Speaker 1: This meeting is being recorded. We're starting, by the way, Chris,
Speaker 1: just start this with the sound of this meeting is
Speaker 1: being recorded. I want to hear all of this, this
Speaker 1: cinema veritation. I want everyone to hear me opening my
Speaker 1: morning been a drill and popping piece before we get started,
Speaker 1: and waving around a knife to open the bin and
Speaker 1: drill somehow, Jesus Christ, it's a little knife. Who's at
Speaker 1: this point? Both podcasts? Now, you started off with this
Speaker 1: one with a knife and the last one with a gun.
Speaker 1: So he's a gun. I mean, there's a gun right
Speaker 1: right behind me. I'm just I'm excited for the next one,
Speaker 1: the next one. Just just keep upping the anti Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think I'm gonna order my my young
Speaker 1: Ward Garrison just found out how to order one of
Speaker 1: those bolow wraps, which are the things the cops shoot
Speaker 1: at you now that like wrap around your body and
Speaker 1: stop you from moving. So I think I'm gonna get
Speaker 1: one of those, Oh my god, that it's like, uh,
Speaker 1: it just it like wraps around you like in cartoons,
Speaker 1: like yeah, look in cartoons, yea yes, And the cops
Speaker 1: are gonna find out how to kill somebody with it soon,
Speaker 1: but I want just to funk around with. Yeah, they've
Speaker 1: already made them lethal and like attached like little knives
Speaker 1: at the end of them. There's already kind of little knives. Actually.
Speaker 1: On the of course, there is is um for people
Speaker 1: who don't know behind the Bastards podcast Bad People Um.
Speaker 1: I woke up feeling like shit. As I was just saying,
Speaker 1: last night, I had a friend come over and then
Speaker 1: leave it like two thirty in the morning. And I
Speaker 1: had a choice. Once my friend left. Was I going
Speaker 1: to go to bed or was I going to buy
Speaker 1: a bunch of drugs and get funked up until four
Speaker 1: thirty or five in the morning and then stumble into
Speaker 1: consciousness to do this podcast hungover. And I chose sobriety,
Speaker 1: and I went to bed sober, and I woke exactly
Speaker 1: as late as I would have if I gotten sucked up,
Speaker 1: but I feel exactly as bad. And the lesson is
Speaker 1: always do drugs, yes, Just say yes, Just say say
Speaker 1: yes to drugs. You know. It's like that that movie
Speaker 1: Yes Man, Yes exactly exactly, the movie Yes Man, which
Speaker 1: contains all of life's lessons in it. Yeah, it really,
Speaker 1: it's a great movie about Lessons And was that one
Speaker 1: of the Jim Carrey movies or not. I actually, to
Speaker 1: be honest with you, I I've never actually seen it,
Speaker 1: but I remember thinking about the plot and going, uh,
Speaker 1: what if someone offers some heroin? And uh, that's the
Speaker 1: movie I wanted a heroin? Really, Yeah, if someone's offering
Speaker 1: it's just rude. Does they know? I mean, I've turned
Speaker 1: it down when it's been offered an injectable form. But
Speaker 1: there was this one time in rural India where a
Speaker 1: guy had a bunch of black tar and his finger
Speaker 1: and was offering licks and I absolutely took a lick. Um, Yeah,
Speaker 1: who's not going to take a lick of a stranger
Speaker 1: in the desert? Like, well, I gotta say yes to this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that what's up? How do you feel about the Holocaust?
Speaker 1: All anti anti? That makes sense, That's that's really the
Speaker 1: only call with the Holocaust? Yeah, not a fan. Have
Speaker 1: you heard of a fellow a dude, a chapurino by
Speaker 1: the name of ran heard hydrick Reinhard hydrick Y. I
Speaker 1: don't believe I have. I mean, in a way, it's
Speaker 1: like one of those German names where I'm like, if
Speaker 1: you just said it out loud I proposed nothing, I'd
Speaker 1: be like, oh, that's that famous Nazi. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean yes, yes, he is a famous Nazi, and you're right.
Speaker 1: If not, I think people hearing that would be like
Speaker 1: he probably did some like Nazi ship back in the
Speaker 1: n Yeah, judging by the context of the podcast, lawn
Speaker 1: and that very German sounding name. But no, I don't
Speaker 1: think I've heard of him. Well he's not just he
Speaker 1: is a Nazi, but he's also the Nazi. So you're
Speaker 1: on behind. In the Bastards, we pretty much exclusively discussed
Speaker 1: the worst people in history, and they're horrible crimes. Monsters
Speaker 1: are business. So you, Sophie, and you Matt, and also
Speaker 1: our regular listeners will know what it means when I
Speaker 1: tell you this might be the worst person we ever cover.
Speaker 1: Great right and hard. Heydrick is the man who is
Speaker 1: the architect of the Holocaust. He's the man who there
Speaker 1: were a lot of people who wanted to do a Holocaust.
Speaker 1: He is the guy who figured out the nuts and
Speaker 1: bolts of it. That's who we're talking about today. He
Speaker 1: was the most passionate about Holocaust thing and he figured
Speaker 1: it absolutely he and he he found that was the
Speaker 1: niche he chose within the Nazi system um and he
Speaker 1: he made that be his thing and then eleven million
Speaker 1: people died. Yeah, he's he's pretty bad, dude. I mean
Speaker 1: I'm anti him. Yeah, like sound anti him. So to
Speaker 1: give you a little bit of context for this guy
Speaker 1: before we go into his life story, he was a
Speaker 1: Nazi for eleven years, and in that time he earned
Speaker 1: these nicknames, the Hangman, the Butcher of Pradu, the Blonde Beast,
Speaker 1: Himmler's Evil Genius, the young evil God of Death, and
Speaker 1: Adolf Hitler himself. Adolf Hitler's nickname for Heydrick was the
Speaker 1: man with the Iron Heart. That okay, So first of all,
Speaker 1: some of those are like not gonna lie, pretty cool
Speaker 1: sound nicknames, which is like the worst thing about Nazis
Speaker 1: is their absolute commitment to just style and like you know,
Speaker 1: whether it was how they dressed or like the what
Speaker 1: they named ship. You're just like, fuck, that's a cool name.
Speaker 1: I A solid half of those would be really good EPs,
Speaker 1: like if he was a hipp artists like fucking you
Speaker 1: see you see a dude's face, and the young evil
Speaker 1: God of Death on an album coming You're like, well,
Speaker 1: funk I gotta check this ship out. I've literally, I've
Speaker 1: definitely downloaded half of those nicknames on Napster in the nineties,
Speaker 1: you know, listened to the Man with the Iron Heart
Speaker 1: fucking um. But he was not. He was a real
Speaker 1: piece of shit. Yeah. So Dr Werner Best, who was
Speaker 1: a horrible Nazi and was Hydrick's deputy for many years,
Speaker 1: called Reinhard Hydrick the most demonic personality in the Nazi
Speaker 1: leadership and said that he was driven by an inhumanity
Speaker 1: which took no account of those he mowed down. And again,
Speaker 1: this is a Nazi saying this. It's like, this is
Speaker 1: Hitler calling him the man with the Iron Heart. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not just like a Nazi saying it. It's like
Speaker 1: they have Hitler to compare this person too, on alive
Speaker 1: Hitler because right there, this guy looks bad. Even Hitler's like, damn, dude,
Speaker 1: it down a little bit, Yeah, man, peel it back
Speaker 1: on me. Yeah, said that to him. No, that's not
Speaker 1: how Hitler worked. Um. Now, and I should note that
Speaker 1: because of all of the Nazis who say horrible things
Speaker 1: about Hydrick, one thing we should know it at this start.
Speaker 1: And we'll note a couple more times in the episode.
Speaker 1: Is that the Nazis who talked about Hydrick after the
Speaker 1: war were Nazis who survived and thus had a vested
Speaker 1: interest in trying to downplay their own complicity and elevate Hydricks. Right,
Speaker 1: So we do need to keep that in mind. But still,
Speaker 1: the fact that not just after the war, during and
Speaker 1: before the war, other Nazis consistently recognized Hydrick as a
Speaker 1: terrifying and vile monster says a lot about the man.
Speaker 1: It's it's honestly, it's impressive in the most disgusting way
Speaker 1: that he is. Uh. I mean the fact that you're
Speaker 1: calling him like the worst Nazi and Hitler and Hitler's
Speaker 1: there and I'm just like funk Man and like, also,
Speaker 1: you know, shame on me for having ever ever heard
Speaker 1: of him, you know, was you know, was he in
Speaker 1: that movie Conspiracy? Did someone play? Oh, yeah, you've seen Conspiracy. Yes,
Speaker 1: he is the main Nazi in Conspiracy. Oh he's that
Speaker 1: blonde guy guy that Kenneth Brana. Yeah, he's played by
Speaker 1: Kenneth Brana in Conspiracy, which is a very good movie,
Speaker 1: I think, a very good movie about the the Vanse Conference. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: I love him. I love him. Yeah, that's Reinehard Hydrick. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And here's the thing about him. When you set him
Speaker 1: up like that, one expects Hydrick to be almost a
Speaker 1: force of supernatural evil, like a fucking Wolfenstein Nazi, right,
Speaker 1: like fucking summoning demons and ship. The reality is that
Speaker 1: every single person listening to this knows at least one
Speaker 1: person with a personality similar to Reinhard Hydrick's. The most
Speaker 1: terrifying thing about this guy is that he was not
Speaker 1: a super anti Semitic dude from the start. He was
Speaker 1: not a super committed Nazi from the start. His evil
Speaker 1: grew from the most mundane seed possible. He wanted to
Speaker 1: be a big man, that's all. That's all. This is
Speaker 1: not a guy. It's not like Hitler, Hitler. This is
Speaker 1: a dude who has like fucking demonic dreams from a
Speaker 1: very early age, these dreams of of of conquest and
Speaker 1: violence against his enemies. He follows a decades long plan
Speaker 1: to achieve them. That's not right. Hard Hydric Hydrick is
Speaker 1: a guy who wants to be important and respected and
Speaker 1: that and he was like planned the Holocaust, right, he
Speaker 1: was like all right, well, what's like, what's trending right now,
Speaker 1: what's the everyone's going to be into, Oh, hating the Jews.
Speaker 1: I could do that, and then he just pivots the
Speaker 1: hating Jews. Yeah yeah, And it's a little what we're
Speaker 1: about to talk about it right now, So let's get
Speaker 1: into it. Reinhart Tristan Eugen Hydric was born on March seven,
Speaker 1: nineteen o four, in the city of Halla in Prussia.
Speaker 1: His name was picked by his father, Bruno Hydric, who
Speaker 1: was a composer and an opera singer of modest success
Speaker 1: and notoriety. Bruno's first opera was Amen, which debuted in
Speaker 1: eighteen nine to significant critical acclaim. The central conflict in
Speaker 1: the opera is between Thomas, a peasant leader who represents
Speaker 1: the rise of social democracy in Germany. Thomas is the
Speaker 1: bad guy um and the hero is Reinhard, a nobleman.
Speaker 1: A heroic nobleman of fine breeding and traditional aristocratic German values.
Speaker 1: Reinhard is murdered by Thomas at the end of the play,
Speaker 1: and since Thomas is a devious cripple, he has to
Speaker 1: stab Reinhard in the back to kill him. The fact
Speaker 1: that Bruno Hyadrick named his son after the protagonist of
Speaker 1: this opera is telling, as is the fact that the
Speaker 1: plot of this eight opera very much mirrors the right
Speaker 1: wing reaction to Germany's defeat in World War One. It's
Speaker 1: the stabbed in the back myth right like this exactly so.
Speaker 1: And also it's like, uh, I mean props to having
Speaker 1: commitment to just hating like the peasant class. And yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure, just like in any other like context, like
Speaker 1: when is like the noble lord you know, is the
Speaker 1: hero of this, I would say it's it's not because
Speaker 1: there's I think an element in this guy's work of
Speaker 1: actually like deifying the peasant class. But the peasant class
Speaker 1: when they know their place, right, this is like a
Speaker 1: hatred of the peasants who wants, you know, to not
Speaker 1: be ground under the feet of the lord's right exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: People just you know, opera singing about getting the boot
Speaker 1: off their neck and then Lord's being like, na, bro,
Speaker 1: stay stay there. Bruno is a monarchist. Um. He's not
Speaker 1: a fascist. He's a he's a monarchist um. He would
Speaker 1: have been a fascist if if that had really been
Speaker 1: coming up in his time. But he was, you know,
Speaker 1: just a big supporter and didn't like the idea that
Speaker 1: there would be any kind of democracy, and Germany was
Speaker 1: prior to World War One, there were large democratic elements, right,
Speaker 1: the Kaiser is not as absolute and autocrat as, for example,
Speaker 1: the Tzar. So most of the sources I've come across
Speaker 1: online about Reinhard tend to fall into the same traps
Speaker 1: when describing his childhood because he was such a monster
Speaker 1: as an adult, they seem to have a need to
Speaker 1: sow the seeds of that evil and with a particularly
Speaker 1: vicious upbringing, the claim that like, oh there was there
Speaker 1: was something in his background that made it clear he
Speaker 1: was going to do this, and I'm gonna they're trying
Speaker 1: to yeah exactly, Yeah, they want to make a bunch
Speaker 1: of Dalmatians push his mom off the roof of something.
Speaker 1: You know, it's one of the silliest things. Like I
Speaker 1: thought that was like somebody like fucking with me, as
Speaker 1: opposed to that being in an actual movie. Oh, it's
Speaker 1: very real, very real. YEP. I want to quote in
Speaker 1: order to give you an idea of how his background
Speaker 1: is usually kind of summarized. When you like read you
Speaker 1: google Ryan Hard, Hydro can read an article about him.
Speaker 1: Here's a quote from an article from War history online
Speaker 1: about him. His father, Bruno, was a non religious singer
Speaker 1: and composer who was kept out of the upper echelons
Speaker 1: of German society due to a humble background and a persistent,
Speaker 1: though false rumor that he was Jewish. Ryan Hard's mother,
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Krantz, was a practicing Catholic from a rich musical
Speaker 1: family in Dresden. As Reinhard grew up, both his father
Speaker 1: and his classmates incocated him with a virulent anti Semitism.
Speaker 1: He was a loner who tried to prove his superiority
Speaker 1: through his studies and through sports. This is largely wrong,
Speaker 1: or at least incomplete. Um. It is true that there
Speaker 1: were rumors that Bruno had Jewish ancestry. These were false
Speaker 1: uh and while they were a semi regular annoyance for Bruno,
Speaker 1: they had no impact on his success. So Reinhard's dad
Speaker 1: grew up destitute due to the fact that Bruno's father
Speaker 1: had died early um And Bruno was actually a pretty
Speaker 1: incredible guy. He was, like as a child, the breadwinner
Speaker 1: for his entire family, and he had to teach his
Speaker 1: younger siblings um and despite their desperate financial decision as
Speaker 1: a young adult, he made the decision to strike out
Speaker 1: and have a career as a professional musician, which was
Speaker 1: not a common thing to be able to do at
Speaker 1: that point in time. Was very unlikely that he would
Speaker 1: succeed at this, but he did with no money, no
Speaker 1: family money, and no family connections, which speaks to his
Speaker 1: talent and dedication. The idea that the Hydric family was
Speaker 1: kept out of the upper echelons of German society is
Speaker 1: entirely false. Reinhard's mother, Elizabeth, came from a very wealthy family,
Speaker 1: and the fact that they were willing to marry her
Speaker 1: off to Bruno speaks to how successful in respected he was.
Speaker 1: He was a local celebrity and a significant one because
Speaker 1: his son became a monster. There's a trend among people
Speaker 1: writing about the Hydricks to dismiss Bruno was like a
Speaker 1: second rate musician and composer and be like, well he
Speaker 1: was never very successful and you know, maybe that came
Speaker 1: off on his kid and this like fresh They love
Speaker 1: this origin story. They love the origin story of like
Speaker 1: failed artist goes Nazi and you know or like you
Speaker 1: know is progeny goes Nazi or failed artist who everyone
Speaker 1: said it had like low key Jewish ancestry. They always
Speaker 1: had that too, because I've heard that with Hitler. I
Speaker 1: mean it is, I mean it's a thing both for
Speaker 1: there's rumors both for Hitler and for Hydrick, and for
Speaker 1: Hydrock is a more significant thing. But it's not. It's
Speaker 1: not a thing that like stops his his dad from
Speaker 1: doing anything, for sure. And it's no I think it's either. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's just a slur that people used to
Speaker 1: do on the playgrounds back in the day. Everyone like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's a secret Jew. You know, everyone at one point
Speaker 1: got called a secret Jew back in though it's not uncommon.
Speaker 1: And the more important thing to note is that, like Bruno,
Speaker 1: Hydrick was not a second rate musician composer. He was
Speaker 1: extremely well respected in his time. He was even invited
Speaker 1: to join the Hall of Freemason Lodge, which he duly did,
Speaker 1: which means if you're being invited to join the Freemason's,
Speaker 1: you're in the upper crust. And they like late a
Speaker 1: tender's early nine. Yeah, they had very strict guidelines for
Speaker 1: they would let in to be a mason. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: it also is not true, does not seem to be
Speaker 1: true that Hydric was a loner who tried to prove
Speaker 1: his superiority through studies and sports, at least not to
Speaker 1: any extent that was unusual at the time. It was
Speaker 1: mostly raised by his mother and governess, while his father
Speaker 1: devoted his life to work, and this was very common
Speaker 1: for the time. It would not have raised eyes as
Speaker 1: an upbringing. People just hate the idea of people who
Speaker 1: commit evil acts being in any way ordinary. They need
Speaker 1: to have some extraordinary origin story so that you can
Speaker 1: feel better about the fact that you know, whatever your
Speaker 1: horrible beliefs are, you're like, well, at least I would
Speaker 1: never go as far as that person. They need to
Speaker 1: be evil and unredeemable from the beginning. So, for example,
Speaker 1: Hitler can't have been a guy who, as a young
Speaker 1: man near destitute when he got his inheritance from his mother,
Speaker 1: handed all of that money to his sister because she
Speaker 1: was a young mother in a truly selfless gesture of love.
Speaker 1: Because Hitler can't have done a selfless gesture of love,
Speaker 1: because it's much more frightening if he did. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like, oh ship, that means anyone could be a Hitler.
Speaker 1: I don't like that. I don't like that one. Yeah yeah, Now, um,
Speaker 1: the so Bruno was so successful that not only like
Speaker 1: I mean his his his kind of his his playwriting
Speaker 1: or opera writing kind of career eventually did level off.
Speaker 1: There was a point at which he stopped, you know,
Speaker 1: they stopped doing as well. But he also started a
Speaker 1: music school, a conservatory, which was extremely successful, and the
Speaker 1: family gets fucking rich off of this conservatory. So again,
Speaker 1: not exactly frustrated ambitions here. He's successful as a musician
Speaker 1: can be in this period, Yeah, kind of crushing. It
Speaker 1: seems like everything should be going fine for them and
Speaker 1: no one should turn Nazi. And as the oldest son
Speaker 1: in the family, Reinhard was expected to inherit his father's
Speaker 1: music school um and as a result, most of his
Speaker 1: early childhood was devoted to preparing him for this task.
Speaker 1: Reinhard received constant, rigorous musical training from early childhood on
Speaker 1: before he started primary school at age six in nineteen ten.
Speaker 1: He knew musical notation and he could play the piano.
Speaker 1: He do it. Ye honestly, if you if you've ever
Speaker 1: been a kid taking piano lessons, after a while, you
Speaker 1: just started like, I'm going to commit atrocity. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I hate this. I mean, I'll tell you, honestly, most
Speaker 1: of why I carry a gun is that if I
Speaker 1: ever see a piano, I'm just gonna dump the mag
Speaker 1: into that fucking THINGO piano in this house can't stand yeah.
Speaker 1: Um yeah. And but like the fact is actually like
Speaker 1: you could hear this back and be like, oh, maybe
Speaker 1: he Um, he didn't like being pressured in music. He
Speaker 1: fucking loves music. Um. He loves music his whole life.
Speaker 1: He's very good. Uh. He starts violin lessons at age six.
Speaker 1: For everything we know, he seems to have been extremely
Speaker 1: enthusiastic about that path in life. His mother, Elizabeth, was
Speaker 1: raised Catholic. Um. And I think that like the family
Speaker 1: kind of went with her family religion, and this did
Speaker 1: make her and later Reinhard members of a minority. In Germany,
Speaker 1: Catholics were about thirty six percent of the German population.
Speaker 1: This is a Protestant country, right, Martin Luther, the guy
Speaker 1: who makes Protestant doesn't be a thing as a German.
Speaker 1: Germany as a Protestant nation. Catholics are a large minority,
Speaker 1: but their minority, um, And this was like kind of
Speaker 1: the time that Reinhardt is being raised and his family
Speaker 1: is very Catholic, like he's an altar boy as a kid.
Speaker 1: And this was a period of time in which a
Speaker 1: lot of Catholics in Germany were starting to assert themselves
Speaker 1: as Germans first and Catholic second, because there were a
Speaker 1: lot of conspiracy theories and like bigotry against Catholics, right that, oh,
Speaker 1: you're loyal to the pope, not to the Kaiser, and
Speaker 1: this is the thing fucking JFK has to deal with.
Speaker 1: But like in like the sixties and ship I saw
Speaker 1: someone do that with Biden recently, just like what the
Speaker 1: fund is wrong? Like we bring the popes aren't even
Speaker 1: loyal to popes anymore. There's like two living popes right
Speaker 1: now hanging out. Nobody keeps seeing that. Yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: this is like so this is like a thing that's
Speaker 1: happening in Germany at the time. And the Hydricks bucked
Speaker 1: this trind like right, I'm not I don't think they
Speaker 1: were like saying that we're loyal to the pope over Germany.
Speaker 1: But they extremely pious. They were consistent mass attendees, and
Speaker 1: there were legiosity stands out particularly with contrasted with the
Speaker 1: fact that the early nineteen hundreds in Germany is a
Speaker 1: time of rapidly increasing secularism. Church attendance rates were dropping
Speaker 1: dramatically during this period, and the fall was most notable
Speaker 1: among Protestants, but it was significant for Catholics too. We'd
Speaker 1: be speculating to say what impact this had on young Hydrick,
Speaker 1: but it is worth noting also that percent of his
Speaker 1: city was protest it so he grew up in a
Speaker 1: devoted religious minority, and that's kind of worth noting. Now.
Speaker 1: One of the most significant things about Reinhard as a
Speaker 1: child is that he was weak and sickly. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote from the book Hitler's Hangman by Robert
Speaker 1: Gerwath here quote as a child of slender and relatively
Speaker 1: small stature, with a weak constitution and a susceptibility to illness,
Speaker 1: Reinhard was encouraged by his parents to take up every
Speaker 1: kind of physical exercise from an early age, swimming, running, football, sailing,
Speaker 1: horse riding, and fencing. Hydrick's lifelong passion for sport began here.
Speaker 1: The family summer vacations were usually spent on the picturesque
Speaker 1: coast of the Baltic Sea and the swinky seaside town
Speaker 1: of Swinemunda on the island of dum. For the Hydric children,
Speaker 1: this was surely the most exciting time of the year.
Speaker 1: They spent their holiday sight seeing, taking walks, and enjoying
Speaker 1: boat excursions in Days on the Beach. I'm so pissed
Speaker 1: because these guys they have really great Instagram lives and
Speaker 1: and I just crushed it on the Graham the Hydricks. Yeah, dude,
Speaker 1: there would they would be. They'd have a fucking TLC
Speaker 1: show about them. There was. God, it's just pisces me
Speaker 1: off man, Like, why are these the people who do
Speaker 1: Holocaust thing? It's just man, Yeah, evil evil, evil, fucking
Speaker 1: like entitled rich kids who you know, fucking I don't
Speaker 1: blame the Jews for no goddamn reason. Yeah, we'll get
Speaker 1: into why so. Yeah, and again, it is worth knowing
Speaker 1: that at this point in his early childhood, pre World
Speaker 1: War One, this is a kid who by all accounts
Speaker 1: like he's got some health problems, but he seems to
Speaker 1: be having a good upbringing. There's like no reports of
Speaker 1: him picking apart flies or torturing animals. There's none of
Speaker 1: the stuff we have for Hitler either. These stories about
Speaker 1: him going on these bizarre, unhinged rants are threatening suicide
Speaker 1: and murder. His family was successful, he was gifted, um,
Speaker 1: and when he grew older, it was decided that he
Speaker 1: would go to secondary school. Now, only about ten percent
Speaker 1: of boys got to do this. At the time, most
Speaker 1: adolescents went kind of right into like learning a trade
Speaker 1: after primary school. The school that about ten percent of
Speaker 1: boys like actually went to secondary school, the school that
Speaker 1: Reinhardt's parents picked for him was also unique. It was
Speaker 1: called the Reform Gymnasium, and it was a new sort
Speaker 1: of institution in Germany that was focused on the scientific
Speaker 1: optimism at the time. And unlike about nine of German
Speaker 1: schools in this period, secondary schools are religious schools, either
Speaker 1: Catholic or Protestant. I assume there's some Jewish ones in there, um,
Speaker 1: But this is the Reform Gymnasium is a religious so
Speaker 1: he doesn't have a strong like when he starts getting
Speaker 1: his education, there's no religious bent to the education in
Speaker 1: his second justice, so he had like a secular Yeah,
Speaker 1: secular schooling, yeah, which is rare for the time. Yeah. Gymnasium. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's all one word in German. I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it just sounds bad. Yeah, that means the word gymnasium
Speaker 1: a lot back. I don't know, Sophie, I don't know.
Speaker 1: They were wrong about everything. It was the old times.
Speaker 1: It just made up the word gymnasium and applied it
Speaker 1: to anything. It's a great word of him. Medium just
Speaker 1: sounds like a Pilates class where you get bullied. I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure there was a gymnasium in my reform temple
Speaker 1: growing up, but I don't believe that was a reformed gymnasium.
Speaker 1: So separate things. So Reinhard thrived at school. At secondary school,
Speaker 1: his grades were particularly good in math and science, and
Speaker 1: his first ambition was to become a chemist. He also
Speaker 1: did well in languages, and he fell in love with reading.
Speaker 1: He developed a special fondness for detective and spy novels. Now,
Speaker 1: most of these novels that he loved as a kid
Speaker 1: had their origins in the United States, are great Britain.
Speaker 1: He he loved Nat Pinkerton novels, which were written by
Speaker 1: the fucking Pinkerton guy. Yeah, he also loved Sherlock Holmes
Speaker 1: and he would be a lifelong devotee of the detective
Speaker 1: novel genre. When Reinhard was ten years old, world War
Speaker 1: One did its thing. Uh. He was a member of
Speaker 1: Germany's most awkward generation, and as a result, the generation
Speaker 1: that produced some of the very worst Nazis so Ryan
Speaker 1: hard like Heinrich Heimbler was too young to go to
Speaker 1: the Runt and fight as a soldier, but old enough
Speaker 1: that he was fully conscious of the war and fully
Speaker 1: conscious of all this propaganda idolizing the front generation. So
Speaker 1: it's extremely kind of like spends his adolescence hoping to
Speaker 1: get to fight, but he never does because you know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't want to Ungo great for Germany. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: lose that one and then they lose their their precious Kaiser.
Speaker 1: They do lose their precious Kaiser. He goes off the
Speaker 1: fucking the Netherlands to chop wood. Fucking weirdo. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the this war was a like you know, as
Speaker 1: far as I can tell, none of the Hydricks or
Speaker 1: their close relatives died fighting in World War One. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm sure they had some relatives who died, but I
Speaker 1: haven't run across it, so it must not have been
Speaker 1: anyone who was super close to the family. But it
Speaker 1: was a disaster for the family. Um. The war brought
Speaker 1: blockades from the British, which caused rationing and an economic
Speaker 1: collapse that cut the feet out from under Bruno's music conservatory.
Speaker 1: Now you can say the Hydricks were still lucky within
Speaker 1: kind of the majority of the German population. Like a
Speaker 1: million Germans starf to death as a result of the
Speaker 1: British blockade. None of the Hydrick starve, but they don't
Speaker 1: get to enjoy the kind of foods they had before
Speaker 1: the war. They're definitely hungrier. Like for an example of
Speaker 1: how bad this is, nationwide, um, bread rationing starts in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifteen. Meat rationing starts at nineteen sixteen, and by
Speaker 1: nineteen sixteen, so the pre war average daily diet of
Speaker 1: a German citizen had been twenty five calories, it's about
Speaker 1: twelve hundred by nineteen sixteen. UM. So they suffer like
Speaker 1: everyone else. And well, they're wealthy enough to avoid starving
Speaker 1: to death. The war chips away at the family income
Speaker 1: and erodes their fortune. Uh, their vacations become a lot
Speaker 1: less fancy. Um. Now they're still on vacation, they're still
Speaker 1: doing vacations. They still live in a mansion, but they're
Speaker 1: not They don't have the stay in a flat inside
Speaker 1: the city. But it's only a forty five minute drive.
Speaker 1: It's a beautiful drive, cipport, Why are you complaining? So
Speaker 1: the worst thing that happened to them, and this must
Speaker 1: have been a miserable time. But from what we can
Speaker 1: tell kind of Ryan Hard does not seem to have
Speaker 1: suffered unduly during the wars, particularly compared to most people.
Speaker 1: And in fact, the worst thing to happen to the
Speaker 1: Hydric family during World War One, um was not the
Speaker 1: fact that was not any of the dying like this
Speaker 1: happens in nineteen sixteen, which is also a year in
Speaker 1: which the German Army throws a million lives into the
Speaker 1: meat grinder at Fordune. Here the Hydrick family's tragedy is
Speaker 1: that they're obsessed with this upcoming release of a new
Speaker 1: addition of Hugo Rieman's Music Lexicon, which is the most
Speaker 1: popular German encyclopedia of music and musicians. And they were
Speaker 1: really excited because Bruno Hydrick was supposed to show up
Speaker 1: in the volume. He was going to get his own
Speaker 1: little entry in this music Lexicon, and he does. But
Speaker 1: here's the great tragedy for the Hydris. They missed him
Speaker 1: as a Jewish composer. Ah, oh yeah, that really kisses
Speaker 1: him off. God damn dude, that is And it seems
Speaker 1: to have been that like a former student of Bruno's
Speaker 1: that he had a falling out with got hired by
Speaker 1: this and like inserted the like to funk with him,
Speaker 1: like no, like knew it wasn't true, just wanted to,
Speaker 1: like exactly, It's like you said, it's a playground, insult
Speaker 1: doesn't like him, works for the company and sticks it
Speaker 1: in the incite, does brink. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: like finding out that fucking Ashton Kutcher accidentally did the Holocaust.
Speaker 1: You know. It's just like I was just sucking with
Speaker 1: him and now he can punk them. Oh man, that sucks.
Speaker 1: So Bruno sues the Encyclopedia for libel and he wins
Speaker 1: the case and they fixed the encyclopedia. But rumors about
Speaker 1: the family's Jewish ancestry grow more frequent after this, and
Speaker 1: Reinhard's schoolmates begin to tease him and his younger brother.
Speaker 1: Now that quote I read earlier in a lot of
Speaker 1: summaries of hydrox upbringing will note that his family was
Speaker 1: extremely anti Semitic, and this is something that seems like
Speaker 1: it would have to be undeniable given his future. But
Speaker 1: his biographer Robert Gerwath argues that there's no evidence of
Speaker 1: this um, which is not to say that they weren't
Speaker 1: anti Semitic, But that's not the question. The question is
Speaker 1: were they anti Semitic in any way that kind of
Speaker 1: exceeded the background level of anti Semitism in Truman Catholic
Speaker 1: Protestant culture. Yeah, yeah, probably not. I'm gonna quote from
Speaker 1: Robert Gerwath here. Throughout the war years, the Hydrick's placed
Speaker 1: a great deal of importance on denying these rumors, threatening
Speaker 1: those who repeated them with libel actions. Yet their own
Speaker 1: personal relations with the Jewish citizens of Halla, who numbered
Speaker 1: no more than four hundred and nineteen ten, were quite normal,
Speaker 1: and there is no evidence to suggest that Bruno Hydrick's
Speaker 1: attitude towards the Jews was hostile. On the contrary, Jews
Speaker 1: sent their sons and daughters to Hydrick's conservatory. Bruno rented
Speaker 1: out the seller of the school as a storage space
Speaker 1: to a local Jewish salesman, and his eldest son, Reinhardt,
Speaker 1: became friends with the son of the cantor of the
Speaker 1: Hall of Jewish Community, Abraham Lichtenstein. Reynard has a Jewish
Speaker 1: friend as a kid, the family is willing to sell
Speaker 1: and like do business with them. They're not. They're not
Speaker 1: particularly hateful to their Jewish citizens, right, and Jewish people
Speaker 1: to them, aren't some like weird foreign abstraction, you know,
Speaker 1: they're not. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they know them. They know Jews.
Speaker 1: They they've talked to Jews, their friends with Jews, they
Speaker 1: work with them. Uh yeah, it's more the reason they
Speaker 1: react so I let do these rumors is that it's again,
Speaker 1: it's a very racist society. The rumors are bad for business,
Speaker 1: it's bad for the family honor. Like that's the reaction.
Speaker 1: They're not unwilling, like they don't treat Jewish people like
Speaker 1: there's some alien culture. They just but they also they're
Speaker 1: a part of this very racist culture and they don't
Speaker 1: want to have the consequences of being seen as Jewish. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that they're like not that there's anything wrong with that.
Speaker 1: I don't think they're even saying that. Like, again, we're
Speaker 1: not trying to whitewash it either. But it's not like
Speaker 1: they're not like they're not like laser targeted on being racist.
Speaker 1: Like they're pretty normal and perhaps even for the standards
Speaker 1: of the time, a little bit more enlightened than a
Speaker 1: lot of their fell neighbors, like you know who also
Speaker 1: isn't more anti semitic than the background level of the culture, Sophie,
Speaker 1: I think probably that's not a good idea. No oh boy, uh, Sophie,
Speaker 1: can you play me out like an air Horner three? No,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna say, hopefully it's a Volkswagen AD, because
Speaker 1: if it's a Volkswagen AD, then it is a bit
Speaker 1: more anti semitic than the background level. Ah, we're back
Speaker 1: and we're thinking about what a completely unproblematic and positive
Speaker 1: brand Volkswagen is. Volkswagen the cars that never did anything evil,
Speaker 1: perfectly good car. Everything it's associated with, norm and fun
Speaker 1: Folkswagen starting in nineteen forty six, a cool and fun
Speaker 1: brand folks Volkswagon, remember the bug that was nice and
Speaker 1: had flowers on wagon. I don't think too much about
Speaker 1: the meaning of the word volk oh. I love that
Speaker 1: they totally just uh they KFC their name. Yeah, where
Speaker 1: they were like w Yeah, if BMW can exist, that
Speaker 1: fucking b W can. Folk just means people literally, just people.
Speaker 1: Nothing more can be read into the meaning of the
Speaker 1: word vulcan never mean anything, but this perfectly normal word people.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a lot of I think if there's
Speaker 1: any excuse for kind of bigoted German accents, it's this episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, so I feel like the German people
Speaker 1: love when an American does. There's there's a couple of
Speaker 1: different groups around the world that you can always make
Speaker 1: fun of. Americans are one of them, obviously, Russians are another. Uh,
Speaker 1: and then there's the Germans and the Italians. Oh in
Speaker 1: the British, the Italians for sure. Oh yeah, the Italians.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's my My entire Sopranos podcast is just
Speaker 1: you know, two dudes doing real bad Italian accents. So
Speaker 1: you know, if you like that, check it out. Someone's
Speaker 1: the legacy of imperialism. Like, the only downside you faces
Speaker 1: an imperial country is it's it's it's fine to make
Speaker 1: fun of your accents and hand gestures forever. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: You lose one thing, big lose one thing. We're gonna
Speaker 1: We're gonna make fun of your fucking pizzas, We're gonna
Speaker 1: make fun of your accent. Feel of it. So when
Speaker 1: the war ended, Ryan Hard was fifteen, which was more
Speaker 1: or less a young adult by the standards of his time,
Speaker 1: he's like fourteen and it ends, but like fifteen when
Speaker 1: kind of like it starts to everything because there's like
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's not a super clean end um. Now,
Speaker 1: German defeat was followed by a wave of protests in
Speaker 1: a number of left wing revolutions in Germany, and this
Speaker 1: seems to be what really politicized Hydrich for the first time.
Speaker 1: He joined the German Nationalist People's Party, which was an
Speaker 1: anti democratic monarchist organization, in nineteen nineteen, and in February
Speaker 1: of that year, a group of miners and Halla proclaimed
Speaker 1: a general strike against the Reich government. This was met
Speaker 1: by an anti communist counter strike. Businesses in Halla closed
Speaker 1: to the nie striker's food, doctors, teachers, and other civil
Speaker 1: servants refused to work. And this was again they were
Speaker 1: striking against the strike. So this is the right wing strike,
Speaker 1: and there's a right wing strike against the left wing strike.
Speaker 1: I love that. Like a left wing strike is when
Speaker 1: the workers get together and decide to make demands upon
Speaker 1: uh their employers, and a right wing strike is when uh,
Speaker 1: the cabal of rich people who can roll everything decided
Speaker 1: to starve the people. Yeah, and you can see who
Speaker 1: has the power there, you know, yeah, it's the it's
Speaker 1: the starving workers. The left wing mob cancel culture came
Speaker 1: for the exactly so damn and they're trying to cancel
Speaker 1: Germany just because a World War one. Uh So, the
Speaker 1: strike grew despite the counter strike, three quarters of the
Speaker 1: minds across Germany eventually closed, and in a Halla alone,
Speaker 1: fifty thou workers gathered to demand the resignation of the
Speaker 1: Reich government. The Defense Minister ordered a free Corps unit,
Speaker 1: which is like free Corps are. It's like the oath keepers.
Speaker 1: They're veterans, but like scarier because like the oath keepers,
Speaker 1: they all they claim their veterans like of them either
Speaker 1: didn't do anything in the military at all or were
Speaker 1: like a guy whose job was to like sign for
Speaker 1: the bullets that real soldiers used. Fran Corps guys are
Speaker 1: like these guys have just gotten off of the front
Speaker 1: where their job was to beat people to death in
Speaker 1: a trench with a wooden club. Like they're scary people.
Speaker 1: I look that the oath keepers are, like half of
Speaker 1: them are just stealing valor. It's like that's incredible, But
Speaker 1: these free corp dudes are are some of the most
Speaker 1: terrifying men who have ever lived, and that if its
Speaker 1: Minister of Germany orders a Free Corps unit into the
Speaker 1: city to smash the strike, the whole situation ends in
Speaker 1: a bloody invasion, with several days of insurgent combat in
Speaker 1: the city. Artillery was used to blast out leftists hiding
Speaker 1: and buildings. In total, twenty nine people were killed in
Speaker 1: sixty seven were wounded. And ship like this is not
Speaker 1: just happened. This is happening all over Germany. There's a
Speaker 1: bunch of different like attempts to take over cities and
Speaker 1: larger chunks of the government, and like fights between right
Speaker 1: and left. Um and by comparison to other cities, the
Speaker 1: rebellion in Paula is not like one of the most
Speaker 1: noted ones um Reinhard Hydrick was distinctly on the fringes
Speaker 1: of this developing history. He joined a voluntary civil defense
Speaker 1: force which was established by the Free Corps after they
Speaker 1: killed all the leftists, in order to maintain order uh
Speaker 1: in case the left tried something again. And he's unlikely
Speaker 1: to have done anything meaningful. Odds are his joining was
Speaker 1: more or less a symbolic gesture, a way of asserting
Speaker 1: his manhood after missing out on the excitement of a
Speaker 1: real war. Now that's nineteen nineteen, nineteen twenty. There's another
Speaker 1: quasi rebellion in Holland. This one is a push by
Speaker 1: a far right German Nationalist Party, and this too was defeated.
Speaker 1: It's defeat brought about another left wing attempt to take power. Right,
Speaker 1: this is a collapsing fucking empire here, right, So you
Speaker 1: have all these political sides who had been kind of
Speaker 1: pushed down in terms of their ability to funk with
Speaker 1: each other by sort of the Kaisers, you know, in charge.
Speaker 1: The Kaiser goes, everything collapses, and they just there's a
Speaker 1: couple of years where they're just kind of murdering each
Speaker 1: other in the streets. And yeah, obviously like and so
Speaker 1: it's just such a strange impulse to like try to
Speaker 1: defend your fucking phantom limb of monarch, you know where
Speaker 1: you're just like that's gone, dude, time to time to
Speaker 1: move on and bounce. He's living in a mansion now, alright, bad,
Speaker 1: he's gone yourself to death and he never missed a meal.
Speaker 1: Why are you such a fucking good liquor. It's like
Speaker 1: imagine licking a phantom limb. You know what I mean,
Speaker 1: It's like that's insane, Like the fucking boot is gone
Speaker 1: and you're still licking it. Yeah, it's it's pretty great.
Speaker 1: So there's you know, a series of street battles um
Speaker 1: and Hydrick remains in the civil defensive forces in nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty UM, but there's no evidence that he fought during
Speaker 1: any of this. He had by this time developed what
Speaker 1: one friend called quote an extremely volcus attitude towards politics,
Speaker 1: and this means that he thought this is like the
Speaker 1: the proto fascist strain of ideology in Germany. Volcans thought
Speaker 1: in this basically, to sum it up, Volcus thinkers thought
Speaker 1: that the health of the Vulcan or the German people
Speaker 1: generally the Aryan German people right, took precedence over any
Speaker 1: other concerns, including petty morality. Obviously, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: racism anti Semitism wrapped up in this um again see
Speaker 1: see the Volkswagen for more. Um So, Hydrick later claimed
Speaker 1: that during this time he joined several of the racist
Speaker 1: and pro Aryan societies that sprang up in Hollam and
Speaker 1: all across Germany during this period. This was probably a
Speaker 1: lie that he told later to burnish his Nazi credentials.
Speaker 1: There's no evidence that he joined any of these anti
Speaker 1: Semitic societies in nineteen twenty UM. And the fact is
Speaker 1: that Reinhard Hydrick, while he was definitely kind of on
Speaker 1: the right wing side of thing, does not seem to
Speaker 1: have been primarily motivated by politics during this period. In fact,
Speaker 1: his his larger aspirations seemed to have been a belief
Speaker 1: in himself and a desire to be respected. What is
Speaker 1: important about the politics of the period in terms of
Speaker 1: Ryanard is that he came of age in an era
Speaker 1: in which increasingly people who were very political were expressing
Speaker 1: their willingness and displaying their willingness to do a violence
Speaker 1: against their political enemies. That was increasingly common when he's
Speaker 1: a young man, and that's really the biggest impulse impact
Speaker 1: this has on him at the time. Yeah, trying to
Speaker 1: trying to prove themselves in the eyes of their sociopathic,
Speaker 1: psychopathic peers and just being willing traumatized peers. Right. One
Speaker 1: of the reasons Germany is there's so much murdering it
Speaker 1: over politics in this period is that, like, if you've
Speaker 1: some of these guys have literally seen tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of people die and their eyes they've stepped over the
Speaker 1: corpses of their schoolmates, blested apart by artillery. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: just don't have any fox to give right, like to
Speaker 1: not murder somebody. If you've been through that, what we
Speaker 1: mean do you You spend like twenty four hours that
Speaker 1: were done and you're gonna be like, oh, people dying,
Speaker 1: is that's normal? Ship? I could I could do that
Speaker 1: all day. Yeah, it just doesn't mean the same thing.
Speaker 1: And by the time Reinhard was eighteen, the German economy
Speaker 1: was entering a period of hyper inflation that entirely wiped
Speaker 1: out the savings of the middle class. In the upper
Speaker 1: middle class by this point, the Hydrick fan only was
Speaker 1: in this category. They had been very wealthy, they had
Speaker 1: had a mansion. They lose their mansion at some point,
Speaker 1: they lose their money. The conservatory doesn't quite close for
Speaker 1: a while, but it's barely hanging on there and it's
Speaker 1: reduced to begging for government funds to stay open. This
Speaker 1: much must have liked rankled Ryan Hard Like he's again.
Speaker 1: He grows up with money, he grows up proud of
Speaker 1: his family, and the fact that his family business collapses
Speaker 1: because again he loves music. It seems like that's the
Speaker 1: thing he actually would have. Number One. Everyone seems to
Speaker 1: grey he was a very good violin player. He was
Speaker 1: a very talented musician. But the fact that his family
Speaker 1: business collapse is the fact that there's no money in
Speaker 1: teaching music or even really playing it in this period,
Speaker 1: convinces him to pick a different career from his father.
Speaker 1: In In nineteen twenty two, he joins the navy. Uh yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's good idea. Yeah, ki, yeah, just try to avoid
Speaker 1: any state armed forces at all. Fucking yeah yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: Reinhard had spent most of his life up to this
Speaker 1: point living under the Kaiser and willelm the second had
Speaker 1: been absolutely obsessed with the Navy. Again, wille Helm is
Speaker 1: like he sees himself in a lot of ways as
Speaker 1: a British Man, and he is he's like, he's like
Speaker 1: a grandson of Queen Victoria. Um. Kaiser Wilhelm is an
Speaker 1: admiral in the British Navy. Um like um, and he's
Speaker 1: he he's very obsessed with the Navy. He has this
Speaker 1: kind of unhinged needy as but this love of British
Speaker 1: culture and this kind of unhinged need to to beat
Speaker 1: the British and prior one of the things that leads
Speaker 1: to World War One. One of the factors is that
Speaker 1: he's obsessed with building up the German Navy to a
Speaker 1: point that it threatens the British Navy. And this is
Speaker 1: part of like why tensions escalate. Um. But the impact
Speaker 1: of this for a kid like Ryan Hard growing up
Speaker 1: as a child during this period is that there's a
Speaker 1: ton of propaganda about how fucking cool it is to
Speaker 1: be in the So this these giant ships. You can
Speaker 1: hang out with all these dudes. You could listen to
Speaker 1: music and rock and roll, which hasn't been venged yet.
Speaker 1: You could eat all sorts of chocolates on the sea.
Speaker 1: You could You're going to have a great time. Here's
Speaker 1: a navy. They maybe kills you, kas I don't know if.
Speaker 1: We will probably throw you into a vow with no
Speaker 1: real with no real you know, objective of us as
Speaker 1: in a land crab. But it will be fun. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the November Revolution in that and and so there's
Speaker 1: being a navy man becomes complicated after the war because
Speaker 1: at the very end of World War One, there's this
Speaker 1: thing called the November revolution, which helps into the Kaiser's government,
Speaker 1: and it starts with a bunch of sailors in Keel,
Speaker 1: which is a board city, refusing the orders of their
Speaker 1: superior officers to put the Imperial fleet out to sea
Speaker 1: to engage in a last apocalyptic battle with the Royal Navy.
Speaker 1: So the whole World War One pretty much Germany has
Speaker 1: a navy that is on paper, um, might be able
Speaker 1: to beat the Royal Navy. Um, but the Kaiser is
Speaker 1: terrified of risking it, right because if you try to
Speaker 1: beat that, you might lose, and then you'd lose this
Speaker 1: beautiful navy that you're so proud of, So he only
Speaker 1: ever lets it have. There's only one in all of
Speaker 1: World War One, one full clash between the German and
Speaker 1: Royal in British navies, and they both kind of claim victory.
Speaker 1: I think you could kind of argue the Germans did
Speaker 1: a bit better than the British, but it's really not clear.
Speaker 1: But they have this. It's very brutal for both of them.
Speaker 1: And so after that they stay in port pretty much
Speaker 1: the whole fucking time. Um. And at the end of
Speaker 1: the war it becomes clear they're going to lose the
Speaker 1: British are going to like try to take all of
Speaker 1: the boats from them as part of the surrender agreement,
Speaker 1: and the Admiral of the German Navy and the Kaiser,
Speaker 1: i think, also kind of just want the Navy to
Speaker 1: sail out for one last glorious just to see if
Speaker 1: they could beat the Royal Navy, right, and the sailors
Speaker 1: are like, well, but the war is lost. Why why
Speaker 1: are we going to die for this? If the war
Speaker 1: is lost, I'm just doing an experiment. Yeah, it's called
Speaker 1: a fucking hail Mary. So they don't do the hail Mary.
Speaker 1: Instead the revolt, which is rad um German the enlisted
Speaker 1: men of the German Navy for that um. But this
Speaker 1: kind of among assholes ruins the reputation of the navy, right,
Speaker 1: like if you if you don't suck, this would make
Speaker 1: the Navy seem cooler, Like yeah, fuck dying pointlessly for
Speaker 1: the Kaiser, the dumbest man in Europe. But this fox
Speaker 1: up their reputation to people who are like shitty nationalists.
Speaker 1: Now the Navy's reputation is saved after the fact that
Speaker 1: after the Treaty of Versailles, when you know the British
Speaker 1: is supposed to be given. Basically most of this German
Speaker 1: navy that remains German sailor sailors heroically destroy their own
Speaker 1: navy at Scapa Flow rather than handed over to Great Britain.
Speaker 1: So it's been a complicated period of time for the Navy.
Speaker 1: When Reinhardt joins the Navy, it's number one, vastly reduced
Speaker 1: from its previous size, and it's it's a complicated thing
Speaker 1: to be in now. Reinhard likely joined the Navy because
Speaker 1: in his childhood navy men and had a reputation for
Speaker 1: being dashing, capable, heroic and sexy. He wanted the respect
Speaker 1: that came with being an officer and the steady paycheck
Speaker 1: that the military provided, because again, the whole economies fucking collect,
Speaker 1: the whole countries in free fall at this point. And
Speaker 1: by all accounts, Hydroc did very well in training. He
Speaker 1: was even sent to officer training straightaway in nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: four after becoming a senior midshipman. Now, after World War Two,
Speaker 1: some of the guys who had been Reinhard's comrades during
Speaker 1: this period would claim later that he quote had no
Speaker 1: friends among the crew. And again they're trying to distance
Speaker 1: themselves from the Holocaust guy. So this is pretty consistent
Speaker 1: and it's it was probably accurate. And a lot of
Speaker 1: the claims made about him in this period um like
Speaker 1: it's easy to overextended. Oh he had no friends because
Speaker 1: there's something wrong with him, Like from the beginning, people
Speaker 1: could tell that he was he was just bad. That's
Speaker 1: not the truth. This is a class thing. And his biographer,
Speaker 1: Robert gerwaf Um credits the fact that he was a
Speaker 1: loner in the navy to his and he was particularly
Speaker 1: a loaner when he's before he's an officer in the
Speaker 1: period early on in his navy career, and Gerwa says,
Speaker 1: this is because he's from an upper middle class educated
Speaker 1: background and he's like he's too fancy for the enlisted
Speaker 1: navy guys. He spends his time off duty playing the
Speaker 1: violin on board, and people make fun of him for this,
Speaker 1: like that's why he's a loner. The German Navy, particularly
Speaker 1: like you know at the midshipment level, is this hyper
Speaker 1: masculine world and hydric is this urbane defeat like a
Speaker 1: violin player, Yeah, exactly, violin player. They see him as
Speaker 1: a pansy girl, writes quote his musical inclinations repeatedly made
Speaker 1: him the target of ridicule during his basic training and keel.
Speaker 1: For example, a non commissioned training officer from West Prussia
Speaker 1: frequently woke him at night and forced him to play
Speaker 1: the to Selly serenade on his serenade on his violin.
Speaker 1: Many years later, Hydrock recalled these humiliating incidents when making
Speaker 1: condescend in comments regarding the racial inferiority of the West
Speaker 1: Prussians with their Polish infested blood. I love esoteric race.
Speaker 1: Hate of the day. It's just like, oh, you know
Speaker 1: those Westrusians. Else it's just another kind of German. But
Speaker 1: you're like, no, they're infested with Polish blood. They got
Speaker 1: a little bit of pole and them. You don't want
Speaker 1: any of that growth. Like there there are quarters slav Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Northern Italy. They're basically Swiss Southern Italy. Those are Libyans,
Speaker 1: uh so. Ryan Hard's early years in the Navy included
Speaker 1: a number of assassinations of liberal politicians by right wing extremists,
Speaker 1: including the murder of Foreign Minister rathanaw By, one of
Speaker 1: Heydrick's fellow naval cadets. A guy he goes to the
Speaker 1: Navy school with Despite the fact that he was in
Speaker 1: close proximity with a right wing terrorists who assassinated a
Speaker 1: government minister, Reinhard exhibited no interest in this case. Like, again,
Speaker 1: he's not political at this point. He's like, you know,
Speaker 1: he doesn't give a shit about this. He just wants respect,
Speaker 1: He wants to wear a big boy he's able. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he doesn't care about anything else. He's also not very
Speaker 1: interested in. Another thing that happens during this period is Germany.
Speaker 1: You know, they're unable to pay back their war debts.
Speaker 1: They like strike in terms of war debt repayment, and
Speaker 1: the French military occupies the Rule which is Germany's industrial heartland.
Speaker 1: This is a huge deal for the right wing. This
Speaker 1: is like a major This is like fucking Benghazi for them,
Speaker 1: right like they they go to they are obsessed with
Speaker 1: this fucking deal. Um and Reynard doesn't care about it either,
Speaker 1: because again he's just not a political guy. His comrades
Speaker 1: in the Navy actually considered him a liberal, and a
Speaker 1: lot of them disliked him for that reason. Years later,
Speaker 1: his wife Lena would claim that at this stage quote politically,
Speaker 1: he was clueless. He regarded all parties, particularly the Nazi Party,
Speaker 1: with arrogance, and considered politics itself to be vulgar. In
Speaker 1: this connection, he acted very much the snob and regarded
Speaker 1: his naval career as the most important thing. The rest
Speaker 1: didn't matter. I just I love that he was a
Speaker 1: political because it's like it just you know, it proves
Speaker 1: to me that like whenever someone gets goes from a
Speaker 1: political to immediately radicalized, it's like, nah, you have no ideology,
Speaker 1: you have no political beliefs, your your radicalization is absolutely
Speaker 1: dependent on just positive reinforcement. So like you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's this isn't a deeply held belief that he's had
Speaker 1: for years and years. It's totally saw which way the
Speaker 1: wind was blowing, and it's pretending to have always been
Speaker 1: down for his fucking right wing revolution. Yep, yep. And
Speaker 1: it's I mean, well we'll talk about that too in
Speaker 1: a bit, because I think there is there is some
Speaker 1: more to it. But at this period of time, again,
Speaker 1: his his his enlisted navy comrades consider him like a
Speaker 1: defeat liberal. Um, he's not super popular among his fellow comrades,
Speaker 1: and his unpopularity in among them kind of brings a
Speaker 1: resurgence of the rumors that he was Jewish. One fellow
Speaker 1: officer could debt later recalled Hidrick was more or less
Speaker 1: regarded as a Jew because another crew comrade from Halla
Speaker 1: told us that his family was actually called SEUs and
Speaker 1: that this was widely known in Halla. This is like,
Speaker 1: that's where the rumors come from, that one of his
Speaker 1: relatives had a last name that was also a Jewish
Speaker 1: last name. Um So Hydric earned the teasing nicknames white
Speaker 1: Jew and White Moses. And in order to fight back
Speaker 1: against those rumors, Hydrick starts trying to claim that he's
Speaker 1: super anti Semitic, and he starts claiming that he'd been
Speaker 1: a member of a bunch of anti Semitic organizations before
Speaker 1: joining the Navy. Um again probably untrue. He starts lying
Speaker 1: about this to counteract the rumors. But also this is
Speaker 1: kind of the period in which his his commitment number one.
Speaker 1: This is the period in which political anti semitism is
Speaker 1: going viral in Germany, and Hydric is kind of along
Speaker 1: for the ride, and he's in part inspired by the
Speaker 1: fact that it behooves him politically to be as anti
Speaker 1: Semitic as possible. Now despite all the difficulties he had
Speaker 1: with his crewmates. Reinhard was a solid naval officer. His
Speaker 1: career moved steadily upward. The summer of nineteen twenty three,
Speaker 1: he was transferred to a cruiser where he met Wilhelm Canaries,
Speaker 1: the future head of Nazi Germany's military intelligence agency. Canaris
Speaker 1: was impressed by the young officer and became his mentor.
Speaker 1: By nineteen twenty four, Hydroc had found his groove. He
Speaker 1: excelled as a navy man, and he even begun to
Speaker 1: find respect within a certain set of the officer cast.
Speaker 1: Many of these men appreciated his artistic talents and noted
Speaker 1: that he seemed completely transformed when he would start playing
Speaker 1: the violin or discussing music. People will say that his
Speaker 1: his violin playing brings folks to tears, like he's supposed
Speaker 1: to be very good. Um. In nineteen twenty six, he
Speaker 1: was promoted to second naval lieutenant. His roommate reported that
Speaker 1: after this he quote developed significantly. His superiors frequently gave
Speaker 1: him recognition and good evaluations. He was obliging and showed
Speaker 1: that people could rely on him. With every sign of recognition,
Speaker 1: his zeal increased, and so did his arrogance. Ambition was
Speaker 1: undoubtedly hydric strongest characteristic. He wanted to accomplish something, and
Speaker 1: others were supposed to be amazed. Now Hydro began to
Speaker 1: dream of one day. Because an admiral in night, he
Speaker 1: was promoted to first lieutenant. This brought him more free time,
Speaker 1: which he devoted to athletics, music and women. He had
Speaker 1: been noted by his colleagues as having a wandering eye.
Speaker 1: In nineteen six, when aboard the Schleswig the Schleswig Holstein,
Speaker 1: which is a boat with a terrible name. Horrible name,
Speaker 1: horrible name, uh, on a journey through Spain and Portugal,
Speaker 1: he gained a reputation for sleeping around with absolutely anything
Speaker 1: in a skirt. Uh. Women, I'm looking for I'm looking
Speaker 1: for a Holstein to I would like a Holstein Fortig
Speaker 1: signs of boats. I'm sorry, So not just ladies he
Speaker 1: meets in bars, but ladies he meets in brothels. And
Speaker 1: there's even one point where there's like a joint naval
Speaker 1: social gathering with like the German and British navies, and
Speaker 1: he starts really awkwardly, probably drunkenly, heating on a British
Speaker 1: officer's wife, and she like turns him down very publicly
Speaker 1: in a way that's super embarrassing. So Hidrock had no
Speaker 1: issue engaging in sual liaisons with sex workers, but his
Speaker 1: real goal was to find a high class woman with
Speaker 1: social status that he could show off at fancy parties,
Speaker 1: because again, he's an image guy. On December six, nineteen thirty,
Speaker 1: he met Linna van Austin at a ball. Now, when
Speaker 1: you run into Germans with a Vaughan between their first
Speaker 1: and last names, it means they're either a grifter pretending
Speaker 1: to be a noble, or they have some sort of
Speaker 1: noble heritage. And his father was descended from Danish nobility,
Speaker 1: but the von Austin fortunes had fallen since the eighteen sixties,
Speaker 1: so they're they're the aristocraty the aristocracy, but they're also broke.
Speaker 1: They're broker than the Hydrick family. By the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: Lena is still upper class though, because again, class isn't
Speaker 1: something that has just to do with money. It's about
Speaker 1: your breading. So she's high bred but broke um and
Speaker 1: she and Hydrick fall for each other. Three days after
Speaker 1: their first date, Reinhard Hydrick invites Lena to the theater
Speaker 1: and then to a wine bar where he proposes to her.
Speaker 1: So he eventually success accepts and to try and understand
Speaker 1: why she accepts, I'm going to cite a passage from
Speaker 1: the book Nazi Why Lives quote. Lena found him intriguing.
Speaker 1: I felt sympathy for this purposeful yet reserved young man,
Speaker 1: and agreed to a rendezvous the next day. In her memoirs,
Speaker 1: she breathlessly described how Heidrick opened his heart to her
Speaker 1: over a series of long walks, a visit to the theater,
Speaker 1: and a meal in a restaurant, and then asked her
Speaker 1: to marry him during their third evening together. Lena liked
Speaker 1: to suggest that their love was written in the stars
Speaker 1: and could not be denied. Others have speculated that his
Speaker 1: sudden proposal was a necessary prelude to getting her in bed. Um.
Speaker 1: Oh that's game, dude, Just like going yea dude, rock dude.
Speaker 1: You just you whine him and dine them for three
Speaker 1: dates and then you go, hey, would you married you?
Speaker 1: Did you fuck me? If we get engaged? Now you will?
Speaker 1: Oh man. That's also at a time when I think,
Speaker 1: like three dates, if you didn't ask someone to marry
Speaker 1: you by then, yeah, you were just being a harlot
Speaker 1: if you had not married, Yeah, you're dating is it's
Speaker 1: it was a it was a different time, a different time.
Speaker 1: You know, it was a different time. Um, but fuck
Speaker 1: you on the third date without game, No, Sophie. That's
Speaker 1: the way it is. That's true. Can I at least
Speaker 1: I'm hoping for dick pillads, whether or not they're dick
Speaker 1: pill ads. The one promise we make on this show,
Speaker 1: the only promise we make about our sponsors, is that
Speaker 1: they all fuck absolutely fuck like these products. Fuck fuck.
Speaker 1: Here's another Volkswagen ad. I mean, if you ain't got
Speaker 1: laid in the back of a beatle, Like, what are
Speaker 1: you doing? What did you do? In twenties? The two
Speaker 1: thousand one swagon by v W by v W mixing
Speaker 1: We're back good times. So they keep their engagement secret
Speaker 1: at first, Um, because Reinhardt has to get the family's approval, right,
Speaker 1: you don't like legally, you don't have to, I don't
Speaker 1: think in this period. But it's like and it's polite.
Speaker 1: And also he's he's comes from a high class family.
Speaker 1: Their riches, health, they're not nobles, but they're very wealthy.
Speaker 1: They run in high class circles, she's a noble You
Speaker 1: want to do things properly. Um. So they get engaged
Speaker 1: in secret, but he promises her that he's going to
Speaker 1: get her family's approval before Christmas. He just kind of
Speaker 1: wants to get all his ducks in a row make
Speaker 1: himself look as impressive as possible. Um. He writes her
Speaker 1: a letter shortly after their engagement that ends with this
Speaker 1: paragraph quote. Being straightforward and upright is the key demand
Speaker 1: I have always placed upon myself. It will thus not
Speaker 1: be difficult for me to look your father in the eye.
Speaker 1: You know. For me, there is nothing worse in people
Speaker 1: whom I love than beating around the bush and insincerity.
Speaker 1: I don't hesitate to confront mean guys with the same weapons. Now,
Speaker 1: of course he was lying, Yeah, I wonder like that's
Speaker 1: how it's translated. He was lying to He was not
Speaker 1: like about wanting to be married, because they did get married.
Speaker 1: He was lying to her about being a sincere and
Speaker 1: straightforward man. The truth is that Ryan hard Heydrich was
Speaker 1: a habitual liar when it came to sex and pretty
Speaker 1: much everything else. He was already involved with another woman.
Speaker 1: In fact, he had gotten involved with another woman six
Speaker 1: months before he met Lena. We do not know the
Speaker 1: precise details of the story, but one of a couple
Speaker 1: of different things has to be true. Either he forced
Speaker 1: himself slash, you know, raped a woman and then promised
Speaker 1: to marry her afterwards to keep her quiet. And you know,
Speaker 1: I'm putting the words rape in there, but at the
Speaker 1: time you you might not, like, she might not have
Speaker 1: described it that way, right, because people talked differently about
Speaker 1: at that point where we fucked, and like, consents not
Speaker 1: a thing in my culture. But you have to marry
Speaker 1: me now, right. That's one possibility. Um. The other possibility
Speaker 1: is that he started sleeping with a woman, uh, and
Speaker 1: he had to claim that they to get he had
Speaker 1: to promise to get engaged to her so that they
Speaker 1: could keep sucking. Right, they fucked once and she's like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: we gotta get it. You got you can't make me
Speaker 1: a dishonest woman, like we have to get married now
Speaker 1: because be fucked. One of those two things is true.
Speaker 1: Robert Gerwath and I tended he knows more about Reynard
Speaker 1: Hidric than I do. His take on this is you'll
Speaker 1: hear a couple of different ones. His take is that
Speaker 1: Hydrick met this woman six months earlier to another bar
Speaker 1: and that this young woman just kind of assumed that
Speaker 1: she and Hydrick were engaged because they were fucking. So
Speaker 1: maybe he didn't even promise to get engaged, but because
Speaker 1: of where things culturally are at the time, Oh we fucked,
Speaker 1: we're engaged now, that's what. I don't know what the
Speaker 1: case is, whatever the truth, rein Hard did follow through
Speaker 1: on his promise to tell Lena's family. Uh, they approved
Speaker 1: because he was a young rising naval star with a
Speaker 1: semi famous father. Um, so they start printing engagements and
Speaker 1: announcements for the local paper to celebrate. And the woman
Speaker 1: that he's having sex with on the side sees one
Speaker 1: of these engagement announcements. She is not happy about this.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote from Hitler's Hangman again. Ryan Hard, who
Speaker 1: continued to cultivate the relationship even after he had met Lena,
Speaker 1: invited her the second woman, to Kiel, where he's stationed,
Speaker 1: despite her request for a separate room in a hotel,
Speaker 1: and herurage should have spend the night in his living quarters.
Speaker 1: Further reproach MO probably occurred on this occasion. In any case,
Speaker 1: the young woman saw herself as compromised and reacted to
Speaker 1: the receipt of Hydrick's engagement notice with a nervous breakdown.
Speaker 1: Now we don't know who this lady was, but we
Speaker 1: do know that her father was some kind of prominent
Speaker 1: person in Germany because he was directly connected to the
Speaker 1: commander in chief of the entire German Navy. Is a
Speaker 1: bad family to piss off if you're wanting a Navy career.
Speaker 1: So in yeah, in the navy. So Hydrick gets court
Speaker 1: martialed over this um, and it's because it's dishonorable behavior, right,
Speaker 1: Honor is a big thing. This is like scummy behavior.
Speaker 1: You can get in trouble for this. And most sources,
Speaker 1: including Girwath, seemed to agree that normally he would have
Speaker 1: just gotten kind of a little more than a slap
Speaker 1: on the wrist, but it wouldn't have ended or even
Speaker 1: derailed his career, right because again it's what it's fucking like.
Speaker 1: All of these rich dudes are sleeping around, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're all doing it. Probably he would have just got
Speaker 1: if he if he had as soon as they brought
Speaker 1: him and been like, yes, you know, I'm just a man.
Speaker 1: I fucked up. Uh, this is my bad. I'm so
Speaker 1: sorry among whomot who among us and all the other
Speaker 1: dudes have been like, yeah, you know what, we're all
Speaker 1: rich navy officers of us are cheating on our wives
Speaker 1: and we're cheating on our mistresses. Okay, Like he would
Speaker 1: have gotten a punishment in order to mollify the father
Speaker 1: of this woman, and it would have gone away. But
Speaker 1: that's not how it goes because Hydrick cannot take responsibility
Speaker 1: for his own actions, so instead he tries to blame
Speaker 1: everything on the woman for seducing him. Yeah, and again
Speaker 1: you're talking about one of the most patriarchal misogynist cultures
Speaker 1: in history, Germany and the German Navy in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties. His behavior is so gross that it horrifies
Speaker 1: all of these admirals, right like you and and that's
Speaker 1: difficult in this period going to be two misogynists for
Speaker 1: like the admirals of the German Navy. Yeah, and they
Speaker 1: saw they saw like thousands of people dying like on
Speaker 1: the on the Rhine, and they're just like you disgusted me,
Speaker 1: but not wow. So his general sliminess is so upsetting
Speaker 1: to them that they decide he is not fit to
Speaker 1: wear a German uniform and he is discharged from the Navy. Um,
Speaker 1: you have to you have to really think in your
Speaker 1: head how gross you have to be for all these guys. Again,
Speaker 1: I can't over emphasize all these guys in the twenties
Speaker 1: going like this dude's kind of anti woman. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I beat my wife and my girlfriend every day,
Speaker 1: but this guy seems to be done. Yeah, I hit
Speaker 1: them because I love them. He's just a meani What
Speaker 1: the mean? Man? So this fox up all of Ryan
Speaker 1: hard Hydrick's plans. Oddly enough, his Lena, his fiance, stays
Speaker 1: with him. This might sound odd if you don't understand
Speaker 1: the fact that and this is a rarity for the show.
Speaker 1: Lena van Austin Reinhard Hydrick's wife sucks as much as
Speaker 1: he does. Like she's a terrible person. And I don't
Speaker 1: say that lightly. Normally I try to have because it's
Speaker 1: a hard time. Women don't have a lot of are
Speaker 1: great and a lot of agency by the society in
Speaker 1: this period. She's really bad. She's a really bad person
Speaker 1: in the and not just because she stays with like,
Speaker 1: not because she stays with her husband during or right
Speaker 1: hard during this but for a lot of other reasons.
Speaker 1: She sounds independently bad. She's independently shitty. Yeah. In the
Speaker 1: book Nazi Wives, James Wiley writes, quote, Beyond the powerful
Speaker 1: physical attraction between them, Lena and Hydrick shared some key characteristics.
Speaker 1: Both were fixed on escaping their backgrounds and forging a
Speaker 1: different destiny for themselves. They were stubborn and extremely ambitious.
Speaker 1: Each had a cold calculating streak. Neither suffered fools gladly.
Speaker 1: Both had an inflated sense of their own worth and
Speaker 1: felt that the majority of people were inferior beings. So
Speaker 1: real power couple of being trashed, just sitting around in
Speaker 1: the living room going, I fucking hate the Italians. You
Speaker 1: should know you know who. I don't like the Prussians.
Speaker 1: Just the whole vest of Prussia is just gross Polish. Yeah,
Speaker 1: sounds get married is just love. They're both like looking
Speaker 1: like they're like at a museum touching a phrenological like
Speaker 1: like one of those heads with bumps tell you like
Speaker 1: and like the hands meat in the middle of the
Speaker 1: semoy seminar or whatever. People both about to measure the
Speaker 1: same skull and not hands met. So you've surely heard
Speaker 1: the phrase behind every man as a great woman. And
Speaker 1: unfortunately this is also true of history's greatest monsters. And
Speaker 1: Lena not been the sort of woman she was, we
Speaker 1: might not have had a Reinhard Hydrick, because he might
Speaker 1: have killed himself after getting discharged from the navy. And
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote again from from Wiley's book, Uh
Speaker 1: Fucking Nazi Wives. On thirty April nineteen thirty one, he
Speaker 1: was dismissed from the navy. Lena said that he was
Speaker 1: so shattered by the verdict that he had a total breakdown,
Speaker 1: locking himself in his room for days on end, smashing
Speaker 1: furniture and weeping uncontrollably, and she had to piece him
Speaker 1: back together again. Where they're true or not, And it's
Speaker 1: hard to imagine the man Hitler called iron Heart behaving
Speaker 1: like a hysterical child. The most startling thing about the
Speaker 1: whole incident is Lena's unswerving loyalty. Under the circumstances, nobody
Speaker 1: would have blamed her if she'd called off the engagement.
Speaker 1: She was only nineteen, so this was hardly her last
Speaker 1: chance at happiness. Clearly, Lena was convinced that with her guidance,
Speaker 1: Hydroco could still rise to the top. I can fix him.
Speaker 1: I can fix him. I can. I can make him
Speaker 1: powerful and that will make me famous. I can make
Speaker 1: him so much worse. Yeah. Now, the Vaughan Austin family
Speaker 1: rescinded their approval for the marriage after Hydric got fired.
Speaker 1: This was not like necessarily a moral thing, was a
Speaker 1: pragmatic thing. The family is broke and they needed to
Speaker 1: know that Hydric was going to have money before they
Speaker 1: would accept this. Lena seems to have considered it her
Speaker 1: duty to make sure her husband to be got the
Speaker 1: chance to be as great as she knew he could be.
Speaker 1: She was convinced his chance would come through the National
Speaker 1: Socialist German Workers Party. While Hydrick was fairly a political
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty when they met, Lena was already a
Speaker 1: dedicated Nazi. She had first attended a party rally the
Speaker 1: year before, where she'd swooned over the sexy, black uniformed
Speaker 1: men of Hitler's new bodyguard unit, the s s or
Speaker 1: should have Stoffle now. When she met Hydrick, her only
Speaker 1: disappointment with him came from the fact that he had
Speaker 1: never even heard of Hitler's mind comp In fact, he
Speaker 1: mocked Nazi leaders regularly. Calling Hitler a Bohemian corporal and
Speaker 1: Gebel's a cripple. Again, he's racist against the Nazi leadership.
Speaker 1: Hitler's an Austrian. That piece of ship and basically swabs
Speaker 1: and this guy's got funny legs like a cripple. Like
Speaker 1: first off, so was the Kaiser, Yeah right, yeah, your
Speaker 1: beloved enough. They kept that pretty under wrapped so that
Speaker 1: Lena's brother was a committed Nazi, a member of nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty nine since nineteen nine of the Essay or the Stormtroopers.
Speaker 1: He was one of the first hundred thousand Nazis. Her
Speaker 1: whole family is embarrassed and impoverished. Aristocrats appreciated the Nazi
Speaker 1: message of German rebirth. Lena particularly appreciated their racism. Decades
Speaker 1: after the war. In the nineteen seventies, she admitted to
Speaker 1: interviewers that as a teenager, she'd come to view Polish
Speaker 1: refugees who entered Germany and nineteen eighteen has quote intruders
Speaker 1: and unwelcome guests. Their presence provoked her so much that
Speaker 1: she had to hate them. Yeah, it made her hate
Speaker 1: them by not looking like her. Yeah, She compared seeing
Speaker 1: refugees who had fled to Germany to avoid massacre as
Speaker 1: a forced marriage. They're raping me with their presence, basically
Speaker 1: is what she says. Like, that's again, she's trash. She's
Speaker 1: really bad, and I'm sorry. She is trashed and she
Speaker 1: is canceled. She is driving factor in Hydros developing anti
Speaker 1: simmit isn't because it really hits warp speed. Once he
Speaker 1: meets Lena, I think she kind of drives his racism
Speaker 1: and a lot of way she drives him towards the
Speaker 1: Nazi Party, and so Lena advised her Bow to join
Speaker 1: the Nazis and offer his services to the s A. Again,
Speaker 1: the Essay are the brown Shirts. These are the street
Speaker 1: fighting Nazis, and at this point they have about a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty thousand members. They're kind of creating a
Speaker 1: parallel military to the German military the Reiks Fair and
Speaker 1: as a result, they're actively recruiting former military officers whose
Speaker 1: experience could help the Essays leader a fellow named Ernst
Speaker 1: Rome turned the organization into a real military. Now it's
Speaker 1: important to note that the Nazis are not Hydris only
Speaker 1: path to avoid destitution. This is not his only choice.
Speaker 1: After the Navy, he gets offered a cushy, well paying
Speaker 1: job teaching sailing that would have paid him more all
Speaker 1: honestly than he had made in the Navy, but he
Speaker 1: wouldn't have had respect. Sailing. Teachers don't get uniforms, they
Speaker 1: don't get ranks, right, Nazis those who can't do teach,
Speaker 1: you know. And he's just like, I'm not gonna I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna go down that road. Uh. No one gets
Speaker 1: less respect than a teacher. I love that. That's just
Speaker 1: universal concept. Yeah. Yeah, And nothing's worse than being a teacher.
Speaker 1: I'm going to join the Nazi party, yeah, exactly. Now. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the Nazis, cognizant of Reinhard's experience as an officer, offered
Speaker 1: him an elevated position within their organization, one on the
Speaker 1: staff of a little dude you might have heard of
Speaker 1: named Heinrich Hmmler. Now, at the time, Himler had newly
Speaker 1: been put in charge of the S S and the
Speaker 1: s S again. S S stands basically for bodyguard. It's
Speaker 1: like protection squad, I think is the literal translation. These are.
Speaker 1: They start just as a small group of the most
Speaker 1: loyal and also most like an aryan looking Nazis to
Speaker 1: guard Hitler's body, right, they've become a state within a state,
Speaker 1: there's eventually like a millionaire. So of these guys um
Speaker 1: at the time, there's very few s S men. They're
Speaker 1: subordinate to the Essay, so they're not independent. But Himler's
Speaker 1: in charge of them, and he has a dream to
Speaker 1: supplant the Essay, to make them the biggest thing in
Speaker 1: being a Nazi. Now. His first step to doing the
Speaker 1: was to increase the party's capacity to carry out counter
Speaker 1: espionage because both anti fascists and the German police are
Speaker 1: infiltrating the Nazis and the Essay at this point. Um,
Speaker 1: So Himmler his first vision is like, Okay, what are
Speaker 1: we bad at? We're bad at rooting out spies. So
Speaker 1: that's one of the things I'm gonna have the s
Speaker 1: S do. I'm gonna build a capacity for counter espionage
Speaker 1: into it. And he needs a guy to lead this
Speaker 1: because he doesn't know anything about counter espionage. And the
Speaker 1: friend of Reinhardt Hydrick's family, who in of Lena's family,
Speaker 1: who basically comes to the Nazi and say, hey, I
Speaker 1: know this officer who wants to join if you'll offer
Speaker 1: him a cooshy job, he claims that Hydric is an
Speaker 1: ex naval intelligence officer. This is not true. It's it's
Speaker 1: came out as a result of kind of like a miscommunication.
Speaker 1: He was in like signals intelligence, but he doesn't know
Speaker 1: anything about espionage. But Hydrick gets the interview anyway. He
Speaker 1: immediately impressed Himler, who saw in his his new SS
Speaker 1: Like Himler wants the s s to be the racial
Speaker 1: elite of the Nazi party, and so from the beginning
Speaker 1: there were strict requirements for genealogy. They would reject mainly
Speaker 1: on appearance if you have like an inferior body. Which
Speaker 1: it's funny because if you look at Hinrich Hembler, he
Speaker 1: looks like an extra from Trek E's Yeah. Meanwhile, right
Speaker 1: Heart Hydrick, though, Like it makes sense that Himler falls
Speaker 1: in love with this dude. Hydrick is tall, he's over
Speaker 1: six feet, he's athletic, he's in very good shape. He's
Speaker 1: blonde haired and blue eyed. Right um he gets played
Speaker 1: by Kenneth Braunay by played ably by Kenneth Brandon. Yeah
Speaker 1: very well. Yeah, so it's clear that I love that
Speaker 1: the whole Nazi leadership are just the most fugle fucking
Speaker 1: gules you've ever seen, and all of their propaganda is
Speaker 1: just like, we are the most beautiful people on earth.
Speaker 1: We have blonde hair, and we never bulge, we never
Speaker 1: get fat, and you just look at like Martin Borman
Speaker 1: and you're just like what the fuck? Yeah, fucking Jankie
Speaker 1: asked Martin Borman hit here with his with his screwed
Speaker 1: up and testines, shifting himself constantly like most Garing horribly
Speaker 1: addicted to heroin, because the most sickly flawed, disgusting people
Speaker 1: just being like, you know what a hot Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's not like, look, hey, we're all we all
Speaker 1: have ibs and drug ads problems. We just don't pretend
Speaker 1: not to a fake racial hierarchy that murders of other
Speaker 1: people who basically, yeah, I know I know what my
Speaker 1: my features look like, you know, and I say, rather
Speaker 1: than being like, no I have a small nose, I'm like, no,
Speaker 1: big noses are sexy. This is this is what I
Speaker 1: look like. So anyway, Himmler loves Hydrick because he's he's
Speaker 1: a fucking sexy ass, blonde hair, blued eye dude. Um
Speaker 1: and yeah, so uh Himler's thrilled with his appearance, of course,
Speaker 1: but that didn't necessarily mean he was going to get
Speaker 1: the job because Himler's hiring for a specific technical task.
Speaker 1: He wants someone to build a counter espionage agency. Um
Speaker 1: Hydrick has new experience in this, and to explain how
Speaker 1: he gets the job any way, I'm gonna quote again
Speaker 1: from Hitler's Hangman. Undeterred by the realization that the applicant
Speaker 1: in front of him lacked any previous qualification for espionage work,
Speaker 1: Himmler asked Hydrick to sketch out an organizational plan for
Speaker 1: an SS intelligence agency and gave him twenty minutes to
Speaker 1: complete the task. Without any previous experience in the field
Speaker 1: of espionage, Hydric resorted to the minimal knowledge he gained
Speaker 1: from years of reading cheap crime fiction and spy novels,
Speaker 1: and wrapped his suggestions for a future s S intelligence
Speaker 1: service and suitably military phraseology. His minimal knowledge of espionage
Speaker 1: appears to have surpassed that of Himmler. The Reich leader.
Speaker 1: SS was impressed and hired him in preference to a
Speaker 1: second applicant, a former police captain. Oh my god, it's okay,
Speaker 1: let's a pros and cons. Pro he's a police captain.
Speaker 1: Con He's not as hot and he hasn't read every
Speaker 1: Sherlock Holmes. So we're going with Mr Hydrick Shaw saying
Speaker 1: if he need to be doing more heroin as you're
Speaker 1: saying more heroin, and you're saying we need like an
Speaker 1: little fat man who will also help us out in
Speaker 1: BOT I love it. Oh. The horrible historic already here
Speaker 1: is that in in picking Hydric over this police captain,
Speaker 1: he actually made an excellent decision for a dumb reason.
Speaker 1: But this police captain turned out to also be an
Speaker 1: undercover cop trying to infiltrate the s Sally makes the
Speaker 1: best of the two decisions just for the dumbest possible reason. Damn.
Speaker 1: And it's funny. We talked about this in one of
Speaker 1: our very first Behind the Bastards episodes. Like the influence
Speaker 1: that like shitty fiction has on the Nazis there is
Speaker 1: hugely influenced by like a con man and cowboy novelist
Speaker 1: who wrote writes like these, these like fantasy cowboy novels
Speaker 1: about like you know, Native Americans and boys and shit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's funny because like Hydric gets hired to basically
Speaker 1: run the s S Secret Police because of his knowledge
Speaker 1: of these these fantasy detective novels during World War Two,
Speaker 1: during the the Russian War, when like things are going
Speaker 1: badly for the Nazis, Hitler sends hundreds of copies of
Speaker 1: these hitty cowboy novels too his generals on the Eastern
Speaker 1: Front because he's certain that they're filled with like strategic insights,
Speaker 1: Like I can't overestimate the degree to which these guys
Speaker 1: are just a bunch of fucking nerds, the nerdiest fucking fools. God,
Speaker 1: just like fucking really, Like, Okay, I have read every
Speaker 1: Tom Clancy, and I think I can run counter terrorism.
Speaker 1: I'm certain that, like when our fascist takes over and
Speaker 1: invades I don't know, fucking China and the war goes badly,
Speaker 1: they're going to start like mailing copies of R. A.
Speaker 1: Salvator novels to their generals. Uh fucking hell, so God
Speaker 1: damn it. Um yeah, anyway, Um Hydrick gets hired by
Speaker 1: Himmler and his starting salaries and a lot of money,
Speaker 1: but when combined with the money he was still receiving
Speaker 1: from the Navy after getting fired, Um Hydrick was now
Speaker 1: making a modest income enough to support he and his
Speaker 1: wife to be. Now Hydric seems to have had something
Speaker 1: of an instinct for party politics. He's good at this job.
Speaker 1: He's good at the politicking part of this job. We
Speaker 1: can debate how good he is at counter espionage, but
Speaker 1: he's good at making a place for himself in an
Speaker 1: organization and consistently expanding that place. He recognizes Himler early
Speaker 1: on as a guy he should tie himself to, and
Speaker 1: he sets about mimicking every opinion and deeply held believe
Speaker 1: his boss expresses. He also dives into proving himself as
Speaker 1: a Nazi. Now. The best way to do this in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen thirties is to get into a bunch
Speaker 1: of street fights with communists and social Democrats. During the
Speaker 1: run up to the nineteen thirty one Hamburg elections, the
Speaker 1: Nazis sent small motorized s S units around to assault
Speaker 1: left wing party gatherings, and they were in cars they
Speaker 1: could disappear before the cops would arrive. Hydric leads one
Speaker 1: of these squads. He's good at this job, and his
Speaker 1: shock troop actually gets a reputation of being particularly brutal.
Speaker 1: Hamburg communists start calling him the Blonde Beast, so he's
Speaker 1: he's This is how he really proves himself to the
Speaker 1: other Nazis, you've gotta crack some fucking skulls in this period. Now,
Speaker 1: Reinhard also knows that one of the best ways to
Speaker 1: make yourself valuable in a new organization is to find
Speaker 1: something that's not doing but it needs to do, and
Speaker 1: then create that thing. For the s S. This is
Speaker 1: the I'm not even gonna try the Security Service hereafter,
Speaker 1: referred to as the s D. This is the s
Speaker 1: S intelligence branch that Himler had been wanting to make
Speaker 1: for a while. Hydric jumps on the task and it
Speaker 1: starts off at the beginning. Hydrick is the only man
Speaker 1: in the SD. The organization is just him and eventually
Speaker 1: this will this will be tens of thousands of guys.
Speaker 1: So like, that's kind of the how he grows this,
Speaker 1: like himself alone in a room to the head of
Speaker 1: security basically for all of Nazi Germany. Um. Now, again,
Speaker 1: he's it's a pretty humble position at the time in reality,
Speaker 1: but the fact that he's the head of something makes
Speaker 1: him sound impressive enough that he's able to write to
Speaker 1: lean his parents and ask for their blessing to go
Speaker 1: forward with the wedding, and eventually they say yes. Hydrick
Speaker 1: also impressed his new Nazi colleagues. His first big task
Speaker 1: was to convince his superiors to give him the funding
Speaker 1: to put together a group of s S men who
Speaker 1: could unmask spies within the organization. This strike force would
Speaker 1: be able to act quickly to get rid of threats.
Speaker 1: He had an effect, created the first Nazi secret Police,
Speaker 1: a fact that was discovered by a local newspaper which
Speaker 1: described it as a fascist checa, which is like, that's
Speaker 1: the Soviet secret police. Um. Yeah. Now the article named
Speaker 1: Hydric as the brains of the operation. So he's he
Speaker 1: starts to be known for what he's doing. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's getting ink spelled about it. He's getting which means
Speaker 1: maybe he's not actually all that great at the secret part,
Speaker 1: but being in a party. At the end of nineteen one,
Speaker 1: he had more than fifty officers in his SD. The
Speaker 1: von Austin family finally gives him their approval and in
Speaker 1: December of that year he and Lena are wed. Now
Speaker 1: at the time they got hitched, the s s of
Speaker 1: the essay were briefly illegal as the result of a
Speaker 1: temporary crackdown by one of the Weimar governments. Like last
Speaker 1: independent ish kind of leaders before Hitler's rise. Despite this,
Speaker 1: the High Drick's wedding was conducted in uniform. Here's how
Speaker 1: Lena described her husband's wedding in a letter to a
Speaker 1: family member. The essay and s s dressed in white
Speaker 1: shirts and black trousers, formed a guard of honor all
Speaker 1: the way to the cemetery gate. The pastor was also
Speaker 1: on our side and gave us a luther quotation as
Speaker 1: a wedding motto. And though this world, with devil's filled
Speaker 1: should threatened to undo us, we will not fear, for
Speaker 1: God hath willed his truth to triumph through us. As
Speaker 1: we marched out of the church, the organist played the
Speaker 1: Horst Vessel song as we left the cemetery. Following the wedding,
Speaker 1: several guards of honor were arrested by the police. So
Speaker 1: that's the Hydrick wedding. Very Nazi wedding, Very Nazi. I mean,
Speaker 1: you've got everything. You've got people dressed up all all
Speaker 1: goth and ship, You've got a fucking uh it's they
Speaker 1: got married at a church with a cemetery in it.
Speaker 1: I mean these guys were really going for it, like
Speaker 1: fucking style wise. Ye as a reward for his hard
Speaker 1: work and for getting married him, they were promoted Reinhard
Speaker 1: Hydrick to S. S. Storm Bunfeuder or Major, was just
Speaker 1: seven days after his last promotion. The happy couple moved
Speaker 1: in together, but they did not spend much time enjoying themselves.
Speaker 1: Hydrick was a workaholic, constantly at his desk were out
Speaker 1: in the street fighting for the party. His work ethic
Speaker 1: only somewhat compensated for the fact that he had no
Speaker 1: experience doing the kind of job that he'd gotten for himself.
Speaker 1: Robert Gerwath writes the need for reforms to Hydric. Still
Speaker 1: highly amateurist spy network in Germany became a parent in
Speaker 1: February nineteen thirty two when the SD suddenly found itself
Speaker 1: in a crisis, prompted by the arrest of one of
Speaker 1: Hydrick's agents, who had tried to gather secret military information
Speaker 1: from Navy command in wilhelms Chavin. And although the police
Speaker 1: investigation did not reveal Hydrick's involvement in the case, he
Speaker 1: nevertheless recognized the need to restructure his intelligence service in
Speaker 1: order to avoid further embarrassment, and he he restructures it
Speaker 1: in a way that seems to be fairly effective. By
Speaker 1: June of nineteen thirty two, Hydrick's s D was the
Speaker 1: best intelligence gathering operation in the Nazi Party. It's competition,
Speaker 1: which had been the Essay Intelligence Division, is actually shut
Speaker 1: down because his SS and his SD makes it unnecessar
Speaker 1: Arry Hydrick gets promoted yet again, this time to colonel
Speaker 1: and now he has eight full time employees. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: things kind of go up and down for the Nazis
Speaker 1: in this period. There's some dark times in late nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty two when they get kind of beamed in an election,
Speaker 1: But by this point Hitler was adjacent to power, and
Speaker 1: you know, they he orchestrates his way into power by
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty three, and he and his comrades succeed in
Speaker 1: seize and control of the Weimar government through a trail
Speaker 1: of factory that we detail in our non Nazi Bastards
Speaker 1: Behind Hitler episode Reinhard. Hydrick was not a major player
Speaker 1: in the Nazi seizure of power. By the time Hitler
Speaker 1: wound up in control, he had established himself as the
Speaker 1: chief of the Nazi Secret Police. Now that had been
Speaker 1: an inter party secret police, but now the party was
Speaker 1: the government and Reinhard Hydrick was about to find himself
Speaker 1: in near total control of the German police. We're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about that and what came after in part two,
Speaker 1: but you know we're going to talk about right now
Speaker 1: what you're plugables, plugs, plugs, plugs. Oh man, I got
Speaker 1: so much to Polly. Well, if you love uh talking
Speaker 1: about uh real bad Nazis, Uh, you're also gonna love
Speaker 1: this HBO series of Sopranos. And if you you love
Speaker 1: the Sopranos, check out Pot Yourself a Gun. That's a
Speaker 1: podcast that me and Vince Mancini do. Uh, it's like
Speaker 1: a Sopranos rewatch podcast. We also do a movie podcast
Speaker 1: called The Fraud Cast f R O T C A
Speaker 1: s T. Check that out. That's about not the Sopranos,
Speaker 1: about movies and stuff. Yeah and yeah, follow me on
Speaker 1: Instagram at Matt Leave Jokes at Matt Leave Jokes. All right, well,
Speaker 1: friendos and enemies, enemies, Um, A lot of enemies listen
Speaker 1: to this pod. A lot of enemies listen to this podcast.
Speaker 1: Shout out to Reinhard Hydrick, fan of the pod, fan
Speaker 1: of the pods from hell on his zooon, I love
Speaker 1: you so evil. He has a zoom. Yeah great, the
Speaker 1: level of evil that we can't even father. Hitler's there
Speaker 1: on like an iPod original being like technology. It runs
Speaker 1: on Linux. Yeah, I love this. Hitler as a Microsoft chauvinist.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. That's the big split in the Nazi party
Speaker 1: in Hell. It's between like the Microsoft and then like
Speaker 1: the Strasser rights who go for Linux. Right, you got
Speaker 1: a diamond joke. It only holds twelve songs and that's
Speaker 1: all you need. Anything more? Is Vanity best MP three
Speaker 1: play on the market. Alright, Well that's the end of
Speaker 1: the episode. We'll be back on Thursday to just a
Speaker 1: lot of genocide coming on Thursday. Very fun, all right, bam.