've all invited that guy to the party before. Right, right. Yes. In early 1933, Eichmann was laid off from his job as a result of the economic downturn. Now, this seems to have been an amicable split. He was on the chopping block because he was unmarried, and they...

They fired unmarried people before people who were married and thus had families to support.

And his severance was generous for the time. Now, the fact that the person who lays him off as his Jewish boss makes it tempting to be like, oh, is like that an inciting incident? But he just doesn't write about this as if he's angry. Like his writing about it is like, yeah, you know, I knew like this was happening everywhere. I knew it was going to happen eventually. I had already started looking for new options and they gave me good severance. Right. He just doesn't doesn't really describe himself as being particularly put off by this.

It doesn't seem to be that thing that everybody's looking for. No. It's obvious that his antisemitism is coming while he's already in the SS. Right. He's not quite in it yet, but he's heading up towards the SS, right? He's in the Nazi party and he clearly aspires to the SS, so he's getting more antisemitic. It's just...

It's careerism, I think, that inspires him to get more anti-Semitic rather than like something happening outside of that, which people seem to constantly want. Yeah, he's chilling with his bros who are in the SS. He's going to be anti-Semitic eventually. Yes. Or lie about it. Or pretend. Hang out with his friends and get a fucking job because he just lost his. Yeah.

And honestly, to a certain point, does it matter if you're like pretending to be anti-Semitic in the SS or really anti-Semitic, right? It's just like, oh, I said that slur ironically. No, you didn't. No, man. No, you didn't. You're literally in the SS. Come on. So the party is kind of his social safety net, and it's also his backup plan.

When he loses his job, he goes to Kaltenbrunner and he's like, look, I need work now. Can I get some help? And Kaltenbrunner pulls some strings and gets Eichmann taken in by the SS. Now, Austria bans the Nazi party not long after this. And so some of the people who had been high ranking leave and go to Germany, right, to participate because the Nazis are now in power in Germany. So these guys like leave Austria to...

to help run the German government and run the SS in Germany. Kaltenbrunner is one of them, and he takes Eichmann with him, right? So Eichmann kind of flees Austria when the Nazis are banned with Kaltenbrunner and gets a job in the SS. He goes through several- He's doing a weird Nazi birthright. Yeah, we have to go back to Germany now. Yeah, exactly, right. He's doing a Nazi birthright thing.

And he goes through months of military training and indoctrination and then further training on how to run and operate a concentration camp. Now, at this point, the concentration camps are not what they will be. A lot of them, at the point at which he comes over, are what you'd call wild concentration camps, which are, we've got this old school or police building. We've got a bunch of political prisoners, communists and whatnot, that we're going to torture. Some of them we'll kill. Let's just throw them in there and have guards, like, fuck them up a bunch, right? Yeah.

Gradually, the system gets more formalized. But at this point, obviously, Jews are a lot of the people being taken in, but also just a lot of like communists, a lot of political enemies, social democrats, people who are enemies of the regime are being put in camps. And it also wasn't unheard of for people to get released from the camps at this period of time either. No, no. Most people do. These are not death camps yet, right? You get like paroled. Like people die at them.

But they're not death camps, you know? The goal of these camps is not to kill you. The goal is primarily to scare people, right? By 1934, he was working under Camp Commander Theodor Eich at Dachau. This involved a transfer to the SD, which is the SS Security Service, which at the start of the Reich is a small organization, but it's powerful and feared.

Now, Eichmann gets in too late to participate in the Night of Long Knives, but he benefits from the fact that the SD had been the sharpest of those knives. So it's kind of extra, people are extra scared of it, and it has an extra degree of prestige because of how it performed during that period, right?

In the space of less than two years, he goes from being a mid-level manager at an oil company on his way to unemployment to a member of the most feared security agency in the German world. His boss, like the guy, once he kind of gets moved to the SD, his direct superior is former Bastards Pod alumni Reinhard Heydrich.

In Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Bettina Stangneth writes, This was a big step up in the world. Eichmann felt he had established himself, a fact in his decision to marry and start a family, which within the SS was also a good career move. He married Vera Liebel, a woman from Mlad in Bohemia, four years his junior. She and her two brothers, who worked for the Gestapo, would come to profit from her husband's social climbing.

And this is a big part of how shit works, right? This is like a gangster regime. A lot of the benefit... Eichmann doesn't have money, right? He's still not rich. Right, his connections. But he can get married and convince someone because he's got connections, which will help your family out, right? So like, yeah, if you... I don't have as much money as you might want from a suitor, but...

I can help my brothers-in-law get contracts and stuff, right? I could be a Nazi job program for your shitty brothers. Right, right, for your fail brothers. Yeah, that's exactly how a lot of the stuff works in this period. Yeah, of course. I mean, his dad has gotten him almost every job he's ever had, and now he's...

Yeah.

Right, right. And you don't have to also you don't have to do any of the pointless drills and marching that like a lot of guys in the SS do. There's less of the paramilitarism, which is boring, right? It kind of makes life a chore. It totally is. The military makes everything a fucking chore. They're the only people that can make you sick of walking.

Yeah. And this is like your fake racism military. And Eichmann gets to skip the bullshit. Right. And he gets to skip the bullshit in a way that makes him feel special. Right. I get to skip the bullshit because I'm like smarter and more valuable than the other guys. Right. And like his ego, he so much of why he becomes so dedicated to the Nazis is that Nazism feeds his ego and his belief that he's special, that the world had not really tailored to earlier in his life.

And unfortunately, it seems to like a lot of these guys, of course, it's careerism, but like he was good at it. He is going to be unfortunately good at it. Yes. Yeah. Unfortunately, he's very good at this. He's got a good brain for logistics, tragically. Yeah. After April of 1935, SS members were officially forbidden from having personal contact with Jews. This was waived for the SD because the nature of their work meant that they were always on duty. I

Eichmann decided to rebrand himself as an expert on Jews and Judaism, and he starts going undercover to Jewish civil organizations and making connections to different community leaders.

And he pretends to be a liberal, right? So he'll show up at Jewish gatherings. Remember, this is early in the Third Reich. These communities have not been completely disrupted or uprooted yet. And they're trying to figure out how do we protect ourselves from this government that's getting increasingly hostile towards us. And Eichmann starts showing up and being like, hey, man, fucked up what those Nazis are doing. I'm really curious about your faith. Would you like tell me some stuff about how things work? Right? Yeah.

God. Yeah. And he was – I hate that. He would occasionally – he would be open about being in the SS, but a lot of Jewish community leaders would still talk to him because they were like, well, it's useful. He's a man in the SS we can reach, right? He seems like a decent enough guy. We can convince him that we're people and maybe he'll provide us with some protection, right? Yeah.

We can convince him of our humanity. He goes so far as to briefly take Hebrew classes from a Jewish teacher, despite being officially forbidden on two different occasions from doing so. And this is something – it's going to be – it's exaggerated, right?

Because he will exaggerate it. He's never a fluent speaker of Hebrew, right? He picks up a couple of phrases that he can use and whatnot. And he likes to drop them. He likes to drop Hebrew phrases and like SS meetings and stuff to show everyone how knowledgeable he is about the Jews, that he's the expert, right? What's really funny is I think most people at the time would speak Yiddish and not Hebrew anyway. Well, he also picks up some Yiddish, right? He takes Hebrew classes, but he does pick, he picks up little bits of both, right?

Sure, sure. The movie Conspiracy, he kind of, the Eichmann in that claims to have learned a lot more Hebrew than he really did. But that's also what real Eichmann did to his colleagues, because none of them are able to be like, you don't really speak Hebrew, right? Because they don't know they're Nazis, you know? Right. They don't know the first thing about it, because it's...

And he can make himself seem like more of a strategic thinker. He's like, no, I know my enemy and such and such. I know my enemy. You know, he's doing his Sun Tzu shit. Yeah. And you see that kind of shit all the time when people are reframing these guys and making them seem like evil geniuses and not just like...

Again, a Nepo idiot who was really good at logistics. The genius here is not that he was so well informed about Judaism and like gained such a deep. It was that he knew all I have to do if I take a cut, if I can get like a dozen words and phrases down and I can read.

passages from a couple pieces of rabbinical literature. Everyone else knows so little about these people, then I will be the most knowledgeable guy about Jews in the SS, and that's probably a really good path to career advancement.

No one's ever going to call me on this shit, and I can make a place for myself in this organization, right? He's literally the world of the blind, the man with one eye is King, but he has one eye for Hebrew. Yeah, right. Stangnath's book goes on to describe the extent of his studies. Later, Eichmann would speak of a course of study that took three years. He didn't mention that his superiors occasionally had to reprimand him for disorganization and tardiness.

It would be easy to mistake his lifestyle for that of a scientifically inclined astute with some crude political views, except that between coffeehouse chats, memos, lectures, and evening conferences with his colleagues, he was meticulously keeping denunciation files and writing anti-Semitic propaganda, making arrests, and carrying out joint interrogations with the Gestapo.

Now, there were occasional rumors within the SS because of the way he talks, because of what he's doing, that Eichmann is either sympathetic towards Jews and there are even there's there's a long series of myths that he has Jewish ancestry, that he's like born Jewish, that he's born in a Jewish part of the world. Right. Like, yeah, there are myths about that within the SS. Right.

But that also gets overstated, like he dealt with a little bit of shit probably, but the overwhelming reaction of his colleagues seemed to have been respect for his knowledge. By 1936, Adolf Eichmann was widely considered the SD's chief expert on Judaism.

His mentor in the SD, Edler von Mildenstein, had become fascinated with Zionism and started to consider if immigration to Palestine was a possible solution to Germany's Jewish question, right? Could we ship all these people to Palestine, right, and have that let us get rid of them? Right. It reminds me of the Madagascar plan as well. We're about to talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So –

you know, he's one of these guys where there's a lot of unscientific thinking and a lot of just like

propaganda around the Jews that is, is, is just made out of fantasies. Cause they're just at a certain point when they're rising to power, just throwing out as many lies as possible to scare people. But Reinhard Heydrich and the SD is like, no, no, no, we need a scientific approach to race and we need to have a real understanding of what's going on here. And as a result, Heydrich is going to kind of pick out Eichmann and be like, this, this guy is someone we need to, uh, uh, like bring further into the fold.

Per an article on the BBC's website titled Adolf Eichmann, the Mind of a War Criminal, quote, While rabble-rousers like Joseph Goebbels railed against the Jews and called for ever harsher but directionless measures against them, the SD quietly promoted Jewish immigration. To this end, Eichmann contacted Zionist envoys and even made a visit to Palestine in 1937.

Now, again, Eichmann is going to make a lot of tea out of the fact that he's been to Palestine. This is a total nothing burger. Eichmann makes it to the border of the British mandate in Palestine. And the British authorities are like, are you literally Adolf Eichmann? Get the fuck out of here. What do you think you're doing? We know who you are. Get out of here. Like, get your SSS out of fucking here. Yeah. This is classic Heydrich as well. It's just like,

he takes all these street thugs and is like okay i like the energy but we need to professionalize it to make it palatable for everybody right we can't we can't all just be street clubbing racists we have to be gentlemen racists in our really stupid hugo boss uniforms all right who who has read a book just eichmann okay you're my expert promoted

And for the rest of his career, Eichmann would constantly talk about like, you know, I've been to Palestine. I've seen what the Jews are like in their natural environment. Right. Like that's the way he phrases it. And it's like, again, you like got to the border. The Nazi Richard Attenborough. Right. Right. That's what he's trying to be. And again, he has he does nothing over there. Right. The British will not let this fucker in. Yeah.

This is where we start to see his brilliance for branding, right? If he was coming up today, he might have been an ad man, right? Because he's going to use this very effectively, even his failures, to kind of blend into this myth he's creating for himself, about himself.

His specific recommendation to the SD after he finishes talking to, you know, this trip, and he also has a lot of interviews with a bunch of different Zionists in Europe, and he makes an official recommendation that the SD should not promote the creation of a Jewish state. Per that BBC article, instead, it should encourage Jewish immigration to backward countries where they would live in poverty. And his assumption is that, like, well, if we send a bunch of them over to Palestine and they, like, when the British leave, they make, like, a state,

you know, with the Palestinians, that state might do well.

And then there will be like a place where Jewish people are comfortable. We can only send them to places that are like completely fucked. Right. That's his attitude. Yeah. That's why the first thing they came up with was called the Ohio plan. Right, right, right. Yes. So immediately after this, he's promoted and sent to Vienna. Austria had just been annexed by Germany. And as the SD's Judaism expert, Eichmann was put in charge of an operation to convince Austria's Jews to emigrate.

Here he applied his experience from the corporate world, cutting through red tape and ordering all the different agencies who had a hand in the immigration process to combine and operate out of a single physical space to speed things up.

He also does – and obviously that works. That's generally better, especially in this time where you don't have the internet, if people just have to go down a floor to get this paperwork stamped by another organization before this family can leave. Yeah. He also does his normal thing of – and this is a big part of his logistical work in this very early stage of the Holocaust –

he is directly interfacing with rabbis and other representatives of the Jewish community in the different places he's working, in this case, Vienna, right? Where he will sit down and say, look, there's all these different groups. You know, you've got Orthodox folks, you've got folks who are like these different kind of communities within Vienna. You all need to form a single organization to represent you and elect representatives so that I can negotiate with a representative on behalf of

all of you in order to execute the plans that we're going to be executing to try to push you guys out, right? I want a single umbrella organization and that organization, we will let raise money from rich Jews to fund the immigration of poor Jews out of Austria.

Right. This is what he's doing in this period of time. I need you to guys to form a government that represents you so I can get rid of you so I can get rid of you. Right. We need you to centralize because I don't want to talk to fucking 40 different people to like actually like like work this together. Right.

And despite his antipathy towards Zionism, he starts allowing Zionist organizations to operate in Austria because he's primarily being judged on what are the number. It's like, you know, with ICE right now, it's just how many what can we get? How many numbers can we get on the board? Is the easiest thing to go after, like law abiding people who are showing up in court the way they're supposed to and just arrest them? That's easier. Pumps our numbers up. What Eichmann's doing is like, look,

These Zionist organizations, I just told everyone, I think it's a bad idea, but they're getting people out. They've got money. And all I'm being judged by is how fast Jews are leaving Austria, right? That's all that matters to me right now. You know, right now, that's all that matters to him.

In Germany, Eichmann had used charm to try and convince Jewish leaders to meet with him. If that didn't work, he'd hold up the SD's bloody reputation as a threat. In Austria, armed with potent new legal authority, he simply subpoenaed every Jewish community leader he wanted to meet.

Bettina Stangneth writes, "'Eichmann flaunted his black SS uniform, his writing crop, and his knowledge of Judaism and Zionism. Adolf Bohm, who had just completed the second volume of The History of the Zionist Movement, learned that Eichmann was one of his most avid readers, who knew whole pages of the first volume from memory. Bohm realized that the SS was going to use the knowledge he had painstakingly gathered as its access point to the world of Jewish organizations and as a weapon against the Jews."

Eichmann then explained what he expected from the third volume, a lengthy chapter about himself, Adolf Eichmann as a pioneer of Zionism. The fact that Adolf Bohm couldn't bear the thought and never wrote another word tells us all we need to know without even thinking about what happened next. This guy, this scholar's like, wait, who's reading my book? Oh, no. Oh, no.

Imagine doing the convention circuit and he comes up to your desk like, I retire forever. I'm not Saito, I'm Doug. I fucked up. I think I need to be a cobbler. If Eichmann's my biggest fan, I made a mistake. I'm sorry. I was not doing the right thing.

You have chosen poorly in life. Yeah, I see that now. You need to find a new venture. Like, I think we could all agree if Adolf Eichmann is your book's biggest fan, get rid of that book. Get rid of that book. It would be like if Nick Fuentes came to one of my live shows and like, show's over. I love your shit. Podcast is over. Nope, nope, nope, nope. We're hitting the wrong demo. So the guilt and shame from this caused Bohm to have a nervous breakdown for which he was institutionalized.

As you may be aware, the Nazis first started experimenting with Zyklon B, with gassing in general. They weren't using Zyklon B yet, as part of the T4 euthanasia program, which can be accurately summarized as murdering disabled people. Adolf Bohm was gassed at the Hartheim Euthanasia Center on April 4th, 1941. His wife was gassed at Auschwitz in 1944. Both of their children escaped to the West, right? The guy that writes this book. Christ. Now, I've gotten ahead of myself a little bit here. I just...

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So where we are in the story now, the Anschluss has just happened, Austria is Germany now, Eichmann is currently in Vienna, tasked with getting as many Jews to leave the country as possible. Cesarini writes, "...he established an assembly line system whereby a Jew could end up at the central immigration office with his papers and proceed from desk to desk until he arrived at the end, with a passport and an exit visa but stripped of his property, cash, and rights. Within a few months, the office had emigrated 150,000 Jews."

Now, this is seen as a massive success, not just by his boss, Heydrich and the SD, but across the whole Nazi party. He was promoted again, and after the annexation of Czechoslovakia, was ordered to repeat his performance in Prague. He does this well, and he winds up in late 1939, attached to a major Gestapo office in Berlin and tasked with managing the immigration of Jews from the entire Reich.

He's got great Nazi sabermetrics. He really does, right? Like, that is... He's a logistics guy, right? Like, that's... His whole involvement in Zionism is all like, well, these people have like a... Already have a path to getting folks out. Even though I may not... I personally, like, have already expressed why I don't think that's a great idea. All that I care about is my career. And this will... This puts numbers on the board for me, right? That's fundamentally who he is. Now...

By this point, by the point time after Prague, when he's in Berlin and he's in charge of emigration out of the Reich of all of the Jews in the greater German Reich, he has fully become the man who will ultimately organize the mass murder of about six million Jews. Right. And Eichmann loves being this guy. There is nothing banal about it. He luxuriates in the power and prestige of his position, and he describes himself as a member of the ideological elite in the SS.

One Jewish witness who met him at one of these meetings described, and then Eichmann entered like a young god. He was very good looking at that time. Tall, black, shining. In Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Stangneth continues, his behavior too was godlike. He was master of arresting and then releasing people, of banning institutions and then allowing them to resume. He initiated and censored a Jewish newspaper and eventually even got to decide who could access the Jewish community's bank accounts.

And he loves this, right? This power, this I can make your organization legal or illegal with a snap of my hands. I have control over your community's bank assets, right? And I get to use that to make you do whatever I want, right? I have gone from being this middle manager to being this guy with like, I am in charge of the Jewish people in the Reich, right? That's his position here, right?

He seems to be basking in the globe because the banning and unbanning thing to me is more of a clue than the bank account thing. Because he's controlling people that can come together. It's like, never mind your band. Never mind who can come together. I can just do this all day. Yeah. Yeah. This is totally within my power.

By the end of the 1930s, he is famous across Central Europe, not just within the small world of the SD, but among the entire remaining Jewish population in Central Europe.

And Eichmann makes damn sure everyone knows he's the shot caller, even when he isn't. He bragged that the Zionist Review, a German-Jewish newspaper, was, quote, my newspaper because of how extensively he'd exercised control over its contents. That's Nazi stolen valor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's, he's, yeah. Jews across the Reich wrote about him to each other and in letters to relatives and colleagues on the outside. So this is,

This is the point at which people start talking about Eichmann in newspapers and whatnot outside of Germany.

And in fact, he is the first guy directly associated with like implementation of anti-Jewish policies in Germany who gets discussed widely outside of Europe. Right. And somehow he's the guy that becomes the portrait of banality. Yeah. And he's really not a Nazi rock star. Yeah, exactly. He's like a rock star of racism. Right. There's nothing but all about it.

Holocaust scholar Tom Segev pointed out that while Eichmann was not very high ranking on paper, he is not a top member of the SS.

He answers to Reinhard Heydrich, right? And that's not his only superior. He has other people who are his bosses on paper, but he's answering to Heydrich, who is very high up in the Nazi hierarchy and favored by Hitler. And Eichmann is the highest ranking member of the SS to sit directly with Jews and talk to Jewish community leaders, right? And as a result, this is Segev writing, the Jews looked upon him and Hitler as the two Adolfs who perpetuated the Holocaust, right?

So part of this is he's really burnishing his image. And part of it is, you know, every Jewish survivor obviously hates Hitler, but also they hate Eichmann because a lot of them were face to face with him. They saw him interacting with her. He's the guy. He's literally the face of their deportation misery. Right, right. Exactly. Exactly.

This is very helpful to his career in the immediate term. It ensured he was taken seriously and that local Jewish leaders who still believed there could be some sort of compromise with the Nazi state would bend over backwards to do what he said. This makes it easy for him to hit his quotas, which ensures his continued prestige and the rise in his career prospects. By the immediate pre-war period, he'd been invited to meetings with Hermann Goering and was known personally by guys like Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler.

More than rank, personal connection to famous figures in German leadership are what ensured one's position in the Reich. And once you see Eichmann with the literal Reichsmarschall, Hermann Goering, right? The guy who's supposed to take over if Hitler dies, right? He starts getting invited to things, right? Because you're like, well, fuck, this guy's in, right? We'd better, if I want to be in, I'd better make sure he's at my parties. And so he starts getting invited to these high-end social functions.

In 1938, at age 32, he's invited to a film industry ball in Vienna. He takes parts in parades and annexed Czechoslovakia. And when he has ideas for experiments, like creating forced labor camps for Jews in Austria, he's allowed to divert funds and manpower to attempt them.

Now, he's, again, he's loving this, right? Both the flux of power and the respect that he's giving. He's never the only mind behind implementation, right? Or execution. There's other guys in the SD who are interested in labor camps for their Jewish prisoners. But Eichmann is like the guy who's helping to pitch this. And he's also making sure his face is out in front of it because he thinks it's a good idea, right?

He is better than any of his comrades at PR, and he starts giving himself nicknames. And his favorite nickname is the Tsar of the Jews, right? Oh, my God. Yeah. We love a guy who nicknames himself, and the nicknames are always terrible. Mm-hmm.

awful but it shows you how he views himself right and what is satisfying yeah he's not satisfied in this point that he's eliminating these people he's satisfied primarily that they have to bow to him right that's his first high here right yeah he he probably enjoys that and the fact that people know that he's doing it more than the fact that he's doing it right because again

We haven't talked about any of his hardcore anti-Semitic writings or ideological turn. This is all careerism and self-promotion for him. He would do this if they weren't Jewish. He would do this to some other group. Yeah, and he is writing very anti-Semitic papers here. But I do think that...

The benefits to him personally for going down this road are more a motivation, although he does. He also makes himself increasingly anti-Semitic as he's doing this, too. Right. He is getting more and more racist and more and more hateful.

Yeah. And I could also see this as kind of like fitting the part because before he got all these connections, people were spreading rumors about him having Jewish family members because he was, you know, having, let's say FaceTime with Jewish community leaders. So now he's like, no, I'm going to do both. And now nobody is going to be confused about this. And this is not like, of course, a good thing. The fact that he's willing to do this for bald face careerism is not a

better or worse thing. It's not only, by the time we get to the Holocaust, there is more than bald-faced careerism in it. Yeah, of course. But I think that's his, I think that's what a lot of this is right now, right? He takes a lot of joy whenever he hears his nicknames repeated in the wild by other people because it proves that they're spreading. And he sees his name start to be in constant use in Western newspapers around the world. Right.

particularly like socialist-inclined papers, which are some of the earliest ones to report on early stages of the Holocaust. He must have loved that so much. Oh, he fucking loves it. He makes a big show about being angry at the Jewish press for calling him names, but he has his

staff members comb dozens of newspapers from different countries looking for mentions of him and like clipping them out and he keeps them in like he has these little keepsake books for his news coverage god um just rapidly coming up with new nicknames like he's chris jericho that's right that's right uh and these two like these nicknames and all of these new the news clippings about him he uses them as weapons during his endless meetings with jewish community groups

Benno Kohn, a representative for the Jewish community in Berlin, recalled one such meeting years later. It began with a forceful attack by Eichmann on the representatives of the German Jews. He had a folder of press cuttings in front of him, foreign of course, in which Eichmann was portrayed as a bloodhound who wanted to kill the Jews. He read us excerpts from the Pariser Tagblatt and asked if this was correct, and said the information had to come from our circles. Who spoke to Landau from the ITA? It must have been one of you!"

And it's interesting to me that he's like, he's taking these both to yell at them for like, who's talking to these different newspapers? How could they possibly know? And also to like show them, look at how they're talking about me, right? You need to take me seriously, right? And he loves- You guys aren't going to blink at me when I hit you with the Teen Vogue clipping. Right.

And Bloodhound is a common title that members of the SS get in this if they're very aggressive at pursuing Jews. And Eichmann, despite what he says in this meeting, is proud to be called a bloodhound, right? In Hungary in 1944, he would introduce himself in meetings by saying, do you know who I am? I am a bloodhound, right? Like, that's how he's talking about himself. It's the Christoph Waltz character. Yes, he very much is. Do you know what they call me? Right, yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, Eichmann was by far the best known of his comrades, and the fact that he really was deeply complicit shouldn't obscure the reality that he also exaggerated his involvement and responsibility for clout. He was not the only guy with nicknames like this. Once the Nazis invaded Poland with the USSR, Amon Goethe became the head of a concentration camp in Krakow and earned the nickname Emperor of Krakow.

This put him right up there with Joseph Weitzel, one of Eichmann's top employees and commandant of a camp in Doppel, which earned him the nickname the Jews Emperor of Doppel. Right? Christ. Yeah. If memory serves you right, isn't Amon Goth the camp commander that was so corrupt that Nazis fired him? Yeah, I believe he was the one that got shit canned for being so fucking, like, yes. Yeah.

Oh, man. So we don't really know how often these nicknames are things that he came up with himself. How many of them are things that...

people in Europe came up to describe him because of how major he is. But he was, a lot of the time, he created his own nickname, right? During, like, while he's in Argentina and hanging out with other escaped Nazi friends, he would brag to them that he had been nicknamed the Jew's Pope. And there's no evidence of this, that anyone ever called, this is a nickname he made up for himself? Like, no one would have called you that, Adolf Eichmann. Dude.

Do you hear what they call me in Vienna? They call me Thunderbird. Right. Isn't that cool? Yeah. He also told friends, the men in my command had the kind of respect for me that prompted the Jews to effectively set me on a throne, right? This is very important to him that like he be seen as having been worshipped by these people who are under his thumb, right? That's a massive deal for Adolf Eichmann.

Now, he's often depicted as a fanatic, driven by hatred, but in deep reading, I see ego as at least as much a driver of his actions. He certainly hated, and his bigotry only increased alongside his power, but I read a hunger for power and respect that drowned out other motivations a lot of the time. Eichmann did not rise through the Nazi hierarchy because he was a fanatic. He became a fanatic because Nazism offered him an opportunity to be a great man, one which no other system would have afforded him.

Now, the conquest of half of Poland presents a problem for Eichmann. Prior to the Nazis invading, Jews had made up about 1% of the population of the Reich, which is about half a million people out of a population of 67 million.

Significant numbers of these folks had immigrated, and in general, the Austrian and Czech Jewish populations were also comparatively small, right? Which had made it easy for Eichmann to put up good numbers using the tactics we've discussed. Almost three and a half million Jews lived in Poland prior to World War II. This meant overnight the task on Eichmann's lap increased by an order of magnitude. Per a BBC article titled Eichmann, Mind of a War Criminal,

Eichmann explored a fresh option: deporting Jews to a designated Jewish territory. He traveled to Poland to identify an appropriate location and then ordered that thousands of Czech and Viennese Jews be rounded up and sent eastward to lay the basis for this territorial solution. Within a few months, however, the plan was scrapped. Eichmann's office lacked the resources for it, and other SS projects had preference. At the same time, he was brutally evicting hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews to make way for ethnic Germans transplanted from Eastern Europe into the newly annexed areas of the Reich.

As a temporary measure, the displaced Jews were packed into ghettos. But where would they go eventually? After the fall of France, Eichmann took up a plan emanating from the German Foreign Office to ship 4 million European Jews to Madagascar.

And he's not the author of the Madagascar plan, but he is for a while kind of its most prominent like adherent. Right. Which is this idea that like we got to get these people out of Europe and maybe that we could if they live in Madagascar, that'll be fine. Right. It'll be safer for. Yeah. This is why those movies were dangerous. They give people ideas. Yeah. Yeah. You think different things about Madagascar, including the fact that there's already plenty of people there. A lot of people. Yeah. Famously. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, this is also the Madagascar plan because this doesn't really happen. It never gets close to happening. But it's evidence that the Holocaust was not necessarily a given from the jump. As we'll talk about, you can find quotes from Hitler and other top Nazis going back to the 20s that can be seen as preludes to the Holocaust. But it wasn't a settled plan until the early 40s.

Yeah, and there's something of an unfair amount of weight that gets put on the Madagascar plan. Like, no, obviously, of course, the Holocaust deniers, like the ones that acknowledge the camps existed, but the people died from like disease or whatever is the track that they take. Like, there is these detailed plans in place to send all these people to Madagascar rather than it was...

Drawings on a drunk person's napkin. They talked about a lot of shit, right? That they didn't come close to doing, right? Exactly. And Eichmann, you know, the reason he gets involved is not that he is a major believer in this. It's that any new idea that comes through his office, he tries to stick himself to because like...

You know, if it fails, he's not the guy who instituted it, but if it succeeds, his name's attached to it, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's good for him either way. He doesn't lose anything. He only has things to gain. Right. In 1939, after the invasion of Poland, Eichmann briefly championed a plan to remove Jewish people from newly conquered and absorbed territory to a reservation guarded by the Nazis near Lublin.

thousands of people were forcibly transferred to what became a ghetto before the plan was abandoned in the spring of 1940. And this is, they were very much looking at what the US government had done to Native Americans. And we're like, well, maybe we can do something like that with the Jews, right? Maybe we like, we find a chunk of land that's like our Oklahoma that we don't really want, and we put them all there. And we just kind of like keep them locked there, right? That's the basic idea. And

And it's evidence of, you know, again, how much of all of this is based off of them looking at the United States and being like, well, shit, this seems to be working for them. Right. Mm hmm. Yeah. Speaking of things that work for us, advertising. Wow. Yeah. This ad brought to you by the Oklahoma Tourism Board. Yeah, that's right. Oklahoma, the Lublin of America. Yes. Sorry to both Lublin and to Oklahoma. Yeah.

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So,

As the Second World War gets a-movin' and Germany blazes through France and then starts tearing through big ol' chunks of Western Russia, the fevered egos of men like Eichmann, who now feel like masters of the universe, gave way to ever more sweeping eliminationist concepts.

In September of 1941, Eichmann lobbied successfully to extend the definition of a Jew to include half Jews, right? He had loud conflicts with those among the party who argued that people with just one Jewish grandparent shouldn't count or that Jews who converted to Christianity weren't Jewish. And Eichmann is on the no, no, no. It's all about the blood. Any drop of it is somebody we got to get rid of, right? Once again, taking it from the United States and the one drop. The one drop rule, right. Right.

Now, he moves from city to city, orchestrating the expulsion of one local Jewish population after the other. From Sezekin and Pozen, he forces tens of thousands of people into ghettos far from home. The horror of forced resettlement earns him even more media attention, and Eichmann uses it in meetings with Jewish leaders in other cities to say, hey, if

If you don't make sure your people leave when I tell them to leave and we meet our immigration quotas, I can do to you what I did in Posen, right? You read the news, right? That was all me, baby, right? You got to do what I, you know, you don't want that here. By this point in 41, the international press is increasingly reporting on the violence and mass killing that had often followed such resettlement campaigns.

Eichmann's not always involved in these mass killings and in these resettlements. He's not doing all the resettlement. He's not the only guy doing this, right?

There are a lot of war crimes being committed in 41, and he's not central to most of them. He's not running the Einsatzgruppen, right, on the Eastern Front, right? He's just the one that seems to be really comfortable putting his face on it. Exactly. And so he gets credit for a lot of massacres in the foreign media that he was not involved with. And sometimes this was done out of pure habit, right, where they would be like, oh, and Eichmann must have ordered this because he's the guy everyone knows is doing stuff like this. Right. And-

At the time, Eichmann is proud to take the credit, right? He's like, yeah, absolutely. I'll take the blame for that. Sure. Stolen valor once again. He's stealing valor from even worse Nazis. Although, yeah, maybe that, I don't know. He's stealing valor from Nazis so he can get a discount at Nazi Chili's. Right. Yes. He's putting fake Nazi medals on his uniform. Now, he is so proud of his reputation that when Heinrich Himmler announced an exhibition celebrating the mass resettlement campaign...

titled The Great Homecoming, which was essentially meant to be a big PR announcement for the opening of the Holocaust.

Himmler plans it with the goal of burnishing his own image, right? Himmler's plan is like, I want to be seen as the guy who was responsible for this. But Eichmann's like, hey, boss, I should get like a room in this big thing for like the stuff I've been doing, right? Like, you know, I did good, didn't I? Shouldn't I get like a whole room that's just about what Eichmann did to help with this resettlement campaign? And Himmler eventually agrees that he'll get a special hall in the exhibit to share his achievement to the masses, right?

Stangneth writes, the main welfare office for ethnic Germans objected, preferring to leave this section out for fear of a negative public reaction. Pictures of happy new settlers were one thing. Numbers and images of people who had been expelled were another. But Eichmann's pressure was for nothing.

The exhibition was postponed until June 1941, and having viewed it, Himmler canceled it at the last minute, putting off the experts who had provided the content until March 1942. The exhibition never took place, in part because the success that was hoped for was never achieved.

Yeah, he didn't learn his lesson from Heydrich. Like, you don't show people the shit that you're doing. No, no. No, Eichmann's all in. Yeah, I want my name in a whole room. And Himmler, like, sees the plans for this bragging about the early Holocaust party and is like, I don't know, man, I don't think I want that shit. I don't think I want my name attached to this, actually. You made Himmler uncomfortable. Right, right. Yeah, the only other thing that did that was literal Auschwitz. Yeah.

Yes. So the other reason this gets canceled is that by March of 1942, the Wehrmacht has gone through its first winter on the Eastern Front. And it's become obvious to any intelligent Nazis that this is not going to be a quick or easy war. Right. Now, I don't think they're all aware that defeat is a foregone conclusion, although they probably should have. But a fear starts to set in.

that both elides the desire to brag about what's being done and introduces a growing sense of desperation to solve the Jewish question sooner than later.

In early 1941, Himmler had given orders to deport all remaining Berlin and Viennese Jews at the end of the war, which was expected imminently. By October, it was clear that this would not be the case, and the growing desperation of the Eastern Front acted as a justification for more extreme acts of violence as revenge. A new deportation campaign was executed in Berlin by the SD. A Swedish newspaper at the time described...

The campaign began on the night of October 17th. People were pulled from their beds by the SS in order to get dressed and pack a suitcase. Then they were immediately taken away, their apartments sealed, and everything in them confiscated. Those who had been arrested were taken to railroad freight depots and ruined synagogues and transported east on October 19th. They were all old men between 50 and 80, women and children. They will be used for useful work in the east, which means drying out the Rokitno marshes.

The work will be done during the Russian winter by old men, women, and children in the clothes in which they were arrested. There can now be no doubt that this campaign is premeditated mass murder. The campaign leader is SS Gruppenführer Eichmann.

And we see in this from the Swedish paper, a great example of the half accurate reporting, right? The broad strokes of the deportation are correct. Eichmann is involved in it, but he's not running it. He's not the campaign leader of the program. And he's also not a Gruppenführer, right? That rank roughly equivalents to Lieutenant General. And he never reaches that high. Um,

Yeah. So Stengeth suspects that he gets given this rank by the press because they can't imagine someone they've heard about so much as anything but like a central spoke to the Nazi party. Right. Like he's got a well-connected hanger on. Yeah. And I think his I think his actual rank is close to like a major or a captain. But that's just not high enough. We got out. We got to bump it up. Right. Otherwise, he's not going to seem as central as we've decided he is.

I think it also owes to a lot of modern misunderstandings of how the Nazi government and the infrastructure worked, where everyone likes to say that, or believe rather, that it all functioned a certain kind of way because Germans are just very efficient and it was a militarist culture, so it had to be run this way, blah, blah, blah. No, it was just a bunch of weird connected barnacles. Ranks were involved, but they were mostly just window dressing for...

People wearing incredibly overdone uniforms. Right. But it really didn't matter. Yeah. Yeah. What matters most is your connection, like who you know, right? Yeah. Yeah. Which is, you know, the case with all authoritarian organizations like this. Yeah. Now, alongside the German invasion of Russia, the Einsatzgruppen had started carrying out the first mass killings of Jews of what would come to be known as the Holocaust. Eichmann has nothing to do with organizing this part of it, but it

but it becomes rapidly clear that just shooting millions of people is not practical, right? There's a number, first off,

Bullets are going to be a problem for Germany, right? Like they don't have enough of anything, let alone bullets. Second problem, this kind of destroys your elite troops, which is what they're using. Like they're using guys who are like, would be usable as fighters and shooting babies all day. Even for guys who suck as much as the Einsatzgruppe does, it just kind of ruins human beings, right? Like they're not able to handle it for long. Yeah, they all start killing each other drinking. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, drinking is a major problem. And so they start experimenting with other ways. And one place they start experimenting is with the use of gas vans at a place called Helm. And in that summer of like 1942, Eichmann travels to the east to or of 1941. Sorry, in the summer of 41, Eichmann travels to the east to observe the process, these first gas vans in use. He spends that summer and the later part of the year in what becomes a fact

finding mission for the Wannsee conference in early 1942, which is the meeting where the Nazis are going to lay out their plan for the final solution. So Heydrich basically has him being like, hey, the East is our laboratory for killing Jews. I want you to talk to the folks doing the shooting, go see some of these gas fans and how they work, and come back to us with information on the best way to kill a lot of people at scale, because...

We're going to start next year ramping up the actual extermination of all of these Jews that we've gotten a hold of in the parts of Europe we've conquered. He puts them in charge of the Holocaust soft launch. Right, right. Yeah. And he's largely, he's like fact-finding, right? So that we can, we need to know how quickly can you gas people? How much does it take? What are the best kinds of gas? What do we need to know to start constructing these camps, right? Eichmann is going to be a big part of getting that information, right? Yeah.

And again, you see both. He's not what he claims. He's not leading this. Eichmann didn't make the call to do a Holocaust, but he's the guy who's respected intellectually as an expert. And when it becomes clear we're going to do a Holocaust, they go to him and are like, hey, Adolf.

We got a job for you. We got a guy for that. Need you to gather some info. You're good at that, right? You're good at gathering information. Come help us with this. Everybody's sitting around the office. We need to build how many camps? Yeah. I got a guy for that. Get me my camp guy. Yeah, get me my camp guy. Bring an old Ikey. Yeah. We sent him to concentration camp night school. He should know how to do this. He's probably good at this by now. And yeah, we'll talk about that and more in part three.

Joe, how you feeling? Just wonderful, Robert. Yeah. Just absolutely wonderful. I set myself up for failure for this one because I came to this like, last time I was on here, we talked about Lavrenti Beria for four hours. What could you do that's worse than that? And you've showed me. You've showed me real good. Yep. Yep. I've been hoisted by my own petard. We all love our petards. Um...

Are we allowed to say Patard anymore? I don't know. You can't say the hard P. You can't say the hard P. It just sounds wrong. Great. All right, everybody. This has been Behind the Bastards, a podcast. Joe, do you have anything you want to plug?

Yeah, I am the host of the lines up by donkeys podcast. We talked about history, military history, genocide, fun, lighthearted stuff like that. If you want to hear more about the Eastern Front in winter, we talked about the Battle of Stalingrad for, I believe, five hours. So you can go listen to that series and we do all sorts of stuff like that. Fantastic. Excellent. All right. Well, everybody. Bye. Bye.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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