Hello everybody, I am Robert Evans and this is Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we take you through all of the strange things you didn't know about the very worst people in all of history.

With me today is Jack O'Brien, my once in future boss. We worked together at Cracked for like more than a decade.

Yeah, very long time. Yeah, I am thrilled to be here, thrilled to be launching a podcast with the Robert Evans who you know started the personal experience section at Cracked wrote some of our most popular articles.

And yeah, one of the things you were always good at is finding out interesting information about awful, awful people.

Yeah, I think the genesis of this might have come after the revolution in Ukraine where that quasi dictator Unicavitch got kicked out and he did this press conference afterwards where he was like shouting at how angry he was and he tried to break a pencil.

I like emphasize a point, but he had a pin in his hands and it just bent. And so there's just like 20 seconds of this dictator trying to break a pen and failing. And that's the stuff I want to like the sad like Michael Scott from the office moments and the lives of all these like nightmarish dictators who who started wars and you know ruined hundreds of thousands of millions of lives.

They're all such like weird sad people when you really get right down to them. Right. Yeah, one of our most popular articles at Cracked was you reading every single edition of the ISIS like magazine that was almost like a 17 for ISIS kids. Yeah, yeah, it's like their people. Yeah, it's always like these monsters and their monstrous regimes are always like there's this beautiful layer of the absurd that if you can get past the the nightmarish human suffering like there's a lot to just gogal at. Yeah, it's amazing.

So in addition to being a really funny dude, Robert is also a really great journalist, the personal experience section of the Cracked site was where he would interview people with just really crazy or harrowing or interesting life experiences. And then he would put together these articles that were, you know, funny, but really interesting accounts that you've never heard before of like what it's like to be on heroin, what it's like to be on meth. Right. A lot of drugs. Mostly that.

Yeah, but you know all sorts of interesting stories, things that truck drivers see out on the highway, which included a lot of people having sex apparently. Yeah.

But yeah, so this was one of the ideas when we decided that you were allowed to work with me again. This was I think the first idea you pitched and I got super excited right away.

Yeah, I just I love talking about terrible people. You get a deeper understanding of the world when you understand these guys monsters like Saddam Hussein and Assalam and Laden and good old fashioned Hitler, Nikolai Chesku, like all these dictators.

Right. But they're also just like like we're going to be talking about later in the in the series. We're going to be talking about like Hitler's young adult fiction novels that he based his plans for World War II on. Right.

And we'll be talking about like Assam bin Laden's love of Hollywood movies and how he'd use it to jazz up his fighters before like going into battle.

Like all these ridiculous stories that add like so much color to these people's lives and help explain like why they did the shit they did. Right.

But also you know puncture the myth like we mythologize and make these people into just these huge icons of you know their Darth Vader type people and actually they have bowel problems as we'll talk about today.

Yeah, that's what we're getting into today. It all Hitler warlord monster histories greatest evil and also a ridiculous farting hipster in his 20s and 30s.

Yeah. So you're giving them a little taste of what they would get in a normal episode. Just a quick quick in and out. Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. I think a lot of people feel like they they know the fewer pretty well. Right. You've seen a lot of Hitler and movies and TV shows and usually either this like psychopathic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's either like the psychopathic powerful warlord of the broken trembling wreck of a person in downfall. And those are both accurate to certain periods. But you never seen nerdy hipster Hitler.

Right. No. In fiction. Sure do not. So when Hitler was a teenager and a young adult his best friend was a violinist named August Kubicek. Now after the war Kubicek wrote a book about Hitler called the young Hitler I knew. And it's weird because Hitler and Kubicek had a very weird relationship.

In the book Kubicek writes about a time when Hitler went with him to the funeral for Kubicek's violin teacher which quote rather surprise me as he did not know professor to sour at all when I expressed my surprise he said I can't bear it that you should mix with other young people and talk to them. So that's the kind of friend young.

He's a young jealous little showing up but strangers funeral so his friend doesn't talk to anyone else. So one night in 1905 Kubicek and Hitler on a walk and Hitler's you know ranting about Hitler stuff which he apparently did from the time he was like 15 on up.

Oh that's adorable. Yeah. Just a smaller version of himself. Yeah. But just always rant. He's always been yelling about stuff. And so during this walk they see a quote slim blonde girl and Hitler grabs his friend's arm.

And says you must know I'm in love with her. Now, God according to Kubicek's book Hitler remained obsessed with this girl for like four straight years. He never talked to her. He never told her how he felt. He never flirted with her. But he forced his best friend to spy on her and report back to him for years.

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