EP291: Leopold and Loeb - Nein Übermenschen (p2 of 2)

Crimes and Consequences

True Crime, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.6 • 869 Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2026

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1924, two wealthy, brilliant University of Chicago students set out to commit what they believed would be the perfect crime.Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb believed themselves intellectually superior and beyond ordinary moral restraint. Inspired (and deeply misreading) the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, they convinced themselves that rules applied to other people.It became the first true Trial of the Century. A national referendum on free will, punishment, privilege, youth, psychology, and whether the state should answer killing with killing.Were Leopold and Loeb supermen?Or were they privileged, deluded young men who mistook intelligence for immunity?🎙️ Join us as we dismantle the myth.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode may contain content of a graphic nature, including descriptions of physical and sexual violence against adults, children, and animals.
0:21.4	Listener discretion is advised.
0:33.7	Hi, I'm Shannon.
0:35.9	Hi, I'm Tanya.
0:37.0	And we are Crimes and Consequences, a hardcore true crime podcast.
0:44.2	The body was discovered.
0:47.2	The perfect crime had not even survived 24 hours.
0:52.1	How ridiculous, girl.
0:53.4	I know. I mean, clowns. Yeah. Violence ridiculous, girl. I know.
0:54.8	I mean, clowns.
0:56.2	Yeah.
0:57.1	Violence unmasked.
0:58.8	Stripped of philosophy, stripped of rhetoric,
1:01.6	stripped of post hoc explanation.
1:04.5	The murder looks like this.
1:06.4	A child trusted a familiar face.
1:09.3	A tool was used.
1:14.5	A body was hidden badly. Evidence was left behind.
1:22.9	No brilliance. No inevitability. No destiny. Just violence. mundane, clumsy, and final.
1:30.7	This is where every abstraction dies. There's no Nietzsche in the backseat, no Superman at the culvert, no intellectual experiment in the fire. Only a 14-year-old boy killed because two young men
1:38.7	believed intelligence excused them from seeing him as human. The collapse.
1:45.2	Glasses and the hand of God.
	...

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