Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 229 - Witold Pilecki, The Auschwitz Volunteer Part 3

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

The conclusion to the story of Witold Pilecki Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Get Joe's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Frontier-Corps-Military-Sci-Fi-Forlorn-ebook/dp/B0B5YJD7J2/ref=sr_1_3?crid=3KIOPIRCXJ4D1&keywords=joe+kassabian&qid=1665384891&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIzLjI4IiwicXNhIjoiMi44MiIsInFzcCI6IjIuODYifQ%3D%3D&sprefix=%2Caps%2C189&sr=8-3 Sources: Witold Pilecki. Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery Adam Koch. A Captain's Portrait: Witold Pilecki - Martyr for Truth Jack Fairweather. The Volunteer

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 Lines of my Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and with me is Liam. Hello Liam. You are so enthusiastic for being, what is it, 5.57am your time. That is what the advantage of chemicals are and mostly just caffeine i don't i don't i don't do anything else just a lot of caffeine leo actually actually my blood is 30 dmt at this at this point um if if you took my blood i think there would be like crystals of instant coffee floating within it oh you got oh

yeah instant coffee i remember when i was on birthright sorry and uh i i had they didn't i was in israel obviously uh and they don't have any goddamn you know american style drip coffee so i was smearing instant coffee packets on my gums. Yeah, it's a weird thing that when you move to certain countries abroad, that if you're used to the normal, like, I'm going to wake up and start my nice gallon of coffee in my coffee machine. My souvenir mug I got at Niagara Falls. Yeah, that is one thing that I made sure to bring when I moved

because like all the coffee cups here are tiny and I brought three, like what we would consider normal American coffee cups because they are three times the size. Like I don't feel like shelling out the money for like a drip coffee machine because, you know because I live alone.

I'm not going to drink a liter of coffee every morning. Not with that attitude. But I do want to drink what amounts to be three cups of coffee that you would get at the corner cafe here. So, Liam, how are you doing, bud? I'm good, dude. I'm good. Yeah, i got engaged yeah i saw that congratulations i think that's the the first time in the history of the pod that someone got engaged in the middle of a series yeah i i assume my uh hopefully my marriage uh does better than uh

people lucky here well i mean I mean, if your marriage ever becomes comparable to breaking into Auschwitz, we have other problems. Yeah, that's not wrong, man. That's a good point. I would love for my beloved to not A, be sent to a death

camp, or B, be comparable to a death camp to my people. She is Catholic, so you know i mean so the options are still open who knows man corinne please don't listen to this episode so i was listening to uh my fiance's podcast and you know he was really hoping i was not the human equivalent of auschwitz so i think we should probably call this one off that's that's why the good lord of thechwitz. So I think we should probably call this one off. No, no, no, no, no. That's why the good Lord of the couples counts.

Together we can get through anything. And I definitely believe you're not the human equivalent of Auschwitz. Neither of us believe that. So, you know, it's good. So we are on part three of the Vitold-Pelecki saga. And I will say that this one does not have auschwitz in it however you probably all know this series is an ending with like a happy ending right like everybody knows this no this he's gonna get got and we're gonna have some opinions we're known

for our opinions uh i mean we're talking about poland in world war ii nothing about this ends well no um so when we left you last time warsaw was about to explode well explode again it already exploded two other times at this point for different reasons and yeah we will talk about the the warshetto Uprising at some point. This is a different Warsaw Uprising. So I hope I didn't get anybody's hopes up. I don't want to say scoreboard, but I am proud of my people for holding out for, what, 28 days? It's hard to operate two machine guns at once with both your middle fingers in the air at the same time it was it was pretty it's a crazy story and i think it's not really told all that well

uh in most places that try to no no i don't i don't believe that either i'll buy that not that i'm gonna be like obviously we'll tell it the best but you know we will now uh this other warsaw uprising this occurred as the nazis overall lot in the war was what i guess you could call it terminal decline since about 1944 i mean you could really say it before then um but this is when the like regular people in poland were really starting to notice like wow the nazis are nazis are down bad um so like their backs have been broken in the east soviet forces were nazis are down horrendous able broad's not responding to dms things are going poorly on the eastern front here uh like their back had been broken in the east. Soviet forces were rapidly steamrolling through

the remnants of the Barbarossa force. Before long, the Red Army was in eastern Poland itself, and they are expected to reach the banks of the Vistula River and encircle Warsaw itself pretty much any day by the end of

July. Meanwhile, the rest of the Allies had stormed ashore at Normandy and were beating back the Nazis in France. While much of the Polish Home Army was really hoping on a rapid Western Allied advance that would force the Nazis to pull much of their forces back to face them and pull them out of Poland, that just hadn't happened. to face them and pull them out of Poland. That just hadn't happened. Without that, the Poles were facing a garrison of tens of thousands of battle-hardened German soldiers with better weapons, better training, and much more equipment.

Because at this point, the Poles have a fair amount of guns, but it's mostly shit to the air ball to steal and smuggle. The Polish Home Army in Warsaw isn't exactly a professional army, you know. Just, I don't know, what's a Polish name? Justin Rosniak and friends. So that left them effectively with two options. Lay low until the Soviets showed up.

Kick the Nazis out and then surrender the Home Army to the Soviet Army. This option was incredibly unpopular for obvious reasons. By this point, Stalin's plans for a very much not independent Poland were very well known. And even the communists and socialists that had shacked up with the Home Army for this were not excited about that prospect. We'll talk a little bit more about the people

who ended up becoming the Soviet proxy forces made up of Poles. But there was the Home Army. The Home Army was effectively apolitical. They were not explicitly anything. Anybody could show up and join us please get out of our fucking country thanks yeah yeah it was like anti-double occupation forces there was communists and socialists there was a couple anarchists there were people that were a shy uh

like hair's length away from effectively being neo-naazis. It was when those situations were like, look, we're going to put all this aside until later. You know? Yeah, I suppose they would just be Nazis then. Yeah, you're right. Now, the Allies, and by that I mean the US and Britain, had been on board for a large-scale Polish insurrection within occupied Poland,

well, within the German portion of occupied Poland, for quite some time. And the government in exile had been trying to get their support for it for years because they only could get support from the US and Britain. Everybody knew the Soviets were not really on board with this. Right, right, right. Now, this is despite the fact that at the same time, the Soviets were calling for a full Poland-wide uprising on Radio Moscow during their advance towards Warsaw at the same time.

At least make our jobs easier for 10 minutes right until we crush you underfoot like a bug. Well, I mean, the thing is, it was effectively propaganda, right? Obviously, they didn't support a wide-scale Poland-wide insurrection. They controlled a fair amount of Poland. They didn't want that in their backyard. The Soviets were only going to support proxy forces which they could control. I mean, the US and the UK generally do the same thing. Otherwise, it gets messy, as recent history would suggest.

Otherwise, it gets messy, as recent history would suggest. Now, the only support that the US and Britain were able to muster for the Home Army were some supply drops and a crisp high five or two. However, just when things were beginning to look completely hopeless for the Poles, a flood of German soldiers fleeing the East swept through Poland. The Germans were a haggard mess. There's no hiding anymore how bad they were. They were barely dressed in uniforms that still fit on their back. They were leaving the wounded on the side

of the road. They were frostbitten, skinny, thirsty. They were running for their lives from the Red Army. Only signs that to say things going poorly yeah uh like there was no hiding anymore about how bad off they were like this seemed to be the kind of demoralizing show that absolutely crippled the local nazi administrative state within poland uh soldiers dressed in rags and some of them not even with boots

marched through the streets of warsaw as polish civilians went out to heckle and throw things at them like they were singing polish national songs hucking shit out of the windows like previously this ends with you like against a wall right you know uh or you know maybe not immediately but you'll be sent to a camp or or everybody in your entire apartment would get swept up in a gestapo raid for for this kind of outright anti-nazi behavior right this time they just didn't like they're like we we can't enforce shit anymore um right and it's because at the same time this is happening warsaw was effectively an open war zone uh resistance ambushes and acts of sabotage have become so common that nazis did not

leave their barracks like the end and when they went outside and remember this is a place that had been uh occupied for fucking years at this point um like and all of the nazi garrisons and like police stations have been fortified and if anybody left they had to go in like a full squad like a dozen people armed like they were going on a combat mission just to go across warsaw you know um good good no nazis should be afraid to leave their doors and then when they do leave their doors to get their legs blown off and then fed to them. I think that's perfectly reasonable. Yeah, the

German delicacy of self-leg. I'm sure there's a bizarre world word for it. If you say it fast enough, it sounds like one of those incredibly long German compound words they enjoy so much. Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm i'm saying joe now after this hilarious parade of nazi misery all remaining order within the occupied

not german occupied poland broke down shops ran by nazis and their sympathizers which were mostly german uh ethnic germans uh ethnic german, stuff like that. Because they were obviously benefiting from this arrangement. They all closed down and everybody realized we got to get the fuck out of here. The Reich in Poland is dead. Socialism is coming. We're about to be publicly

owned. And they were getting on any kind of motorized anything they could get the fuck kind of motorized anything. They could get the fuck out of there faster. A lot of people were just walking. My personal favorite was SS men were getting drunk in broad daylight and crying on the streets until Polish resistance members came up and beat them to death.

I mean, of course, there was the normal wide-scale looting. And normally, you'd expect the looting to come from the Poles. Like, aha, authorities are gone. Let's go get food and shit. But instead, it was German soldiers. They were just packing every bit of wealth they could and driving back towards Germany. However, Hans Frank, if you remember that asshole, he was still in charge, and he had been ordered by Hitler to create Fortress Warsaw.

Oh, wow. Yeah. There was also an ongoing German counter-offensive that was desperately attempting to break the Soviet advance towards Warsaw. And for the resistance inside the city, little to no information to go off of and they couldn't really make concrete plans for an uprising yet because there's too many unknown variables like what if the germans win in in their counter-offensive against the soviets like our our uprising will be fucking pointless right what if the soviets are just steamrolling them then we don't really have to do anything because then it would be a waste.

Are the Americans coming? Are the British coming? What should we do? Nobody's talking to them. That's awful. That's good. Yeah. I mean, if they launched a successful uprising after a German victory, it was a suicide mission.

They're all dead. Right. However, if they launch at the same time as the soviets broke the german counter-offensive it could work they would find themselves in a very short two-front war right like a two-front battle uh they had would have they would have nowhere safe to uh retreat from and the soviets certainly weren't talking uh to. No, because they have plans for you. Yeah, and they were not... They no longer recognized the Home Army, but we'll talk about that. Oh, that's quick.

That was quick. On the advice of his intelligence chief, General Komorowski cited that they decided to call off the uprising until they got more information. Which, for an intelligence chief, normally when I bring those up on the show, it's due to a colossal fuck up. This time... An oxymoron, if you will.

Yeah, exactly. This time, not so much. Now, from where the resistance was sitting, the battle had been at best between the Red Army and the Nazis, fought to a standstill on the outskirts of Warsaw. And they would, if they could, buy their time until they knew that the outcome was certain. They couldn't... Oh, sure. There's no point in putting your guys out there if the Soviets are going to clean it up.

Now, there is a small problem, though. This is a good idea. But Hans Franks, the local Nazi administrator, wasn't an idiot, which normally helps if the local occupation authority is dumb as hell, but he wasn't. He realized with the ongoing counter-offensive, the battle will eventually come to Warsaw, no matter what happens. Also, he needs to build this fortress Warsaw. So there's also, Frank's knew about the home army. Everybody knew about the fucking home army.

So he needed to find a way to defang them. So they don't have like this enemy support directly in Warsaw. Right. So he ordered the conscription of all polish men between the ages of 17 and 65 yeah now this was this wasn't for military service um uh palecki wasn't sure if this was for mass deportation which was probably was and at this point if the germans remember this is 44 at this point if the germans you in a train, you are going to be murdered. And Plecky knows that better than anyone in the Polish Home Army.

Yeah, the guy got out of Auschwitz. Yeah. Might have an idea. Now, there was also the possibility that they were going to be used as forced labor to build this fortress Warsaw. Either way, Plecky was pretty goddamn sure. Not thrilled. Yeah. Plecky was pretty sure no. Pilecki was pretty sure

no matter if he was digging a trench or getting in a train, this all ended with him back in Auschwitz. Not to mention, this was done to sap the strength of the Home Army. 17 to 65 is virtually every man. Yeah, it's virtually the entire thing.

So, Komorowski knew that he couldn't let his men be snatched up for forced labor in a date with a fucking unventilated box in the countryside so he ordered a general mobilization for all of warsaw's resistance under his command unfortunately of course this was a snap decision they don't really have a lot of plans so they're just like now they have to be the home army was going to attempt to secure warsaw oh boy because now they have no choice yeah now it's weird how my orders just say march or die pussy your entire company go change that light bulb now the home army was attempting to uh like had was attempting to work on

this uprising plan for a while. They even had a name for it because in my opinion, you need to come up with a cool operation name and then work your way back. Nobody cared. Totally agree with you. They called it Operation Tempest. Solid name. Could also be

a dad butt rock band name. Hey, bro, you want to go see Operation Tempest at the State Fair? Oh, yeah, dude. But it wasn't a solid plan. They knew they had decided their

local rallying points. They had some weapons caches, but they didn't have all that many. It was all at the last minute because their hand got forced. What's the idea? Now, after mobilization was ordered, commanders began getting all of their men into position. And on August 1st, 1944, the Second Warsaw Uprising began.

However, because Frank's orders had kind of forced their hand, like I said, for Operation Tempest, they also had to launch it before full mobilization and before preparations had been done. They were really hoping on having more guns. Not everybody would have a gun. There's quite a few holes running through the streets at night. But also, they had to launch it before the mass conscription date. So that meant not everybody

was able to get to their previous established positions, which were all picked because they were near their objectives. They knew they needed to capture the hard points. They had to capture garrisons, Gestapo stations, administrative

buildings, shit like that. Of course, there's guns inside the police stations and the garrisons, but they also need to cut the head off of the command by capturing administrative buildings. But they couldn't get into position. And because they couldn't have guns

at home, that would be too suspicious. Those positions were where the guns were stashed. So at 5 p.m., when they were ordered to just launch, they were just randomly throughout the city. So they just had to pick the nearest German position and assault it. Sometimes it was only just a random checkpoint, like a German owned building. And because they didn't get to their previous established positions, they couldn't pick up the rifles in a lot of cases or submachine guns or pistols. So like one checkpoint got assaulted by screaming Polish people armed with rocks and a plank of wood with a nail in it. Did it work?

That's my question. If it works and it's stupid work that's why that's my question yes it should if it works and it's stupid it's not stupid yeah uh because of course they could like you get brained with a plank of wood with a nail in it how embarrassing dude so much for your fucking master race my my guy is laying there half open on the sidewalk yeah it's a lot like you know uh the former japanese prime minister being murdered with a homemade t-shirt cannon like this is not a place of honor too bad imagine that like the the nazi state putting all this time and effort to train

uh warsaw and you can't beat with a fucking flintstones weapon viatcha sloth from the top rope and then you know after you shove a nail through home dude's forehead you grab his weapon and his ammo and scamper back off into the city sure problem solved you know honestly what uh so where v told palecki was in the middle of all of this so he uh found himself the group of local teenagers as they as they were noted in the volunteer they did not say resistance member they said quote local teenagers and they they waited in an alleyway until a german car passed by and they like hucked something in front of it like uh like a big fucking obstacle the car ran into it and none of these guys had guns so like they had just ran up on the car like reached them through the window

pulled them out and stomped their fucking heads in until they were dead so they just mario got mario carded them they got they got blue shelled you tied to a blue shell uh it's so whimsical when nazis die it's it's like this scene from fucking the first hostile film where he uh he blackmails the kids with candy to beat the mafia men to death just like drug out of their cars and like the craziest part is this was kind of working throughout the city because to the germans there was no rhyme or reason or pattern or plan to what was going on just like huh suddenly all of our men are getting murdered with flintstone weapons this is weird and not to mention they were so worried about the soviets on the other side of the river that like they weren't really sure what to do like

they seem to be being attacked by a mob rather than a well-laid military plan from the local resistance but either way by the end of the first day of the uprising the home army was in control of the center of warsaw as well as a few other parts of the city things were going pretty well now this because a lot of a lot of that uh had to do with that chaos right like the germans had no idea how to react uh their rapid success meant that the germans still had no idea like where to go next. There was still the obvious problem of not having enough firepower. So that meant that

the Germans, once they realized like, hey, we're getting clapped on every street corner here by fucking angry kids with a fistful of like a sock full of marbles or whatever. They just retreat back into their hardened positions and start reorganizing. The local commander didn't even bother to report this as a major incident and left it to the local SS garrison to handle.

There's no need to make all of us look bad politically by saying, hey, there's a fucking uprising. We need reinforcements. Let's just let the local anti-partisan forces, you know, read Death Squad, handle this, right? However, by 530 that evening, things had gotten bad enough where he had to pick up the phone and call a little guy named Heinrich Himmler. I'd be like, boss, we got a fucking problem. You would not believe how many of our guys are being brained with party, party, brawl weapons. Oh, oh, my poor boy.

What's dumb German name Franz? He didn't even see the Fred Flintstone gun coming. There's a fucking spears. We're not sure what's

happening. You guys know sobbing into the microphone as as Franz and friends are brutally murdered by the by the Polish home army.

You guys know the crank gun from future rob we get murdered with a scooty puff junior up in this bitch and then as their technicals are driving the way they do that the flintstone car yeah i'm tired of getting run down by flintstone cars fuck the nazis that's funny now himmler did the most himmler thing possible he called the commander of the saxon house and concentration camp where oh god dude the home army's old resistance leader stefan roweki was being held and ordered him to be immediately murdered on the spot then he called hitler um after a short talk with hitler

himmler ordered the city to be destroyed entirely and said, quote, every citizen of Warsaw is to be killed, including men, women, and children. What a fucking dick. I can't believe I have to say that, but yeah, Himmler's a dick. Yeah, this fucking hot take, dude.

So you think this Himmler guy might be a tad problematic? Have the decency to let yourself be killed as opposed to taking a suicide capsule. You fucking pussy. I will say on the scale of Nazis who look like absolute fucking losers, Himmler on the top, no competition.

Look at that fucking nerd. Look at him. One of those stupid little fucking glasses. Normal glasses existed back then. You didn't have to dress like a silent film no you gotta you gotta look like a brooklyn hipster man yeah i'm pretty sure i've seen polycules made out of entirely dudes that look like this undercuts tiny circular glasses no bottom like no chin whatsoever nope now a mood of optimism flooded Through Warsaw as rumors began to spread

That the Soviets were almost there Which meant of course the Nazis Were going to be on the run soon People hung Polish flags from the windows And like civilians ran out and like partied With the resistance in the street Everybody assumed that this shit was almost over Now Palicki wasn't doing any of that

Instead he was doing What I assume is something he's been plotting on doing since he was in Auschwitz, and that is hunting German snipers through the pitch darkness, stalking them on rooftops, and then stabbing them to death one by one. Oh, good. Yeah, no, I've seen that scene from Inglourious Bastards, and it

rules. He could have used a gun. He wanted to use a knife. Yeah, it's fine. By day three. Silencer too loud. It's the old Polish silencer. By that mean stabbed to death.

I mean dagger. By day three of the uprising, he was leading an assault in the local post office when German tanks appeared for the first time. And they were marching civilians in front of them to act as human shields. The Germans... Yeah, I'm starting to think these Germans might not be on the up and up, Liam. They just poured fire into the home army. The home army did not

return fire because they'd end up shooting civilians, but they did manage to pretty easily outrun the tanks because they knew more so like the back of their fucking hands oh did the tiger break down just make the shitty german tank turn a little bit

too hard and it'll catch on fire and kill the crew oh it's flipped what a surprise it just cartwheeling no it's a pillbox it's just gonna cartwheel through the air like a PS3 glitch. But the resistance still, even with tanks in the city, the resistance was still managing to capture things. But the optimism didn't last a super long time,

which tends to happen when you're besieged in a city surrounded by Nazis. Also when you're Polish, just in general. Yeah, it's a vibe. The Nazis cut off the city's water supply um so you know because up at this point the municipal water system still worked which i have to say off topic here that's incredibly impressive that is very impressive how many times has the city been fucking blown up and you're still turning on your tap and like ah hot and cold running water i've had apartments in the united states where that was even a possibility like like oh the wind blew a little too hard my my water is brown now cool meanwhile in a literal

war zone ah water for my tea right um this led to resistance members digging wells into the side of the fucking road like and trying to tap into pipes yeah and like the water was described as a quote milky brown um tasty it's not good but people drink it because they you do i gotta say if i if anybody ever describes almost anything that i'm drinking as a milky brown i'm out uh i'm not drinking milky brown sorry even if you described my coffee as milky brown i would be off put that you described it in such a way but i mean because of you know all these other problems they were also running along other things like food and ammunition and having to rely completely on what they

grabbed from dead nazis which i I support this kind of requisition. Yeah, it's not immoral to loot dead Nazis. No, it's just, it becomes a problem. Especially right there at the Geneva Convention. If there's Nazis, you get a pass. Yeah, no grave robbing, parentheses. You can grave rob a Nazi. But the problem is,

it's not the most sustainable logistical system. You eventually will run out of dead Nazis. Good problem to have, though. Yeah, yeah. The crop is good. This um this meant you know in a lot of cases if you don't doesn't have a face anymore if you had a gun you only had a couple bullets or you didn't have a gun and you know the germans weren't exactly uh known for their restraint when it came to putting down uprisings. So thousands of people were already dead in the city. At least 2,000 resistance fighters and we don't know how many civilians.

A fucking lot. Pilecki was fighting Nazis room by room, throwing grenades back and forth when Nazi planes appeared over the head and began just carpet bombing what remained of the not carpet bombed portion of Warsaw. More tanks appeared and he more tanks than he had

ever seen before which is impressive when you realize that he fought the invasion um and they just ran over the barricades that the home army had put in the middle of the streets to try to ward them off um so everything was pretty pretty quickly collapsing here now they did get around one thing which was like the the garrison buildings that the Germans and the SS had. The SS were held up in a hardened, I think it was like a barracks. Reinforced. The windows had like sandbags. Like you weren't going to be able to come in.

They had firing ports and shit in the walls. So they simply put a fuckload of dynamite on the ground floor and leveled the entire building, which, this might surprise you, worked really well. Yeah. However, it seemed like whenever the resistance did something to raise the morale,

the Nazis did something equally terrible to drop a ray back down. I can't believe they would do that. Yeah, yeah, they're Nazis. And this is when the Home Army learned that, quite honestly some of the most evil motherfuckers in all of nazi germany were coming to their backyard an ss detachment under the command of eric julius eberhard von dembach zoletsky that just sounds like a

fucking uh mega villain yeah uh he was a former member of the fucking reichstag and he uh who quickly became i will say one of the most enthusiastic leaders of a death squad in all of Nazi Germany. He entered the city with his detachment and with the strict orders, like we already talked about, to literally kill everybody. Those were his orders. Bok-Soletsky was the commander of the local, this detachment is called Security Warfare, which was one of the several different words that the Nazis for anti-partisan operations. And this is effectively, well, not really even effectively, it's an ISAT scruping unit. It's a death squad unit. And he was put in charge of the entire counteroffensive of entire city he's put in charge of murdering warsaw and while box zoletsky is is

himself one of the most evil men to literally ever curse the earth under his command was arguably someone who was the most evil oscar fucking dial vonger he was if he's not the most evil man to ever walk the earth oh he's fucking up there fucking close we're gonna talk a little bit more about him in a second now around this time the so-called Warsaw

airlift started large-scale allied supply drop mission to feed and arm the resistance within the city to keep it going. Bullets, food, water, all of it was down to nothing. So when you think of an allied airlift effort, you think of more modern things, right? Because there are some nations, specifically the United States and NATO forces, that can make just an insane logistic system

appear seemingly overnight. We're not there yet. This is 1944. They can't do that yet. It was a miserable fucking failure in every way possible. Now, some of this reason was because it was effectively sabotaged by the Soviets.

I mean, not all of it is their fault. It would have gone a lot better if they didn't actively attempt to make the mission fail oh we're just gonna stop combat operations don't worry about why we're doing this oh we'll get to that uh now for starters the soviets dropped their because like the soviets had to take part right they were part of the allies they had to put some kind of token effort um this because at this point, they're not entertaining Stalin that much. They're not like, no, you can literally take whatever you want. They're not there yet. So Stalin is still playing his part in the Allies. But he dropped his supplies onto Warsaw without parachutes. That meant everything just hit the ground like a fucking meteor and exploded into uselessness and destroyed on impact. I mean, we're not sure if that happened on purpose to make sure nothing useful dropped. But we do know that the US and Britain did use parachutes because, of course, they did.

Like, why would you not? 80% of our supplies, us being the United united states drop into german occupied territory anyway though yeah yeah we missed entirely because like we were attempting like the the the allies are attempting to drop supplies on a very small target right and really nothing is that accurate in this day and age right like you're just flying things wildly into the air sure sure now you can combine this with what the rest of the Allies were doing. And like I said,

seemingly throwing supplies into the air wildly without aiming them. About half of the Allied supplies fell in the German hands. About 20% slammed uselessly into buildings or missed a target so badly the resistance couldn't recover them. 20% of everything

was completely lost. It is easier to chalk all of this up to incompetence rather than malice, but it wasn't for a lack of trying. Remember, Warsaw is deep in Nazi territory, so these are long flying missions to try to drop supplies on them.

The easiest place to launch these missions would be from Soviet airfields because they'd be much closer. So the Soviets simply did not allow their airfields to be used for the supply drop. So that's the part that I cannot chalk up

to incompetence. That's pure malice. Yeah, exactly. But that distance that the Allied planes had to fly was so long that they couldn't carry a ton of supplies. They had to carry less, so they went around on gas. And when they got near Warsaw, they faced a massive curtain of anti-aircraft fire. They would then fling their already small payload randomly towards the direction of Warsaw or maybe even just, I don't know, the last name of some guy they can't pronounce at all and then try to escape.

This resulted in one aircraft being lost for every ton of supplies dropped. Oh, Jesus. Which is catastrophic. It was bad for everybody. Other than the Nazis, I guess. They came out on top of this one. However, this meant that for every bit of advance the resistance made, they would then have to stop, wait, and hope that they would receive another drop of ammo, which most of the time they didn't.

They would just watch the boxes fly off into the distance and never get any of them. So in the downtime, even weeks into the resistance, they had to just farm dead Nazis for loot. Of course, this made continued forward offensive pressure impossible because they never had enough ammo to fight through the now prepared Nazi positions. And as the Germans retook parts of the city they'd lost, Plucky was forced to fight increasingly desperate rear guard actions throughout rooms of houses and kitchens and shit he would have to escape through

right and he was a long sense out of ammo he was flinging grenades at Germans and make them run and then after like a grenade he'd then throw a rock that they would also believe was a grenade so he could take off running fair enough fair play fair play

at one point his detachment was running through like a warren of blown up buildings they got cornered they realized they have nowhere to go this is it this is like a vetoed pleck he's finally gonna get shot and then as the Nazis close in

pocket sand the door flings open and they're rescued by the local rail yard union armed to the tooth of pry bars and they just proceed to start braining the shit out of nazis with pry bars i'd like to believe they show up wearing hard hats and high vest too here's your safety briefing it's just absolutely splitting fraud's face in half with the pry oh you love to see it fuck some nazis man now there's several parts of plecky's memos that reference what he called russian mercenaries

um and if anybody's going to read his book um that requires some explanation uh because you know his book is a primary source for the war for the warsaw uprising so you know people assume that there were russian mercenaries like we're not talking about World War II era Wagner group here. From researching Himmler's deployment orders, because I'm an insufferable nerd. I had to figure out what he was talking about. I had the best explanation that I could find for this. And the one that makes the most amount of sense is that they were collaborators of the so-called Kaminsky Brigade. Because the Germans weren't using mercenaries. They just fucking conscript you

but there was the kaminsky brigade which is an ss brigade made up of ethnic russians that was deployed to warsaw and they were deployed there because they're noted for their fucking like absolute ruthlessness and cruelty that uh that was on in power with like the derlwanger brigade um and that's who they were teamed up with. It was obviously Dirlvanger's attachment. Together, they were under the command of Heinz Reinfarth, who would commit some of the worst violence that would be seen outside of a death camp all in Warsaw.

And Dirlvanger's violence in particular was so depraved and terrible. I'm legitimately on the fence of ever doing an episode about him because I think it's just too much. Like it's... Psychotic child killer and molester and rapist. Yes.

Someone so disgusting the Nazis did not want to work with him. Like... Yeah, but they did anyway, so there you go. Yeah, one pressed far enough like, yeah, right, we'll employ the serial child murderer rapist.

It's fine. Collectively, these people were responsible for tens of thousands of murders or more throughout the city because it's thought that at least 40,000 people at this point were dead. And these detachments were literally going door to door and murdering everyone they found. And as a small side note here, because we've been having a chuckle. I have to bring that down a bit because this is the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. Reinfarth

might be one of the worst Nazi war criminals to never face any repercussions for his actions. People like Mengele don't really count to me because they spent the rest of their life running with Israeli fucking murder teams on his heels. I don't really count. I will say one israeli state gets real right is executing all nazis might be the only thing we get right you'll never hear any complaints from me

yeah uh hey so you could run but then what we're gonna do right is we're gonna stalk you for months and then we're gonna uh kidnap you from the bus stop. And then we're going to drug you and dress you as a patient and bring you back to Jerusalem and put you in a bulletproof box and give you what we're going to call a fair trial. But is it? And then we're going to hang you. All right, cool. Let's do this. I think my favorite part of that story was that we will absolutely cover at some point is Barbie got burnt by his own uh because his son was hitting on another german that lived there who's not a nazi uh like a drum a member of a german family who's not nazis like by the way

my dad is klaus barbie yeah like oh how'd that work out for you get kidnapped get kidnapped at a commercial ill alal-jet. But Mengele spent the rest of his life running. I consider... Obviously, that's not justice, but I consider him suffering some repercussions. Reinfarth didn't do any of that. He stayed right in Germany and eventually ended up in politics, becoming the first mayor of Westerland, and then at parliament representing Schwestern Holstein until 1967, receiving a general retirement pension

when he retired. So that's cool. Yeah. We should have never rebuilt Germany. We should have just split it all the way down into all the tiny things that used to be Germany. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will say you were the greater

german reich you're now 65 different countries yeah suck it you're all princely states again and if we reunify and if you try to reunify we'll turn you into whatever the equivalent of we'll turn them into glasses what we should have done what we should have done what we should have done you know what cut it nope nope i'm not gonna make that joke i'll make the joke to you off air i know they surrendered use the atom bomb on them anyway that was the original plan uh to nuke the nuke germany but they surrendered before his uh before his available fucking quitters uh now uh these mass murders were publicly blamed on the resistance either directly or the Nazis telling Polish people they wouldn't have to kill so many of them if the resistance simply surrendered.

So within a month of fighting in the city, there is no optimistic civilian support anymore. Everybody was either dead, fleeing, tired, sick, whatever, or hiding in a basement, fearing even seeing a member of the resistance because that would get them a visit from the local death squad right and not to sugarcoat things here but the resistance also did this shit um there was a lot of elements of the resistance that like maybe civilians ran out and joined them they weren't exactly doing background checks to join the home army and like there's a lot of units of the resistance that you know were freedom fighters and then there were some that are literally fucking bandits uh taking advantage of a horrible

situation which is 100 always happens like you if you look at if you look at any rebel group or resistance group even ones that are weirdly popular with younger people today on the internet they're effectively drug gangs which ones do you mean are very popular with them? Which one do you mean, Joe? You can say it. I know what you mean. Can't imagine. Say it, coward.

Now, a lot of these people were reacting to... I'm afraid of fighters, Joe. A lot of these guys were reacting, the civilians, I mean, of course. The reason why they were reacting this way is because of Nazi terror. But there is some parts of the resistance that once things got tough, supplies ran low, they got hungry, whatever, they turned

on the populace too. So depending on where you were in the city, the person at your front door might be a gang of Home Army dudes or fucking SS and there was functionally no difference depending on who it was. Other times, more of the extreme

far right wing groups of the resistance uses a breakdown of law, order, and even command at this point to specifically target the remaining Warsaw Jewish population. Sometimes this ended, say in the case of Vitold's detachment

and him shooting at other resistance members to protect civilians. So like, not exactly a recipe for military success in the city. There's literally parts of the resistance who are at war with each other. Not to mention that there's some who are

outright fucking bandits preying on civilians. And on the other side of that is Oscar fucking dialing. You're like, there's no winning here. A hard place. One might say, yeah,

no matter how hard the resistance fought, there was little they could do to hold back the tide of the German war machine. And while they're on the ropes, they're still much stronger than the home army. V told his men were trapped in a building's basements for days at a time as the city was destroyed around them. Because the Nazis decided, even using literal psychiatric patients, like some of the dudes from Dahlwanger's detachment were. Because that's not even a euphemism.

That was literally where they came from. They were released from prison, many of them serving cases for multiple murders and rapes. A lot of them were considered psychotic, even by Nazi standards. They were probably, if they didn't get pressed into the SS, they would have been T-Ford. They were so

crazy by them. Instead, they get put into an SS uniform. They finally decided that they didn't even want to lose them fighting street to street. So they just started carpet bombing entire city blocks rather than fight house to house. And while all this was going on, the Home Army was still assuming in their last shred of optimism that the Red Army was going to show up anytime and help them. Arguments aside, a Soviet division being thrown in the fray definitely would have sent the German forces that were still fighting in the city

to run. Mostly because the Dahlwanger Brigade and people like it were not soldiers. They didn't fight. They murdered. They weren't used to fighting people that shot back. Specifically,

later on before Dahlwanger gets killed in captivity, his forces nobody knows how yeah beaten to death by members of the home army if i remember correctly nobody knows yeah the like they were noted for like being in terrible soldiers they don't fight they murder and at the first sign of like actual resistance they generally ran away. So Soviet assistance absolutely would have worked. And the US and the UK were screaming at Stalin to send home army assistance as they were literally with an eyeshot of Warsaw. Now, eventually Stalin caved, but not in the way that you think.

He eventually authorized 1,600 Polish soldiers from his own Polish army detachments to cross the border and join the battle. However, they could only carry the weapons in their hand, like their personal small arms. They'd have no support whatsoever from the rest of the Red Army. And when you think about it, you're Stalin, which I hope you're not. This plan makes sense. It's in the Soviet Union's best interest that they let the Nazis kill the Home Army, let the Home Army weaken the Nazis, and then just walk in over whatever's left and mop up. Now, I will say that there's still a fair amount of argument over if this was Stalin's actual plan.

There's no argument that August Stalin directly ordered the army to stop its advance at the same time that the uprising started, which being a member of the Allied command, of course, he knew about. There's no doubting that. There's also the opinion of some people, namely David Glantz, who I should point out is a member of the Russian Federation Academy of Natural Sciences, that the Red Army simply ran out of its own supply line and had to stop in order to strengthen it. I don't consider him a good source in this matter, because this might surprise you, the modern day Russian Federation does not accept any of these criticisms. Now, there is some legitimacy that the first Belarusian front, which was the unit parked

outside of Warsaw, was pretty beaten up. However, it's also you wouldn't have had to use the entire force. The Nazis didn't actually have that many men in Warsaw at this point. There's things they could have done. And the reason why you can kind of land the dial on they did this on purpose is because other things that they did, not just their lack of movement. For instance, Stalin ordered his forces to do everything they could from their side to stop any flow of supplies overland into the city. This included elements of the Home Army, which existed within the parts of Poland under Soviet occupation. That's sad. Yeah. He ordered them to be detained

and disarmed rather than allowing them to move towards the city to join the fight, despite the fact that previous to this, he supported a Polish-white uprising. I mean, verbally. Not in reality. It doesn't help the claim that the Soviets are powerless in this entire thing because a month

before the uprising started, the Soviets set up what was called the Polish Committee of National Liberation to compete with the previously accepted Polish government in exile, which did have some claim to legitimacy, if anybody did, because they were the pre-war

government. Right. This group would become the government the Soviets recognized as a legitimate one when they took over Poland. So do with that information what you will. But it is sure suspicious this all happened at the same time. after 54 days of fighting however the commander of the resistance komarovsky met with uh dembok zaletsky to agree to terms of

surrender by the end of september he had managed to negotiate a term that gave the resistance soldiers proper pow status rather than being insurgents, which would end with them going to Auschwitz. It also sold the civilians of the city out to what was called relocation. You know what that means. I do. I've

heard that one before. And Komorowski should have known exactly what the fuck that meant because there's one guy within his organization that uncovered a lot of information about what relocation means. And he went for it anyway. Cool. I love the species. In the end, 130,000 people died in Warsaw fighting, almost all of whom are killed by German death squads.

This included all but 5,000 of Warsaw's remaining Jewish population that had been left from the last Warsaw uprising and liquidation. Around 60,000 of the half million or so Warsaw civilians that were sent to the camp system were sent directly to death camps. Now, what's honestly the most surprising about any of this is the Germans actually upheld their end of the deal regarding POW status for the Home Army. I was like, this is where Pilecki dies, right? But no, that's not what happens. The POWs get sent to Southern Bavaria

at a camp so nice that it's chosen for Red Cross visits. That's kind of a mindfuck. It's fucking whiplash here. And that's where Pilecki would spend the rest of the war following Allied advances over the radio until Warsaw finally fell to the Soviets on January 17th. After fighting tooth and nail against the Nazis, the resistance within Poland announced their disillusion at the end of World War II, and the government in exile no longer existed because Poland was Soviet now.

They couldn't go back. Any elements of the resistance that stood against Soviet occupation were immediately disregarded by any kind of greater Polish organization, and all support was cut off from them as Roosevelt and Churchill chucked Poland under the bus. However, none of that meant Witold Plecky was done fighting. Because remember, in the beginning of all this, he was going to fight the Soviets too. And by too, I mean, again, like he wanted Poland to be free, as a lot of people did. Even as the Germans surrendered on May 7th, 1945, and his POW camp was liberated, he was still kind of working on what was going to happen next. A Polish general who had been fighting in Italy at the end of the war, Wiatoslaw Anders, decided that his war wasn't quite over yet. And he needed soldiers to fight to free Poland because

now it's simply occupied again. Many of his soldiers just went home. They'd seen enough. What World War II did to Poland is, I think, the closest thing to an apocalypse a living person has ever seen. Everybody's like, dude, I'm

fucking done. I'm going home. What you consider an essential organized structure immediately collapsed. Anders ran into Pleki and they got along great because apparently Pleki has never seen enough fucking awful things for one lifetime. Vito Plecky was. Everybody knew who he was, especially within the Polish Home Army structure, whether that be for the uprising or for his work in Auschwitz. He was effectively a Polish hero. So he wanted Plecky to set up an intelligence network, which is generally what he was best at anyway, within Soviet-occupied Poland and work towards effectively a new kind of resistance. Now, this time, unfortunately, Pilecki did not have a whole lot of luck. All of his friends from before the war, all the people that he worked with before were either out of the game, exiled, or dead. Because if you survive the Gestapo and now you're trying to spy

on the NKVD, you're eventually going to lose that dice roll. A lot of these guys end up in a vast fucking network of NKVD prisons, which effectively just moved right in and took over what the Gestapo was doing. Most of them decided like, we got to get the fuck out of here.

We can't do this because now they have no support at all. They have no friendly governments, nothing. So he didn't have a network. VTOL didn't take him long from being there to realize that violent resistance against this is pointless. They're too in charge. They have too much support. We can't do what we did against the Nazis here.

Though other surviving elements of the Home Army clearly didn't have the same ideas, and that first year of Soviet occupation was full of raids on NKVD targets, as well as attacks on the Soviet-backed government. These became known as somewhat badass as the cursed soldiers. Now, there's probably a lot of people who

was like, whoa, you just called these people badass. Alright, admittedly, these guys fucking suck. Now, surviving in small detachments. Let me finish. Let me finish. Let me finish. There's a lot going on here. So the cursed soldiers, these guys survived in really small detachments in the fucking Polish forests.

And there was some like sometimes you hear them called like the Forest Brothers and like Lithuanian stuff like that. Same kind of idea. They would be in really really small groups raiding small targets and they all knew they wouldn't win in a million years hence the title of cursed soldiers right when do you think this stopped

1981 okay not quite these guys these detachments were on fighting Soviet occupation until 1965. That's pretty impressive. Yeah. My like, imagine you're fighting a resistance movement from World War Two into the space race.

Yeah. Now, I need to be since we brought him up. I do have to be clear. A lot of these groups were fucking disgusting. Some of them were outright Nazis. One of these groups, the National Armed Forces, assassinated Polish

Jews within the Home Army. Thanks, assholes. Yeah, they did a lot of fucked up things. It turns out, Liam, this might surprise you. Bear with me. When you invade a country a bunch of times, you unleash some pretty awful parts of society. You sure do. Yeah. Almost like you did this to yourself there probably wouldn't be armed groups of nazis stalking through the polish forest

if you didn't fucking invade poland like now for vitold his hidden identity was compromised pretty quick uh while he was back in in Poland and Anders heard about that and like you need to get the fuck out of Poland and he refused his friend sold him out under interrogation in 1947 which I mean admittedly when you know the things that happen during these interrogations you can hardly blame them I think we've said

countless times in this show that the second they sit down like a pair of pliers in front of me I will sell my own fucking mother like I am not going to be tortured no thank you he was snatched up by the secret police and at a planned resistance meeting that got snitched

on he was interrogated and tortured over 150 times over the next several months undergoing what was called plucking the goose which meant tearing off everything that could be torn off that wouldn't kill him immediately reportedly he never actually broke not a single time he knew he knew jesus fuck yeah he i guess the what is said is that he knew the soviets knew some things about him so those are the only thing that he would talk about

like he wouldn't sell out people that he knew but he would tell them that he worked for General Anders which everybody fucking knew or that he had fought the Soviets during the invasion like people were aware of that like he didn't give them anything that they didn't know this is all done under the command of Colonel Roman Rumkowski the secret

police would later admit after the Polish October Revolution of 1956 his department made up all the crimes they tortured and executed people for. Every single political crime they shot someone for, he made up. Now, finally, in 1948, Plucky was charged with treason, planning assassination and being an agent of, quote, foreign imperialism, which I assume is wanting his country to not be occupied. And he was sentenced to death. After news of this got out, the international response was pretty good, I guess. I mean, for as much as a condemnation can go, which is effectively useless.

The Polish government received waves of letters from Auschwitz survivors begging them to spare his life. They were ignored. letters from Auschwitz survivors begging them to spare his life. They were ignored. There was even members of the Soviet-backed Polish government who started a petition to save his life because he was a national hero, and they were all fired. On May 25th, 1948, Witold Pilecki was executed via a gunshot wound to the back of the head by state executor Petor Similanski, and his body was dumped in an unmarked grave that has never been found as of 2022. His last known words, Vito Plecchi refused to beg for mercy from the court and instead said, I tried to live my life in such a fashion that so in my last hour, I'd rather be happy than fearful. I find this happiness in knowing that the fight was worth it. Now, unfortunately,

since Vito Plecchi's death, his story has been championed by some of the worst people who tend to fall into the camp that tend to proudly call themselves anti-communists rather than actually just calling themselves Nazis. In America and Poland, these people tend to be very, very far right. And they happen to be the same people who are engaged in various serious historical revisionism about Holocaust in Poland and rehabilitation of some of the worst characters of the resistance era that are happening currently. However, it's clear to me that Veeb told Pleki you'd fucking hate these people. He wasn't a neo-Nazi. He was not a hard right nationalist and he wasn't an anti-Semite. He hated the Soviets as much as he hated the Nazis because they both invaded his country. Politics had little to do with it. Pleki's story is instead one of strong moral and religious conviction that ended with him being fucked over by every single person he trusted as Poland was torn apart and sold out for geopolitical imperial powers who cared more about cementing their sphere of influences than any real national liberation, democracy, socialism, or any basic principle of solidarity. All these fucking people suck and the world is better that they're dead. That's the series.

I don't know how else to end it. Liam, we do this thing called a question from the Legion on the show. You know what it is, but if you're listening and you don't, you can donate to the show, just a dollar, and you can join whatever long thread of stuff on the

Patreon or ask me via Discord a question and we will answer it on the show today's question from legion is what is the dumbest thing you've done at school i'm going to do with the parentheses here like that also you're not admitting to crimes oh yeah uh i i have a few they're they're harmless one is i we were given i don't know if you guys had this but uh the week before prom they did the like don't drive drunk psa only it was like three hours at an assembly outside on the baseball field and they landed a helicopter they landed the medevac helicopter to like simulate what happens when you drive drunk and i was so enraged that that's how they were spending like taxpayer fucking money rather than actually educating us uh that i just got up and left and

got in a shit ton of trouble and the other one was i like walked to my parents house and i was just like i like i'm not like i'm just out like i was like two weeks away from graduating i was like nah like what are they gonna to do? Fucking extol me. The other one, and it's funny only in hindsight, was we were talking about the possibility of arming teachers. And I grew up in central Pennsylvania. So guns are very great. Were they talking about doing that while you were in school? Hypothetically, the district, to my knowledge, has never implemented it.

We just became famous because the district was willing to strip search children. Uh, Oh, in case they were holding drugs or something. Yeah. And, uh,

and then they got international listeners are probably fucking horrified right now. Like they got sued into oblivion. Whenever I talk about like wild shit that happens in like the American, like school police state situation, they're like, Oh yeah. What the fuck is going on? Right. Exactly. Uh, happens in like the american like school police state situation they're like oh yeah what the fuck is going on right exactly uh but the other one was i uh they were talking and like someone

i went to school with was like well we should just give the teachers guns blah blah blah blah and i said the sentence quote do you want to know how long it would take to empty an AR-15 in here. Not that long. And that's when you get suspended. I did not. I was sent to the office and they called my dad. For those of you who don't know, my dad's a lawyer, but he's a retired lawyer. He did social security, bankruptcy, disability, and a state law. So nothing glamorous, nothing glitzy. He was not some high-profile attorney.

state law so nothing glamorous nothing glitzy he was not some you know high profile attorney but he was really good at and the trait of his i have inherited is knowing essentially just enough to be able to get away with it uh and my dad pointed out it was clearly a hypothetical he didn't own a gun i didn't own any guns uh and the school was was making a big fuss out of nothing uh and i uh yeah i got off scott free and i pointed out like i wasn't saying i was gonna empty an ar here i was saying that somebody could and i was also pointing out like we keep the fucking doors unlocked at this school like if somebody wanted to like stand by the back door with a shotgun and kill 20 of us they could like yeah i mean yeah arming arming teachers is not gonna fucking fix anything that's like the the most american way to solve a problem ever is not to look at any root issues but just slap a gun on

it snap guns on top yeah what okay hear me out liam but what if the school was also a gun i kind of like the idea of giving teachers guns but only if we also give all the students guns. Oh, God. I kind of like the idea of mutually assured destruction in a ninth grade English class. It's really hard to find guns that fit the kindergartners. Daringers, tiny little daringers. I'm trying to remember what the dumbest thing I did in school was. I'm trying to remember what the dumbest thing I did in school was.

I think this is straight up without an actual explanation of why it's dumb. Did you ever have kids smoke cigarettes and stuff in the bathroom while you're in school? I'm sure we did, but there was a courtyard you could smoke pretty discreetly and if you wanted to. I used camel snus in high school. oh so you were already in almost in your final form by that point you're you're the snooze guy um i love it i'll never apologize for it i i was like i pretty routinely smoked cigarettes in the bathroom and you could get away with it because like if you smoked quickly and you bailed out you'd be gone before someone would tell like the the school resource officer.

But one time I decided to smoke weed in the bathroom. Oh, you're an idiot. Yeah, which smells significantly more strongly than cigarette smoke. And I probably wasn't smoking for more than a minute and a half before the fucking cop busts into the bathroom. Wow, that is truly pretty stupid, Joe. It's a pretty big school. it's a pretty big school it's a pretty big school but like you know i'm just pretty stupid by joe kasabian well what's the what's the possibility that fat fuck will actually be walking down the hallways with no known value

yeah and i got suspended I got a possession charge, et cetera, et cetera. Then I joined the army like an asshole. That was like two years later. Well, eventually you did join the army. Factually, that's true. I had to finish my probation or I wouldn't be able to enlist. Liam, this is the P zone.

Plug your pods. Oh, yeah. You have them. You have pods that you cast. 10,000 losses. Well,. Plug your pods. You have them. You have pods that you cast. 10,000 losses. Well, there's your problem. You screw it sometimes. Listen to those shows. If you like this show, consider supporting

us on Patreon. You could have gotten this episode early. You can get three bonus episodes a month. You get access to our Discord. You get discounts on our store and the Hell of a Way to Die store. If you don't feel like giving money, that's also fine. Leaving a review is free, and we really enjoy seeing them.

Please make sure it's good. Some of the bad ones are quite funny. Because we work on this show for for a long time and we really don't know if you like it or not if we don't get reviews um it makes us feel better about ourselves and by we i mean me um and uh also i have a book coming out uh called the frontier core you can pre-order it now uh i don't know any other things I have to plug. That's the series. The next one won't be...

Well, the next series won't have Auschwitz in it. Great fucking moral victory for Joe. See how I'm hedging already? I was going to say it's not going to be depressing. I had to backpedal and simply say that Auschwitz wasn't going to be in it. You're the worst.

And everybody, thank you so much. I have to talk on this show with therapy. Did you know that? You're probably not alone in that. Everybody, thank you so much. Talim's therapist, thank you so much. And until next time, don't invade Poland.