CZM Rewind: Gay Resistance to the Nazis
01:18:26 Share

Pro savings days are back at Lowe's with limited time savings on the supplies pros need. Get up to 40% off select major appliances. Plus, save an additional $100 on every $1,000 you spend on select major appliances. And don't miss your chance to activate and earn three times the points on select DeWalt and Klein tools. Lowe's. We help. You save. Valid at 328. Selection varies by location. While supplies last. See associate or lowes.com for more details on qualifying items.

Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. It's stock up savings time now through March 27th. Spring in for store wide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in-store tags to earn on eligible household items like Ziploc freezer bags and dinner essentials like Hunt's diced tomatoes and Tillamook shredded cheese plus many more. Then clip the offer in our app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more.

Restrictions apply. Visit Safeway.com for more details. Okay, so we all need to get away from the world sometimes. Well, in the all-new 2025 Nissan Murano, you don't even have to go anywhere. The Murano is the getaway. Just picture it. The Bose premium sound system plays your favorite music as the Murano's massaging leather appointed seats melt away your stress. Yeah, that's a real getaway. Drive the all-new 2025 Nissan Murano today. Bose.com.

And massaging leather-appointed seats are optional features. Give your kids a summer full of fun and learning. Give them ID Tech. ID Tech camps are all about high-energy fun, meeting new friends, and our top elite instructors. Located at 75 prestigious college campuses all across the country, ID Tech features over 50 epic courses like BattleBots, AI, and machine learning, coding, game design, and more.

There's something for every kid ages 7 to 17 at ID Tech. Sign up at IDTech.com and use code IDTech to save $150 on a week of a lifetime.

Hello! It's cool people who did cool stuff. Your weekly reminder that where there's bad things, there's people doing good things. And this week... Okay, it's a rerun. You probably figured that out because it's in the title. We might have called it a rewind. But, you know, we're going to run one that we've already run before. But I'm sort of excited to run this particular rerun because it's one of the first episodes that we did. And for some weird reason, it's on my mind.

It's an episode about gay resistance to fascism. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, the podcast about all the rebels and weirdos and revolutionaries who fought against all the war shit that the world has to offer. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is Shireen, who is a director, an artist, a poet, a general jack of all trades, and is the co-host of the podcast Ethnically Ambiguous. How are you doing today, Shireen?

I'm doing. Hi, it's Shireen. I have a podcast and I've done so many of these and every intro I've ever done is so awkward. It's me. I'm Shireen. That's actually something that I really appreciate about podcasts is it makes me feel like I'm doing okay. Yeah. And I also don't know how to do these things. That's why I exist. To reassure everybody. If I can do it, you can do it. Probably better.

We've also got our producer Sophie listening on like the voice of God or maybe like one of the three Norns weaving the fate of the rest of us mortals. How are you doing today, Sophie? Oh, that's my favorite intro you've done. I'm great. You know, surviving kind of. Excited for this script. It's a good one.

Thanks, thanks. Cutting some threads. That is a great image. And Sophie is like that. That was great. Perfect. A plus. Okay, so I figured today we should do something really lighthearted, easy breezy, and talk about Nazis. I figure no one ever talks about these guys, right? When was the last time anyone talked about Nazis? So I figured we should talk about Nazis.

But more specifically, I want to talk about how during the early 20th century, there was this like queer accepting culture that was blooming all across Europe, which the Nazis tried to crush. But it turns out it didn't actually work out that way in the end. The Nazis actually, spoiler alert, get crushed. Cool. And they took out a lot of queer people along the way. Not all. But a lot of queer people fucked up the Nazis too. Yeah.

So that's what we're going to talk about today. I like that. I like a good, like, I don't know, revenge. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is good. I think you might like some of this story then. Obviously not all of this story, unfortunately. Okay. So I don't know if you knew this, but there's actually not one way to be, to be gay. Um,

Oh? Yeah, no, I was shocked to learn this as well. There's not one straight way to be gay? Thank you for laughing so much. Yeah, like, every culture has had different conceptions of homosexuality and transness and all of these different things. And, like, to be clear, like, guys have been fucking guys since the beginning of time, girls have been fucking girls, and wherever there's been gender, there's been people transgressing gender roles. But

since Western civilization is like trying, so I almost feel like guilty focusing on this particular conception of gayness and how we develop to our current Western conception of gayness. But since Western civilization is trying its hardest to be like the one single culture over the entire world, I feel like it's worth knowing its history of queerness or at least some of it. And I kind of oddly, a lot of the history we have about queerness,

gayness in our culture doesn't come from like the ladies who liked scissoring but instead the priests and the governments that tried to stop us from doing that instead so I want to start with this book of monsters hell yeah yeah Lever Monstorum this is this it's a series of three volumes that was written in old English around the turn of the 8th century and it's got like cyclopses and centaurs and shit in it but

It's not just like a collection in alphabetical order. It was written in kind of a specific, like they picked who to put first and who to put at the end. And the third book. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's a monster playlist that this guy's writing to try and impress someone probably, which makes it perfect actually, because the very first monster in the very first book of monsters in English is a trans woman, um, or possibly an intersex person, uh,

Those concepts were very blurry all throughout history. Right. And so to quote Lieberman's storum from a translation by Andy Orchard,

Indeed, I bear witness at the beginning of the work that I have known a person of both sexes, who although they appeared more masculine than feminine from their face and chest, and were thought male by those who did not know, yet loved feminine occupations and deceived the ignorant among men in the manner of a whore. But this is said to have happened often amongst the human race. Oh, so is the person writing this pretending they're not human?

No, no, I think it's just like... Just the way old English works, it sounds strange. Yeah, basically. So the very first monster in all of English history is me. So that rules. I mean, projecting. They're projecting. If that's the very first playlist or song in the playlist they chose, hey, look inwards. That's a very good point. Yeah.

And the same book also describes, it specifically quotes like Ethiopians also as monsters. And it's not exactly a tome I would like to see live on in the modern world in any appreciable degree. But...

Okay, so fast forward a couple hundred years, and in the 10th century, the Church of England, they were passing around these manuals of recommended penance for sinners based on their different sins or whatever, right? And one of the passages refers to a third gender of person, which is the badling, or maybe badling. I don't actually know how to pronounce Old English. I'm going to go with badling. And...

And we know that they meant it as a third sex because the specific rule is that any man who, quote, has sex with a badling or with another male or with a beast ought to fast for 10 years in penance. Wow. And so this is probably, again, the same concept. This is a concept of someone who is either intersex or trans. And...

It's, and it's related to all these other effeminate words that they had at the time or words for effeminate men that they had at the time, including, you know,

Battle and Baden. There's a lot of arguments. People like to argue about this shit endlessly on the internet. I don't know if you've met the internet. But it likes to argue about shit like this. There's a chance that the word bad comes from this. Wow. Which I will also happily take. I'm totally down to be the origin of monsters and bad. That's badass. I don't even mean that as a pun, but I think that's really cool. Yeah.

And different people have tried to reclaim these words in different ways to various degrees. Okay, fast forward even more, and you've got two important pieces of legislation whose bigotry has echoed throughout the world, thanks to colonialism. The Holy Roman Empire, which stretched from Northern Italy up to modern day Germany. In 1532, it passed something called the, I don't know how to pronounce Latin, even though it took three years of it,

constitutio criminalis carolina and one of the laws in this this set of laws is when a human commits fornication with a beast a man with a man a woman with a woman they have also forfeited life and they should be according to the common custom banished by fire from life into death jesus yeah um so they weren't like

Huge fans of homosexuality. Not really. It seems like they just kind of hate, hate us. Yeah. Yeah. Um, the very next year, it must've been like sweeping the Europe at the time because the very next year, Henry the eighth of England in 1533, he passed the buggery act, uh, which made anal sex and bestiality punishable by death. Um,

It's just so disgusting to me that those are always coupled together. And I say this as someone that used to have a friend like five years ago that was arguing that point. And I'm not her friend anymore. But I could not believe someone my age would be able to still have any thought about that. And it blew my mind. So I'm very... I just hate... That's just beyond upsetting and disgusting to me. I just... Ugh. Whatever. Yeah.

Like, yeah, no, I agree. No, it's like, I don't know. It just makes me really mad that humans are like that. But also like, okay, I studied art history in college and the Roman Empire or whatever the shit, a lot of their artworks involve all genders everywhere and their gods are intersex and all this stuff. So it's just so ironic to me that they're also burning people alive.

I honestly like the best I can figure out and I'm not sure, but the best I can figure out from like all this research I'm doing for this episode is that like,

Not only have the it's like it's not like everyone was just like hiding and in the closet and afraid of the witch hunters the whole time. It seems like it like cycled. People would be like, oh, being gay rules. And then people like, yeah, it does rule. And then I would just have like a whole culture of people being like this rules. And then someone would get into a moral panic and then murder us all and drive the rest of us back into the closet, which is a really cool pattern that.

We are hopefully not in the middle of right now. Well, that makes me very nervous the way you said that. But we'll keep going with this story. I was not thinking about that at all. Okay, continue. All right. So England's laws get exported all over the world because they are fucking colonialist scum. And the Holy Roman Empire's law becomes Prussian law, which becomes German law, and then becomes Nazi law.

And then actually stays the law after the Nazis go away too, but we'll get to that. So the Nazis didn't invent the prosecution of gay people, the persecution of gay people. They just turned it up to 11. In contrast at all, during all this time, France, when they did their whole revolution thing in 1791, they legalized homosexuality. Wow. That's pretty incredible. I didn't know that. No, I didn't either, honestly. And then I hate that I'm about to say something positive about a Napoleon.

But then when he went around and conquered Europe, he brought the French law with him and eradicated anti-gay laws everywhere he went. Wow. That short kink. I know. Shireen. Hey, that is pretty freaking cool. Yeah. And so it's like.

So Prussia becomes Germany by bringing in Bavaria and some other regions. And Bavaria actually had legalized homosexuality, but Prussia did not. So in 1871, when Prussia becomes Germany, the whole country suddenly has an anti-gay law again. And it's a law called Paragraph 175. And it was the law in Germany from fucking 1871 until... Do you want to guess what decade they got rid of Paragraph 1871? What decade? 1871.

I don't know. I'm genuinely going to say like 1960 or something. No, no, no. 1994. I was going to say you were alive. You were alive. Oh my God. I just thought like after fucking, I don't know, NATO won, maybe they were like in a good mood. No, never mind. The 60s sucked. That's what I think about it. But that is very unfortunate and sad.

unsettling yeah and they did like they actually they did reform the laws in the late 60s and early 70s and like and i think what they did i don't have the notes in front of me but i think what they ended up doing was um making it so that there was just a higher age of consent for for gayness than for straightness or whatever um so like straight kids were allowed to fuck at 14 but gay kids weren't allowed to fuck until they're 21 or something which is like

Progress, but in the weirdest, most horrible way, you know? Yeah. So this law, paragraph 175, is unnatural fornication, whether between persons of the male sex or humans with beasts, is punished with imprisonment with the further punishment of prompt loss of civil rights.

Whoa. And okay. So like most of these laws are just about men, right? The Holy Roman Emperor one managed to include lesbians as well. But so Germany, they actually tried to extend it to include lesbians a couple of times, but they, they couldn't reach consensus on exactly like how women would go about fucking each other. And so like exactly what would be illegal. And,

That's so funny. It's like straight guys making lesbian porn or something. You know what I mean? They're just like, is this what they do? Let's throw that in. Yeah, totally. I just like to imagine that there's like this room full of dudes and like powdered wigs or maybe like hats with spikes on them. And they're like trying to mimic exactly what they thought. Maybe like one of them cuts their fingers with some scissors by accident or something, you know? Yeah.

So, and in England in 1921, they tried to expand the law to women as well, the English law. But they got afraid that if they did, it might give women ideas. So the Earl of, I don't know how to pronounce English names. Well, I mean, like, women can't have ideas though, Margaret. Like, that's so dangerous. Yeah. Well, I mean, this actually ties into my, I mean, like, I think the reason that men hate lesbians is that they realize that...

if women can enjoy each other, then the men have no purpose. Yeah, 100%. I actually think this is why they even hate trans women especially or also is because like, because they could hold on to like, well, at least the human race wouldn't continue. Yeah.

And you're like, sorry, we're going to fuck that one up for you, too. Well, no, I think you're correct. That is why. So, OK, so the Earl of Desert. I'm just going to call him Desert. Desert. I don't know if I can think. Desert. I go Desert. OK, they colonize like half the fucking world. They can get their names wrong. Yeah, exactly.

How many people does one suppose really are so vile, so unbalanced, so neurotic, so decadent as to do this? You may say there are a number of them, but would it be like at most an extremely small minority? And you're going to tell the whole world that there is such an offense to bring it to the notice of women who have never heard of it, never thought of it, never dreamed of it. I think that is a very great mischief. I love that. I love the performance. Thanks. But I was just thinking about it.

Like, annihilating the human race, or not annihilating, but slowly killing us off, that would be... Have you seen us? Have you seen this planet? Like, that's the way to save the world. Lesbians. And trans women. Yeah. Like, the man that wrote... The men that wrote that, just... Probably so gay. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's the other thing we're gonna, like... There's a lot of different conceptions that come up about, like...

you know, whether sexuality is in it or whether it's like socially contagious and like, Oh, so that wasn't even part of the question yet. It was more just like the act.

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I was saying that later in the script we're going to talk about. Oh, sorry. Oh, sorry. I thought you meant the law. Yeah. No, no. So they didn't they didn't expand the law to include women because they couldn't, you know, they didn't want to give any women ideas. But OK, despite the fact that there's all these anti-gay laws on the books, 1920s and 1930s, Germany was like fucking unbelievably gay through and through left wing, right wing center, gay people everywhere. Right.

And, of course, a lot of these people were fighting for their rights, which brings us to the Institute for Sexual Research. From 1919 to 1933, there was a place in Berlin called the Institute for Sexual Research, which was opened by three Jewish sexologists. The most famous of these is a guy named Magnus Hirschfeld. And-

This place, I don't know, as far as I can tell, fucking ruled, right? 20,000 people visited every year from around the world. There was this museum of sex. There was a massive research archive. They offered consulting on matters of sex to gay and straight people. Like if you were confused about your sexuality, you could just like show up at the Institute and someone would set you straight.

or gay. I wish I had that now. I know. So ahead of its time. I know. And they did endless scientific research into homosexuality.

Some of it seems like really weird today. Like at one point they spent a while trying to, and this is all voluntary, but they, they tried to transplant testicles from straight men into gay men to see if it would cure the gay men of their gay. Oh, wow. But they, and again, this wasn't a forced conversion therapy. This was like people being like,

I want to do this or whatever. Yeah. Um, but they, they kind of dropped anything like conversion therapy pretty quickly. And then they moved apparently all their focus to helping people navigate homophobic society rather than, you know, trying to fucking cure them or whatever. They, they, they coined the words, both transvestite and transsexual. I know transvestite isn't in vogue now, but like it actually was a word that meant a lot to me as some, when I was younger before I identified it as, as transgender. Um,

because I prefer women's clothes. Yeah, exactly. Words change and they evolve in their meaning. I had no idea that's where they were coined from. What an amazing little institute. Oh yeah, no, this place is just like

That's so much cool shit. They pioneered this idea. I mean, I'm sure other people came up with this idea too, but they pioneered this idea as like a scientific thing that if you just let trans people exist and you let us like go through society the way that we know we belong in society, that we're happier and society is happier and we don't like kill ourselves as much. Because like...

you know, homophobic societies drive an awful lot of people to hurt themselves. And the government hears that and they're like, no, we have to keep them miserable or else they don't need us. We have to keep them scared and miserable and sad. That's actually the truth. Yeah. I genuinely believe that. They're like, I'm miserable. So you have to be miserable. Exactly.

Okay, and they also, they performed probably the first gender confirmation surgery in history, or at least the one that's like known about in Western records or whatever. I have a feeling some people tried and did this a long time ago too. But this woman named Dora Richter in 1930 was the first person to, in our understanding, to undergo full like,

gender confirmation surgery. And she actually worked at the Institute. She was a maid, basically. It was one of the only places in Germany where trans people could get jobs. But I honestly, I don't know how well they were treated. It sounded like they all got kind of shit jobs. Like this woman was a maid. And Hirschfeld was like traveling around, staying in luxury hotels and shit. Oh, there's always a negative side, I'm sure, to everybody.

Yeah. And they also were tied in with the first Western pro-homosexual advocacy group in history, which was the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which was founded in 1897. And they treated homosexuality as gender... So this gets into the

There's a lot of different conceptions about gayness arguing at the time. And the Institute's theory was that homosexuality and gender exist in the body and are essentially determined at birth rather than being conscious choices, which led them down to some strange paths. They presented this idea that homosexuals were sort of a third sex halfway between men and women, which implied that like all lesbians are a bit masculine and all gay men are like a bit feminine. Yeah.

Um, they did, however, separate out trans people, uh, from all of this to not be exactly the same as gay people. Um, so it was like progress and, and they got away with a lot of this gayness because even a one 75 paragraph one 75 was technically a law in the books. The, the local government basically told the police like, nah, don't enforce this. Cause the local government was like far more progressive, um,

That's something at least. But, I mean, it's also interesting this guy, Magnus Hirschfeld, wasn't out as gay. He was very, very clearly gay, but he wasn't out. And, like, lived with his partner and was active in the gay scene. And...

I don't love everything that this guy did. For one thing, as part of the coalition to abolish paragraph 175, the law that they advocated instead would have legalized homosexual prostitution. And he was... And Magnus was like, no, no, no, no, take that part out. Not because he hated sex work, but because he... It would be too controversial. It would fuck the... You know? Yeah. I don't know. Sex workers get thrown under the bus fucking constantly. And...

And it also kind of throws on working class gay folks under the bus more, right, if you do that. Yeah, exactly. And he was also super fucking assimilationist. I'm not trying to, like, rag on this guy, but I feel like you gotta understand him, you know? If you had stopped, like...

three minutes ago like he started institution whatever like that's great but this is an example of like don't meet your heroes right yeah totally if i would have just kept him as like this heroic figure if you just stop there yeah it's good to know everything yeah so at one point he was like when he was trying to convince everyone that that gays were cool he would like bring cops to gay bars and to be like look we're just like everyone else and like

I like to imagine being in that bar and trying to be like, okay, we're, we're what we're like everyone else. All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Everyone put on your, everyone else. Yeah, totally quick. Stop fucking in public. Um, and, and they also, okay. So they weren't the only game in town either. Um,

There was this anarchist named Adolf Brand who started the world's first gay magazine. Again, whenever I say like the world's first or whatever, I want to like really heavily disclose that like all of these history books are going to call it the first whatever. And they mean the Western world and, you know, whatever. So fucking cool. They started this gay magazine in the fucking 19th century in 1896. And the name of the magazine translates to the unique history.

And he was really fucking out. Like he kept getting arrested for being gay and they would be like, are you gay? And he'd be like, fuck yeah, I'm gay. Fuck you. And, and he, but he also, and I don't love this guy either. I'm going to get to that, but he didn't fuck around with this. Like gayness is a feminine thing to him. Male homosexuality was like the epitome of masculinity often bordering on or falling into outright misogyny. Right. Because it's like,

men who only need men and right which we've all run across yeah you know i mean both yeah with women and with men i would say that happens totally totally and then the activism that came out of his circle was called the path over corpses and which is really metal but not actually very cool and what they did is they they outed high-profile gay men um like often you often leading to those people to kill themselves

Holy shit. And they just didn't care. And that's why it was called the Path Over Corpses. They invented cancel culture. They invented cancel culture. We don't even need Twitter anymore. Wow. That is...

Wow. That's one way to go about it, but that's not a great way. Yeah. And I usually root for the anarchists in anything, but I actually... Not this time. No, no. Okay, and then there's this third conception that

I think was floating around a bit, the Western world, but actually as far as I can tell in my limited reading was far more common in like Southwest Asia, Northern Africa, which was this, and gay men from the West would go visit Southwest Asia to go be a bit more free for a while. And it was this conception that sexuality and gender weren't things that you are, but instead they're things that you do, right?

And all of those are going to come up through the different characters that we're going to get to. That's part of why I'm trying to lay the scene. Very interesting. But you know what else is wholesome besides sexuality? I've decided that the show will only be sponsored by incredibly wholesome things. The most wholesome things we can think of. So today, Sophie, can we just be sponsored by tap water? Like the concept of tap water? I mean, what about the potatoes?

That's true. I do really like potatoes. OK, tap water and potatoes, two things that are very wholesome. I mean, that seems fair. We do need more than one sponsor. Yeah, I'm OK with that. Protect the potato. Yeah. OK, so we're sponsored by those things and then maybe these other things and we'll be right back.

Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. It's stock up savings time now through March 27th. Spring in for store-wide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in-store tags to earn on eligible household items like Ziploc freezer bags and dinner essentials like Hunt's diced tomatoes and Tillamook shredded cheese plus many more. Then clip the offer in our app for automatic event-long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more.

Restrictions apply. Visit Safeway.com for more details.

Have you ever brought your magic to Walt Disney World like, "Hey, we came to play"? Did you tip your tiara to a Creole princess or get goofy officially? Step up like a boss and save the day? Or see what life's like under the tree of life? Did you? If you could, would you? When we come through, it's true magic, 'cause we came to play. Bring the magic at Walt Disney World Resort.

Give your kids a summer full of fun and learning. Give them ID Tech. ID Tech camps are all about high energy fun, meeting new friends, and our top elite instructors. Located at 75 prestigious college campuses all across the country, ID Tech features over 50 epic courses like BattleBots, AI, and machine learning, coding, game design, and more.

Does this podcast make you happy? Of course it does. That's why you're here. But it only comes out once a week. For happiness every night, you need Adam and Eve. Yes, I'm talking about sex toys.

Okay, and we are back. And...

Of all of these different types of things that are happening, it seems like Hirschfeld and the Institute had the longest and most widespread impact on the Western world. And the Nazis didn't like that.

at all it turns out um do you know that famous photo of nazis burning books or like if you imagine nazis burning books yeah the image popped in my head yeah yeah um so and everyone's like oh look the nazis are bad they burn books and what usually goes unsaid is that the books they were burning was the research library of the institute of sexual research and its photos wow

Why don't they mention that? They should at least mention that in a caption somewhere. What? The huge pile of books on fire. Yeah. And then just Nazis Nazi-ing. Yeah. Wow. I mean, definitely going to help that they were Jewish either, right? Yeah, exactly. Honestly, I think the reason it isn't mentioned is because I think that most of polite Western society was secretly fucking glad that all those fucking books got burned.

And like, you know, we're erased from history in a lot of different ways. And the Nazis liked erasing us more actively than the sort of like liberal democracies. But they like trying fucking to. It's dark, but true. And unfortunately. Yeah.

On May 6th, 1933, the Nazis showed up and they burned like 20,000 books, destroying endless amounts of research into homosexuality, transsexuality, cross-dressing, everything. Joseph Goebbels, I don't know how to pronounce Goebbels' name, which I should because he's like one of the famous people in history. He's the chief propagandist of the Nazis and he gives a speech to 40,000 people during this fucking book burning event.

And Dora Richter, the first trans woman to undergo gender confirmation surgery, probably was killed in this attack. It's possible that she was arrested and died in prison shortly after. There are a couple rumors that people that don't have as much evidence to back them up that she like got out. And I like to think she got out, but she probably didn't.

Meanwhile, Magnus Hirschfeld, he sees the writing on the wall before all this happens. And so he's off on a world tour, basically trying to figure out where the fuck to get his gay Jewish ass to. Because he's like, this is not going to fucking work. I can't stay where there's Nazis. But he didn't destroy his own records and lists of names before he left Germany.

Oh, so the Nazis got those. And those are like the one things they didn't burn was the list of like all the fucking gay people in Germany. Um, not clearly not all of them, you know, but, um, yeah, but that's, uh, shit. I can't wait to hear what happens next. Yeah. I mean, okay. So the Nazis get those, they use them in a campaign to eradicate the homosexual blight because the Nazis minus the gay Nazis I'll talk about in a second. Um, or,

or later, they sure didn't see homosexuality as like something inherent and natural. They saw it as a plague that needed to be destroyed, let it infest everything or whatever. So Magnus Hirschfeld, he never comes back to Germany. He goes into exile in France and he dies of a heart attack on his 67th birthday on May 14th, 1935.

Adolf Brand, the anarchist who path over corpses guys. He was super brave before the Nazis. And then when the Nazis come over, he retires from activism, marries a woman to try and like play straight. And then he just like shut the fuck up and tried to survive the war. And he didn't because an allied bomb fell on his house in Berlin in 1945. Died at the age of 70.

The Nazis then expanded paragraph 175 substantially. It used to be gay men can't fuck, but then it became gay men can't try to excite the sexuality of other men.

And so... That's where the plague mentality comes in. Yeah. You know, like if this gay guy even comes near me, like... Yeah. Maybe my thoughts will be unleashed. Yeah. I keep thinking about dick. Yeah. Exactly. Many people do. It's a natural thought. Yep. Okay. So like something like 100,000 men who are accused of homosexuality are arrested. And...

A lot of them are like, this is often like a, it's a really easy way to blackmail people. It's very similar to like witch hunting, you know, like you're mad at someone, just say he came on to you and you can get someone arrested. Um, so a hundred thousand men are arrested. Half of those did prison time, 10,000 of them or so. Everyone argues about numbers, uh, were sent to concentration camps where they were forced to wear the inverted pink triangle badges, which is where the pink triangle is a symbol comes from. Um,

In the camps, at least by everything I read, they were treated socially like kind of the worst. It was like them and Jews at the bottom of everything. And then gay Jews had to wear like an inverted. It was both a pink triangle and a yellow Star of David over top of each other. And they had it the worst. I read really gnarly accounts of what they suffered, and I'm not going to tell you about it. Thank you for that. Thank you so much. My imagination is enough. Yes. Yeah. And about 40% of them survive. So 60% of them die.

and there's no law on the books against lesbianism, but the Nazis didn't like gay women any better. And so what they did is they basically found excuses to send as many of them as possible to the camps, uh, non Aryan ones in particular, and then Aryan ones would get forced to have babies, which again, we will leave there. Um,

And those who resisted were arrested on imaginary charges. Like two women were arrested for disrupting their workplace by sleeping with women from work. Interesting. So Nazis didn't like gay people. But fortunately for history, a lot of gay people didn't like Nazis either. And they decided to do something about it. Which brings us to one of the best places in LGBT history, Amsterdam. I fucking love Amsterdam.

I still got to go there. I want to go there. That's like one of my top places I want to visit. It's yeah. I remember like sitting on a triangle memorials, like a dock into one of the canals. It's like a triangle memorial. When I was like a baby, barely even knew I was queer, like traveling squatter staying there. Wow. That must have been powerful. I can imagine. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, so one of the most iconic acts of gay resistance to the Nazis is in Amsterdam after the occupation. It's a story that weaves together some of my favorite people I've run across in history, at least judging by their actions. I actually don't know much about them as people, but they did fucking cool shit. And we're going to start with Willem Aran Deus.

He was born in 1895 in Amsterdam into a theater family. His parents were costume designers. Originally, they support he's an artist, right? And they support him in his art of his writing and painting. But then he came out when he was 17 as gay and they kicked him out of the house. Homosexuality was legal in the Netherlands, but, you know, no one liked it. I mean, lots of people liked it, but, you know, society like to frown upon it.

So he develops his art. He starts taking on commercial art jobs. He paints ads, stamps, that kind of shit. He did some like tapestries and coats of arms for some cities, at least one of which is still around. He did a mural for the Rotterdam Town Hall. And you can look up his art, actually. It's really good. Anyone listening, you should look it up because, well, because I think y'all should get tattoos of it because of fucking rules. But it's like more designery than fine art, which I think is cool. Yeah.

So and some of his art is on display at the Met and at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. But he wasn't really well known at the time, to be real. This is he's a commercial artist, not some like. Yeah. I mean, everyone, every most not every most artists are not really well known or famous until after they pass. Yeah, totally. And if you want to be a famous artist, you should do stuff like Willem goes on to do. That's my recommendation to you.

Okay, so he spends years of his life partnered with a man named Jan Thiessen. And he supports the two of them barely on his art and on the royalties from a biography he writes about a painter named Matthias Maris who had fought in the Paris Commune.

Um, but Willem is, is dirt poor, largely unknown. He shifts to novels in 1935 and he publishes novels with the names like the owl house, the tragedy of the dream. And then this is my favorite cause it's the most Dutch gay title I've ever heard in my life. And I love it. Uh, in the blossoming winter radish. Oh my gosh. Perfect. No, no notes. I know. I know. I want to read it. Um,

And the Nazis take over in 1940. And they start off kind of trying to be nice to some of the Dutch people, clearly not all of the Dutch people. But homosexuality had been legal in the Netherlands for more than a century. And so Willem is one of the first people to go off and join the Dutch resistance.

which was actually more nonviolent in character than elsewhere in Europe, but they weren't slouchers. By the autumn of 1944, the resistance was hiding or had hidden 300,000 people, and

Somewhere between 60 to 200,000 people were doing that hiding and over a million people were actively letting all of that happen just by like knowing their neighbor is hiding somebody and not fucking saying anything about it. Yeah. Like allies. Yeah. Yeah. That's a big number. I wasn't expecting that high of a number, but that's pretty incredible. Yeah. And like gives me a little bit of hope whenever I want to drag hope out of this kind of thing. Oh, that's the point of this podcast. Right. There's over...

1,100 separate resistance newspapers, which reach a readership of over 100,000 people during the occupation. But Willem's partner can't handle all the heat in Amsterdam and he fucks off and moves back to a small town somewhere else. And Willem stays in Amsterdam and he keeps going. In 1942, he starts an underground newspaper called Brandarisbrief, which means letter of insignia.

In 1943, it merges with another paper called... I'm just going to say the English translations. Called The Free Artist, which was edited by a man named Gerrit van der Veen, who's another one of today's heroes, actually. But I believe tragically heterosexual. Oh, God. No one's perfect. Exactly. Exactly. And he doesn't get as much screen time in the story. So I want to tell you a little bit about our man, Gerrit. He...

I could be mispronouncing his name. I'm actually sorry, Dutch listeners. But I can pronounce the name Sjoerd, which is going to come a little later. Anyway.

Okay, so he starts off his career as a mechanical engineer, but he really just wants to be a sculptor. And then one day before the Nazi invasion and shit, he's standing on the shore when a fully loaded oil tanker catches fire. So the crew flees and gets away, but he dives into the water, swims out to the ship, extinguishes the fire in the engine room. Whoa. I know. Yeah. He's just like this guy on the shore. He's like, oh shit, a fire. I'm gonna go put it out.

It's like Keanu Reeves helping... What's her face? When someone's car breaks down. He just goes and helps that person. But no one has evidence of this. That guy just did it. He didn't need paparazzi to capture it. Yeah, totally. A good person. One of those. So the sailors...

They're so grateful that they buy him a ticket to Amsterdam and pay for a year's tuition for him to go to art school or like an allowance for him to become a sculptor because that's what he wants to do is he wants to go become a sculptor. So he does. He becomes a sculptor because he's performed this heroic deed. And his shit is really good. Like looking at photos of and stuff, a lot of it's still around.

But after the invasion, and I believe he's of Aryan ancestry, but I'm not sure. And they asked him to sign a paper saying, sign this paper to say you are of Aryan ancestry. And he's like, no, fuck no, I'm not going to do that because he's a good person. So instead he goes underground, he starts a newspaper. And most importantly to our story, he starts forging IDs for Jews and other people who are hiding from the Nazis. Yeah.

So Willem joins Van Der Veen's crew, and it's made up of artists and dancers and poets and shit. A lot of them are openly gay. And they just start cranking out fake IDs just all over the fucking place. They made more than 80,000 fake IDs. And because everyone over the age of 15 was required by the Nazis to carry an ID, and Jewish names were like, Jewish ones were marked with a big J on them.

The counterfeiters called their services Personals Proof Central, and they sold the IDs, but at a sliding scale. So basically, if you were rich, you'd pay a lot of money. And then if you're poor, you would pay no money. Love that. Yeah. Yeah. That's how they finance the whole thing, you know? Yeah. That's how the world should be, to be honest. Yeah, totally. Okay.

And so then there's a problem. They're making all these IDs, but there's records on every one being stored in a storehouse. So curious Nazis and collaborators, which I guess you could just call them Nazis, honestly. That's the word for Nazi collaborator, I think. Yes, yes. 100%. So they just go and double check the IDs against the records stored in the warehouse and then bust people later. Yeah.

And so, but the Dutch resistance had people everywhere, including in these records keeping storehouses or whatever. And so they're working as fast as they can to falsify documents. I think they're basically saying like, okay, we did this following ID, change the records. And they're like, okay. And they go and they change the records, but it's not fast enough. And by the start of 1943, they all get the sense that like really bad shit is coming. And so they like need to step this up.

So they come up with a plan. And okay, so the problem is that there's a bunch of records, right? And the records are stored in a building, right? But buildings are notoriously vulnerable to explosions in like the game of paper, rock, scissors, you know? Dynamite are the kryptonite of buildings, one might say.

I like when Sophie laughs at my scripted jokes. Hey, a laugh from Sophie is so affirming. I get it. I agree. It was funny in writing when you said it. Thanks. What can I say? So, okay. So, so a lot of this crew are pacifists.

Not all of them. We'll get to that later, but some of them were. So they devise a plan to not only destroy hundreds of thousands of Nazi records and blow up a building, but to do it without killing or seriously injuring anyone, which is my argument is that these people invented the heist movie. Yeah.

Yeah, that's funny. See, haha. I'm laughing. No, I'm kidding. To be honest, it takes a lot for me to laugh out loud. Like when I'm watching comedy or whatever, I'm usually just silent and I feel like a piece of shit. But I find things funny. I just don't react. It's fine. It's fine. I understand.

Okay. So you thought that was funny. So it's, this is not a small plot. Uh, in the end, 15 people get arrested for it. And there's so many more people involved than that. Um, but to tell it like a heist movie, I'm going to start with the action.

On March 27th, 1943, Aran Deus and a whole crew of other people, they dress up as like army captains and shit. Police captains, actually, I think. They march over to the record storehouse and they're like, hey, they say to the guards because the guards are on, you know, they're like, something's up. We're going to be really careful. And so they show up and they're like, hey, we think that there's people trying to blow up this building. So we're here to sweep the building and check for explosives. Yeah.

Wow, I love this. I love this. Where is this movie? And so the guards believe them and let them in. And then medical students who are with them pull out syringes full of sedatives and inject the guards, rendering them unconscious. They drag them over to the zoo next door because this building is next to the zoo and just like leave them unconscious in the zoo.

Okay, zoo twist. Not expecting that. Last thing I thought you were going to say was zoo. That's incredible. I love that addition to their plan. Yeah. They could have just left them there, but they put them in a zoo. Right. No, exactly. Because they didn't want to hurt anybody. Yeah. So they pull all the records they can find. They pile them up in the center of the room. They pour benzene on them as an accelerant. They place bombs. They grab all the blank IDs and all the money that they can find. And they get the fuck out and the building goes boom.

Successful heist movie. Yeah. So it wasn't completely destroyed, but the building is soon on fire. So the fire department comes and they show up kind of late. And then they kind of take their sweet time putting out the fire. And then when the fire is out, they just keep pouring water on the building. Just keep going. Because they're trying to destroy all the records because the fire department got tipped off saying, hey, can you help us destroy this building? Yeah.

You can always count. Okay. The fire department. Yeah. You can always count on them. Like, you know, there's, there's cops and there's firemen and there's always a good guy. And yeah, it comes from history. Obviously. The way that my dad put it once is that no one becomes a firefighter because they enjoy having power over other people. Um, damn. I love that. I've never put, heard it in those words, but yes. Yeah. Yes. And opposite for cops. Yeah, exactly. Um,

So in the end, they destroyed about 800,000 records on people, which and it gets painted as this failure because that was only about 15 percent of the total that were stored in the building. But they also they make it out with 600 blank IDs and 50,000 guilders. And I could not for the life of me figure out how much 50,000 guilders is in today's money and U.S. dollars. I tried. I promise I tried. Someone I'm going to say it's a lot. Yeah, it's more money than I currently have. I'm willing to bet.

And yeah, it's like, okay, so sometimes like history is like, oh, and they kind of failed. I'm like, okay, they didn't like single handedly save everyone in Amsterdam all at once. But they fucking destroyed 800,000 records and like saved thousands of lives, you know? They put guards in zoos. I know. I would say it's mostly a success. I mean, obviously not like stupendously, I don't know. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, so there was a traitor in their midst. And unfortunately for the heist movie and for them and for us, we actually don't know who the traitor was. Fucking Judas. Yeah. And they get sold out and one by one, the conspirators get arrested. Willem, when he's arrested, they grab his journal and use it to catch a bunch more of the people. And like, just, I'm really not trying to shame anybody, but if you're going to blow up a Nazi warehouse, you should burn all the evidence at your earliest convenience. Okay.

So keep that in mind. Yeah, exactly. And okay. So 15 of them are rounded up. Willem Arandaes, his defense in court is basically like, I did literally all of it. Blame it all on me. No one else had anything to do with it. And it's not the first time that doing research for this podcast, I've run across people using this defense in court. Cause it's, it's a cool thing that cool people sometimes do. And it, it saves two of his co-defendants lives, two of the medical students, um,

are like just given like 15 years in prison or whatever, which fortunately means they're given a couple of years in prison and then, you know, the allies liberate the Netherlands. Um,

But he didn't save everyone. Along with 12 others, he was marched out to the dunes and executed. His last communication was through his lawyer, who was also a badass. I'm going to talk about her in a little bit. And he said to her, and this gets translated a thousand different ways in every retelling of it, but he said to her basically, never let them say that homosexuals are cowards. Wow. Yeah. That is...

Beautiful. Yeah. What a life. What a good guy. I know. That is, I like this show. Thanks. I do too. And he, the thing I, I mean, like, I was like, I cried so many times while I was like researching this episode because, I mean, this guy just wanted to fucking like paint and write novels and like fuck his boyfriend. Yeah.

And then instead Nazis took over his fucking country and he did what he fucking had to do. And like, and the other guy that's like a sculptor. Yeah. It's you're not allowed to express yourself creatively or like as an artist, you're like you're forced into activism almost because to survive. If that makes sense. Totally forced, but you're by default. Totally. But yeah, it's wow. I'm glad to know about these people. Thanks. That is cool. I might tell you about more of them.

Yay! More cool people that do cool things. Okay, I'm gonna tell you about his boyfriend next. Not the one who like fucked off because shit got too hot, but the one that he dated later and was dating during it all. His name was Schwartbacher.

That's the name you can say. Yeah, yeah, totally. Because one of my best friends in Amsterdam, his name is Sjoerd. And I actually am still not saying it correctly. But, you know, I try. No one has to know. Yeah. Everyone named Sjoerd knows. Oh, got it. Hopefully my friend Sjoerd is listening to this and forgives me. Okay. So he's a tailor. Not my friend. My friend owns a pizza shop. But this guy is a tailor. And.

And Schubert Bacher, he sewed the counterfeit police uniforms that they all wore into the office. And because he was Willem's partner, the defense tried a strategy of basically be like, go easy on him. He only did it because he was in love with Willem.

And then short was like, oh, fuck. No, like, no, I fucking did it. And I would fucking do it again. Like, fuck that. Wow. So again, not cowards. Yeah, that's like, you know, that's amazing. Yeah. I could have just fucking saved his ass. I know. And then instead, and this is the gayest part of all and the part that I fucking love. Right before he dies, he's offered one last request. And I'm seeing what you say is about choking up. He asks for his pretty pink shirt.

And so he puts on his pretty pink shirt and that's a pretty pink shirt as a translation. It's a machine translation. I, you know, but, but he asked for his pretty pink shirt. He gets marched out to the dunes and he gets executed alongside his lover. And it was his shirt, his pink shirt that helped people identify the bodies of all the people who got executed. I, I,

My eyes are kind of watery. I know. That is so sweet and sad. I know. And then his brother and his uncle kept fighting, and they also died later in the resistance. But then you got someone who survives.

Frida Belafonte, who's a part Jewish lesbian cellist and conductor. And she's the first woman in the world to serve as the permanent conductor for a professional orchestra, but that comes later because she survives. And it's not very often that you get to say the lesbian survives in a story like this. She was this promising cellist. She won a conducting competition against entirely men. And then Nazis take over. And as someone whose father but not mother was Jewish, she was

allowed to apply for a special dispensation to keep working professionally uh under the under the nazi regime at least at the start but she was like no fuck you i'm not gonna fucking do that and so she puts down her music career puts it on hold and she goes underground and starts forging fake ids um and after the bombing she goes underground again and she uh dresses as a man as she often did to avoid detection or for whatever reason that she felt like dressing like man um

Probably being part of an expert fake ID ring helps when you're trying to go underground, you know? Yeah. I would imagine that's a good asset to have. Yeah. I was just thinking, like, how all these badass people, they consciously, like, every opportunity that was presented to them as, like, you can save yourself, like, you can have an easier life. Yeah. If you just, like, kind of... What's the word? Like...

I know I can't think of the word either, but if you just roll over and just go along with it. Consolidate? Not consolidate. There's a word that I'm thinking of that's not the word, but it's really cool that with every opportunity that was presented to them, they're still like, no...

I this is who I am I'm not a coward yeah it's it's not even I don't even think the kind of I would go on record saying like they didn't even think of it that way you know what I mean yeah just they just did it because that's the right thing to do when they're good people totally I yeah I think that they there was like that that's not an option like why would I yeah exactly um

But but what is an option is buying fake IDs from our sponsor, fake ID ring dot. Is it net or com, Sophie? I think it's org. It's org. Yeah, I was going to say what Shereen said. It's definitely dot org. OK. Nonprofit. Yeah. And so for our next wholesome sponsor is the concept of fake IDs.

As well as whatever other ads come after I say this and then stop talking. But mostly fake IDs. And potatoes. And potatoes. Here's some ads.

Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. It's stock up savings time now through March 27th. Spring in for store-wide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in-store tags to earn on eligible snacks like pepperidge farms, goldfish, and kettle chips, or sweet treats like Keebler cookies, Hostess snack cakes, M&Ms, and Ben & Jerry's, plus many more. Then clip the offer in our app for automatic event-long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Restrictions apply. Visit Safeway.com for more details.

Have you ever brought your magic to Walt Disney World like, "Hey, we came to play"? Did you tip your tiara to a Creole princess or get goofy officially? Step up like a boss and save the day? Or see what life's like under the tree of life? Did you? If you could, would you? When we come through, it's true magic, 'cause we came to play. Bring the magic at Walt Disney World Resort.

ID Tech, the first and most trusted tech camp, is where kids ages 7 to 17 find their people. The coding and creating people. The fire-breathing, shell-spinning battle bots people. The just-as-happy-building-games-as-they-are-playing-them people. At 75 prestigious college campuses all across the country, ID Tech features over 50 epic courses like Battle Bots, AI, and Machine Learning, Game Design, and more.

Visit IDtech.com and use code IDTECH to save $150 on a week that's guaranteed to be a highlight of summer. Does this podcast make you happy? Of course it does. That's why you're here. But it only comes out once a week. For happiness every night, you need Adam and Eve. Yes, I'm talking about sex toys.

Okay, and we are back.

So Frida, so resistance folks smuggle her first to Belgium, to France, and then she has to get across the Alps into Switzerland, but it's winter. So she crosses on foot. She crosses the fucking Alps on foot in winter.

holy shit that is yeah not easy yeah it's like not something I'm trying to do you know no yeah I already thought she was a badass like before the break but now it's like oh yeah yeah confirmed yeah uh so she makes it to Switzerland and she starts a choir in the refugee camp um

Of course she does. I know. I love her. And then she becomes local to you all. After the war, she moves to Orange County, California. I actually don't know where Orange County is. I think it's LA. We don't claim Orange. We don't know. Oh, shit. Okay. I mean, technically, if you're looking at a map, sure. But we don't claim. Los Angeles does not claim Orange County. Okay. Maybe back then, it was more like, oh, this is all...

This hot desert SoCal. We're all the same, but no. At this point, Orange County is like a red...

Very red, very anti-vaccine, very anti-mask situation in the last couple years. I was born in Anaheim. Anaheim is part of Orange County and I was born there. Oh, well, shout out to Anaheim for doing something right. Yeah. Just me. Just giving us Shireen. Literally all I know about Orange County is that someone I went to high school with was an actor on the OC show.

That's as much as you should know, honestly. The theme song just went bursting into my head. Actually, wait.

I know people from Anaheim are going to be like mad at me for even saying that. So I had to look it up. Oh, no, it is. It's the second largest city in Orange County. OK, great. Because that's also where Disney is. So I was like, is it Los Angeles or Orange County? OK, sorry, anyone out there. Please don't at me. Thanks. OK, OK.

um so now everyone knows that i don't know anything about california i'm a fucking appalachian girl at the moment it's okay that's that's that's what we're here for yeah honestly i wish i i wish i did not know anything about this place i wish i was catapulted into outer space i don't want to be here i don't want to know anything what shireen said uh good to know um thanks

And Frida wanted to be there, not LA, but Orange County. So she goes to Orange County and she starts, she organized the Philharmonic Orchestra and does it as a nonprofit and all their concerts are free to the public. And she runs the orchestra for about 15 years. And now she's the aforementioned first permanent conductor of a orchestra or whatever, a woman conductor of an orchestra. And then one day after like 15 years, someone's like, and I'm paraphrasing here as in making this exact way it goes up.

whatever i'm making this part up but not the thing that happened just the words yeah okay so one day someone's like oh shit we're letting a woman run an orchestra and so they start talking about firing her right because like whoops we accidentally let a woman yeah but then they're going back and forth about it they're like ah yeah but she's like really good like maybe we should let her keep doing it and then someone's like wait wait wait but she's also a lesbian so she gets fired no god fuck that person yeah and i feel like it's like worth pointing out that like

You know, like like a lot of World War Two is like the bad guys and then the so-so guys, you know, right? Like, yeah, it's not like everyone fucking like it's not like Britain was like, man, we're so not it. Whatever. Britain's really anti-Semitic, too, is what I'm trying to say. But there's still like a scale, you know?

I agree. It's, there is no, it's like, it's not black and white thinking. There's no good and evil. Like, you know what I mean? Like, again, what you said earlier, people that support Nazis are Nazis. You know what I mean? People that are like even a little bit homophobic or like whatever it is, like, it's just like,

I don't know if that makes sense. I guess that's partly black and white thinking, but I think you know what I mean. And I'm going to shut up now and let you continue. It's black and gray thinking. There's the evil and then there's the slightly less evil. And then there's the good. And there's still evil. I know. And then the good are the individuals who are doing this kind of shit, you know? Yes. Yes. And so... The Keanu Reeves of our race. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

And I'm like trying to picture Keanu Reeves playing her in the movie. But I know that it's not allowed. Okay. Anyway. Okay. So she gets fired and she, but she keeps working with music the rest of her life. And one of her whole things that she ends up having to do is that the whole story that I'm telling you, this whole bombing plot, people took the gay angle out of it in history.

Like, even though Willem's last fucking words were like, never let them say that homosexuals are cowards. People were just like, look at these great resistance fighters and like never talk about their sexuality. And so it wasn't until the 90s. That just proves like history, history is all made up and made up by...

mostly straight white men yeah totally don't trust history books don't trust history books um sorry go ahead no no no i mean and so it's in the 90s when uh she's able to like tell them like no the fucking the fact that we are like gay is fucking part of this um and needs to be part of the legacy um and she dies in 1995 but she's a good fucking run of it

Another guy, Karl Groger, he was part Jewish, although he'd been baptized Catholic. He'd been born in Austria. His father was a lawyer and his father was like defended the people who later became Nazis. But young Karl, he was a social Democrat and he was a medical student and he gets the fuck to Amsterdam as soon as he can to get away from the Nazis. But then the Nazis come after, of course, and he gets conscripted into the German army and

And then they quickly figure out that he's part Jewish and kick him out. So he joins the resistance. He works on a newspaper called Rattenkreut or something. Rat Poison, which is a fucking punk rock name for a goddamn newspaper. Yes.

Super metal. Yeah. And he's... I think he's one of the medical students who sedates the guards. And I think he's the only one of the medical students who gets executed. But I'm not 100% certain about that. But his last letter to his parents includes the line, I believe that with this one action, I brought more boon to humanity than an entire life as a physician would have done. Wow. And he's probably right. Yeah. No, I think so too. He's... I don't know. It's like...

What will shift the thinking of humanity versus... You know what I mean? Totally. The fact that he had even like a nudge of that arrow is so much more helpful than versus like, I don't know...

I was going to say, oh my God, I was going to say delivering a baby, but maybe I should not say that. I mean, like doctors could do lots and lots of good stuff and I'm entirely in favor of it. But he like, I know, but he definitely saves more literal, just immediate lives just by fucking burning 800,000 records. And he like, yeah. And you're right. He also just shows that people can stand up for shit, you know? Yeah.

Okay, so then another one, you've got another Willem, Willem Sandberg. And he was a typographer, which seems like a good skill set if you're going to become a counterfeiter. And he helped plan the whole thing. And then he actually goes underground and he survives. He's hidden by a dentist friend after the bombing. And he keeps up his typographic work. He keeps doing his art while he's underground. And he releases 19 experimental typographic pamphlets because he's a fucking artist while he's on the run.

And I kind of love that too. Like he set aside his art a little bit, but then he was like, oh, but now I have all this time to work on my art because I'm hiding from Nazis. I got to express myself. I'm an artist. Yeah. And he designs the plaque for all of his dead friends that hangs on the building where the attack happened. And he goes on to direct one of the more important museums in Amsterdam, the Stedelijk Museum.

where he constantly runs into trouble for trying to present art that involves sexuality because Nazis aren't the only shitty prudes around. Then there's Rudy Bloomgarten, who's a very non-pacifist Jewish resistance member. Before

Before the bombing, he tried to assassinate a high up Nazi collaborator. After the bombing, when they came to arrest him, he shot the arresting officer and got the fuck away. He was caught later in a nearby city. He didn't survive the war, but like, fuck it. He blew up a Nazi warehouse and shot a Nazi. And I don't, what more can anyone ask? Yeah. Yes. Thank you for that. You gave us a good life. Yeah. Okay. Another non-pacifist was Johann Brauer.

And almost everyone else is like artists and students and shit, right? But Johan was a bank robber. At least in the... Oh my God. And more than that. So he's a bank robber in the 20s. And then he murders a guy who's blackmailing him about the bank robbery. And then he goes to prison for murdering the guy who's blackmailing about the bank robbery. And then he gets out. And then he gets his PhD in Spanish mysticism.

and he converts to Catholicism, and then he fights in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side, which is not what most Catholics are doing. Most Catholics are specifically on the fascist side of that one. And then he comes back from the Spanish Civil War and becomes a professor. And the Nazis take over the country. They fire him because they figure out he's a murderer and he probably shouldn't be teaching kids, which I actually think he should be teaching kids because he's got rules. Yes, I agree too. So he blew up. He's not going to let himself be blackmailed? Come on. Yeah. Like, come on. Yeah.

that's a well-rounded guy yeah he can teach and he can kill yeah exactly um and so he blows up their records and i think he gets executed i wish i want to find out more about this guy because he's fucking yeah he sounds really fascinating i know i want to be friends with him he's a complete wingnut who always throws down when you need when you need it you know yes i love that love it okay love the con yeah i love a good scam yeah totally

The guy who helped them figure out where to place the explosives was named Martinus Neyhoff. He was a World War I vet who fought against the German invasion as part of a regiment of bicycle infantry. I was not aware that bicycle infantry was a thing until I read about this man. Yeah, me either. The more you say it, the more I'm like,

can i am i imagining just like an army of bicyclists yes in their little speedo outfits that's that's what i imagine a bicyclist it was a little like well it is nice skin tight you know what i mean no i like imagining the brand yeah no i yeah yeah not like you know whatever shireen no as much as a man in uniform is very handsome i think a man speedo is more handsome so i'm fully okay with the uh great thank you this version of the infantry yeah um

So he's like the explosives guy for him. He gets the blueprints of the building from an architect who's one of them. And he suggests, okay, here's where you should place the bombs. And he wasn't caught. I don't think he actually went on the actual raid. He just told them where to place the bombs.

And after the war, they had a hunger winter, which is never a good time when your country has a hunger winter where 20,000 Dutch people starve to death or froze to death. I've never heard that term before. Yeah, I hadn't even heard about the hunger winter until...

reading about this guy um yeah and then he because war has all kinds of unintended consequences um or intended consequences i guess sometimes and yeah so he he hangs out at his house and hands out all of his food to to kids until his supplies are exhausted um and he survives and he's mostly remembered for his poetry so i like that the speedo wearing um uh explosives guy from the heist movie i'm talking about these like real people as if they're whatever anyway um

They are. I mean, no, he's a poet. And as I mean, a good heist movie is like,

There are real heists in the world. You just call it a heist. You know what I mean? But in a heist movie, there are a bunch of different characters with a bunch of different backgrounds and qualifications. So this just makes sense to me. There's a poet. There's a bank robber. There's a sculptor. There's an artist. You know what I mean? Totally. I can keep going. No, totally. It's well-rounded. Yeah. Okay, another guy was named C.S. Honig. And after the bombing, he just goes back to school, his medical school, like nothing happened. But then he just gets arrested while he's taking his medical exam. Yeah.

And he, he's one of the people who gets saved by, by Willem, uh, by his admission. And he, he goes to a concentration camp, but he he's freed when the Netherlands is liberated. And then you got your noble cause you need a random noble in all of this too, right? You need a rich guy. You need a rich guy. Yeah. So Edward Samuel Adrian von Muschenbroek, uh, Muschenbroek. He was, he was basically nobility. Uh,

He also didn't like the Nazis. And so he fights against the German invasion and then the Dutch army capitulates and, you know, the Netherlands gives up. So he, he and his friend drive off to join the British army and,

And then he joins and fights with the British army as far as France before he's captured by the Germans. He escapes the Germans. He makes his way back to Amsterdam. He joins the resistance, helps blow up the records. Then he goes into hiding, but he was tracked down, arrested and executed. And he spent three months in prison with his arms chained above his head.

In a cell. Wow. And his father was also sentenced to five years in prison because he had sent a postcard to his kid that was like, good luck. And it was probably good luck blowing up the Nazis, but...

It's sad. Yeah. Okay, then you have a double agent cop because you needed a double agent cop. The only good kind of cop, I would say. I agree. Cornelius Roos. He's supposed to be policing the Jewish quarter, but instead he's actively helping Jews escape, including at least in one case, hiding them in his house.

And he's the one who steals the police, the two police uniforms that he then gives to short in order to have them copied. And he also after the attack, he's passing along all the police information about how they're trying to catch everyone. But unfortunately, because he's passing along those documents, when one of the people is caught, they find the documents, they trace it back to him and he's executed alongside his comrades. Yeah.

Every time you introduce someone, like, I'm just so curious where it's going to end up. Like, and then they were executed or and then they got away. You know what I mean? Right. It's totally, you know, but good. Another good another good person. Yeah.

uh henry halbert halberdstadt uh he arranged the explosive heist in the first place because they needed to steal the explosives to blow up the other place right um and so one of his relatives was a cop and he gets the relative cop double agent to sneak out the explosives to him which he then used personally on some like railway lines to to fuck up with the just fuck up the germans but then he um he gives bombs to the the bombing plot and he gets executed for that

And then there's Garrett Vondervine, who I was talking about earlier, the sculptor. Before the bombing, he actually once set fire... The sculptor, this is the guy with the ship, right? Yes, uh-huh. I've been curious about this guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so before the bombing, he actually set fire to an employment office for the same purpose, but he didn't do a very good job of it, so it didn't really do much damage. Then he had the more successful bombing, right? And then he goes on underground. He stays on the run for two years, and...

He gets it gets increasingly desperate. At one point, he and two others carry out another raid that scores them like 10,000 blank IDs instead of like the 600 they grabbed the time before. But more and more of his friends are winding up in prison. And so he can't have that. Right. So he tries to raid the prison to set them free six times, six times. He tries and six times he fails like he just won't fucking quit attacking the prison.

And then the last time he attacks the prison is on May 1st, 1944. He and 28 others were let in by a friendly guard. But they... Oh. I know. But they get attacked by a guard dog. Oh, no. And Van der Veen shoots the dog. Oh. Which everyone hears. And so a firefight breaks out.

Von Der Wien gets shot in the back and paralyzed from the waist down and somehow still escapes. Like maybe he's carried away by a comrade. That's like the more likely thing. But I don't know, this guy just like doesn't know how to fucking quit. So it's like kind of easy to imagine him just like crawling away. Yes, exactly. And a friendly doctor treats him and they were all caught a couple weeks later and he was tried and executed.

The ending is always the one that's just like, where's it going to go? I know. Okay. One more. One more. No, no, no, no. I love these. No, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I only wrote one more. Okay. That's fine. Okay. So Ian, their fucking lawyer is cool. Lau. Oh, okay. The woman. Yeah. Lawyer. Okay. So Lau Mazerell. I'm listening. Yeah.

Yeah, no, no, no. Yeah, totally. She's like, I'm an engaged podcast guest. I think you are. Oh, thank you. So Lau is down for the struggle before the Nazis, during the Nazis, and after the Nazis. She represents immigrants and refugees and queers and Romani folks. Before the Nazi invasion, she tried and failed to get the Dutch government and the synagogues to destroy all their records about who's Jewish.

Basically, she's like, this shit's going to happen. Have you seen Germany? You should get rid of your lists. And they're like, nah, we like lists, you know? And then it happens and she's like, see? Yeah. I told you. Yeah. And her... She's a smart lady. I know. Her Jewish husband goes on the run with her kids. So, because her kids are part Jewish or whatever, get in trouble too. And...

They actually survived the war too. And she frees people like legally when she can and illegally when she passed to one time, she like literally jumps on a train to drag Jewish kids off of them. Basically being like, you can't kill them. They're like under my legal protection or whatever. Wow. Another Keanu. I know. Wow. Yeah. Oh my God. I love these people. And she was originally going to go with everyone on the night of the bombing and help do the bombing. But in the end, she decided not to go because she was too short to realistically pass as a cop.

Um, so as soon as I read this, I like messaged my, my lawyer friend and was like, I found you in history. Um, and, uh, and then after, you know, after the, the Nazi thing is over or whatever, uh, she becomes, in addition to fighting for all these other things, she also becomes an anti-census activist because she's like, I've seen what happens when governments keep lists of people.

You know what? Fair. Yes. I've always... You know, the census always drives me the wrong way. I don't understand it. This woman, she knows what's up. They also never seem to do it right in America. Yeah. No. What's the... Whatever. But I do like that...

Because she was the one that Willem, I hope that's his name, he told her that just don't let anyone say gays aren't cowards, right? Yeah. Or homosexuals or whatever the word he used. So because she was the one, the only person that was told that, she probably is the one that kind of like wrote or helped write what happened in the history and stuff, right? That's what I would assume. I think so. She also... Go ahead.

No, I was going to say that makes her really cool to me. Yeah. Like in 1946, I just didn't even make it into my script, but like in 1946, she forms or helps form one of the like main gay rights organizations. And just like, she's like, yeah, okay. Like I think she's probably also straight too. I don't know, whatever. She's married and has kids. It doesn't make her straight, but you know, she's just like,

I'm going to fucking absolutely get involved in LGBT shit as soon as this happens. A true ally. Yeah. Yeah. Like in an actual sense of the word, like allies and like the two of us are invading a country together, you know, like. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. No, totally. I like her. I like all these people. I like all I like all these people. Yeah. This is. Hi. You know, I hopped on. That's it. You know what I mean? Uh huh.

But I'm pleasantly surprised. These people are so... I want to look up all these people when we're done with this. And just... This gives... I mean, I'm a very cynical person. And I don't have faith in humanity. I think we are terrible. And I unfortunately think the bad outweighs the good. Because bad usually wins. But this kind of stuff really gives me hope that like...

actual good people will keep doing good things. Yeah. You know? And there's a reason... Like, jumping in the ocean and helping a ship not be on fire, like, you know what I mean? There's always going to be that... I don't know what I'm saying, but... It's always going to be a Kiana. There's always a point... Yes. There's always a point in every podcast where I start to philosophize, so this is the point when that happens now. This is great. This is the right time. I'm here for it. Okay, great. But, um... But no, I think...

I think especially in the culture that we are in now, which I don't like how there's like

You're being observed at all times. There's cameras everywhere. And when you're not being observed, you want to be the observer and record something or take a photo. There's all these outside forces that influence your actions, unfortunately. Even subconsciously, I think that happens. Whether it's posting something or you want to share... Especially as artists, if you want to share something, there's going to be a reaction. And you have to be online to even feel relevant and all this stuff. So I think...

If we just dial all that back and like, I don't know, doing good things just to do them versus like, like, I hate when celebrities are like, I fit the homeless today. Just like, just go be the homeless. You know what I mean? Go donate money. You don't have to fucking tell us about it. You know what I mean? If they're actually good, they would just do it and not say a word. Yeah. How would they get? How would they get compliments on the Twitter? So performative. That just proves it's performative. You know what I mean?

But maybe one day the good might outweigh the bad. But the current trajectory, I don't know, man. Yeah, I don't know. It's... I don't know. We'll see what happens. But I like this kind of show. It's to give me hope. I'm glad. Yeah, I don't know. I...

One of the things I like about how all of them are artists and stuff is that they're not doing it for clout. They're just doing it because they're like, well, I'm an artist, but I also got to do this shit now. Exactly. Some of them, you got to use their skill sets, like the typographer or whatever, but the cellist isn't like, I'm playing cello for the revolution. The cellist is like, I guess I'm fucking making fake IDs now. These are very talented people in their own right because they're...

notable in whatever they're doing. Yeah. Not that it matters to be notable, but you know what I mean. Yeah. And then, okay, so this whole plot, I've been calling it like the Amsterdam plot in all my notes. It doesn't have a cool name in history that I've been able to find. Like, even the group of them, they don't get called like

I don't know, the cool gay artists who blew up Nazis or whatever, blew up Nazi warehouses. They just get called the Garrett Vondervine group because there was a straight guy there who like helped run some of it. Um,

I don't know. Do you have any name ideas for them? Like, what do we call the, you know, the gay bombers of Amsterdam or, you know? The gay bombers of Amsterdam? Not to put you on the spot. Well, very literally put you on the spot. I mean, this is so... The first thing I thought of is bad. It's not good. I thought of glam squad. Okay, okay. Just on the G train. You know what I mean? I was on that word. Yeah.

I think squad can be a badass addition, but I also think it's like predictable. Maybe it should just be some random word. Like, I don't know. The I'm trying to combine, like, just find a word that's like bombers, but like a better version of that. Bomb squad. That's not what I want to say. Well, that's what they did, though. They showed up and they're like, hey, we're the bomb squad. We're here to check for bombs. Yeah.

actually they're the original they're the very first bomb squad that you should ever know yeah exactly this is what they are they're the og bomb squad that's what they are the og bomb squad i'm glad we came up that's not the greatest not the greatest but i will yeah finish all right so that so that's it for today uh when we come back on wednesday we're going to keep talking about this stuff we're going to talk we're going to move back over to germany and we're going to learn more about cool gays who did cool gay stuff like fight nazis

Yay. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Do you have any plugs for Shushu? Oh, yeah. That. Again, about being observed and needing to stay relevant. If you want to follow me on the internet, you're allowed to. I'm on Twitter at ShiroHero666.

And on Instagram, it's just ShiroHero. And if you want to know anything about me, you can just Google me and find it there. It's fine. I feel very jaded at this point. I have a podcast. I have a poetry book. It's all on the internet somewhere. I don't know. Find it. Yeah. If you really care, you would dig for me.

information any plugs for you at the moment well I still like plugging my new podcast cool people did cool stuff that you all can listen to I like you plugging that too yeah I just don't know where they can listen to it no I'm not sure either I think you actually can't find podcasts anywhere

Yeah. But legally. Yeah, totally. So hard to find. Or if you're willing to go underground to the to find it everywhere you listen to podcasts, you can do that. Yeah.

Good show. I like it. See you all Wednesday.

Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. It's stock up savings time now through March 27th. Spring in for store-wide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in-store tags to earn on eligible snacks like Pepperidge Farms goldfish and kettle chips or sweet treats like Keebler cookies, Hostess snack cakes, M&Ms, and Ben & Jerry's plus many more. Then clip the offer in our app for automatic event-long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more.

Restrictions apply. Visit Safeway.com for more details.

Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead. Okay, so we all need to get away from the world sometimes. Well, in the all-new 2025 Nissan Murano, you don't even have to go anywhere. The Murano is the getaway. Just picture it.

The Bose premium sound system plays your favorite music as the Murano's massaging leather appointed seats melt away your stress. Yeah, that's a real getaway. Drive the all new 2025 Nissan Murano today. Bose and massaging leather appointed seats are optional features. Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from Ebbgliss.

After an initial dosing phase of 16 weeks, about 4 in 10 people taking EBCLS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin. And most of those people maintained skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EBCLS, Lebrechizumab LBKZ, a 250 milligram per 2 milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with

prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. Ebglus can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to Ebglus. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Ebglus. Before starting Ebglus, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Searching for real relief? Ask your doctor about Ebglus and visit ebglus.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979.