HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah baby! Man.
MARCUS PARKS
(singing) Baby, baby! Is that what you got in your mind?
BEN KISSEL
Is that Amy Grant?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. (singing) Baby, baby!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god, they should play that song over the footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) Baby, baby, I got a new emotion. Honestly it's a good way to sell it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Fear, dread.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's so hard to sell it. But I was looking at the information last week and I had this thought and I realized Marcus is Oppenheimer, Kissel is Leslie Groves.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Cool!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's Leslie Groves. And I'm the genius Albert Einstein. That's me!
BEN KISSEL
Well I definitely think we all have the similar eating habits of those people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
So that's fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I got the little like, it's the little Einstein cunnilingy tongue.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, you really, really do. Hey everyone, welcome to Last Podcast on the left. Ben hanging out with Henry and Marcus. My goodness gracious.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're not with me! You're not with me today.
BEN KISSEL
Well no, as a matter of fact this is old school.
MARCUS PARKS
It is.
BEN KISSEL
Back in the day when Henry became a big celebrity and had to move to Los Angeles-
MARCUS PARKS
Big star.
BEN KISSEL
And leave us, the little slugs back in New York City-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I remember.
BEN KISSEL
We had to do it this way where Henry is out of the room. Henry is actually in the crux of Scientology right now, in the clutches of Scientology in Clearwater, Florida.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm not going to say that there was several recording studios that denied my request, and this is real, there were several recording studios that denied my request to record there. And then I'd go through, it was like look at the addresses, they're all right next to the Death Star in downtown Clearwater. It's so weird, man. But yeah, I'm ready, man. I'm feeling the heat, that atomic level heat.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, man. You don't have to worry about recording in no studio that has pictures of the Scientology jazz band in the lobby. You don't need that shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't need it. But it would have been nice. Honestly, it looked nice. But here at Soul Studios is absolutely incredible. You see that, it's a nice place plug, it's a good plug.
BEN KISSEL
There you go, good plug. With any luck, you walk in there, they'll think you're L. Ron Hubbard. Okay. Well speaking of Death Star, let's get on to part three of the Manhattan Project.
MARCUS PARKS
So when we last left the Manhattan Project, the science and engineering side of the endeavor was well on its way to success, although it would take a further year and a half of trial and error before they completed construction of the bomb itself. But the thing about that year and a half of science and engineering is that it's a year and a half of science and engineering.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That most usually involves the minute details of uranium refinery, firing mechanisms, and various other atomic bric-a-brac.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(snoring)
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, bore-ium. Chlorophyll, more like fill my fucking ass.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's why we're doing a little bit of skip around.
BEN KISSEL
Good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we'll go back to Robert Oppenheimer when it's interesting again.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, the juice really comes from the Trinity test.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
So we're gonna wait until the juice is flowing real hard and real fancy.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS
Now therefore for this episode we're going to shift to the side of the Manhattan Project that was ultimately unnecessary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
BEN KISSEL
Great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is sad because it's the funner side in terms of action and adventure and all that kind of shit. But it is the unsuccessful side. It was bad.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They did it all wrong.
MARCUS PARKS
I would not say unsuccessful, it was successful, just unnecessary. I would say this is more a story of war, what is it good for?
BEN KISSEL
What is it good for? Music, making money, power.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly the GPD. But otherwise nothing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
So from a perspective of an artist, this is when back in the day you'd fill out your writing packet, send it in to Jimmy Fallon and say he's gonna love it but they never read it. But you did a good job.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep. Exactly. That's an incredible analogy actually.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good work.
MARCUS PARKS
But this side did end up accomplishing something that was wildly important to the history of the 20th century. It's just that they did so halfway by coincidence. This is the rest of the story of the Bastard Brigade, the men who would partly make up the Manhattan Project's espionage, reconnaissance, and recovery wing.
BEN KISSEL
Cool.
MARCUS PARKS
And again, read 'The Bastard Brigade' by Sam Kean. It gets our high highest recommendation and tells a far more human WWII story than what you're probably used to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's really good. It's highly readable, like I flew through the first 300 pages of 'The Bastard Brigade'. It's a fun adventure, it's Tarantino-esque. You can kind of see he must have stumbled upon this material when he was working towards Inglorious Basterds.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it kind of has that feel of like ragtag, a bunch of people who shouldn't be doing extremely important jobs doing them in a way that you can't teach.
BEN KISSEL
Yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean? It's like that naivete and lack of skill is sometimes extremely powerful.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Also a fantastic film if you just want to see a bunch of Nazis burning alive in a movie theater.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
BEN KISSEL
Rarely can you see footage like that and celebrate publicly.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
But you can when it's Nazis. I was gonna say if I was going to be arrested for anything, espionage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I could see-
BEN KISSEL
Hi! Hey! I'll be a honey trap. I'll go to Washington DC.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Tell me little girl, have you ever been to see the Washington Monument? You're incredible, you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen in my life.
BEN KISSEL
I could also put on a dress. I could do a whole series of different things with a lot of questionable politics.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're not wearing a dress? What is this? Oh it's a very loose shirt. Oh, it's a lot of soft clothing. I'm sorry, I thought that you were just a seven breasted woman.
BEN KISSEL
Another honeypot potted.
MARCUS PARKS
Now if you'll remember from episode one, the British had attempted to blow up the Norsk Hydro plant in Norway because it was producing heavy water that ostensibly could be used in what they thought was a rapidly advancing Nazi nuclear program. But as we know, the Nazi nuclear program stalled in 1942, lurching along in ultimately feudal fits and starts right up until the very end of the war. The Allies however were still operating under the assumption that the Nazis were ahead of them in every respect, so they acted accordingly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, if you were going to overshoot a project during any time period, this really was the time.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, absolutely. Also lurching, to the tall community that is a derivative of the L word which is Lurch and I will open doors for people but I don't need the responses. And also I don't need to be called Hodor. So if you're gonna mention that, please give me a heads up so I can be prepared.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man. For you, truly Hodor should be the H word.
BEN KISSEL
It is the H word.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it is unfortunate how many times I hear it. And it's just like okay, all right, technically he speaks for a living. Okay?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He just displaces the same amount of water as the actor who plays Hodor.
BEN KISSEL
I asked my friend, I said is that a compliment or a diss? He said well everyone loves him but he is the R word.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, very much so.
MARCUS PARKS
And it happens a lot at comic book conventions. when we were at WonderCon, there was somebody in the elevator with us that just straight up called you Hodor.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And then like it felt bad.
BEN KISSEL
It was weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It did.
MARCUS PARKS
It felt real bad.
BEN KISSEL
Just like the Manhattan Project.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I felt like a weird sense of like whoa, so this is what racism is all about. Whoa. Incredible.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the first mission to blow up the Norsk Hydro plant, Operation Freshman, that had been a massive failure that had resulted in the deaths of 30 British commandos. These deaths had occurred either during the botched landings of their suicide gliders or at the hands of sadistic Nazi commanders, worst possible fucking ending to a mission you can imagine. Well additionally, the other fuck up was that Operation Freshman also made it clear to the Nazis that the Allies knew about their atomic program, which implied that the Americans had their own atomic program.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But a year later, the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare decided-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I hate it. I hate it, man.
MARCUS PARKS
(British accent) You don't want to be a part of the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These fucking British. Again, they invented imperialism. They're like one of the people that did that.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so they're all like spying. Because they got to us, right, we had this idea in America that spying was ungentlemanly, right, like we didn't want to do it. But the British were way ahead of us, man.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were already doing that shit for years. We learned it from them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah but nobody was ahead of the Russians though.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
The Russians have been doing spycraft for centuries.
BEN KISSEL
I do like the name. I think it's fun.
MARCUS PARKS
I like it too.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I think it's very fun.
BEN KISSEL
It seems like they have knives in their canes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well they decided that the Allies had no choice but to give Norsk Hydro another go. And this is also partly because this sort of action, this was about all Britain could do to contribute to the overall nuclear effort. See their nuclear program, Project Tube Alloy had been stymied-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh. Still one of the worst names of a project in WWII.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It really is.
MARCUS PARKS
It had been stymied by German bombings. So the Brits helped pick up the slack by preventing the Germans from producing the bomb and they also took on the task of sneaking European scientists out of Europe just like they did with Niels Bohr.
BEN KISSEL
Oh and you know how difficult that is with their creaky bones.
MARCUS PARKS
And their big heads.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And Niels Bohr is just anti intelligence. He just does not understand what secrets are because his head was just so big, he just assumes everybody's inside it.
BEN KISSEL
Aw. You just see him in Prometheus the film as his face is right against the helmets.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, this is true. We're covering all of the Manhattan Project history that's not gonna be in the Oppenheimer movie. Because you know the Oppenheimer movie is all about that dusty skeleton man eating pussy next to a nuclear reactor. And it's mostly gonna be them all like not... We're gonna be... Ugh. You have any idea how much it's gonna be Oppenheimer saying goodbye to the woman that commits suicide? And it's just gonna be like get back to the splosions.
BEN KISSEL
Do you wanna know a synchronicity with the Oppenheimer film?
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
BEN KISSEL
It comes out on my birthday.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
July 21st.
MARCUS PARKS
Hopefully that's the only one and we won't have a nuclear war.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Actually no, we got right here is the creator of the second biggest bomb in the world, it's called his comedy career. Come on, Kissel. Come on, I'm sorry, buddy.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa, whoa! What did I do to deserve that? I thought it was gonna be a bowel joke.
MARCUS PARKS
I thought it was gonna be a defecation joke.
BEN KISSEL
I thought for sure because I just took a massive dump today cause I'm on a Digiorno kick.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh is that the new diet?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, it's the Digiorno kick diet. Just one Digiorno a day keeps the doctor at bay.
MARCUS PARKS
Well back to Norsk Hydro. While the British would organize what came to be known as Operation Gunnerside, it would not be British commandos doing the dirty work. Rather the job of blowing up the power cells at Norsk would be given to local Norwegian soldiers and resistance fighters.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This needs to be a movie. This whole story.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
There's like three movies that are based on this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good, good. I did not know. I was looking that up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So is that real? What movies?
MARCUS PARKS
They're all Norwegian.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We All Ski Naked. Is that one? What's the other one called? It's called like I Hate my Vacation.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, That's Not a Bump, That's a Medical Problem. I love that film.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, The Heroes of Telemark was a 1965 movie. That must have been boring as hell.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And there's also a movie called The Heavy Water War which is just ugh man, that looks boring as fuck. Come on, Norwegians! This all looks dumb.
BEN KISSEL
That reminds me my older brother Chris was anorexic and I got him the movie Heavyweights for his birthday as a funny joke.
MARCUS PARKS
That's a funny...
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
You knew he was, you knew.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, he was ill. He was a model. He was a model in Italy.
MARCUS PARKS
And you thought this was funny, that he would think it was funny? Or did you do it because you thought it was funny?
BEN KISSEL
I thought it was funny. He wasn't offended or anything, he's just like I don't even get it. I was like because you're fucking anorexic! The movie is called Heavyweights.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Great. And I like how the clear up is actually probably what then makes it offensive.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean? Because then you have to explain why it's offensive.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then he has to sit there and he needs to go like-
BEN KISSEL
I'm his younger brother, I can do this.
MARCUS PARKS
Did you sit outside of his door and play All You Can Eat by The Fat Boys?
BEN KISSEL
No, no. But we did watch the Disorderly Orderlies. And yes, there's a scene that involves a lady.
MARCUS PARKS
(singing) All you can eat, ain't that a treat. Over and over again.
BEN KISSEL
I love The Fat Boys. Let's move on.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when it came to Nazi collaboration in WWII, the government of Norway unfortunately has a reputation for hard capitulation. To wit, the man who weaseled his way into power when the Nazis blitzed Norway was named Vidkun Quisling.
BEN KISSEL
Ugh, it sounds like a Twizzler with cancer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He definitely looks like a boob.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He looks like one of my tits with a hat on. You know what I mean? He's very deflated, he's got kind of a ruddy complexion.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Quisling capitulated so hard to the Nazis that his surname is now a dictionary listed noun meaning a traitor who collaborates with an enemy force occupying their country.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. Is that also like boot licker?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's a very offensive term.
MARCUS PARKS
Well a boot licker can be any man or a thing. Boot licker can be like a man who owes allegiance to his boss, even like the boss of a corporation, even though the boss has no feeling for him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's what I normally think of a boot licker as. Like that fucking guy in the new Zelda game who's holding up all the fucking signs for a boss who doesn't give a shit about him. He doesn't even know who the fuck you are! Why are you holding up signs all over Hyrule and I gotta come along and I gotta fucking help you fix these fucking signs, you fucking boot licker! You fucking boot licker!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just as lost as you are.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Fernando knows what I'm talking about!
BEN KISSEL
Okay. Zelda is actually the name of the Princess. Link, Link is actually the main character.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I heard that boot licker was a Native American moniker for the first ever sub in a tribe.
BEN KISSEL
All right, fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Moccasin sniffer is the second thing they also did sometimes.
BEN KISSEL
Really good.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Quisling was tried as a traitor and executed by firing squad after the war, so he got what was coming to him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That happens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was crazy for a Norwegian to be turned into Swiss cheese.
BEN KISSEL
Comedy career made in a lab.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm made in a lab.
MARCUS PARKS
Made in a lab.
BEN KISSEL
Made in a lab.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Scientology can't fucking kill me, dude.
BEN KISSEL
No they can't.
MARCUS PARKS
But it would be wrong to paint all of Norway with the same brush as Quisling because the Norwegian resistance movement was one of the most ferocious and well organized of WWII. At 40,000 strong-
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
They called themselves the Milorg.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
BEN KISSEL
What's that?
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know what it means in Norwegian but it sounds cool as shit.
BEN KISSEL
It does.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It sounds like a death metal band.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it sounds like something that lives in the Mines of Moria.
BEN KISSEL
Milorg.
MARCUS PARKS
And their ferocity was largely fueled by Nazi brutality. For example, Norwegians could be executed for having something so innocuous as a bag of British baking flour. As was mentioned in 'The Baster Brigade', one village was burned to the ground after a single bag of British flour was found. And as far as the people in that village went, 18 men were executed on the spot and the rest were sent to concentration camps.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god. Honest question, how the fuck do they know the ethnicity of the flour?
MARCUS PARKS
The bag, what it comes in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Truly it's probably cause the bag. It probably has a Union Jack on it or something, the name of a British company. And this is because they were trying to very fully stamp out all... Because of how strong the movement was to fight the Nazis from within Norway, they tried to punish them as often as possible by doing that where it's like we kill everybody for one infraction.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
In other words, Norway had a few grudges to settle.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And a handful of Norwegians got the chance with Operation Gunnerside.
BEN KISSEL
Cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Now instead of a commando force of 30 British soldiers making a direct assault on the plant, the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare decided to use Norwegians. And in the process, they played to Norwegian strengths.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. They got big bottom women, they don't like clocks. Norway likes, oh gosh, fjords! They used the fjords. And then you got-
BEN KISSEL
Black Metal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Black metal. Yeah, oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And ships. I also think they like ships and vessels of the sea, don't they?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pickled fish. A lot of pickled fish there.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, pickled fish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Does the plan involved pickled fish?
MARCUS PARKS
No. The new plan was-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh, all right, whatever. Who gives a fucking shit?
MARCUS PARKS
Absolutely not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Who cares, man?
MARCUS PARKS
Perhaps they had pickled fish along for the ride as rations. So maybe pickled, I cannot confirm nor deny the existence of pickled fish in Operation Gunnerside.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know who is one of my least favorite things about Norway is what else they gave us was Garrison Keillor. God, I hate-
MARCUS PARKS
What's wrong with Garrison Keillor?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I fucking hate Garrison Keillor.
MARCUS PARKS
Prairie Home Companion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I hate it.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a comforting Saturday afternoon.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I hated Prairie Home Companion. I hate that show! I hate their little voices. I hate quiet radio. But I hate the oh well let's see what Terry has to say.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I hate that type of comedy where he just goes like these rutabagas, they're green! And everyone goes ha ha Rodney. I hate Garrison Keillor.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
BEN KISSEL
Garrison just lives a small recluse life now I believe in Minnesota.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No small back is safe around Garrison Keillor.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the new plan was to use 10 resistance fighters who also happened to be expert skiers who could quickly ski their way to the plant after being parachuted to the ground.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa, James Bond.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I wonder if that scene in Inception was based on this.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm sure, yeah. I think it was also used in the beginning of True Lies, wasn't it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, a lot of skiing.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, a lot of skiing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Skiing commandos are fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, some boobs.
MARCUS PARKS
After getting to the plant, they'd break in, plant explosives on the heavy water power cells, and hopefully cripple German, heavy water production.
BEN KISSEL
Dude, that's cool. It's also reminding me of Metal Gear Solid.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I tell you what though, I don't think they gotta worry about heavy water being created because they had Sergeant Kissel somewhere there and as long as he kept his latrine filled, he was making that heavy, heavy water.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic. Thank you, Henry.
MARCUS PARKS
So on the night of February 27th, in the dead of the Norwegian winter, the team skied to the location, stacked their skis and an igloo they made made themselves, and scaled a 600 ft tall sheer cliff at the back of the plant to avoid guard posts.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Because the Nazis are like nobody's fucking crazy enough to scale up that, it didn't even cross their mind that someone could do this.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And again what fueled them was truly pure ignorance then met with like oh we can do this. Like they did not truly understand that it was in the bottom of a crag, like this thing was literally perfectly safe from any sort of overhead bombing. And so that whole breakdown in 'The Bastard Brigade of them trying to figure out like okay, can you even climb this fucking wall that surrounds this thing? And the one just being like (Norwegian accent) if there are plants growing, then they are places for our hands to go. And so then they went and that's where they figured. So they would just look for the plants. It's crazy. And the blinding snowstorm.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
After following Nazi patrol routes to hide their tracks, the Norwegians found an unguarded gate and cut the lock, whereafter five men provided cover while the demolition team cut a hole in the fence to gain access to the plant itself. But when they got through the outer perimeter, the team found that contrary to their advanced insider intelligence-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah?
MARCUS PARKS
Every door and window had been bolted shut. Improvising, they found a utility duct and crawled their way to the room where the heavy water was both stored and produced.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's crazy, man. They're doing like Persona 5 Royal shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When you have to like do that, it's also in Metal Gear Solid too where you have to find a lot of vents.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, a lot of vent use. Also with the Arkham Asylum, with the Batman game which is actually why I don't really love the Batman games.
MARCUS PARKS
The Batman game is 90% vents.
BEN KISSEL
I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A lot of vents.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well after dropping 15 ft from the ceiling to the floor, the commandos snuck up on the only guard. Improbably, the Nazis had left a frumpy old Norwegian man named Gustav to guard what was supposed to be the Nazis' most treasured scientific resource.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Norwegian accent) Are you looking for the fat boy water? It is in the other room.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you, Gustav.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you, Gustav!
BEN KISSEL
He just definitely seems like the Milton from Office Space where it's like okay Gustav, we're going to go party, you stay here and guard the water. Okay, I'll guard the water.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did not give a fucking shit.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because he's like I'm basically a prisoner here too. You know?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm being forced to watch this thing by Nazis. So he's like yeah, just do it. Just get it done.
BEN KISSEL
Also you're watching water.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's real boring.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, of course. And so Gustav was held captive in a corner while the demolition team placed enough explosives to blow up all 18 fuel cells and 770 lbs of heavy water.
BEN KISSEL
The worst was when they started tickling me. They were tickling me in the corner, I couldn't get out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Next thing I knew it got bigger and bigger. And then it was me and five skiers and all it takes is one pole to make a little bit of a side war party.
BEN KISSEL
They made fun of it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Gustav, the entire time he's like (Norwegian accent) please be careful around there, if you are not careful around that, you're going to hurt the heavy... Oh I see what you are doing. Okay.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS
Like he didn't, it took him a while to figure out that they had showed up to destroy the plant.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
And so after planting all the explosives, they took Gustav with them and at 1:13 AM, two hours after they climbed that sheer cliff, they lit the fuse and the cells went boom!
BEN KISSEL
Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS
Mission accomplished!
BEN KISSEL
Sweet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they also knew that the Nazis were gonna come and round up everybody within like 100 miles of the plant. So what they were doing was as they went, they ripped off a patch they had, they were all dressed like British soldiers, so they ripped off the British stuff. It's like,it's cool because again it feels like an action movie.
BEN KISSEL
That is so cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And like threw the British insignias down and then they would talk in Norwegian about how beautiful London was around all of the people that they were gradually kidnapping throughout the heist part of it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's great.
MARCUS PARKS
They ended up with two hostages by the end, Gustav and another Nazi, and an actual Nazi that they came across along the way.
BEN KISSEL
Oh okay. Interesting. Why do I feel like Gustav would be played by Josh Gad?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Damn you, Josh Gad! It should have been me! It should have been me!
MARCUS PARKS
Now this team thereafter went down in Norwegian and WWII history as some of the bravest and most important heroes of the war because they'd seemingly crippled the Nazi nuclear program.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
That however is not really the truth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just got debunked!
BEN KISSEL
No, don't let the truth get in the way of a good war story.
MARCUS PARKS
But while the mission was indeed impressive in its planning and execution, Operation Gunnerside didn't really matter because Heisenberg's program had stalled. Even worse, while Norsk Hydro was supposed to be out of commission for at least a year, up to two years, it was back up and running bigger and better than ever within six weeks.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They barely put a dent in it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
By the time they had, in the book 'The Bastard Brigade', by the time they had the big congratulatory dinner, because then they took all the guys that did it out to dinner in London.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
By the time they had got to the dinner, the plant was already doing its thing again.
BEN KISSEL
It was still good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he didn't want to tell them. So they literally all knew, they scheduled the big celebration knowing that it didn't even matter.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it was nice because then they all got to get out of the war.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And it's still good for morale. They did it, they got in there, they blew up a building.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Great for morale.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But the plant engineers worked 24 hours a day in shifts to get the cells repaired. And by the end of it, they had managed to actually expand the heavy water operation from 18 cells to 26.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Which increased their production of heavy water from 11 lbs a day to 15.
BEN KISSEL
It's kind of a really just sort of a glorified demo day and then a rebuild.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A little bit.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It actually kind of made space for them to be able to build it better in a way that they didn't even think about.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're like (German accent) oh now we could actually put so much, so much more the heavy water could go.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're like (German accent) wow, this is actually kind of nice. Thank you, thank you, Mr. Gunnerside.
MARCUS PARKS
(German accent) I thought this was a load bearing wall, turns out it's not, we can really have like an open, we can have open concept in here. This is going to be great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) Open concept. And now we've got the shiplap on one side and we've got the rolling barn doors because it creates an illusion of space.
BEN KISSEL
They really are fantastic. I mean look at World Trade Center one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
How beautiful is that building?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nothing like a nice big target.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. And they got that big mall there now.
BEN KISSEL
They got a big mall.
MARCUS PARKS
They wouldn't have had that mall, the mall that looks like a cadaver.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
That wouldn't be there.
BEN KISSEL
Yep, the memorial.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That wouldn't be there. Nah, man. Nah, dude. And we they got a Burger King there, man. It's great.
BEN KISSEL
They do, they do.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the British refused to acknowledge that Operation Gunnerside had ultimately been a failure, at least they refused to acknowledge it to the Americans. And to this day many historians still refuse to believe that the whole thing had been all for naught. Because it is, as you said, it's a great war story.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's an inspirational story.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But back in 1943, General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, he wasn't about to accept the British view of the mission, especially after he received intelligence that the whole thing had been an objective failure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I will say I don't think it's unwarranted but 'The Bastard Brigade' has a for certain anti British bias within the book. Because the entire thing is constantly talking shit about how the UK had no idea what the hell they were doing, that they didn't know, that they had second guessed, that they were incorrect all the time. And I don't know if it was real or not but it's like Leslie Groves was like goddamn these limey bastards, they have no idea what they're doing. You know what I mean? And it's all in the book.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you're like I don't know if this is just dialogue written by a man that once got his teeth broken on a bad scone or something and now he hates all British things.
BEN KISSEL
A little resentment perhaps from the past.
MARCUS PARKS
Possibly. See when it came to Groves, his projects were all that mattered. And if he needed to go outside of normal channels to ensure that his current project was a success, he did it. After all, if the Nazis beat the Americans to the bomb, that would mean that the Manhattan Project had been a failure.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
So Groves called for help and contacted the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS
Which is as we know the antecedent to the CIA.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is back when espionage was fun and only done by old money people that would then form the fate of the rest of the country later on.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
I would disagree with it being only old money people. Old money people in charge, yes. But there were plenty of weirdos down at the bottom doing the dirty work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well that's the thing is that you learn it was a classic American approach of blue blood running through the very base of it and then everybody is a freak.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everybody else is a literal unwanted person that knows and doesn't fit into any the other branch of the government or society, that is very easily manipulated and used very effectively for espionage work.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well Groves got a hold of OSS founder Wild Bill Donovan and brought him up to speed on the situation. And the two of them got to work on a plan to take out the Norsk Hydro plant for good.
BEN KISSEL
You know they call me Wild Bill but I actually just have early onset Alzheimer's. I actually think it's kind of offensive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's for Wild Bill, just being like is this my house?
BEN KISSEL
That's Wild Bill right there, that's Wild Bill. Are you my house? He's being wild.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm not being wild, I don't know you.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. Wild Bill.
MARCUS PARKS
Wild Bill!
BEN KISSEL
Wild Bill!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Please, for the love of god, where am I?
MARCUS PARKS
Now the plan that Groves and Wild Bill came up with to stop the production of heavy water at Norsk Hydro, that didn't work out. But it was still the beginning of the Manhattan Project's involvement in covert combat, espionage, recovery, and assassination operations.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I also didn't understand that Leslie Groves could call a bombing in.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That he literally could call the US government and say like can you go bomb this place? And they would just go do it for Manhattan Project?
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Well we'll get to that in a second. But remember he was a general, he was General Leslie Groves.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
What a fun power to have.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can you imagine if he was a specific?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That's cute.
BEN KISSEL
I don't really get it.
MARCUS PARKS
It's really cute. He's not a general, he's a specific.
BEN KISSEL
Oh wow. This is really something that must only be made in a lab.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I gotta get out of Florida.
BEN KISSEL
That must be made in a lab.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I literally gotta get the fuck out of Florida.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I think you might.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My strength is leaving me, I was in a hot garage all day, I was doing a very Mama Zebrowski version of an episode of hoarders where she kept being like I want everything thrown out. And then anything I go to throw out, she'd go no! No! Don't you understand, that's my wedding dolls! I'm gonna talk about wedding dolls on Side Stories.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I know. You're going through a lot right now. Henry is at home helping his mother throw out things that she will not throw out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, those wedding dolls from her first marriage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Begging me to come get rid of these things. Now I am here, cannot believe that I would say yes. Now does not want to go through it. Junk man Joe is coming first thing in the morning and that shit's gotta go out.
BEN KISSEL
Junk man Joe. All right, so that explains the joke.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck you.
BEN KISSEL
He's under a lot of stress.
MARCUS PARKS
He is. Now as we were just talking about and as we covered in our MK Ultra series, some of the first men in the OSS came from the most powerful families in America, the DuPonts, the Morgans, the Vanderbilts. But in addition to the rich boys, Bill Donovan also had wild cards. He had mafia contract killers, this is all gone through in 'The Bastard Brigade', mafia contract killers, bartenders, pro wrestlers.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And as it pertains to our story, professional baseball players like former White Sox catcher Moe Berg.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Moe Berg is one of the more interesting characters in history because he's such a weird combo of a lot of different qualities. He was a genius, he was a multilingual person. He literally could speak Japanese. He's great.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's a very interesting guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Moe Berg was a natural athlete, he was beyond brilliant, he was fluent in at least six and maybe as many as 12 languages.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
He was so comfortable with like just Latin that he could talk to a second baseman in Latin during a baseball game when he played shortstop and they'd know exactly what the fuck he was talking about.
BEN KISSEL
That'll confuse a batter, that'll confuse a runner.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And again, he was played by, I forget, in The Catcher was a Spy he was played by Paul Rudd. And I said this on the stream but he looks like the evil baby from The Simpsons. Like he looks like Imelda Marcos if Imelda Marcos was from the Bronx.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's something about him. He's got a gummy bear body, he's got a full unibrow. But he was an extremely compelling spy, people loved this guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's just really bizarre because obviously we want to be inclusive in this world but how do you get people to identify as hideously ugly?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just choose. Just choose it. We do here. We are all proudly ugly.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm actually a pretty handsome man.
BEN KISSEL
He feels handsome. Marcus feels handsome.
MARCUS PARKS
I've been told by many people that I'm quite the handsome boy. I mean it's a matter of taste, of course.
BEN KISSEL
Yes. I'm just saying Hollywood needs to stop prettying up all these ugly people through history.
MARCUS PARKS
I agree with that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
More ugly actors.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean I would say Moe Berg was 1930s handsome.
BEN KISSEL
Good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He was witty, he was the personification of the old cliché, women want him and men want to be him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I've always wanted to be a catcher.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've heard.
MARCUS PARKS
Moe Berg was also an inscrutable loner with no close friends or relations. In other words, everything about Moe Berg screamed spy.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Spy!
BEN KISSEL
Nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Moe had a surprisingly long career in baseball and impressively attended Columbia law school full-time throughout the season during his early years in the league playing for the White Sox. I think his career was like eight years long, something like that.
BEN KISSEL
Not too bad.
MARCUS PARKS
But after an injury in 1930, he was demoted to a bullpen catcher for the Washington Senators.
BEN KISSEL
Once you tear your taint as a catcher, you're done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The taint is one of the most crucial organs. Is it an organ?
BEN KISSEL
It's an organ, yeah, it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's all taint.
BEN KISSEL
It is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because I was a catcher.
BEN KISSEL
I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wink. And you can see I got a catcher's knees.
BEN KISSEL
I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I got an umpire's mind.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Berg came to be known as Professor Berg amongst sportswriters. This is due to his habit of reading books about non-Euclidean spacetime in the bullpen. And he understood it well enough where after the game he'd call, he got Albert Einstein's home phone number and just called up Albert Einstein and said hey, you want to talk physics?
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay. So this guy really was intelligent.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because then Albert Einstein was like I will teach you about physics if you teach me about baseball. And then they taught him about baseball and he taught him about physics. But then he tried to teach him all the rules about baseball and he was like I do not get it. I am not a fucking jock. Fuck you, Chad. That's what he said.
BEN KISSEL
Oh come on now!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he was like Albert Einstein, come on, Albert Einstein.
BEN KISSEL
Albert!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You get black pilled?
MARCUS PARKS
Well even more impressive was the fact that after Moe Berg's baseball career was over, he made an appearance on a national radio quiz show called Information Please.
BEN KISSEL
I'm immediately annoyed because I'm gonna be on hold for 20 minutes. Information. Being like I just gave it to the automated system. Why do you need my information again?
MARCUS PARKS
That was in 1938. And in that year he became an overnight celebrity. He was sort of a Ken Jennings if you will.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. And of course Henry and I, cheap plug for our Patreon, had a chance to interview Ken Jennings. So check out that conversation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, man.
BEN KISSEL
Ken is a big fan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kissel definitely didn't try to use him as the info booth and ask him a bunch of trivia questions to see what he knew.
BEN KISSEL
I asked him why Axe body spray is so cold when it goes on your body.
MARCUS PARKS
And you thought that was a Jeopardy question.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he explained it!
BEN KISSEL
He did explain it.
MARCUS PARKS
He did explain it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He explained it, oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That's interesting. Well maybe I'll have to listen.
BEN KISSEL
Well you might, yes.
MARCUS PARKS
But like so many other Americans when war broke out, Moe Berg wanted to fight for his country. But the military wouldn't take him due to his old injuries. So when the OSS was formed, Wild Bill Donovan trusted his gut and recruited Moe Berg, making Berg one of America's first International Men of Mystery.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well Moe Berg for some reason was kind of obsessed with the concept of either being a spy or wanting to do something because he took a trip to Japan as a younger man. And he filmed a bunch of shit from the top of a hotel, like he got really into taking pictures and for some
reason he did espionage film where he filmed like a, what's it, like a port? He filmed like where the boats came in. He filmed a couple of places where there was like a factory district. He did this stuff as a sort of almost like some kind of reel, like an espionage reel so that people would do it. And he spread this video around and apparently it was so useful to the US government because up until this point, the only information that they had about the Japanese shoreline and anything that happened in the Japanese mainland had come from like tourism books. They didn't even know what was happening over there. So it's very interesting. He was obsessed with it.
BEN KISSEL
He shot a pilot, he shot a pilot.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did.
BEN KISSEL
For the CIA or the future CIA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's your show.
BEN KISSEL
OSS.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right there. They saw that and they were like that's your show.
BEN KISSEL
Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
Now being an OSS agent was just as dangerous as being in the CIA if not more so because the OSS was very much making shit up as they went along and they often did so in a dramatic fashion. For example, the OSS regularly used the infamous cyanide capsule, which of course could be bitten down upon if the agent was captured by enemy forces.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Foaming death would come within seconds and the agent's secrets would die with him.
BEN KISSEL
There was a recent situation about, what was it, five or six years ago, the dude in Russia who took it on the stand and you can watch him die. Have you seen that?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I haven't.
BEN KISSEL
It works real fast.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Real fast.
BEN KISSEL
People, as soon as they knew what he was doing, they like lunged for him and tried to get it out but he already did it and he was dead in like 45 seconds.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It happens real fast. I also did not know that they were rubber coated.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So I guess there's a thing that if you pop it in your mouth and you don't need to kill yourself, you can just eat it and shit it out apparently. Like literally it's a rubber capsule so it just flows right through the hole.
BEN KISSEL
Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I wouldn't trust it.
BEN KISSEL
No, I wouldn't trust it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
An eighth of an inch of government rubber between me and certain death?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. I always imagine that Vladimir Putin has it all the time. Like a Chiclet in his mouth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just get used to it.
BEN KISSEL
I'm sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he just gets used to it.
MARCUS PARKS
Like a dip, just like some Copenhagen just right in the lip.
BEN KISSEL
Yep. I believe it.
MARCUS PARKS
Now these men were trained in sabotage tactics like lockpicking, phone bugging, and silent methods of murder. But since it was all hush hush and since it had no precedent, the OSS had to create its own covert methods for graduating their training program.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This shit's crazy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is like such an outlandish concept.
MARCUS PARKS
In Moe Berg's case, he was tasked with planning a solo heist that involved infiltrating an American defense plant to steal any classified document he could find, didn't matter what kind of document, it didn't matter what it said, all it matters is it was stamped classified.
BEN KISSEL
So this is the tangible, when they get someone who knows how to like hack into computers to work for the government and they're like hack into our system so we learn how to do it. But this is that in the real form.
MARCUS PARKS
Kinda.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can you imagine though? But up until that point, if you hire a hacker that has hacked into the government, you know that he can do it. This is literally being like okay, we put you in a fun house training segment where you have to shoot at plaster Nazis that pop up in window frames. Like what Keanu Reeves does for John Wick, they do all that like type of training. And then it's literally all right, go spy on us and come back.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's crazy to me.
BEN KISSEL
That is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That they would just go not tell these companies that they would do it and then afterwards they'd have to under pain of death to go through all of this stuff. And then basically be like this is an OSS training. And they'd all have to go like oh, oh okay.
BEN KISSEL
And then somebody just had to be like wait, the catcher for the fucking Sox?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
That's who's doing all this?
MARCUS PARKS
Well the point was that they wanted to see if Berg could come up with a plan on his own and execute it under pressure in a real life situation. But Berg's plan wasn't as clever as you'd expect. He somehow got a hold of some White House stationery and he just kind of wrote, he forged a note and tried to bluff his way through it.
BEN KISSEL
And?
MARCUS PARKS
And when he wasn't able to charm his way past a guard, he sheepishly had to admit that he was participating in what amounted to a glorified panty raid.
BEN KISSEL
Oh Moe, come on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wait a second, do you want to see the panties? Wait a second, I can just see these panties? Absolutely, sir. Come this way. And as you see all of J. Edgar Hoover's panties just like lined up in this beautiful array. He's like yes, he comes here each morning and depending on his mood and the day of the week, as you can see M T W T F S S, yes, days of the week panties. His balls, big front!
BEN KISSEL
As you'll notice, this one here is used.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(sniffing) $5? You can Venmo me.
MARCUS PARKS
Well even though Berg failed, the OSS still decided to take a chance. And by the fall of 1943 he was being parachuted into Norway under the command of Wild Bill Donovan and General Leslie Groves on a reconnaissance mission concerning the Norsk Hydro plant. Now Berg soon found and interrogated scientists familiar with the plant and those scientists confirmed that the heavy water production had only ceased for about a month and a half. That interrogation was relayed back to Groves and Donovan who both said fuck it, let's just bomb the fucking thing into oblivion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay!
BEN KISSEL
Right, sure. Why not?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's just bomb it!
BEN KISSEL
Just bomb it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's such a fun day. Yeah, we can blow it up! Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
So within a week or so after the information was delivered, Groves and Donovan managed to gain command of 142 bombers from the Bloody Hundredth. Planes with such colorful names as Boss Lady, Picklepuss, She-Hasta, Rum Boogie II, The Raunchy Wolf-
BEN KISSEL
Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS
And two names that were simply named Horny.
BEN KISSEL
Well there you go, creative naming.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Strange.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just the idea of sitting there being like yeah, she is, that's my plane. Yeah, Horny. That's her name. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's ready for it. God, you can't even sit in the seats.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly I slide out of the cockpit each time.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the men, they also had colorful names. There was Bubbles, Handlebar Hank, Lucky Luckadoo, The Two Harrys, The Three Buckys, and a guy just named Veal.
BEN KISSEL
Oh man, it sounds like you're describing a bunch of rescue dogs as someone's going to look to adopt. That's Lucky Lou right there, that Beaver Stu.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's the list on Tobie's Small Dog Rescue, they're up for adoption.
BEN KISSEL
You don't wanna know why we call him Horny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well the reason why the call me Veal is because I'm a little sheepish. Come on, guys!
MARCUS PARKS
That's funny. Isn't veal beef?
BEN KISSEL
Veal is beef, it's cow that is brutally, brutally treated at a very young age.
MARCUS PARKS
It's tiny cow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no, no.
BEN KISSEL
Technically you shouldn't eat it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Made very tender-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
By far too small cages and making them blind. The whole point, Kissel, you see is that they're supposed to turn into sort of what Arby's does, something between a liquid and a solid.
BEN KISSEL
Viscous, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Gotchu.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The idea is to make a thing a living slurry.
BEN KISSEL
There you go. Well that's nice, that's humane.
MARCUS PARKS
But perhaps the reason why there was such levity around the Bloody Hundredth is because a lot of them got killed. They were called the Bloody Hundredth for a reason.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
An alternate name, a much less cool and a name that's a lot less fun, they were also called the Vanishing Americans.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bad nickname during a war.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
But the thing about bombing is that no matter how good your crew was, targeting just one building is really fucking hard and it's even harder to target a single room within that building. That would be the heavy water room in the Norsk Hydro plant. Therefore while 12 bombs hit the plant, only the power generators went down and 22 civilian villagers were killed in the process. That's why they were a little reticent to go the bombing route.
BEN KISSEL
What? That's all? Out of 12 bombs, that's all that it was able to do?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was literally inside of the... This is why I'm so glad I have a bidet now.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you have any idea how hard it is to get to the dingle berries at the very bottom of the crevice?
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's extremely difficult without help. That's why I ended up clearing the field, blitzkrieging it, by snipping it in the hole around my b-hole. I'm sorry Samantha, new assistant here. But this is different because you can't get to it.
BEN KISSEL
You can't get to it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How do they count the bodies they kill? Can I ask? Like truly in the end when they talk about war casualties, this is just a general question, how do they like figure that out?
BEN KISSEL
I think they go, one, two-
MARCUS PARKS
A-two.
BEN KISSEL
Three.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh I forgot, it was the Tootsie Pop method. I didn't know.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That always held.
BEN KISSEL
And then they bite the head off the fourth and then they call it a day.
MARCUS PARKS
I think just after the war is over there's record keeping, there's reckoning. How many people were in the village at the beginning of the war? How many people are in the village now? When did those people die? There's usually someone in the village that's keeping track of all this shit.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Did your husband not come home?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's truly a very morbid nerd's job.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
SOmeone's gotta do it.
MARCUS PARKS
That's one of the only reasons why we know so much about the Black Death that we do know is because-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, all the records.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, certain countries were insane record keepers and that's why we know more about one than we know about the other.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
Now this failure again enraged Leslie Groves because Leslie Groves is real-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Goddamnit! Goddamnit! Just a lot of that, a lot of punching the air, playing with his belt.
MARCUS PARKS
Got angry real fast.
BEN KISSEL
Well this seems like a reason to be angry.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
He wasted what, millions of dollars I would assume, right?
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Didn't do a good job, had a hard target, couldn't break it. Much like Jean-Claude Van Damme.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kissel, you're Leslie Groves. How would you react?
BEN KISSEL
Get me that goddamn Wild Bill.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm Bill?
BEN KISSEL
No, I'm actually Bill.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I see this here, I see this little sign, yeah I see this sign, I guess I must be Bill but I don't know Bill.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Bill, man, you are fucking wild.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you guys have a bunch of birds in here? What's that sound? Oh god, are there a bunch of birds in here?
BEN KISSEL
Fucking wild. Trust me, this guy doesn't remember shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Am I Bill?
BEN KISSEL
Wild Bill, we got a mission for you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa. Me?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. You're Wild Bill.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My name is William.
BEN KISSEL
No, yeah. Wild Bill. Wanna go kill some Nazis?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
BEN KISSEL
There you go!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
BEN KISSEL
Wild Bill is back.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when Leslie Groves calmed down, he realized that by just dropping one of his dudes into the thick of it, he very quickly had gained highly valuable operational information about the Nazi atomic bomb program. Didn't matter if the bombing worked or not, he still knew that it was all up and running and he knew it straight from the horse's mouth. So Groves talked it over with Wild Bill and Moe Berg was given a over to the Manhattan Project as America's first atomic spy.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Now smartly Groves gave Berg no specifics about the Manhattan Project. But Berg did learn enough quantum physics to be able to interrogate European physicists in their own language.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude, it's crazy because they couldn't have anybody that had any operational connections to Manhattan Project over in the theater of war because they knew if any one of these guys get scooped-
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We love our scientists because Groves knew we need scientists doing this so they can understand what they're looking at when they go look for evidence of a Nazi atomic program. But they knew they can't have somebody from the Manhattan Project because we love our scientists but let's just say once it came to being spoken to in the quote "in the style of the Russians" you knew that they were going to fold immediately. Any sort of physical, like they can't be tortured, as soon as they're tortured, they're gonna start spilling their guts.
BEN KISSEL
And I don't disagree with them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well Niels Bohr couldn't even stop talking about being an atomic scientist when nobody was torturing him.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
He just talked about it out loud.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Danish accent) I did not go to 49 years of being a nuclear scientist man to just not stop saying about it. All right? Oh you're Mr. Radio Man, Mr. Radio Man does whatever, everybody knows what you do.
MARCUS PARKS
In addition, Berg poured through the work of the great nuclear physicists of the day such as the Joliot-Curies, Otto Hahn, and Enrico Fermi. But he was especially drawn to the work of Werner Heisenberg, who would soon become Moe Berg's number one target for first kidnapping then assassination.
BEN KISSEL
Assassination.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Assassins! Also just so you know, I have had a lot of people talk and I got a little bit of pushback and I want to give credit where credit is due. And Otto Hahn actually mostly stole a lot of the work from Lise Meitner, that was actually the person that was the actual brains in the operation. Otto Hahn, very similar to many of these guys that are in charge of a lab, will just kind of be like that's me, yup. I came up with it! But it's also everybody on their team who really is the people that like give the actual information.
MARCUS PARKS
Interesting. Was she a Nazi?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh, I actually don't know. I don't know. I think that she was fine. I think like a lot of people, she was just kinda there under duress.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh okay. All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll figure it out, we'll get there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
We'll figure it out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Before I say yes, let's say...
MARCUS PARKS
Now Berg was already on the front lines when it came to atomic spycraft. But Groves still needed a small team that could coordinate investigations into foreign nuclear activities that included but was not limited to domestic spycraft.
BEN KISSEL
Oh very fun.
MARCUS PARKS
That team named itself Alsos, which pissed off Leslie Groves because Alsos in Greek means grove.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well now why would that be aggravating?
MARCUS PARKS
Because it was a not a very good secret keeping name.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because Leslie Groves was very much famous for being... Anybody within the world of the military knew that he was running this thing called the Manhattan Project that was probably associated with us building some form of atomic bomb. So as soon as you see the word grove attached to a thing that's a bunch of people looking for Nazi atomic bomb secrets in Europe, you're immediately like oh these are all guys from the Manhattan Project. And now we know that they are that far ahead in their atomic bomb program. Also Leslie Groves just didn't like the British.
MARCUS PARKS
True.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, maybe a little egotistical on his part as well.
MARCUS PARKS
Quite possibly.
BEN KISSEL
Could be.
MARCUS PARKS
But nevertheless, when it came to the man who would lead Alsos, Groves chose a fiercely anti- communist Russian named Boris Pash, formerly Boris Pashkovsky. Now Boris had been born at the dawn of the 20th century in San Francisco. But in 1913, his family returned to Russia where his father became a Russian Orthodox bishop during what was in an especially dicey time. You know what the dicey time is?
BEN KISSEL
What? We already covered it.
MARCUS PARKS
When?
BEN KISSEL
With what? What are you talking about?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I see that they're talking. I see that they're talking and I see that there's a show on. It's like oh yes, I'm on the show.
BEN KISSEL
There is a dicey-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I see my drinks are here. I see my drinks, I must be...
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've been talking. Oh god, am I Wild Bill? Is this me?
BEN KISSEL
That was a dicey time there.
MARCUS PARKS
Being a Russian Orthodox bishop in 1913 in Russia. That's a dicey time why?
BEN KISSEL
That's probably not good because they didn't like religion.
MARCUS PARKS
Because?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did not know, we didn't...
BEN KISSEL
They have a leader there that was anti-religion.
MARCUS PARKS
Not yet.
BEN KISSEL
Buddy, all I know is bishop, fucking flog it, make the juice. I really don't care.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a numbers game.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Comedy is a numbers game, you never know. You never really know.
BEN KISSEL
I don't think being a bishop ever is fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this was right before the Russian Communist Revolution.
BEN KISSEL
Sounds like a dicey time. Yeah, exactly.
MARCUS PARKS
And when the Russian Communist Revolution came, Boris not surprisingly fought for the Tsar as a part of the White Army, which was made up of religious zealots and the capitalist bourgeoisie who benefited from tsarist rule. As we know, the revolution ended in the death of tsarist Russia. So Boris slowly made his way back to America where he was born.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, eventually every one of our topics is gonna touch each other, isn't it?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that's all Rasputin.
MARCUS PARKS
This touches Rasputin directly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's so weird, so crazy.
BEN KISSEL
That's what I was talking about.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I wonder what the connection between Boris Pash and Rasputin is.
BEN KISSEL
That's what I was saying, we covered it.
MARCUS PARKS
I would say none because Rasputin was just hanging out in the palace having a good old time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just trying, I'm just hoping, I'm hoping for an extended universe.
MARCUS PARKS
That'd be nice.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And by the mid 1920s, Boris Pash's name had been shortened from Pashkovsky to Pash because when he came in through immigration, they're like you're Pash now.
BEN KISSEL
It's a lot easier that way.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And he was soon teaching high school in Hollywood. Hollywood High School.
BEN KISSEL
I drive by it every day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, was he actually at Hollywood High School?
MARCUS PARKS
I mean they just said a high school in Hollywood. So maybe Hollywood High School.
BEN KISSEL
It's probably Hollywood High School.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's so crazy. That's so weird. It's like where Judy Garland went and shit. It's very strange.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. There's a mural of all the actors that are famous from there on the outside of the school.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh wow.
BEN KISSEL
Strange.
MARCUS PARKS
It's really strange.
BEN KISSEL
Very strange.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh the one on the way to the Sirius XM-
BEN KISSEL
Yes sir.
MARCUS PARKS
I know exactly which one you're talking about.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very famous, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Actually it probably was that one.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I think that's what they said in 90210, I think it was based on that.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow. In 1930 though, Pash returned to the military and joined the Army Reserve. 10 years later, Pash was in the army's intelligence division tasked with hunting Japanese insurgents in the Baja Peninsula in an effort to prevent an attack on San Diego after a Japanese sub had surfaced in Santa Barbara, California to fire on an oil refinery.
BEN KISSEL
Now that's a Baja Blast.
MARCUS PARKS
Now no insurgents were ever found in Baja nor were any Japanese American citizens ever found guilty or even tried for espionage or treason. In fact, out of the 10 people convicted of spying for Japan domestically during WWII, all 10 of them were white weeaboos.
BEN KISSEL
What's a weeaboo?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, man.
MARCUS PARKS
A westerner who is extremely obsessed with Japanese culture.
BEN KISSEL
Oh. Like Gwen Stefani.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like anime.
MARCUS PARKS
It's more of an anime thing but still, these were people who were extremely obsessed with Japanese culture to the point where they were traitors against their own country.
BEN KISSEL
Well that's what got Gwen Stefani in trouble because she said I'm kind of Japanese but she's not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She claimed to be Japanese and I haven't seen the documents but I see a white woman and you just never know.
BEN KISSEL
You never know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You never know what's inside. Because me, I'm half Spaniard.
MARCUS PARKS
Are you?
BEN KISSEL
We know that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just saying it. I'm just saying it.
MARCUS PARKS
Cool.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the most interesting of these weeaboos was a woman named Velvalee Dickinson, aka the doll woman.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa, man, the nickname is scary. The name is sexy but her nickname is scary.
MARCUS PARKS
You think Velvalee Dickinson is sexy?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I like it.
BEN KISSEL
Velvalee Dickinson? Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Velvalee Dickinson definitely sounds like a woman I'd end up ruining it all for.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Damn you, Velvalee, get out of my mind!
BEN KISSEL
Velvalee Dickinson, from a long line of Dickinsons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dammit, Velvalee, get out of the trunk of my car!
BEN KISSEL
I ain't going nowhere without you! I'm Velvalee.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Velvalee, you got me cornered!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Yeah, Velvalee Dickinson, yep. She's a babe.
MARCUS PARKS
Well after becoming obsessed with Japanese culture, Velvalee used her doll shop in Manhattan as a front for Japanese espionage. She passed military intelligence to the Japanese in letters that relayed information through doll lingo.
BEN KISSEL
Well I don't like that she's doing that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh, it's so creepy.
BEN KISSEL
And I don't like doll lingo.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, what is doll lingo?
MARCUS PARKS
She would refer to things like fishnets like doll accessories-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fishnets?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, fishnets. That was one of the weirder ones was fishnets.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't like all this sexy little dolls.
MARCUS PARKS
She would say like I'm getting an order of two fishnets from San Diego. Or I'm getting a set of fishnets repaired in San Diego.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah you would, Velvalee.
MARCUS PARKS
Which told the Japanese that there were two ships in the harbor at San Diego being repaired at that time.
BEN KISSEL
Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hot damn, Velvalee. You know what I mean? Oh man, those letters. You can even read through the letters that she's got a body.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed. Although fishnets need to be cheaper.
MARCUS PARKS
You think so?
BEN KISSEL
They're fucking expensive. Have you ever gone to one of those stores when the lady wants to dress up all fun? And fishnets, there's no material. 50 goddamn colors.
MARCUS PARKS
They're difficult to make though.
BEN KISSEL
They are not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why are you pricing out fishnets?
BEN KISSEL
Ay!
MARCUS PARKS
Ay!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why are you doing that?
BEN KISSEL
I'm just saying they're very expensive for limited fabric.
MARCUS PARKS
That is true but it's the quality you pay for and you pay for the labor.
BEN KISSEL
No, you're supposed to be able to tear them open.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh, weird, Kissel.
BEN KISSEL
No-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We've headed into a weird, private part of your life.
BEN KISSEL
No, everyone agrees.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you just rip apart fishnets at home like you're a giant horny dolphin?
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like do you just go and you're Gojira itself?
BEN KISSEL
No, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just being like nothing can contain me! And just like put it over your head and just rip it.
BEN KISSEL
Why not?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So your face can go through.
BEN KISSEL
Have fun with it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the letters written by Velvalee were sent to Japan via Buenos Aires and she used names of people in the doll trade that she had grudges against. And it was that little bit of pettiness that got her caught because the letters were intercepted and they started to see like oh this sounds... A code breaker looked at it like oh this is obviously all code and it would have the name of like Martha Johnson who lives in Boulder. And they'd go and talk to Martha Johnson from Boulder and say are you a fucking spy for the Japanese? She's like that sounds like something Valvalee would be into.
BEN KISSEL
Wow!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Velvalee is like yeah, I may have done a treachery or two but when it comes down, everything's fair in love and war.
BEN KISSEL
Velvalee.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right, Velvalee.
MARCUS PARKS
Can I show you a picture of Velvalee, Ben?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, let me see her. Because I got a pretty hot steamy picture going in my mind. Well, so I understand why they called her the doll lady.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Oh well, oh no, Velvalee is very different than what I thought.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
But you know it was also the photography back then. The photography back then isn't...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I literally thought, in my head I was just seeing a blonde bombshell with just a slinky Jessica Rabbit style.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, to be fair there's one picture of her and it looks to be her in her 50s. She had something, I'm looking at it from certain angles.
MARCUS PARKS
I think this picture is from her in the 30s and she looks like a melting skeleton.
BEN KISSEL
Well aren't we all?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She does.
BEN KISSEL
Aren't we all?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She does.
BEN KISSEL
All right. That's why she's got such great personality, that's why she's always playing with dolls.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She looks like before the Wicked Witch of the West turned.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She looks like the real life version of her.
BEN KISSEL
Dude, say what you want about that Wicked Witch, she's got a tight bod.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I must be horned up today.
MARCUS PARKS
You really seem to be, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, man.
BEN KISSEL
I just haven't jerked off in a while. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's coming off of you.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
But when it came to Boris Pash, he fell in love with the military intelligence game during his hunt for non-existent Japanese insurgents. He was great at managing agents, he was a master of disguise, he had a knack for putting wigs on straight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I hate this guy.
BEN KISSEL
Why?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly for all intents and purposes, I should love this guy but I hate this guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
This is what you would be doing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
And he was pretty good at funny voices. Voice alteration.
BEN KISSEL
Well as long as he doesn't use them in our fucking ads because they don't like funny voices.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We've gotten some asked to be re recorded, yes.
MARCUS PARKS
But Boris Pash therefore caught the eye of the OSS and he was soon named head of West Coast Domestic Security for the Manhattan Project. Now Boris Pash's first task was to investigate lead scientist Robert Oppenheimer and his associates to see if any of them were passing information to the Soviet Union.
BEN KISSEL
So it seems here truly there's a lot of distrust.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Absolutely.
BEN KISSEL
So the investigations are all like within the house at this point.
MARCUS PARKS
And with good reason.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Over the last two episodes-
BEN KISSEL
That is really interesting though because you think about like the combined front, the United States vs the commies and the Nazis and the Japanese.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Never once.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
But really everyone was like who the fuck do we trust?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well because this entire lab was based off of basically current and former communists were all there. You had a bunch of people that were all, some of them card carrying communists that were the ones that were the leaders in nuclear science. So they're all at the Manhattan Project, they're at Los Alamos. And so they basically hire an internal affairs guy to go and you're gonna watch us, well we watch ourselves because we don't know how this is gonna work out. Like we actually don't know because again, warring factions. Half of them are like the Russians are our allies, there should be a free border here, there should be osmosis of our science and their science, like we should be sharing it. But they were not fully privy to the idea that we were setting up villain number two for the sequel.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And to the point of everyone coming together for the war effort, that is very much a rose-colored view of history. America, when we were first asked to ration, we fucking hated it. We were dragged along kicking and screaming the entire time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I believe that.
MARCUS PARKS
We did not like rationing, we did not like sharing. The government basically had to hire a daddy to force everyone to do it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But if they wouldn't have forced everyone to do it, we wouldn't have won the fucking war.
BEN KISSEL
So there you go.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Sometimes you need a daddy.
BEN KISSEL
No you don't.
MARCUS PARKS
Don't you, Ben?
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Don't you sometimes need a daddy?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sometimes.
MARCUS PARKS
I think sometimes you need a daddy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I always need a daddy.
BEN KISSEL
No, I am good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kissel, I think that if you had a very special little daddy, I feel like, you know, because he doesn't have to be in charge of you, he could be lateral. He could be your co-daddy.
MARCUS PARKS
Right. Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I have enough. I have enough little people around me. If there was just a group for me to just go talk with other big people and just be like these littles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how it starts. That's how it fucking starts, man.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh god, is that what an NBA locker room sounds like?
BEN KISSEL
I don't, they have their own issues.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think they're all just getting too laid and paid to be angry.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're NBA guys.
BEN KISSEL
I think they're pretty happy.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the FBI had already been investigating one of Robert Oppenheimer's students and that student was indeed passing information from Oak Ridge and Los Alamos to Soviet agents. Pash however demanded that he be given total control over all investigations into Manhattan Project staff. That authority was swiftly given and Pash began a lifelong career of being the type of guy who would fit his entire head up your ass if he thought there might be a communist hiding inside.
BEN KISSEL
Hey buddy, I got a couple of communists in my ass. You wanna come check it out?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You want it too much.
BEN KISSEL
No, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll look. I'll have to look.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now I have to look.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My god, this is the cleanest asshole I've ever seen.
MARCUS PARKS
There wasn't a communist in here now, there certainly was one here recently.
BEN KISSEL
Nice and cleaned up.
MARCUS PARKS
Put a surveillance team on that man's asshole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There was a kind of a problem though because a lot of this shit he did was completely illegal. So he'd set up a house that he wired for sound and he'd invite communists to it and go yes? What do you think of this? And so the students got caught. But because all of the evidence against them was built up illegally, they didn't know what to do with them. So you're like well we can't prosecute them for espionage officially, so they just sent them all in the worst details in the war. Like they sent one to Alaska, they sent one to another place where they just put them away from anything important possible.
BEN KISSEL
Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And just were like all right, you go peel potatoes for the next two years.
MARCUS PARKS
yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You love potatoes, you're a communist.
MARCUS PARKS
He installed surveillance equipment worth $100,000 in modern currency in the radiation lab at the University of California Berkeley.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He also had undercover security agents follow anyone he suspected of having communist ties and he flipped Oppenheimer's driver and his bodyguards into becoming informants that reported directly to Pash.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so there is a really interesting push and pull in that time period, it's very difficult to cover accurately on a podcast vs a book. But like Oppenheimer understanding that everyone was trying to out him as a communist spy was a part of like one of the big pressure points during the end period of the Manhattan Project as they were going up to the Trinity test because obviously he's under a lot of pressure as it is. He's under pressure in his own mind, he's under pressure from the US government. But now they're all looking for any evidence that he's a communist too. So he tried to quit like four times.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's like I can't handle it, I have to go. And you're like Robert, come on, buddy. Come on.
BEN KISSEL
They're gonna make a movie about you, don't worry.
MARCUS PARKS
But as I said last episode, the unfortunate reality is that, as Henry said, there were quite a few card carrying communists both orbiting the Manhattan Project and quite a few inside the project itself, even a few in the inner circle. Although most of them weren't feeding information to the Soviet Union, they were just communists.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
It was just a political ideology.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just were communists. Yeah, they were American communists.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Military intelligence however is not necessarily known for sussing out nuance. And by late 1943, Pash's hard on for communism got to be so obtrusive that everyone in the Manhattan Project and the OSS hated him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, eventually they're like you know what? Honestly the communists are crushing it right now. You're killing me, Pash. You're fucking killing me.
MARCUS PARKS
yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everywhere you go. Because he was too good, he was too good at being an internal affairs guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They fucking wanted to send him away. Get out of here.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. He just sounds very annoying probably, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Extremely. He's an aggravating person.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's bringing the vibe down.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And he's also fucking up your day in the process. He is setting your work behind.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because you can't get the fucking project done if half your guys are being interrogated by Boris Pash or if they're fucking constantly worried that Pash is gonna arrest them.
BEN KISSEL
It's weaponized HR.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Actually it really is.
BEN KISSEL
Yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
And this is partly how Boris Pash got put in charge of an Alsos mission that tracked the developments of Axis nuclear programs which necessitated a relocation to Europe.
BEN KISSEL
Oh fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like this is the type of thing that showed just how much of a genius Leslie Groves was.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because he kind of understood. Well yeah, he hated communists too, he was a fucking diehard American. But there's like a part of him that did understand we need these Russian nerds right now, like we need them. After the war you guys can all tear all of these guys to pieces if you want. But right now I need to just this, all of this shit needs to stop.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it doesn't matter. By 1944, Boris Pash was in Italy tracking down a former assistant of Enrico Fermi to see what he knew about German atomic studies. This was a mission called Operation Shark.
BEN KISSEL
Ooh, that's fun. Dancing, remember the dancing shark.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I remember.
BEN KISSEL
Baby shark.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, baby shark.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, baby shark. God help us all. God help us all. Oh Mr. Bill. I'm just becoming, I'm just wild bill in my head now. Just going my god, my god. Am I a shadow of myself?
BEN KISSEL
That's wild. That's Wild Bill for you.
MARCUS PARKS
That's real wild. Well in Shark, American agents would be sent to Rome to quote unquote "persuade" this former assistant to defect to the Allies. If the assistant were to resist however, agents were authorized to beat him into submission and drag him to a submarine by force.
BEN KISSEL
All right guys, you know what? I'll just go with you. What if I just go with you?
MARCUS PARKS
But since this spycraft stuff was still pretty new to the Americans, Operation Shark got double booked. Unbeknownst to either man, both Boris Pash and Moe Berg had both been assigned to interrogate and/or retrieve this Italian assistant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's so dumb. It's just such a thing, it's humanity again. We always talk about the human element and it's just so crazy. Because everything is so secret, nobody can know what the fuck's going on.
BEN KISSEL
So what are you doing here? What are you doing here? Same thing you're doing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's a whole scene-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's literally en entire scene like that.
MARCUS PARKS
Now if you'll remember, Moe Berg was a minor celebrity and when he arrived in Naples on his way to Rome, he got recognized in the street by none other than a group of major celebrities who were in Italy on a troop morale mission.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no. By the, what is that called? The USO tour guys.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Who's a good medium athlete celebrity?
BEN KISSEL
Back then?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, like now.
MARCUS PARKS
I'd say if we go back to the 90s, let's say Deion Sanders.
BEN KISSEL
Well he was an A list celebrity.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was huge. Yeah, he was huge.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, he was huge.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm trying to think of somebody who was medium that you'd have to be like oh-
MARCUS PARKS
Rickey Henderson?
BEN KISSEL
Sure, Rickey Henderson. But I think he's number one for stealing bases.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Patrick Ewing. You'd be like oh he was famous.
BEN KISSEL
Patrick Ewing.
MARCUS PARKS
Ah, I got it. Ickey Woods.
BEN KISSEL
okay, Ickey Woods. The Ickey Shuffle.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ickey Woods. That's perfect. Ozzie Smith.
BEN KISSEL
Ozzie Smith's very, very famous.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ozzie Smith's the guy.
BEN KISSEL
You guys are saying all of these very famous people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's all we know. That's why we're looking at you.
BEN KISSEL
Detlef Schrempf is the answer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Perfect.
BEN KISSEL
Detlef Schrempf was the answer, boys.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, okay. All right. Well the crew that recognized Moe Berg was baseball star Lefty Gomez-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They call me that because I only use my right hand.
BEN KISSEL
I get it now.
MARCUS PARKS
A heavyweight champ named Jack Sharkey and Humphrey Bogart.
BEN KISSEL
What the fuck?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just hanging out.
MARCUS PARKS
Just hanging out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause they went to go talk, they were doing a USO trip, they were all like going hanging and saying hello.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they were hanging out and they got a free trip to Naples out of it.
BEN KISSEL
Sweet.
MARCUS PARKS
Because this is not too long after the Allies took Italy.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Now since Berg had been a baseball player of some renown, he was known, Lefty and Sharkey, they knew him, they'd hung out. And when they spotted him in the street, they'd go Moe! Moe!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Moe!
BEN KISSEL
And you can just see him just like not now. Guys, not now. Just like cut it out. Not now, guys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's literally what he did.
MARCUS PARKS
That's exactly what he said. He put his finger to his lips and went shhh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Shut the fuck up.
MARCUS PARKS
And then he just disappeared into the crowd.
BEN KISSEL
Shhh, I'm undercover. Gotta go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Shhh.
BEN KISSEL
That is such a funny coincidence.
MARCUS PARKS
So when Berg arrived at the Italian assistant's home in Rome, he did indeed find the assistant but he also found Boris Pash, who'd already been interrogating the assistant. Pash asked Berg, who are you? And Berg said I'm here on behalf of the Alsos mission. And Pash said-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I am the Alsos Mission! It's me! It's what I do! But he did the thing where he was like tell me! Like he was hard interrogating the scientist.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the dude just couldn't handle it. He just shut down.
BEN KISSEL
I would much rather get interrogated by Moe Berg.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Much rather.
MARCUS PARKS
Moe Berg was actually very good at it.
BEN KISSEL
Well he's smart.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah because he's very smart and he's charming.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
So he's good cop. Boris Pash is bad cop.
BEN KISSEL
Gotcha.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And Pash had not gotten anything out of this assistant during his interrogation. But Berg, he was able to confirm from the assistant, he was able to confirm that this assistant had been in contact with several Axis physicists, Italians, Germans. This guy was in contact with them all. Berg then went back and re-interviewed every scientist Pash had interrogated.
BEN KISSEL
Oh man.
MARCUS PARKS
But he did it better. And each person, he uncovered something new.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's one of the most effective spies in the world.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That is really cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like it's crazy.
BEN KISSEL
Fuck this Oppenheimer movie, I want to know the Moe Berg story.
MARCUS PARKS
They already did it and it failed.
BEN KISSEL
What was it? By who?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was called The Catcher and the Spy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh well that's a horrible-
MARCUS PARKS
The Catcher is a Spy.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I looked it up, man.
BEN KISSEL
I don't even wanna know about what's going on on these gay porn sites! All I know is that is a horrible, horrible name.
MARCUS PARKS
It's terrible and it stars Paul Rudd as Moe Berg.
BEN KISSEL
Again? Well that's Paul Rudd.
MARCUS PARKS
That's Paul Rudd.
BEN KISSEL
So that was the Paul Rudd movie, okay.
MARCUS PARKS
That was the Paul Rudd movie, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's hot garbage.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I watched about 10 minutes of it.
BEN KISSEL
Fuck. Man. Make another one then.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
BEN KISSEL
They made two Steve Jobs movies after... Poor Ashton Kutcher. He never should have been cast in it.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
Just make another one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The movie is just a fucking asshole in a turtleneck walking into a room being like we need to make icons. That's it.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not a good story.
BEN KISSEL
And that's the story of Apple.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well Berg came across a postcard sent to physicist Gian Carlo Wick. That postcard was from none other than Werner Heisenberg, the proverbial big fish of Nazi nuclear physicists.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa! This is a smoking gun.
MARCUS PARKS
The postcard clearly stated that Heisenberg was in the Bavarian Alps scouting for a location for a new lab. And with a location in hand, Alsos began formulating a plan to remove Heisenberg from the board one way or another.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, get 'em!
BEN KISSEL
One way or another.
MARCUS PARKS
Meanwhile back in France, some of the other nuclear physicists stuck in Europe were spending their time day in, day out avoiding Nazi capture and/or death. We're about to get to the people who are in the shit, who never left the shit.
BEN KISSEL
You know what you wanna do? What you wanna do there is zigzag. Everyone you go, zigzag.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Serpentine.
BEN KISSEL
Serpentine, serpentine. Zigzag.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Change up. You're really gonna need to change the way you go, you know what I mean? If you're taking Elm Street, take Wisconsin Avenue.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You gotta fucking really move it around.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. It's true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how I avoid getting kidnapped.
BEN KISSEL
Everyday.
MARCUS PARKS
That's right, I forgot that you're constantly worried about getting kidnapped due to your small stature.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, you know the roaming gang of children that follow Henry around with knapsacks?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's what I know.
BEN KISSEL
Just being like oh he'll fall. Don't worry, he will fall.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm training them, they're training me at the same time. No bag can contain me.
MARCUS PARKS
Well scientists Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie, they'd been in the thick of Nazi occupied France working for the resistance. But the situation was starting to get too hot even for them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because if you remember they were running a cyclotron forcibly by the Nazis. The Nazis were making them do all of this research for them and then they were intentionally sabotaging it as they went.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And working for the resistance at the same time. And this is before the Allies landed in Normandy, like this is Europe is still totally under Nazi control.
BEN KISSEL
Very interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
Incredibly though, even though they knew they had to get out of France as soon as possible, they delayed their escape for a month so their daughter could take her bachelor's exam in physics.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. It's so strange that like real life things are still happening.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's one of the things that I think really goes by the wayside when people think about WWII is that Europe, yeah, a lot of fucking people died but life went on normally for a lot of people, even in Nazi Germany. A lot of people in Nazi Germany, they skated through the 12 years of the Third Reich and then they just came out the other end and nothing really changed for them throughout. Life was just kind of the same.
BEN KISSEL
My grandfather lost a million dollars.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean in no way he deserved it. There's no way.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. There were plenty others. There's plenty others who just fucking skated through. The Mengele Corporation.
BEN KISSEL
Oh that's right.
MARCUS PARKS
The Mengeles came through on the other end still owning their tractor company.
BEN KISSEL
That's right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's really weird because I guess it truly in America we don't know what it's like to have a war walk through your country.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean? So we don't understand that life doesn't just stop, it all keeps going.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean well think of it this way, it's like if there's a war in which New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Seattle, all these places are bombed. If you're living in Cincinnati, I mean you might have less chocolate and you might have a hard time getting a hold of certain goods.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But overall you're still going to school, you're still going to work selling that fucking chili.
BEN KISSEL
Ugh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I tell you what though, those real estate, that's going up.
BEN KISSEL
Oh absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And actually it sounds like a kind of a solid plan in many ways to have super aggressive realtors.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Change the face of this country using light domestic terrorism.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know, Escape From LA, Escape From New York. I don't think that means escape to Cincinnati.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I would say a more apt description would be if Texas got bombed and Austin and Houston are getting bombed but like Austin, Houston, and Lubbock are getting bombed but if you're living in Abilene, shit really doesn't change much.
BEN KISSEL
No, it doesn't. Nothing to bomb. Sad. It's almost sad.
MARCUS PARKS
However the Joliot-Curies leaving a month late, that actually ended up being their saving grace. By complete coincidence, the Joliot-Curie family left Paris for Switzerland on D-Day.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And since the Germans were suitably distracted, the Joliot-Curies escaped. Had they left a month before, they undoubtedly would have been stopped at the border where they absolutely would have been captured or killed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Damn.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And because remember no one knew D-Day was coming.
BEN KISSEL
Right, of course not.
MARCUS PARKS
Not even the Nazis knew D-Day was coming.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And once the Allies firmly planted themselves on French soil and began marching towards the capital, the resistance in Paris turned up the volume and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who remember this guy's just a fucking physicist by day, he returned to Paris to join the fight.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Using his scientific know-how, Joliot-Curie made chemically superior Molotov cocktails by mixing potassium chlorate and sulfuric acid with the petroleum to make the weapons that much more effective and deadly. I would imagine they would be stickier and they would burn harder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's crazy.
BEN KISSEL
It sounds like napalm.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Sounds like it would just... Oh that's a bad way to go.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Oh man. Well armed with the Joliot-Curie cocktails, thousands of French police successfully defended themselves against German tanks after the police had barricaded themselves inside their own police station. But after that battle, Joliot-Curie received a message that it was finally time to end the fight. With France all but taken back by the Americans, Boris Pash was coming to take Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie to safety. Pash found Joliot-Curie in his lab which was still covered in stamped swastikas even though the Germans had all been chased out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just don't... Why do they do that? Why do the Nazis always gotta... They always show up, it's like the first thing they do is change the decor.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it's because they are unoriginal and what they want to do is they want everybody, they want to rewrite history.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
We're gonna get into that here in a little bit like how they truly tried to rewrite history. But if they stamp everything with swastikas enough then people will start to think oh swastikas has always been there. It's a subconscious thing like oh the Nazis must have done that, it's got a swastika on it.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. It doesn't take long.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And with that, Alsos had its first victory in their mission to secure a nuclear physicist who had been floating in the wind. Now by the fall of 1944, the Manhattan Project was still a little less than a year out from even successfully testing a bomb and they still had no clue where the Germans might be building it or how far along they were. See even though it was almost certain that the Allies were on track for victory on the European front, an atomic bomb could still be a silver bullet of sorts for the Nazis.
BEN KISSEL
Of course.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. At the very least, if they didn't have enough to hold the world hostage, they could also use that atomic weapon to make the largest suicide bomb in history.
BEN KISSEL
You got that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes.
BEN KISSEL
And then of course, as we know with aforementioned Scientology, their fantastic film Battlefield Earth, leverage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Leverage.
BEN KISSEL
They get the bomb, that deal coming out of WW2 would look a fuck ton different.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh it would. And we were also very concerned about just them using radiation poisoning in general.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just like between the dirty bombs or just leaving uranium out, like you just would leave it and drop it off places because you can't smell or taste or feel radiation poisoning. It just happens to you. So it's there. There's a whole interesting chapter in 'The Bastard Brigade' about the geologists that helped figure out how we could find out if areas were nuclear before we went to it. Because they thought that they would just start throwing uranium places and poisoning our advance like as we went.
BEN KISSEL
As a matter of fact, I think this is a great job for Wild Bill. Bill, why don't you go lick the mountain for a while and see if you get dead?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now licking, what is licking?
BEN KISSEL
With your tongue, what you do with your wife perhaps. Cunnilingus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay, you mean my mouth penis.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, your mouth penis. Just go lick the mountain, see if there's uranium in it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I guess I should because I'm just a shadow.
BEN KISSEL
And that's what became of those people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that sad?
MARCUS PARKS
Well to the point of the uranium, it was known that the Germans were in possession of hundreds of tons of the stuff. See when Germany conquered Belgium, they gained access to all of Belgium's colonies. These territories included the Congo which had the largest uranium mines in the entire world. But once Belgium was liberated in September of 1944, Pash tracked down a good amount of uranium, 30 tons.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
That's a lot of fucking uranium.
BEN KISSEL
That is a lot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
That uranium was then sent to the United States where it was processed and funnily enough-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah?
MARCUS PARKS
Here's a fun little bit of trivia for you.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
That's the uranium that was used in the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
BEN KISSEL
Wow!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay!
BEN KISSEL
Now that's some fun trivia!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow! Good!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, from Belgium to bad to Baden-Baden to Los Alamos.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Straight to Japan.
BEN KISSEL
That's where my Oma And Opa lived was Baden-Baden.
MARCUS PARKS
Really?
BEN KISSEL
Yes, I was many times in the Black Forest. It was very fun, beautiful forest. Gorgeous land. Gorgeous land actually.
MARCUS PARKS
Well we'll actually get to the Black Forest here in a bit.
BEN KISSEL
No kidding?
MARCUS PARKS
You can possibly reminisce a little bit.
BEN KISSEL
I had fantastic memories. We would go find castles.
MARCUS PARKS
Cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do they have a thing called, I feel like because they went through... The lines that they used are actually very similar to the Nazi ratlines that they'd use later on. Because America would also travel to Europe via South America. It was very interesting, they have to go from the trampoline to freedom to bounce that uranium all the way around the world to get back to America.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And the problem was it was known that the Nazis had been in possession of 1000 tons of uranium.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
970 tons were still unaccounted for.
BEN KISSEL
That's a lot.
MARCUS PARKS
The mission of finding it was given to Boris Pash, who would take the rest of the war to accomplish that mission.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. So he's better than Hans Blix.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Remember that? WMDs?
MARCUS PARKS
He's gonna find that yellowcake, my friend.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Meanwhile the Allies were also closing in on Werner Heisenberg. His secret lab was located deep within Germany's Black Forest.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh! (singing) That's where bears can talk and lions roar and cats are people and god there's more food than ever before!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Heisenberg is such a little bitch. He wrote a whole paper. So he got into philosophy during this time period while he was working on the bomb because his whole thing was trying... He wrote an entire paper basically exonerating himself, how he made himself philosophically-
BEN KISSEL
Well I mean he's writing it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He wrote a paper basically saying philosophically I'm just a scientist and these sciences, you can't attach anything any sort of meaning to this science. And he did a whole, it was like a 300 page book about why he was innocent.
BEN KISSEL
Well I do understand from a scientist perspective, I don't necessarily think that they have ill intent. They just do it, they create the art or the science.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were making an atomic bomb. It's all ill intent.
MARCUS PARKS
They were making an atomic bomb for the Nazis.
BEN KISSEL
For the Nazis. Got it. I understand.
MARCUS PARKS
They knew it, they weren't making this in a vacuum. They knew exactly where the bomb was going.
BEN KISSEL
Let's talk about the beauty of the Black Forest more. The trees are very big and there's little rocks you can climb and there's a bunch of bugs. Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Did you find any like Allied bodies out there? Like German bodies? Like Nazi bodies?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa.
BEN KISSEL
No, didn't find any Nazi bodies.
MARCUS PARKS
Like Nazi gold, like Nazi loot?
BEN KISSEL
Nope. Didn't find any Nazi loot. There was a castle which was a cafe.
MARCUS PARKS
You didn't find that, that's just a place on the side of the road.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a restaurant.
BEN KISSEL
No, it was in the Black Forest. But yes, it was touristy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
But then there was other stuff. Yeah, fun stuff, fun stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
Well for the kidnap Heisenberg mission, the OSS chose a guy named Carl Eifler who was pretty much the stereotype of the tough as nails special forces spy soldier who snapped necks and broke hearts, all while being a family man.
BEN KISSEL
The worst thing is man, I loved you and then you're gonna go and kill me?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He's sort of like Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no kidding?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that sort of guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm gonna ask this to our audience. Sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com. Every single Arnold Schwarzenegger movie there is a beautiful woman all over that man.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can you imagine being kissed by Arnold Schwarzenegger?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like there is nothing less sexy. I think it's not about the muscles, it's about that big fucking face and his head.
BEN KISSEL
Are you, wait a sec, no, I'm not gonna allow this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Him getting closer, go ah!
BEN KISSEL
No, no, no, no. Pierogi Boy. No. This is absolutely... Pierogi Boy and Can't Breathe over here. No. Arnold Schwarzenegger is an iconic sex icon. Like literally a sex icon.
MARCUS PARKS
He is?
BEN KISSEL
Am I insane? Am I literally insane?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Austrian accent) I am coming!
BEN KISSEL
He redefined what masculinity is for an entire generation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Austrian accent) Get to the chopper! I'm coming!
BEN KISSEL
It is so adorable that you guys actually think for one second a woman is turned off by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a man who has only succeeded at every single thing he's ever done.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And if he was allowed to run for president, would win.
MARCUS PARKS
But masculinity has nothing to do with sexuality and his sexuality has nothing to do with him succeeding.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS
He's merely an immigrant success story, Ben.
BEN KISSEL
You are so wrong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He is.
BEN KISSEL
Another reason why he's hot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com.
BEN KISSEL
You guys are so wrong.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean the body, yeah. But the head, come on.
BEN KISSEL
It's Arnie Schwarzenegger.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the face!
MARCUS PARKS
It's the face. He has no lips.
BEN KISSEL
You know what? I'm not even-
MARCUS PARKS
He has no lips.
BEN KISSEL
I am not...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Austrian accent) You had me at hello!
BEN KISSEL
He's literally one of the most, he's considered to be one of the most sexy human beings that's ever-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Austrian accent) I'll have what she's having!
BEN KISSEL
It's just wow. It's just wow that you guys would even think for a second... Wow. Yeah, of course he has hot women.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Have you seen... Again, I'm not gay. I'm not gay!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He apologized for grabbing butts.
MARCUS PARKS
He did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He apologized for grabbing butss.
MARCUS PARKS
He did, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Recently.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Carl Eifler, he had made his reputation in a mission that seemed to be a forerunner for quite a few future CIA operations. See if you can tell a pattern here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
In 1943, Eifler had led 10,000 Burmese citizens in hit and run attacks against Japanese forces. At the end of it the Japanese lost 15,000 troops, while Eifler had lost only 85.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't see a lot of similarities there at all with what the CIA would later do.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I could be wrong but it seems like Eifler's mission was the template for using local forces to advance American interests, whether it be the CIA's early role in Vietnam as military advisers, the securing of corporate interests in South America for the United Fruit Company, flipping Iran to a theocracy, supporting Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, or any of the others in the vast menagerie of CIA goof-em-ups.
BEN KISSEL
Don't forget about Saddam.
MARCUS PARKS
Don't forget about Saddam.
BEN KISSEL
And then what is it? So '43, it started in '47 the CIA. So yeah, they're just about to start fucking a bunch of shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I'm gonna have to go and say and say no. Yeah, no, it's got nothing to do with it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's got nothing to do with it.
BEN KISSEL
They also did a whole bunch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, no.
BEN KISSEL
I covered this on Sirius, the Lavender Scare.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Where they lumped a bunch of gay people in with communists. There was a bunch, the CIA started off hot.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they did start off real hot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They really did.
BEN KISSEL
But I was thinking about it because of the pride tweet that they had the audacity to tweet out. The CIA. Don't worry, they're pride.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I was saying because it's very similar to the Bene Gesserit plan in Dune where they would go ahead and plant planets with archetypal religious stories that would work their way into their culture. And then later on they would go to complete those religious ideals in a way that was completely manufactured to gain control over the population.
BEN KISSEL
What does it have to do with Dune?
MARCUS PARKS
Something.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whatever.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, all right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm fighting the one man war against the state! It is me vs Florida vs my mother's garage!
BEN KISSEL
It's okay!
MARCUS PARKS
Well I think really what this is, it's a lot like as it went with rooting out the communists.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Many of the ways in which America fucked up massively throughout the 20th century and beyond, a lot of that shit had its roots in WWII because a lot of those methods worked at least once.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
And so they figured if it worked in WWII, it can work again. But the thing is that we keep hitting our fucking heads against the wall over and over again, trying the same shit that worked in the 40s and expecting it to still work today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's also against like the most pure black and white enemies we've ever had. So it's like all of the templates are incorrect.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They did all of this shit and it's like no, WWII was this one, what, seven year period that all of that shit was in play and then that's it. But then yes, we have just been... We are just in love with ourselves.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They're still sniffing our butts about WWII.
BEN KISSEL
Well hey, why not? We'll take it. We'll take it. I'll take a little butt sniffing on that. They say history-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We've lost four wars since! We lost four wars!
BEN KISSEL
But you know what? We've had four wars too. And isn't that important? Isn't that important how much money has been made?
MARCUS PARKS
And isn't it better to have had a war and lose it than to never have the war at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. You're right.
BEN KISSEL
But it does seem as if even if we lose, a lot of people seem to win.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But either way, we're talking about Carl Eifler here.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
After he was done leading the Burmese against the Japanese, he was sent back to America and that's where he met Wild Bill Donovan. And Wild Bill gave Eifler the assignment of kidnapping Werner Heisenberg. Now the plan put together for Eifler began with a ruse where Eifler would pose as an American customs agent traveling to Switzerland.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Once there, he would meet a team of commandos, break into Heisenberg's lab, knock Heisenberg out-
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Smuggle him to Switzerland, steal a plane, and fly back to England.
BEN KISSEL
Why does this sound exactly like the plan from Mallrats? That Silent Bob had to get the goddamn-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very similar.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But this was vetoed by Eifler because he also hated the British, refused to work with them.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, these British guys, I don't know what they did to make everybody so mad.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know what happened.
BEN KISSEL
I can see it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No one likes what they did during WWII. None of them are happy with it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They tried. Churchill was fine.
BEN KISSEL
No, Churchill was not fine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't think he was funny as that stupid movie made him out to be.
MARCUS PARKS
No. And they were quite resilient during the blitz and all that. They were very resilient. Dunkirk was-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Was huge!
MARCUS PARKS
It was huge. I mean it was a defeat to be sure, it was a huge defeat. A massive defeat. But-
BEN KISSEL
Churchill fucking every-
MARCUS PARKS
It was a good story.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sometimes it's better to have had a war and lost than never had one at all.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Than none. Remember the Alamo. Churchill literally at peak war, everyday, 3 PM, he had to take a nap.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did.
BEN KISSEL
Every fucking day.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he did. But that got him through.
BEN KISSEL
He didn't do anything! He's like Bill Gates just bought the IP. Churchill didn't do shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, he oversaw-
BEN KISSEL
He killed so many people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, you gotta smoke a cigar, you gotta have the bowler hat.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did a lot of stuff.
BEN KISSEL
The war was hard, I only had a nap for a half hour today.
MARCUS PARKS
And you know he started everyday with a scotch. Drank a lot of brandy. Brandy, that's what he drank.
BEN KISSEL
That's also more to my point, I can do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kissel, I think that you show lower the rage and see more of yourself in Winston Churchill and how you will one day be a true leader of men. Because that's all it takes.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. I can't wait for the knock on the door when you guys are both there and it's called something like an intervention because I've been channeling my inner Winston Churchill by getting hammered at 10 AM.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(slurred) Nah, I'm just Winston Churchill.
BEN KISSEL
I'm Winston Churchill.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(slurred) I'm just Winston Churchilling right now.
BEN KISSEL
Start sneaking red wine into my Diet Coke bottles.
MARCUS PARKS
Well instead of the British plan-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Your lips are just purple all day.
BEN KISSEL
Best thing is they have no idea I'm fucking hammered.
MARCUS PARKS
Well instead of the British plan, Eifler designed an even wackier plan-
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Where he would impersonate a German general. After parachuting in, he would find a German general's outfit, he'd impersonate a German general. Then on brass balls alone, he'd kidnap Heisenberg and bring Heisenberg back to America himself.
BEN KISSEL
So what Chris Farley and David Spade did-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Austrian accent) Come with me if you want to live!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Austrian accent) Come with me!
BEN KISSEL
With one of the sexiest men alive? I will go with you and we can come together.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Austrian accent) Come with me, little girl!
BEN KISSEL
Gross misinterpretation of Arnie's accent. Tommy Boy, David Spade, Chris Farley had to get on that plane. I've got a plan. And then they take the stewardess outfit there. Well you know it has nothing to do with this. It really has nothing to do with it.
MARCUS PARKS
Is there an old lady taking a nasty shit anywhere? Can you connect that to this story at all? Cause that was a big part.
BEN KISSEL
Well now you know I'm thinking prune brothers.
MARCUS PARKS
That was a big part of that scene, remember? When the old lady took a shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah the old lady taking a nasty shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good lord!
BEN KISSEL
Either way, it does seem like he's gonna be racist though. Because you're gonna go and you're gonna try and be a German, I would love to see what he does. Just puts sauerkraut in his beard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when Eifler asked what he should do with Heisenberg if the two of them were captured by Nazis, Donovan gave him full permission to shoot Heisenberg in the head.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
However it soon became clear that Eifler's plan was a bit far fetched, not to mention quite dark. So the operation was handed over to a group that included Moe Berg.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's the thing, you're going to this guy and his only concern is about like he's just excited to shoot somebody in the head.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because then he's sitting there like I can always shoot him. Like yeah, we know.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We know. And just being like listen, his head's right there. What if I strangle him? Sure, a lot of options. We prefer him safe. Well what if I drown him? If I can run a bath, tell him I'm gonna make him relax and then I kill him.
BEN KISSEL
You know it's good to have that as an option.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well heading up that team was a Swiss physicist named Paul Scherrer, codename Flute. Flute had been friends with Heisenberg. So he, Moe, and another scientist named Samuel Goudsmit formulated a plan to meet Heisenberg at a conference in Zurich.
BEN KISSEL
Did he whistle while he talked? Like guys (whistle) please don't (whistle) call me flute (whistle). I can't do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He could have had a huge fucking cock.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Ah but skinny and long.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. All right.
MARCUS PARKS
Well once they were at this conference in Zurich, they figured they could interrogate Heisenberg on the spot or kidnap him or maybe kill him. But what they really needed was to gain intelligence on the German nuclear program.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What if I take a little bomb and I put it in his food, it goes down to his stomach and explodes his belly?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Another good idea, another good idea. Let's try to keep him alive just for now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Austrian accent) AH! To the chopper!
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
That however, like almost all things Alsos, soon became unnecessary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. This whole thing is about unnecessary shit.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That just could have been cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. During the liberation of France, a treasure trove of documents were found at the Reich University at Strasbourg, which was located right across the border from Germany. This Reich University was one of three whose main purposes were to spread propaganda and indoctrinate students in Nazi ideology. If the Nazis had won, this would be where Mengele would have gone to teach after the war.
BEN KISSEL
See, it's just like CRT, what they're doing with our kids now. It's just like that. It's just like Nazi Germany trying to explain racial disparities of the past. It's just like Nazi Germany.
MARCUS PARKS
But so-called Aryan physics had been taught at the Reich University as well.
BEN KISSEL
What are Aryan physics? Is it different than other physics?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was dumb shit. It was literally dumb shit physics.
MARCUS PARKS
They did actually tell that, like they told Heisenberg that he wasn't allowed to teach the Jew physics of Albert Einstein, he had to teach Aryan physics instead.
BEN KISSEL
It's physics. It doesn't know your nationality.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Basically they were not allowed to because most of the Jewish population in the scientist community were the ones that created all the stuff about quantum mechanics. And that changed the face of physics. But the Nazis didn't like it because the Jewish person came up with it. So they were like no, we use Euclidean physics here.
MARCUS PARKS
That's all you can do. Physics, perpetual motion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Drop a feather.
MARCUS PARKS
But one of the professors at the Reich University was the son of the Nazi Secretary of State. His name was Carl von Weizsäcker.
BEN KISSEL
Oh mama.
MARCUS PARKS
And he regularly corresponded with Werner Heisenberg. Well soon into the search, also scientist Samuel Goudsmit found letters that contained Heisenberg's address and telephone number.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. Maybe don't put that on the letters.
MARCUS PARKS
But most importantly, the letters clearly stated that the Nazis hadn't made progress on their nuclear program since 1942. This is 1944.
BEN KISSEL
So this is like Brett Favre texting the governor of Mississippi being like do you think this is illegal? When they literally put it in like everything is fucked, we're totally failing. Anyway, here's a letter!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. That's exactly what fucking happened.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But the problem is that Groves was like the thing about these Nazis, all they do is 4D chess. This is a lie, lie, lie, lie.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you're like he's not incorrect.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This entire section of Manhattan Project is truly, not to be, they were correct to, but they overestimated the Nazis. There's a lot of people that really assumed that the Nazis were like just about to fuck up everybody at all times and that they were this like unstoppable machine, but they didn't really understand up to that point it's like no, actually mostly it was a lot of like incoherent psychopaths and dweebs that just fucked everything up again and again and again from the inside out.
MARCUS PARKS
But at the same time the Nazis were also highly dangerous and very scary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very.
MARCUS PARKS
Very.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And their shit was, I mean the blitzkrieg was fucking terrifying.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah dude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And they didn't know that it's just a bunch of fucking meth heads in tanks.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Which is very scary.
BEN KISSEL
Even scarier in some ways. Yeah. It's Sweet Tooth from Twisted Metal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Actually we kind of stole, that's not very American. That's how I view that now. Cause you just let meth go. You know what I mean? That would be a great army.
MARCUS PARKS
Well because General Groves dismissed the letters as disinformation, neither the production of the bomb nor the hunt for Heisenberg slowed down for a second. Oppenheimer meanwhile wasn't doing Groves' paranoia any favors. He started speculating. He started saying hey, you know now that I think about it, maybe the Germans aren't enriching uranium the same way that we're doing it. Maybe they don't need these big factories that we're having to use to build this stuff. Maybe now I'm really thinking about it, maybe this science is so new that this German atomic bomb could be built like anywhere.
BEN KISSEL
Like with witchcraft.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oppy, honestly I don't need this shit right now. Okay? I'm already just kinda, I'm like doing a bunch of shit at once.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah but if you like think about it-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm a General, not a specific. I don't know how to do it. I don't know what else, I don't know what you're saying. You know? You think too much< Oppy. I need you to just think this direction, I need you to just think in another way. Okay?
BEN KISSEL
But it is good to be scared. Keep you on your toes. Cause it's war.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) It's fit to be scared.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But tragically for the Alsos mission scientists at the Reich University, they stumbled upon an entirely different kind of Nazi research in their quest for atomic knowledge. See the Reich University had been the home of Heinrich Himmler's Ahnenerbe Institute, aka the legacy of ancestors. Der Ahnenerbe were the guys who-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh is that not the new add on to Elder Scrolls?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I think so. It's $100 30 minute extra piece of land.
MARCUS PARKS
Der Ahnenerbe were the guys who went on archaeological expeditions all over the world, these were the guys that went to Tibet, the ones who went to Ukraine. These were the guys-
BEN KISSEL
These are Nazis?
MARCUS PARKS
These are Nazis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're Nazis.
BEN KISSEL
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to be a Nazi in Tibet? Because there's all these people being like you don't have to do that. The symbol is Buddhist. It's a Buddhist symbol.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You don't exist. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you don't exist.
BEN KISSEL
So literally they did see a bunch of Nazi symbols but it probably was just Buddhists.
MARCUS PARKS
Well okay, you just kind of broke my brain in trying to explain that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well that's what they were trying to prove.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm trying to untie that knot and I'm not sure. Yeah. Can Henry help me out?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Basically the Nazis were kind of banking on that which is why they stole it in the first place. And then they went there to kind of backwards prove that everything that they said about being a Nazi was correct and that it was like this natural thing and it was this powerful force and it came from the universe itself. So they used that to retroactively, when you we were seeing the Swastika, most of Europe did not know that it was this ancient other symbol. So then they would go and use this school to cover all of these ancient things and say look, see, we've always been there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These guys are all ancient Nazis.
BEN KISSEL
Gotcha, gotcha.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they went and they measured like the nose and the faces and the bone structure of Tibetans to try to prove... Because that's the thing is that these guys were high on their own bullshit. They believed what they were teaching. All this shit was coming down from Himmler.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause they had to.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they absolutely had to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They literally fucking had to.
MARCUS PARKS
And they were therefore also involved heavily in Heinrich Himmler's occult studies. All of this shit was tied in with the Thule Society. But in their attempt to prove the racial superiority of Aryans, members of Himmler's Ahnenerbe mutilated and dissected human beings and even kept a collection of Jewish skeletons sourced from the Dachau concentration camp. Once the Alsos team opened the doors to the institute, the legacy of ancestors, they found severed human limbs left behind in mid dissection and they were faced with giant tanks full of alcohol containing floating human corpses.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is a scene from Wolfenstein.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it is.
BEN KISSEL
Wolfenstein and also House of 1000 Corpses, Doctor Satan. This is just nasty.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well most likely those corpses have been a result of the Polygal experiments. In these a victim will be given a tablet of a substance called Polygal which was made from beets and apples.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh nice! Ooh so it's organic. So it can be sold at Erewhon.
BEN KISSEL
It's not that bad at this point.
MARCUS PARKS
The victims would then be shot through the neck or the chest or they would have their limbs amputated without anesthetic while they were still alive. All to see what effect Polygal might have on blood coagulation.
BEN KISSEL
What effect did it have?
MARCUS PARKS
Nothing. It's beets and apples.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, why? This is Nazi physics?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) All I know is if you take 15 of them, your poopoo gets all crazy.
BEN KISSEL
I would imagine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) I never know. And sometimes I forget that he took it the night before.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) And then I was just like oh shit, I have cancer! I have cancer!
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) And then it's just like oh no, I was taking my beet pills.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Well these corpses could have also been a result of the Nazis' extreme pressure and temperature experiments which rivaled the experiments performed by Japan's Unit 731 in their savagery. This was the type of stuff to see like how high can pilots go? How much frost can they take?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
How much heat can they take? Yeah. Unit 731 type shit.
BEN KISSEL
It's the wet hands in the freezing cold temperatures being hit with the stick.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Ugh god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh those things are so nasty.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Some of the scientists who saw this shit, they had to go home.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I would go home.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Samuel Goudsmit had a mental breakdown and he just said like I gotta go home.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, it's good to go home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Meanwhile Moe Berg is going like the thing is, that's why you gotta switch pitchers.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because at the end, your first pitcher, you gotta have that relief pitcher.
BEN KISSEL
Moe, this has nothing to do with baseball, Moe. Nothing to do with baseball. Ugh goddamn it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, listen. A severed hand is kind of like a catcher's mitt. Let me tell you how you gotta do it. You gotta be careful.
MARCUS PARKS
Now right as Germany was engaging in their last ditch effort to drive back the Americans and push the British into the sea, that was the Battle of the Bulge, the Nazi media began suggesting that this was when they would finally use an atomic bomb which would win the war in an instant. This was actually a genius bit of propaganda because an atomic bomb would have been just about the only way for Germany to win the Battle of the Bulge. The most capable German soldiers were by this time either captured or dead, and the army was near the end of their resources and equipment capabilities. The German people knew all of this. The Manhattan Project however wasn't taking any chances.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
They were still on the Heisenberg case. And on December 18th, Heisenberg gave a lecture to 20 fellow physicists. In the audience was Moe Berg, who had concealed on his person a Beretta pistol.
BEN KISSEL
Ooh cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, he put it inside his giant extravagant wig. And then he had a lasso inside of his beautifully laced corset as he was dressed as the absolutely sensuous Velvalee Roberti, an Italian mistress of propaganda.
BEN KISSEL
Yes. In no way a former catcher for the White Sox.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ciao. I'm here to take you out on a date. I heard you like physics.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Moe's assignment was simply to just kill Heisenberg after the lecture.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
We're not gonna get him, we're not gonna kidnap him, just fucking kill him. But by the end of Heisenberg's two hour talk, Moe Berg just couldn't do it. He wasn't a murderer.
BEN KISSEL
Oh come on, Moe. This is why you never won the big World Series.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude, do you have any idea how many assassination attempts were stopped against Celine Dion? Once she hit It's All Coming Back To Me now? And they're sitting there and they're just being like I can't kill this incredible woman.
BEN KISSEL
Well I just really hope that Celine is doing well. She has a severe illness.
MARCUS PARKS
She does. Her bones are calcifying.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It sounds like a horrific, horrific disease.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I chose a random name.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I literally just, it just came from the ether. I forgot she's got-
BEN KISSEL
She has a real illness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know that's she's got like frozen syndrome. Yeah. No, I know. I know this, I'm sorry.
BEN KISSEL
Is it locked in? I think she has like locked in or something?
MARCUS PARKS
It's slowly becoming locked in.
BEN KISSEL
God. I wouldn't make jokes about her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's locked out syndrome. It's locked out syndrome.
MARCUS PARKS
Absolutely. I mean it's in bad taste beyond.
BEN KISSEL
I think it's horrible. It's almost like someone from Florida would say that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right now they're looking for a proper locksmith because she has locked out syndrome which means she can't get back into her own brain.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And she's just watching it from the side. It's really very sad. I should have chose Michael Bublé.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Michael Bublé.
MARCUS PARKS
Hot down there in Florida, huh?
BEN KISSEL
Really hot down there. Michael Bublé.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I must sleep. I am on a bed. My parents got a futon on discount and it's slant. I'm sleeping at a 25-30 degree slant like I am in one of those air prisons.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
On the side of a mountain.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right? I woke up pooled at the end of my own bed.
BEN KISSEL
Well that's good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm sore, i saw a bunch of pictures of myself at 300 lbs.
BEN KISSEL
Right, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just need to move forward today.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, absolutely. You're having a rough go of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I gotta get out of here.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Moe couldn't bring himself to kill Heisenberg.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
So he took a less violent route. Flute hosted a dinner party in Heisenberg's honor and that was where a much simpler plan was enacted.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
They were gonna get him drunk and see if they could get him talk about the atomic bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's so much nicer than killing him. It's like so much nicer.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Like what if we could kill him-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's literally Moe Berg is sitting there, Moe Berg is literally like all right, I'll put a bullet in his brain or we could have a party.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Feed him a bunch, get him drunk.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I get too? I get some?
BEN KISSEL
Heisenberg is like that second idea is fun.
MARCUS PARKS
A dinner party. But Heisenberg was more interested in talking about Nazis and how they related to his beloved Germany.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whatever. Yeah, he honestly pontificated again about why he's innocent.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. After his tongue was loosened by wine, Heisenberg said that (German accent) the good people of Germany were being demonized. The Nazis, they were the last bulwark between civilized Europe and this coming red horde. And besides, the Nazis hadn't really done that bad stuff to the Jews.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Really nothing more civilized than attempting to take out an entire continent. That is so civilized.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, he's a full apologist.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Finally though after all that blustering, Heisenberg admitted that Germany was gonna lose the war. However he still said quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) "But it would have been so good if we had won."
BEN KISSEL
That's it?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
But it would have been good if we would have won?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's it.
BEN KISSEL
Everyone's dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And then you're saying it would have been good if we would have won.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause then he'd be on the winning side. Everything, he's the Sarah Jessica Parker of the Nazi party. Every single thing is about Heisenberg.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's all about him and what he's dealing with at all times.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And Hitler is like his Mr. Big. And are they gonna get back together or aren't they?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know. I actually kinda feel like he might be closer to a Kim Cattrall.
BEN KISSEL
Oh sexy.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Heisenberg's thing was that he loved Germany.
BEN KISSEL
Apparently.
MARCUS PARKS
He loved Germany so much that he figured, he's like (German accent) yeah, we'll let the Nazis have a good time and then they'll kind of tire themselves out and then after that Germany will get back to normal. But then Germany will be on top of the world which is what we should have been doing in the first place.
BEN KISSEL
This is like if you go on a date and they just start talking about Andrew Tate. It's like oh my god, just shut the fuck up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like I love this carousel. Yeah, my mom's getting raped on it but I love the carousel. Like I just love the horses and I love the poles.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Again, taking aggression out on his mother.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again, it was just a random relationship that I assume.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is not written. I don't follow a script.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is just me making shit up in a room in Florida.
BEN KISSEL
Having a slow meltdown.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Slow? A slow meltdown? It feels like a very regular melt.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like a Zicam under the tongue.
BEN KISSEL
A lot going on on this episode.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in the end, Heisenberg still kept his wits about him to keep quiet about the bomb.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
And when Berg reached deep down once again, they said if you can't get him to talk at the party, you're gonna have to kill him. He still couldn't do it.
BEN KISSEL
Moe! This is the one... Man, he had a chance. But he has a chance to get one. He can actually get a righteous murder. Not easy to get one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He has soft skills. He has soft skills. He's a talker. He's charismatic. He's a spy, not an assassin. And I really do think that there's an inherent difference.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because Eifler was the assassin. That dude has been thinking about different ways to kill this guy and fuck the hotel maid all day. Like he's ready to go.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
Now after the Allies won the Battle of the Bulge, it was all but over for the Nazis. But behind the troops overrunning Germany was Boris Pash, who was still on the lookout for those 970 tons of missing uranium.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
See since the Nazis were caput, Boris' mission was no longer about preventing the Germans from building the bomb. Rather it was about keeping the Russians from finding the uranium.
BEN KISSEL
Yes. How quick the friend turns to an enemy.
MARCUS PARKS
Well by this time Germany had already been split up into the four zones controlled by the Allies and it was discovered that the uranium was in the Soviet controlled zone. Pash had therefore made it his own personal crusade to secure the uranium for America to keep it out of the hands of the godless communists.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. And you know it's American uranium, they put a little flag on it and they listened to some good old fashioned Carter Sisters.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the higher ups soon agreed and said to hell with the Russians. So in less than a week, Pash organized 260 vehicles packed with men who all worked together to steal 970 tons of uranium right out from under the Soviets' noses.
BEN KISSEL
Where do you put it? Do they have JNCOs? How do you get all that out?
MARCUS PARKS
They loaded it up into 960 trucks.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Because it's Germany in 1944, it's fucking chaos everywhere.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now this of course made the Soviets furious because they'd been planning on using that uranium ore for their own nuclear program.
BEN KISSEL
Oh guys, come on! That was for our nuclear program.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And while it would be an oversimplification to say that Boris Pash started the Cold War, he does have the dubious distinction of being one of the men who fired the first symbolic shots.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was happy to contribute.
MARCUS PARKS
Now even though Alsos was ultimately unneeded when it came to the Manhattan Project because Germany had no chance of making a bomb, Moe, Boris, and the rest of the crew nevertheless ended up serving an important function. It was pretty much in the same ballpark as the mission to steal the uranium. See when the war was nearing its end, Alsos had already been on the hunt for members of Germany's Uranium Club. So when the dust began to settle, the Americans were perfectly positioned to scoop up as many nuclear physicists as they could find.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just imagine it's like you know those things where you have to catch all the dollar bills?
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When they're shooting up everywhere. But it's just like screaming Germans.
BEN KISSEL
But you know what you do there? You would let the dollar bills come to you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Press yourself against the wall, allow it to amass around you.
BEN KISSEL
Yes. Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now this wasn't necessary to the Manhattan Project because as opposed to our space program, the Nazis had absolutely nothing to offer us in terms of atomic knowledge. At this point Oppenheimer is right on the cusp of building a working prototype.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I remember yada, yada, yada, they've been doing a lot of science.
BEN KISSEL
Weren't the Germans still trying to like convert shit into gold?
MARCUS PARKS
Alchemy?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Wasn't Hitler into alchemy?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well they were building the big, they had the big gun.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I forget. The V-3. So they had that giant like what was supposed to be this meters long gun that shot 9 ft bullets.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And apparently Hitler, what they would talk about is that he loved giant works.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, it was a big mistake.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So like any time you told him that the most concrete to have ever been poured in Eastern Europe, it's like he loved to hear that. So that's where he was focusing a lot of his energy because he said he had a dream first, he had a dream that the V-2 program wouldn't work. And so he halted everything because he had this dream. And Albert Speer had to come and convince Hitler, he was the quote unquote "reasonable" Nazi that would say like hey, we have to think about all of these things because it's kind of important. I know your dreams are great Adolf, we love them.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everybody loves them here. But that's where they were pouring all of their resources in was this thing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they we trying to... One program they had was to attach a bomb to a tiny plane that attached to a big plane so they could fly it across the Atlantic to drop another plane to bomb New York. Because he was obsessed with bombing New York.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He really wanted to bomb New York.
BEN KISSEL
We got a big plane to drop a little plane that has a big bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Makes all the sense in the world.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the point of bringing the Uranium Club members to our side was that we didn't know what they knew. And if we kept these Nazis on ice, it would prevent them from being captured by the Soviets. This mission came to be known as Operation Big. At the same time though, General Groves and the rest were starting to realize that those letters from Heisenberg that were found at the Reich University, those were genuine. When Alsos caught up to Uranium Club member Walther Bothe, he proudly showed off the cyclotron that he'd just gotten running by war's end.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See?
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's just like wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right on time, pal. Also Operation Big, 13 year old makes a wish on a boardwalk, becomes a man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I was waiting.
BEN KISSEL
And then is technically raped by a woman.
MARCUS PARKS
Did she sleep with him or did he just feel her up?
BEN KISSEL
She had sex with him and she thought that his boyish character was charming. He was a boy indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
He was indeed a boy.
BEN KISSEL
I'd be fucking pissed off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When you really take the movie apart, it really is very sad.
BEN KISSEL
Also there's another movie, 13 going on 30. There's something wrong with Hollywood.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. So that's weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hollyweird.
BEN KISSEL
They seem to love the 13 but like pretend they're older.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is back in the day.
MARCUS PARKS
This is back in the day.
BEN KISSEL
It was like 10 years... No. Anyway, well go on.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean I would say it's more to do with wanting to play to the adolescent fantasies of the audience, that a 13 year old would like to see what if I was big and got to sleep with that woman instead of it being an indictment on their own personal fantasies of being an older woman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If I was 13-
MARCUS PARKS
Because there weren't really any older women that were in charge in Hollywood.
BEN KISSEL
As a 13 year old who was big, it's fucking a nightmare. So you're just supposed to be an adult but then you're not.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Samuel Goudsmit, when he was shown Walther Bothe's cyclotron, he could barely stifle a giggle because what Bothe had built was an after-school science project compared to the cyclotrons that had been developed back in America.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Even so though, the top priority was to track down Heisenberg's so-called uranium machine and ultimately Heisenberg himself, still in the wind. Now after the Battle of the Bulge, Heisenberg's military exemption was revoked. Almost everyone left alive in Germany following the battle were drafted into the Volkssturm, the People's Militia. This is just old men, women, little kids. They were all expected to die for Hitler in a symbolic mass suicide. Throw yourself-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) About that though... How mass? How big?
BEN KISSEL
Exactly.
MARCUS PARKS
Heisenberg of course had no interest in doing such a thing. So he teamed up with his buddy Carl von Weizsäcker to continue atomic research on his own in the middle of a war zone. Riding their bicycles through Germany and leaping to the side of the road to avoid bombs, Heisenberg and von Weizsäcker secured some heavy water. Then they biked the heavy water back to Heisenberg's secret lab that was in a cave near the village of Haigerloch.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
There Heisenberg performed one last nuclear experiment but it still fell short. Although this was the furthest the Nazi atomic bomb project ever got, Heisenberg never achieved a fully self-sustaining chain reaction. In fact, he had never even built anything as good as what the American team had built in Chicago three years earlier. The pile.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
However I did just realize something. This is what he accomplished when he was left alone for two months. Two months.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He's left alone in a cave and this is what he accomplishes.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Imagine if he wasn't in the middle of a fucking war zone. Imagine if he hadn't been forced to go to Nazi dinner parties and rallies and all that other bullshit and they would have just left him alone like the Americans did with Oppenheimer, put him in the desert and let him do his fucking thing.
BEN KISSEL
Sounds like the origin of Tony Stark in Iron Man. By the movie calculation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I do think that it shows one of the true inherent flaws that are why in the end fascism is a non sustainable government.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because when you're in that sort of ideologue center, you can't get... Like yes, a lot of people who are quote unquote "pro fascist" believe it's because "oh they make simple decisions and then things can get done" quote unquote. But obviously they fucking don't.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they're all so in love with themselves that they can't get anything fucking done.
MARCUS PARKS
They just end up with massive blocks of concrete.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. That's all they had.
MARCUS PARKS
That's what the legacy of the Third Reich was in Germany.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And pain. And you notice is all the stuff that they did on a mass scale was just pain.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is actually an extremely, we talk about destroying things is much easier than creating something.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It doesn't take that much cleverness to create a place that's a concentrated place of pain. This is something else. And I just think Heisenberg's such a bitch.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he is a bitch. He absolutely is.
BEN KISSEL
Bold statements about that Nazi.
MARCUS PARKS
He's a bitch but that does not mean he's any less brilliant unfortunately.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
But when it became obvious-
BEN KISSEL
You know what though? I'm actually gonna say it does make him slightly less brilliant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It does. I think his choices show-
MARCUS PARKS
I mean as a person-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Your personal choices show.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
As a person it does make him-
BEN KISSEL
On the whole, I'm talking about the whole pie.
MARCUS PARKS
Ii the whole pie. Okay, yeah. So he's less emotionally intelligent because he's a narcissist and half a sociopath.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
But when it comes to pure scientific brilliance, he's one of the smartest men of the 20th century.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he would have where the good science was and he would have went with all the other scientists who ran away. That's my other thing. A true good scientist would also see oh, no good science is being done here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah. Well he was a bad person, yeah. But he wanted to eat his cake and have it too. RIP Ted Kaczynski.
BEN KISSEL
His yellowcake.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God. Another hero gone. Who do we look to?
MARCUS PARKS
But when it became obvious that all was truly lost and that either the Americans or the Soviets were on their way, Heisenberg and his team hid their assets and abandoned the cave lab. Boris Pash soon arrived and blew it up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Then Pash began searching the nearby village for Uranium Club scientists. There he found Otto Hahn with his bags packed. Yeah, he's just ready to go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hello!
BEN KISSEL
Gotta go! Hello! Hi!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Blue jean! Love the blue jean, baseball!
MARCUS PARKS
Hahn directed Pash to 3000 lbs of heavy water that Heisenberg had hidden in a mill just in case, they had fucking cut up two tons of uranium into cubes and hidden and buried them in a field. And as far as their technical reports went, Heisenberg had hidden them in an active septic tank. This right here is one of the greatest quirks of history. When the tank was opened, the Alsos team found pretty much the entire archive of the Nazi atomic bomb project in what amounted to a big bucket of shit.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, that is ironic indeed. Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's so deeply symbolic. It so crazy.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god. I'm surprised he didn't just dip his balls in it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If I knew it was that kind of party, I'd stick my dick in the mashed potatoes.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. The State, a successful television show briefly.
MARCUS PARKS
Heisenberg meanwhile was surviving in the chaos... Yes, I remember The State.
BEN KISSEL
You remember The State.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm gonna dip my balls in it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll dip my balls in it!
MARCUS PARKS
Ken Marino, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I mean they might as well because nothing they were doing was working.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well Heisenberg meanwhile was surviving in the chaos of Germany only by the grace of god and through bribery. Since he had hadn't reported for duty-
BEN KISSEL
Mostly the bribery, let's be honest. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Mostly the bribery. Since he hadn't reported for duty in the Volkssturm, He was technically supposed to be executed on the spot for desertion.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And indeed an SS officer almost killed him for just that. But he was only stopped when Heisenberg bribed him with a carton of Pall Mall cigarettes.
BEN KISSEL
That's it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's all it takes.
BEN KISSEL
His life was worth a carton of Pall Malls.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Soon after, Heisenberg arrived at his dilapidated family cabin in the Black Forest. That's where he found his furious wife.
BEN KISSEL
Oh she was mad at him?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
She was freezing, starving, and suffering from scarlet fever along with their six children.
BEN KISSEL
Well go have fun with the talking bears and the coconut trees.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not real! It's not real! She was fed a lie!
BEN KISSEL
Oh no, it is a magical forest. It really is magical and deeply haunted, deeply haunted.
MARCUS PARKS
But when Hitler committed suicide on May 1st, Henry's birthday-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We got him!
BEN KISSEL
Congratulations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Same thing with Osama bin Laden! Osama bin Laden we also got on my birthday.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. Look at you.
MARCUS PARKS
Werner and his wife broke out a bottle of wine and celebrated. It was all over. Because remember the Nazis, he didn't like the Nazis, he just loved Germany.
BEN KISSEL
Also Oppenheimer, as I said, July 21st, my birthday. Is your birthday involved in this story?
MARCUS PARKS
You know what, I don't think so.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't think so. I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're out!
MARCUS PARKS
I'm out. Okay.
BEN KISSEL
Two out of three ain't bad.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's not bad at all. Well they were clinging to the hope that all Germans clung to at this point in history. Pretty much let's hope to god the Americans find us before the Soviets do.
BEN KISSEL
I thought you were gonna say-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or he knew for a fact that Hitler had lived and moved his way to South America and he knew that eventually he would come back to create the Ninth Reich and that once he hit 90 and he had robot legs, he would be able to really orchestrate a new thing there.
BEN KISSEL
There does have to be somebody being like-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Synth music.
BEN KISSEL
There does have to be someone who's just like what if they forget?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Truly.
BEN KISSEL
Like what if we just show up for work like we didn't quit?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
You know, actually in Germany, I've been doing a lot of research on it lately and a lot of people in Germany did just try to forget.
BEN KISSEL
You have to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Just try to move on.
MARCUS PARKS
They wouldn't talk about it. That's why shit got real weird in Germany in the 60s because their kids were like hey, so what were you doing between 1933 and 1944? And most of them were like-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, the kids came.
MARCUS PARKS
And they almost universally everyone would say you weren't there, you don't know what it was like, I don't wanna talk about it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. I believe that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as it went, Boris Pash was indeed on his way. The day after Hitler died, Pash arrived after following a rumor only to find that Werner had just left to go visit his mother. Heisenberg's wife called him home and Pash made arrangements to have Heisenberg and his family taken into American custody. After that, Pash soon collected the remaining Nazi physicists, which in the end became the lasting legacy of Alsos. They were successful in keeping every single member of the Uranium Club out of Soviet hands.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And even though the Nazis were far behind in their atomic research, a mind like Heisenberg's could have easily brought the Russians up to speed if he'd had access to the intelligence that was being funneled out of Los Alamos by Soviet spies. Heisenberg however was still convinced that his experiment in atomic research was as far as anyone had gotten.
BEN KISSEL
He's so stupid.
MARCUS PARKS
As far as he was concerned, he was on the verge of a massive breakthrough. He was therefore excited to continue his work with the Americans. And as he put it, he was gonna (German accent) catch up the world on all this nuclear reactor business.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, thank you so much.
MARCUS PARKS
It was only when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima four months later that all the members of the Uranium Club realized just how far behind they'd been.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And it's with the testing and dropping of that bomb that we'll continue our series on the Manhattan Project.
BEN KISSEL
All right. Holy hell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Long strange trip it's been. And next week we're finally gonna get to all that melting you guys have been asking for.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, what's it called? Frothing?
MARCUS PARKS
Sloughing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sloughing.
BEN KISSEL
Sloughing, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sloughing.
MARCUS PARKS
Well to be fair, sloughing won't come until episode five.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Next episode will be mostly vaporizing.
BEN KISSEL
Oh vaporizing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Vaporizing. Getting super hot. You're gonna love it. Again, there's one whole book that says it didn't happen. And I don't know how.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why they think of this. So I'm gonna go through this whole thing. It's very strange but it's... God, man. We're gonna get into it. This is when it gets real grizzly.
BEN KISSEL
You know what, I'm putting my conspiracy hat on here. Not when it comes to this because it definitely happened. But moon landing, 50/50.
MARCUS PARKS
50/50. Okay.
BEN KISSEL
I'm going 50/50 on the moon landing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh great. This is great. We have done so much work in the last four weeks that you have literally just torn apart with one statement with Marcus sitting next to you on camera.
BEN KISSEL
No, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was one statement to literally drag all of the hours-
BEN KISSEL
Marcus agrees with me.
MARCUS PARKS
No, I don't agree.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hours of research.
MARCUS PARKS
No, I don't agree with you but I'll meet you halfway. And you know how I'm gonna do that?
BEN KISSEL
50/50.
MARCUS PARKS
50/50. I'll meet you halfway. We did land on the moon but the cameras-
BEN KISSEL
Lost the footage.
MARCUS PARKS
We lost the footage and so we had to recreate it.
BEN KISSEL
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
How's about that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not real!
BEN KISSEL
Buddy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's been debunked!
BEN KISSEL
Simply don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't believe I'm here.
BEN KISSEL
We simply don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, we do know. We do know.
MARCUS PARKS
We really don't know.
BEN KISSEL
Because we simply don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you go up to Buzz Aldrin and you say that to him, he will sock you. He will sock you right in your-
BEN KISSEL
I watched a clip of Buzz saying it didn't happen.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And that was on Instagram. And so that's like a mail service.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh. Oh actually I didn't know that it was on Instagram.
MARCUS PARKS
My favorite small epilogue from this episode is that when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Otto Hahn called Heisenberg a second rater. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nice!
BEN KISSEL
The highest insult you can give.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay everyone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In Germany.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh and also Moe Berg went on to live, after the war he just stayed in Europe and kept drawing a paycheck from the OSS saying like yeah, you know, I'm getting to the Russians.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep!
MARCUS PARKS
And he just fucking galavanted around Europe for a few years and then hired an architect to argue with the CIA until he died in his bed a happy man. And his last words were how did the Mets do today?
BEN KISSEL
Oh I love that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah! That awesome.
BEN KISSEL
And it's unfortunate they lost.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And Boris Pash just became an asshole for the rest of his life.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
He was just in the CIA.
BEN KISSEL
I believe that. All right everyone. Well thank you so much for listening. Hope you're doing well. And do we have anything that we want to talk about?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh god, I don't know.
BEN KISSEL
Let's not worry about it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I can't.
BEN KISSEL
Let's let these people go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No more here.
BEN KISSEL
You are all let free.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I gotta get outta here.
BEN KISSEL
All right. Henry's gotta go take care of his mother. Hail yourselves, everyone!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan!
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein!
BEN KISSEL
Megustalations. Don't make a bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And if you've got a minute, don't make a bomb. If you've got a minute, hail me. Come on.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Try it on your way to the store.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
On your way to the store. Just think about it, just bless up. Cause you never know.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a good idea. Hailing seems like a strange thing to do after this episode.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That's heiling.
BEN KISSEL
Oh that's heiling.
MARCUS PARKS
You're thinking of heiling.
BEN KISSEL
That's a good point.
MARCUS PARKS
That's an entirely different thing.
BEN KISSEL
Good point, good point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Goodbye everybody!
MARCUS PARKS
Bye!