Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 228 - Witold Pilecki, The Auschwitz Volunteer Part 2

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

Pilecki plots his escape when it becomes clear that the allies will do nothing about the crimes being committed within Auschwitz. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: Witold Pilecki. Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery Adam Koch. A Captain's Portrait: Witold Pilecki - Martyr for Truth Jack Fairweather. The Volunteer

Hello and welcome to the lines up by donkeys podcast i'm joe and with me is liam hello liam is Liam. Hello, Liam. Hello, Joe. Liam, today we get to talk about something really uplifting. We don't do very... Do we, Joe? Is that how you're a softball fan here? No, we're talking about Auschwitz, man. I'm sorry.

It's all fucking good, man. Listen, you know, I was raised Jewish, am jewish uh come from a long and line of well sort of jewish people uh my my my mother's family uh is at least half jewish my mother my dad's jewish so i'm jewish suck on it but uh i will say and i've made this joke before so i as a teenager, went to the Holocaust Museum. I had been to the Holocaust Museum before, but I went for

Sunday school, my Hebrew school, and then I went to, oh, birthright, sorry, and I went to Yad Vashem, of course, and... I would really like to go there. You've seen one Holocaust museum, you've seen them all. I knew a girl who uh so i've been

to auschwitz actually but i knew a girl uh my ex oh boy my ex's mom's boyfriend's daughter there we go uh went on like or was scheduled to go on like a grand tour of concentration camps she was jewish and she was like yeah we're gonna go to like bout uh auschwitz and like buchenwald and then like berth now we're gonna see like baba yar and all that and i'm just like you know one is one is sufficient like you don't need to see triplinka and yeah it's gonna be fine yeah um and it sounds like a fucking absolutely terrible vacation like i would like to go because like that's kind of like how pure free will i know what that is where you're just like all right all aboard the cost of church camp let's let's do this yeah so like oh how was

your vacation like i don't know if vacation's the word i would use for that uh yeah what's a vacation but for being sad um it's like oh uh, I was going to go to the beach, but instead I'm just going to tour animal shelters, but I'm not going to adopt anything. I'm going to look at the sad dog with three paws. Right. We're on part two

of our VTOLed Pilecki series, out of three. There's a lot going on in the world right now. We're recording this. It is September 14th in Armenia, so it lot going on in the world right now uh we're recording this it is september 14th in armenia so it's 13th in the u.s there's a lot going on uh this this episode is not very uplifting joe is joe is currently recording this with a colt 45 by his side i don't just in case baby i haven't slept in like two days uh it's um it's been a lot but you know i this show is one of the few things that bring me brit like doing this show is one of the few things that bring me

enjoyment in the world at the moment uh so i'm going to try to keep uh the the show's tenor as normal as possible which it means depressing sorry uh really really wish we were in the middle of a series that was like you know uh like one of the the crazy funny guys you know yeah we kind of blew our load on dude's rock yeah we we hit a dude's dude's rock overload and we ended up in fucking auschwitz somehow like it's great this is the exact opposite of where i want to be yeah yeah the suffering of my people is the thing i i generally have to unpack in therapy it's uh it's it's it's lovely intergenerational trauma stuff it's good i fucking hate the fact that i have a non-jewish therapist man i have a jewish psychiatrist uh which is uh you know like I have gone my psychiatrist office

does rotations every few months so you get you know a newbie someone not fresh out of med school I don't really know how the rotation process works I think they're like a little more than fresh out of med school and every time they're like okay like who would you like your psychiatrist to be and every time I'm like give me the Jew and they're like that's kind of and I'm like

no no no it's not kind of offensive if I'm doing it yeah be offensive if i did it yeah i'm just like no no i need to see a jewish psychiatrist preferably one named like hayim lebowitz who's got a weirdly contentious relationship with his mother give me that guy i don't see the problem like i i know it's like kind of a big thing in the states for like uh like especially in like california and massachusetts for like armenians to only go to armenian doctors and only go to armenian therapists and whatever like now if i walked into my therapist like i would like one jew please like that'd be quite offensive there were people with my practice my parents are still practicing law that would call and ask for

a jew lawyer they would say jew lawyer because i grew up in central pennsylvania and uh it's funny because they're like you got any jew lawyers i'm like one does bankruptcy one does education law so you are not going to have a fun time with this good god they can be your lawyer you're not going to enjoy it i think that's all lawyers really unless you're rich like i feel like that extra money comes with bedside manner or whatever bedside manner is called for lawyers. A personality, maybe? I don't know. I think, I mean, we have a lawyer on retainer on this show. Only one for when people threaten to sue us. Well, I love him very dearly.

I got to say, he's a boisterous young man. He's a little brash around the edges. He's too nice for a lawyer. I think that's like being a labor lawyer gets you is you still get to retain some of your old self. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I got to tell you if you're a disability and bankruptcy

and a state lawyer and social security, you just turn into a maladjusted freak because you're my dad and it's really funny because you're my dad. It's really funny because you develop that absolute contempt for everyone around you.

I feel like that's being a podiatrist. Nobody goes in. You can't go into certain... No one's happy to be in a podiatrist's office. He's not happy. You're not happy. Nobody's office. Yeah, yeah. He's not happy, you're not happy, nobody's happy. Or have you ever seen the whole Nine Yards where they keep making jokes

about dentists all killing themselves? And the dentist is like... They do that a lot. The dentist is like, that's not true. What are you talking about? I'm fine. They're like, yeah, sure, fine, whatever. There's certain professions that you have to be in. I think dentists have a higher rate of... Dentists and lawyers kill themselves all the time. Huh. I'll be damned. like there's certain professions that you have to be here to have a higher rate of status and

lawyers kill themselves all the time huh i'll be damned i feel like those three things are probably connected yeah either drink themselves to death or whatever you know it's it's tough being a lawyer or whatever but uh i uh i i like i said i i do like the idea of uh of of like i i i've said this to a million times and I know listeners of the show don't really know my dad, but like dad's generally, he's not, he's nice.

He's the kind dude. Like he's got a good heart. He's got the biggest heart in the world, but he is incredibly abrasive in case you're wondering where I get it from. And he does this thing you do where you can't, where you can't tell if he's joking like today he was calling me and he was just like rooting on the lindsey abortion bill

where he was just like bloodthirsty for the republicans to tear themselves apart uh but like i couldn't tell if he was like seriously he was like yeah i think it's a great idea lindsey grants my new hero or like just trying to be a dick he's a staunch supporter of abortion rights i know what he believes but i just like this idea that like uh at some point his sense of humor around his clients sort of devolved to like a coping mechanism where it's just like are you making fun of the clients or are you trying to help them he's like it's usually both like yeah you gotta you gotta you gotta you gotta find your joy wherever you can man so let's talk about auschwitz now that i've gone on for my fucking chaos rune enjoyment theory um now now now that we got all her our yucks out

of the way let's talk about fucking auschwitz we just soften the blow for everybody um am i gonna get animal facts in this one? I mean, I know what happens in this, I guess. Spoiler alert, Auschwitz. Don't tell anybody how this ends. Somewhat uniquely, we're going to be talking about Vito Policki part two. And Vito had a, I'll say, a pretty unique place in the world for a guy who is not a Nazi because he was in Auschwitz effectively when it opened and he watched it transition into a death camp. So his story from

here on out is quite strange. You don't hear it so often. And I think this is probably as close we're going to get to just charting the history of Auschwitz. I don't know why I would ever make that episode of that series, quote honestly. So this is probably as close as we're going to get. When we left you last time, Vito Blecki had kind of been voluntold to get locked in. Yes, by his supposed friend and commander. Yeah, who is kind of a right-wing ghoul um right this was a guy who was buying into nationalist borderline nazi rhetoric himself right can't remember his name

yeah the only thing that really separated uh uh him from being like a neo-nazi collaborator is that he wanted polish neo-nazism not german uh Nazism. Polish neo-Nazism, but I repeat myself. Let's run Poland, I'm coming for you. So the whole point was so the Polish Home Army could report Nazi atrocities to the world and also maybe stage a prison uprising. However, the reality is, Polecki had no idea how hard his job was going to be, and it took him a month to finally get word out of the camp, back to his handlers in the Home Army, and tell them what was going on. While he had been writing to his sister-in-law in coded language, because this was back when Auschwitz prisoners could even send letters, that's how early he's in this camp.

That's how early he's in this camp. He was worried that if the two were even remotely connected, both he and his sister would end up hanging from a rope. So he didn't really tell her anything. He knew that there couldn't really be a paper trail. People get searched. You have evidence. He knew how this spy game shit worked. And this is around the time when Auschwitz would occasionally have parolees,

which sounds very weird. So this is Auschwitz I. It's the only Auschwitz that exists at the time. It was for specifically political prisoners. Okay, got it. I won't say nobody's locked in here for being Jewish or gay or whatever. But those are also considered political sins as well, like the von c conference hadn't happened yet there is no final solution quite yet like the easiest way to describe is like the whole it is uh the holocaust by bullets at this phase in the eastern front so the nazis believed that you know um paroling people out of the prison was was fine of course it was done under the the strict promise that you will not open your fucking mouth by anything that happens in here or you will be put back in here. And after surviving Auschwitz, most people did not even back then. That was kind of enough to keep people quiet for the most part, at least until the end of World War II.

Sure. So he figured the easiest way to get word out was through one of these parolees. Um, so one of these parolees is Alexander Vila Popsky. He was a former, by the way, I nailed that name.

Uh, a former Polish. Yeah. Yeah. I should have started this off with a, not a, an Auschwitz, um,

uh, warning, but like Polish names warning. I'm going to ruin them all. Oh, no, this is wildly inappropriate. But what's long and hard that a Polish bride gets on her wedding night? Oh, no. What? A new last name.

Ross taught me that joke. Thank you. Thank you. Now, Alexander was a former Polish military officer that found himself being thrown out of Auschwitz because he was a former Polish military officer. They couldn't risk giving him a letter. That's like I said, it's evidence. It's a paper trail. So instead, this guy was given a verbal message to memorize. So they were playing telephone.

Oh, no. Now, he was effectively locked in a room with VTOL and screamed at and told to repeat this flawlessly time after time after time until he was allowed to leave and go on parole. He carried this message all the way back to Warsaw, which is now rapidly being closed off

because he was turning into a ghetto. That's the time change that warsaw which is now rapidly being closed off because he was turning into a ghetto that that's that's the time change that we're in right now alexander passed v told entire report to broecki the home army leader along with a request bomb the fucking camp yeah that was uh v told's immediate uh conclusion to auschwitz is tell the British to bomb the fucking camp. And they didn't. Now, he said, quote, the prisoners beg the Polish government, for the love of God, bombard these warehouses. Should the prisoners die in this attack, it would be a relief given the conditions. Now, just remember, this is before the Holocaust.

Now, just remember, this is before the Holocaust. He argued that if they weren't killed, which they probably would be, but if they weren't killed, the bombing would at least create so much chaos and destruction. A diversion, right. Literally anything was better than what was happening. Now, Roeki then copied this game of weird death camp telephone into a letter. Here's a part of the volunteer. I wasn't really expecting to hear the sentence of weird death camp telephone. Yeah. It's,

there's a lot of shit happening in this episode. And there's, there's, there's a huge part of the book, the volunteer, which I cannot recommend enough that goes in depth. It's, it's actually kind of what that book does better than most of the other ones

of like the weird international spy rings that made the Home Army possible. It's not super important to our story, so don't go huge into it. But they have spies and handlers everywhere. So for instance, Roecki copied this onto a piece of paper that had to get to the UK. It had to be smuggled to Sweden via a noblewoman's luggage onto a resistance member's brother, who then hand-carried it to the fucking Pyrenees Mountains on foot into Madrid, Spain. Jesus.

Yeah. This took months. It was now December when he finally got to the Polish embassy, which was still weirdly open in Spain. Because the Nazis helped Spain. And then when the Nazis asked Spain for help, Franco was like, nah. This one out champ. Yeah.

So the free Polish embassy remained open. There's something deeply funny about that to me. And he handed that letter off again, because it had to be moved to London, where the Polish government in exile was based out of since France had fallen. And there's a lot of stories like this. Like at one point, there's like an SOE spy who goes by the name Napoleon, who... I bet you love that. by the name napoleon who i bet you love that uh he's he's an interesting guy um now napoleon is british which shouldn't actually that is kind of surprising that he goes by that name but what isn't surprising is like he's this weird eccentric guy who and because his whole goal is to smuggle himself into poland and help with this prison uprising and instead of just like him bouncing from one bar to another, like I said, there's a lot of weird side stories to the story that don't quite fit our narrative.

Now, unfortunately for the Home Army resistance who thought the Polish government exile, which was then led by Prime Minister Sikorski and the British government led by Winston Churchill, were close buddies. That was not true. They believe that like, why would the British government invite prime minister Sikorsky to London if they didn't see eye to eye and they weren't these super close allies. Right. But they fucking hated one another. I mean, Stalin was there too.

And they, they sort of didn't, they got along, I guess from what I understand, but did not like each other. Although the British government also really did not like de Gaulle in the beginning either. They were completely fine with working with Vichy France. Yeah.

I mean, we'll talk a little bit about the Stalin angle to this weird allied relationship in a bit. Because it was a goddamn Stalin angle. angle to this weird allied relationship in a bit. But Churchill could not even be bothered to learn how to pronounce Prime Minister Sikorsky's name. He literally just called him the Polish guy. Which, to be fair, is the most...

He actually just said some sort of slur. I don't know a slur. Yeah, that's true. I know like one slur for Poles. I think we both yeah that's true i know i know like one slur for polls yeah we i think we both know it uh everybody who's listening is like oh yeah blank and they said it in their head like congratulations you've got some monsters yeah you're fucking terrible people now sikorsky to his credit is like wow the british are racist as fuck which i do have to say is very astute.

Churchill is incredibly racist. But also, how grim is it that a Polish prime minister in 1940 recognizes that you're racist? That's a good point. Good God. Now, there's also a small fact that the British and even the world were already a little aware of the German concentration camp system, at least a little bit. They were not aware of the extent of it, but they were aware of its existence. The British had published a public paper about it in 1939, which is about a year before this, specifically about Buchenwald and Dachau,

both of which are in Germany. And they started as, like Auschwitz said, a political prisoner camp. When Sikorski and other members of the Polish government attempted to explain to the British that what was happening in Poland was different and worse, the Brits simply didn't believe them since they already knew it was so grim

they could hardly comprehend it. They were trying to explain, like, no, things are way worse in Poland. There's something different. And obviously looking back, hindsight's 20-20. It's hard to fully explain the complete lack. They call it lack of imagination. When people were describing what was happening in Poland,

it was so fucking bad, everybody thought that they were overreacting. So that was also happening. And of course, Sikorski is telling them this and Churchill's like, well, he's only saying that because he's Polish. Now, Sikorski and Churchill's relationship was so bad that when Pilecki's letter finally got to him around Christmas of 1940, he didn't even bring it to Churchill, knowing that the guy would dodge him for weeks at a time and skip their appointments. Instead, he brought it directly to Bomber Command

of the Royal Air Force, hoping that he would be able to spice it up, sell it, and then blow it the fuck up. This was not a great time in the history of the RAF. Sikorsky himself was doing some politics. He believed that if he lobbed this meatball up to Bomber Command, they would jump on it to make themselves look better. These are the folks that bombed Dresden.

So yeah, I get it. In a couple of years. Yeah, that has not happened yet. No, no, I know. Bomber Command struggled just to keep anything in the air at the time. And when they did, the results were terrible due to crews that were being rushed out with very little training. Now, according to the volunteers, this led to an incident where a bomber crew got lost and turned around in the night, assumed that they were over Germany, and bombed their assigned target, only to discover that they had, drumroll please, bombed their own base. God damn it, too.

So when Bomber Command saw this letter from Pilecki, they knew strategically it was pointless. Militarily, there's nothing important to bombing Auschwitz. However, but politically, it was priceless. It would have been the longest bombing mission in RAF history. It's kind of like Doolittle's Raiders. very little damage, all propaganda. We can reach out and touch you. Now, which would have been very good for getting the government off of their ass for

accidentally bombing yourself that one time. However, this is what you get for expecting... I don't want to dig the British on this one. We make fun of the British a lot. I don't want to dig the British on this one. We make fun of the British a lot. Anyone. This is what you get for expecting anyone at this point in 1940 until the current day to do the right fucking thing. They won't. They will not. Bomber Command, led by a guy named Colonel Pierce, I think it was, wrote up a bombing plan which he, of course, had to submit to Churchill for approval. Now, his plan omitted

Pilecki's evidence entirely of atrocities. Instead, his plan relied entirely on how cool it would be to do a really long bombing run. So he completely obliterated context from it. Thank you, Guy. He submitted for approval

and was immediately denied, citing that this is strategically pointless why would we do this thank you thank you the suffering of my people you know not my people yet i suppose but yeah we'll get there so you know i'll take it now let me posit a possibility here and i'm not making this out of thin air i'm not doing any like original thesis typing here now we're in we're now in 1941 this But by the time that this bombing approval gets written up and denied, it's already past December. I believe it's mid-January. The death camp phase of the Holocaust wouldn't begin for another year in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference.

Now, this phase, which the Nazis assumed would be carried out in secret. Now, of course, they knew they could not do this in complete secret. People were aware, especially within the greater occupied Reich, that Jews were going to camps and they were not coming back. That's effectively how most Germans understood what was happening. I'm not saying most Germans didn't know that horrible things were happening to the Jews. Most of them didn't know about death camps because that was the point. It's the same reason why they instituted race laws. And they, instead of sending the SA and SS street mobs after Kristallnacht to continue doing that, they had to legalize it. They had to church it up and make it look good.

The whole thing, and it was mostly Rehardt hydrick that did this he believed that people would be much more pliable and agreeable to what was happening is if you made it look legitimate so that's why they didn't happen to yeah exactly fuck them all rest in piss the the murdering would be happening within very large groups of people of course like the the amount of and the staff that required these death camps to work is astonishing um and nearby towns would absolutely know what was happening in these death camps right you could smell it for miles you'd smell it yep like uh more than one uh eyewitness of i believe it was near like the auschwitz complex by the time it was built to say it occasionally rain ash like these people knew about it. But the vast majority of the population did not know about the final solution.

So the goal was for this to happen. When you say that, let me ask you a question. So you say that most of the population didn't know about the final solution. Not all of the details, of course. I don't mean they didn't know what was happening to Jews. They didn't know all of the details. That's the answer to my question. I assume your average German

not living near the camps would have known that... I guess maybe they would not have noticed that because they wouldn't have had Jewish neighbors by that point. They would have all been shoved into the ghettos. Well, I mean, there's actually a really good topic in there that might be better saved

for a whole episode. I'm not saying that the German public in World War II was absolutely guilty of what happened to the Jews. I'm not absolving them of that. Thank you, because I literally would have thrown my headset down and stormed off.

That is a fucking myth. It's a lot like the clean Wehrm that is uh a fucking a myth uh it's it's a lot like the clean wehrmacht is the clean fucking german populace um now uh by by not by saying not knowing about the final solution i mean specifically about the murdering um now i mean that specifically within death camps the public absolutely knew what was happening on the Eastern Front. So the Holocaust by bullets was pretty well known. Soldiers move around. They talk.

And not to mention, large, large groups of the German public were encouraged to take part in the Holocaust in a myriad of ways. For example, there was a government program

for turning in your neighbors. You would get a slice of their property when it was auctioned off. This happened, and people jumped on it so fast that the Gestapo had to tell people to please stop calling the cops because they cannot handle all of the calls. And that's on top of the Aryanization of small businesses and stuff like that where... Specifically, people always say that like, well, Hitler was a monster, but he helped the economy or whatever. It's like they say about Mussolini making the trains around time. It's a fucking myth. The way that he made the economy better for Germans was getting rid of everybody who wasn't German and selling their property and businesses to people who were. It was a lot of... I mean, in the long term, even without World War II, Nazi Germany would have failed for these specific reasons.

Their economy was in fucking shambles. And everything they did was a very short-term thing to try to get people to look the other way. Because at first, it was actually quite unpopular. The Aryanization program, the boycotts of Jewish businesses, those were actually quite unpopular at first. That's why it had to escalate. There was voluntary Aryanization and then involuntary Aryanization. What voluntary was, we're going to raise your taxes. We're going to do this boycott. We're going to make things... We're going to make the environment so... Untenable. Oh, yeah.

It's toxic, so untenable that you're going to leave and we'll help you leave. That was that first wave of Jewish immigrants to get the fuck out. They're the lucky ones. Unfortunately, a lot of them went to France. And they were all for us. Yeah. But then there was involuntary where it's

we're gonna fucking take it from you and then you're going to you're going to be deported um and then eventually of course it goes to you're going to a camp so like the population absolutely knew anybody who fucking told you is either a a bad faith liar or b B, they went to American high school. I don't know. Yeah. So the key is that the mass death in death camps is not happening in the open. It is theorized by more than a few people to include myself that if the British bombed Auschwitz, that phase of the plan would have been delayed or abandoned altogether because they would have publicized German atrocities of Auschwitz while they were happening.

Of course, this doesn't mean that the Holocaust would not have happened. It was some other form, but we're not talking 6 million death total, maybe. I mean, who knows? But yeah. That's the most charitable theory is that the Holocaust wouldn't have been so bad.

And when you're talking about something like this, not so bad is all you can aim for. Now, instead, life inside the camp is getting much, much worse as Heinrich Himmler ordered a massive expansion of the facilities and the staff. As Pilecki's time in the camp came up on its first year anniversary, he was expected to... He's already been there for a year. He expected to hear something, anything about the camps in his report being sent over a radio because somebody had smuggled a radio and that could tune to the BBC. He heard nothing. Now, as that was happening, winter, which nearly killed Pilecki with pneumonia and exposure, turned into summer, where the camp was torn through by typhus. Because another huge killer in these camps is disease, before the Germans could even kill you.

Yep. It was about creating an environment. It's so hostile that humanity itself breaks down. Typhus is very, very, very easy to treat. Improve hygienic conditions so lice don't infest everything. It's very, very easy. Improving hygienic conditions is not hard.

They simply didn't do it. It was one of the multi-layered approaches to causing death. It's creating an environment where human life can simply not exist. Whether that be starvation, exposure, thirst, or hunger or disease. However, Nazis were not going to improve these hygienic conditions because they're Nazis. Instead, the SS doctors in the camp used this as a reason to start the beginning of medical experiments that had become infamous and people still talk about it.

Without going into detail, these were not medical experiments and instead were just elaborate and brutal ways to cause death. Yeah, this is just sadism. This is just pure fucking sadism. Yeah, I think we've talked about this a couple of times on the show.

Nothing was gained from these medical experiments. People will often say this, the Auschwitz medical experiments or Unit 731 discovered something. They didn't. They didn't discover anything. Everything that they did was out of pure sadism.

None of this was science. One of the key points of medical science and even experiments is being able to be fucking replicated under controlled environments. And you can't fucking do that in a death camp shack. That's not how that fucking works. They're just psychos. This is just elaborate euthanasia. There is a lot of value in studying genocide denial. There is no value in

debating it. When you debate someone, you have to... You give them a platform. You legitimize them, at least to some extent. Yeah, of course. You give them a platform to spew what can only be bigotry. there's no other kind of genocide no than bigotry right and that includes dom chomsky um like there's and by by by debating them you accept that their argument isn't good faith right and it's on equal but uh opposite standing of your

own and that's not how that works. That's that both sides bullshit that we always laugh about that when every time you turn on American media, climate change denialists get the same amount of time as climate science people. It's fucking bullshit. And that's why I don't do it.

We've done an episode on Holocaust Now a while back. It's kind of out of date now. And one of the guys involved actually ended up finding it, one of the neo-Nazis, and sending me an email asking me to debate him. I did not debate him. I would have been pretty disappointed if they had. No, I'd debate him with a fucking baseball bat. That's about it. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. High date. Here's where things get weird. no i debate him with him a fucking baseball bat that's about it yeah yeah yeah exactly hi date here's where things get weird um here's where things get weird okay yeah i'm on board okay let me rephrase it maybe not so weird as unforeseen um okay okay so camps were ran effectively by camp functionaries. And by that, I mean prisoners. This includes a lot of the medical staff. Yep.

Yeah. Now, a lot of the medical staff that helped carry out experiments were prisoners. They weren't. Yep. Some of them were Jewish. I am painfully aware. Yeah. I will save anybody's judgment on them for yourselves there's obviously there's not a lot of volunteering happening in this situation

you can dm me for what i think yeah i think everybody knows what you think people will do very obscene things to save their own life yes they will yes they will we don't know we don't know what darkness lies in the heart of man and so on and so forth. Now, the medical staff, one of the members was Wiatoslaw Daring. Now, I will say Wiatoslaw Daring is not a gray zone. I truly believe he's a bit of a monster. He was a prisoner and a doctor and a member of the Polish underground. Oh, boy. He was also an army buddy of P of plekis and a vehement anti-semite thanks guy now actually this relationship with daring which was uh uh strictly um a functional for for being in a death camp or camp so far is one of the reasons people think

that via uh v told pleki is not righteous among the nations, which, you know what? Fair enough. I'm not going to argue that one too hard because Daring is a fucking monster. Now, there is no evidence that Pleky had any idea about his full collaboration with the Nazis. Though Daring was able to escape later punishment due to the fact that he was a prisoner. He's like, well, they made me do it. However, of course, if he didn't take part, he absolutely would have been murdered. And that's the same defense that any kapo would have used. And they did.

And they used it effectively. And to be fair, they were certainly right. Now, it's up to all these people to decide what is worth their life and what is not. However, Daring is accused of conducting 17,000 experimental surgeries. That's too many. And euthanasias. He killed thousands of people. That's too many.

Yeah. So, I will let you be the judge there. Now, Dering also took part somewhat enthusiastically in the T4 program. somewhat enthusiastically in the T4 program. For people unaware, the T4 program was the Nazis' euthanasia program of what they called useless eaters. That being anybody who was terminally ill, had a mental illness, physical disability. Yes, disabled people.

Blinked slightly strange. And the T4 program was mostly Germans, but not always. And it was heavily, heavily stilted to also be anti-Semitic. Because shocker, right? Yeah. Gotta make it count. Yeah. And that's part of the thing that some people theorize that why the Holocaust could have been stopped by publicizing those things.

The T4 program in Germany was largely canceled when Germans found out about it. Oh, okay. It was super unpopular. Right. Now, by supplying the SS with a list of the camps incurably sick, they'd be taken off in secret and killed.

Because that's how the T4 program shifted over, was to camps once the public got pissed. Now, Daring, to his credit, allegedly did not know about the T4 program. But when he did, he did not stop. He seemed to be fine with it when they weren't Polish, is what it boils down to. is what it boils down to. And then he found out about it because the Germans would ask him,

we need a long list of people who are incurably sick. We're going to send them to a hospital camp where they can get better treatment. Now, Daring being in the privileged position that he was in, heard about another train being organized for more sick men to go away for treatment.

And that's when he put two and two together. Nobody's come back. They're dead. He's like, I've euthanized a ton of fucking people here. I know probably what happened. So he ran and told Plecky tell everybody to not volunteer for medical treatment because the Nazis would literally

ask for volunteers. And people would fight over getting in a spot in a train because they'd be like, what could possibly be worse than fucking Auschwitz? Unfortunately, a lot of people did not believe Placky because the Germans were describing to them quote, it's like a spa day. None of them ever made it back.

Now, by the fall of 1941, the camp's morgue at crematorium number one, which is inside the main camp, Auschwitz one, which had since been turned into a sprawling complex because it would eventually be able to absorb

100,000 people at once. Crematorium one had been retrofitted to become the first gas chamber. Previously, there had actually been a smaller test chamber in the woods that Plecky could not see he would simply watch people get marched out to the woods as he put it and they would never come back he's

probably figuring they're just being fired at or something and he's just not hearing it or something he knows they're dying but i guess doesn't know the the scale or methodology yet right because who would right and but he was an eyewitness to the first mass gas chamber murder. Soviet prisoners of war, thousands of them. Pleky didn't know what was happening, but he watched line after line of men be marched into the crematorium. And then in the middle of night, you heard ear-piercing screams of the sounds of hundreds of people dying all at once. He heard this repeatedly for hours. The next day, Darren got a note to him informing that there was a systemic murder of nearly 1,000 people and it took 20

minutes. That's the kind of industrial-level killing they finally got into. Vitold had no idea what the Holocaust was, nor would he during his entire time in the camp, and barely he heard about it before he was dead. But he now knew of large-scale gassing,

and his is the first report of this that the world would ever see after he was smuggled out of the camp a month later by another parolee. As the dead began to mount, he sent more and more parolees out of the camp, all heading directly towards the Home Army with more reports.

And we can assume that all of them were like loyal resistance members or Placu would have been murdered. None of them were ever turned. Unfortunately, Roecki, who was sitting inside Warsaw, where it was full Warsaw ghetto status at this point.

Sure. A thousand Jews died every month in the Warsaw ghetto from starvation and lack of medical care or outright murder. But nobody could put two and two together when it came to the gassings when he got the report. And Pilecki didn't understand it either. Nobody could make sense of it. And honestly, who fucking could have? Who would just jump to the conclusion like they're gassing all the Jews? Right, right.

That sounds crazy. It does. No, I mean, instead, they believe like, ah, they're testing gas for use in war. Like we have to tell the allies. All of this, despite the fact that the ongoing horrors being committed by the Nazis in the Soviet Union were very well known. The Polish underground had built their own version of the German Enigma machine and passed it off to the British. Now, the Germans had no idea about this and were freely transmitting evidence of their crimes to the East,

which the British were then intercepting. So the British and Roecki knew about the mass murder of Jews. I can't believe the British government didn't do anything. Thanks for nothing, fuckholes. It gets worse. Of course it does. Leah, why were you making fun of the Queen dying? I feel pretty fucking justified. If anybody's mad about that, you're listening to the

wrong fucking show. Now, in fact, the numbers being transmitted were so high that the British intelligence analysts that were reading them thought they had to be an error because there's just so many victims. Or the Nazis are personally transmitting incorrect numbers to fuck with British intelligence. Even Churchill knew what he was hearing was different. And on August 25th, he spoke publicly about the mass murders being committed by the Nazis on BBC. However,

he didn't mention that the victims were Jews. I wonder why. There's two pretty obvious reasons for this. And I'll let you be the judge because, admittedly, we do not know for sure. That's my academic opinion. My personal opinion is because he's anti-Semitic

as fuck. I'll buy that. One reason is that if it got out that there was a mass murder of Jews and gassings within the camp and the mass murders in the Soviet Union, he would burn the Polish Home Army sources within the camp.

Maybe they would just total liquidation of the camp just to get rid of a spy. They didn't let as much information out in order to keep Pleky safe. That's probably not true. The other is Churchill knew mentioning atrocities. It was a really good way to get people to care about fighting and buy into the war that had already caused just total fucking devastation. And not to mention, this war was not going well for Britain at at this point however that he

was worried that that that sympathy would fade if the british people knew that they were jewish and they wouldn't care as much unfortunately churchill was probably right according to his own autobiography fuck your dead queen according to his book the book churchill one parliamentarian said quote even winston had a fault He was too fond of the Jews. So yeah. We should have nuked that whole fucking island when we had the chance. That's right, Brenton.

The reason why I believe this excuse, or the other one about burning a source, is because just talking about what was happening in the East was good enough to warn the Germans that the British had cracked the Enigma code and they stopped transmitting death counts over the radio. They didn't just like, there must be a spy at Auschwitz. That's not what they jumped to.

Many other people within the British government rejected the reports as well. I think just calling them anti-Semites while true is overly simplistic. And I do have to be somewhat fair here. It was a combination of things. Racism, anti-Semitism, and a total failure of imagination like we talked about. Remember the war, before the war and even hell, mostly during it,

the British government and the military saw Germany as their enemy, but also as a brotherly European peer nation. We've talked a bit before about how the the british royalty was quite fond of the nazis you can find that picture of queen elizabeth as a child doing the hitler salute you can find the picture of the queen meeting hitler uh i know she was a child i don't care uh i i'm not gonna be too sympathetic to the british

I don't care. I'm not going to be too sympathetic to the British. There's also a lot of people within the upper class. The UK were quite friendly with the concepts of National Socialism. I went beyond

familiarity and sometimes the outright sympathy to include the fucking king oh he sure did yeah i mean he was fucking a german spy so when resistance members got word back to them that tens of thousands of jews had just been shot at baban yar uh people thought it was so ridiculous that it had to be bullshit i mean and to fair, this is something that still happens. When people hear about ongoing atrocities in modern war... Just reject it, yeah.

They assume it can't possibly be that bad. We saw that in Bucha. People are like, ah, it can't be that bad. And then pictures come out. People still are like this. And to be fair, it's because they don't think

that the world could be that brutal and that angry. They don't think human beings can do that kind of thing because they're like, well, I wouldn't think that the world could be that brutal and that angry. They don't think human beings can do that kind of thing because they're like, well, I wouldn't do that. Statistically, you probably would if push came to shove, but also some people would.

Some people really are that hateful. Now, eventually, the British and the American officials demanded that their field offices stop forwarding materials from Jewish resistance groups about what was going on because quote, it might inflame the public. Suck my

fucking dick. Now as the Allies did nothing with the information that Pilecki was smuggling out and risking his life for, remember he is in Auschwitz to do this. This is why he's there. He was finally beating the planet uprising,

seeing that the Allies were fucking useless and this is our only way forward. Now, unfortunately, this would never happen for a myriad of reasons, but he figured that the SS had a garrison of around 1,000. And with incoming Soviet POWs and former Polish soldiers,

he could probably get the same amount of people who knew how to fight to join his cause. It might not succeed, but he thought they could at least destroy large sections of the camp and render it useless or slow them down somewhat. The resistance still had expanded to include camp functionaries, like included capos like the the brutally psychopathic ones uh i mean they're like at this point they're still career criminals so like they're easy to bribe hashtag team better than nothing yeah exactly talk about the lowest bar i think we've ever talked about i cannot think of a situation the history of this show is like, well, they have the capos. One of the most important people that he got to turn were functionaries that worked within the camp's records office. Because as I'm sure people are aware, most of the evidence that we have of the Holocaust, other than piles of bodies and death camps, was paperwork because it was kept meticulously by Nazis.

That paperwork was filed by prisoners. So, Pilecki turned that person as a prime opportunity to get more evidence in the form of prison records. They kept track of every single person that came into the camp. Because there is a phase of the Holocaust where they effectively pick who's going to immediately die. Step off the train and immediately be led to the gas chamber. One thing that they did before doing that was take every single one of their picture and file them down.

They put everything down on paper. It's absurd. It's insane. It's the most German thing I've ever heard of in my life. Not a fun loving people are the Germans. Now, by March of 1942, the records had been passed on to him, which include the records of around 30,000 Polish people that have been put in a camp so far. 11,000 were still alive. This include 2,000 Polish Jews.

All of them are dead. It also include 12,000 Soviet POWs, which now around 100 were left. This is before things have truly hit what people think of as when they think of Auschwitz. This is still happening. This is how they were learning how to be better at their industrial death machine. better at their industrial death machine. Now, smuggling information on the camp had also become easier as members of the resistance

had been... They had an electrical engineering student that got thrown in the camp for being a resistance member. And he had built a radio transmitter to have spare stolen parts. Good for him, man. Which was powerful enough to reach Warsaw. Now, they couldn't use it all

the time, of course, but, and, and to, to, because it's like, you know, they,

the capos and that, uh, um, the SS kept a pretty close watch on everybody. Um, so like in order for this to happen or for them to have fun enough time to work, they had to use a distraction and that distraction,

I shit you not was an inmate walking up to SS guards and doing magic tricks with cards those were times baby what else do you say like imagine like if that man of metal if you had a flaw i have a plan i know a sick magic card trick you're not gonna like it but i do have a plan i'm gonna go up to that guy i just want to beat three people to death and tell him to pull a card. Ah, you got the seven of clubs. Ah, pay no attention to what's going on behind me.

Like somehow that requires more balls than anything that we've talked about so far. Like I'm going to confront this concentration camp guard with like, oh, I see you have this card behind your ear. Yeah. I originally wrote this as impressed him with magic card tricks uh but then i kind of instead pictured that uh like a camp uh it made challenging an ss card to a to a game of like magic the gathering uh and that's that's it's not that ridiculous but it's almost as ridiculous and i play my third kismet and this is going to end with someone sending in a question from Legion and asking what kind of deck a Nazi would run

and honestly we both know what that would be. Straight white. Mono white deck. Yeah, I was going to say either that or mono blue control because Nazis don't like having fun. Although I also play mono blue control, so yeah. Hold like having fun although i also play mono blue control so yeah congratulations on your cell phone good sir now thank you it was now that plecky and the rest of

the resistance in the main camp had heard of birkenau that being another because the auschwitz birkenau complex is generally the term birkenau was one of many Auschwitz camps. And Birkenau is where the Jews went. They heard from other people in Birkenau because they could sometimes talk to each other through intermediaries, etc, etc. Someone told them like, man, thousands of Jews are being packed into Birkenau. And from Birkenau, they would be marched in a line over to the main camp into crematoria one, where they would be murdered. A truck parked outside revved its engine loudly to cover the sounds of the screaming of the dying. Now, just so people understand the massive scope of this, the camp is huge. Auschwitz-Birkenau is a small city. It's hard to

comprehend, really. There's Auschwitz I, which was where Pilecki was, Auschwitz II, which was Birkenau. And that's the vast majority of where the murders would occur. And then there's Auschwitz III, known as Monowitz, which was built for the purpose of feeding slave labor over to IG Farben. So every camp is different. When you're thinking of Auschwitz, you're thinking Birkenau. That's what most people are thinking of. Birkenau is the one that is mostly in ruins today. Auschwitz I, I believe, still mostly stands intact.

Pilecki knew immediately that he had to get word out about this. He knew what was happening now. He didn't quite understand. Of course, he didn't understand the concepts of a fucking genocide. But he knew this had to get out. But he couldn't use a radio. It was a huge risk. And it didn't work that well, the radio did. It was fucking MacGyver together in a goddamn shack in Auschwitz. How reliable could it be? They would have to get another message out. But at this point, the Germans had stopped paroling inmates for obvious reasons.

So one resistance man would have to break out of the camp to get word out. And it fell on a guy named Stefan Bielecki to do the job. Bielecki and another resistance member named Vincetti escaped out of a complex satellite camp because they had a lot of smaller labor camps as well. And at this point, most of the labor is being done by non-Jews.

So like he was... They're under less guard. And he escaped by swimming across a nearby lake. He marched across the countryside for the night and then several more days for dozens and dozens of miles until finally ending up in Setti's sister's house and Bilecki ended up going to Warsaw.

Now, unfortunately, he got there in June 1942. Oh, sorry, guy. He got to Warsaw in June 1942. Now, word of the Nazis' genocidal intent was pretty well known within the ghetto. People who are not Jewish probably wouldn't tell you what was happening because they couldn't comprehend it. But there's one thing with a generationally oppressed and victimized people understand is like it's happening again. There's a Chris Rock bit, not to take away from the seriousness of it, but I always think about this. I was talking about days after 9-11 where he was saying,

you know, at first it was, I hate all these fucking Arabs, man. And that was cool. And then it was, I hate all these fucking foreigners. Like I'm an American,

I'm an American. That was cool. And then it was, fuck all these illegal immigrants. You know? And then I started listening because I know black people and Jews are next. That train's never late. Oh yeah.

He accidentally discovered the old poem. Yeah. He did that except he wasn't in the free corps so yeah yeah fuck you new molar now roweki and the jewish labor union which was i know that i talked to nate about this uh the like and i'm liam i'm sure you know uh the jewish labor union was unfortunately, as the boond. We're not so good at naming stuff sometimes. Naming things boond within the Jewish community is super common. As Goyom, I read that, I was like,

oh dear. Not that guy. Don't worry about that. They had to contact the allies and collect much of the incoming information and spread it out like the home army and the jewish labor union working very very closely um this eventually got to sikorsky who uh prime minister and he began making public speeches about it because he realized churchill wasn't going to do anything so he just went on his own speaking tour demanding direct military response to stop

what was turning into the Holocaust. This is one of those things that people call Polish resistance or the Polish Home Army anti-Semitic. It's gross oversimplification. Organizationally, absolutely, we're not. Of course, there's elements of it that were. But the leadership of the government in exile, and specifically the resistance members on the ground who, again, broke into Auschwitz, were certainly not. And

they were attempting to stop this. We probably owe you one. Sorry, boys. Now, the rest of the allies pretty much ignored him. And this is about the time that the US was taking immigration quotas for Jews, even after they knew about it. Yeah, look up the SS St. Louisis you want to get bummed out yeah now back in the camp things were getting worse someone told palecki that a man things are getting worse in auschwitz yeah who would have thought they kind of just get worse until the end uh like the things don't get better like the you know liberation we know how it goes. Yeah. Someone had warned Pilecki that a resistance cell member of his was probably a Nazi snitch.

And this is where Pilecki maybe does something that's pretty bad. Now, he had to get rid of this guy. So he has him murdered. He does it through Vyacheslav Dering. murdered uh he does it through viatislav daring so there is some question um if what plecky really did know about daring because daring uh told plecky to spike his food with this oil that he gave him which would cause the man to have diarrhea at which point that man would have to be checked into the hospital at that point daring told would have to be checked into the hospital. At that point, Daring told an excess doctor that the man was incurable

and they executed him. The man was a Nazi snitch. However, how did Plecky know that was how it was going to end is my question. Did he know that the guy that he didn't know everything about, did he know that

he was taking part in euthanasia? Or did he just say like, did daring to say, I'll take care of it. Pleky leaves that part out. I mean, don't get me wrong. The,

the, he had to do what he had to do. He was going to kill everybody in that resistance. Exactly. Pretty ugly way to go about it though. Now, if they smothered him with a pillow or something that would make sense and kind of absolve Plecky

of knowing about the depths of what Daring was doing. My guy probably knew from what I understand. He probably knew at least a little bit. But Plecky did know that people were being murdered in the hospital. I don't know if he knew that Daring was doing it.

Right. He totally did. What was happening in the hospital. But I don't know if he knew that Daring was doing it. Right. I mean... He totally did. What was happening in the hospital, outside of medical experiments, because they weren't really talking about those, people knew what was happening in the fucking hospital. After a while, when someone was sick,

like, oh, you should go to the hospital. They'd be like, fuck no. Nobody comes back from the hospital. Right, right, right, right, right. So they knew that there was also a like a side death factory over there um i don't know i know i'm suspicious um i am also suspicious i'll let you be the judge at the end of the series if he's absolved or not i i honestly i think i think it's a world of grays and when you're when you're operating a resistance cell in the middle of Auschwitz.

I will say, sometimes you get a pass. I'll let you be the judge if he gets an Auschwitz pass. Just this once, though. We're not doing that again. However, with the snitch dad, that didn't mean that the Nazis didn't know about the cell. So it was decided that they'd have to launch their uprising sooner than planned

in order to slow down the Nazi response yeah you gotta plan that more in order to slow down the Nazi response resistance infected Nazi guards with their own typhus like they would go through their bedding and pick out their own lice and then lice bomb

SS guards as they walked by just like pocket sand from King of the hill yeah but they do it with their fuck face they didn't fucking do it with lice um and they also had people that did the guards laundry and they would like put the lice in their pockets uh which would spread the typhus into the guards however as uh plucky was planning an uprising two different breakouts occurred in birkenau one involved some fucking movie shit uh two guys stole some ss uniforms simply walked by all the guards got into an officer's car and drove out of the camp however unfortunately as i'm sure you're aware um know breaking out of auschwitz ends with a lot

of reprisals real real bad um and that was something that immediately made plecky pump the brakes he's like wait wait if we get out everybody's gonna fucking die like this i don't know if this is worth it this is reinforced in stanislaw uh veers bicky sorry uh one of roweki's inner circle when the home army's inner circle, one of the Home Army's inner circle, ended up in the camp. Nobody's entirely sure why, but he was not an infiltrator like Polecki. He was not there as a volunteer. But Polecki assumed that he was sent to the camp to get word to him like, hey, operations coming. We need to get the uprising underway.

The resistance is going to send people to help from the outside. He assumed this is my sign. Instead, Stanislaw told him nobody cares. The allies aren't coming. This piss Vitold off, but that did not slow him down. And this is actually one of the ways that we have almost full

complete blueprints of the Auschwitz death complex. He fucking stole them from the records room and smuggled them out using a string of different couriers until they got into the hands of the Polish and British governments.

That's why we have those. Those were specifically used to debunk genocide denial in a court of law in the UK. Oh, you do it now, assholes. Now, he did this because he's like, well, how can these people not care? Look at this.

At the same point, the death camp had reached a capacity for 6,000 victims per day. And Vitold's resistance cell was rapidly beginning to die from disease murder snitching he had to scale back the operations as more and more people were taken out and he was pretty sure it was only a matter of time before it was his turn instead of an uprising he began to plan an escape uh something that he should be good at now since all of the escapes from auschwitz one had been done with his planning. There's been 10 people have successfully escaped from Auschwitz I. Birkenau is a completely different story.

But Auschwitz I, he had helped plan every escape. So he knew how to do it. There's also something else driving him to escape. He had watched countless, by his estimates, hundreds of thousands of Jews be led to their deaths at this point. And by now, ethnic non-Jewish polls were going into the chambers as well. That meant he's like, there's no way I can do an uprising here. We're all just going to die. We have to get the fuck out of here. And then non-Jewish prisoners of the camp, so most of the still surviving population of Auschwitz I, were set to be transferred to Buchenwald to make room for more Jews. Now, Buchenwald wasn't a purpose-built death camp like Auschwitz, but had become one. And it was still a fucking horror show.

And people there, it was being worked to death generally at this point um but he also knew being moved was a way um to ruin your continuity of resistance like he like he'd have to start all over again he's like so i just i can't let that happen i have to get the fuck out of here he managed to get he managed to fake it and skip the transfer by uh or get out of it by faking an illness. Um, but virtually his entire resistance movement was transferred. Um, so there's another problem.

He was almost certainly slated to die as a sick man and fucking Auschwitz. Um, but, uh, he managed to get out of the immediate death sentence of that by using his connections within the hospital to say that Plucky wasn't sick. He was just drunk, which was somehow that also didn't end in him being executed.

I truly don't understand how. But after this, he was assigned to the bakery, and this would be his escape route because the bakery was outside of the fenced walls of Auschwitz. It was outside of the main camp, and every bakery shift would only be guarded by a handful of SS guys like two or three on what they

you know they assumed was probably a chill job eating bread all night or whatever like they didn't think the bakers are going to give them any problems now finally after two years over two years in fucking Auschwitz Vito Pilecki and the rest of his bakery team two men named

Edik and Jan escaped out the back door while telling the SS they're going to go get some flour Auschwitz. Vito Pilecki and the rest of his bakery team, two men named Edik and Jan, escaped out of the back door while telling the SS they're going to go get some flour. As they ran off into the night, the SS shot at them, but couldn't see them in the dark, won't have to hit anything. They eventually changed into civilian clothes that they had brought, like they

had smuggled out of the camp with them and scampered off into the night. But they didn't bring any food or water with them because that would be suspicious. And they were left to simply go through the Polish countryside, knocking on doors and asking for favors. And they made their way towards Warsaw, which is around 200 miles

away. Shockingly, they were actually welcomed by everyone. And this is despite the fact that everyone they ran into knew exactly where they came from because of their appearance. Now, Auschwitz was not a fucking secret to anybody. But he looked like a skeleton and had his head shaved. Everybody fucking knew what that meant in the area.

But just because people offered them food and water didn't mean they trusted them. They figured that maybe they'd get them to sit in place and they'd call the Germans on them and get a reward. So instead that they would take... Yeah. So instead they took what was offered to them immediately and then just ran off into the woods. Understandable. Yeah. During one of those stops, that's exactly what happened.

And someone called the... There's a soldier in the village. Someone called him over and told him these guys look like they came from the camp and they ran off into the woods as the soldiers began shooting at them and Pilecki got shot in the shoulder, but it was seemed to be more of a glancing blow.

Now they eventually able to escape and make contact with the resistance in the next town over. And this resistance cell was led by a man who pointed out that they had read Pilecki's reports and they wanted to launch an attack on the camp a year ago. But the resistance leadership in Krakow did not believe Pleki's stories and thought they were so over the top. He must be like a German double agent.

Fuck you, man. Specific orders were given to shoot Pleki on site as a collaborator. Thankfully, this this regional resistance leader is like, well, that sounds stupid. I'm not going to do that. And he took him in and got him a fake identity so he could pass checkpoints and helped get his paperwork together.

But they also started planning an assault of over 100 fighters onto the camp. But then Roeki, head of the Warsaw resistance, was arrested by the Gestapo and the exile head of state, Prime Minister Sikorski, died in a plane crash. So that kind of puts a damper on any organized Home Army plans. Yeah. So plans were tabled and he returned to Warsaw in August of 1943, which is not a good time to be in fucking Warsaw. By this point, Warsaw was effectively a war zone. The resistance was in a state of open warfare against occupation forces,

killing Nazi officials left and right, which led to Nazi reprisals of 100 poles shot on site for every act of resistance. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, led by the Jewish Combat Organization and military Union, something that we will definitely be talking about at length in a different time, had been crushed by now. And the ghetto had been burnt to the ground a few months before. The Allies just landed in Italy in July, and Stalingrad was retaken by Soviet forces in February. So the Nazis were probably starting to really feel those walls close in on them a little bit by now. However, back in Warsaw, Plucky was trying to get the new resistance leader, Komorowski, to greenlight an attack on Auschwitz-Birkenau.

When he was told that that was a suicide mission, he pointed out that he knew and he did not care. Thanks, guy. Yeah. Instead of his plan being agreed to, he was sent over to a unit that assassinated collaborators. Pleky ended up being quite good at this. And his personal unit also freelanced to take up members of the Home Army that were anti-Semitic. Thank you. Yeah.

He killed a lot of his own people. Because there were some Jewish survivors in Warsaw still. there were some Jewish survivors in Warsaw still and when Pilecki got reports that those people, that like members of the Home Army were preying on these people, he would go and kill them. So yeah, good guy Pilecki.

Thanks Pilecki. I couldn't find evidence that that he I couldn't find evidence of how many he killed but it's implied that it was quite a few. He also helped organize relief efforts for Jewish families for food, water, and hiding, because if they came out, they were going to die.

The Polish resistance were worried about something else, though. The Red Army was currently steamrolling through their country, had broken off relations with the Polish government in exile after news broke of the K-10 massacre, where the NKVD executed an estimated 22,000 Polish prisoners of war and political prisoners. Now, this is mostly the educated class of Poles and military officers with soldiers given this, if enlisted men were there. officers with soldiers given this like if like enlisted men were there some of them were given the uh the choice to switch sides um and a lot of them end up during the polish people's army which is like the soviet controlled polish proxy army uh yeah previous to this the soviets had lied to sikorsky uh and all of the polish government in exile about what had happened to the pows that died in the forest and signed an agreement that the Polish government in exile about what had happened to the POWs that died in the forest

and signed an agreement that the Polish government and the Soviets would work together to defeat the Nazis. When Polish leadership asked about releasing those soldiers, because 22,000 is a lot of fucking people, like, hey, we could really use those soldiers and officers in the Polish Free Army. Could you free them and send them over

to us? Because at this point, everybody simply thought that they were in a POW camp. Stalin kind of shrugged and said they'd all been released. Then changed the story like, oh, I think they're in Manchuria. In 1942, some Polish rail yard workers heard rumors

about a mass grave and reported to the Polish underground. But it wasn't until 1943 when the Nazis heard about it, that word really got out because of course the nazis use for propaganda against the soviet union well some people namely absolute fucking moron grover fur uses the evidence that the nazis had committed this crime against humanity they didn't uh it just so happened that stalin was so fucking stupid he gave a really easy layup to the Nazis, which actually happens quite often.

Just before the breakup of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev admitted that the NKVD had definitely done that shit, and in fact, they have done that in several more places as well. With this as framing, the resistance was worried that even though the end of the Nazis was definitely in sight, they would be

replaced by Soviet occupation once again. And now they knew what occupation looked like. The Soviet occupation was not liberation for them. It ends in K-10. As 1943 turned into 1944, the Polish resistance thought that they had promises from the allies, the allied governments, namely the US and Britain, in support of their future independence. However, in February 1944, it was announced that Churchill had pretty much agreed to give all of Eastern Poland and Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union. Notably, no part of the Polish government or any kind of Polish representation was in on these meetings or decision-making. Polish representation was in on these meetings or decision-making. Nobody was consulted about this.

This is simply made by imperial powers of the time. Right. So only a year out of Auschwitz, and the Poles have been pretty much betrayed by everybody in the world. Witold Pilecki joined up a cell of the resistance led by Emil Fyodorow, who was actually ethnic German. That's a weird one. Yeah, there's quite a few ethnic Germans in Poland who fucking hated the Nazis.

I mean, they also hate... Yeah, I mean, they hate the Soviet Union as well, that dual occupation concept that we talked about. Sure. Now, they agreed to fight anybody who invaded and occupied Poland. And together with the Home Army and other elements of the resistance, they began to plan the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

And that is what we'll pick up next time on the conclusion of the story of Witold Pilecki. And it does not get better from here on out. At least there's no Auschwitz involved. It's hard to be worse than talk about Auschwitz for an hour and a half. That's true. Oh, that was mentally draining. Yeah, that was Vito Plecki part two. And see, that's the reason why I started this by saying this is probably the only time we're going to chart the history of Auschwitz.

Because there's only so many ways you can do it. You have to have a narrative structure. And I think doing it through Vito Plecki is a really good way to do it. Just like there's other death camps with a lot of history, Treblinka, Sobibor, etc. I think the best way to see them is through a narrative structure of a resistance member because they're the ones taking

a lot of notes because that's their point, right? But that is VTOL Pleki part two. Liam, plug your shows. I feel kind of gross doing that. There's your problem 10 000 losses listen to them uh buy my books uh his books if you like what we do here leave us a review it's free um it helps us a lot i've noticed a lot more people are doing that and it's really really good

thank you so much um if you think that we what we do is worth a dollar you can throw it to us on patreon uh you get a whole bunch of bonus stuff uh you'll get this episode early um before anybody else or maybe you already did uh we're in a weird gray zone here um and again thank you so much for listening and until next time uh learn how to bamboozle nazis in the streets hang the nazis in the streets