Waffen-SS

I got to find out what's going on here.

there's uh rats i should have written this down there there's a right-wing group and their name is actually a play on waffen ss oh it's assas it's assas like assas or something like that and it's the name of a i think it's a political science department a student union at one of the local paris universities that's associated with the right wing and so they call themselves the waffen assas like pun like plan words and apparently there was you know they were um raiding or attacking some of the left student unions at this street level of violence.

Apparently, and again, I need to look into this, in one of the provincial cities during the curfew, the street Nazis, you know what I mean? local organizations of right-wingers were marching through the streets with like their french flag with the fascis in the middle of it the problem with all of this is like you just don't know what's real and what isn't anymore and so you see these things come across your feed or your news sites and etc and without i i can't cite these things as having happened without verifying you know that it's actually true these days um one thing i think that just for context for the your listeners for the character of the French students themselves, which is, I mentioned my, when I came to France permanently was 10 years ago.

No, actually, when I came to Europe permanently 10 years ago.

His early research focused on supposedly inherited physical traits, a field tangled with eugenics and theories ranking human beings by race.

Mengele joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the SS in 1938.

This was not a harmless scientist suddenly hypnotized by one evil assignment.

He pursued a career inside a system that treated prejudice as scholarship, exclusion as policy, and human worth as something officials imagined they could measure with calipers and family charts.

Nazi racial hygiene claimed Germany could improve its population by encouraging births among those labeled desirable and eliminating lives labeled undesirable.

The clinical vocabulary concealed forced sterilization, persecution, and murder.

Mengele later served as a Waffen-SS medical officer on the Eastern Front, where he was decorated and wounded.

After becoming unfit for combat, he returned to research before receiving an Auschwitz assignment in May 1943. apparently an opportunity he wanted rather than a punishment, he reluctantly accepted.

But anyway...

McGraw ended up being the person that recommended James Brady to this program, probably to get him out of the rougher conditions of the camp, but then probably didn't anticipate that they were going to be recruiting from there into the Waffen-SS, so I doubt he could plan that far ahead.

But eventually McGraw was sort of exposed in all this subterfuge, and he was sent to Dachau, and he was tortured until he was liberated at the end of the war.

And he kind of, he has a very sad ending because he returned to Ireland but he was like physically and psychologically damaged to such a degree that he had a nervous breakdown and had to quit his day job at the Theatre Royal.