Riga

Lange was a 31-year-old lawyer and SS officer commanding security police operations in Latvia.

On January 19, the day before Wannsee, He commanded the murder of approximately 900 Jews outside of Riga.

Then he flew to Berlin and attended the meeting the following day.

And that's perhaps all we need to know about the atmosphere surrounding Wannsee.

The question was increasingly not how to kill people, but how to hide the evidence that they had already been killed.

Lange, still only 34, but with an astonishing level of brutality on his record, supported Sonderaktion 1005, the vast Nazi attempt to erase traces of mass murder.

Mass graves around Riga were opened.

The decomposing bodies of people killed years earlier were dragged back out, and they were stacked and burned.

you.

Happy to see you here in Riga.

Thank

you.

We next caught up with them in episode four of our own podcast in February of 2024, while we were in Panama and they were in Costa Rica doing some boots on the ground exploring.

Then in season two, episode 34 in September of 2024, while we were in Riga, Latvia, we caught up with Julie, who was enjoying Serbia from horseback.

Most recently, in episode 45, in March of 2025, Roy and Julie talked with us about their decision to buy a home near the Pacific Beach in Pedasi, Panama, much to their surprise.

Today, they're joining us from their new home in Panama, and we're thrilled not only to be catching up with them again, and maybe to be able to help out with an event that occurred not long after their move.

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R I X is Riga.

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Now let's go look up Buenos Aires to Riga is 12,750.

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Yeah.

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R I X is Riga.

Yep.

That's working.

Now let's go look up Buenos Aires to Riga is 12,750.

Yep.

That's working.

Yeah.

I wasn't attending any conferences.

And it was only in 2019 when I went to the Honey Badger in Riga, my first Bitcoin conference, actually.

I started to delve a bit deeper into the real potential of Bitcoin and starting to comparing it to real estate, because at the time I did two things.

I always compared Bitcoin to what I knew about fiat money, which was based on the fact that we use fiat money mostly to buy goods and services because it has lost the store of value function and that function moved into other asset classes like real estate, also into the equity markets, also into the art market.

In a sector where Jewish-owned publishing houses offered fierce competition, as these were systematically excluded from the market, politically reliable publishers like Bertseman increasingly gained a dominant civilian market position, and their profits surged from 284,000 Reichsmarks in 1938 to 3.2 million in 1941, which is 11 times more in just three years.

As expected, these profits also came from the reduction of costs by employing Jewish forced laborers in printing workshops in camps located in Lithuania and Latvia, especially from the Riga ghetto.

Although never joining the Nazi Party, Heinrich Monn always classified as a sponsoring member of the SS, which favored his publishing house for most of the war.

But in 1944, after authorities discovered that the company was illegally holding stockpiles of paper during a shortage period, it ended up being shut down by the Gestapo.

Well, I would say certainly not a unique American Jewish story, but it's my story.

My parents, children of immigrants, my parents born in America, all of my grandparents came from Eastern Europe, Kiev and Riga.

And it is part of a immigration culture that the second generation, my parents, they want to be American.

They want to assimilate.