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cover of episode CZM Rewind: Part Two: Gay Resistance to the Nazis

CZM Rewind: Part Two: Gay Resistance to the Nazis

2025/3/26
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Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff

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Exploration of Weimar Germany's cultural and socio-political environment leading up to the rise of the Nazi regime.
  • Weimar Germany experienced hyperinflation and economic turmoil post-WWI.
  • The period was marked by a vibrant artistic scene, with a significant queer culture.
  • Youth movements like the Vondervogel were prevalent, embodying anti-modernist sentiments.
  • The rise of the Hitler Youth led to the suppression of alternative youth movements.

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Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that sometimes we run rewinds. You probably didn't know that, but I'm recording an introduction for both of the old episodes, and this is the introduction for the second one, because I do episodes mostly in pairs, because they come out twice a week. You've probably figured that out.

Anyway, here's an episode that I care a lot about, about gay resistance to fascism. ♪

Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this week I'm talking with Shireen. Shireen, how are you doing? Good! Actually, I know the first time you told me, I just said I was basically doing bad, but after recording the first part, I don't know if the people know that you record them back to back, but I feel much better than I did earlier. So I feel good after hearing about all these cool fucking people.

Yeah, cool. And our producer Sophie is on the line as well. Sophie, how are you? I'm great. Drinking a cream soda Zevia, living my best life. You know.

So speaking of aftertastes and Nazis, and there's this, I actually don't know how to do this segue, but you are listening to part two of our two-part series on gay resistance to fascism. And so you're probably a little bit confused if you haven't heard the episode that came out Monday. So you should go back and listen to it if you haven't. Yeah. You really should. It's a really good episode. And you will learn about a lot of really cool people. And this is coming from a very big cynic. So go listen to that episode. Yeah.

This is good. It's like try to impress the cynic is like an interesting... It's not even about impressing. It's like, will I still be miserable by the end of this? You know what I mean? Like, it's like, yeah. You know what I mean? Okay. Well, this one is going to be... Oh, I don't want to spoil it. Okay. So where we last left off, there was like a motley crew of queers, artists, and medical students in Amsterdam who just pulled off a like heist movie level antics to blow up a Nazi record storehouse. And today we're going to bring things back to Germany. So...

Germany. There's a country called Germany. Weimar Germany is the period from 1919 after Germany got its fucking ass handed to it in the First World War to 1933 when Hitler came to power and did the whole Hitler thing that I presume most people are familiar with on some level. And Weimar Germany had a lot going for it, right? It was a republic for one thing, which is a step up from dictatorships and such.

People could like vote and shit. And there was free speech. There was free assembly. There was no state religion. Some of the gay laws weren't being enforced, although they were still there. And the government was based out of a city called Weimar, which is how they got the name Weimar Germany. But Germany was completely fucked economically. World War I left their economy in shambles. Hyperinflation took over. Everyone was hungry and, you know, fucked. And then they had the fucking worldwide depression after all of that on top of it.

I mean, I think that's the reason why the Nazis worked. You know what I mean? They had to like kind of get the desperate. You know what I mean? Like they had to really and like then Hitler quotes like, oh, he can save us kind of thing. I think they had to have the previous shitty part in order to even do the other part, if that makes sense. Totally. Because people are so fucked. They're like, I'll try anything. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

And then, so most of the stuff I'd been exposed to about Weimar Germany, which focused on really cool stuff, because Weimar Germany was this very interesting artistic time period. And mostly I'd heard about the cabaret scene, all the sort of decadent queer artists who try to live fancy free lives while they're basically starving. And all of that is like true and interesting and beautiful, but it's only one part of Germany's culture at the time. And actually only one part of it's queerness and it's queer culture. Yeah.

You've also got this really messy assortment of different organizations that have different names, but they're called like the Vondervogel or the German Youth Movement or the Hiking Clubs. And these go back decades. They go back to the 1890s. And there's this movement that it kind of looks like Boy Scouts. If Boy Scouts was like a...

Fuck off huge thing that involved millions of boys and girls, both through various levels of formal and informal organization with weird paganism, vegetarianism, nudism, and queerness running out through the entire thing. So not actually very much like Boy Scouts.

I would like to be that kind of Boy Scout. Oh, okay. Well, then you're going to love our characters today. So millions of German kids formed these hiking clubs and spent their days camping and getting in touch with nature. It was an anti-modernist movement, a lot of parts of it. And whenever people are like, oh, it was this, it's all kinds of different things all happening at the same time. But

A lot of it was about leaving civilization behind. A lot of it was German nationalist, although it didn't have necessarily an anti-Semitic character as far as I can tell, at least on any systemic level.

Some of it was really middle class and some of it was really working class. And a lot of it was just fucking outright criminal in kind of the best and worst ways. There's a French gay anarchist named Daniel Guerin who wrote about the movement in the 1930s because he would go visit 1930s Germany because it was a fucking awesome place to be a gay anarchist.

But he found this movement increasingly politically polarized between the communists and the fascists. And as the whole worldwide depression is hitting, more and more youth are finding themselves homeless. They choose itinerant lifestyles over staying still in one place. So the movement keeps growing and it keeps polarizing and doing all kinds of weird shit. In 1933, huge chunks of this come to an abrupt end when Hitler bans all alternative youth organizations that aren't the Hitler Youth.

A lot of the more mainstreams of these groups just basically become the Hitler Youth. And in 1939, he makes participation in the Hitler Youth compulsory. But the youth movement went a lot of different directions. Not all of it went into the Hitler Youth, as we'll get into. But some of it did, and so we're going to talk about gay Nazis now. These are not the cool people who did cool stuff. Well, got to balance it out, I suppose. But also, I'm fascinated where this will go. My own experience with Boy Scouts...

I was a boy scout and, uh, my best friend who was a boy scout came out as trans like years before I did. Um, and so I love that, you know, me and my best friend were, cause people are like, oh, they're, they're letting girls into boy scouts now. And I'm like me and a lot of other trans women are like, oh no, they always did. Um, but, um,

So gay Nazis. Yeah, that's the thing. Yeah. So before Hitler took over completely and the National Socialists were just like one of the parties in Germany, they were actually the only political party in Weimar Germany with a known high ranking gay member.

Ernst Röhm was the leader of Hitler's SA, which are usually called the brown shirts, which are basically the parties like street thugs who operate outside the law. Like, you know, when Trump told his brown shirts, proud boys to stand by and stand back, a similar sort of organization. Yeah.

And Ernst Romm was really into this hyper-masculinity thing. He's so anti, you know, you're so anti-feminine that you don't fuck women, right? Yeah. And he's really into authority and discipline and obedience. Those are good manly things, unlike democracy, socialism, anarchism, fucking girls, all that weird sissy stuff. Yeah. And this is not to say that the Nazis were pro-gay. They were just kind of pro-hypocrisy, I think. Mm-hmm.

Even before they came to the power, they were the most adamantly anti-gay party in politics. But even the Social Democrats, who were the ones who weren't enforcing paragraph 175 and were part of trying to fight to get paragraph 175 repealed, when they used homophobic language to try and talk shit on the Nazis, basically they were like,

Oh, Rahm's gay. And so and they like published his private letters in order to basically be like, if you support the Nazis, you support pedophilia and gayness and the Nazis will corrupt our children. And so no one's fucking good at this point. No, no political party is looking good. The Nazis are clearly looking the worst, but it's just kind of interesting to me. Mm hmm.

And this causes a split in the gay rights scene, right? Some groups like the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which is, as Magnus Hirschfeld, the guy I was talking about a lot last episode, he warns the gay Nazis. He's like, you know the fucking Nazis are going to come after you too, right? But then the other big organization at the time, this is really not something to be proud of, they're like, what? Nah, they're not coming after all the gay people, just those Jewish gay people, right?

Fuckers. Yeah. But spoiler alert, the Nazis are coming after all the Ks. Mm-hmm. So...

On June 30th, 1934, on what gets called the Night of Long Knives, Hitler has Rahm and a whole bunch of the other brown shirt leaders just murdered. And in public, Hitler was like, oh, I definitely did this because Rahm was going to betray me. But it was really transparently Hitler was tired of being made fun of for putting up with gay people in the ranks. His pal Mussolini liked to make fun of him.

And they were like, oh, how are you harboring gays? You know, whatever. You know, his pal Mussolini. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. It's like the very first no homo with consequences or something. Yeah, totally. And then what's kind of interesting is that Hitler probably didn't personally have a problem with Rome's homosexuality. He just he was a fucking people pleaser and he wanted people to like him, which is definitely never happened again. There's never been a populist right wing leader anytime in history, certainly not in the past 10 years in the United States.

who has clearly not had any problem personally with gay people. No, yeah. Yeah. But... Greatest country in the world! Woo! We're the ones who beat these Nazis. Okay, so...

We're the heroes of this story. Yeah, and then fire the conductor for being gay. So in private, Hitler would either defend or attack Rome's homosexuality, depending on the audience, right? Like sometimes he was like, oh, that was in his misspent youth and he's learned better now. And other times he's like, ah, us worldly men, we understand that such things happen and are fine. That's my Hitler accent.

I don't do accents. No, you shouldn't. I also don't do accents, but I think when I've tried, I've learned my lesson. Yeah. I'm reasonably certain that if someone put a gun to my head and said that I had to speak like a British person for two minutes or I would die, I would die. Because I genuinely believe that with a gun to my head, I would not be able to talk with a British accent. No.

No, no, no, no. No, I did a live reading of Twilight once with Bechdelcast, another amazing podcast. And I had to voice one of the characters who was French. And in the thing, he has an accent. And so I tried, before we recorded, I was like, can I do this? And I tried to have a French accent. And I sounded Jamaican every time. It was so... That was cemented like...

Shireen, accents are not for you. This is not. Yeah. But no, accents are hard. So I understand. And I don't want to do that to the audience. No. Okay. So another one of the people that, another one of the gay brown shirts that Hitler has killed was a guy named Edmund Heinz, who was actually Hitler's cellmate after the failed coup of 1923, the Beer Hall Putsch.

Um, and he was one of the fucking original Nazis. Like literally he was number 78 in the enlisting in the national socialists and he was gay as hell. Um, and when they came for him during the night of long knives, he was in bed with a lover. Wow. By 1941, Hitler starts suggesting the death penalty for gay kids in the Hitler youth. Um,

And then they pass the death penalty for gay SS members. But what they do instead, I mean, a lot of them they kill, right? Some of those sentences get commuted to go be cannon fodder in the war against Russia, which I think they actually did to a lot of people end up dying that way, get taken out of prison and sent to go die on the Eastern Front. Or they're sent to serve in this like all criminal prison.

uh, Durley Vonger brigade of the SS, which is basically a brigade within the SS. That's like all of the worst people in the criminals. And by I put worse people in quotes, but like, you know, where they like go give criminals a chance to go die. I bring all this stuff up. Okay. Do you know that meme? The, I never thought leopards would eat my face. So the person who voted for the leopards eating people's faces party, uh,

No, I don't know what you just said. Okay, okay, okay. Should I look it up? No, no, no. It's just basically this. It's like someone's like, but I never thought the leopards would eat my face, said the person who voted for the leopards eating people's faces party. And that's how I feel about the gay Nazis. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And the reasons to bring this up in this like otherwise conversation about good gay people is that I feel like, okay, when we talk about the bad people in history who are gay, we're usually playing into this trope that like all of them were closeted. Right. But these, these gays Nazis weren't, they were not closeted. They were open about their interests. It was part of their like storied tradition of right-wing homosexuality that ran concurrently with left-wing and apolitical homosexuality. And, and,

Is it just like internalized homophobia or like hatred? I try to wrap my head around stuff like that, like what they tell themselves to legitimize their existence or like what they're doing. So it's like, I don't know. They're just fucking racists, you know? And they're like, I like the racist party. And then they're like, but the racist party hates you for being gay. And you're like, well, I don't care. I'm so racist that that's, you know, it's like we see that a lot. Racist comes first. Yeah. Yeah. And like the modern far right in the United States, there are like,

you know, gay members of it. And you're just like, what are you fucking doing? They hate you and will laugh at you and kill you at the first opportunity. And you're like, no, they like me, you know? You know, I just thought of, it's probably power that changes it. You know what I mean? Like, if you feel like you're a little bit, not untouchable, but like protected, you feel more protected.

able to be a hypocrite, I feel like. Right? Yeah, no, that actually makes sense. Honestly, almost everything comes down to power at the end. Yeah. Womp womp. Okay. I'm ready. Okay. And so the other reason to bring all this up is that...

I think that we forget that a lot of this shit has really high stakes, the way that we talk about sex and sexuality and gender. And I would argue that we should be on the lookout for when some segment of, oh, I don't know, feminism or gay politics starts making common cause with the right wing. Which obviously would never happen now. No feminists would just start making common cause with the right wing at all. No, no, no, no, no.

feminism here. Yeah, exactly. Oh God. I just thought of, I was, I wanted to make like a really subtle Harry Potter reference, but I couldn't do one fast enough. And so I just went with that, the most obvious thing, but you should know listener that I was trying to, uh, talk about JK Rowling anyway. Yeah, me too. That's what I was thinking of too. Yeah. Okay, great. Um,

Okay, so you've got the gay Nazis. They don't last very long. Fuck them. Whatever. But now I want to talk about gay pirates. Hell yeah! Let's do this! Yeah, I want to talk about the Edelweiss pirates who are so much fucking cooler and they're on the opposite side of all this. Okay. So...

All the youth from what I was saying when they're all itinerant doing all this crazy shit, they're running around in these, like, it gets a million names, buns or bands or clubs or cliques or whatever. And they're coming out of the Vondervogel and all these related movements. And the whitewashed version of history that I had run across primarily before doing this research, honestly...

Has them like wandering around the pristine German countryside, like singing camp songs and thinking about like marrying their heterosexual sweethearts monogamously and popping out pure Aryan babies and all that shit. Right. But like this could not be further from the truth. This growing culture of vagabondism and desire for change.

because they're all fucking broke and hungry and mainstream society has completely failed them. And more and more of them are living in camps. And again, totally unfamiliar to people today is, you know, whatever. Um,

A lot of the clubs were just gangs. They were the wild gangs, and they were in a war against civilization and everything boring. Every winter, they would disband, and every Easter, they would celebrate their clique or their gang's rebirth. Their camp songs were parodies of the Hitler Youth songs. They told dirty jokes. They got into fistfights with the Hitler Youth. Hell yeah. Basically, with all the men off to war, the Hitler Youth were acting like the police in a lot of German cities. And so they...

And they lived criminal lives and they fucked. And oh my God, did they fuck. And it was anything but straight, anything but monogamous. It's like queer enough to maybe even get me a little bit like, oh my, maybe that's not the right way to go about these things. So these are not the assimilationist gays. These are street fighting, forest fucking, sex working, Nazi robbing, criminal queers.

Yeah, it's like the Anarchy of Gay. Yeah. And they're called the... They have a lot of different names. But the one I'm going to use now is the Wild Fry, which means the wild free, which was one of their mottos. And they would have things emblazoned. Well, I'll get to that. Merch. They live up to the name. History mostly remembers a subsect of them called the Edelweiss Pirates. And...

And I've got... Yeah, it's a flower. Oh, interesting. Okay! I think... I know, right? Yeah. So I've got information kind of about two generations of the Wild Fry, and one chunk comes from about 1930, and one chunk comes from the early 40s. And so I'm kind of doing my best to give an honest, like, the way that these two connect, but there isn't a lot of information about that because all of this shit is so hetero-washed. Mm-hmm.

But so it's an important, I'm going to do an imperfect job, but I'm going to do best I can and quote original sources and all that shit. And because people, when they mentioned the Edelweiss pirates, they present this sort of like generic working class youth subculture who ruled and were brave as fuck. And they like fought Nazis. There's a movie about them, uh, called, I think it's called Edelweiss pirates. Um,

But the gayness gets taken out. Yeah, totally. And it doesn't talk about their origins and it definitely doesn't talk about gay fucking. So Daniel Guerin, who's the French anarchist who wants to go hang out with gay folks in Germany, so does, he describes a run-in with them in his book called The Brown Plague, which doesn't translate well now, but means the...

It's critical of the rising tide of fascism. Okay. One Sunday on the outskirts of Berlin, we met by chance a strange troop on the road. Needless to say, neither their short pants, their bare calves, which disappeared under their long wool vests, the bulky and sundry loads swaying on their backs, nor their enormous hiking boots distinguished them from ordinary vagabonds. But they were very much toughs,

They had the depraved and troubled faces of hoodlums and the most bizarre coverings on their heads. Black or gray, chaplain-esque bowlers, old women's hats with the brims turned up in Amazon fashion adorned with ostrich plumes and medals, proletarian navigator caps decorated with enormous edelweiss above the visor,

Handkerchiefs or scarves in streaming colors tied any which way around the neck. Bare chests bursting out of open skin vests with broad stripes. Arms scored with fantastic or lewd tattoos. Ears hung with pendants or enormous rings. Leather shorts surmounted by immense triangular belts. Also of leather. Yeah.

Both daubed with all the colors of the rainbow, esoteric numbers, human profiles, and inscriptions such as Wild Fry or Rudber Bandits. Around their wrists, they wore enormous leather bracelets. In short, they were a bizarre mixture of virility and feminacy. Wow. That's a sentence. That is amazing. I know. And you too can buy all of their costumes from our sponsor, the Pirate Store. Um...

which is a non-profit again because we're going pure wholesome with the ads here it's a non-profit store yeah yeah no when you said emblazoned the first thing I was like they have merch you know like you know this is that's one way to spread the word yeah totally um and we too I actually don't think we have merch at the time of this recording but we we do have advertisers and some of them are hopefully the pirate store yes we're manifesting yeah yeah here's some ads

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They're self-organized, right? They don't have this overarching structure, but they do sometimes form into these larger coalitions, sometimes not. There's thousands of these bands, and they all have fucking weird, fantastic names. Some of them are Black Love, Red Oath, Fear Not Death, Bloody Bones, Dirty Guys, Forest and Field Sleepers, Tortoises, Brandy Thrush, Black Flag, Forest Pirates, or the Northern Lights.

Wow. I love that. It's like the legends of the hidden temple, like the team names. Yeah. It's like, well, I'll get to why it sounds like fantasy in a second. That's one of the things I love about it. Um,

Okay, they also, they all had their own distinct styles of dress, which, and they basically, the basic idea was take some idea from fantasy literature and just fucking run with it. Just basically like try to live like you're in a fantasy novel. Wow. They're like, what's it called? What's the thing when you're role playing? It's like something. LARPing. LARPing. It's like LARPing. It's like LARPing. Yeah, but for real. But very creative. Yeah.

And unlike a lot of the rest of the Vondervogel movement, which was fairly middle class, almost all of these are working class kids. And basically they're like, well, a fantasy life, that sounds better than starving, right? And so some of them would dress up as like American frontiersmen. Others would dress up like pirates. Some were in stereotypical German garb and like lederhosen and shit. Others were like crusader knights. Some were caricatures of indigenous Americans, right?

All of them wore Edelweiss flowers, the single symbol that like united all of them and gave them the eventual name, the Edelweiss pirates. And they were into tattoos, including on their genitals. Girls and boys both wore earrings. Yeah.

And when the various gangs, this is one of my favorite details I ran across. When the various gangs would meet up together, though, instead of all wearing their like different colors from their different cliques, they all wore like top hats and tailcoats and like the finest like fancy clothes that I'm sure they stole. Wait, I want to look up what an Etowise flower looks like because I want to visualize their merch. Yeah.

Oh, wow. That's a really... It's like a starfish. Oh, yeah, huh? Yeah. They're like... For anyone who's listening, they're pretty white flowers with like yellow... I don't know anything about biology, botany. I've definitely never seen one before. It's very unique looking, but okay, cool. I have a visual. Awesome. The most influential fantasy author for them, which is kind of funny, is this guy named Carl May, who is this 19th century adventure novel author, who was...

Yep. Uh-huh. Sophie knows where I'm going with this. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. This is Hitler's favorite author. Favorite author. Con Man Carl May. Yep. Yep. Did not know that. There's a whole Behind the Bastards episode about Hitler and about how he loves Carl May.

Wow. Our old friend Carl. I wonder how Carl felt. Oh, man. This is like, I mean, you know. Robert describes Carl May as the JK Rowling of their day. Oh, interesting. That's all I need to know. That's all I need to know. But I want to know because I think of like, I'm in a metal band that takes a lot of inspiration from Tolkien and so are a lot of Nazi metal bands, right? Yeah.

And so I think of it like that, you know, but I haven't read any Carl May. But anyway, so these Carl May LARPers who like rob people and do sex work, they're

A few years ago, a modern queer sex worker focused radical publishing project called Underbelly translated some of their songs from German. And so I'm not going to sing it, unfortunately. I'm sorry, everyone. Darn. But my favorite is just making fun of the Hitler youth for being too masculine and normie. And it's called Short Hair, Big Ears.

Such short hair, such big ears. That means the Hitler youth must be here. Grow long hair, tango knights. There's no Hitler youth in sight. Oh ho, oh ho. And one hears the words on every street. There's no Hitler youth I'd like to meet. Oh ho, oh ho. And they're fucking poets? Come on! That's amazing. That's amazing. And most of them were like 14 to 18. I'll get into that more. But that's the age where you kind of feel invincible, right? Totally. I think it's...

Damn, I would have been all over that. Yeah. They made their living as delivery drivers in various unskilled positions, petty crime, non-petty crime, sex work, especially at various gay bars throughout the city. Honestly, one of the reasons I love them so much is they just sound like my friends. That's just like a description of what my friends do. Yeah. And especially when we were younger. And then they would pool all their money and then use it to pay off all their criminal fines that they incur or to support their arrested friends.

And they go to juvenile detention and jail and shit constantly. And they break out of juvenile detention constantly. Like the study I read of 50 wild fry who had been held in detention, almost all of them had broken out at least once. And six of them had broken out of detention centers more than 20 times individually. Holy shit. That is incredible. Wow. Yeah.

The kids. The kids are the answer. I know. And the more they face repression, the more they just resent mainstream society. This is even before the rise of the Nazis, a lot of this stuff. They just resent mainstream society and they retreat further and further into their fantasy worlds. Yeah.

um in the city colm where the the movement is strongest they coordinated all their gangs which they called guilds into of course they're called guilds yeah of course right yeah and they coordinate them into rings which are coalitions of each guild of guilds by district and then each guild had a had a leader called a gang bull and the bulls of each guild would together elect the ring bull

And to be a bull, you had to prove that you were strong, brave, good at crime and down to fuck. Down to fuck like... Good at crime and down to fuck. All kinds of weird ways. And at least one gang, the Eagles of the Mountains, everyone in it was a bull because they were like no leaders, I guess. Mm-hmm.

And each bowl had a queen, which I think may have been of either sex, but I'm not entirely sure. All male gangs had a beloved who is expected to be sexually available to everyone in the gang. Since some gangs didn't let girls in, girls formed their own all-girl gangs. Mm.

And then some boys wanted to join the all-girl gangs, and so the girls let them in. And I appreciate that, because that would have been me. I would have been the boy being like, can I join the girl gang, though? Yeah. I mean, girls are nicer than...

Yeah. Yeah. But I also was thinking like just guilds and all these little factions and stuff. This is like IRL World of Warcraft. You know what I mean? This is just like factions and battle and like whatever. Like, wow. Yeah. That's art is life and life is art. I suspect these kids weren't bored very often, you know? Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And yeah.

Okay, so each new member, when they would join, was initiated through bizarre and ceremonial baptisms, which were elaborate rituals of violence and sex. They would start off with fistfights and knife fights and then turn into public sexuality, like fucking everyone in the gang or masturbating in front of everyone or getting off during sex fast enough. Like literally someone's standing there with a stopwatch and you have to get off fast enough. So it's like hazing, but...

Like, for badass things. Yeah, yeah, totally. It's like way more like the haze. Prove. Prove you're cool enough to be cool. Yeah. And it's hard for me to imagine the frat where the haze is now you got to fuck all of us. But, you know, whatever. Yeah, yeah. Also a mixed gender frat. And they would all descend into drunken orgies every time someone new was baptized. Of course. And there's actually...

I should have saved them in a file to make them easily available, but there's actually photos of some of these. Some of the weird... And it's people dressed like pirates with knives and all kinds of weird shit. And they lived in the forests and in squats in the cities. They would each...

Each crew would have it. Each guild would have its own squat, basically. Attics or cellars or unused storage rooms. And they would put a single bed in the middle and they called it the fucking sofa. And that was like the only sleeping space. I mean, I'm sure they slept on the floor, but...

This is unreal. If I wasn't on this podcast, I wouldn't think this was true. No, I know. And so I'll say that my main source of this is Daniel Guerin's account of talking to, of the more like crime sex stuff, is talking to a sociologist, a social worker, sorry, at the time who did a study on these people. And that study is replicated in a book, The Brown Plague.

But yeah, because a lot of the later stuff that we hear about Edelweiss pirates just doesn't talk about their drunken orgies at all. But stuff gets erased all the time, right? Like, yes, we've learned from this podcast and just life. Yeah, totally. Okay, so they would like, like one account I was reading, they like, they would steal and sell cars and then they would like

in their stolen car they would like drive around and like i don't remember exactly it was like the guy who steals the car he's like known as like car guy that's like his name or whatever you know um yeah and then they like go around and rip off pay phones i didn't even know they had pay phones back then but they would like go and like rip off pay phones and then try and get all the money out that they couldn't throw them in the river or whatever um and they would fence all their stolen goods through bartenders in exchange for alcohol and this gets and this leads a lot of them a lot of them end up like

in debt to these bartenders and then like when they age out of the wild fry they they just enter like a more mainstream life of crime for better or worse oh i didn't even consider that they would age out actually now that you say that out loud i know you can't stay a wild fry if you're not a small fry you have to be by yourself committing crime all of a sudden no yeah it's

That's not fair. I know. I know. And it's like, because one of the things that this reminds me so much of when I was like a teenage squatter. But I did most of that when I was like 19 and 20. And so I'm a little bit like, oh, I would have been too old to be, you know. Yeah. And that's fucked up. That's not fair. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like very Peter Pan-y lost boys about them. You know what I mean? Totally. Yeah. It is just Peter Pan's army. Stunted. Yeah. Okay. So the Nazis come to power and they refuse to disband. And in a lot of cities, they're powerful enough that they completely just challenge the hegemony of the Hitler youth. In some cities, they outnumber the Hitler youth. And one of the slogans that they had at the time was eternal war against the Hitler youth.

And yes, yes. And so they did resistance in a lot of ways, right? Like, um, just by existing and continuing to like hike and camp and wander, they're resisting Nazi era, um,

travel restrictions, but they weren't content with only doing that. And so it wasn't long before they go from street fights with the Hitler youth to distributing propaganda. When the Allies would drop leaflets on the city, the wildfire would run around and stick the leaflets through people's doors and shit. They helped people desert from the Nazi army. They would rob Nazi warehouses and

uh, you know, eventually started like killing Nazis who needed a good killing. Um, and actually what you're talking about, like aging out, I think that, I think that the war like fucks up the best I can tell the war, like fucks up their, you know, sort of like their specific organizational structure and it becomes a lot looser. And so some of the people that, you know, who get hanged and stuff for this activity are like formal Edelweiss pirates and shit like that. Right. Um, and so they're still hanging out with like 16 year olds doing all these crimes together. Um,

And a lot of them get caught and get sent to concentration camps. On November 10th, 1944, 13 of them, or 13 people, six of them who are teenagers, and some of them are former otherwise pirates, get executed without trial in Cologne, I believe, for theft, murder, and planning to blow up a Gestapo headquarters. This is the most known thing that they were doing. Mm-hmm.

Forgive me if you've mentioned this, but like demographically, what are most of them? Are they just like mixed? Like ethnicity wise? Oh, okay. They do. So they are both Aryan and Jewish. Okay. Or at least they specifically refuse to disallow Jews. I could not tell you what percent of the movement was Jewish. Probably...

I don't know. I know that historically they allowed in. And that was like a thing that distinguished them from a lot of it is that they were like, what? Fuck all that. It was like kind of started, I would assume, by like Aryan people that were good. Yeah.

probably, but I couldn't tell you. I couldn't tell you about Jewish participation in the beginning. I was just trying to imagine them. For whatever reason, when I imagine someone badass and doing stuff, they're not white, so I have to rearrange. No, yeah, totally. That's on me. That's on me. Yeah. Well, considering like the overwhelming majority of Germans at this point are not like really doing their best, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

So like I see my prejudice now. Suddenly I'm just kidding. I think that's fair. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so, so plenty of historians. So they run into this problem where they're not seen as political and

Which in a sense it's true, right? Because they were not friends with polite society, any polite society. They were criminals under the Weimar Republic. They were criminals under the Nazis. And they continued to be criminals when the Allies liberated the country. The wildfire and Soviet controlled areas were treated really harshly and many of them were sentenced to 25 years in prison. And because they're working class criminals, they were never...

acknowledged their anti-fascist work until 2011 when and the families of the edelweiss pirates who were killed never received like reparations from the german state unlike other partisans um and the the last known surviving edelweiss pirate was a woman named uh gertrude caulk uh coach i don't know who died in 2016 at the age of 92.

Wow. That's a long life. Yeah. You know who else survives? The people who drink tap water and eat potatoes. The sponsors of this show. You will live forever. And this is especially funny because now I've been learning more about potatoes because I listen to Buying the Bastards, which I feel terrible to admit on this show.

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And we are back, and we are talking about pirates. Yes. When you first started with the pirates, I've never heard of the Edelweiss pirates, but I was curious what definition of pirate you were going to use. Like the actual, like people that were pirates on, you know what I mean? The high seas, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Or like, but it's just really funny that they're just like dressed like pirates. They do piratey things, but it's not like they're, I don't know, it's just kind of funny to...

see it all come together. Totally. My imagination, yeah. Yeah, I mean, they lived really similar lives to, like, golden age pirates, but they, like, were doing it in costume. You know? Yeah. Fucking rules, honestly. Yeah, it's like, especially at the time, it's like, if the world is going to shit, just, you live once. You know? Like, that's the... I don't know. It's... I like the uninhibited nature of their life. Yeah. I...

I do too. Jesus. Yeah. And then one of the things I like about them is like, it doesn't seem like it was like a gay culture as in like some of them are gay and some of them are heterosexual and some of them are bi. It was just fucking weird. Like, I don't think any of them knew their sexuality. Some of them probably cared and some of them probably didn't. And like, they definitely- But weirdos unite, right? Sorry. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no.

No, I'm into it. I was just gonna say, it's like weirdos all unite, right? So it's like, when you're in high school, the outcasts are all together, whether they're like people of color or gay or whatever. Like, that's what happened to, in my experience anyway. Yeah. Or like when you're, yeah, if you're, what's the word? Um...

Marginalized. Marginalized. Exactly. If you're marginalized and you're fucking weird, you will unite because you want a weird community. And weird, honestly, I think is a great thing. You should be weird. Being a normie? Boring. You know? So stay weird. Hell yeah. Totally. And then, okay, so these aren't the only queers fighting the Nazis within Germany. Far from it. I'm going to tell you about some more of them.

There was a Gad Beck, who was a gay part Jewish Berliner, who in 1942, he borrows a Hitler youth uniform and he marches into the pre-deportation camp where his lover Manfred is being detained. So he shows up in his uniform and he goes to the commanding officer and he's like, oh, I need to borrow this guy for a minute on a construction project. And so the request is granted. And he starts out the camp with his lover Manfred, but then Manfred stops and he says,

I can't leave my family basically. And he, he goes back into the, back into the camp. He dies, him and his family die. Um, but he basically said, you know, if I will never be free, if I'm not free with my family. Um, but so then Gadbeck spends the next three years helping Jews escape before, uh, he gets betrayed by a fucking, a Jewish spy for the Gestapo. Um, and he gets arrested, but he, he survives the war.

So this is gonna be another one of those like who lives, who dies. Okay. Yeah. Like tense moments. Yeah. Yeah. Little list of me just listening intently until the very end. It's like, okay. Yeah. Well, not the next one. Maybe the next one will be better. Yeah. Well, this, you know, so this guy survives the war and he spends his lover doesn't, but

He does. Well, it's nice that like even after his lover doesn't go with him, he's actually a true like, you know what I mean? He keeps doing fighting the good fight. Totally. He doesn't just fuck off, which would be perfectly fair. I am not judging anyone who fucks off out of a place is trying to murder them, you know? Yeah, exactly. Um,

And he lives to be 88, and he spends the last 35 years of his life with his partner. So I like when gays get to be happy. That's a good ending. Yeah. Thank you. Now on to others. Yeah. Okay, so then there's Count Albrecht von Bernstaff, who's a gay aristocrat. And he's a short, balding man. He's always impeccably dressed. And he wastes most of the war years sitting around cafes, hitting on waiters.

Or that's what he wants people to think. Right. I mean, he does. He is these things. He's a short, balding, well-dressed man who hits on a lot of waiters. But he's actually he's he's playing up the like foppish aristocrat gay man stereotype to draw attention from his actual work, which is he's running an underground railroad helping Jews and other dissidents get themselves out of Germany. That's genius. I know. And like that does take like front and center, you know, like.

Put the gay out front and then let me do my secret good job. Yeah, totally. This will keep him distracted. Yeah. He's like, oh, I'm just a creepy, harmless old gay guy, you know, like, uh, and, and he's so aristocratic and I kind of love him for this. He's so aristocratic that he figures like, all right, I'm doing something that is obviously illegal being, being gay, uh,

But I'm so rich that everyone puts up with it. Yeah, exactly. Power. I think it was the last episode. Maybe it was this one. Yeah, it was last. But like power, you can get away with more. Yeah, totally. And yeah, because... And money, power and money. Sorry, I have a lot of inside thoughts that are just, I think, and they say it out loud, even if it's like not even the right timing, but... I think that's the point of a podcast. Why am I a podcast guest? Because otherwise it would be me talking to myself and that wouldn't be half as interesting. That's fair.

But no money and power. So yeah, that's how you hack life. Unfortunately, I know. And it's like all across history. If you're poor and gay, you're fucked. And if you're rich and gay, you're just eccentric, you know? Yes. Yeah. Very true. Look at Oscar Wilde. Yeah, totally. Although it only sort of works out for him. Different points. Yeah. Yeah. But,

But still, that was a bad example. Whatever. No, no, no, no. It is a good example because he's able to exist in that way at all because of that kind of stuff. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was accepted as what he was. Yeah. Versus, yeah. Yeah. Anyway. So Count Albrecht, he coordinates with gay resistance groups in the Netherlands. And to quote an anonymously written article that's coming from an upcoming issue of a magazine called Baden that the author let me read before. Mm-hmm.

Oh, awesome. Count Albrecht had warned his contacts in Holland about the Nazi invasion before it began so they could prepare themselves. In one instance, members of a gay society took measures ahead of the German invasion in preparation for the catastrophe. The editor of their paper, Levenstreckt, burned the organization's mailing list.

Another comrade, Arndt van Santhorst, committed the entire list to memory so that they could find one another afterwards. And I really like that because I like... Yeah. Because when I first started doing this, everyone's keeping these records and it keeps getting them all in fucking trouble, right? And so I'm like, what are you fucking doing? Burn your fucking records, right? Yeah. But then the guy who memorizes it all reminds me that I'm like,

while it was so hard for them to find each other in the first place, that like losing that is losing something really important, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, memorizing is... That's a great solution if you're able to do that, you know? Totally. Also, Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, he memorized the Quran. He didn't know how to read and write. So it works. Well, the fucking rules. Look at him now. He's done well. Yeah. I've heard of him, you know? Yeah, exactly. Praise be. Yeah. So eventually, Count Albrecht gets found out. And he gets arrested. And he gets sent to a series of concentration camps. And he gets...

uh really horrendously tortured um but his fellow inmates they remember him based on he how he kept everyone's spirits up like he would he'd be sitting around in the concentration camp and he'd be like we're all going to have a most fabulous party at my house when this is all done you are all invited everyone's coming over like i'm you know break out all the finest stuff best party ever and um and he didn't survive the the camps he died in the camps um but i don't know it

hundreds of people at least uh jews and gays and gay jews and at least two different countries survived the war because of his efforts and him disguising himself himself as a fop you know and playing into the like being like oh yes homosexuals are cowards we would never do anything bad you know yeah use the stereotype to your benefit just like you know what i mean it's or like not benefit but like your advantage yeah uh yeah wow what a guy i know i like him um

Okay, and one of the things that is kind of dark that I ran across in a lot of this research, a lot of the gay men who survived the concentration camps get immediately rearrested because they're gay. Right. Because you're not allowed to be gay, whether it's Nazi Germany or Soviet Union. Well, East Germany, at least. The Soviet Union had more complicated... Oh, yeah, right. I think Hitler had re... I know that, like, Lenin made homosexuality legal and then Stalin was like, JK, fuck all of you. Right, right. But...

Anyway, one guy, for example, that I was reading about, I don't have his name in front of me. He wasn't as much of a resistance fighter, although just existing as resistance. I'm not trying to like knock him. He retold his experience where he was taken back literally in front of the same judge that had sentenced him to a concentration camp previously because they didn't actually get rid of the fucking Nazis. They just like cut off the head of it. They rearranged things. So he gets sent back to the same judge who's like you again and then sentences him right back to fucking prison. Wow.

Oh, that makes me so mad. Yeah. People in power, staying power. Yeah. Ultimately. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I want to end with, with one last short story about a queer poet named Robert Desnos. And he was love a queer poet. Yeah. He was heavily involved in the French surrealist scene. And he, he joins the resistance to Germany. Once, you know, France is under occupation and like our Dutch heroes from last episode or last,

last Monday, whatever. I don't know how to say. Is this a new episode? Is this just a different half of the same episode? I don't understand the taxonomy of my own job. It's a two-parter. Okay. And the last part of this two-part episode. Yes.

Perfect. Thanks. Thanks. I'm good at my job. So he works as a counterfeiter and he makes fake IDs and he also does a ton of other stuff. He actually works for a collaborationist newspaper as a spy and he passes along all the information he learns by working for a shitty pro-German newspaper. He passes it along

to the resistance. He also wrote for underground papers under a ton of different names. And in 1944, he gets caught and he gets sent to a series of concentration camps. But at heart, right, this guy's a surrealist. So one day, according to a Holocaust survivor named Odette, and it's relayed, this story is relayed through a writer named Susan Griffin.

So Robert's waiting in line for the fucking gas chamber. And, and he just jumps up and runs up to a man who's ahead of him in line. And he's just gets really excited. And he starts reading the man's palm. And he's like, look here, look at your lifeline. You're going to live a long life and you're going to have three children and his absurdism. Right. Cause they all know what's fucking happening. All right. I think his absurdism is so contagious that everyone's just like breaking out laughing and,

And it confuses the guards so completely that the guards sent them back to their barracks. Wow. Because they don't know how to handle...

These people who are supposed to just be like totally given up, who are like riotlessly, riotously, who are laughing very hard, uncontrollably. Wow, that's so fascinating. And he doesn't die in a gas chamber. Wow. You used the phrase un-executed in your script. I love that. Yeah. Everyone gets sent back to the barracks un-executed is the way I wrote it. Yeah.

And he, he technically survives the war, but he, he caught typhoid, I believe in the concentration camp and he dies within a month of liberation. Um, but again, that doesn't seem right. I know. I know. What is nothing? But, okay. But the reason I want to end on that note is because I think people look at some of this history wrong, at least like queer history. Um,

Because they're like, oh, did they succeed? Like a lot of the stuff I would read being like, oh, they didn't succeed because they died or they didn't succeed because they only blew up 800,000 records instead of 3 million records or whatever. Right. But I...

To me, it feels like they've succeeded, right? Yeah. They chose resistance and a lot of them, most of them didn't survive the war, but they saved fucking thousands of people. And I don't know. And they died fighting. You know what I mean? If they did die in a way that they shouldn't have, it's just a testament to like...

I don't know, caring more about the world and yourself. And like, I don't know. I don't know where I'm going. I don't know where sentences end when I start them. But I think it's pretty badass. Yeah. I think that they like they they basically they proved a fucking lot. And they certainly proved like our man Willem said at the beginning that homosexual is not a fucking synonym for weak, which is what people used to treat it as.

And no one can fucking say that they were cowards, you know? No one. Yeah. Definitely not. That's the last thing. Yeah. I was thinking though, not to like, yes and, but... No, yes and it. Like...

The vast majority of these people that we learned about are men, correct? Yeah. So it is interesting just to think how many more people there were that maybe didn't get attention or history written about them. I mean, there's a spattering of women here and there for sure. But it does make me wonder if...

Again, it goes back to power. As a man, you have more power, right? And maybe that's why you're able to accomplish more, especially back then and now. What am I saying? But it's interesting to think about who gets written about even in alt history. Totally. Because...

As, like, I'm a filmmaker. I want to say in quotes, but come on, I should, like, whatever. I have imposter syndrome 101. But I was reading about... Trina is a filmmaker. Yeah. Imposter syndrome is real and it fucking sucks. Yes, it is. But...

I was reading about like writing like scripts and movies and stuff and how we're so used to just pretending that Western story structure is like the default way to tell stories. And we forget that like so many cultures have different ways of telling stories. And like, yeah, it's like Bollywood films are structured so differently than ours. And we just, we assume ours is the right default way. And I think that's the same with just everything. It's all, you did mention like the westernized culture.

uh, version of it. And it just makes me wonder what else is out there because I know there were more amazing people out there. Maybe, maybe we don't have to know about them just to know they existed is enough. Yeah. I don't know if that made any sense. No, no. I think that that actually gets at something really important. Um,

One of the things that I kept running across with this is like, I think I'm, I feel certain that there was as many, you know, lesbians fighting against the Nazis, right. As there were gay men. And most of the people with names that I'm coming up with are gay men. And I think partly that's because they get written about for being gay in a way that a lot of the women aren't being written about, um,

And then, like, it's actually telling that the Edelweiss Pirates, who were a mixture of boys and girls, right? They... That's not a story full of names. You know? There are some names we have for that, but mostly you have these, like, anonymous masses of, like, mixed group of queer kids who are like, all right, let's fuck up these Nazis. And they don't get fucking remembered except kind of collectively. And...

You know, I don't know whether that's better or worse or different or whatever, but it does it. You're right. It leads to this like, you know, the which stories get told. Absolutely. Exactly. Yeah. No. Yeah. I think about that stuff all the time. Yeah. Because, I mean, I don't know, even like, yeah, the history stories or whatever, like.

What we've even gotten as a civilization is about what we've learned from our past centuries of existence. Even that is curated. You know what I mean? Totally. We just live in a matrix and nothing's real. But no, I'm really happy to have learned all of this stuff from you today and on Monday, two days ago. Because we're not recording at the same time. But...

But no, I hope it makes other people think about this kind of stuff too, because it doesn't have to be like this default way of thinking of like, oh, this is just the way things are because this is the way they are. This is the way they are because this is how they always have been because certain people make it this way. Yeah. If that makes sense. So it's, I don't know, just using your brain to philosophize, I think is sometimes a good thing. And like do some shrooms or something. Every other podcast I'm on, I'm like, do some shrooms. But yeah,

If you're able to, it's, I think it's a cure for things or just seeing the world in a different way. Can I shut up for one moment? I love you, Shireen. God, Shireen.

Okay, I'm shutting up now. Yeah, when I saw shrooms, I saw the void. It was really bad and dark for months. Okay, I stay corrected. But my experience is not the... I'm certainly not anti people messing around with this kind of stuff, you know? I gave it multiple shots.

I should have made a blanket statement. You're right. No, no. But people should, I don't know. There's all kinds of blanket statements that are dangerous. All I meant to say was like, expand your mind. And like, I'd like that. I'm leaving this recording being like, you know what? Maybe we're not so bad. Hell yeah. Cool. Would you say that there's cool people who did cool stuff?

You know, I would say that there's cool people that did cool stuff. Now that you mention it. But thank you for having me and letting me ramble to no end. This was really fun. Oh, thanks so much for being on.

Come back again, please. Yeah, please do. I would love to come back and learn more good things about good people. Cool things about cool... What am I doing? I'm messing it all up. Cool things about cool people who happen to be good doing good... I'm doing it again. I'm going to stop talking. This is the end of my sentence now.

Uh, Shireen, before we send you off, is there anything you would like to plug? Uh, yeah, I'm Shireen. You can follow me on the internet if you want. Uh, Twitter is shirohero666 and Instagram is just shirohero. I make films, I write poetry. I have a couple poetry books out that I self-published. What's the newest one called?

archives. Yeah, it's basically just emo diaries I've decided to publish. It's very personal. But yeah, that's just my I'm honest to a fault. And if you want to follow along, great. If you don't like me rambling, good, because I'm going to stop now.

Margaret plugs anything. You can also follow me on Twitter at magpie killjoy, where I try to be clever because Twitter is just this awful competition. It's like an arena of people trying to, um,

acquire enough clout to not starve by being clever and having all the right takes. And I always have the right takes. Oh, always. But were you on Twitter when it was just like a place to like say your thoughts out loud? Because I look at my old tweets and it's the dumbest shit. It's like Facebook statuses or like whatever where it's just like

I'm hungry. Or like, I'm going to fail my test. And now it's just, instead of being like a random thought catalog, it's definitely this one upping. The arena of death. Yeah. Speaking of death, can I plug Jamie Loftus' Ghost Church that's on Cool Zone Media as well. That will be out by the time this episode drops. So check that out. Ghost Church by Jamie Loftus.

Queen. Future guest of this podcast, Jamie Loftus. Future guest of this podcast, Jamie Loftus. I also produce that one. So check it out. Sophie produces all podcasts. I think you've already heard me say that. Yeah. Legally, all podcasts are mine. Yeah. Except for once again, the Joe Rogan podcast, which is actually a YouTube show. Yes. Legally distinct. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Thank you. And we'll be back Monday, right? Yay. Next Monday forever until the heat death of the universe. Cool. Cool. Bye. Cool people who did cool stuff is a production of cool zone media. For more podcasts from cool zone media, visit our website, cool zone media.com or check us out on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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