Transcript
the Joe Rogan experience yeah I mean I wrote a book about Operation Paperclip and oh my god talk about a rabbit’s hole
that’s a rabbit hole they’re having let’s explain to people that don’t know what we’re talking about Operation Paperclip was when after World War two
the United States gathered up a ton of scientists from Nazi Germany brought
them over to America and even Wernher von Braun they had Wernher von Braun run NASA he was a Nazi like a hundred
percent Nazi good friends with Hitler type not say yes he was he ran a Berlin rocket factory where they hung the five
slowest Jews they would hang them out front so everybody would know like this
is what happens when you work slow well hang you I mean the Simon Wiesenthal Center said that if Wernher von Braun
was alive today they would prosecute him for crimes against humanity yes and that was the head announcer that
was the head of NASA that was the guy who got us to the moon that was the big cheese guy yeah so we were willing to
put a lot of really dark things aside in order to gather out the best scientists
of the Soviet Union couldn’t get them all and they got a few of them as well but we got how many more than a thousand
right allegedly 1,400 but I would not be surprised if you know the story changes
and there were more right no but that goes back to our discussion earlier about being in pole position I mean
that’s why we grabbed those Nazis we were like if we don’t get them the Russians I get it I get it and you know and I’m sure the Nazis
could say I didn’t want to do it they made me I’m a nice person I love Jews you know oh that was part of the
mythology it was like we got the good Germans well right we didn’t we got the we got the top Germans and who do you
think the top Germans were yeah they were coveted by Hitler Himmler Goering you know yeah I mean these guys were
right I mean there were guys that we grabbed out of the docks at Nuremberg literally to come be part of our program
you know one of these get smart you’re an asset right I mean that’s what ginga’s Cohn used to do he’d take
warlords from the other side and capture I’m gonna go listen come on for me I’m
mad I mean what you ideology aside I’m super smart and I
want that to be known that’s good that’s that’s the competitor right I mean you can’t you cannot be the best rocket
designer in the world and not want those talents you know demonstrated that’s
Wernher von Braun story that’s the story of all of them and that was was so shocking writing that book because it’s
a it’s like wow you know huge amounts of talent but how far will the competitor
go to see their baby come to fruition what are they willing to put aside yeah
did you pay any attention to the other places where Nazis went when they
escaped Germany like Argentina in particular you ever seen any of that stuff they have entire German towns down
in Argentina right they do Oktoberfest down there they wear lederhosen they drink out of Stein’s
it’s crazy they speak German and you’re like what the [ __ ] is this like my friend Tim Kennedy went down there and
he said he was literally talking to people interviewing people and they had photos of SS soldiers on their wall and
they would talk about how grandfather was a hero and like like you are you’re
the descendants of escaped Nazis and they put together a town down there I mean the way the Nazis were able to flee
is I can’t read enough of that I mean that’s what Jamie now we’re talking about it’s they are oh my god and it
it’s endless I mean they’re so you know the ones that we there was a famous guy
that we got he was the Surgeon General of the Third Reich I mean think about
that okay dr. Walter Schreiber I mean he was such a bad dude he was in charge of the vaccine program I mean you
just put those words together and your mind goes really dark right but we wanted him because he was an expert in
vaccines and we brought him to the United States he was the only Nazi I found of the ones the paperclip
scientists who came here that that was actually outed right he was outed as a
Nazi and that’s because one of the investigators at the Nuremberg trials
recognized him oh Jesus and we he’s the only one we got out of
here and guess where he went she lived out the rest of his life there the the show was called finding Hitler
there they were trying to find evidence that Hitler somehow escaped there’s really a [ __ ] premise to the show but what was interesting is that there
were thousands and thousands of Nazis that made it to Argentina and set up
shop throughout South America it’s a lot of Germans down there it’s kind of weird if you can imagine me on book tour of
like the kind of questions I get because we’re talking right having written books about area 51 Nazis to make assassin
soul people I mean just last night oh is that a book giving you the signing and
people are like is Hitler really dead you know Karthi i mean that if he was alive he’d be the oldest man alive right
imagine he was probably like how old was he during World War two he had to be in this 14b hundreds you know I mean but
right or they say he cloned himself yeah heard 60 years old 120 now Jamie knows
that’s an old man I mean there’s been a hundred 20 year old people but it’s [ __ ] pretty rare yeah so Operation
Paperclip was not even publicly acknowledged until what was it like the
90s like when did they when did it become public thing was through the Freedom of Information Act
wasn’t it was a very intrepid journalist named Linda hunt Hill shot out the window yeah I mean she but you know she
broke the story that’s what’s amazing I mean as a journalist you’re always writing on the shoulders of those before
you right mm-hmm and she had it really hard because she did a Freedom of Information Act request got all these
documents that no one had ever seen and then the government sent her a bill for
a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars and she had to spend a lot of time this is what I understand I never
interviewed her but for for xeroxing fees what yeah I just love that detail
because it’s like it’s such a covert way of getting someone to stop it’s like okay here’s the information we had to
give it to you but now here’s your bill imagine if the government’s coming down on you for 125 grand
yeah see Galica me want to call a bunch of rich people and go hey let’s all just donate a thousand dollars and it’s a
different world now you could do that you could do a GoFundMe campaign you know my god in the 80s and the 90s you
were just like out on a limb yeah they would crush you financially we actually had this very same discussion yesterday with my friend Phil DeMars is being sued
by Marineland and because of he was a walrus trainer and trained orcas and
he’s showing how horrific it wasn’t black fish that’s SeaWorld but that’s SeaWorld is actually the way he says
it’s a day in the park compared to marine land marine lance a horrific place in capital and anyway they have
been trying to squash him with legal beats by dragging out his legal fees by dragging on his case but he set up
GoFundMe and all his legal bills get paid for from people that want him to
win the good fight and this is a this is an option today that wasn’t available to Linda when she was exposing this $25,000
do you [ __ ] like she should sue them for misappropriation of funds like does
it cost you really $125,000 to print those things out of it does you guys should be in jail like that’s like with
like those $10,000 hammers that they have and mm-hmm the Pentagon yeah yeah so she gets all this information and
does the government immediately acknowledge that the important Nazis that no I mean she wrote the first book
and it was just stunning and and you know it was us late 80s Early 90s okay
and you know then more gets revealed because they gave her a certain amount I
mean I filed a bunch of FOIA as there was releases I went to Germany for you meaning freedom Freedom of Information
Act yes then I went to Germany and looked in their archives with like a fellow a German PhD who had you know
real access to stuff and was able to translate for me while we were there looking at this stuff I interviewed a
lot of grandchildren of Nazis and children of Nazis and you know I mean
this one extraordinary oh my god there’s a guy I told you about Shriver
I’m on the narrative level humans acting I’m so interested in rivalry in
competition right as a concept because this is what America does to be the best
and also as humans right because people like that they’re built like that so the
Nazis had rivals amongst themselves and Schreiber’s rival was dr. Bluhm who was in charge of the biological weapons
program for Hitler okay and Blum had a son and Blum was prosecuted at Nuremberg
you can see a picture of him with a big Dueling scar you know he was a bad dude he was a Dueling scar Dueling scar dual
like a sword sword fighting it was like among the Nazis they would they would
duel with one another when they were younger students and then they would pack the wound with horsehair to make it
even more pronounced because it looked ferocious pull up Jamie pull up well you
can pull up dr. Bluhm bol em ii but also right and also you can pull if you pull
up Kurt Debus who was the director of our JFK Center he was part he was NASA’s
Vaughan Browns number two he had a huge Dueling scar and yet when you know II look at there he is right there
knowing what we know now it’s like come on you’re trying to tell me that guy’s not a hardcore Nazi so those guys had
dueling scars on their face yeah you see him how often did they do well when they
were in college of death no no no no no it was like on guard you know and then they would I’m saying venting fencing oh
this guy had it too yeah how’d they not get poked in the eyes oh I guess that was the gentlemen’s rule how do you [ __ ]
listen you go in for the cheek you hit the eye like that happens all the time I mean it must have cut a lot of eyeballs
out I haven’t seen any photographs of missing eyeballs but there’s a lot right on the cheek so maybe that was the whole
point it was actually just a bit for show oh I am a weird butt but it was a
revoir it was a badge of honor yeah there’s more and and but so they all had on their face it’s on the same spot
doing scars yeah Wow so imagine I wanted to have these
scars that was a Jesus Christ oh they had goggles on oh there you go that’s
how they didn’t take up academic fencing it says academic fencing so what they
were essentially doing they were having fencing matches with real swords not with ones with tips Wow and cut in their
faces up [ __ ] man oh Jesus look at this guy’s face yikes Wow
doing cults cults that is crazy so when you consider like wow that
people people did not know about that and then you’ve got these Germans walking around America as part of our
space program in our science programs and oh these are the good Germans I mean now you really have to say to yourself
come on Nazis yeah it’s cars in their face absolutely oh that’s dark matter
gee Fight Club Yeah right off I super og yeah that’s crazy Wow so I go to
interview um doc sometimes you as a journalist you can get amazing
information from these guys oh my god they’re sliced up after European martial
arts yeah well I mean that is a martial art means an art of war really a sword
fighting is a martial art I mean many martial arts have weapons yes sorry you
could say you go to interviews people so to piece together the story right I can’t tell you others can write some
time in the to find out more about the Nazis I went to Germany and sought out
some children of these top top Nazis to see if maybe they didn’t have journals or anything they might share with me and
one of them was dr. Bluhm his son I tracked down I found him and he said yes
you may come visit me and it was such a remarkable journey it was like he lived in the Black Forest I’d take like a taxi
through the mountains up over the hill down through the valley you know into a
courtyard behind a church – dr. Blom’s house so he was the junior to his father who was this horrific Nazi
I mean a top Nazi had favor of the fear were what was called the golden party
badge right Hitler gave out these little buttons Blum’s was I believe number six
so that’s how favored he was and his son dr. Kurt Blome whereas the father was in
charge of the biological weapons program so his plan was to you know murder people with biological weapons from
nature right the son had been a medical doctor but had left the profession to
cure people with flowers it’s called Bach flower therapy so he was this very interesting individual who
had never given an interview before and he agreed to let me come to him so I go on that journey I go to his house and he
was remarkable I mean he was so interesting talk about the sins of the father you know I mean my god what he
what he had what he had as a burden right and he and I asked him to tell me
everything he could about his father and he did and then he asked me to tell me what I knew about his father I had
information from the German archives about his father that he did not have talked like that his father had given
something I’d just come from this archive and found these documents dr. Bluhm ordered that 6,000 tuberculin even
sonder be handling that’s the German word what does that mean special treatment there’s a euphemism for you
that was kill those 6,000 tubercular Jews what do you say tubercular is that
people with tuberculosis they were suffering from tuberculosis and he dr. Bluhm worked closely with Himmler and
they just decided to kill him and you know sitting there talking to this man telling him about his father at his
request was remarkable and then he’s telling me what he knows and then as I’m getting ready to leave he says to me I’d
like you to have these and he takes down from his incredible bookshelf
he himself had written eight books right and he takes down these books and he
hands them to me and they’re in these wrappers and I can see that they have Nuremberg
nomenclature on them and what they are is they’re his father’s documents from
his Nuremberg trial and he and I’m like I can’t take these I’m I thought he
meant take them back to my hotel room look at them and then you know bring them back the next morning when we were doing the next interview and he said no
no I want you to have them and I was like I can’t have them and he
said I don’t want them and you should have them and it gave them to me so I had this stack so I was like on my trip
home it was so perplexing because I threw out all of my clothes I was like screw the clothes I mean I just carry
travel with the carry-on bag right so I in my carry-on bag all I have is this Nazi paraphernalia that is dr. Blum’s oh
my the deputy Surgeon General of the Third Reich’s documents from Nuremberg covered with swastikas all more I mean
he was acquitted at Nuremberg based on all these documents okay and that by the way based on human experiments and I’m
at the airport and I realized suddenly oh my god swastikas like this is illegal if they go through my bag I’m going to
be arrested I’m carrying I mean I’m carrying these incendiary do you have any copies of your book on you oh yeah
no no no I was just like at least one Joe I was sweating almost as hard as I
was sweating at the beginning of this interview right I think I went because
you know I was like wow I went through no problem got home I have them my office no luck you didn’t go through
Israel well you know what it’s not the swastika is not out there but it is in
Germany you may not have any Nazi paraphernalia whatsoever in fact my paperclip book which has a swastika on
it had to be redesigned the cover for the German publication and it just has
like broken up images of the Nazis because you cannot reproduce that image
in German it’s I mean I’m not Pro swastika but it’s so strange that we’ve given so
much power to this design that you can’t even see it it used to be there’s a
there’s a temp out here that I think is I believe it’s a Hindu temple and it was a part of
Hinduism that this swastika predates World War two it predates the Nazis
predates their they’re sort of reclaiming of it and the this building
that was built out here in the nineteen I think was built in the 1920s has swastikas on there’s a big plaque explaining why there’s swastikas on it I
know they had a different angle mm-hmm but I mean talk about branding right I
mean my god that was and the Nazis were you know kings of that I mean they were only that the mustache that guy killed
that mustache there’s not another thing like that but he didn’t kill the dueling scar right
that could come back do you think no no no not after your show what do you have four million viewers probably people
don’t think about it that way they don’t think about the dueling scars being a Nazi thing no no that’s what I find a
remarkable right they really don’t but the Nazis did the Nazis did and then you look there’s an amazing photograph of JFK Lyndon Johnson
Kurt Davis sitting at you know for a launch a moon launch and there’s Davis
with his huge Dueling scar and I’m like and their position was oh he’s one of the good Germans
well that culture was a culture of ruthlessness I mean it was a even the
good ones there he is yes good job Jamie look at that can you believe star on his face
they still give out an award by the way that’s called the Kurt Debus award and I
rang them up and said like why are you guys giving out this award he was a hardcore Nazi well they say they were
like they’ve hemmed and hawed and I finally said well at least tell me what you say to people who asked that
question you know they said well no one’s ever asked us that question before Annie well they will now it’s when you
really stop and think about the horrific nature of what the Nazis did I mean how
inhuman it was how how crazy it was like that had to permeate the entire
culture there is no good Nazis there was not one even one of them that was looped
into that had to be responsible for some awful awful [ __ ] I mean Einstein said it the best when he
said you should you know you could have left like people who could have left should have left all right well do you
know the story Fritz Harbor right the guy yes I mean he wound up having to flee and he’s the guy who created Zyklon
gasps he’s you know he created his icon a which had smell built into it so that
would warn you when you were using this pesticide and then the Nazis turned it into zyklon-b
or they removed that element that added the smell and just this odorless
horrific poisonous gas that they used to gas the Jews and he was a Jew I mean I
you know then when you think about he became he was no longer useful to them because they figured out he really was a
Jew yeah well one since world war two came around see he was a part of World War one when they first started using
gas and he was there’s a great radio lab podcast about it I think it’s called
the bad show but anyway what essentially says that he was winning he was up for
the Nobel Prize at the same time he was wanted for crimes against humanity because he was up for the Nobel Prize
for creating the Habra method of extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere which was used for fertilizer which to
this day they say 50% of the nitrogen in human bodies was created by the harbor method so what you get from food from
vegetables like that nitrogen 50% of it at least is coming from this guy’s method who was a scientist who was a Jew
who was working in Germany before it became Nazi Germany and then was the guy
who figured out how to use gas on people it’s that dark his story this dead dog
story I mean he died looking for medical treatment because he had a flee Germany and he’s had a bad heart he died on a
road trying to get to Switzerland that’s the thing what’s what’s falling yeah yeah it’s I mean Nazi Germany is like
the pole position taken way too far and that’s what’s remarkable that the
Pentagon was like okay but we can learn from mmm-hmm and there there are elements
that are dark in that well it also comes out of the devastation of World War one right the economic devastation the
defeat the Germans are in this terrible state overall in terms of their morale and then along comes this charismatic
psychopath that is just really good at screaming to this day I don’t speak German but this day when you watch that
guy scream and yell at all those people and see them respond it gives you chills like that kind of charisma that kind of
influence that someone has where they can do that in front of thousands and thousands of people and everyone’s goose-stepping and so to see we’re very
fortunate there’s not something like that right now and our forefathers and our grandparents and whoever fought in
world war ii if it wasn’t for them who knows where this world would be right now because that was a literal evil
empire straight out of Star Wars I mean that was like the Sith Lord they were they really were there were human beings
who were doing some of the most evil [ __ ] that you could it almost demonic if
you really stopped and thought about it if there were demons pretended to be people they would do the same thing I
mean it that’s why I think it’s a rabbit hole because it’s so hard to comprehend
that like a culture of educated individuals in that moment in time that
you talked about between World War two World War one and World War two could could completely become Minette
malevolent yeah that’s one of the more disturbing things about the Nazis was that there were so many of these people
that they did extract through Operation Paperclip brilliant engineers and scientists that were also evil like
those two things are very uncomfortable for us we like to think of our scientists as being the people that are
out there trying to solve the mysteries of the universe and provide us with the technology to make our life better here on earth not the Nazis they were trying
to figure out how to kill people better they were trying to figure out how to use rockets to shoot them at Europe and blow people up and it is a it’s one of
the more telling and horrific times in our history when you because it’s it’s
one of one of the more horrific ones that we have footage of because we don’t have footage of Genghis Khan we don’t have
footage of Alexander the Great we don’t we have stories and tales of Napoleon and some photographs and
drawings of dictators past and prep but we have a lot of footage from Vietnam we
have a lot of footage from World War two we have a lot of footage from modern wars and out of all of them the one that
scares us the most and scares me the most is World War two do you think those scientists when they came here because
this is a this is a I could not figure this out even after writing that whole book is it do you think they came here
and actually thought about what they had done or they were able to convince
themselves that they were the good Germans that they were part of it because I never saw a single bit of
remorse ever like no one ever acknowledged what they had done so it made me wonder
I guess results very right I mean I think there’s probably two people that go through the same thing and one person
has no problem with it and the other person literally can’t sleep I don’t
know it’s a good question it would be interesting to interview them the the ones who’ve been caught who’ve been
prosecuted and had been chased down and they’ve got one fairly recently they
caught a Nazi like just a few months ago it’s one of the last ones using as 90s I believe the ones who survived they all
tell different stories and some of them say they just wished following orders
and you know some of them say that they didn’t do it they’re being framed they all have different stories it’s it’s one
of them you know you write a book about that and or you think about it and you kind of have you go down the rabbit hole
and then you have to you have to ask yourself what does this mean or you kind of it’s too dark right and so I asked
that question to a a schvitz survivor okay who I wrote about in the book his name was Gerhard Murkowski and he the
reason he was he survived Auschwitz was because he was taken over to the labor
camp which was called buna so it was a rubber factory and it was led by this truly
evil man named otto Ambrose who became part of Operation Paperclip okay after
being tried at Nuremberg and being convicted of mass murder and genocide
right we got him out and he worked for us you got to read the story I mean it’s
just it’s just astonishing Otto Ambrose extreme chemist oh my right but he was so he so gerhard
was at buna this factory this rubber factory and he lived and I did an
interview with him because I was asking him you know the flip side of of all of that and his whole family was killed at
Auschwitz and I said to him what does any of you know we went through all these questions to try to get some closure to this or some meaning and I
said and then I’ll we land and I said well you know we couldn’t have we couldn’t answer what does this mean
right what does it mean for today couldn’t answer yeah so when I asked him what matters
about all this he went like this he lifted up his sleeve and he showed me
his tattoo and he said that matters and
I have that image seared in my mind I had never seen a tattoo from Auschwitz before and I have not since and it also
made me think cuz I thought he’s gonna die soon and he has diet sense and then
that tattoos gone so all you have is the exchange of
information and people talking about it yeah the eyewitnesses died how did they
get that guy out of Nuremberg how did they get them to release him well okay
so he was convicted at Nuremberg then he went to prison he went to the prison where we had all the didn’t execute him
no obviously they executed like the top Nazis and then a lot of these guys went to prison so there was a bunch of trials
and so I went to the prison I saw his cell I mean in Germany was intense Landsberg prison and then we because we
were sort of policing Nazi Germany after it was not you know after the war was over were police in Germany
and then Kate and a guy named McCoy was in charge he was kind of like the
Governor General of Germany and the Germans wanted Germany back and they
were like we’re tired of you guys policing us the threat from the Russians was very real and so deals were made I
mean I write about all this in paperclip you know based on the documents and one of the provisions was we want our guys
out of prison we want them back in society and that was arranged and again
you don’t even know these things you know they’re like but that was and then Otto amperes and they even gave him his
money back that was astonishing and the family still has this villa in
Switzerland I believe or maybe it’s the Bavarian Alps that had been in the family which is money from you know from
world from Nazi Germany and I called up the son to interview him he was not as
forthright as dr. Bluhm son and you know he hung up on me and said if you if you ever contact me again all you know they
have very serious privacy laws in Germany I thought about going and knocking on his front door my lawyer was
like Annie do not do that they have very different laws in Germany for privacy yes even if issues like this son of a
Nazi yes absolutely well I would imagine look if he didn’t do anything he
shouldn’t be responsible for what his father did no but he has the villa that was the point I had all the money right
and he got that money from his father who got that money from stealing it from people else during World War two yeah
like what happens there yes but if you go back to that like we should really
find out who had the plantations in America and who benefited from that like
go several generations from there I mean you could get weird with with war reparations deeds where people profited
yeah I mean which is sometimes a reason why you I realized in looking at these
in reporting these books which is why certain things are kept secret I mean they open up a whole can of worms about reparations sure you know yeah Wow was
operating Operation Paperclip writing that book was that one of the most disturbing ones reason I
mean that was so dark my husband is amazing he’s Norwegian right and the nor
the Norway was occupied by the Nazis for five years like people kind of forget that but he he grew up there and his mom
you know was a grade schooler and was really impacted like didn’t go to school for five years while the Nazis were
there they were gonna breed with the Norwegians cuz they were such lovely Aryan people so my husband having a
Norwegian mom was like when I was writing paperclip it would be so dark sometimes I would be like down in my
office like I can’t you know honey I kick you know uh and he’d be down there with a sandwich or coffee and say but
are you throwing another Nazi under the bus and I would say yes and he’d say keep typing right and then I realized
well wait a minute the neutral journalist has to really make sure that she’s not just throwing Nazis under the
bus without really good reason and so when I was in Germany at the archives I went to Dachau the concentration camp
and I asked the lead archivist if I could come and see the worst possible photographs that no one wants to see and
he said absolutely and I didn’t write about them in the book because I didn’t want to subject people to that kind of
horror but I looked at them and I watched I saw with my own eyes people
moments before they were killed you know and then the bodies afterwards and these are inhuman experiments to you
know to see whether or not pilots could survive height or you know they simulated different things in chambers a
high altitude or speed and I saw I saw photographs of you know freezing people
to death right because they were trying to develop programs where they would they wanted to see at what temperature
humans actually died right and so they experimented on Jews these are these are some of the doctors that came on our
programs and I looked at those that evidence and I was that blew me away and then I knew when I left there okay I can
I can throw these Nazis under the bus it is it’s such a crazy time in history well you really stop and think about all
the different experiments that they did do it’s almost like they just opened up the vault of evil and said listen we
have an opportunity these P our people let’s do whatever we want it’s like they’re fake people it’s like
like they were an invention I mean the perception really played into it oh so
gross it’s so scary to think about that humans just you know a generation or two
away they’re capable of doing that
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