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

[Applause]