Hitler's Jewish Soldiers Author Dr. Brian Rigg

DR Bryan Rigg Interview

[00:00:00] Jeff Haas: [00:00:00] Hello listeners, a spoiler, our country today on the show, we had the fantastic Dr. Brian rigs. How’s it going, sir?

[00:00:07] Dr. Brian Rigg: [00:00:07] And I’m doing well. Thank you, Jeff. As I mentioned

[00:00:11] Jeff Haas: [00:00:11] to you, I’m off, I’m off the audio. I’m a big fan of your work. Hitler’s drew soldiers. I think it was a fascinating topic. And I was wondering as someone who is a greatest story and a great and an author, have you always loved history?

[00:00:24] Has that been something you just grew up with and you just knew

[00:00:26] Dr. Brian Rigg: [00:00:26] you wanted to do. Well, I, I never I never had the thought when I was a kid that I would be a historian, but that I had a love of history growing up. Absolutely. My dad was a Naval officer. He was a navigator on a anti-submarine attack plane.

[00:00:43] And so I grew up with a lot of military paraphernalia around the house. I had an uncle that fought the Japanese at Pella. Lou, my dad’s older brother, Frank rig. I knew of three great great grandfathers, one in particular, David L. Davidson that fought at Vicksburg and fought for the union during the civil war.

[00:01:02] So my family, especially through my father was heavily focused on war films and history. And we would go to the civil war battlefields where my, my ancestors fought and we would go to museums and talk about tanks and airplanes. My dad worked on course airs when he was in the Navy as well, when he was an enlisted man before he became an officer.

[00:01:24] So, you know, my brother and I took a lot of pleasure in making model airplanes and model tanks. So yes, you know, American history, war history, world war II history was part of my everyday life. You look back at the artwork that I made for my mother and father when I was a kid that my mom has kept all these years.

[00:01:43] It’s basically showing on one side. World war II, planes and tanks and men fighting and other side Battlestar Galactica and buck Rogers of the 21st century and so on. And so had a little bit of science fiction going on there as well. But yeah, I had a strong historical influence as far as understanding history and being passionate about it when I was a kid, just because of my family dynamics.

[00:02:09] And, and

[00:02:09] Jeff Haas: [00:02:09] also looking back at, looking at your history, your educational background is phenomenal. I mean in high school you attended a very important prestigious boarding school, Phillips Exeter Academy, which is a very high level school.

[00:02:21] Dr. Brian Rigg: [00:02:21] Yeah. I’m wearing the shirt of Phillips Exeter Academy right now.

[00:02:24] Oh, very cool.

[00:02:26] Jeff Haas: [00:02:26] So was this your idea to go to this Academy? Was it something your parents were pushing you or did you already know you had an interest in. Pursuing academics at a high level. And this was your motivation to, to move forward. Well,

[00:02:39]Dr. Brian Rigg: [00:02:39] Very very interesting question. And it’s a very kind of, it’s a labyrinth, a little bit of how I got there.

[00:02:46] It was a twisted road getting to, to editor. So as I mentioned offline a little bit to you that you didn’t know, I have the dubious honor of having failed first grade twice. I have what people today call ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And I had dyslexia and I also had a severe speech impediment, which a lot of people find hard to believe today, but I had a loving mother, a loving grandmother, and I was sent to a lab school at Texas Christian university after failing first grade for the second time.

[00:03:15] I mean, my mom had nightmares and seeing her 20 year old son being able to drive himself to his own sixth grade graduation. So she knew she needed to take some action. And they put me to a special school called a star point at TCU, which focused on kids with severe learning disabilities. And I, I met all the requirements and I went there and I had a wonderful teacher.

[00:03:34] She got me got my confidence back up. She got me up to speed with how to read and how to to write and gave me a lot of motivation that I was a contrarian in many respects that she taught me that, Hey, all those kids that were making fun of you, where you went to school, where you failed first grade at twice, and you know that we’re calling you a freak and abnormal and that you felt like you could never read now.

[00:03:57] You’re reading books and you’re even reading books at a higher level than their grade. At third grade, you’re reading Hemingway and you’re reading Steinbeck. And she was, and these were kind of the cliff note versions of these books. But nonetheless, I was reading about these stories of these great authors and feeling that I could do it in getting my self-confidence up.

[00:04:16] And she gave me that drive that I could do anything. I set my mind to now fast forward to it, to prep school. I had actually gone to school here in in Texas to a school called Fort with Christian and very loving community, a Christian school, but not real rigorous academically. And my junior year, I had a very good year in football.

[00:04:39] I was a running back and scored a lot of touchdowns, had a thousand yard season. And I was basically a straight a student and my coach started sending out. My stats to a lot of schools and lo and behold Princeton university and university of Pennsylvania got in touch with me. And they were very interested in having me come to their school.

[00:05:01] So now fast forward to my senior year, I had a very good senior year, had, you know, 1500 yards rushing 21 touchdowns. We went to the playoffs, had a great offensive line that took care of me. Couldn’t done it without them. And started applying to Yale university of Pennsylvania and Princeton. And I didn’t get in my senior year.

[00:05:20] So I called up the Princeton coach and I said, coach, you know, what’s wrong? I thought everything was good. He was like, well, Hey, everything is great on your resume. Except for your sat. Getting back to my ADHD dyslexia, I was not very good with standardized tests and I had a low sat score and I said, well, coach, if you let me in, I’ll be able to do the work.

[00:05:41] You know, I have twice as much drive as most people. And he’s like, well, I, I think I, I believe that rig, you know, talking with you, but we have our, our barrier to entry and you’ve missed out. I was like, well, what are my options coach? He says, well, a lot of kids do a fifth year, senior year at a prep school up North to better themselves, academically to improve their sat scores.

[00:06:05] And then they try again. At the school of their choices. And in this case, you know, we’d want you here at Princeton. I was like, okay, coach, I’ll look at it. So I looked at Andover, I looked at Hotchkiss. Then I looked at Phillips Exeter Academy. And since my dad’s from Philadelphia and I have a long line of family from the Northeast, he knew what that meant that I had a second chance, if you will, to go to an Ivy league school.

[00:06:29] And he knew about these prep schools and he was living, my parents were divorced at the time and he was living back in Philadelphia at the time. So he flew me up after I got rejected from Princeton, Yale, and university of Pennsylvania. And I interviewed at these prep schools and I fell in love with Phillips Exeter Academy.

[00:06:46] I went there very tough school academically. I improved my sat that fall in 1990, by 250 points. And Exeter only allowed you to apply to what they called. One major Ivy, Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, and one quote, unquote, minor Ivy, you know, Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown and Cornell. And so I applied to Yale and Cornell and I got into both of them.

[00:07:15] So I, I knew about the Ivy leagues when I was being recruited by them, my junior and senior year at Fort with Christian, I knew I had a unique opportunity and it gave me the bug. And then when I had the opportunity to go try again, if you will to have, or extra Academy, then I really started getting into the academic mode if you will.

[00:07:36] So it wasn’t always a foregone conclusion when I was younger that I wanted to go to Yale or Harvard. And you know, the reason why I shifted off from Princeton people may be interested to know, you know, Hey, that coach was helping you so much. Is that when I was at Exeter, I did some recruiting trips down at Yale, and I found that their offense fit more to my running style than Princeton’s.

[00:07:56] And the Princeton coach actually blessed that decision. Since I was only allowed to apply to one major Ivy, I could only do either Princeton, Harvard, or Yale. So I decided on Yale. And once I got into Yale you know, and had that experience, that Deborah Phillips Exeter Academy, where I was around incredibly smart kids, wonderful teachers, small classroom environments, which was very conducive and helpful with my LD and my dyslexia.

[00:08:21] It gave me the academic buck, if you will. I really wanted to improve my writing, improve my thinking, be around alpha males and females who were driven academically and wanted to really push themselves mentally. And so that’s where I really got a fire lit under my backside. So, so to speak, to really strive, to get to the elite of the elite of institutions to to better myself as best I could.

[00:08:50] So as I

[00:08:51] Jeff Haas: [00:08:51] mentioned before, I’m off air, I’m a high school teacher, English teacher at a therapeutic high school. And a lot of my students also deal with ADHD, autism gauzy on the spectrum and anxiety and depression, a bunch of a bunch of issues. You mentioned that you, a lot of them. You’re dealing with your ADHD came from getting confidence.

[00:09:12] Well, what else did you do as an individual to work through the issues that you were dealing with to become a good strong student?

[00:09:23] Dr. Brian Rigg: [00:09:23] Well, you know, the first one is, is, is confidence. Obviously, you know, the, the worst. Learning disability is to not believe in yourself. Nine, nine tenths of the equation is motivation and stick to it and it’s being stubborn.

[00:09:38]And so Mary Stewart, my wonderful teacher that, you know, when I went to the school and I was totally demoralized when I was eight years old, I couldn’t speak very well. The child study center at Fort worth had labeled me MBD minimal brain damage HLD hyperkinetic learning disabled, which now is, you know, ADHD and dyslexia.

[00:10:00] And so when she saw how demoralizing I was, I was looking down at my feet, shuffling nervous that I was going to be punished at the school. I’d done two before they had done licks all the time. So I had been spanked repeatedly at Pantego Christian Academy. You know, it was not a very loving place to be.

[00:10:21] And so when I went to the star point, I was thinking, Oh my God, I’m just going to have a lot more failure in, in this wonderful teacher who I’m still in touch with. My third and fifth book are dedicated to her and a few other teachers, but she’s highlighted. She gave me a big hug and she said, Brian, you’re not a freak.

[00:10:36] You’re not abnormal. Like all those kids were calling you. You’re just learning and you’re not learning disabled. You’re just learning different. And I’m here to help you find your strengths. And what she did is she found out what my passions were. And I was passionate about the Titanic, the RMS Titanic.

[00:10:53] And so she taught me how to read and learn about math by using that ship as a portal. For my learning. She says, you know, if you don’t know your math your multiplication tables, you wouldn’t be able to be able to design and engineer that ship. Well, that first day I had my multiplication tables memorized and she said, you know, if you’re not able to communicate well and, and, and see the inputs from your environment and be able to speak and talk about it and communicate through leadership and so on, you’re going to continue on hitting iceberg.

[00:11:24] And so I was thinking, okay, that’s important, you know, to learn how to read and write and communicate. And so I started really getting excited about reading, you know, and then we had the Olympics that year, 1980, and I was really a big fan of the miracle on ice team, a hockey. And she used that example as like, Hey, you got to have discipline and you got to have focus.

[00:11:45] And you got to see that, you know, if you raise your bar high and you try to go after it, quite often, you’re going to surprise yourself. So she was giving me the psychological tools as well to realize, you know what, I am very different. I think differently than most people. But just because it’s different doesn’t mean it’s bad.

[00:12:03] It just means it’s different. And I just need to find new ways of doing things. So what I started doing, which I didn’t know were techniques until when I became a teacher, myself and professor that actually I was doing to help me is I started using the Peck theory of memory. Harry Lorayne has done a wonderful job teaching people about this, that you can learn his techniques that he has out there you know, on DVDs and on the internet.

[00:12:29] But I was doing naturally what he teaches, which is I was using my imagination to remember things, you know, if you’re walking down the road and somebody in a coat and tie and you walk past them, you’ll probably never remember that. But if you walk down the road and somebody is in a coat and tie, but he has a monkey on his head that is throwing knives up in the air and blowing out dragons, you know, from his mouth, you’ll never forget that image.

[00:12:54] And what I would do is I would take information that I needed to remember in school, and I would associate it with those crazy stories. And I would develop a storyline of how, you know, with my biology test or with my history test. And I would associate facts and figures and concepts with crazy imaginative, you know, images of things, whether it be, you know, star Wars, Star track, fish, snakes, and things of that sort.

[00:13:25] And I started being able to remember things that way. And so that helped me of using creativity in my, my brain to memorize mundane, boring facts. I also started doing something that Mary Tommy is that when I started getting anxious and I couldn’t concentrate anymore, she would have me go run around the school a couple of times.

[00:13:47] So when I was home studying and I started feeling anxious, I go sit down and I would do 30 push-ups. I do a hundred sit-ups. I do like 50 jumping jacks. And I still do that today. I have a rug right here in my office and just, you know, about two hours ago, I was getting a little anxious, you know and, and bored.

[00:14:05] So I went down and did 50 pushups, you know, as a 50 year old man. And he came back and did some more trades for my clients. So that was another way of me kind of adjusting to the way my brain works, using the imagination nation, which a lot of ADHD, dyslexic kids have great, crazy zany humor and imaginations.

[00:14:26] They need to use it. To be able to learn in the school environment. And then I learned that if I just kind of break up my learning with some activity along the way, that helped me as well. But the biggest thing, again, I can’t emphasize is that these kids, a lot of times when they’re struggling with learning, what with me was, I wasn’t able to learn anything for two years because I was.

[00:14:48] Crushed at Pantego a Bible church in Bay, basically at school pentacle Bible Academy. Because they just really didn’t know how to deal with kids. I mean, I shouldn’t fault the teachers. They’re very well-meaning teachers except for the ones that were spanking me all the time. But that was kind of the, that was normal back in the seventies, unfortunately.

[00:15:06]But I had a lot of shame because of that. I had a lot of very poor self-esteem and once that got under control, then I had the foundation to be able to explore the imagination, to explore the way I think, in, in right. To, to be able to then perform in school. And every teacher I’ve had, you know, I I’ve had this book that I’m working on called conquering a learning disabilities, and every teacher I’ve given it to you, I’ve given it to several of my elementary school teachers today, high school and junior high, they all tell me, they always knew I was strange and unique and bizarre with how I did things.

[00:15:43] But luckily I had a lot of charm and I was a good athlete, so I can get a hall pass with some of my bizarre behavior and things. And, you know, it’s kind of interesting. How did I learn how to learn another thing that was kind of interesting to explore this with you, Jeff. Well, I gravitated to activities that naturally I performed well at.

[00:16:05] And whether that was in high school was individualized study program. So I continually ask for extra credit cause I could do things on my own. And quite often I could suggest what I wanted to study black holes, our study, the, the the behavior of the mating behavior of water moccasins. Cause I grew up on Lake Arlington, a Lake here in Texas, and I saw the water moccasins all the time, especially when they were in their, like their schools and doing their weird mating rituals.

[00:16:33] So I would get extra credit probe projects on these things that I was interested in world war II projects. And I would get better grades when I was at Yale university. This really. Showed itself dramatically in the following programs that I found Yale had in every department, the ability for you to do an independent study, if you had a professor sign off on it and my freshmen second semester, freshman year, and then my first semester, sophomore year, I started doing these because it just excited me to study about the German Russian conflict of world war II.

[00:17:11] You know, the Russian German war, 1941 to 1945. I was interested in Edgar Allen Poe. They didn’t have any courses just strictly on underground co I was interested in studying about Vikings in America before Columbus. Also the big don’t ask, don’t tell this was happening under Clinton in 1993. So I said, okay, I’m going to just study about gays in the military.

[00:17:29] And what’s been, what’s been the behavior in ancient, Greece, and Rome, and so on. When you have, you have, you know, sexual minorities in the services, and I would do these one-on-one studies. I did, you know, military philosophy with Jeffrey Parker. And these I thrived in when it was one-on-one. And that’s what I found also with ADHD and dyslexia is that if I was doing active learning, you know, one-on-one or doing something that I was getting my hands dirty on, instead of passive sitting in a desk, having somebody lecture me, killed me.

[00:18:01] But when I was debating and arguing and exploring something that I really could get, hyper-focused another trait of ADHD. Then I really found that I could thrive with my way of thinking in the genetics that I got from Darwin. If you will, of being what I consider superior hunters and warriors, and you know land surveyors, if you will, you know, we w there’s three communities I’ve studied that have the highest level of ADHD and dyslexia in the world.

[00:18:31] And that is fighter pilots, special forces in prison. You know, you don’t get it under control. Sometimes you gravitate to bad behavior like taking self-medicating with drugs and cocaine, poor self-esteem, you do bad things and you go down a bad alley. Ned Hallowell talks a lot about this in his books, driven to distraction and delivered from distraction, an expert in Harvard university on ADHD, who is ADHD himself.

[00:18:58] But if it’s harnessed. And you have good self esteem with ADHD, with all that creativity and energy and drive, you know, you know, sober our best special forces guys and fighter pilots. And I would, I would also argue silver bar graders and ventures and so on fit this profile. So luckily I was able to get my self esteem under control early on, and then I gravitated to systems naturally that taught me in those systems.

[00:19:24] Quite often, we’re finding one-on-one mentorship and interaction to create active learning. So that’s a, long-winded answer, Jeff, just to question, what did I find to help me be a better student into learn? Well, so, so, so there you go. Thanks for listening. No, I

[00:19:43] Jeff Haas: [00:19:43] think that’s a fantastic answer. And I, and I think how you approach learning through the use of creativity is something I had not considered as as a wonderful tool.

[00:19:53] And I was thinking as an English major talk as an English teacher, that’s a very helpful tool to think about. And. Begin to figure out how to best utilize with my other, with my students who, like I said, she has many of the same issues. And I definitely wouldn’t want to read that book of yours about the learning disability.

[00:20:09] I think that would be very informative for me as well. So when that book is ready is out, please let me know.

[00:20:13]Dr. Brian Rigg: [00:20:13] Well, I’m hoping I’m hoping to be in production this summer and have it out either mid summer at the beginning of the the school year, next year. So I’ll, I’ll, I’ll definitely keep you informed.

[00:20:24] All right. Well, you

[00:20:24] Jeff Haas: [00:20:24] definitely have sold one book to me, so thank you much. Thanks. Yeah. And like I said, I think that’s very interesting and I liked the idea that someone who struggled early with academics went on to not only go through this important prep school, but you went to Yale university and you had, you also went to Cambridge Cambridge, where you earned your doctorate in history.

[00:20:45]And it kind of got me thinking a little bit about schools that are ideally like Cambridge high level schools. I, you would imagine at least to me that they have a better way of approaching the subjects that they teach perhaps in other institutions. So when it came to Cambridge, how did they teach you to best engage with your subject matter, which was history and how, and how to best relate it to not only others as a writer, a professor or whatever doctorate, what are you going to, whatever with things that you’ve done since, but also how to relate it to the other.

[00:21:19] Subject, they actually had you learning as well. I mean, what did, what was their key to, I guess, their Ivy league level key to engaging with you? What the subject matter, how to best you know, present it?

[00:21:33] Dr. Brian Rigg: [00:21:33] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they’re very, very, very good questions. You know, at Yale you’re required to have 36 courses to graduate and because of the independence system that they had there.

[00:21:45] And, but with my hyperactivity and I also did two summer schools, I have to, to note, I graduated with 56 courses and I also was able to get a few courses that I got when I was over in Germany, when I studied at the good Institute for German language also approved. So I had a very lengthy transcript.

[00:22:03] Most people’s transcripts are like a page and a half. Somebody just almost use a page. Mine was two and a half pages. And, and I just love learning. So some of that was traditional seminars. And also some traditional classroom settings, many of them, I couldn’t stand many of them I could get into because the teachers are just so dynamic and wonderful at, at Yale Cambridge.

[00:22:25] I got the at the Henry fellowship it’s for Harvard and Yale and in Oxford and Cambridge. So one student from Yale and one student from Harvard are able to go to either Oxford or Cambridge and one student from Cambridge and one student from Harbor Oxford are able to go to either Harvard or yell.

[00:22:39] This is wonderful exchange, probably it’s kind of like a miniature road scholarship for just these four institutions. And I was honored to get the Henry fellowship for yelled at year. And when I went to Cambridge, I had the honor of studying under the world, renowned historian. Jonathan Steinberg, he wrote the, the work on the Italian fascist regime under Mussolini and antisemitism, the book called all or nothing.

[00:23:02] And he’s one of the definitive biographers of Otto Von Bismarck, you know, the founder of the German nation. So when I met with Jonathan Steinberg for my beginning of my graduate studies at Cambridge to do my masters in PhD there, he saw the classroom work was not good for me. And they had an English tutorial system of one-on-one with a professor that you basically designed your course of study.

[00:23:28] You got the department of graduate studies to sign off on it. And then you worked your, your program of study and you work your, your master’s and your PhD through that. And so when I came to Cambridge, I had, I took these huge duffel bags and chest full of all my documents that I’ve been gathering for my first book.

[00:23:49] Hitler’s Jewish soldiers. I’d already conducted two full years of research while I was at Yale. And I had taken off a year between my junior year and senior year at Yale to focus on interviewing these guys over in Germany before they died. So by the time I got to Cambridge, I had already conducted over 200 interviews with Jews and men of Jewish descent.

[00:24:09] Good, certainly Nazi military. And I collected over 20,000 pages of documents. Many of them having Hitler’s signatures and, you know, say your signature on them and growing signature. I had Lugers, I had metals, I had daggers ceremonial sword. So when Jonathan Steinberg saw that I had actually built out my own archive and had, you know, like 300 hours of interviews with 200 veterans, the German military world war, two family, veterans of Jewish descent.

[00:24:40] He’s like, Oh my God, it’s going to take you years to go through this. We should just focus on this. So when I was at Cambridge, the beautiful thing that was given to me was the English tutorial system, which was just like the independent studies that thrive that doing at Yale. And now I could focus all my energy on my master’s and then my PhD, which they were separate and they both became.

[00:25:04] Books of mine. The book that’s called the rabbi say by Hitler soldiers, one of the most remarkable rescues about how Nazi soldiers of Jewish descent rescued the Jewish Pope, if you will, the world and got them to America in 1940 was my master’s was the foundation. The foundation piece for that book was my master’s dissertation at Cambridge.

[00:25:25] And then my PhD was about Jews and men of Jewish descendants or the Nazi military. And it was the global look at this history that eventually became my, my motives open, my first book Hitler’s Jewish soldiers. So I would meet with Jonathan Steinberg every couple of weeks, we would have tea and talk about things.

[00:25:46] I tell them about my methodology, how I was organizing my archive. He got me in the press in order to reach more people throughout the world. I was on the front page of the London Telegraph using Tim King. Yeah. One of his former students to talk about, you know, Cambridge student and finds out about, you know Jews in the Nazi military.

[00:26:06] And it went viral and all over the place. New York times, LA times it was in the wall street journal. It was in and design the zoo Deutsches item. And then after that happened, thousands of letters poured in from people who were helping me with my research people who I would have not otherwise been able to reach.

[00:26:26] And so John Steinberg was helping me devise ways of building out my archive even more. He got me scholarships. So I could go to mainland Europe to conduct more interviews, which I did another 200 this year. Like every two weeks I would go over to Belgium and France and Germany and Austria conduct, you know, 10, 15 interviews come back to Cambridge, transcribe them, work them into my note cards, debrief Jonathan Steinberg on what I found.

[00:26:55]My archive got so big for my house that he basically got me in a separate room in Churchill’s archives, one of the residential colleges. So all my archive was by facture and Churchill’s primary documents. You know, soldiers was growing there. Here’s Brendan who ran the archive at the time was very gracious to me.

[00:27:15] And so it was an ideal setting for me in an ideal program that Cambridge gave me for my ADHD and dyslexia, if you will. I thrived in that. And then after I fulfilled three semesters at Cambridge, I was able to study outside the university, moved to Germany and Steinberg helped me get into the federal archives in Germany and have my own archive.

[00:27:37] And the national archives of Germany and worked there for several more years, building out my PhD. So Cambridge was a blessing for a person like me in ADHD, person, creative self motivating, you know student and they really gave me the foundation stones to be successful. But conversely they supported that type of mindset and encouraged it, which was a blessing now.

[00:28:04] Jeff Haas: [00:28:04] I mean, that, that, that is phenomenal. I always wish I could go to a school that, that was at that level of being that elite school. And unfortunately I never did with, to universal Rhode Island. But the interesting thing that I think you brought up, or at least it occurred to me is that to me, I’m, you may correct me if I’m wrong, but it feels like history is all about causation and everything and everything that exists is due to a long spiraling network of other things that have occurred that build up to whoever you’re talking about.

[00:28:35] Presently if I’m wrong, please, correct me. And I always can think about this causation going back hundreds and hundreds of years. I mean, world war two is called by the world war one world. One is due to issues that created in 19th century, things of that nature. When you’re looking at something from historical context and wanting to research it, how do you know.

[00:28:57] What to focus on what to leave out where not, you know, without going too far down the rabbit hole of getting lost in further, you know, meant parts of history and things of that nature.

[00:29:08] Dr. Brian Rigg: [00:29:08] Well, you know, you bring up a lot of interesting concepts and what’s coming in my mind right now. I’m just going to make some notes.

[00:29:14]Cause you know, you, you brought a lot of thoughts to, to the to the discussion. So first about history, history, you know, what is history? I mean, history, I, I like to, to use McCauley the, the, the famous historians phrase, he says history is philosophy teaching by examples. And so, you know, when, when you go into history, you, you, you, you, you really need to be asking the question, you know, what does this teach us about the human condition?

[00:29:42] How does it better us as, as a species? And when we find the mistakes that we see, how can we implement procedures, our educational processes, if you will, that will prevent this, you know, like, you know, genocide and Auschwitz is a bad idea. You know, how, how do we, how do we stop this anti-Semitism is a sick, you know, disease, if you will, how do we stop this?

[00:30:09] You know, and these are larger issues that we’re dealing with, but we’re grappling with them still, even though we’re you know, 75 years after world war two, So, you know, history is, is, is trying to, to make the world a better place. Now, how do you prevent from going down rabbit holes? I like to think of, of my professor at Yale university, German historian Henry Turner, what he told me.

[00:30:35] He says, when you go into something, you, you, you must let empiricism take over and let it lead you to the the, the conclusions don’t have conclusions beforehand. You may have an overriding hypothesis, but then when you get into the documents, let them lead you to conclusions of what you’re going to have in through empiricism.

[00:30:58] And you’ll find the truth and try to find out what’s the overlying thing here. Like when, when I started with Hitler’s Jewish soldiers, I was like, okay, what does this tell us about the Holocaust and what are some of the biggest questions of the Holocaust? Well, why could, you know, during that time period, once you knew something, could you do anything to prevent it?

[00:31:18] Did everybody in Nazi Germany know this? Did they welcome it? If so, why didn’t Hitler put Auschwitz in Berlin with people, you know, clapping and applauding? Why did he have to hide it in Poland? You know, so it led me to answer a lot of questions that we’ve struggled with for a long time. And then some of the conclusions were, were quite shocking.

[00:31:38] You know, I, I came to collusion. A lot of people didn’t truly understand. What was going on with killing 6 million Jews. And, and one of the biggest reasons why I come to that conclusion is that many of these men who I documented, who were of Jewish descent, serving in the Nazi military lost six to seven relatives in the Holocaust.

[00:31:59] And when you look at their behavior and what they were doing, it wasn’t the type of behavior you would think somebody would have if they knew their relatives who were disappearing around, they were being systematically exterminated. And that was something that was kind of shocking to me. So that’s what history does you through empiricism?

[00:32:17] You, you gather the facts and then you start seeing the picture and then how history connects itself. You know, when you’re talking about, I do like to think of history you know, why you need a study you know, as much history as you possibly can. I mean, going to Bryce and like, you know, studying history from the beginning of time, the big bang, you know, 13.7 billion years ago when our universe came into existence and then kind of marching down to the present more, you know, you more, you can understand how the puzzle fits, but I also, I like to tell people, history is like and to know history for it.

[00:32:53] There’s a thousand piece puzzle out there, and you may be lucky to get a hundred. And if you’re a good historian, you may get, get 120 and 130, and you can put those 120, 130 pieces together as best you can in this thousand piece puzzle. And you can see what should be in those gaps. And the more pieces you get, the more answers you can get of what that larger picture should look like.

[00:33:19] And that’s what we strive for. And, you know, it’s also like maybe a piece of, it’s like a huge carpet. You know, this color over here influences over here. If you tug it and pull it and push it, or if you look at it in its totality, how it all kind of blends to give a certain, you know, theme or symbolism with its colors and with this, this design, and that’s also kind of what history does.

[00:33:41] So I look at history, very philosophically, obviously. But I also look at history that there’s just so little that we really understand. And once you get underneath the hood it behooves you as a historian to do your pastor really go into the primary sources, the original sources. Cause most people don’t look at those.

[00:34:01] Henry Turner at Yale university says most historians are very sloppy and he’s he’s right. What they do is they go to the library and they look at 10 or 15 books that people have written about the subject matter they want to write about. And then they write up their book using the 15 books, never looking at the primary sources.

[00:34:17] And I found this just recently with my fifth book, flame thrower that’s in part about the famous battle Iijima with, you know, the famous flag raising on Mount Suribachi the most iconic photograph military photograph in the world. And the most published published photograph of the world that famous flag raising amounts are Abaci.

[00:34:37] Well, you would think that this famous battle for Marines, a famous battle for Americans and and that, you know, has been glorified flags of our fathers and letters from me by Jima by Clinique would you know, in Hollywood that the archives would have been gone over with a fine tooth comb. Well, when I was in the national archives, practicing what Henry Turner taught me a yell through empiricism, go look at the primary sources and see what they tell you.

[00:35:04] Even if you think that historian before you had looked at those sources, he may have had a bad day when he was looking at one file and miss some things, or you have new information that he doesn’t have, that you’ll be able to interpret the documents better. You look at the primary sources. So I went to the national archives and not only did I find the primary sources there, but I found that a lot of them hadn’t been looked at how do I know that several of the files that I looked on, IWA Jima, this famous battle, you know, written up by the fifth amphibious Corps and by the three divisions there, the third, fourth and fifth Marine Corps divisions had pad seal documents.

[00:35:43] And folders that had been stapled shut and had not been opened any screen in the last 70 years worth his salt as a historian would have opened that up while I was opening up these documents and some of them had fit reps, you know, fitness reports on generals and colonels. And so on that hadn’t been looked at before and I was shocked.

[00:36:02] And so, you know, I would like, I guess the mate that half my book, flame thrower has primary sources about the battle of Guam. A lot of people don’t know, we fought a big battle against the Japanese on American territory Guam that had seven concentration camps on it that the Japanese had, that they put American nationals in.

[00:36:22] A lot of people don’t know about this. So I write about that battle, the battle of Iwo Jima. And then I talk about the Japanese Holocaust. And then I talk about the Marine Corps during world war two and half my source material has never seen the light of day. So that as a historian too, I think the gift that a good historian does for the populace is brings new information to a subject matter that people are interested in.

[00:36:48] And then using that information to talk about enduring issues of humanity and how we can make this society a better, more humane, more kind more wise, if you will. So here again, a long-winded answer to several of those questions about, you know, how do you do research? What is history. And how do you impart lessons to the populous?

[00:37:12] But I hope my pontification here on that has helped people understand how I view history and how I’ve done my books. I think that

[00:37:20] Jeff Haas: [00:37:20] was a phenomenal answer. And I think one thing that you said that caught my interest is where it is when you stated that you do not draw conclusions before the evidence.

[00:37:29]Do you find that in searching and going through and combing through evidence that your conclusions have been either false, the initial conclusion falls and you had to readjust, do you find that it tends to be on track? And when you do find that a conclusion that you originally was maybe considering, or going down that path was wrong or needed adjusting, how easy is it and how do you go about changing our mindset to adjust to what you think is now the new reality?

[00:37:59] Dr. Brian Rigg: [00:37:59] I mean, excellent question nobody’s ever asked me that, and what’s interesting, Jeff, and you don’t even know by book yet overcoming learning disabilities or conquering learning disabilities. Those are the two titles I’m working with right now. I talk about the three major subject matters that I’ve explored that have given birth to five books on what we’re two in the Holocaust and how each one, I.

[00:38:24] Came to a totally different conclusion than what I thought I was going to find by going into the evidence. And quite often at the beginning, I was making people feel very upset if you will. Some people are still very upset with the truth, with the information I found, but I actually turned upside down some preconceived notions and ideas about world war II and the Holocaust that people thought they knew about it.

[00:38:54] And I, that also kind of goes with ADHD and dyslexia, Ned Hallowell, famous doctor at Harvard expert on learning disabilities. And ADHD says that people like us ADHD. Dyslexic are game changers, they’re shakers in society. They, they see things from different angles and they’re most often the the changers of, of reality, and because they show light on, on truths that people haven’t seen before.

[00:39:23] I like to actually use that working thesis by Nan Hallowell and kind of show it you know, look at Socrates and Plato with how they revolutionize, how you look at society and government, you know, Plato was even saying back then that women should rule and they should be educated. I mean, th they’re thinking out of the box.

[00:39:43] And so if that is indeed a, a truism about ADHD and dyslexia, it really played out in my life with my historical research case in point my first book, Hitler’s your soldiers. When I started this, I thought I would only find maybe 10 or 20 or 30 inner scenes, survival stories. If you will, of people that had their identity and blended into the Nazi military.

[00:40:07] Well, what I found is that this was government and policy. The Nazis actually made it mandatory that half Jews and quarter Jews had to serve. And when you look at the assimilation of Nazi Germany at that time, you had a couple of million people out of a population of 90 million people. Who had partial Jewish descent.

[00:40:30] And when Hitler brought out the crazy racial number of laws of 1935 dividing up humanity in basically four groups, you had the quote unquote Ariens who had four Germanic grandparents or Christian grandparents. They quite often designated a race according to the religious affiliations, which is we’re seeing in itself, but that’s a whole nother topic to go down later with maybe another hour that we talked about, then you had two new racial categories in between the area.

[00:41:04] And then, you know, on the other extreme was the Jew a person who had three or more Jewish grandparents are practiced the Jewish religion, and they were bad guys. You know, they were the  the, the sub dimension, the subhumans and the, and these two new categories. I have Jew, a person with two Jewish grandparents and a quarter Jew, a person with one Jewish grandparents.

[00:41:25] And suddenly because of assimilation, you had, you know, hundreds of thousands of people in these categories. And certainly with these laws, they’re tainted, they’re they’re citizens, second class, but Hitler made it law that these two categories have two and quarter Jews had to be drafted and they had to do military service.

[00:41:46] How crazy is this? These guys are going into the military becoming. You know well, you know, well, soldiers decorated heroes from Poland and France getting the iron cross and their moms wearing the gold star, you know, and being persecuted. And so when I started coming up with these documents, showing that we’re not talking about a few curious anomalies, I will quote Henry Turner who wrote me a letter.

[00:42:14] And I’m pretty sure I got the phrase ology, right? It’s in my file cabinet here. He said, Brian, quit chasing after some curious anomalies who will not add anything to our understanding of the third, right. And study some serious German history. Well, what I started finding that not only were these guys, you know, in mass recruited and drafted, and many of them were, you know, common soldiers, privates, privates, first class corporals, Lance corporals, sergeants, and so on.

[00:42:45] And there were many that were officers who started getting, you know, clemency if you will, or exemptions. But I started finding that there was a Phil Marshall second in command to the Loeffler alpha, who was a half Jew, Erik, you know, in her heart to muse. And then I found 20, 20, 22 officers for the army generals.

[00:43:06] I found six admirals Naval flag officers. And I found hundreds and hundreds of field grade officers. Majors Lieutenant colonels colonels. So these were not, you know curious anomalies. I mean, I just mentioned the second in command with the little Fafa was a half Jew Earhart muse. The guy who developed the operational concept known as blitz Creek maneuver warfare was Helmut Vuber.

[00:43:34] He was a half Jew and the most successful Admiral of world war II, that’s saying 150,000 metric, tons of shipping are captured. Some of the ships he captured, he didn’t sink them all was a Bernhardt raga. He was a surface rater captain. These were converted merchant Marine ships that looked like merchant Marine ships, but they were men of war, Amanda, men of war ships that they would get close to an enemy ship and they would drop their hidden doors, revealing their cannons.

[00:44:03] They were called surface Raiders and they would tell the ship either surrender will blow you out of the water. Well, raga sending more shipping or captured more shipping than the combined tonnage of the battleship Bismarck, battleship battleship Ghanaians though. Again, Eisenhower and the battleship Deutschland.

[00:44:22] I mean, he was brilliant. And so these guys were not curious anomalies, but they played some of the most significant roles of the third. Right? So here I go to the historical establishment, when I first started my research and they’re saying, you’re not going to find anything there. Weren’t very many of them serving and none of them did anything important.

[00:44:39] And they’re not going to tell us anything really large about the Holocaust. Well, suddenly I, I, Hey, there’s, there’s most likely 150,000 of these guys, the size of the Marine Corps today that served in the ValMark still small compared to the 17 million men that went through the Vermont during world war two.

[00:44:57] But in light of the Holocaust is 1% of the manpower is shocking when you’re looking at the Holocaust and the third Reich politics and the racial, the, of Nazi Germany. And so that was shocking in itself. How many there were also, there was these very significant individuals, you know, what were they thinking?

[00:45:16] What did they know about Hitler’s policies with the Jews and why were they supporting layman’s around and invasion of Russia? These are answering questions about the dichotomy of people who were raised in the Prussian military tradition of always obeying the government. But then what do you do when the government becomes immoral?

[00:45:36] You know, well, they were so tied to their traditions. They, they served an immoral regime and many of them knew this and they had to. Souls and their breasts that they were struggling with all the time. You use a phrase from good to Faust. And then the questions that I bring out about the Holocaust, that there were so many of these guys in the military.

[00:45:55] And so many of them were affected by the Holocaust. And many of them didn’t really know what was going on. One of the most dramatic facts that that I’ve found is that many of these half Jews were causing so many problems with the Nazi hierarchy. We’re protecting a grandmother, protecting an aunt, protecting a mother from deportation.

[00:46:13] They were in their pans are uniform, are there, you know, all show me yoga, their paratroop a uniform saying to the Gestapo, you can’t do this to this woman. You can’t deport that, that man, these are my relatives that Hitler got fed up with this. Eventually he basically said we’re either going to have to protect all the Jewish parents and grandparents and relatives of these half Jewish soldiers, or we’re going to have to discharge the half are we going to have to discharge the half Jews?

[00:46:40] So they start making all these problems? Well, we can’t protect full Jews, discharge the half Jews. And they started being dismissed in 40 41 and 42 in mass, you know, tens of thousands of them. Well, The question to be asked about the Holocaust is that many of these guys, they went back home, they were working or studying for a few years.

[00:47:02] And then in 1944, they started to be forced into deportation actions, sending them to forced labor camps, late 44 and 45. They had basically been in touch for a few years side note here, an irony while their Arion comrades quote unquote had the honor to go to Russia and get slaughtered. Many of these guys were home working and studying and relatively safe compared to the Eastern front where their comrades had to fight who didn’t have Jewish backgrounds.

[00:47:31] And as a percentage that had choosing quarter Jews, well, quarter Jews had to still serve half Jews as a percentage, serves survive at a higher rate just by the very fact that they weren’t serving in mass on the Russian front. But by 1944, Hitler said, we got to start deporting them before labor camps.

[00:47:50] And many of them got notices in the mail, basically from the Gestapo offices or from the labor camps the labor departments that ran these camps and they got the notification that they had to report to their deportation station at a certain time on a certain date. Usually two weeks from the time that they got the car.

[00:48:09] Well, the question to be asked is if they all knew about the Holocaust and that six to seven of the relatives have been deported before them have been deported to their deaths, which most often. Happened to an elderly aunt and uncle and grandmother and mother and father. Then the question to be asked is why did they report to their own deportation stations when they knew that happened to their relatives?

[00:48:31] Well, the logical answer to this is they didn’t know. That’s why most of them reported in mass when they got these notices. And only when they got to their forced labor camps where they’re like, Oh my God. Now I know what happened to my relatives. And, but it was then too late. They were already in the camps.

[00:48:49] But these camps for labor camps were very different than the concentration camps like.cal and suction housing, which, although people were dying there, they were not systematic extermination centers. So dot count Sachsenhausen were very different than like mush and Nick and Belzec and Sobibor and Auschwitz, which were industrial complexes of death.

[00:49:11] So they were like two generations removed from the ultimate horror of the Holocaust. And even then when they got to those camps, they realized, man, this is bad. And luckily for them, they were only in these cans for a few months and then the war was over. But only by going to those cans and they start to realize.

[00:49:29] Oh, no. Now I know what happened to, to outta now. I know what happened to OMA and OPA. Now I know what happened to my mother and so on. And that’s the tragedy of this story that many of these men serve bravely for their nation. Just like their Jewish ancestors had in the Franco-Prussian war and world war one.

[00:49:49] I mean, we need not forget that 100,000 Germans served the German army in world war one and 12,000 of them died for the fatherland Austrian Hungarian empire was more dramatic. 300,000 served in world war one, Sigmund Freud being one of them, 25,000 of them die. More Jews die for Austria, Germany in world war II than an all Israeli conflicts to date.

[00:50:14] Oh wow. So they, a lot of these guys, these half Jews in quarter Jews and so on, they came from strong military traditions and their Jewish relatives that served. And when they’re serving, they’re thinking, Hey, well, we won’t be persecuted anymore. I’ll I’ll prove that that I’m German and that our family are patriotic.

[00:50:31] They didn’t really think that their ancestors, I mean, their, their relatives were going to be slaughtered. They didn’t even think that they were going to be slaughtered. I mean, the sad thing is that had Germany prolonged the war, God forbid had Hitler won the war. These half Jews would have also been slaughtered.

[00:50:46] These have Jews who had served. Germany bravely in Poland, in France, Yugoslavia, Norway, Denmark, they would have been killed as well. And this is the tragedy, the tragedy. They didn’t even see that on the on the horizon for them until they got to these forced labor camps. And then it started dawning on them, what really their fate was going to be, or what it would have been had Hitler continued on.

[00:51:12] So that’s just, that’s just Hitler, just soldiers and how, when I got into the subject matter and got into the research, I was bringing stuff to the forefront that Michael bound, you know, one of the foremost Holocaust historians ever Henry Turner. You know, they were shocked by the, the, the information and it was new and it was, is revealing a lot of light on questions that we have struggled with.

[00:51:37] And at first, many of them were very negative and then believe in me at all. And didn’t think I was going to find anything. And then at the end, they’re endorsing my work, which was great. I know Jeff that we have an hour program, right. So I need to really wrap it up with my, I mean, honestly,

[00:51:52] Jeff Haas: [00:51:52] I can go as long as you feel like you have to be honest with

[00:51:55] Dr. Brian Rigg: [00:51:55] the split into parts.

[00:51:57] Great. Okay. So turning the, the history on its head. I just described what I did with Hitler’s Jewish soldiers and many, you know, to continue on with the theme of talking about some of the events that happened to me along the way with my research, when I was at Cambridge, I told you, Jonathan Steinberg got me into the press to help me do more research.

[00:52:16] So people knew what I was researching so they can write me. So I was, you know, and dozens and dozens newspapers. So tens of thousands of people read my articles. And then they wrote me at Cambridge helping me with my research. That’s why we did it, but many scholars at that time, David Sessor, Ronnie was a very nasty individual at that time to me, although he was a very, he’s a very good historian.

[00:52:38] I cite him in my work. Arnold Pauker Leo Baek Institute was not a very nice person to me. You, you have a few others that, you know, I could list, but you know, some, some very established his story is they didn’t think much. I mean, they just see this upstart poverty up you know, graduate student going to the press and they don’t really know about my research.

[00:52:59] And so they really hammered me saying that I wasn’t gonna find anything and so on. So I took great pleasure that when I, when my book came out and it, it really provided a lot of insight into the third ride can showing a lot of these gray areas and answering a lot of questions about the racial laws and how they impacted the society and how they impacted the military.

[00:53:19] I took great pride in hearing a lot of silence from a lot of those people that were negative. And, you know, along the way, a lot of them, I had quote, unquote, converted over to the historical data. Michael Berenbaum being one. You know, I had Henry Turner at Yale and I had a lot of other people that when they read this, James quorum was blown away.

[00:53:42] He was a wonderful mentor and support, but a lot of times they, they didn’t really think I was going to find very much. And then when I found a lot, they endorsed it greatly and knew, of course, when you look at the back of my book, you’ll see all those wonderful historians that have as supporting one of the greatest stories is Raul Hilberg.

[00:53:58] And he was very, he’s the God of Holocaust history. And he was very negative about me at the, at the beginning, especially with when my book was out. And he was just seeing what the newspapers were saying. And then I was at the gray zone conference with him, I believe in 2004 at Claremont McKenna, where we were going over the gray zone.

[00:54:17] The movie about the Sonderkommandos at Auschwitz. It’s a fascinating movie for those of you who like studying the Holocaust. I strongly encourage you to, to, to look at it. Well, Michael berimbau, who’s been a wonderful mentor and supporter of mine throughout the years. He knew that Raul Hilberg had been negative about me, had read my work.

[00:54:37] And so he planned it in such a way that after one of our conferences, it was a three-day conference. And one of the conferences, one day that that night I was able to have dinner with Ralph Hilbert and we had a nice conversation. He was a veteran of world war two. You know, I was I served in the Israeli military and was in the Marine Corps, so we could talk military and, and we were talking history as well.

[00:54:57] And then we ended up walking around Claremont, McKenna, just P and I, I was so honored about this for about, Oh, I want to say a few hours, if not more talking about history, how we explore ideas and in, in research and how we let the research tell us what happened. And, you know, he had actually made some mistakes in his book about Belzec St only 450 people 450,000 people died there.

[00:55:24] And later on, he found new documents that changed his ideas that he missed, that 600,000 people died and he was. He was very upset with himself. He didn’t see the cues early on, but he says through the research, you got to let the research tell you what’s what’s true. And, and, and I started telling him about my struggles.

[00:55:43] And at the end of that night, he was so great. He’s like, Brian, I was wrong about you’re one of us. I lacked what you, you did, how you explored your research. I told him my, all my methodology, the people I met, the archives, I went to, he read my book and then a few months later after reading it, he called me up and said, good on you.

[00:56:02] I’m glad you proved me wrong. This is a first, a first rate piece of, of history. Good job. And I had the same kind of sentence, similar situation with Henry Turner. Once my book came out and he read it, he was very supportive of me, you know, whereas beforehand he was very, very negative. So the research in itself, you know, like they say, truth is the greatest defense.

[00:56:23]So, but it was a struggle along the way. Now my second book that became also my, my fourth book rescued from the Reich was the first edition. And the second edition is called the rabbi, say by Hitler soldiers. I had come across this story, doing my research about some of these guys in the German secret service, the abs there who had actually been asked by our us government, the state department in the white house to rescue this high ranking Hasidic rabbi leader.

[00:56:50] He was a ready of the  community Kabyle. His name was Joseph . And when I saw this, Jeff, I was like, this is kind of weird. There’s there’s these German officers being asked by an antisemitic anti-refugee oriented government government that they’re asking the Nazis.

[00:57:14] Jeff Haas: [00:57:14] I think

[00:57:14] Dr. Brian Rigg: [00:57:14] you fro sir,

[00:57:19] help them rescue a jeweler. Froze. Am I there? Yeah, I got you again.

[00:57:26] Jeff Haas: [00:57:26] Am I there? Yep, I can. Yep. You’re good

[00:57:29] Dr. Brian Rigg: [00:57:29] now. Got it. Okay. Okay, good. Okay, good. Should I go to the other room? Are we good?

[00:57:35]Jeff Haas: [00:57:35] If it happens again, maybe we can bump the room. Can you hear me?

[00:57:39] Dr. Brian Rigg: [00:57:39] Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Yeah, I’ll say it

[00:57:43] Jeff Haas: [00:57:43] again.

[00:57:43] Maybe we’ll have to move, but I think for now we can keep rolling.

[00:57:48] Dr. Brian Rigg: [00:57:48] Okay, good. So I came across the street, you know, the story about this a rabbi who’s getting rescued from these Nazi soldiers who’ve been asked by America to do so. And so I just kind of slowly but surely gathered information. And before I knew it, I started finding information in the national archives in America, in German archives.

[00:58:09] I found some of the children of some of the major leaders that were doing this at the time. And I sat down with Paula Hyman, one of my mentors and wonderful professors at Yale university. And I told her what I found. She was like, Brian, you gotta look into this. So I took her course on the Holocaust my senior year and wrote my essay up on this rescue.

[00:58:29] And she loved it. And and I continued on looking into this. Now what I found that was so fascinating. First of all, is that this rescued had this rescue happened that our government actually paid attention to a rabbi, a Jewish guy, and that helped rescue him, kind of turned the, you know, the history on its head about.

[00:58:51] How America was dealing with the Jewish refugee crisis at that time, then he St. Louis the ship, the refugee ship that came here, we rejected it and it sell back to Europe. And in one third of the people on the ship ended up in the Holocaust dying. It’s a, it’s a horrible chapter of American history that we didn’t let more people in that we were going after this guy and helping rescue.

[00:59:14] And that’s shocking, you know, a lot of people didn’t really think that I was going to find that, that actually they use Nazi soldiers of Jewish descent to do the rescue that’s even more shocking. And then I found what was shocking is that you actually come to really like these German soldiers of Jewish descent who rescued the rabbi.

[00:59:34] Joseph is auctioneer’s and they are really good guys. And they’re doing some really good deeds. And when you, you study Revy Joseph , he’s a religious bigot. He’s pointing the finger of reform Jews and conservative Jews saying they’re causing the Holocaust. They’re a horrible people. He’s being rescued because God loves him.

[00:59:57] When he’s in America. Finally, instead of uniting Jewish people together to help rescue people, he’s pointing the finger at them saying they’re causing the Holocaust and that he standing in judgment everybody else. And instead of rescuing a lot of lives or trying to, he puts an incredible amount of effort in rescuing his library and Europe, when all these people are dying under the Nazis and he’s actually successful in 1941 of getting his library out of Warsaw to America, instead of focusing all that money and energy and rescuing lives.

[01:00:32] So turning this history upside down, I showed that this rabbi Rebbie Joseph is a Shearson, was a really kind of despicable human being and not a person you really like. And so I have one of the most ultra Orthodox Jewish communities in the world coming after me. You know, how you, you, you know criticize our leader, you know, it’s like me being in the Vatican, making fun of the, the, the Pope.

[01:01:00] No, our ridiculing Pope Pius, the 11th and 12th for their allegiances, with Mussolini and Hitler in front of the Vatican bishops. You know, I’m not going to have a lot of friends, even though many of them know this, these posts did not behave very well during the third, right? If I go in there and really show the evidence, they’re not going to like me very much.

[01:01:22] Well, that’s the case with the  and they came after me. They threatened me. They bullied me. They have haggled me at lectures and it was something I, you know, I wasn’t looking for. I mean, I would have loved to have found that this, this Rebbie was a great session. A wonderful spiritual leader was trying to the rescue lives.

[01:01:43] United people was working with Christians. Like a lot of other ultra Orthodox groups were like rabbi Cutler of Lakewood Yeshiva in New Jersey. He was a Sadiq. He was a righteous human being, even though he was ultra religious, he worked with everybody, Christians, Quakers reforms. He didn’t care. He said, I would bow down to the Pope.

[01:02:04] If it saved one Jewish life, he was not condemning others. He was a great Jewish leader. I wish he was the rabbi that I had documented. They got rescued. And that’s the type of rabbi I wish I had documented, but history told me that’s not the case. So I revealed the facts. And a lot of people said, well, you know, it’s uncomfortable truths.

[01:02:22] But it shows us what our religious leaders should do during this time period and is not condemning others. It’s focusing on the main goal, which is to rescue lives that are being slaughtered well, and we need to be focusing on that. I mean, when Rwanda was going down and a million Rwandans were being slaughtered most often by clerical priests and nuns who were helping the Hutus slaughter the Tutsis.

[01:02:49] I mean, Rwanda, a lot of people don’t realize is, but one of the most Catholic countries in the world and the Pope was silent, you know? And so here’s another case where a religious leader missed the boat of intervening during a horrible time to help rescue live because of the theology that was blinding him at that time, whatever that be with the Catholic, you know, pose.

[01:03:11] I haven’t looked at that history that closely, but I know the Revy was a moral failure and a horrible leader. And I wish I hadn’t found that. But then I found that the Nazis that were involved with this rescue actually were the heroes this time. They should have a couple of these guys at the righteous Gentile, a walkway at Yad Vashem.

[01:03:30] So that was another example of, you know, when you got into research, I thought I was going to find a really great guy rabbi. And I could honor him and I found the opposite, which was, was sad. And in the most dramatic, you know event that’s happened recently to me of going into research and finding something totally opposite than what I was thinking I was going to find was with my book, my fifth book, flame thrower and it’s about I used the life of a, a medal of honor recipient.

[01:04:00] Woody Williams is about his life. I use his life to tell the stories like I was telling you about you earlier to tell about the story of the battle of Guam, where his division fought in the battle of Iwo Jima, where his division fought and putting these two battles within the overall context of the Pacific war, which a lot of people don’t know about any for every book that’s written on the Pacific war.

[01:04:22] There’s like 200 written on Nazi, Germany and the Holocaust. Although that battle on the end that, that, that conflict and the battles that were going on in Asia as well as in the Pacific and the slaughter that he were a Hito was spreading out throughout Asia was worse than Nazi Germany, Imperial, Japan, under Hirohito slaughtered, at least 22 million people, Hitler slaughtered 11.7 million six of those being Jews 3.3 million of them being Russian POW’s.

[01:04:55] And then the rest being, you know, hodgepodge and gypsies polo citizens. Homosexuals socialists, communists and so on. So the death and carnage of the Pacific war was larger, longer. I mean, here retos was slaughtering people from 1926 to 1945 and the Japanese, unlike the Nazis hide things, the Nazis, the Japanese were doing it out in the open.

[01:05:22] They didn’t care and they didn’t, and, or they didn’t care where a lot of Nazis would come forward and say, you know, this was not a good thing. There was a lot of contrition, a lot of reparations Germany’s paid 90 billion in reparations. Japan has paid 1 billion. They’ve been disgraceful and trying to erase their history and hide their crimes.

[01:05:41] Germany has tens of thousands of monuments to the victims. All throughout its country. Japan has zero monuments to the victims in their country. They deny the rape of Canadian King, where they slaughtered 300,000 people and raped 20,000 women from basically the March from Shanghai in September of 1937 until the conquest of an Anne King, which happened in December of 37.

[01:06:05] But then you had basically the domination of that city and all the carnage happening up til March 38. They deny it, you know, the rape of Manila, the which James Scott just wrote a wonderful book rampage on. Rape of Hong Kong, which I talk about in my book, because getting back to my book and my research one of the major Japanese characters is Tata Mishi, Kuri by OCI, the general of the Garrison Viva Jima made famous by Clint Eastwood’s films letters from Eva Jima flags of our fathers.

[01:06:41] And so I document his life too. And I think I have the most thorough dot biography of this man in the English language. So now getting into my subject matter, I use Woody Williams to tell the story. And so I tell, use his life to tell about the enemies we fought the battle, some of the battles we fought the overall strategy of the Pacific war and Fabius warfare, which the Marine Corps really developed for the allies during world war two.

[01:07:07] And when I started this research, Jeff, I thought Woody Williams, American Marine medal of honor, the medal of honor, ladies and gentlemen, for those of you who don’t know, this is the highest decoration you can get for Valor for bravery and combat our nation can bestow and to put it into context is using one battle.

[01:07:28] The battle of Iwo Jima had 80,000 men rotating on and off a bit. During the time we fought there in February, March of 1945 at any given time, there was usually about 30 or 40,000 fighting continuously in the front lines, out of those 80,000 men who fought on that Island in those two months, 27, got the medal of honor.

[01:07:52] Oh wow. 14 of them die doing what they needed to do to get that metal. So only 13 survived so that I was able to get to know a person and interview him and document him and talk to him. That was a medal of honor recipient from world war II. I mean, in world war II, there were 700,000 Marines, 84 got the medal of honor.

[01:08:15]Over 50 of them die. I think it was 54 died doing what they needed to do to get the metal. So Woody is a small percentage of people who got the medal of honor, especially the ones who got it, who survived. So I use his life to tell the story and I’m thinking he is a good guy. He’s, he’s, you know, he is a person we’re going to really love.

[01:08:41] We’re going to get behind him and, you know, in American spirit and then Tanisha Curry by ashy, we’re going to find that, although he was an enemy soldier, he inflicted. More casualties on Americans and Americans and flipped it on the Japanese. And that’s the only time that happened in world war II or world war II in the Pacific for a major battle.

[01:09:02] There was a small little battle that actually my uncle Frank Rigg, who fought the Japanese at an guar right near Pella, Lou thought that they, the Japanese Garrison of 1400 inflicted by 1700 casualties on us. And we basically killed the entire Garrison, but they inflicted more calves beyond us, but it was a small little battle, a small conflict IWA Jima, the Japanese inflicted 27,000 cavities on us.

[01:09:30] And we basically killed the entire Garrison. We killed 21,000 of them and only about a thousand surrendered or survived the war, but could be knocked unconscious and so on. And, and being surrendered, you know, high by default because they were unconscious. So Curry by ashy was the most redoubtable commander.

[01:09:48] In other words, that we met that the Japanese produced. And so I was thinking we’re going to be able to really focus on this man’s genius, which he was a military genius and really get behind him from understanding. A good military commander. Well, what I found is that Woody Williams is a borderline stolen Valor.

[01:10:09] He didn’t do everything that was reported that he did to get the medal of honor. And you find out how all the misinformation got into the historical record. It was from him shooting off his mouth and, and making it a four pound bass turned into a 20 pound bass. And he’s done this with a lot of stuff.

[01:10:29] And is his history he’s made up stories about being with a dead comrade, made up this story about this wonderful love affair he had with his wife when he was dating two women at the same time, one of them that later became his wife. He talks about, you know, his mom losing six babies and childbirth, you know, to get sympathy from the audience.

[01:10:45] Now she did lose three babies. That’s still dramatic, but he, once again makes the four pound bass into six pounds or 20 pounds. But to come back to the metal of honor, to find out that he actually misrepresented all the acts that eventually got into the historical record that got him the medal of honor, which by, you know, a lot of people don’t realize this when a person gets the medal of honor, he’s given a stipend every month.

[01:11:12] That’s tax-free. I mean, what he’s probably gotten around $1.5 million tax free for having this metal for doing acts. He didn’t do it. And when I finally figured out that he was a charlatan. He slapped a fifth district federal lawsuit against me to try to shut me up and prevent the publication of this book.

[01:11:36] Oh shit. For those of you who don’t know what he Williams is, you can do an internet search and you’ll see stuff about him. One of our largest ships expeditionary sea Bay, ship number four, and ESB number four is the Woody Williams ship, the USS Willie Williams. It’s a displacement tonnage of two Titanic.

[01:11:56] It’s 90,000 metric tons. I mean the Titanic was 46,000. Trump was flying them around on air force one. He was at a lot of Trump rallies. Military bases are being named after him. Schools are being named after him. Hospitals are being named after him, especially in West Virginia streets signs, parks, bridges.

[01:12:17] I mean, he’s the biggest living Marine Corps legend today. At many of the Marine Corps ceremonies. He’s right there next to the common arms. And so for me to take on this medal of honor recipient, which once a person becomes a medal of honor recipient, he’s almost like on Mount Olympics. He goes into a room generals, have to salute.

[01:12:36] That’s the etiquette. And he’s never been questioned in me as a historian using my Hunter brain, my ADHD brain. I went down every Avenue to get resources on him. And I started finding out that this guy is not what he’s presented to the public is being, and he has misled people about his, his person, one of the most egregious things he’s done that many Marine Corps generals I’ve talked to about this have gotten very angry about is that he has made up this whole story about being with a dead comrade.

[01:13:09] And he went to the families of the dead Conrad and told them all about the story of him being with him, to ingratiate himself with them and also to impress his new wife when he wasn’t even with the guy when he died. And that made a lot of people who were very upset, especially me then, you know, and I’ve had commandants of the Marine Corps, commandant gray comment on Quilla, look at my research.

[01:13:32] And once they saw my research and evidence, they not only endorsed my work, they wrote forwards for it. So I wasn’t expecting to find that there’s American hero, which in many respects, he is a hero. He did a lot of heroic things. He’s just a very flawed hero, but I, and I found that this guy is not the person people thought he was.

[01:13:51] And that was very disappointing. Now giving you the Japanese guy, Tata Michi Curry by ashy. When I started studying this guy’s life and totality, because if you look at Clint Eastwood’s movies about him, they just talk about is a time in America, in the thirties when he was here and it was attached to our embassy and he visited a lot of military bases and whatnot.

[01:14:12] Actually he did some courses at Harvard. And then, then they fast forward to his time on Iijima. They kind of skip his whole career when here, where Hito was taking over Asia left and right starting in 1937, this guy was the chief of staff of the 23rd army that took over Hong Kong right after Pearl Harbor was attacked.

[01:14:34] And in this three to four week campaign to take over Hong Kong from the British military Garrison there, his army, that he was responsible for swatter 50,000 civilians and raped 10,000 women. And then later on in the occupational duties for the next year and a half hundreds of thousands of people are dying and he’s importing women to go into the rig brothels, the comfort women left and right.

[01:15:03] He was a horrible human being and he was a war criminal. Well, I had actually interviewed the honorable Shindo of the LDP, the liberal democratic party of Japan, which that was Shinzo Arby’s party. He just stepped down as prime minister, but the honorable windows in his cabinet and the honorable Shindo is the grandson of this general.

[01:15:28] And I met with him and shared a lot of this evidence. And instead of him being supportive of me, kind of like with what he wants, I showed all of the evidence to him instead of him saying, coming clean with what he did and the lies he’s been getting all through the years, instead of that, ed slaps a lawsuit against me, well shadow instead of him saying, you know what?

[01:15:45] There’s a lot of problems with my, my grandfather whatever the truth is, you need to rebuild. He tried to torpedo my, my book as well. He bet mouth me to a board that I was on and even threatened the board that he was going to shut down the Island. He would Jima to American tourists if they didn’t do something about my book.

[01:16:08] I mean, he was using strong arm, almost like Italian mafia tactics to try to hurt my reputation and to prevent the information from getting out. But, you know, the way that I was raised with my grandmother and the Davidson and my ADHD, mine and yell Cambridge trained historian brain is that through empiricism, like Henry Turner taught me, you find the evidence and then you present the information and you learn from it.

[01:16:35] And so I was not deterred from these two people who were in many respects cowards with the history, you know what? He was definitely a brave Marine on Guam and IWA Jima, but the way he’s dealt with his history and misconstruing the facts and lying to the public has been disgraceful. And Shindo not being honorable with the information about his ancestor, who was a war criminal and a rapist.

[01:16:59] And a slaughter of civilians is disgraceful. We shouldn’t have politicians like this. And so I go full on and this in my book. And once again, the prevailing history, I turn it upside down on its head. And that’s kinda been the story of my life as a historian, Jeff. So those are the long-winded answers that how I kind of do crazy history if you will.

[01:17:24] But ultimately I bring out the real history.

[01:17:29] Jeff Haas: [01:17:29] I, I, you know, I, I you’re you’re I found it absolutely fascinating. I appreciate your answer. How much research you’ve done in that book? I mean I mean, for anyone, when they pick up the book Jewish Hitler’s Jewish soldiers, the glossary and the notes are about half the size

[01:17:43] Dr. Brian Rigg: [01:17:43] of the book.

[01:17:44]Jeff Haas: [01:17:44] And I, and somebody stopped that. I found fascinating in that book. And one of the things I found most fascinating was just how much time. And personal attention Hitler put into each individual. Am I pronouncing it? They would be described as the word was a Michelin that

[01:18:00] Dr. Brian Rigg: [01:18:00] is running a singular Michelin plural, Michelin a, this was the horrible term.

[01:18:06] The Nazis used to describe half Jews and quartered Jews. And that was the, the Michelin Ersten goddess. The initialing of the first degree were half Jews. And as some Eitan goddess with the Mysoline or the that were quartered Jews. And so you’re right, Hitler spent an awful lot of time going over these guys and what policies were going to affect their lives.

[01:18:27] And then he was giving thousands of clemency documents or get Naomi Goleman exceptions to the rules. And he was so obsessed looking at all these documents of these guys to see if they look blonde enough and were tall enough and have good military records to be declared of German blood, to be airy and eyes is what it was called.

[01:18:48] And so what you’re talking about you that you found fascinating? I found it also just fascinating that Hitler was so obsessed with his ratio, racial ideology, that he truly believed that only he could determine whether somebody was being dominated by their quote unquote area in blood. And with the stroke of his pen, he could either continue to declare somebody a half to record you or declare them an Aerion.

[01:19:13] And then make them a normal citizen again. And he was obsessed with going over these documents sometimes at the height of major battles, like stolen grad. He was looking at dozens of privates and corporals applications to see if they were born enough to be declared areas. Just once again, shows you how obsessed this man was with his pseudo science, racial nonsense.

[01:19:39] And that was something else that was fascinating that people have noted. They did not know about Hitler until my book came out. Now, some of the

[01:19:46] Jeff Haas: [01:19:46] stuff I wondered about, because I thought about that from a psychological standpoint. But a Hitler, I mean, honestly, it’s hard to know what it was going through.

[01:19:53] That guy said

[01:19:54] Dr. Brian Rigg: [01:19:54] yeah, scary area to go into. Right, right.

[01:19:59] Jeff Haas: [01:19:59] Wondering like his focus on that kind of minutia. Pardon me, was wondering if, is, was there a guy complex aspect, which is, I will, I can decide who lives and who dies at the little individual level. And part of me was also wondering if, was it also, this is going to sound weird, maybe a weird way of trying to think about it, but thinking that in terms of great battles and all this stuff, that’s going on, he’s focusing on something he thinks he can control when there’s things around him that are, I guess, battles and all that other stuff.

[01:20:34] And it wasn’t someone almost like. I don’t know, like a weird fricking hobby of this guy that I will do this. When I, when I can focus on these other things, I will hide my, put my energy. Just something I can focus on. I mean, what the hell was that all about?

[01:20:48] Dr. Brian Rigg: [01:20:48] Well, I mean, you bring up a lot of interesting thoughts that I’ve been exploring in my new book, learning disabilities, as well as in, in my, my old, old bucket, lose your soldiers.

[01:20:56] I explore this as well. So you know, the answer th these very profound questions you, you, you give, I give a lot of analysis and source material to the following that Hitler really believed that the fate of the world hinged on him killing off the Jews. He was so obsessed with looking at it. It was really stamped and informed by his Catholic upbringing.

[01:21:25] You know, we, we didn’t have no stay on top that it can to, you know, 1962 to 68, and finally said, Finally after 2000 years that the Jews were not guilty for DSR in perpetuity. You know, it was official preachment of the Catholic church forever that the Jews were a Satan that they killed God and they should be punished.

[01:21:47] And that’s why you have the Catholic church throughout the centuries, burning Jews at the stake, killing them, the pogroms and Poland and Russia because of the Jews being Christ killers and Hitler grew up with that Verlin Catholic you know, anti-Semitic, piffle, I mean, he used to pretend and play priest at home when he came home from church, you know, preaching to the people, you know, in his home there’s mom there and doing all the sacraments, he really enjoyed his Catholic upbringing any, and he basically told his army adjective Ingle.

[01:22:21] He would, you know, he was a Catholic and he was gonna die a Catholic. Now, you know, was he a firm believer going to confession and believing that Jesus died on the cross for people’s sins and so on? You know, nobody really knows that. I mean, he gave a lot of lip service to religion and he used religion very well, but he was definitely stamped with this antisemitism that was Berlin all throughout Austria.

[01:22:43] And this time that the Jews were, you know, man’s unfortunate. And that if you did away with the Jews, you could actually bring back a perfect. Society. That’s why he was going after the areas, you know, saying that the Jews have corrupted the areas. That’s why you have the swarthy dark Jewish man out there raping beautiful blonde women, creating these mongrels called Michelin half Jews and quarter Jews and so on.

[01:23:07] So he was obsessed with what if you could kind of reverse this evolution and evolutionary Bush, if you will, that had gone out and had created this, this hodgepodge and diversification of humanity and bring it back to the pure man. So, you know, the recessive traits of blonde hair and blue eyes and get rid of all the Jews and prevent that quote unquote blood from being in society, that you could then have the garden of Eden.

[01:23:35] Again, you could then have a perfect humanity and in his stupidity, in this respect, I mean, th these are such group tests, horrible, even at that time with the pseudo-science going on at that time that still flew in the face of, of prevailing science that was, was growing in popularity. And sociology and understanding of, of how society should be organized and democracy.

[01:24:02] So on that he was so gripped with this primitive way of looking at humanity and was driving it. Home is one thing that’s just baffles historians too. They but you know, we have it still, well, I mean, you know, ISIS was saying everybody who doesn’t believe in Islam should be slaughtered. So they go into the  just a few years ago, communities who have a, kind of like a pantheistic religion and they rape all the women and they slaughter the people because of thought crime or thinking about things.

[01:24:31] Well, that’s what Hitler was doing, because the way you think about things, if you don’t believe in it, that’s awesome. And if you have a wrong ethnicity here, you know that you are a non or a non Muslim, you know, looking like with ISIS, they also dehumanize people. They think differently than they are creatures.

[01:24:48] Satan. Think of what Iran says, the big Satan, us and the little Satan Israel, they demonize the actual human being. And that’s what Hitler was doing with the Jews. And that he was so obsessed with this. This is why he was going down all these rabbit holes, as well as with these areas, these areas , he was giving to these half Jews and quarter Jews.

[01:25:08] He did have a God complex. He really did believe he was infallible. He was called the German Messiah and many people did say he was godlike in many respects. And so, and he, you know, we know that leaders, when they start to believe they’re infallible, that’s when they start making really dumb mistakes and it was doing this all the time, making the Jews, his enemy and killing off these people, invading Russia, focusing on things that you know, you know, focusing on things that were really you know, not important of the time.

[01:25:44] I mean, and at the very end of the war, as rushed as just, you know, as a pipeline and just, you know, suffocating Berlin, Hitler’s looking at models, I have to rebuild Lentz and grads after the war. You know, he’s looking at munitions that had a blow up bridges, you know, instead of focusing on larger political issues, you know, like the height of the battle of stone grab, like I’m telling you, he’s focused on.

[01:26:08]You know, area and eyes and corporals and sergeants and so on, who are half Jews to see if they’re blonde enough enabled to come into the German you know, society and that they won’t take the blood anymore. So, you know, it does show his obsession with this racial idea. It shows that only he could make the decisions.

[01:26:27] And then also shows that he really believed that this was the critical component of how to win the war. And so th these are many of the answers to, to the to the question of why was Hitler so obsessed with the Jewish question, also looking at how he was going down, rabbit holes. I had a wonderful conversation with Dr.

[01:26:46] Fritz RedLINK who wrote Hitler, a diagnosis of a destructive prophet Redlich was the head of the psychiatry department at Yale university. And he did a 20 year study of Hitler psychologically. And I had conversations with him after his book came out. He did say Hitler was hyperactive, but he wasn’t really sure about the ADHD, but in conversations with me.

[01:27:07] And I think I’ll be the first one to bring this out in my book, learning disabilities. He basically, we, we came to the conclusion analyzing Hitler that Hitler also had issues with ADHD. And sometimes, you know, your hyper-focus with ADHD can be very good when you focus on a task. That you want to get done, or you focus on thinking out of the box and it can be used for a lot of good, but that hyper-focus can be used for a lot of bad, like Hitler did with killing the Jews, but also that hyper-focus and going down rabbit holes like focusing on rebuilding lens after the war in 1945, when the Russians are bombarding, his bunker with artillery, shells just shows you, he wasn’t focusing on reality a lot of times.

[01:27:51] And sometimes ADHD, people need to be careful how they harness their hyper focus energy, and also ADHD people, you know, Hitler was poor in school. He was bullied. He bullied others obviously, you know abuse begets abuse but he had a lot of learning issues and learning problems and it never got really taken care of.

[01:28:10] So it’s one case study on inhibitor. Like we both admit and most people who study him, he had a lot of problems. He had a lot of issues and one of that was ADHD, not being taken care of and nurtured and him having a good self esteem later on. And I focus on this aspect of him, his personality, so that ADHD nature also could have influenced him going down this rabbit hole of focusing on this racial policy.

[01:28:37] And, and all the, my knee, my new details and being obsessed with giving the final word on all these different issues and laws, when there were larger issues to be taken care of at the time that he should have been focusing on. Yeah. And, and you, you wrote something

[01:28:52] Jeff Haas: [01:28:52] very interesting in, in your book I’m going to paraphrase it, but the best I can you wrote that Hitler state in 1942, that Jewish blood was simply stronger than German blood.

[01:29:03] That Hitler felt that Jewish blood was tougher and would dominate well into future generations. How does, how does that not contradict Hitler’s own philosophy of Arion racial superiority, if he’s now worried that this blood is

[01:29:13] Dr. Brian Rigg: [01:29:13] dominant, but, you know, I, I bring out a lot of places in the book where Hitler speaks out of both sides of his mouth.

[01:29:20] I mean, it’s, it’s just quite, I mean, you know, when you’re dealing with pseudoscience nonsense, that has no basis of reality, it doesn’t make sense. You know, Nazi ideology doesn’t make sense. I mean, the, the Uber mench is a person that has recessive traits, meaning that the genes, when they come in contact with other genes are inferior in many respects because they won’t be expressed.

[01:29:46]You know, so, you know, right there, Hiller is speaking out of both sides of his mouth, you know, blonde and blue eyed men being the strong as well. They’re recessive traits. They’re not the strongest. You know, when you look at the Jewish blood, but he’s talking about this, what he’s talking about is that, you know, if.

[01:30:01] One little drop of blood gets in you and the Jews. You can taint your whole mentality. Take how you look and say, you gotta be careful. He kind of looked at Jewish. Blood is almost like venom from a snake. You know, you have one or two drops of a Cobra venom in your blood. And even though you have more blood and water in your system, those two little drops will kill you.

[01:30:24] And that’s what he says. You know, we gotta be careful that these Jews are snakes hiding to bite us and, and infect us. And that little Jewish blood is so strong. It will kill you there. There’s a, and we’ll take you and we’ll, we’ll remove you from the, the, the the, the dramatic people. I mean, there was this one case of a German doctor.

[01:30:47] And in fact, there’s two stories I want to tell you about German doctor and an SS officer. I’ll tell you the German doctor first, he is a he’s driving along. He has all his equipment with him, and he comes across a car wreck and there is a man in the car that’s bleeding out. He Touraj is him. Does it turn it?

[01:31:05] I mean, he tries it very quickly realized that he can save his life. He does. He puts a tourniquet, I think on his leg stops the bleeding, but he realizes he’s lost a lot of blood. And somehow I guess, you know, he finds out what the guy’s blood is. And I think the doctor was a universal donor. So he immediately just put the blood in him from his own body.

[01:31:26] And to this guy who was bleeding out of body and save his life. But later on, the Nazis found out that this Jewish doctor has put his own blood into an area and the guy, and he was brought up for a Rawson, Shonda racial defilement, and he was in prison for polluting and areas body would Jewish blood.

[01:31:49] And the guy who got the Jewish blood was declared, I think a quarter Jew. Holy crap. It’s just crazy. Now, another example of how this Nazi obsession with the blood Stryker would write. He was the guy who was head of the horrible antisemitic, you know, periodicals. And you know, there should have a shredder, I guess, is what it was called.

[01:32:09] And he, he believed that if a Jewish man had sex with a woman, she would never be able to have pure area and babies again, because that semen and blood and other stuff, the fluid from the guy and the woman would take her whole body for the rest of her life. They were obsessed with that. So that was another story.

[01:32:30] In addition to the two stories I want to tell you, so I’ve told you the doctor story, I told you this Stryker story, he was a nut job. He was an idiot too. You like a 90 IQ, they found it Nuremberg. And then you had the story of an SS officer who was brought to Hitler to get an award. And when he was brought before a Hitler, Hitler was shocked by his Jewish appearance.

[01:32:53] And he, he playing to his underlings. I, how dare you bring this SS officer who obviously has Jewish blood and they’re like, no, no, sir. He did his genealogy back to the 1750s. There’s no Jews in his background. He’s a kosher area, inhalers like no, look into it. There has to be something there. And sure enough, they found someone back in the 16 hundreds that he had a Jewish grandmother.

[01:33:18] He was like one, 256 Jewish. And Heather was like, see, I told you even one drop of Jewish blood will just corrupt. You’re looking at a big nose. He had big ears, he had dark hair, you know, Jewish bloods forum, you know, and, and it kind of flipped the whole racial nonsense on its head. I, I love telling this story.

[01:33:40] If you look at my books, lady, my books, a book, ladies and gentlemen on the cover, you’ll see a picture of a, of a German soldier and that’s verdict Goldberg. And there’s a full picture of him in the text in 1939. He was in a battalion that was stationed outside of Berlin. And Goebbels had asked a lot of the military units in that area to give them the propaganda unit that Goebbels had given.

[01:34:03] And some of their most Arion looking soldiers, the photograph. Well, Vernor Goldberg won the competition. He had white blonde hair, blue eyes, and they paraded him around as the typical area in soldier for several months, until they found out his father was a Jew. It shows you once again, just how bankrupt these Nazi racial laws were.

[01:34:25] So yeah. You know, Hitler talked about though, you know what I mean? This is the interesting thing. I mean, he talks about on one side, the Jewish blood being horrible and being so powerful, but on the other side, talking about the Jews being weak and corrupt and horrible and so on, but then he, on one side he says, you know, Hey, if we don’t kill off the Jews, they’re going to rule the world.

[01:34:44] Look at the protocols of the elders of Zion. They’re going to take over the world. And they Ru they, they already rule all the banking. They control the law, they control the medicine, they control everything. They’re powerful. You know, we got to get, I got to go get them get rid of them because they’re only using this power to corrupt us and hold us down, you know?

[01:35:06] So on one side, you know, they’re so powerful, but under say, Hey, look at them. They’re like little monkeys. They have flat feet and big noses and they’re fat and dark hair and the swarthy complexion and they’re full of disease like syphilis and so on. But yet they’re going to dominate the world. I mean, the schizophrenia, the Nazi ideology was just Legion, you know, Well, there’s one

[01:35:30] Jeff Haas: [01:35:30] great quote that I just want to use from the book.

[01:35:31] That kind of goes over that a little

[01:35:33] Dr. Brian Rigg: [01:35:33] bit as well. You, you have a quote from

[01:35:35] Jeff Haas: [01:35:35] Hahns. I think it’s the  there’s 96. He says, this is a quote from him. I just don’t like Jews. I would never do anything to a Jew. I must tell you that because the Jew is also human being. When I get to know a Jew, then he’s no longer a Jew, but a mentor like you and me, the idea of hitting it individual, till you get to know them is such this such a mental dissonance there between the idea that these are bad people until you get to know the person, then that person could be fantastic.

[01:36:04] That it makes you wonder about. And it seems like a lot of races across the board have a similar ideology of there’s, you know, there hates a group, but there’s a good one of this. There’s a good one of that. And I kind of, I was wondering how does the racist not see the contradiction there between saying these people are good when I know them, but the ones I don’t know are bad, you would figure there’d be some logic there of saying, well, then maybe they’re not bad.

[01:36:29] If you know what I’m saying,

[01:36:33] Dr. Brian Rigg: [01:36:33] this phenomenon it’s usually, if we’re cutting you off Jaffa on this phenomenon, I always thought, you know, I was a product of the Israeli military and the Marine Corps. And also I played college forts and these are great equalizers. You know, when you’re in the Marine Corps, after 10 weeks of going through OCS, you know, you’re going through OCS with African-Americans Latinos, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, atheists, you know, you name it.

[01:36:55]Then the knees, I had a guy Dan and my, my group was wonderful guy. And you know, after 10 weeks we’re willing to die for each other. There’s one color green, you know, our cam up and we’re brothers in arms. And you know, when you have that intimacy, it’s very hard when you are with a fellow human being to hate them.

[01:37:13] When you realize that they’re just like you, they want to have families, they want to be productive. They’re driven and they’re good comrades. And so hunts hurt or who was a quarter Jew himself. Slamming the Jews was also infected with the antisemitism, especially of Austria because he’s from Austria and they had a totally different antisemitism than Germany.

[01:37:33] It was worse. And the respects with this hatred and the hatred they had was toward ultra Orthodox Jews. The ultra religious Jews who gave Jews a bad name, who were acculturated the, the echoes, the acculturated German Jews. And so a lot of times we talked to these guys like hands. I remember he’s looking at the shtetl, June, the ghetto Jew, the guy who wants to study Torah all day long, who actually tells people they are the chosen people and that everybody else is inferior and that are religious bigots.

[01:38:02] And he’s kind of hating that to you. And then you add his religious, I mean, his his secular education in an Austria during the time of the third, right? When you have all this pseudoscience, antisemitism, horrible racism combined with. The bigotry that was there against these ultra religious Jews, it just added fuel on the fire.

[01:38:24] And that’s why he can’t stand these people now. So instead of him saying intellectually, you know, I don’t like religious types, whether they be Mormons or ultra Jews. And I don’t like people who have religious bigotry, you say they have their true religion. Everybody else is wrong. And intellectualizing them process.

[01:38:43] He just kind of go through his default of what he was raised with saying, you know what, those Jews and the captains, the nuts, this is what they were saying about in many respects, they were right. They were bad and so on. And I was shocked when I heard this, but it was something that you, you struggled with with a lot of these people, they had a lot of self-loathing because they were Jewish.

[01:39:03] They were personally Jewish themselves. Many of them had grandfathers and grandmothers that were religious Jews, who they were criticizing, you know? And when I brought that out to the likes, like hands hurt her and many others. I’m like, Hey, you’re criticizing these people who were like your grandfathers and grandmothers and so on.

[01:39:23] Well, how, how, how dare you do that? Yeah. And they, they had a schizophrenia to some degree. I mean, Ralph on Sudan wrote a book called fear to breathe. And he did everything he could to prove that he wasn’t Jewish. He almost became more of a Jew hater in his school, in the Hitler youth and so on. And then, then the, the Nazis that were there, just to prove that he was part of the in-group and it’s, it’s sad that you have that psychology, but the fear of being ostracized, the fear of being outside of the circle of the fear of not being accepted is, is a universal human fear.

[01:40:05] It’s just sad when you have that fear laced with the intolerance and antisemitism and the radicalism of a third, right. You know but we have that also in America, we’re still dealing with the remanence of Jim Crow, laws and, and, and racism. Like we’re seeing now the fear of a black man being pulled over by a white cop and what that means.

[01:40:28] And also the fear that I’m sure you’re dealing with your students. And just like, I fear not being accepted because being labeled stupid, you know, so these are enduring themes of humanity. And so on one side, when I heard this antisense and medic piffle from these guys, like Huns herder, I understood that, Hey, the first 20 years of their lives, they were raised with all those antisemitism.

[01:40:47] And they had a deep program themselves to some degree. And many of them never really fully deprogram themselves, which is sad. And it just shows you how important it is to raise people early that were part of one race, the human race, and that the bridges that bond is as human beings are so much more plentiful than the tiny little streams of ideology and religion that divide us.

[01:41:15] And if we can really live our lives, according to the Jewish Sage Hillel, what is hateful to you do not do to others. We will have a more moral society. So Heinz herder is a hard binger, if you will, for the future of what we need to do early on with our children of creating more tolerant society. So we don’t create monsters later on when they’re adults.

[01:41:40] Well,

[01:41:41] Jeff Haas: [01:41:41] the thing I found fascinating as well as kind of play on the same kind of theme so much of the Nazi I want to say Durham by wasn’t German, it was Nazi time, energy mindset was involved with the Jewish questions, right? They were, they dismissing discharging thousands of 50 per percent of 24% Jews from the army that was for funding for them.

[01:42:06] So much administration time was spent worrying about the Jews. So much time of Hitler was spent worrying about the Jewish question. If the Nazis did not have that those issues was, would there have been enough soldiers in the army that were Jewish that would have that they weren’t discharged and all that other energy could that have been a decider in the war?

[01:42:26] Like go in that what I’m saying so much time, energy and every, and every house.

[01:42:31] Dr. Brian Rigg: [01:42:31] Well, yeah, I mean, these are good questions. I’ll let you know, you always gotta be careful with hypothetical history, but you know, if, if. If you had 150,000 men that were of Jewish descent. And I break that down to 90,000 quarter Jews and 60,000 half Jews.

[01:42:49] So those say 60, 70,000 half Jews were kicked out in 40 and 41 before Russia. That’s basically in MOC terms, that’s three military divisions. Now Hitler wanted to take Mascoutah and had Moscow fallen. There’s a good chance that installing would’ve surrendered. I mean, he was already wanting to kind of surrender and give half up half of his country up to Germany.

[01:43:15] If he could have, you know, the Eastern part of Russia. And he had moved his government, you know to the West of the bureaus. And so had Hitler had three more division when he was attacking Moscow in November, in December that might’ve been the deciding factor. Eddie took it, but you know, we look at Napoleon, Napoleon took Moscow and he still lost, and it was a very cold winter.

[01:43:38]So would it have made a difference maybe? I mean, there’s, you know, had Hitler maybe focused on the Messerschmitt two 62 and let it be a fighter in 40 and 41 when it was coming on. Instead of trying to turn it into a bomber for a couple of years, that could have changed things over the air war. Had he got the snorkel.

[01:43:55]Part of the U boats early on, where they could recharge their batteries without servicing. So the British and American planes couldn’t find them what the radar is easily. Would that have made a difference positive had Hitler, not invaded Russia period that there would be a a monument to him on every corner in Western Europe, because he most likely would have won the war.

[01:44:16] Had he not gotten to Russia? Had he not focused on the Jewish question like he did and had he not persecuted the Jews, how to use the Jews and the people of Jewish descent to to help his society like Germany did in world war one, using the Jewish population as part of the German population, they were Germans.

[01:44:33]He most likely would have done a lot better in the conflict with the war, taking resources away from his military by focusing so much on killing Jews, 6 million of them like he did and focusing so much bureaucratic time like you, like you said, and then, you know, discharging such wonderful, brave well-trained soldiers was idiotic, you know, so, you know, I I’ve often said when people said, how could it Hitler won the war?

[01:45:03] I think, you know, if you could have sat down with Heather and try to use them for good and saying, okay, Hey. You know, doing weather reside, treaty German nationalism, bring Germany back together, you know, focus on cancer research, which he did focus on that the auto bond and cars for everybody, which he did focus on medical research, which he did focus on good military hardware.

[01:45:27] You know, it’s a good thing for, for power focus on education, getting everybody universal education. He did, you know he’s doing a lot of good stuff. Getting people back to work, feeding a family, better infrastructure with the logistics of food. Good. He did that. And if you focus on his is okay, Hey Stalinism.

[01:45:43] And installing slaughter 20 million of his own people. He was a bad guy, just as bad as Hitler. We should have gotten rid of him that we were allied with him as a disgrace in many respects, but you know, the old Roman phrase, but the enemy, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And we installing really bled the German army white because 80% of all, Germans who died in world war II died on the Eastern front.

[01:46:05]But you know, had somebody been able to influence Hitler in such a way, once he got power to use all that energy and focus towards science and education. And fighting communism, a good thing and not antisemitism, but doing some things about, you know, some of the bad regimes that were raising their ugly head at that time, like stolen ism.

[01:46:30] There’s a good chance that you would have been, you know, one of the greatest leaders Europe ever had. And like I said, especially if he didn’t persecute the Jews and didn’t go to Russia and just took over Western Europe and consolidated his gains you would have, you know, monuments all over Europe to, to, to the man.

[01:46:47] But, you know, we know the history that we do and he was a horrible human being and it sad that the world had to be subjected to his role for 12 years.

[01:46:57] Jeff Haas: [01:46:57] And, you know, I, I really do think you’re your novel hinder Jews. So I think it was so fascinating. I think it tells us so much about how people viewed themselves

[01:47:05] Dr. Brian Rigg: [01:47:05] identity, the

[01:47:07] Jeff Haas: [01:47:07] dangers of justice.

[01:47:09] Hatred, I mean, absolute hatred and how destructive that is not only to the individual, to the family, to the community, but I mean, in the macro, I mean, literally an entire war was potentially lost due to an uncontrolled hatred that cost him this hard bias that affected a lot of things. And I said, I think, I think the book was absolutely genius.

[01:47:31] And so we, we, we talked for a couple of hours and I want to thank you so much for all your time. I really think appreciate your insights into history and learning. And when that, when your book is out about learning disabilities, I definitely need to buy myself a coffee and it’s terrific.

[01:47:47] And I thank you so much, Mr. Dr. Riggs, Dr. Reg was a pleasure to speak

[01:47:51] Dr. Brian Rigg: [01:47:51] with you. Oh, well, thank you, Jeff. I appreciate it. And if I may end on this note where you bring up about identity and the importance you, you got my theme, and I like to lead this with the people you know, with what we’ve been talking about today, especially with Hitler’s your soldiers and the hatred like you’re talking about.

[01:48:05] I think it’s very important for all of us speaking to the crowd now, To look at our identities, especially when we’re raising our children and being around our students. Like, you know, I had, for a long time, I had over a thousand and Jeff, you have students now and look at these questions, ladies and gentlemen of whoever, because ultimately the way we come to identify ourselves, you know, am I black or am I white?

[01:48:29] Am I a Jew? Or am I a Christian? Am I worthy to live? Or am I worthy not to live? I mean, ultimately the way we come to answer these questions directly reflects how we understand history, how we interpret our society. And more importantly, the way we come to answer the question, who am I directly re corresponds with how we treat others?

[01:48:56] Yeah. There in lies, the wisdom, you know, are you treating people more, more in a more kind way in a more understanding way in a more wise way? And if you are, that’s an interesting reflection of how you’re actually identifying yourself as a human being. And that’s what the whole crutch of my theme is with my Hybels juror soldiers, as you’re reading there’s, as you’re seeing how important it is to answer that question, who am I, and the answer it.

[01:49:27] Properly incorrectly. So thank you for bringing that out there at the end, Jeff, and letting me in with that and thank you so much for having me on your program and honoring me with your questions and having read my book. Thank you. It’s

[01:49:40] Jeff Haas: [01:49:40] definitely my pleasure, sir. So I’m gonna, we’re gonna head out, but just take off just a few minutes after I stopped recording.

[01:49:45] I greatly appreciate your time. And like I said, it’s, it’s a great honor, sir.

[01:49:51] Dr. Brian Rigg: [01:49:51] Thanks Jeff.