The Colonels Corner The Splendid Blonde Beast Part 6

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0:00 Hello, Illini. Hey, Colonel. I'm going to start referring to you as my partner in crime. Please don't. That might be immiscible evidence in four years if we're not careful. Yeah. My gosh. Crazy, crazy stuff going on. How are you today, Bridget? Bridget? Bridget just texted me. Are you speaking? Colonel, I can hear you right now. Okay. Asking Bridget. Yeah.

0:46 So she's going to have to go out and come back. Let me let me make you. All right. You're cutting in and out on me right now. It could be me, though. OK, no, it's not you. It there was something going on on X. I'm going to go ahead and go live over here on Rumble. Can you hear me? A little. You cut in and out. You're going robot right now. Oh, my gosh.

1:33 Oh, I hate these people. All right. All right. Let me bring Bridget back up. I would love for them to let us do just one space normal. Amen. Okay. Right. Hey, at least I can hear. I can hear. It's a miracle. All right. So how's the volume now, Illini? I can hear you. Okay. All right. So we're going to go ahead and get started.

2:20 We are on Chapter 6 of The Splendid Blonde Beast. And the title of this chapter is Who Still Talks of the Armenians? And I'm just going to jump right in. Mental patients and disabled people appear to have been first ones that the Nazis actually gassed. They killed at least 50,000 in an experimental euthanasia program codenamed AK.

2:49 I guess it's Action T4, A-K-T-I-O-N T4, that began in the fall of 1939. Reports from German-occupied Poland suggest that the SS gassed a number of Polish prostitutes at the same time. They were referred to by the Polish people as cold pogroms. It resulted in, let's see,

3:16 The deportation of tens of thousands of people to barren wastelands or to desperately overcrowded ghettos where death came slowly through hunger, disease and exposure. It says Nazi concentration camps during this period were prison camps, not extermination centers. German security troops and paramilitary undertook thousands of massacres.

3:48 of Romanian gypsies, people they suspected of being communist, and of Jewish people. But they carried out these killings on a local scale, not in concentration camps at this point. The cold pogroms were kindred to Turkey's World War I extermination of the Armenians in many ways.

4:15 Both were driven primarily by a determination to achieve quote-unquote security through wiping out an entire race of people, rather than by conventional economic or military actions. The Germans used administrative methods similar to those of the Turks, and both campaigns chose to do it locally by starvation and exposure as their chief instruments of death.

4:48 Between September 1939 and the summer of 1942, a casualty rate approaching that which the Turks had achieved in a comparable time with the Armenians. Hitler was well aware of Turkey's genocide of the Armenians and the failure of the international community to do anything about it. Hitler commented in an interview that, quote, the extermination of the Armenians had led him to the conclusion.

5:18 that masses of men are mere biological plasticines over which Aryans would eventually triumph, unquote. He also said, our strength is in our quickness and our brutality. Genghis Khan had millions of women and children killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees only in him a great state.

5:51 Thus, for the time being, I have sent to the east my death head units with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians? Unquote.

6:17 On at least three other occasions, Hitler pointed to the brutality of the Turkish regime and its willingness to strike without mercy as a model for his government. A new and more terrible wave of slaughter began when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941. Special SS troops dedicated to mass murder now follow close behind the advancing German army.

6:46 Within 36 months, these units of paramilitary shot about 2 million people, according to Nuremberg's military tribunal. The large majority of the dead were Jewish. Although the net also caught hundreds of thousands of people suspected of being communist, Slavic, Romanian, Polish, homosexual, hospital patients.

7:16 unarmed prisoners of war, and even children. These 2 million murders, moreover, do not include any of the gassing at any of the factories. And the author goes, he quotes a 1942 report, and it talks about the, basically it gives an overview of what I just said.

7:48 that was actually out of documentation that was later found. The extermination campaign gathered momentum by integrating itself with the day-to-day activities of Hitler's government and German society. In January 1942, 14 senior German government bureaucrats met at an SS office at Lake Wannsee.

8:16 in the suburbs of Berlin to coordinate efforts to exterminate Jewish people. Up to that point, the various German ministries had often worked at cross-purposes on this issue. Officials in charge of the economic exploitation in the Nazi-occupied territories in the East had sometimes advocated retention of the Jewish people to be used as slave laborers. Reinhard Gehrich.

8:47 of the SS had pushed for mass executions. Still other ministries had favored a variety of deportation and resettlement. Though they were unable to agree on exactly where to relocate the refugees, the extent of the terror was obvious by the conversations that they were having. Wannsee meeting changed all of that. The SS security chief

9:18 Reinhard Heyrich enlisted the support of each of the major general ministries in the Nazi party organization in a concerted effort to clear the living space of Jewish people in a legal way. The tactics were relatively simple. Europe will be cleansed up from the west to the east.

9:46 Able-bodied Jewish people will be taken to a large labor camp, Nazi-occupied territories on the Eastern Front for work on roads, in the course of which action, a great part will undoubtedly be eliminated because their intent was to work them to death. The possible final remnant will undoubtedly be the toughest, and they will have to be treated accordingly.

10:15 agencies were to cooperate with the SS in this plan. Hadrich assistant Adolf Eichmann estimated that there were approximately 11 million Jewish people to be quote-unquote cleaned up. He provided a country-by-country breakdown of this population to help plan tactics. There were 5 million Jews to be murdered in the Nazi-occupied Soviet Union, according to his list.

10:47 2.3 million more in former territories such as Poland. A long-range plan called for the SS to eliminate all 4,000 Jews in Ireland once the Germans made it that far. They placed a special emphasis on the word legally, that it would be crucial to their psychological operation to emphasize that point.

11:19 He wanted to dispel any lingering doubts about the propriety of what they were doing. Most of the prominent people had spoken at this conference to include leaders of the Catholic Church. Not only Hitler, but the Gestapo chief Mueller was there, other members of the party, the elite of the civil service.

11:49 All of them was at this meeting. It also says, it quotes one of them as saying, at that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I was free of all guilt. Eichmann testified at his trial because he was saying that he was basically ordered to do so.

12:18 On an operational level, each German government ministry took responsibility for some piece of the project, either through registration, the seizure of property, transportation, whatever. Everybody was assigned a job. Each act of this program, except for the actual gassing, came complete with a more or less reasonable explanation available to the people that were conducting it.

12:48 The government was deporting Jewish people as a security measure and to put them to work, the story went. This would benefit German society and perhaps even benefit the people being deported. By dividing up responsibility for this plan, the Nazi party and the SS enlisted and the German state.

13:13 along with most of the German society, because the elite of the civil service was there too, it would basically spread the blame. Note that at Wannassie, the truth that millions of Jewish people were to be killed or work to death was not openly discussed. Almost all of the Jewish people were said to be eliminated by natural causes.

13:46 That's the way Heydrich described it. This simple deceit can be traced to the police security surrounding the installations where that would later happen and the psychological need of most people to evade any complicity in the actual murders. SS did not fool German bureaucrats into cooperation. Rather, the Wannsee Conference illustrates how

14:14 The Nazi-dominated society created a social conscience that both facilitated and aided in this program. The legalization of it, again, kept being emphasized throughout the entire meeting. Preparation for a Blitzkrieg-style attack in the occupied areas was underway within months of that meeting.

14:45 They had already begun producing the Zyklon B poison gas at least as early as September 1941 as far as mass stockpiling it. There were similar experimental executions at a camp called Sachsenhausen. This new technique

15:14 was viewed to be highly effective, and they began building centers to use it. They gassed 5,000 Romanians at a place called Chelmno. The previous October, Hitler had ordered that virtually all Jewish people remaining in Germany were to be deported to the east. It was a security measure, he said.

15:45 The Nazi occupation governments in France, Belgium, Holland, Slovakia, and Greece soon issued similar decrees. They hit the so-called stateless or refugee. Most of these people were deported to Auschwitz. In mid-July, French collaborations with the police there captured almost 13,000 stateless.

16:12 Jewish people in Paris and deported 9,000 of them, including 4,000 children, to a camp at Drancy, from which they were then forwarded to Auschwitz. Vichy France then began rounding up French Jewish people and deported at least 7,000 of them that August. The governments in Belgium and the Netherlands cooperated with similar deportations.

16:43 Surviving SS records show that Nazis murdered more than 200,000 people during the last two weeks of August 1942 alone. Business channels, the information pathways of the day-to-day commerce in German society, proved to be one of the most important sources of information about this campaign. Officially, the gassing and mass murder were a German state secret of the highest order, but this information could not be fully concealed from the corporate community.

17:14 Because, of course, most of these were co-located with the corporate community. The people who had began building these facilities, like the construction men, the engineers, and the temporary people co-located at these places, all knew what was going on. In January 1942, only weeks after the initiation of mass gassings of prisoners at the camp,

17:43 involving IG Farben, Ernst Struss, S-T-R-U-S-S, was returning by train after a short visit to the factory. Struss overheard a German worker remarking in a loud voice that the Auschwitz large number of people were being burnt, that the cremations were being carried out in crematories on site.

18:13 and that the air in IG Farben's factory smelled of corpses. Struss jumped up and shouted, these are lies. You don't know what you're talking about. Stop spreading lies. The man answered, no, these are not lies. In Osseous, there are 10,000 workers and all know it. Similarly, executives in the Central Intelligence Department at IG Farben were uncertain over how to process the reports of mass deaths of laborers.

18:43 that they had just had working for them. The evidence shows that despite later denials, much of the corporate elite of Germany was well aware of what was going on. Thousands of German corporate directors and senior managers knowingly contributed to these murders because, again, they were happening at buildings beside their factories. And the workers were changing out quite frequently.

19:13 In many cases, even after they had become disenchanted with Hitler and knew that the war was lost, the SS and Nazi party could at least point to their ideology as an explanation of sorts. But the business elite could not even make that claim. For them, cooperation in years of genocide became simply a matter of a way of doing business. One clear indicator that corporate executives did.

19:41 often have detailed knowledge of this campaign, is recorded in the handful of businessmen who became spies for the Allies during the conflict. Significantly, these agents were not members of the Nazi inner circle. They were simply prosperous businessmen who broke with their government out of political or moral disgust. These spies were relatively isolated within German society.

20:06 and their sources of information concerning the exterminations was limited to the usual business and social conduct of people that worked at these facilities. Nonetheless, within weeks after the gassings began, these men were able to report accurately on the existence of the program and the highly secret mass murder programs. Industrialist Edward Schultz

20:34 for example, owned strategically important zinc mines and other real estate near what once what had been the German-Polish border. He was a conservative Christian Democrat and committed to anti-Nazi-ism, who repeatedly risked his life and fortune to spy on the Nazis on behalf of the Polish, Swiss, and eventually U.S. intelligence services.

21:02 picked up most of his information by listening to political gossip of German industrialists through family ties, like he had a cousin that was one of the officers at one of these plants. Such sources consistently knew more of German secret affair than was previously.

21:28 They showed off their knowledge in casual conversations. The results of this simple espionage was impressive. Schulte provided early warnings to the Allies of the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and of the Soviets in 1941. And perhaps, though the evidence is less certain on this point, of Belgium, Holland, Norway, and Denmark.

21:57 He passed on dozens of bits of information concerning German military campaigns, petroleum stocks, and resource shortages. His information was sometimes incorrect. The Allied agents who handled him from Zurich had little doubt that Schulte was a reliable source. In July 1942, less than six months after the Wannsee Conference, Schulte reported the essential facts of what was then labeled

22:25 the final solution in an urgent message to a representative of the World Jewish Congress in Zurich. The details were sketchy, but Schultz accurately reported that Hitler had decided to kill everybody they were labeling a deportee as quickly as possible. There was, of course, much more to this story than Schultz knew, and Polish intelligence had already pieced together a grim, horrific capture of what was going on.

22:56 Because they had firsthand knowledge of it happening in Poland. Relatively, let's see. The point here, however, is that a relatively minor industrialist working on his own without access to any secrets or being an insider in the Nazi party knew this was going on. And so did all of the allies because he was telling them. Hans Diekmann.

23:24 D-E-I-C-H-M-A-N-N, a junior executive of IG Farben during the early 1940s, reported similar experiences. In March 1942, Diekmann's work as a manager at an Italian contract labor facility took him to IG Farben's plant at Ottswitz, where many of the Italian workers he had enlisted were working.

23:53 Even at the early date, Deachman said, quote, no one could have approached the IG Farben works without becoming horribly, fearfully aware of what was happening nearby, unquote. The smell of burning flesh hung in the air. The work columns from The World of the Dead could be seen on all roads leading to the factory.

24:24 He later said that he went to Auschwitz 10 times between March 1942 and 44 and each time for a day. And everyone I met spoke of nothing but the camp. He also said, quote, my Italians, who in theory couldn't understand the people around them because of language, quickly managed to learn even more of the ghastly details than what others knew, unquote. The fact that.

24:54 Anti-Nazi outsiders, such as these two, were fully aware of what was going on is illustrative of how commonplace the knowledge was. But it does establish that such information was readily available. IG Farben appears to have been the first company to fully integrate concentration camps into their industrial production. And it eventually became known in Germany as a model enterprise for this new

25:27 Farben executives even provided advice and training to others, such as Volkswagen, Heinkel, and Messerschmitt. Hans Diechmann recalls a lunch he attended with a senior IG Farben manager in autumn of 1940, shortly after the fall of France, and before the mass.

25:56 Gassings at concentration camps happened. Quote, the four-year plans administrators had given IG Farben the job of building a giant synthetic rubber factory in Upper Cilicia, but a site had not been chosen. It would have to be near an area with an abundance of either essential natural resources like coal or of manpower. The IG Farben commercial and technical director.

26:27 George von Schnitzler and Fritz Dermier assumed that the other people present at the lunch knew that Hitler's largest camp for enemies of the regime was at Auschwitz, and they preferred to it as the only sure source of manpower, unquote. The sole inconvenient aspect was the

26:53 Probable necessity of occasionally, but suddenly having to replace carefully. Suddenly, but oh my gosh. Having to retrace, retrain personnel before the task was completed. Although this was over a year before the implementation of the plan we were just talking about. Oswich was already known.

27:19 to these industrialists as a place where thousands of people were sent that were being murdered. Yet they made their decision to build a plant at Auschwitz without a hint of cynicism or displeasure while sipping soup. In the beginning, the SS intended to create its own factories for manufacturing war material, and they were going to do it co-located with these concentration camps.

27:48 This was strongly opposed, of course, by the German elites because they didn't want to not make money off of this deal. Industrialists complained bitterly that the SS had ambitions of competing with them in private industry and eventually supplanting it altogether. You know, almost like they're communist. Building new factories inside the concentration camps would only aggravate the acute shortage of labor.

28:18 I don't know, maybe he shouldn't be killing so many people. If the factories would not come to the camps, German industrialists would go to the factories. The SS could supply forced labor to the industry and it would be of mutual benefit. Concentration camp prisoners could be a valuable assistance in factories already existing in the industrial sector. Robert Spears wrote,

28:46 quote, these factories would merely have to be expanded by means of building more buildings and adding additional machines. An experienced stock of specialists and engineers was already available. This argument for private business instantly won Hitler over, unquote. From mid-1942 on, the SS became a major provider of slave labor to the industry. German corporate leaders

29:16 courted the SS to obtain labor, contracts, and influence. Oswald's commandant, Rudolf Hoes, confirmed this. His affidavit during his trial states that the concentration camps have at no time offered labor to the industry.

29:39 On the contrary, prisoners were sent to enterprises only after the enterprises had made a request for concentration camp laborers, prisoners. In their letters of request, the enterprises had to state in detail which measures had been taken by them, even before the arrival of the prisoners, to guard them, quarter them. I visited officially many of these establishments to verify the statements.

30:08 During my official trips, I was constantly told by executives of the enterprises that they want more prisoners, unquote. Similarly, Oswald Pohl, the SS chief of the entire slave labor program, testified that nearly, quote, nearly all arms producers came to my department to get labor from the concentration camps. Those who already employed

30:34 Such labor forces usually ask for an increase in the amount of prisoners, unquote. Members of the board of directors of IG Farben, Simmons, Krupp, Volkswagen, and other major companies that desired large members of labor, forced labor, personally took on the task at high-level liaisons with SS to bid for laborers.

31:01 The corporate leaders with whom he personally negotiated for distribution of prisoners included IG Farben's director, Otto Ambrose, and Fitz Demir, Simmons director, Rudolph Bingle, and Volkswagen's Ferdinand Porsche. Pohl's assistants, Carl Sommer, who was responsible for many of the day-to-day details and the negotiations with their corporate customers, left a similar affidavit.

31:29 Sommer recalled SS agreements for provisions at concentration camps negotiated with Porsche of Volkswagen, director Paul Hilger of the major Schlotzgetter Steelworks and Wrightswerk Hermann Goring, Fritz Kratzfuss of Dresdner Bank, and

31:56 B-R-A-B-A-G, Energy Syndicate. In the middle of the war, Germany had become dependent on forced labor in almost every important sector of its economy. Some 20% of the entire workforce in Germany was made up of forced labor. Almost 40% of IG Farben workers were forced labor, including tens of thousands of inmates from Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

32:26 At the Reich's vast holding company for aircraft and arms production, Reichswerk, Hermann Goering said no less than 58% of its employees were forced laborers. German business fed on forced labor. The initiative for these programs came from industry as a solution for the problem that the Nazi government had.

32:55 Private industries, quotas for steel production, aircraft, weapons, and other war material, and the labor requisitions necessary to produce these items were determined through government industry consultations. It was not done by a Nazi fiat. In the mid-1942, Hitler gave Albert Speer the task of coordinating Germans' war production, realizing that he was no expert in industrial management.

33:25 Speer personally went about selecting persons in industry who were considered experts by their peers. Edward Zilbert wrote in a Rand Corporation analysis of Speer's military production techniques, quote, the men were not made civil servants, but instead were recognized as honorary members of the ministry in a fashion analogous to the drafting of prominent.

33:55 industrial leaders in the United States for war production positions and attaching them to the government as a dollar a year men. At the same time, Speer permitted these experts the greatest possible latitude in the operation of their particular specialties. This policy was given the name of self-regulation or self-administration of industry.

34:20 That is, the responsibility for the production programs rested on the individuals concerned with the actual production, unquote, and not the SS or the German government. Germans' industry unprecedented exploitation of slave labor became a crucial element of the Holocaust, but it is often overlooked in popular imaginations and portrayals of Nazi crimes. They tend to stress,

34:49 the Nazi state. Forced labor in Germany can be divided into three overlapping categories. Pressed, ganged, foreign workers, POWs, and concentration camp inmates. Each group is frequently described as slaves. The foreign workers became what amounted to chattel slaves. Most were Poles, Ukrainians, French, Russian.

35:20 and virtually every European nationality was represented in this group. The Nazi government effectively owned these workers and leased them out to private industry for war production or agriculture. All of the men must be fed, sheltered, and treated in a way that they are able to produce at the highest level possible. Labor Minister Soskel ordered. Soskel referred

35:49 here only to men, but in fact, 25% of these workers were female. They made minimal effort to keep any of them alive. They oftentimes referred to them as quote-unquote guest workers. In contrast, Jewish concentration inmates and many Soviet POWs were set to work in order to extract some labor from them during the process of destroying them.

36:19 The procedure typically required between one to six months before they were dead. The police agency pursued both of these avenues as far as enforcement and selecting some inmates for death through labor while immediately killing others. Prisoners worked to death were primarily Jewish, though they were in time grouped with Polish and Russian POWs.

36:51 The Germans created a hierarchy among these groups of people to treat them subhumanly. Combined with heavy doses of police terror, it contributed to keeping the system of forced labor in operation. On the next step up, the SS in some cases preserved the stronger, more economically usable people, at least for a time. They worked these men and women to death in vast construction or mining.

37:23 On the same step could also be found many unskilled workers from the East, Soviet and French POWs, and others destined to be worked to death. These came from another group, which included laborers from Vichy France, Italy, Belgium, and Western Europe, who were ostensibly, quote-unquote, they were portrayed as volunteers. They still had similar treatment.

37:52 This system employed both coercion and reward within boundaries. Foreign laborers could gain improved rations and other benefits as a reward for increased production. On the other hand, corporate managers could and often did push slackers into the other group to be marked for death. As the war turned against Germany, the labor ministry turned to simple press ganging of foreign workers.

38:21 Sockel told Albert Speer in early 1944 that out of 5 million foreign workers who recently arrived in Germany, not even 200,000 came voluntarily. Sockel's ministry began manhunts and roundups in Nazi-occupied areas for every man they could find to work in these companies.

38:46 In many instances, captives were shipped to Germany before they could even bid goodbye to their families. Sokol's men treated Ukrainian and Russian women with special cruelty. Females surprised in their bed were in some cases loaded into boxcars and shipped across Europe wearing only their underwear or a nightdress to the amusement of the guards. In Ukraine, the violence

39:10 occupying labor recruitment grew so severe that even the Nazis' own quizlings complained to Berlin. One protest in 1943 from a German-sponsored local administration lists 16 instances of violence during a supposedly voluntary labor enlistment campaign. One Ukrainian village that failed to meet its labor quota, the Germans murdered 45 people, 18 of them were children.

39:41 Industrial barracks for foreign laborers became de facto concentration camps, complete with barbed wire, searchlights, armed guards hired by the companies, corporate managers from Krupp, IG Farben, Demler, Benz, and similar companies enforced regulations under which laborers who sabotaged production or left their posts without permission were punished. Hold on a second. I got to plug in my phone.

40:22 Okay. With beatings, hangings, or deportation to the death camps. As the war grounded to its conclusion, the rations for workers in some factories fell to lower than 800 calories a day, guaranteeing a lingering death. In the end, German industry worked several million of these people to death and permanently injured millions of others.

40:53 The conditions at the SS concentration camps still got worse. There was no medical care. Inmates who collapsed or failed to turn out for the morning roll call were beaten or executed. By the end of the war, the SS had created a network of 23 main concentration camps that served as the hub of submerged nations, a nation of prison laborers.

41:26 These labor camps were usually separated from the extermination centers. The sprawling complex at Auschwitz, however, combined slave labor and mass extermination programs and the inmate population there was at times larger than a small city. The main labor camps were surrounded by at least 1,000 side camps established by German companies.

41:56 These facilities came under the administrative umbrella of main SS camps. But as a practical matter, they were ran by the companies. At Krupp Steelworks, for example, they controlled 55 of these camps in Essen area alone. The guards at each were Krupp employees, not SS.

42:20 At some Krupp camps, inmates slept in barracks. At others, they slept in tents or bombed out buildings. The company kept 1,100 French prisoners of war in a dog kennel. They were six feet wide and three feet tall, meant for sleeping, and they stuffed five of them in there at a time. Many Krupp inmates had spotted fever.

42:50 reported to CREP headquarters in 1942. Lice, the carrier of the disease, together with the countless fleas, bugs, and other things that inhibited these camps, made people sick. Nearly all of the inmates became infected with some type of skin disease during this time. The shortage of food caused many other ailments. Despite this widespread and oftentimes brutal

43:18 industrial exploitation, the important element in the SS cover story for the mass murders that became Auschwitz, the relatively visible forced labor inmates provided some of the answers, however, unsatisfactory to the nagging questions concerning what had become of all of these people.

43:44 Meanwhile, the Allies' carpet bombing of Berlin and other cities accelerated Germans' exploitation of these people. The Allied bombing itself was a war crime because they were not military targets. They tended to reinforce Nazis' effort to mobilize the German society to carry out its measures, particularly

44:10 the deportation aspect for Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels. It was a propaganda boon. For millions of ordinary Germans, as bystanders, it provided a lot of sauce for the psychological operations that was going on around them. The British bombing strategy was calculated to kill or maim as many German civilians as possible to spread terror and demoralize them.

44:39 and to disrupt industrial production by burning the working class quarters of the cities around them to the ground. Allied spokesmen frequently claimed at the time that a new offensive of which the primary target would now be the homes of German people.

44:59 Quote, no longer would a city in Germany be spared because of its remoteness from military targets and no longer would specific targets in large cities be aimed at rather than a city as a whole. The ferocity of the area assault was really now to be restrained only by technical or meteorological obstacles, unquote.

45:26 The U.S. in time adopted many aspects of the British air campaign. The firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the later use of the atomic bombs illustrate that. The opening years of the war, when the U.S. was still officially neutral, President FDR had forcibly condemned as a war crime any

45:54 Airborne bombing of defenseless cities. Great Britain and the U.S. were signatories of the 1907 Hague Convention, Roosevelt said, which banned attack or bombardment by any means of towns, villages, or buildings that were not defended. The phrase by any means whatever had been inserted specifically to deal with bombardment.

46:23 of defenseless civilians. The U.S. acknowledgement that bombing civilians constituted a war crime disappeared from Allied war propaganda after 1940. Let's see. By the time the U.S. entered the war, the Allies had already concluded that British and U.S. air campaigns against German cities would remain among their most important tactics. Before World War II was over, both sides had killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in this fashion.

46:54 each blaming the other for initiating it. As the Allies gained control of the skies over Europe, they stopped claiming that these acts of bombings were crimes, while the Germans stepped up their argument that they were crimes. The Nazis used Allied airborne crimes against Germans as a compelling and seemingly convincing reply for German audiences to the Allied charges of Nazi crimes.

47:20 Thus, contrary to Allied intent, bombing raids tended to mobilize the German population, reduced passive resistance to Hitler's policies among the German military and industrial elites to facilitate a more dramatic shift towards total war mobilization. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey

47:43 found that Allied bombing had little negative impact on the German war production up to the fall of 1944 and that earlier Allied raids were actually accompanied by increases in the level and efficiency of the German war production. U.S. targeting of German oil and railroad centers in the last months of the war, in contrast, does seem to have had considerable military impact, which makes you wonder why they didn't do it sooner.

48:13 Allied bombing fed directly into Hitler's war against the Jewish people as well because it provided a propaganda program. Propaganda minister Goebbels repeatedly linked the Nazi genocide of Jewish people to Allied bombing in his broadcast speeches throughout Nazi-occupied territory. He also commonly referred to

48:45 the Jewish press of London and New York for instigating Britain's bloodthirsty malice against Germany. He would say that these Jewish people will pay for it with the extermination of their race. That was Goebbels' message. He clearly believed that the bombings fueled German mobilization for genocide, giving ordinary Germans a justification for moving Jewish people around.

49:14 Otto Ohlendorf, a leading SS intellectual and ideologue, offered similar reflections during his post-war trial for the murder of 90,000 civilians under his command. Ohlendorf saw it as he saw it, the Nazi mass execution of Jewish children by gas and gunfire was directly comparable to Allied killing German children in their bombing campaign.

49:44 The murder of Jewish children, he claimed, was a security measure because otherwise the children would have grown up and surely being the children of parents who had been killed, they would constitute a danger no smaller than that of their parents. He continued, quote, I have seen very many children killed in this war through air attacks for the security.

50:14 The general public in Germany closely associated the Jewish people with the Allied bombing campaigns. At first, this took the form of popular hostility as supposed foreign spies and manipulators behind Allied governments, a view that was systematically encouraged, of course, by Goebbels. Indeed, diehard Nazis and their sympathizers in that day

50:41 present Auschwitz and other concentration camps as security measures created in a response to Allied initiatives. Later in the war, however, the reverse idea seemed to have taken hold among the German public, much to Goebbels' distress. Beginning at least as early as the summer of 1943, confidential police reports indicate a widespread populace of belief

51:08 that the Allied bombings was retribution for what was happening in these forced labor camps. Many Germans believed the cities and religious areas were being bombed because of what the Nazis were doing. Similarly, many Germans throughout the war regarded the Jewish as useful hostages who could be employed to deter Allied bombs. The elite Nazi intelligence service,

51:38 reported that many national comrades, Nazi party members, are of the opinion that the Jewish question has been solved by us in the most clumsy way possible. They say quite openly that our cities would still be intact if we had only brought the Jews together in ghettos without deporting them. In the way, and they don't actually mean deporting, they mean taking them to the camps.

52:04 the way we would have today a very effective means of threat and countermeasure at our disposal. These sentiments can also be found in letters sent by ordinary Germans to Goebbels' ministry. Such notes frequently included suggestions that Jewish people should not be allowed in air raid shelters, but should instead be herded together in cities threatened by bombs.

52:31 The number of their dead published immediately after each air raid so that the Americans and British would be accredited with their murder. The Allies avoided bombing Jewish in German city. Wait a minute. None of these popular German myths had any basis. In fact, there is no indication available in intelligence reports that Allies avoided bombing.

53:00 Jewish people in German cities, nor did the treatment of Jewish people in the German localities play a role in the Allied. And that's not what they were actually saying. They were actually saying that they wanted to use them so that they could blame the Allies. Allied bombing spurred German industry demands for concentration camp labor and often encouraged public assistance of mass slave labor as a legitimate war measure.

53:31 For example, Hamburg was the center of German submarine production and a likely target for Allied bombers. The city prepared for the worst and undertook extensive civil defense measures requiring millions of tons of cement, bricks, and other construction material. The SS established a major concentration camp, brickworks, and stone quarries in the local area.

53:57 In time, the Forest Labor Center became the flagship of the SS commercial subsidiary, the Deutsch ERD Steinwerk AG, which was provided considerable income to the police agencies. When the air raids came to Hamburg in 1943, the SS marched their tattered wretches out of the camp for a new task in the center of the town. There, tens of thousands of Germans saw forced laborers to

54:29 at work excavating unexploded bombs, clearing rubble, and pouring new concrete on docks and factories. By the end of the year, Hamburg city government and a score of private military contractors acquired squads of prison laborers from the SS to use in heavy construction, clearing bombs, and similar tasks. Within a year, hundreds of large companies in northern Germany had their own forced laborers and several

54:57 factories maintained full-scale company-owned concentration camps for these workers. By the end of the war, one of the camps alone had distributed more than 100,000 inmates to factories throughout northern Germany. German subsidiaries of U.S. companies, including General Motor, Ford, and several oil companies, made extensive use of forced laborers as well. Broken-walled

55:26 Concentration camps supplied labor to GM's giant Russellheim plant, which the Germans converted to aircraft engine making, and to the Ford truck plant at Cologne. International Red Cross records suggest that these two locations provided prisoners for the Ford and GM plant at Berlin and Brandenburg. But the evidence on the point remains fragmented.

55:56 It is clear, however, that the camp inmates were used for bomb clearing, cleaning up reconstruction, and other services essential to the factories. Ford's German management also extensively exploited Russian POWs for war production, which is generally considered a war crime. The prisoners' civil defense work became an important pillar of the system of mass forced labor.

56:23 the violence of war home to German cities, the Allied bombing contributed substantially to the atmosphere where mass slave labor could be accepted as an ordinary fact of life in Germany. Importantly, the framework of international law constructed by Robert Lansing, you know, John Foster Dulles' uncle.

56:47 And John Foster Dulles himself and others in the wake of World War I obstructed efforts to confront Nazi crimes. Much of the expertise in international law in both the US and the UK was centered around their foreign ministries, which dealt with international legal affairs daily. By the beginning of the Holocaust, these offices played a dominant and at times exclusive role in the legal precepts in

57:17 defending the Lansing-Dulles status quo. The principal U.S. government experts on international law were generally staunch advocates of a cramped conception of legality that supported the Hitler government's claim that it could treat civilians any way they wanted. International law experts at the U.S. State Department considered German forced labor to be legal.

57:46 perhaps more precisely, not legal, not illegal under international law. They regarded it as inappropriate, but not illegal. They also viewed that outside governments meddling in interior policies to include those of the enemy was not their job.

58:15 They also said legal authority to protect the rights of slave laborers inside of Germany was considered indirect threats to U.S. interests because their proposals would require official U.S. recognitions of the rights of laborers far beyond what the State Department regarded as prudent. Observers such as George Kennan, Joseph Grew, and other factions within the Foreign Service

58:44 regarded almost any German depravity against the Soviet Union to be legal because they regarded the Soviet Union as an illegitimate regime, even though they were their allies. Most of these Western experts had difficulty coming to grips with the growing evidence of the Nazi criminality. It cannot be said that German policy is motivated by any sadistic desire to see other people suffer under German rule.

59:13 wrote George Kennan in April 1941, even though he knew that was a lie, when he was the chief administrative officer of the U.S. consulate in Berlin. He wrote this after almost two years of well-publicized programs in Poland and mass deportation of German, French, and Dutch Jewish people to concentration camps.

59:43 Germans are most anxious that their new subjects should be, I'm quoting this, Germans are most anxious that their new subjects should be happy in their care. They are willing to make what seems to be important compromises to achieve this result, and they are unable to understand why these measures should not be successful, unquote. Kennan wrote that,

1:00:11 to fdr the public pattern of nazi crimes fell outside the realm of what these men considered criminal for them germany's forced labor seemed little more than a particularly harsh solution to a problem they ignored reports of any of the spies that they were employing coming back and basically telling people these were

1:00:39 Camps that where they were working both civilians and POWs to death. And some even went out of their way to discredit accurate information about what the Nazis were up to. And that accurate information was gathered by their own spies. So that's it. That's the chapter. So just as a heads up, the rest of.

1:01:15 the book is going to reveal the names of the people behind what George Kennan just said. There's a whole laundry list of names that are very prominent people in the State Department. As far as policy goes, most of them we've not ever heard of. That behind the scenes had made the decision, despite the intelligence that they had, that they were not going to

1:01:44 Embrace the crimes against humanity aspect of quote unquote war crimes and basically blanket that anything that was done inside of the areas that they were working in was off the table as far as being prosecutable. And there are a lot of reasons why the people in the State Department wanted that to be the case.

1:02:14 Because they're fully aware of what the United States had been doing as well. And I'm not talking about gassing people or anything else like that. But up to that point in the 1940s, the United States had overthrew a slew of countries over the previous 40 or 50 years. And so they're very, very stickler about what they classify a war crime as.

1:02:44 So just be cognizant of that because what they're afraid of is it's going to come back to bite them. Maybe one other factor in this is that, you know, it's, it's 1940, you know, it had been, you know, one lifetime since the civil war and since slavery had ended. So like the equivalent of that today would be we eliminating slavery in 1945. I, well, I think it's,

1:03:20 I think it's more, well, I'll say that. We'll come back to that point. I don't even think they viewed it from a slavery perspective. I think they viewed this as saying anybody, you know, like basically putting a fence around any territory that Germany occupied during, just fence it off.

1:03:48 And their philosophy is anything inside that fence that you do. None of our business. None of our business. Even when it included what they were doing to POWs that happened to be from the allies. None of our business. And you're going to see that. So, again, there there's much broader implications.

1:04:14 That if you can create the precedence, which they did in World War I with the Armenians, that if you are, quote unquote, at war with someone and anything you do with areas that you occupy, then fine. And the U.S. was deathly afraid that their bombing defenseless cities would be taken as a war crime.

1:04:43 because it was against agreements that we had signed. So they don't want to open that Pandora's box, and they don't care how many dead bodies are laying around. They're going to use whatever mechanisms they can to keep themselves clean. So, Colonel, a question for you. Like, our grandparents kind of told us that a lot of the Germans wanted to surrender to American soldiers.

1:05:15 And that in general, sort of the hostility experienced by the Germans was kind of in proportion to which parts of Europe had been occupied by enemy forces and the overall level of the war that was visited in the population. You have a master's degree in this. Is there sort of a correlation between the length and the duration of the war?

1:05:44 And its impact on the opposing side and the tolerance for war crimes is on the other side. So as you can see, there's not an easy answer to your question. And it's actually a very good question. You know, the same thing.

1:06:07 was happening in Germany that has happened in America for the last 70 years. There has been a massive propaganda campaign and nobody was better at it than Goebbels. And they manipulated the average citizen in Germany. Now, there's several aspects to your initial comment about who they wanted to surrender to. So part of the propaganda machine.

1:06:35 It's kind of twofold. So at the same time that in the lead up to World War Two, a lot of propaganda about Russia being the big boogeyman. And I know about the agreements and all that other stuff that was supposedly secret. But Germans believed the communists in the Soviet Union.

1:07:06 was literally the devil themselves. So, anybody that could surrender to the Americans or the UK forces in the theater, they absolutely did not ever want to. And then, on top of that, that's number one. They had just been largely defeated by the Soviets. So, in a war,

1:07:37 When Germany made such hate in invading the Soviet Union and did so well, there was lots of celebrations. The Germans were ecstatic at the fact that they were able to basically do what they did in what apparently felt like not that big of a deal. But the humiliation of...

1:08:07 the pushback and eventual defeat devastated them. And that made the propaganda of hating the Soviet Union 10 times more palatable to these people because now it wasn't just hate, it was hate and humiliation on top of that. And so there was no way any of them wanted to have anything to do with the Soviet Union.

1:08:38 So what was the second part of your – about the longer the war went on? The longer the war goes on and the more suffering the civilian population on the opposing side seems to suffer, it seems like the more tolerant that country is of war crimes perpetrated by them on the opposing side. Well, that kind of is illustrative of what the author was just talking about where –

1:09:09 The decision of the Allied forces to bomb defenseless cities was a propaganda boom to Goebbels. And the longer that went on, the more angry the German people got and the more supportive of the German government they became. And so, yes, the war fatigue.

1:09:35 And I was just going over for our other project, the Guatemala coup. And people get fatigued from the constant state of terror. And if the government they're very sympathetic to their government when they're when it first happens, because they view it being done from an outside.

1:10:03 But the longer it goes on, the more they're like, well, if this guy that they're attacking will just go away, maybe our lives will get better. So there is a psychological, as we all know, piece to this entire thing. If you are the aggressor and you do not have the territory under your control, you're going to.

1:10:32 push the psychological aspect of manipulating the people because you want to drive the people to do what you want them to do, which is topple the government. And that's why these Gladio events concentrate on controlling the masses. And they know specifically that if they can get enough people out there to make it look like it's critical mass, they don't ever have to go to the lethal part of this.

1:11:01 And so, yes, psychological operations of controlling the populations is a huge part of warfare, a huge part. And people do get war fatigue and the opposing forces depend on it. Miles, go ahead. Hi, Colonel. Emotional weekend for a lot of people. I did a pre Memorial Day space on Saturday, just kind of a pop up space.

1:11:36 I knew people were busy doing stuff, but it was really good. It went for five and a half hours. Ron Partain came in and then also Carolina. And I wanted to introduce them to each other. Carolina worked in D.C., but she gets really emotional around this time because she goes back to Normandy. She'd been going to Normandy for many, many years. And a lot of people don't understand.

1:12:03 what really happened there and what continues to happen there. There's a lot of ordinance that's unexploded, and they always have to. It's like they call 911 right away. And all the people in Normandy, in that region, they adopt American soldier at our cemetery, and all the crosses and grave sites are faced west, facing home.

1:12:35 And so Ron wanted to talk about the why of the war. And I cautioned him. I said, Carolina gets really emotional around this time because she made so many friends in that region. And she doesn't care about the politics of the war. She wants to talk about what happened. And she's got so many testimonials because people just didn't want to talk about what happened there.

1:13:04 Some information got out about a location. I mean, they'd throw everybody in. The Germans did this. They'd throw all the townspeople in a church and burn it down with them in it. And those remains are still there. They don't destroy anything over there. So, like I said, it was an emotional weekend. If you want to go listen to that space.

1:13:29 A lot of good information was talked about. It was like I was interviewing Ron for hours. We just went back and forth. And at one point I said, Ron, I think we've covered every country on the planet. So thanks, Colonel. Speaking of which, several years ago, they created the cemetery. They were commissioning. I don't know what it is.

1:13:59 They were hosting a ceremony at the cemetery that corresponds to Normandy in the Netherlands. And the guy that I interviewed that used to work for me, Senior Master Sergeant Justin Ivey, was invited over there, too. They did a big aerial display. He's a PJ, jumps out a perfectly good, which is pararescue. He was a medic.

1:14:27 And he was on our search and rescue teams in the Air Force for many years. And so he loves jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, which is not something that I would recommend anybody do, but he loves doing it. And he was invited over by the commander of that mission to be a part of that jump during the actual ceremony that they did there in the Netherlands.

1:14:57 As far as I know, the last time I talked to him, they have began doing like every five year anniversary of that at the one that's in the Netherlands as well. So, yeah, there's there's so much of our history. You know, that's kind of what's the reason why we're here.

1:15:21 There's so much of our history that has been buried from us. And getting to do, I was the officer. There's a place in Italy that had a major battle fought in the Southeast region as we entered the European from Africa through Sicily and then up through the boot of Italy. And I was asked.

1:15:49 to be the Air Force representative to that ceremony. It was some anniversary when I was over there in the 90s. And the reverence that American military is provided by the majority of the Europeans at those events. And I'm talking about the locals. I'm not talking about government people.

1:16:18 is something that I will never forget. I sat at the head table, people came up and everybody there wanted to speak to you and tell you how grateful and thankful. It was a very, very humbling experience for me. I want to say it was the 50th. Yeah, that would have been the 50th anniversary. It was an amazing, you know, something that

1:16:46 Most officers never get to participate in. So it was a pretty cool thing. Anybody else? Well, if I can just follow up, a lot of people don't realize that generational, they'll pass a GI's name down to a family member and they go and they take care of the gravesite and they remember them for eternity, I guess. So, I mean, they're so grateful for what happened.

1:17:20 They know that a lot of civilians died in the trying to soften up that target in the area. But they understood what they were trying to do. And it just it is really humbling. And that's why Carolina, it's just she's actually Ron wants to have her on the show and and not name any people. You know, Americans are French, but just tell some of the stories, the testimonial.

1:17:50 Stuff of what happened. Yeah, that's awesome. Thanks. That would be a great thing to do on Veterans Day, too, as a special show, because it helps when you realize after the fact that contributions and sacrifices that you make as being part of the military is appreciated by other people. It's a big deal. There's more American flags.

1:18:22 in Normandy than French flags. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. All right. So that's it. We will be back tomorrow at four o'clock and, um, I don't have anything tonight, but obviously we've got, um, alpha warrior tomorrow night at nine 30 and war hamster. And I will be back at it on Thursday at noon. Um, continuing our series that seems even more relevant now than it has ever seemed.

1:18:58 So I hope you guys will be able to join us. That show has become one of my favorite things to do because I learn something every show as well. And that just goes to show how important having these conversations are, because despite how much you do know, even for somebody who's now devoted the last two plus years to this effort.

1:19:27 You can always learn more. And it's so crazy how relevant is because I was on. I don't know if you I know a lot of you were there. I saw you in the line. I was there. He was covering my six the entire time, which I greatly appreciate. And more than he could ever know. So that presentation with me is a lot of fun. I enjoyed it.

1:19:58 Yeah. Well, you were you were instrumental in it. And I just I wanted to acknowledge that. And thank you. Thank you in front of everybody for joining and being there. So, Colonel, can I share one more story? Hold on just a second. Let me finish this part. Well, now you already made me forget what I was going to say. Go ahead, Miles. Sorry, Colonel. Yeah, there's a soldier that was buried in Normandy.

1:20:29 They couldn't find his twin. He was there too. They finally found him in a ship and they did a DNA test. So his remains, he's buried next to his twin brother. Thanks. That's cool. That's a cool story. I mean, it's an awful story, but cool at the same time that they went to that, the extent to try to find it and it became a mission for them to do that.

1:20:58 Yeah, the the the repatriation of our military. I will share this story with you. The general that I one of the two generals, one of the three generals that was in our front office when I was at Pentagon for the last two years had flown missions in Vietnam. And at the time that I was there, which was in the 90s, it was a time when they were bringing repatriating a lot of.

1:21:29 the remains from Vietnam. There is an entire team over there doing this mission. And they would go to Hawaii for identification at the lab there. And then they would be forwarded to Washington, D.C. to be buried at Arlington. And the general that I worked for was originally, I want to say he was from Tennessee. Yeah, Tennessee.

1:21:58 And he made it his mission that if he was in town, he did every single funeral. And you guys, I don't know if you know about, if you've never seen one of these ceremonial funerals that they have at Arlington, it's amazing. The horse-drawn carriage, the whole nine yards. And there is always a general officer from the Pentagon that leads the procession.

1:22:28 Every single one of the repatriation funerals that they had over there, if the general that I worked for was in town, he did it. And sometimes that would be three in a week. But that was his mission. It was something that was near and dear to his heart.

1:22:53 I would have to, I was his executive officer, so I'd have to rearrange meetings. And every time I saw the lady that worked at the Pentagon that handled the coordination of the general officer's schedules for those ceremonies walk in my door, I'm like, oh my God, not again. Because it's difficult because these meetings, you know, would have 10 or 12.

1:23:18 senior officers other general officers and you had to coordinate with all of their executive officers it wasn't easy doing that thing but it didn't matter he was going to do it and he got replaced probably about nine months before I left to go to MacDill and the new guy that came in he was scared to death of horses and

1:23:47 He looked at me and told me that if they came in, he was not interested in doing them at all. And he said when it came his time that he was going to be somewhere else. He was either going to be on leave because he was petrified of horses, but he didn't want me to tell the woman that did this that he was scared of horses. And I don't think he ever did one. He didn't do one while I was there.

1:24:15 And it's normally a duty. It's like an additional duty. Everybody has a pecking order and you have to go do it. But he never did one. So it's funny how different people handle things like that. But it was never a dull moment in that job. Okay. So that's it for today. Bridget, did you have anything you wanted to say?

1:24:46 Typey, typey, typey. I'm just typing away. Typey, typey. That meme that Bridget posts all the time of the cat typing on the typewriter, she has been at this for about the last two weeks. And that is what she has done morning, noon, and night. You guys are going to be very impressed when we're able to share what we're working on. I guarantee you. And Bridget has been the long pole in the tent on this effort.

1:25:18 So anyway, thank you, Bridget. You put all this stuff in my head, so now it has to go somewhere. And I'm so thankful I finally have found a home. Yeah. Well, you definitely found a home because you're not ever going to be allowed out of the house. Amen. Just to pick strawberries. That's pretty much it. There you go. All right. And cantaloupe.

1:25:42 Well, well, let me talk to you about this cantaloupe for two seconds. So I'm doubling my amount of plants this year, by the way. I don't even want to hear it. I'm going to have to make a trip to Missouri, you guys. So my husband's friend who comes over and helps us with some projects around the house came today bearing a cantaloupe.

1:26:08 And it was one of the best smelling cantaloupes I've ever had. And I took one bite of it and I'm like, that's not Bridget's cantaloupe. Bridget, that's the problem. Once you've had that, okay, I've gone through dozens and dozens. Every year I would plant like four different varieties looking for the perfect cantaloupe until I found that one. And it's like, after you have this one.

1:26:36 There just is no, you just throw the rest away. What's the name of it? It is a Burpee, which is the name of a company, Burpee Hybrid Cantaloupe. And it gets about the size of a basketball. She can verify there were, I sent her two and they were enormous cantaloupes. So Bridget put two cantaloupes in the mail and sent them to me.

1:27:01 And they were the best cantaloupes I've ever had. And I want to tell you that's a tall order because cantaloupes number three, strawberries number one, watermelons number two, and cantaloupes number three on my list of favorite foods. And I've had what the Hoosiers call in Indiana, muskmelon. And those are very, very large. And they're also very, very good. But Bridget's cantaloupe beat them.

1:27:31 Hands down. So. And technically it is a muskmelon. It is technically a muskmelon. So also just I want to share with you guys. I'm actually going to get to meet Bridget. I've never met Bridget in person. We are taking a second trip in August this year. And I am going to get to meet Bridget face to face for the very first time. And I am tickled pink about it.

1:28:00 So, definitely. We've done video, but we've never actually physically met before. And so, this is a big deal. It is a big deal. Because I feel like she's part of my family now. As I do with all of you guys. But especially Bridget. Bridget and I text morning, noon, and night every day, all day long. So, I'm really excited about that. But, anyway.

1:28:29 Thank you guys all for being here. Appreciate it. Craig says cantaloupe with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. How dare you, Craig? I would never, ever put ice cream on cantaloupe. As a matter of fact, I put salt on watermelon and cantaloupe. So no ice cream for me. But everybody's different. Okay. Thanks, everybody, for being here.

1:29:01 Too many personal notes on this show. I think pineapple go better with ice cream. I'm with you, Donnie Vision. As a matter of fact, you're getting really close to pina coladas now. Put a little rum in the pineapple with some ice cream. I'm there all day long. All right, guys. Again, thanks for being here. I really appreciate it. And I will be back tomorrow at four o'clock. Take care.

Entities here

Nazi Party50 World War II25 West Germany25 Allied Strategic Bombing Campaign24 Allied Forces21 United States18 Adolf Hitler15 Holocaust15 IG Farben12 Auschwitz12 Soviet Union10 United Kingdom9 Joseph Goebbels8 Poland6 Armenian Genocide5 Wanli Conference5 Edward Schultz5 U.S. State Department5 Hans Diekmann5 Normandy5 West Berlin5 George F. Kennan5 Netherlands5 Turkey4 Albert Speer4 Krupp4 Volkswagen4 Pentagon3 Reinhard Heydrich3 France3 Belgium3 Franklin D. Roosevelt3 Ford Motor Company3 Italy3 Fritz Sauckel3 Hamburg3 Fritz Dermier2 Adolf Eichmann2 General Motors2 Allen Dulles2

Claims made here

Nazi Party carried_out_attack Poland book_quoted ▶ 2:49

“I guess it's Action T4, A-K-T-I-O-N T4, that began in the fall of 1939. Reports from German-occupied Poland suggest that the SS gassed a number of Polish prostitutes at the same time. They were referr…”

Adolf Hitler ordered_assassination_of Poland book_quoted ▶ 5:51

“Thus, for the time being, I have sent to the east my death head units with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will …”

Nazi Party carried_out_attack Soviet Union book_quoted ▶ 6:17

“On at least three other occasions, Hitler pointed to the brutality of the Turkish regime and its willingness to strike without mercy as a model for his government. A new and more terrible wave of slau…”

Reinhard Heydrich headed Wanli Conference book_quoted ▶ 9:18

“Reinhard Heyrich enlisted the support of each of the major general ministries in the Nazi party organization in a concerted effort to clear the living space of Jewish people in a legal way. The tactic…”

Adolf Eichmann member_of Nazi Party book_quoted ▶ 10:15

“agencies were to cooperate with the SS in this plan. Hadrich assistant Adolf Eichmann estimated that there were approximately 11 million Jewish people to be quote-unquote cleaned up. He provided a cou…”

Adolf Hitler ordered_assassination_of West Germany book_quoted ▶ 15:14

“was viewed to be highly effective, and they began building centers to use it. They gassed 5,000 Romanians at a place called Chelmno. The previous October, Hitler had ordered that virtually all Jewish …”

France carried_out_attack Auschwitz book_quoted ▶ 15:45

“The Nazi occupation governments in France, Belgium, Holland, Slovakia, and Greece soon issued similar decrees. They hit the so-called stateless or refugee. Most of these people were deported to Auschw…”

Ernst Struss member_of IG Farben book_quoted ▶ 17:14

“Because, of course, most of these were co-located with the corporate community. The people who had began building these facilities, like the construction men, the engineers, and the temporary people c…”

Edward Schultz spied_on West Germany book_quoted ▶ 20:34

“for example, owned strategically important zinc mines and other real estate near what once what had been the German-Polish border. He was a conservative Christian Democrat and committed to anti-Nazi-i…”

Edward Schultz spied_on Netherlands speculative ▶ 21:28

“They showed off their knowledge in casual conversations. The results of this simple espionage was impressive. Schulte provided early warnings to the Allies of the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and…”

Edward Schultz spied_on Poland book_quoted ▶ 21:28

Edward Schultz spied_on Soviet Union book_quoted ▶ 21:28

Edward Schultz spied_on Belgium speculative ▶ 21:28

Edward Schultz spied_on Norway speculative ▶ 21:28

Edward Schultz spied_on Denmark speculative ▶ 21:28

Hans Diekmann member_of IG Farben book_quoted ▶ 23:24

“D-E-I-C-H-M-A-N-N, a junior executive of IG Farben during the early 1940s, reported similar experiences. In March 1942, Diekmann's work as a manager at an Italian contract labor facility took him to I…”

IG Farben funded Auschwitz book_quoted ▶ 24:54

“Anti-Nazi outsiders, such as these two, were fully aware of what was going on is illustrative of how commonplace the knowledge was. But it does establish that such information was readily available. I…”

George von Schnitzler member_of IG Farben book_quoted ▶ 26:27

“George von Schnitzler and Fritz Dermier assumed that the other people present at the lunch knew that Hitler's largest camp for enemies of the regime was at Auschwitz, and they preferred to it as the o…”

Fritz Dermier member_of IG Farben book_quoted ▶ 26:27

Nazi Party supplied_arms_to West Germany book_quoted ▶ 28:46

“quote, these factories would merely have to be expanded by means of building more buildings and adding additional machines. An experienced stock of specialists and engineers was already available. Thi…”

Rudolf Höss member_of Nazi Party book_quoted ▶ 29:16

“courted the SS to obtain labor, contracts, and influence. Oswald's commandant, Rudolf Hoes, confirmed this. His affidavit during his trial states that the concentration camps have at no time offered l…”

Oswald Pohl member_of Nazi Party book_quoted ▶ 30:08

“During my official trips, I was constantly told by executives of the enterprises that they want more prisoners, unquote. Similarly, Oswald Pohl, the SS chief of the entire slave labor program, testifi…”

Ferdinand Porsche member_of Volkswagen book_quoted ▶ 31:01

“The corporate leaders with whom he personally negotiated for distribution of prisoners included IG Farben's director, Otto Ambrose, and Fitz Demir, Simmons director, Rudolph Bingle, and Volkswagen's F…”

Otto Ambrose member_of IG Farben book_quoted ▶ 31:01

Fritz Dermier member_of IG Farben book_quoted ▶ 31:01

Rudolf Bingel member_of Siemens book_quoted ▶ 31:01

Carl Sommer member_of Nazi Party book_quoted ▶ 31:01

Paul Pilger member_of Schlotzgetter Steelworks book_quoted ▶ 31:29

“Sommer recalled SS agreements for provisions at concentration camps negotiated with Porsche of Volkswagen, director Paul Hilger of the major Schlotzgetter Steelworks and Wrightswerk Hermann Goring, Fr…”

Fritz Kranefuss member_of Dresdner Bank book_quoted ▶ 31:29

Albert Speer appointed West Germany book_quoted ▶ 32:55

“Private industries, quotas for steel production, aircraft, weapons, and other war material, and the labor requisitions necessary to produce these items were determined through government industry cons…”

Fritz Sauckel ordered_assassination_of Nazi Party documented ▶ 35:49

“here only to men, but in fact, 25% of these workers were female. They made minimal effort to keep any of them alive. They oftentimes referred to them as quote-unquote guest workers. In contrast, Jewis…”

Fritz Sauckel recruited Nazi Party documented ▶ 38:21

“Sockel told Albert Speer in early 1944 that out of 5 million foreign workers who recently arrived in Germany, not even 200,000 came voluntarily. Sockel's ministry began manhunts and roundups in Nazi-o…”

Krupp secretly_owned Nazi Party documented ▶ 41:56

“These facilities came under the administrative umbrella of main SS camps. But as a practical matter, they were ran by the companies. At Krupp Steelworks, for example, they controlled 55 of these camps…”

Allied Forces carried_out_attack Nazi Party documented ▶ 44:10

“the deportation aspect for Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels. It was a propaganda boon. For millions of ordinary Germans, as bystanders, it provided a lot of sauce for the psychological operations that wa…”

United States carried_out_attack Nazi Party documented ▶ 45:26

“The U.S. in time adopted many aspects of the British air campaign. The firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the later use of the atomic bombs illustrate that. The opening years of the war, when the U.…”

Franklin D. Roosevelt exposed Allied Strategic Bombing Campaign documented ▶ 45:26

Joseph Goebbels covered_up Holocaust documented ▶ 48:13

“Allied bombing fed directly into Hitler's war against the Jewish people as well because it provided a propaganda program. Propaganda minister Goebbels repeatedly linked the Nazi genocide of Jewish peo…”

Otto Ohlendorf covered_up Holocaust documented ▶ 49:14

“Otto Ohlendorf, a leading SS intellectual and ideologue, offered similar reflections during his post-war trial for the murder of 90,000 civilians under his command. Ohlendorf saw it as he saw it, the …”

Nazi Party founded Deutsch Erd-Steinwerk AG documented ▶ 53:57

“In time, the Forest Labor Center became the flagship of the SS commercial subsidiary, the Deutsch ERD Steinwerk AG, which was provided considerable income to the police agencies. When the air raids ca…”

General Motors recruited Nazi Party documented ▶ 55:26

“Concentration camps supplied labor to GM's giant Russellheim plant, which the Germans converted to aircraft engine making, and to the Ford truck plant at Cologne. International Red Cross records sugge…”

Ford Motor Company recruited Nazi Party documented ▶ 55:56

“It is clear, however, that the camp inmates were used for bomb clearing, cleaning up reconstruction, and other services essential to the factories. Ford's German management also extensively exploited …”

Robert Lansing founded U.S. State Department host_asserted ▶ 56:23

“the violence of war home to German cities, the Allied bombing contributed substantially to the atmosphere where mass slave labor could be accepted as an ordinary fact of life in Germany. Importantly, …”

Allen Dulles member_of U.S. State Department host_asserted ▶ 56:47

“And John Foster Dulles himself and others in the wake of World War I obstructed efforts to confront Nazi crimes. Much of the expertise in international law in both the US and the UK was centered aroun…”

U.S. State Department covered_up Holocaust documented ▶ 57:17

“defending the Lansing-Dulles status quo. The principal U.S. government experts on international law were generally staunch advocates of a cramped conception of legality that supported the Hitler gover…”

Joseph Grew member_of U.S. Forest Service documented ▶ 58:15

“They also said legal authority to protect the rights of slave laborers inside of Germany was considered indirect threats to U.S. interests because their proposals would require official U.S. recogniti…”

George F. Kennan member_of U.S. Forest Service documented ▶ 58:15

George F. Kennan covered_up Holocaust documented ▶ 1:00:11

“to fdr the public pattern of nazi crimes fell outside the realm of what these men considered criminal for them germany's forced labor seemed little more than a particularly harsh solution to a problem…”

Nazi Party targeted_for_regime_change Soviet Union documented ▶ 1:07:37

“When Germany made such hate in invading the Soviet Union and did so well, there was lots of celebrations. The Germans were ecstatic at the fact that they were able to basically do what they did in wha…”

Operation Gladio targeted_for_regime_change West Germany host_asserted ▶ 1:10:32

“push the psychological aspect of manipulating the people because you want to drive the people to do what you want them to do, which is topple the government. And that's why these Gladio events concent…”

West Germany carried_out_attack Normandy host_asserted ▶ 1:13:04

“Some information got out about a location. I mean, they'd throw everybody in. The Germans did this. They'd throw all the townspeople in a church and burn it down with them in it. And those remains are…”