Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 146 - The Jewish Avengers

Episode Date: March 15, 2021

"A nation for a nation" Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys sources: https://apnews.com/article/tel-aviv-international-news-israel-ap-top-news-69cb4cdfab7d416a968b95aef87d18c1 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-an-eye-for-an-eye-jews-who-sought-to-kill-germans-in-revenge-for-the-holocaust-1.8094962 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/26/second.world.war Lang, Berel (1996). "Holocaust Memory and Revenge: The Presence of the Past". Jewish Social Studies

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now, back to the show. Okay, this is Shake Hands with Danger, mix, track four. Shake hands with danger mix track four. Shake hands with danger. Meet a guy you ought to know. I used to laugh at safety. Hello. And welcome to another episode of the Lines of My Duckies podcast.

I'm Joe. And with me today is Liam Anderson, one of the Well, There's Your Problem crew, the only engineering podcast worth your time, and honorary Armenian as of today. As of today, hi, yes, I'm Liam Anderson. I just wanted to say real quick that this is literally my favorite podcast. I've been calling my girlfriend all day long. I'm so excited to go on Joe's podcast Joe and I are friends now we hate the Turks together like you wouldn't understand our bond

and there's just some fucking lady on Twitter telling me that I am an ungrateful dog I guess for being Jewish and she thinks I'm Armenian and I don't know what to fucking do with that other than like yeah I like Jew Armenian yeah we're pretty close so just like the idea of this

lady being like i'm gonna put all these fucking racist caricatures on twitter and why are people getting mad at me for it and i'm just like lady a you can't type b you sound dumb as shit c fuck you yeah she like it's she tried to do the own where where she like posted a picture of my face which like number one i'm not the worst looking dude in the world. Sorry about it. Number two, like, listen, if you want to flick your bean to me, that's fine. Just don't tell me about it. You know, it's weird because we've been on a podcast together before.

I was on. Well, there's your problem. What seems like forever ago now. And the Lang tunnel collapse or it's like and it was the hardest I've ever laughed while doing a podcast to the point I had to turn my mic off I will

not be doing that I'm gonna make Nate's job for the next hour and a half the worst fucking time he's ever had I have been doing that for almost three years I always wait I always wait. I always wait for the day that Nate has simply had enough. And like one of our mics just cuts out.

That's it. And it's just a voiceover of him talking as opposed to like whatever the actual podcast audio was. So he has never actually been on the show. But the only time he has been kind of on the show is when he spliced himself in making fun of me for pronouncing things incorrectly was that the battle of ajin core episode yes it was uh yes it was and let me tell you the uh the the problems with only using the uh the medium of reading for an episode and not watching a video and how things are pronounced first like I could probably figure this out the British

had some captured Turkish warship I think that which was the Agincourt but they called it a Jincourt nice because it was because of its luxurious officers quarters and the fact that the rest of the ship was basically like a you know like a

floating pallet that sounds very british um now i reached out to you uh to do an episode finally uh i don't know why i waited so long and i gave you options and you picked by far the most depressing option that has that's liam baby and i you know credit where credit's. I told other people the next time they came on, Francis and Shox, my other group of long suffering guests, that they would not have to suffer through an episode about crimes against humanity. Liam, you do not get the same privilege. Oh, that's fine. That's fine. I can do this, baby.

This is what all those, what I would would do to be like i said to you uh before we started recording uh being a jewish kid in the united states is basically just going from holocaust museum to holocaust museum and them telling you over and over why the holocaust was bad like i was this is this is like a truly horrible uh sentiment i had but i went sorry on birthright and they take you to yad vashem the jewish holocaust memorial and i remember thinking like all right listen like at the end of the show like it's like day nine and i'm like exhausted and miserable and i said as an aside to my friend who was on the show with me i was like all right listen like if you've seen one holocaust museum

you've seen about like we know what happened like it's like, and I was just like, no, the ancestors. No, I'm so sorry. And I told my dad about that when I got back to the States. And as like, and I'm a grown man at this point, but like, as like punishment for me being so insolent to the ancestors, sent me non-stop like holocaust themed reading material god that's bleak and i was and he was he was he was just like i basically expect a report on this when i see you next i'm like i'm 27 years old he's like don't care you know it's funny because as an armenian kid growing up my childhood was virtually the same and that i went to a lot of holocaust museums as well

because there's like i grew up in detroit so there's no like armenian genocide museum and the holocaust museums always kind of have like a nook dedicated to us yeah so we're like look there's your museum kids over there we're just like well we feel bad why should we get the whole museum yeah we're gonna do a good deed and give the Armenians a corner. And, you know, I did the same thing by going over and seeing a memorial. Admittedly, like the Memorial Armenia is like fucking huge in regards to like the closet that we normally get. But like I've been to so many of them. It's funny that we have the same experience, though.

My my mom was not as hardcore about it because she was like way into us just being American. Like she totally bought into the assimilation thing. And so my name is like Joseph and not like, I don't know, Armin. You should just change it to Armin. I like that. Armin could save you you just be real obvious when you're emigrating i mean i'm already like the if i don't shave or cut my hair for two weeks i am the most armenian man that most people have ever seen um so i might as well just slap like hejop

is my first name and just fucking go all out um i always liked that i i i've been told sometimes as by a jewish person sometimes you don't look jewish and you're always like oh what does that mean and like at this point i'm just like you know what it fucking means okay like like my girlfriend told me she's like he's passing um point she was like you know you don't like you look irish you don't look jewish and i was like oh what does that mean and she's like you know what it fucking means like you're not five three with curly brown hair you know yeah i'm i'm very i'm six three so like i tower over most other armenians that i meet uh yo dude when we meet if we meet in person what we'll do is i'll stand on your shoulders and we'll be 12 and a half feet tall yeah uh that's how we finally bring down turkey is my both trotting together our genocide

power running through istanbul just knocking shit over at the most inconvenient times i i i've been to istanbul and i'm just like ah lovely city full of the worst fucking people i've ever met in my whole life just everyone there from bartenders to like cab drivers to like museum and has was the worst fucking piece of shit and i was just like you fuck you like fuck you man like i don't give a fuck that your economy's in the toilet i didn't crash the lira like suck a dick like the one guy like told me to my face i hadn't gotten a chance to shower because we had literally just got off the plane cadre was like oh you smell pretty bad and i was like thanks asshole like i know i fucking do dude i've just been baking in the nega for a week and a half like suck a dick and uh it's so fucking funny you mentioned the the little armenian genocide

nook because when i was at the hockey hall of fame do we have a genocide nook at the hockey hall of fame no of course not. Fuck that. We're not going to learn about schools. But they put the miracle on ice in this tiny little corner in the back of the museum. And they're like, the greatest hockey game ever played. The 2012 Olympic Final between the US and Canada. And I'm just like, which doesn't have a movie made

after it like no it's the miracle on ice you ungrateful fucking can i just can't imagine i just can't help but thinking now that every time you build a museum you have to build the obligatory or median genocide nook like just here we are at the museum of natural sciences anyway in trebizond uh but you know um uh so i have unfortunately like i said you picked the fucking most depressing option i gave you which means we have to start this off by talking about the holocaust uh done all right childhood part two let's do this now i'm actually not gonna talk too much about the holocaust because i assume anybody who's listening to this show has heard me talk about it before or they have a baseline knowledge of what the holocaust is now i shouldn't be too open with

that assumption because according to a recent study two-thirds of americans don't know what the holocaust is is that fucking serious now admittedly one of the like one of the stipulations were like they didn't know how many people died in it which is weird because that's like the we make it pretty obvious everybody fucking knows like there's various different degrees of um revisionism depending on what circle you're in when they try to like get rid of you know especially like homosexuals or trans people are those numbers or maybe romas depending on what part of eastern europe that you're in um oh yeah uh it wasn't a genocide it was just a friendly dislocation of their people yeah it was um a cleansing due to ethnicity oh fuck i hear the phrase ethnic cleansing you you can just say

genocide folks it's the same thing it's the same thing we we know what you mean uh so i'm going to go on a limb and assume that most people listening aren't that fucking stupid and you're aware of what the show is um so we're gonna move past that and we're going to talk a little bit about what my, what my favorite topic on any genocide is. And that is armed resistance to that genocide. Um, because as I'm sure you can attest and things that people have told you,

one of the first things that anybody ever talks about is like, wow, they just went into the camps to be slaughtered like animals oh they they love to do that they love to do that shit and I'm just like a please don't smirch the memory of my people that way be not on and yeah

they just they fucking far right like even the there's the I can't even remember the name but there's a reactionary far right Jewish gun owners group that loves to do that shit. And they're all these bizarro world. Like, first of all, they're all Soviet expats. Yeah, we're weird.

I don't know how many of your listeners are Jewish, but like specifically ex-Soviet American Jews who emigrated, especially right around the fall of the berlin wall absolutely the most insane right-wing reactionaries you've ever fucking met they are they're like to the right of kissinger on foreign policy like dude they're they're all nuts and like one of them like my parents attend this like synagogue in beautiful york pennsylvania not a huge jewish community um and the one guy who's like who's a soviet emigrant was just like i'm gonna bring my gun to the congregation like for self-defense and i'm just like please do not do that like in pennsylvania in york pennsylvania which is just it's a fucking farm town man like not to mention there was a fucking terror attack in a synagogue in the

same state yeah yeah you might want to you might want to check like and he he really did see nothing wrong with it and eventually the rabbi had to be like if you do that you're banned and he was just like oh like like persecuting gun owners are we like nazi germany and i'm just like what happened to you in 1989 that like your brain broke this way i just hope like deep down inside i hope he's one of those rabbis who got really into krav maga and just snaps the dude's fucking arm at that point dude our rabbi is like he's like six six and he's a good like he he is also doesn't look jewish and i just always wanted him to put people who talk on the high holidays like in

sleeper holds because I think he could do it just like leave the bodies like the sleeping bodies of of congregants who wouldn't stop talking like on the Bema just like this is an example and like to be fair like this actually isn't an American

only thing in Israel inrael's early history it was common for military-aged males who survived the holocaust to be discriminated against um to the point that like their children would lie and say they were uh sabras like you know born in israel yeah so they so they wouldn't get the stigma of their parents having gone to a camp rather than fight it's fucking absurd and armenians have the same thing to be completely clear um it's just not as widespread because ours you know happened over 100 years ago so our survivors are all dead uh but yeah it's that's one of the reasons that i like because you only hear about this sort of thing where it's always reactionary ass right wingers

and they're like well what if they had guns like you ignorant ass motherfucker they did like they tried they sure tried like uh you know we we talk about i mean i'm not sure if we're gonna talk about this episode the warsaw ghetto uprising they held out for a long time against a whole lot of gestapo and ss Yes. We're not going to talk about it so much. We're going to talk about a different ghetto. But we do bring up the Jewish Fighting Organization, which took part in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And I definitely want to talk about that later on,

and I will fucking keep your name in mind, because that will be an amazing episode. Oh, thank you. But the reason why I bring that up is Jewish partisans, especially those in the East, were caught between a, I guess, easily called a rock and a hard place. On one side was, you know, the Nazis and their functionaries.

And the other side was the Red Army or various groups of other partisans, some controlled by the Soviets and some of them not. Now, the Soviet Union and some of these vaguely nationalist, sometimes communist partisan groups that formed after the invasion by Germany were, in many cases, incredibly anti-Semitic.

The Soviet Union itself was also incredibly anti-Semitic, though it wasn't always that bad, or was that supposed to be that bad? No, that's sort of a comes with a geographic territory you happen to be standing on.

Well, we have the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Thanks, guys. The Pale Settlement Law. Like, for instance, after the Revolution, the Pale Settlement Law was abolished from the Tsarist days that pretty much exiled Jews to one very specific sliver of land and nowhere else. And that was actually something the Ottoman government did as well when, like they said, quote, the Armenians can live in the desert and nowhere else, where, you know, you die because you can't live there.

but in many cases like specific classes of jews couldn't live in this pale territory or the pale area which effectively forced them into even greater exile or just made them live as illegal people uh you know thankfully something that doesn't happen anymore in our country as we know yeah um but the bolsheviks attempted to repress Judaism and Jewish culture, something they attempted to do to all minorities within the new Soviet Union and force them into a Russian monoculture. Um, Lenin himself wrote both for and against Jewish pogroms, and it really all depended if it was politically expedient. to them at the time yeah you get a lot of people uh who who tend to say oh well you know the soviet union well when it was jewish i'm like no like you you get it's it's a it's a we were a tool of political convenience just so we've been a political football since the second temple burned like we we we know better than that we've we've we've tried to kick that football one too many times yeah i mean for example obviously there's the white terror by the white russians during the

civil war they targeted virtually everybody walking but mostly jews and lenin spoke out against that because he had to look good in comparison to the white russians which again low fucking bar but then in 1919 in his quote policies on the ukraine he said that ukrainian jews shouldn't be allowed in any administration positions within their new system so yeah he got a bit of a mixed bag comrade um rucification is bad i think we can kind of agree on that yeah good thing we don't still deal with that today like that war that my uh fucking half my goddamn country was taken in september yeah no they oh god i just that's the worst part about dealing with these online twitter dweebs that are all 17 and tankies

it's just like they're like ah soviet union always good and i'm just like much like every other country soviet union a land of contrasts like i am begging i'm begging you to to not just read theory yeah um i would instead invite them to read history books uh particularly those not written by uh grover fur um a guy that is somehow still alive uh because there's no justice in the world. Is he fucking really? Yeah, yeah. At least that's what I heard. I could be fucking wrong.

I don't know. To Wikipedia. Now, by the 20s and 30s, the Soviet Union officially made a scream against Jewish people bad again. He's a year older than my dad. What the fuck? God damn it.

See, this is where I say something that Nate has to cut out but i'm gonna i'm just not gonna do it do it you can do it joe make make nate earn that money joe um but unfortunately you know uh with jews being able to legally exist again becoming a thing then stalin took over and did most of that and undid most of that oh he sure did but we're supposed to be a big fan of of stalin nah fuck him fuck stalin yeah yep uh he used leon trotsky's jewishness against him and sparked anti-semitism he sure did also the doctor's purchase folks yeah and the the rootless cosmopolitans uh which is

like my my personal favorite spin on that old you can't be a loyal you can't be loyal to judaism and whatever uh nation of birth that you're in you know the same thing that nazis and everybody else did oh they love the dual loyalty myth man they love that they love that slandered man i'm just like as as a jew like i can tell you like i i have many problems with the united states but if as you'll see with my twitter exchanges with that dumbass turk on twitter i love my idiot country yeah it's like i will defend armenians i have like the armenian state doesn't mean a whole lot to me uh mostly because i don't think states are a great idea same i feel that but does not mean i'm cool with being genocided again so you know a little bit from column a a little bit from column b i feel that i i very much feel that and then you get the people who are like oh well you know you're jewish free palestine and i'm just

like does it say israeli anywhere in this fucking bio no it doesn't it says humanistic jew stop that yeah that's i think and that is you know as especially what the soviet union and what a lot of other people like you can't have loyalty to home and, you know, at the time, a country that does not even exist. And now a country that you strongly disagree with. I sure do. But listen, I went to Israel. I didn't marry a nice Jewish girl. My girlfriend is Catholic.

I took BB's money. I did it right. girl. My girlfriend is Catholic. I took BB's money. I did it right. Now, the reason why I bring all this up is because that's how Eastern Europe was at the time of the Nazi invasion. And like most times in history

before it, and for some time afterwards, it was not a great place to be a Jewish person. Most of this ingrained anti-Semitism that had lingered in the generations meant that when the Nazis came through, many civilians were more than happy to sell out their neighbors. It meant that they would be left alone

while others became full-on supporters of the Nazis' goals. Despite the fact that, based on dumb Nazi race science, the very people that were helping them were absolutely next on the chopping block due to the hunger plan that was going to kill them in a couple of years uh lithuania it's just poland too man you get these people like uh it's so fucking funny because as a jew

you always hear about that you hear about you know the the few jews who did return to their homes and like them were killed or whatever but i just i i always i always heard about that as a kid the sort of like they were sold out by their neighbors can you believe that and that's why you we all should have our own country and i was just like or or something else you're so close maybe something arsenic in a water supply maybe many people are saying this and that is what brings us to our main

character today a guy named Abba Kovner have you ever heard of him before I have heard of daddy Abba actually my dad is a is a big was a big fan he fled my dad was a big fan. My dad was always proud that he fled into the woods and then became a Soviet partisan and survived the war.

I just love this idea of Abba sitting under a rock, eating some berries, shooting Nazis. He was a poet by trade, if I'm not mistaken. He's actually way cooler than just that um now he was born in 1918 in ishmani belarus but moved to vilna then part of poland now called villainous and part of lithuania i'm sure i pronounced it incorrectly most of that in fact who gives a shit yeah uh if if you if you live in lithuania come at me bro also me I believe that we could win Kovner was

made in a factory to be something that the Nazis hated more than anything else not only was he a Jew but he was also a communist he was a member of what was called the Hesomar Hatsir something else I'm sure i

pronounce terribly if yeah you got pretty close joe you got pretty close my lithuanian is bad my hebrew is worse it's okay there are they were a socialist zionist uh organization and he was actually as far as i know related to uh meyer villner which is fucking hilarious because that guy was i think he's his cousin you imagine going to that reunion just like gunfire and just like vanguard party as you're trying to read a poem and is my year related to golder my year I'm sure probably through some through some corrupt bloodline that's a fucking power

family right there yeah like like he said this is a Jewish secular Zionist movement and it's actually still in existence today obviously in a much different form by the 1930s the vast majority of its members were centralized

in Eastern Europe, and when the Nazis came storming through, they switched from being labor organizers to actively fighting the Nazis. Now, some of the most renowned Jewish partisans, not counting the Belsky brothers, thanks to the Daniel Craig movie, were all

members of this organization, to include Mordecai Analewicz of the jewish fighting organization who led and commanded the warsaw ghetto uprising and have you seen defiance yes i have i like it even if it like really whitewashes some of the fucked up shit the belskies did yeah it it does but like there's this also, just as a Jewish person, there's this narrative that I find really interesting that the people, especially who resisted, because there's always this idea that Jews went like lambs to the slaughter, which actually Kovner himself said, I think. Oh yeah, we'll get that.

There's a narrative, at least as a Jewish kid growing up in the sort of rural suburban area of Pennsylvania, that like your heroes should be people who fought back against injustice. Like I learned about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising when I was like five. And my dad, especially, always tried to do the like, no, armed resistance is appropriate when your people are dying. tried to do the like no armed resistance is appropriate like when your people are dying so i've always been kind of baffled by the like jewish people went meekly to the slaughter when it's like no like we we held out with basically like potato masher grenades and nothing else for a few weeks yeah uh especially in the account of like warsaw guy like they're making fucking zip guns and shit and fighting against artillery. What do you want them to do?

This is made out of a lead pipe. It's just a lead pipe. But before the Jewish fighting organization and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, there was Daddy Abba. He and like 55,000 other Jews, a number which would eventually grow higher,

would be forced into the Vilna Ghetto when the Nazis took over in June of 1941. And as soon as that happened, Kovner knew that he had to get the fuck out of there so he could fight some Nazis. So he and several of his friends fled the ghetto with the help of a local convent fleeing into the woods. Now, this is where he actually ends up being way cooler than how you described him. After this, Kovner and his friends joined a local partisan group,

or at least tried to, but he was rejected because they were Jews. Well, thanks, guys. Good looking out, comrades. That is when Kavner came to understand that while they might have some allies, the only people that were going to care about saving the Jews of Europe

were the Jews of Europe. These partisans did not give a fuck about what was happening in the ghetto. So they'd have to form their own group to fight Nazis from within the ghetto itself. So they snuck back into the ghetto to form the United Partisan Organization, which fell under the command of Kavner's friend,

Yitzhak Wittenberg. So they left. We're free. We're like, fuck that. We're going back in. I love the idea of just being like, we got out and we're getting like, just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in. It's just a guy through a fence handing you a machine pistol. Now, the UPO had some problems pretty much immediately, one of which was a lack of weapons and recruits, but another was the ghetto itself.

Now, inside each ghetto, the Nazis would set up a government led by other Jewish people, which was known as the Judenrat. Now, to be fair, most of the people serving on the Judenrat were not exactly given a choice on the matter if they want to be part of the ghetto government or not. So they're not collaborators or anything. In many of these governments, in fact, most of them, they would immediately be supportive of the resistance groups that would pop up within the ghetto that were normally there to smuggle people out and supplies in, though sometimes it was armed resistance. And in a lot of cases, for instance, Warsaw, that government would actually become part of the command structure of the resistance itself. Vilna, it turned out, was not one of those places. Nope. The government

was headed by a former army officer turned cop named Jacob Jens. I think it's Jens or Gens. I'm not sure. Now, he took his job very seriously and ruled with an iron fist to the point that other people from the ghetto called him king jacob which is not a good sign now jacob was working within the idea

that um if he and the ghetto uh that he was kind of in charge of but not really cooperated with the nazis things would go better for them and his people would be treated better. It was this line of thought that led Jacob and his fellow Jewish police officers to round up Jews to be deported to Ponary in 1941, where a massacre would take place that would eventually include 100,000 people. At least a thousand of those people, the Jewish police of Vilna were directly personally responsible for. people the jewish police of vilna were directly personally responsible for yeah it's worth noting that that uh king jacob i believe that he could essentially work with the germans and sort of convince them that uh if you let the jews do it uh you know that that if you let the jews do it that he would be able to save more Jews. He did have to do some pretty horrific stuff,

like giving up old people in exchange for saving other residents, and then bribing the commander of the Padari killing squad to accept 400 instead of 600, that sort of thing. Yeah, he made a deal with Martin Weiss. He was a fucking collaborator. I mean's that's the fucking word you want normally i will say the dude you didn't rot was not but uh yens or gens or whatever the hell absolutely a fucking collaborator uh and in case uh you you you guys are ever wondering why i what the word kapo means when I call another Jewish person that on Twitter. It's actually a functionary in the extermination camps. So don't use that word if you're not Jewish.

And most kapos didn't have a choice. I know. That's something I struggle with as a Jewish person, man, is like, you know, you get obviously like you you want self-preservation kicks in at some point. And like, well, it's easy for me to say, like, you should have just, you know, you should have died rather than then give up your people like that's not a fucking choice I'd like to make. Yeah. And I mean, a lot of the capos in the camp specifically were, I mean, some of them were criminals who were not Jewish. Right. Others were Jewish.

And for instance, like in Auschwitz, the kapos had an uprising and destroyed one of the others. Yes, they did. So, like, you know, the kapos weren't a monolith. And I feel like that's unfair to a lot of them in comparison to Jens, because the Kapos didn't actually kill people. Jens himself personally murdered 400 people. Yes, he did. And I thought he was

saving people to do so. Do not do this, people. Yeah, it turns out you cannot, in fact, make deals with Nazis. And, you know, tell Joe Biden that. Yeah, Yitzhak Arad, who's a historian and a member of

what would go on to be called the Avengers, was hesitant on calling Jens a collaborator. He said that he he erred fundamentally

in his conception that the German administration regarded the existence of the ghetto and its inhabitants vital for economic reasons. His idea was, at least this is what Arad says,

is like Jens believed he could show the Nazis that like, hey, obviously we're good for you. Look at the work that we do. So you can't kill everybody. That's very stupid uh but i'm trying i'm trying to put myself in these shoes um especially what what kovner is going to run into himself um because like kovner is one of the first people that is not like actively in the ss that openly says the nazis are going to kill all the jews right um so like and when he went into

the camps or sorry when he went back into the ghetto he didn't go to any camps um he was like hey they're gonna fucking kill us all everybody's like no they're not that's stupid why would they do that he releases the pamphlet in what 41 or 42 i think 41 yeah let us not go to lambs to slaughter uh and then it was it was that nobody knew how widespread it was yet as far as i remember well the reason for that really believed him so he started talking about they're going to kill all the jews in uh 1941 now the reason for that a lot of people were like yeah like come on why the fuck would they do that is because the von c conference wouldn't be held until january of the next year right um where the nazis themselves would hash out the details of their so-called

final solution um but they had been setting death squads into the east to murder jews like at ponary um since operation barbarossa um but you know the around this time when he goes back into the camps um there's a couple hundred thousand people already dead or when he goes back into the ghetto my bad i keep saying that um by the time the von c conference is done about a half million people are dead um and you know when he saw because like kovner found ponary when he was still out in the woods right he he saw the killing grounds and he was like they're they're gonna kill us all use those all on all of us yeah yeah and he like like you said he printed a letter and it'd go down in history uh where he released it in the vilna ghetto titled we will not let them take us like sheep to the slaughter.

And it not only became the organization's motto, but it was the first documented source outside the SS inner circle at this point. Cause at this point, the Von C conference hadn't happened, but you know, the Holocaust is well underway. It's well underway and known,

but only within certain groups on the Eastern front. Right. So like outside of various, a very small circle of commanders and high ranking people, he's the first person to say anything about it. The letter ended with quote, we will not be led like sheeps to the slaughter. Sure.

We are weak and helpless, but the only response to the murders is revolt. Brethren, it's time to die fighting like free men and live at the mercy of murderers arise arise with your last breath this shit's fire right yeah no uh you could you actually could pick up his mixtape on uh on that piff uh but yeah there's a there's a long There's actually a guy from Detroit, your brethren, who has a klezmer band who did a song about Daddy Abba. I think I saw them on tour once.

It was weird. Yeah, no, it's this sort of like you'd rather die upon your feet than to live upon your knees. But at that time, he would have sounded like a crazy person. And I think one of the reasons one of the things that does piss me off so much about Wolf, the Jews had just been armed is like nobody fucking even knew what was happening because nobody told a shit because there's a whole war going on. Nobody fucking even knew what was happening because nobody told a shit because there's a whole war going on. Yeah. And that like he he was kind of like gaped at like a crazy person or an idiot.

People just didn't believe him because I mean, like. I can only imagine someone come like your life is shit. Obviously, life in the ghetto is terrible and people are being killed. Violence is begets violence. And this is your reality. But you don't think you and everyone you know is about to be sent to a fucking death camp not to mention especially as an eastern european jew your grandparents or great-grandparents probably remember the last fucking time some shit like this happened like oh no the fucking other people are going to come

through and burn our shit down and then steal from us. They might kill your cousins or whatever. At least these speak German, I suppose. That's a refreshing change of pace. Right. Like pogroms are such a ingrained part of a cultural memory that someone saying like, no, no, they're going to kill all of us this time. They're like, why the fuck would they do that? That's stupid. Come on. I just love the idea of like your old Jewish grandfather being like,

come on. That's like bullets are whizzing past him. Yeah. I mean, like that's like quite honestly what Jen's thought. Like now they can't kill us all. We're worth too much. Right.

Like, don't worry, man. Don't worry. Not to Nazis. No, it's, it's,

it's, it's, it's funny. Not funny, but like the sort of desperation to survive. And like, you know, well, if we just it's like an abuse victim. Like if we just cooperate, you know, then they'll leave us alone. It's being a Jewish person, as I imagine being an Armenian person is fucking depressing, man.

Yeah. the impression is is fucking depressing man yeah i mean a lot of our um cultural touchstones all go back to one specific event that happens to be one of the most like you know after like the holocaust or before the holocaust one of the worst crimes that's occurred in human in modern human history uh and one was modeled after the other yes so like it was. We had a lot of... General trauma is... Or generational trauma is real, folks. 100%, yeah. And it's always really weird.

Like, I did a series on Monty Melkonian, and one of the things that kept touching back to him is that he was born in the United States, went over to Armenia to fight, and one of the things is like, no matter where you went, Armenians always kind of bounded that way and it's like incredibly fucked up how we internalize that but you know a

lot of that i believe is because it's unresolved to this day nobody's ever been held accountable for it unless it's through vigilante justice uh which was pretty fucking rad uh and like nobody accepts it it's still not legally accepted as a thing in the united states uh you know but you know we get our corner in the holocaust museum so we have that going for us yeah we're happy to share our corner with you that's that's the that's like it's so funny man because and where i grew up too there weren't many Jews, so you get these, like, bizarro world bonding experiences about, like, the weird shit your upper-middle-class

liberal parents did, like, liberal Jewish parents did, where, like, they're just, like, bursting through a door and be like, you gotta go meet with the Holocaust survivor at the synagogue, and it's, like, 8 a.m. on a Wednesday, and you're like, why the fuck am I dead? It's like, never again. Never again means never again. Get your ass there. ass there but cartoons rod shut up and go to school yeah and then and then

your dad calls the school because they're not teaching the holocaust history right and then you're sitting in the office and he's just screaming at the teacher and your rabbi's involved and yeah it's a whole mess that actually happened to me he was he was very mad that that they weren't teaching holocaust history uh in a way that he thought was appropriate so he called up my history teacher and just screamed at them for like an hour the joys of teaching history folks as i i had a holocaust history class when i was in high school and uh it was taught by some italian guy from new jersey uh yes notable notable survivor of the holocaust vincent gabagool now when he uh when kovner returned to vilna he and and you and passed out his pamphlet and everything,

he probably expected some kind of popular uprising, and that's not what he got. Nope. But he did get some recruits, and he managed to bring together kind of like a cross-hatching of just Vilna society. He brought together communists, Zionists, labor organizers, rabbis. Didn't matter. What do you think that happy hour looked like? Yeah, it's fucking popping uh unfortunately it was only about 50 to 70 people depending on tens of thousands that's that's not great returns on investment there no um and they were mostly

unarmed because you know one of the problems being smuggled into the ghetto is you have to leave a lot of your shit behind but they did manage to rage a gun and hand a grenade hook up with the same convent that smuggled them out the the same convent that helped smuggle um him and the other members out in the very beginning and smuggle him back in also gave them weapons thanks dominicans we appreciate can you imagine just like the priest is just like oh welcome back boys it just like gives you a 22 here's your sacrament it's just a fucking grenade all right that we're gonna let you're lining up for communion and a guy's just stuffing uh ammunition in like a sack for you.

The body of Christ hands you a fucking MP24 or whatever. All right, go get him, champ. Now, Kavner's small group was now armed, again, by the convent. That's just fucking wild to me. They also began openly resisting the Germans. They had a hard time doing a ton of damage due to Jacob, though, and his Jewish police. Now, normally how popular resistance works for people who are unaware is people support you.

Obviously, the people of the ghetto hate the Nazis. Therefore, they will support the resistance. And that makes your job easier. You get better recruits. You get more hideouts. You don't have to wonder where your next meal is going to come from or someone's going to fucking snitch on you. That's not what happened because he had the cops and the cops are actively working against them.

In other ghettos, the cops were also normally resistance fighters because they realized that I'm going to fucking die too. So what would happen was, say, the resistance would carry out something, say, like shooting a Nazi. The Nazis would then clamp down harder on the ghetto and instead of clearly like understanding that like the Nazis are doing Nazi shit Jacob would instead blame the resistance for the increase

of Nazi pressure on the ghetto so like you know the Nazis are being dicks to us because the resistance shot a Nazi not like the Nazis are being dicks to us because they're not because they're nazis yeah that's a that's that's a jesus christ antifa are the real fascists yeah what what is the fa jacob uh weird tell us what the fa is yeah yeah and like that made uh And that made life for Kovner and his fighters pretty hard. And so by 1943, with resistance rising within the ghetto, Jacob finally straight up sold out the partisan leader,

Yitzhak Wittenberg, to the Nazis, who at no point had figured out who was actually in charge. So they couldn't do a decapitation operation and try to take out the leadership. Now, Wittenberg heard through the grapevine that the Nazis had a picture of him. They had his name and they're looking for him. And he knew if he tried to dive into the hideouts or whatever, or even run from the ghetto, the Nazis would just come down on the partisan group. So he simply walked into the Gestapo office

and turned himself in knowing he was going to die because he figured if they killed him, the heat would come off the partisans. And that's kind of what happened, honestly. Now, there is a rumor that Jacob and Wittenberg had an agreement ahead of time, and he slipped him a cyanide pill while he was in jail. There's no evidence of that other than what seems like historical revisionism on Jacob Jen's family side.

And there's also some argument dad to be a collaborator. I get it. Yeah. Yeah. I understand why you do it, but you're wrong. Yeah, I understand why you do it, but you're wrong. There's also some arguments on if Jacob himself sold out Wittenberg or another member of the Juhnrat did it, but it seems like it was probably Jacob.

But after this, Kovner, now in charge fully, realized that, like, we got to get the fuck out of here. Time is running out. So once again, they escaped with the help of the convent just be like oh leave it so soon boys it's just like the priest continuing to hand you like

machine pistols like a nice catholic grandmama it's just the priest sending you out with just like I don't know like molotovs in a literal bread basket however do not drink these these are for throwing not for drinking is some members of the partisans stayed behind so like you know when the nazis came to liquidate the ghetto the parsons rose up again this time openly um and unfortunately so this is from the Shua Research Center.

Quote, in September 1943, the Nazis began liquidating the ghetto. The FPO, which is their Lithuanian acronym, prepared to fight and called on the ghetto's inhabitants to join them in revolt. However, the inhabitants did not respond, thinking that they

were instead being sent elsewhere to work. Which was a common view held by residents of not just the Vilna ghetto, but many ghettos. Yeah, and in the Vilna ghetto, specifically, I believe that attitude was helped long by the fact that Jacob Jens was there to attempt to

smooth things over. And Jens and all of his Jewish police, who had been killing hundreds of their own inhabitants, were shot alongside the rest of their ghetto it's crazy how that works yeah now kovner renamed his group the avengers or the knock mim um i'm working on my hebrew uh you're doing all right i got some other parts in here hold your applause applause. Well, listen, man, my Hebrew is limited, we'll say, so I can't come at you too hard. Now, Kovner, free from the ghetto

and working hand-in-hand with Soviet-commanded partisans, had a new goal. He would not only still attack Nazis, but he would also tag anybody who even remotely worked with them. Civilians, women, children, unarmed, armed, it didn't matter. And many of these outlying villages near the forest, Soviet partisans would raid town for food and materials. Now, some of these villages willingly supported the partisans, giving them all the food they would need, while others didn't support the partisans maybe due to the fact that like hey we need food too while still others openly supported the nazis um now it's a bit of a

gray area the partisans weren't exactly a scalpel of the situation um you know sometimes they just acted like bandits um yeah they may have done a massacre once or twice. Yeah, 100%. The Kanuchi Massacre. Yeah, they did a massacre. It's worth noting that, as far as I know, a lot of the Kanuchi Massacre is at least controversial. So, you know, maybe we didn't kill 38 civilians. Who knows?

Who's to say? Now, about the Kanuchi Massacre, one of the things that happens in a lot of these towns that maybe lean more towards the fast side they reach out to local police like hey the fucking partisans are demanding we give them food now those cops were controlled

by Nazis and they're considering Nazi auxiliary so when you reach out to these groups they don't really have the manpower so the cops would give you guns to defend yourself. Now, the partisans, Kovner and his group included, seeing that these civilians were now armed by the Nazi-controlled state,

assumed this meant they were collaborators. So in 1944, Kovner and his unit raided the village of Kanuchi and killed 38 civilians and burnt everything to the ground now this could was this a massacre probably were they collaborators maybe war sucks yeah war's not fun yeah it's almost like war is in fact bad a moral yeah there's there's there's there's there's not a lot of morality uh when you're being genocided. And Kovner was not against

killing civilians, as we will soon find out. Now, afterwards, Kovner and his partisans helped the Soviet Red Army liberate the city of Vilna after it had been liquidated. As the war ground to a close, he busied himself helping surviving Jews

escape Eastern Europe, mostly to what would become Israel, then the Palestinian mandate. But also, as the war ended, Kovner and his comrades saw things like the Nuremberg Trials unfolding and got pissed off. Now, the reason for this is, so this is from a study when it comes to denazification. I talked a little bit about this before during our Clean Wehrmacht episode, but I do need to retouch on it a little bit to explain why Kovner may have not just been a bloodthirsty

psychopath. So after the war, Allied officials estimated about 13.2 million men in Western Germany alone as eligible for automatic arrest because they had been deemed part of the Nazi apparatus. Fewer than 3.5 million of these were ever charged with any been deemed part of the Nazi apparatus. Fewer than 3.5 million of these were ever charged with any crime.

And of those 2.5 million were released without trial. So Kovner saw things like the Nuremberg trials and be like, okay, you're killing the top Nazis, but I didn't see, you know, uh, Reinhard Heydrich or any of these people fucking killing people in the ghetto.

What about all the henchmen? What about the soldiers? What about the middle? What about middle fucking management? Reconstruction sucks. You don't need to give Nazis an olive branch. No, you do not. So Kovner decided this is a bunch of bullshit, and he formed another

group called Dad Yahudi Nakam, or Jewish Blood Will Be Avenged, commonly known as the jewish avengers um now while allied powers were busy uh holding a few of the top nazis accountable kovner and his group hunted everyday members of the party soldiers and the ss i do yeah it's you know this is this is not a entirely foreign uh thing for jews to do the mosad also carried something out like this after the black september massacre operation wrath of god oh where they may have accidentally waxed just some innocent waiter in lillehammer norway

but things happen but he looked vaguely like that black september member yeah uh i do love the idea of just like like obviously the only good nazi is a dead nazi but you imagine just being like the nazi's hr guy or just some like lower level peon and you come home after a long day of like re-assimilating into normal german society. And you just take two to the dome. You're like a finance guy in the Wehrmacht. Skirted out of duty, like faked injury. Like, haha, I got out of that war. And you sit down and there's a fucking guy sitting in your car.

You go home in your German car and there's just a pipe bomb under it. And all you ever did was rearrange spreadsheets. I admittedly those guys get the wall all right if you're really into excel they get the wall you're getting you're getting you're getting knock mimmed um there was a there was an armenian group after the genocide as well that did the same thing and they obviously like one of them killed talat pasha like effectively turkish Hitler. But also, they killed literally anybody who had any kind of role within the Ottoman government. Like, oh, I see you're the bodyguard for the fucking Sultan's harem. Getting the wall. We're going to kill you with a fucking hammer.

And they did things in a very unique way. Nobody has any fucking idea how many people Kavanaugh and his hit squad killed a very unique way. Nobody has any fucking idea how many people Kavanaugh and his hit squad killed throughout, not only Europe, but Canada, Latin America, and Russia. Yeah, they went international. They fucking missed their worldwide. There was even a plot to get into Landsberg prison where a lot of the

high-ranking Nazis were being held. And because they realized some of these guys are going to get hung. Cool. But a lot of these guys are getting fucking prison sentenced. We don't want any of that bullshit. They're going to get let off early. And Kavner didn't know. He was 100% right about that. Almost all of them had their fucking life

sentences converted. But the problem was he couldn't find any guards willing to take a bribe pussies because like most of the guards were American at the time at least according to one of the other knock mim guys

and they point out like okay you bribe me and I leave and then like a dozen prisoners are killed that's still to fall back on me. That's fair. That's fair. Yeah. So the team made car accidents happen and they ran people over on the side of the road a lot.

It was noted that a very low tech way to achieve your goals. I like that. Just do the fucking burnout on someone's skull. Just doing a shug night to some ss asshole and it's noted that like uh auto vehicle deaths uh by former members of the ss mysteriously skyrocketed um they also strung people up from trees and broke into their houses and shot them um but they didn't want to like openly murder them because

it caused other ones to go into hiding though they didn't like I said these guys aren't exactly a fucking surgical scalpel here like that one time a former high-ranking Gestapo official had gone into a hospital for a routine surgery right and he was mysteriously found with a

fucking vein full of kerosene and dead I have experimental procedure see how they like it they also tracked one guy down all the way to suburban Winnipeg Canada oh my god

he was his name was Alexander Locke and he was an Estonian or he was an Estonian auxiliary that worked in a concentration camp. And he was thought to be responsible to around 100,000 deaths at his camp. So they waited for Locke's wife to leave to go to an evening cinema trip, and then confronted him in his home with all of his crimes, evidence, and like, we're going to kill you. However, we invite you to kill yourself first. Otherwise, we're going to come back and kill you and your entire family.

So he killed himself. I don't know. Hey, man. Hey, man. If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid. Yeah, I mean, they didn't want all these guys to catch one between the eyes because then their other nazi buddies would find out but if a whole bunch of them mysteriously killed themselves it's genius yeah but after looking at the amount of germans

he killed which is thought to be several dozens uh he figured at this rate he was never going to avenge the victims of the holocaust so covener decided the was never going to avenge the victims of the Holocaust. So, Kavner decided the only thing that could avenge the Jewish people was doing a genocide of his own. He said, quote, a nation for a nation and came up with a plan to poison the municipal water supply of Nuremberg, Munich, Hamburg, and Frankfurt

with the goal of killing 6 million Germans to make up for the 6 million dead Jews of the Holocaust. It's poetic. It's poetic. I just I love we've got to think bigger. What can we do? It's like a marketing meeting. Yeah, right.

A marketing meeting of your local vigilante group. Boys, our Nazi kill uh is doing well it's like that scene in glorious bastards where he's like uh with uh stieglitz or whatever oh yeah your status is not the killer is still uh amateur we would see it if you wanted to go pro yeah that's exactly what kovner is the the brad pitt in this situation kovner is trying to see if people want a GoPro. I just love the escalation from we're just going to hunt down individual Nazis and kill them too. What if we killed five cities worth of people? And admittedly, a lot of people in the group are like, wait, what?

Yeah, that's right. Five cities, baby. Fucking do a Western Germany tour, baby. Now, this is where a lot of details get murky as you can imagine a lot of the people involved in this don't want to say they were because you know the genocide um but the first thing that kovner had to do was find a massive source of arsenic uh and now he was a this is all mostly hearsay but it's been repeated by multiple people so i will say take this to the grain of salt. He was put in contact with a guy named

Chaim Weizmann, who then put him in contact with a chemist named Ephraim Kitesur, who then hooked him up with a fuckload of arsenic. Now, the reason why a lot of people say that this did not happen, mostly that being Weizmann and Kitesur, is that they would both eventually

become presidents of the state of Israel and that would certainly look bad on the record no they don't care there's the there's the early not early Zionist groups but there's a group called the Stern Gang

and the Haganah and they blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and then one of them went on to be president so like this shit happened a lot of israel's early days just like you you done you know massacring british soldiers or whatever and then you turn around and you're president now yeah and i mean to be fair kovner would eventually go and join the haganah as well um a lot of these guys would um but as you can imagine, it looked kind of bad if they were openly acknowledged the fact that they were going to murder several million Germans.

Both denied this ever happened. But even in Kovner's telling that this plan did not work, obviously, as you know, those cities still exist. So instead, he managed to get some arsenic from a different chemist at a local university in the Palestinian mandate and hid them in cans of condensed milk. Now, this is where kovner ends up being kind of dumb um in order to travel uh to the palestinian mandate which the british had to severely

restricted immigration uh of jewish people into because they realized what was happening and were very bad at administrating and you know look at the problems that we have but you if you were a Jewish person in Europe you couldn't just be like I'm gonna go to Jerusalem like that yeah so he disguised himself as a member of the Jewish Brigade which fell under the British Army and he had fake papers

to go along with it and he was traveling by boat his name was called out his disguise name now this led to a problem his disguise was immediately found out because in order to be a member of the jewish brigade you had to speak english which kovner did not so all they had to do is like hey are you whatever his disguise name is like uh what like oh he doesn't speak fucking english yes how you say uh yes

and like uh you know so he was caught immediately um and he managed to ditch the cans of condensed milk overboard with like into the water which can contain enough arsenic to kill millions of people maybe

they're still there i don't fucking know um but you know that he wasn't caught because the brits were onto his plan to kill half of germany he was caught because they assumed that he was working with many of like say like the haganah and smuggling people into the palestinian mandate and he was not the first person to try to disguise himself as a member of the Jewish Brigade. There's also the possibility that he was ratted out by people like

Kaitzuer and Weizmann because they looked at this guy who came at them with a plan to kill 6 million people. They were like, this might hurt our chances of starting our own country if we kill Germany. So they turned them in. But that's kind of hearsay, I guess.

But either way, Kavner was not out of the operation. Leaving the Avengers, under the command of Joseph Hartzman, or sorry, Harmitz, who decided that he saw this first plan, which, Harmits, who decided that he saw this first plan, which, to be fair, he was on board with, but he now saw it as being untenable. So he had to move on to

Plan B. Plan B targeted Stalag 13, a prisoner of war camp that housed solely members of the SS that were being processed and arrested, somewhere in the somewhere in the process of being

looked at to make sure they weren't some horrific war criminal and then when they were found out not to be they were just released basically scot-free so this was the good plan yes I do like I said I like I like the chutzpah of

just like we're gonna get so much fucking arsenic you guys it's so incredible like uh that he had like harmuts like just got all this arsenic very easily well he was ready to go well cobner's like no i gotta go to fucking palestinian mandate i gotta put on a fucking disguise, get all these fake paperwork, and Harmut's like, yo, I got all this arsenic right here. You guys wanna go? Like, I'm ready.

I gotta be a fucking secret agent. Now, they knew they wanted to target this place, but they weren't entirely sure how until they realized that the camp's bread all came from one local bakery. So Harmut's picked out someone from the Avengers ranked who looked young enough, but also Aryan enough to be hired by the local German bakery,

which I have to say is the most horrible sentence I've ever had to say out loud recently. Glad I could be here for it. Like, imagine you're a Jewish partisan. Like, which one of us looks the most german so we could like pass into like our almost certainly anti-semitic baker he speaks the third most italian i don't speak italian uh he settled on a guy named ari distill who looked to be about 15 years old and had blue eyes and sandy blonde brownish hair. So he got the job.

Yeah, and he got the job as a trainee baker and the plot had to wait a couple months for him to slowly work his way up through the bakery ranks to be able to work on his own in the morning. This is the long game, man. You know someone in the Avengers is like,

can we just go in the front door and machine gun these people like we could but have you guys heard of my incredibly elaborate and needlessly time-consuming plan your plan doesn't have nearly enough arsenic in it and eventually Distel worked himself

up to that point but Distel could only smuggle in a little bit of arsenic at a time and hide it under the floorboards without being noticed by his boss. So over the course of several days, Distel managed to bring enough poison to kill tens of thousands of Nazis.

I'm not sure exactly how much arsenic that is, but I don't know. Enough. I'm not a chemist. I'm going to go assume like, assume like i don't know cargo pocket full well they had 40 pounds worth at least so yeah they had to bring in so like um you're like the guy having to oh i i have to go use the bathroom real quick as you like drag in more things labeled not arsenic. Sacks of totally safe flour? Why are they all in this corner that's never lit?

Why don't we have any rats anymore? Like, fucking the skull and crossbones just painted over with a bigger red X. It's just like a smiley face. So on April 13th,th 1946 during a shift change harmat sent several other people with distel to paint the bottoms of around 3 000 loaves of bread with arsenic um and i don't they like had to work it into like a solution so it could be easily paintable uh i would like to assume that they melted bread or something, or like melted butter to fucking like paint it on

like garlic bread or something. You got just like the idea of like opening up a pizza from Papa John's. Oh no! They confused the arsenic butter with the garlic butter. Just dying. Who got all the butter?

I love the idea. I got all the butter? I love the idea. I do like the idea. Like a little pastry broth with just arsenic. It's like very time consuming, like painting very slowly over. And it's like a fucking Olive Garden commercial where it zooms in as the bread rises. Yes.

But they were able to get 3000 loaves of bread, but they were unable were able to get 3,000 loaves of bread but they were unable to paint the rest due to the fact that the bakery was actually on strike and they thought that bringing in too many people into the place at once might tip off the US Army

who Harmatz got the tip that they might be looking into several members of their group. I don't know. Maybe for all the car related murders. What do they care? We're just doing their job for them. Yeah, exactly.

Their original plan was the target 16,000 loaves of bread. by the New York Times in 1947, there was enough poison left over under the floorboards to kill 60,000 people if they would have eaten it. But I also love the idea that all of these Jewish communists are like, shit, we gotta fucking scab the bakery so we can poison the Nazis

because there's a strike going on out front. After painting the bread, the Avengers escaped to southern France. The next day, the bread was distributed within the camp and poisoned over 2,000 Nazis. I do love the idea of just like, alright, see ya.

The entire bakery is mysteriously leaving. We no longer wish to work for you. No other reason. We're joining the picket line. Bye. Bye. Hundreds of the SS guys were badly poisoned and nearly died.

Reportedly, like a dozen or so were blinded or otherwise crippled for life yeah now the avengers claimed because they rightfully assumed that the amount of poison that they use literally at least going to kill hundreds of people probably thousands and they said that they killed you know all the way up until very recently harmats who died very recently uh said that like oh hundreds of people died the army just doesn't want to talk about it but what probably happened is that they spread the arsenic too thin that's a shame yeah uh or another thing that could have happened yeah if you see a guy eating bread and he suddenly collapses to the ground and he can't see you're not gonna eat the bread yeah exactly that's probably

what happened or you know you only eat a little bit of it because it means odorless and tasteless if it didn't hit so some people so quickly you know a lot of people probably would have eaten all of their fucking bread and died but apparently hit real fast they

got the two parts arsenic one part butter recipe perfectly but yeah nobody died uh nobody has any fucking idea how they how the nazis got so lucky that's a damn shame yeah um everything that we have like even hard mods is like that what can you do uh now after after this the avengers laid low many of whom traveled to israel to fight in the coming war of independence or do terrorism uh while still others continued to hunt nazis in europe for years afterwards uh and like to the to be fair nobody's exactly sure like the the people that stayed behind um uh like how many people they killed but they're like

Harmatz is probably like well if we killed several dozens they probably killed hundreds so like my personal favorite thing about all this is that absolutely nobody stayed quiet about it you know what I mean like normally when you

I don't know nearly kill thousands of people like people like harmatz is like and distel would be like i don't know what you're talking about i've never seen that camp before they're just like yeah we fucking did it like harmatz wrote a whole fucking book about it i i just love the idea of like you know oj's book if i did it like like harmatz basically writing a book on that time i tried to kill a whole bunch of pows and almost got away with it too yeah i love the like but like and i like i can't blame you like after the war like you probably want the notoriety and you want people to know like this sort of shit doesn't go unpunished uh yeah i i do i do just love the idea of like of of writing this book somewhere like in like somewhere in someone in hiding and being like and i do it again too

well that's the funny part is um well all this is going on um in 2000 germany opened up a case against harmatz and distel who who were still alive, for attempted murder. I'm assuming tens of thousands of counts of attempted murder, right? And then they quickly shut the case for, quote, unusual circumstances. I assume because they realized

that they were, in fact, Germany, and about to prosecute Holocaust survivors for trying to kill Nazis, and realized how bad that looked and they're like ooh we're going to close the book on this one I do I do like the historian Dina Porat who's

done a lot of work on Cobner and the Avengers said that the failure of it is a miracle she's not sympathetic to Nazis but she believed that the idea of a nation a miracle. She's not sympathetic to Nazis, but she believed that the idea of a nation for a nation was evil. But I gotta say, as a Jewish

person, nah. They kind of deserve it. You die, you die. You are a fucking Nazi. For wiping out the SS camp, I don't feel bad about it. If they would have succeeded with murdering five cities,

I'd be like, oof, okay. But before his death in 2016, Harmatz was asked if he regretted anything that he did. He said that, yes, in fact, he did. He regretted not killing the SS men that he had poisoned. Wait, repeat that? Repeat that? So, before his death in 2016

harmats was asked if he regretted anything that he did and he answered that he did in fact regret something he regretted not killing the SS men that he had poisoned yeah yeah that's fair it's like you know that uh um the journalist has to be like

I got him he's he's gonna act uh you know that he is shameful and like yeah you know do you regret and just be like yeah i regret that we didn't kill more fucking nazis sunglasses fall over his head he lights a fucking cigarette like blows it or some shit the journalist's face and that is that is the wonderful tale of the Jewish Avengers. Now, Liam, on your show, you do a thing called Safety Third, which is one of my favorite parts. Thank you. On our show, we do a thing called Questions from the Legion.

From the Legion. Now, today's Question from the Legion, I guess I should say if you want to ask a question from the legion donate a dollar to the show you get access to the discord okay i thought you were telling me personally i'm like joe i signed up for your patreon no no not you liam you the listener okay you can ask a discord through patreon you can slide into my DMs, email Messenger Pigeon, put a message in a bottle, let it go off the western coast

of the United States, eastern coast of Australia. Maybe it'll float over to me. Today's question from Legion is a mix of the two. That is, what is your most personal safety third experience that you've had?

This one is asking in the military, but I'm curious for you and me, what is your most safety third experience that you've ever had? Oh, man. Okay. So I, when I was, it's not super exciting, but when I was an undergrad, I wrote a a paper uh describing the i've only really held boring jobs but describing the the ways casinos lied to uh atlantic city and said like oh you know we'll have jobs and we'll definitely pay taxes wink wink uh and i wrote that i wrote that paper with a professor of mine and i got a sternly worded letter uh from the casino trade association told me that i was banned from every single casino in the united states and canada that's just gonna get you kneecapped by some guy named vinnie yeah

so like i my girlfriend has convinced me or tried to convince me numerous times to go to atlantic city and i'm just like petrified that one day I'm going to walk in and they're going to be like you write that paper and I'm just going to end up in like a shadowy dark room just like with my kneecaps broken and you know like my kidney missing I think my most safety

third moment is and I wrote about this a little bit in my book hooligans of K&R but there's some stuff I left out. Great fucking book. Go buy it. Please buy it. I would like to continue eating. So every time we went on a foot patrol,

we had to carry a mind detector with us, a metal detector. They called it a mind detector. Didn't fucking work, right? It would beep if you pointed at anything. To underline this, the guy that was... Oh, did you get the British one that beeped at anything? So it was American. Well, we may have contracted it out.

We may have shared it, but it was from ostensibly an American company. I don't fucking know. It was this fold-out piece of shit, and I could point it straight up in the air, and it would still beep. Nice. We're literally carrying it for no fucking reason and it's heavy i mean it's 20 ish pounds but when you're carrying it for 12 fucking hours while walking however many miles up mountains and shit shit gets heavy um and finally i folded it up and just put it in my backpack um and my lieutenant uh got pissy and was like why aren't you carrying

the mind detector and i was like sir why aren't you carrying the mind detector? And I was like, sir, I don't need a fucking mind detector. And he's like, why? I'm like, I'll look my fucking self. And I just went over to this very suspicious-looking pile of wires, and I just fucking kicked it. There's pictures of me doing this. We actually had a combat camera guy with us,

which now are just called i don't know photographers and he has a picture of me kicking the suspicious mound of dirt um and like from a very safe distance mind you and i was like nope nothing there sir walked over to the next like culvert where they put a whole bunch of bombs and stuff normally and i just fucking kicked the side of it like still good 100 should be dead uh but that's 100 like my safety third i love it you'd rather do that than fucking carry the uh to carry the mind detector around i would rather be a smart ass to my lieutenant than keep my legs that's that's some real army shit right there joe

and uh that's definitely my i don't know the army in general the military for my uh understanding everywhere in the world is just the definition of safety one big take to start oh yeah yeah like you know a good example of that is like i was a tank crewman though i didn't use tanks very often uh because you know 21st century and all um and one of the things is like obviously we have a turret and we have a hall and though you know three members of our tank crew are in the turret one's in the hall completely separate right uh the driver has a hatch they can get out of and there's absolutely no safety mechanism anywhere um that stops you from traversing the turret while the driver's hatch is open. And you can slice them in half.

Cool. Cool. Cool. There's a warning light, but it does not stop you. That's USA, baby. That's I'm real proud to be an American shit right there. And another thing uh is like there's an emergency escape hatch right like if you are the driver and say the tank's on fire

and you can't get out of the hatch your hatch because you know remember you'll be crushed um you you have to just specifically line the main gun of the tank over the back left fuel cell, if my memory serves me normally, it doesn't, to open up this escape chute where you can scuttle into the turret. Oh, no. But, like, again, there's nothing stopping the turret from moving. Like, say you got hit by another explosion or whatever that originally set you on fire. could again be cut in half um while you're on fire that's an indignant way to die yeah or you know another thing is like oh you know we got hit with something big enough to hurt

the driver which is very hard how are we going to move our turret oh we can't i guess you'll just burn to death like jesus fuck yeah a whole thing is a woodpecker safety third it's great and that's why i'm a podcaster now yeah i feel you i feel you i i will say i always loved hearing rosa stories of being like 300 feet in the air not tied off and just sort of hoping for the best there oh yeah so fucking true um like i was never a construction worker or anything because i abhor manual labor and i'm terrible at it but like more than once i'd have to like do stupid chores for the army or whatever what many of which recall like required getting on roofs um for like they called it area beautification um where you like you have to clean garbage and shit off of roofs that accumulates whether it be leaves or otherwise we weren't

tied off to fucking anything it makes you more of a man joe yeah don't you don't you want to be a man's man on the flip side of that you would have to wear your ballistic helmet when you used a lawnmower why what i don't know i don't know you'd have to wear your ballistic helmet when you used a lawnmower. Why? I don't know. I don't know. You'd have to wear your ballistic helmet, your ballistic glasses, and your fucking flash resistant Kevlar gloves to use a push lawnmower.

What did they think was going to happen to you? Maybe the Taliban planted a fucking IED in that field. What a way to go. Yeah, his riding lawnmower got hit by an IED in that field. Oh, what a way to go. Yeah, his riding lawnmower got hit by an IED. The most embarrassing way to die is getting fucking Mujahideen

out of goddamn Coleman or whatever. He died doing what he loved, riding his John Deere. Well, Liam, we've already talked about your show a little bit, but you can use this area to plug your show. Thank you, Joe. Sorry, I was eating wings.

So I am on a podcast called Well, There's Your Problem. We are an engineering disasters podcast with slides. We are also on Patreon. You can find us on Twitter at WPYP, WTYP pod. Our next episode is about a plant explosion in Philly that I'm looking forward to. We have bonus episodes every month. $2 gets you a bonus episode. You can send in requests.

Usually we'll take them. They'll get added to queue and your episode will be released sort of when we get around to it. Uh, but I'm also on here or I wanted to promote, I am starting to record my own series of stuff. Just shit that I find interesting. I don't really have a theme like military history or any of that, but my first episode should be coming out next week. Assuming I learn audition in that time. Uh, what else? what else i think that's called i don't know yet man perfect uh we will uh when we find out we'll definitely put that in the

show notes and put it under our twitter and shit appreciate it but yeah thanks uh so much for coming on the show i love your show man i can't wait to beg borrow and scrape my way into becoming a guest again uh yeah just send me a dm and we'll schedule you uh i think last time i i managed to work my way in because i had a book to promote i don't have a book you can just come on the show joe you can just come on i look forward to it and um you know we have a theme going in the show like whenever we're on our way out we always try to say something kitschy and like the last couple times we've always been talking about shooting nazis so like i don't know how many times we can say until next time redacted nazis um i maybe uh maybe you just pray for an OSHA violation for some Nazis.

A really bad loss of time accident for some Nazis. Yeah. Until next time, give your local Nazis some bread. Yeah. Remember, thick spreads, guys. Thick spreads.