0
SPEAKER_01
Guess what, Will?
0
SPEAKER_01
What s up, Mango?
0
SPEAKER_01
I ve been trying to write a promo for our podcast, Part-Time Genius, but even though we ve done over 250 episodes, we don t really talk about murders or cults.
0
SPEAKER_01
I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy.
0
SPEAKER_01
We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food and how do dollar stores make money?
0
SPEAKER_01
And then, of course, can you game a dog show?
0
SPEAKER_01
So what you re saying is everyone should be listening.
0
SPEAKER_01
Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
0
SPEAKER_04
A new season of Bridgerton is here.
0
SPEAKER_04
And with it, a new season of Bridgerton, the official podcast.
0
SPEAKER_04
I m your host, Gabby Collins.
0
SPEAKER_04
And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
0
SPEAKER_04
Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix.
0
SPEAKER_04
Then fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton, the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0
SPEAKER_04
Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday.
0
SPEAKER_03
Hey everybody, it s me Josh, and for this week s Select I ve chosen our episode on Legends of Nazi Gold from April of 2020.
0
SPEAKER_03
This is the one where we learn that Nazis were even worse than we thought.
0
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Not only were they murderous swine, obviously, they were also scumbag thieves too, who didn t have enough money to fund the war they started in the first place.
0
SPEAKER_03
So they went around looting and robbing from neighboring countries.
0
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And by the end of the war, with the writing on the wall, they hid a lot of that gold that they stole in strange, unmarked places around Europe.
0
SPEAKER_03
Some people believe it s still hidden, just waiting to be found.
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Hence this episode.
0
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Hope you enjoy.
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
0
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
0
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I m Josh Clark, and there s Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there.
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Jerry s somewhere.
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SPEAKER_03
We lost her.
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SPEAKER_03
I think she wandered off.
0
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
0
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But this is stuff you should know regardless.
0
SPEAKER_03
The lost Nazi gold edition.
0
SPEAKER_02
The legend of Curly s gold.
0
SPEAKER_03
If Curly was a white nationalist.
0
SPEAKER_02
Well, who s to say he wasn t?
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SPEAKER_03
I don t, I, I don t know.
0
SPEAKER_03
He, Jack Palance seems like the kind who would have beat up white nationalists for fun as like a hobby.
0
SPEAKER_03
You know what I mean?
0
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_02
You know, uh, we, we can t get into the super ins and outs, but as you know, my brother worked on the legend of Curly s gold and Jack, Jack balance was a tough sob.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_03
I hear he used to do shots of nails.
0
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I mean, he wasn t a jerk, I wouldn t say, but it just sounded like he was just sort of a very cantankerous old fella to work with.
0
SPEAKER_03
That s so funny, man, because, I mean, at the end of the day, he s an actor.
0
SPEAKER_02
I know.
0
SPEAKER_02
You re an actor.
0
SPEAKER_03
It s not like you weld machine guns or something like that.
0
SPEAKER_03
Give me a break.
0
SPEAKER_03
You re an actor.
0
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, like, Clint Eastwood s not really tough.
0
SPEAKER_02
Well, actually, that s not true.
0
SPEAKER_02
Is he?
0
SPEAKER_02
Oh, sure.
0
SPEAKER_02
Probably.
0
SPEAKER_02
He s gotta be.
0
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At the very least, he s been acting like it so long he s developed.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, it s probably like a callus, you know what I mean?
0
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Where it just kind of forms and stays.
0
SPEAKER_03
A callus.
0
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It s the callousness of toughness that an actor will form.
0
SPEAKER_02
I don t think Clint Eastwood whines about a hangnail.
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SPEAKER_02
Let s just say that.
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SPEAKER_03
No.
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Like we do.
0
SPEAKER_03
That d be pretty disappointing.
0
SPEAKER_03
I actually was whining about a hangnail to myself the other day.
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SPEAKER_03
Of course.
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But I m not an actor.
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I m a podcaster, Chuck.
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No, we have a TV show that proves that.
0
SPEAKER_02
And I m speaking for both of us.
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SPEAKER_02
Ouch.
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SPEAKER_03
I thought I did some good work.
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SPEAKER_02
I thought you did a better job than I did, actually.
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SPEAKER_03
I think we both did a much better job than you remember.
0
SPEAKER_03
All right.
0
SPEAKER_03
So if you hate Nazis and you re like, it s been a while since I was given a reason to hate Nazis, a new one.
0
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Rejoice, because we re about to give you another one.
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At least I didn t really realize this to this extent.
0
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Did you?
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You know, I knew about Nazi gold and that they took things, but I didn t know that it was almost one big people-killing and world-robbing operation.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, that s the thing.
0
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That s the new thing to hate them for.
0
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Not only were they murderers, they were also just common thieves as well.
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I mean, thieves on one of the greatest scales anyone s ever seen, but thieves nonetheless.
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SPEAKER_02
I m an exceptional thief.
0
SPEAKER_03
Who was that?
0
SPEAKER_03
Michael Caine?
0
SPEAKER_02
No.
0
SPEAKER_02
Diehard.
0
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They called him a common thief.
0
SPEAKER_02
And he goes, I m an exceptional thief.
0
SPEAKER_03
Right.
0
SPEAKER_03
Rodney Dangerfield.
0
SPEAKER_03
Can you imagine?
0
SPEAKER_03
Oh, I can t wait till technology gets like advanced enough that you can just insert whoever into whatever character and they ll say the same lines and everything.
0
SPEAKER_03
That d be great.
0
SPEAKER_03
That s the first one I m doing is Rodney Dangerfield as Hans Gruber.
0
SPEAKER_02
He would have been wonderful.
0
SPEAKER_02
That scene where he s fooling him into thinking he was one of the party goers.
0
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And he goes, what s your name?
0
SPEAKER_02
Oh, it s Bill Clay.
0
SPEAKER_02
That s what it is.
0
SPEAKER_02
Don t shoot me.
0
SPEAKER_02
Come on.
0
SPEAKER_02
Nobody shoots me.
0
SPEAKER_03
I got no respect.
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SPEAKER_03
That s pretty good.
0
SPEAKER_03
Pretty good.
0
SPEAKER_02
Oh boy.
0
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Okay, so the Nazis were thieves, not just because they looted and plundered the countries that they occupied, but that they did it because they were broke to start off with.
0
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That s what truly makes them thieving SOBs, is that
0
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their whole jam, this whole war, World War that they started, they didn t have the resources financially or industrially to actually carry out this war.
0
SPEAKER_03
They had to go steal to fund their role in World War II, which they started.
0
SPEAKER_02
That s right.
0
SPEAKER_02
You point out here, you put this together.
0
SPEAKER_02
Good stuff.
0
SPEAKER_02
Thanks.
0
SPEAKER_02
That in 1923, they had hyperinflation such that in November of that year, it cost 80 billion marks to buy a loaf of bread.
0
SPEAKER_02
Is that right?
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, which sounds like a lot on its own.
0
SPEAKER_03
But if you consider that earlier that year in January, a loaf of bread cost 250 marks.
0
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_03
So the price of bread went from 250 marks to 80 billion marks in less than a year.
0
SPEAKER_02
But isn t that just a way of saying that nobody bought bread?
0
SPEAKER_03
No, it meant, it s a way of saying that their money was totally worthless.
0
SPEAKER_03
Remember it happened in Zimbabwe?
0
SPEAKER_03
I can t remember what episode it was.
0
SPEAKER_03
Maybe how much money is there in the world?
0
SPEAKER_03
We talked about hyperinflation.
0
SPEAKER_02
I think so.
0
SPEAKER_02
That was staggering.
0
SPEAKER_03
It was staggering.
0
SPEAKER_03
And the same thing happened in 1923 in the Weimar Republic.
0
SPEAKER_03
And this is the state of the German economy that the Nazis rose to power in because, you know, that s one of the reasons they were able to rise to power and fascism was able to take over.
0
SPEAKER_03
Because the country and the economy was in such dire straits that this idea of like, hey, everybody get in line behind this guy because he s going to lead us out of it, that s essentially one way that Hitler and the Nazis were able to rise to power.
0
SPEAKER_03
But that also means that he inherited a terrible economy and he had to figure out what to do.
0
SPEAKER_03
Not only a terrible economy, Chuck, but Germany lacks natural resources that you would need to start a war machine, too.
0
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, they have no oil.
0
SPEAKER_02
They don t have mineral deposits that you can make really fine metals out of.
0
SPEAKER_02
They ve got sauerkraut.
0
SPEAKER_03
They have sauerkraut.
0
SPEAKER_03
They have a lot of beer, too, to their credit, but if that s all you got, you need more to fight a war with.
0
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so what happened was they had what was called the Reichsmark, which was the monetary unit of the Third Reich, and there were five
0
SPEAKER_02
neutral countries that declared during World War II, like, we re not going to trade in Reichsmarks.
0
SPEAKER_02
So Hitler and Germany said, well, you know, what s always valuable anywhere is gold.
0
SPEAKER_02
And let s start taking it from anywhere and everywhere we can get it.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, and gold in particular, it s what s called a very fungible commodity.
0
SPEAKER_03
Like, you can trade just about anything for gold, right?
0
SPEAKER_03
If you have gold, people will give you whatever you want.
0
SPEAKER_03
You can use it to buy oil.
0
SPEAKER_03
You can use it to buy guns.
0
SPEAKER_03
You can use it to fund terrorism.
0
SPEAKER_03
You can use it to back your own currency.
0
SPEAKER_03
There s a lot of stuff you can do with gold.
0
SPEAKER_03
But in particular, in World War II, if you were the Third Reich, the Nazi regime,
0
SPEAKER_03
you needed to use gold because these neutral countries couldn t accept Reich marks by agreement, but also the Reich s marks were worthless anyway.
0
SPEAKER_03
So if you wanted to buy a bunch of guns, you needed some gold.
0
SPEAKER_03
And because Germany at the time only had about 25 tons of gold in its reserves, which sounds like a lot, but as we ll see, is a paltry amount of gold compared to what they looted and pillaged and took.
0
SPEAKER_03
Um, they, they needed some gold.
0
SPEAKER_03
And so, yeah, they started looting it.
0
SPEAKER_03
And the first place they turned, Chuck, was Austria.
0
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_02
How much gold did you say they had?
0
SPEAKER_03
They had 25 metric, from what I understand, 25 metric tons.
1
SPEAKER_04
metric tons of gold in the reserve.
1
SPEAKER_04
Germany did at the outset of World War II.
1
SPEAKER_01
All right, well, this will drive home how much that is.
1
SPEAKER_01
They looted 15 tons, just 10 tons less, from the citizens, Jewish citizens of Vienna, Austria.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
From the capital city only, they looted 15 tons of gold from Jewish citizens.
1
SPEAKER_04
Just citizens, like you said.
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah, and that s, those are just people.
1
SPEAKER_01
So the Central Bank of Austria, they got 100 tons of gold.
1
SPEAKER_01
So right there, four times what they had in reserve.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then they said, hey, you know that six tons of gold that you re trying to send away to England to keep safe from us?
1
SPEAKER_01
Bring that back here too, we want that.
1
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, they did.
1
SPEAKER_04
So just from Austria alone, they got 121 tons.
1
SPEAKER_04
Yes, to add to their existing 25 tons.
1
SPEAKER_04
It was a huge deal that kickstarted the Nazi war machine into high gear.
1
SPEAKER_04
It was a big coup.
1
SPEAKER_04
Austria wasn t expecting it.
1
SPEAKER_04
No one was expecting it.
1
SPEAKER_04
And so other countries in Europe.
1
SPEAKER_04
suddenly like gulped and they were like we need to we need to take this as advance warning basically we don t want to become like Austria and they triggered Chuck the largest physical transfer of wealth that the the world the planet has ever seen.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, because I didn t know this, and it s kind of cool that countries that are friendly to one another will help each other out like this.
1
SPEAKER_01
You can say, hey, US, you ve got Fort Knox there.
1
SPEAKER_01
I ve heard that s a pretty safe place to keep gold.
1
SPEAKER_01
We re England, so can we send you a bunch of that to keep for us?
1
SPEAKER_01
And just, you know, we ll make a receipt out so we know how much there is.
1
SPEAKER_04
See an IOU.
1
SPEAKER_01
And you promise not to spend any of it.
1
SPEAKER_01
And the U.S.
1
SPEAKER_01
and Canada, early on at least, did things like this.
1
SPEAKER_01
They accepted huge gold shipments.
1
SPEAKER_01
There was an operation in 1940 called Project Fish where the U.K.
1
SPEAKER_01
was sending, or Britain was sending, 1,500 metric tons of gold to the U.S.
1
SPEAKER_01
to store in Fort Knox.
1
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, and in 2019 dollars, the amount that they sent on slow boats through the Atlantic, which, by the way, were infested with U-boats by 1940, was worth $166 billion in today s dollars.
1
SPEAKER_01
And it got there somehow.
1
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, not one of those ships was sunk astoundingly.
1
SPEAKER_01
Isn t that nuts?
1
SPEAKER_01
Crazy.
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, they didn t know, clearly.
1
SPEAKER_04
And so Britain sent that 1,500 metric tons.
1
SPEAKER_04
Russia, they were like, we re just going to take care of ourselves.
1
SPEAKER_04
They evacuated a bunch of stuff from their stockpiles.
1
SPEAKER_04
They sent 2,800 tons of gold from its banks to a location in the Ural Mountains for safekeeping.
1
SPEAKER_04
They also sent two other national treasures too, the embalmed corpse of Nikolai Lenin
1
SPEAKER_04
and artwork from the Hermitage Museum.
1
SPEAKER_04
Those were the three things they prized the most to transfer by train to the Ural Mountains to stash until the war was over.
1
SPEAKER_01
So all told, if you want to add it up, during the course of World War II, the Nazis stole at least, that we know of, 400 million American dollars in gold from countries they occupied and another 140 million dollars in gold from people, largely
1
SPEAKER_01
Jewish people from their homes, people that were imprisoned in concentration camps.
1
SPEAKER_01
They stole.
1
SPEAKER_01
It was a very meticulous thing that they did.
1
SPEAKER_01
They would raid their homes.
1
SPEAKER_01
They wouldn t just round people up.
1
SPEAKER_01
They would go to their safety deposit boxes.
1
SPEAKER_01
They would rip their
1
SPEAKER_01
dental fillings out of their teeth such that it even got the name tooth gold, sun gold.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that didn t, you know, that covered everything that they stole from people, not just the gold from teeth that covered people s wedding rings and their jewelry and their parts of eyeglasses and other things like that.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s just unbelievable how much gold they looted from concentration camp victims.
1
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, especially when you step back and look at it like that Germany really needed the money.
1
SPEAKER_04
The Third Reich needed the money.
1
SPEAKER_04
They were just robbing, robbing and murdering.
1
SPEAKER_04
That s what they were doing.
1
SPEAKER_04
You know, it really kind of puts it into perspective more.
1
SPEAKER_04
I mean, the Nazis were the worst, dude, and still are.
1
SPEAKER_04
Nazis are the worst.
1
SPEAKER_04
So most of that gold that was stolen from occupied countries, I didn t see how many tons it was, but would you say generally the figure I ve seen is about 500 to 600 million dollars in 1940s dollars.
1
SPEAKER_04
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_04
stolen, and most of it was put into the Reichsbank, which is Germany s central bank, kind of like its Federal Reserve.
1
SPEAKER_04
And there are different branches throughout the country.
1
SPEAKER_04
And, you know, the gold was kind of distributed here or there.
1
SPEAKER_04
But as the war kind of moved on, it was moved more and more into the central Reichsbank in Berlin.
1
SPEAKER_04
Until 1945, and there was a bombing raid on Berlin, on Germany, and they said, we need to get this gold out of here and into secret locations.
1
SPEAKER_04
And so the gold from the Reichsbank, hundreds of millions, today, billions and billions worth of dollars worth of gold was moved to places where no one had any idea, secret locations that weren t banks in Germany.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so this would set off, I mean, people are still looking for Nazi gold today.
1
SPEAKER_01
And not just walking around with a metal detector, but some people are putting a lot of money into looking for Nazi gold.
1
SPEAKER_01
And one of the big reasons is A, like you just said, we know that they moved it at some point.
1
SPEAKER_01
And B, in April of 1945, there were some military police patrolling around the town of Merkers.
1
SPEAKER_01
And they questioned a couple of French women who had been displaced.
1
SPEAKER_01
And they said, in French, I would imagine, that they saw gold being stored in a potassium mine near the town.
1
SPEAKER_04
And the MP said, Sacre bleu.
1
SPEAKER_04
I mean, holy cow.
1
SPEAKER_01
And the army investigates this, and they found the, it s famous now, the Merker s Mine treasure, which was a hoard of gold.
1
SPEAKER_01
There was a room
1
SPEAKER_01
covered in 7,000 marked bags of gold coins, gold bars, gold jewelry, valued at about $238,945,000.
1
SPEAKER_01
So this was a signal to everyone like, wow, the legend of Curley s gold is real.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, because this is only about half the money.
1
SPEAKER_01
So let s let s get our metal detectors out.
1
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, I mean, this idea that the Nazis hid gold in mine shafts or all sorts of different places was proven by that Merkers mine treasure, that they did this and there were substantial amounts to be found.
1
SPEAKER_04
That was $238 million worth, but they stole $500 to $600 million worth
1
SPEAKER_04
which means that there is a substantial amount of gold unaccounted for.
1
SPEAKER_04
And that is what has fueled treasure hunters to look for what today would be billions of dollars worth of gold that was lost and scattered and spread after World War II.
1
SPEAKER_04
And I say, Chuck, I have a proposal for you.
1
SPEAKER_04
I bet I know what it is.
1
SPEAKER_04
Pie.
1
SPEAKER_04
What s your favorite kind of pie?
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I really love a key lime.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s hard not to go with key lime.
1
SPEAKER_04
Okay, but what about just like a standard traditional fruit pie?
1
SPEAKER_04
They re really tough to beat, like a good cherry pie?
1
SPEAKER_01
If I m going fruit pie, it s going to be an apple crumble for sure.
1
SPEAKER_04
Okay, I used to be in that same group with you.
1
SPEAKER_01
Until you had the sweetest cherry pie.
1
SPEAKER_04
Yep.
1
SPEAKER_04
Warrant talked me into trying it, and I loved it.
1
SPEAKER_04
Cherry Pie is actually as good as the song makes it sound.
1
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
1
SPEAKER_01
All right.
1
SPEAKER_01
We ll be right back.
1
SPEAKER_04
Okay.
1
SPEAKER_02
Guess what, Mango?
1
SPEAKER_02
What s that, Will?
1
SPEAKER_02
So iHeart is giving us a whole minute to promote our podcast, Part-Time Genius.
1
SPEAKER_03
I know, that s why I spent my whole week composing a haiku for the occasion.
1
SPEAKER_03
It s about my emotional journey in podcasting over the last seven years, and it s called Earthquake House.
1
SPEAKER_02
Mango, I m going to cut you off right there.
1
SPEAKER_03
Why don t we just tell people about our show instead?
1
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, that s a better idea.
1
SPEAKER_03
So every week on Part-Time Genius, we feed our curiosity by answering the world s most important questions.
1
SPEAKER_03
Things like, when did America start dialing 911?
1
SPEAKER_03
is William Shatner s best acting work in Esperanto.
1
SPEAKER_03
Also, what happened to Esperanto?
1
SPEAKER_02
Plus, we cover questions like how Chinese is your Chinese food?
1
SPEAKER_02
How do dollar stores stay in business?
1
SPEAKER_02
And of course, is there an Illuminati of cheese?
1
SPEAKER_02
There absolutely is.
1
SPEAKER_03
And we are risking our lives by talking about it.
1
SPEAKER_03
But if you love mind blowing facts, incredible history and really bad jokes, make
2
SPEAKER_02
Make your brains happy and tune into Part-Time Genius.
2
SPEAKER_02
Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
2
SPEAKER_03
Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception.
2
SPEAKER_03
I m Andrea Gunning, and now we re sharing an all-new story of betrayal.
2
SPEAKER_03
Stacey thought she had the perfect husband.
2
SPEAKER_03
Doctor, father, family man.
2
SPEAKER_03
It was the perfect cover for Justin Rutherford to hide behind.
2
SPEAKER_04
They led me into the house, and I mean, it was like a movie.
2
SPEAKER_04
He was sitting at our kitchen table.
2
SPEAKER_04
The cops were guarding him.
2
SPEAKER_03
Stacey learned how far her husband would go to save himself.
2
SPEAKER_04
I slept with a loaded gun next to my bed.
2
SPEAKER_00
He did not just say, I wish he was dead.
2
SPEAKER_00
He actually gave details and explained different scenarios on how to kill him.
2
SPEAKER_04
He, to me, is scarier than Jeffrey Dahmer.
2
SPEAKER_03
Listen to Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
2
SPEAKER_01
A new season of Bridgerton is here.
2
SPEAKER_01
And with it, a new season of Bridgerton, the official podcast.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m your host, Gabrielle Collins.
2
SPEAKER_01
And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
2
SPEAKER_01
Colin Bridgerton has returned from his travels abroad.
2
SPEAKER_01
Is Betrothal written in the stars for the eligible bachelor?
2
SPEAKER_01
Meanwhile, the ton is reverberating with speculation of who holds Lady Whistledown s pen.
2
SPEAKER_01
We re discussing it all.
2
SPEAKER_01
I sit down with Nicola Coughlin, Luke Newton, Shonda Rhimes, and more to offer an exclusive peek behind the scenes of each episode of the new season.
2
SPEAKER_01
Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix.
2
SPEAKER_01
Then, fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton, the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday.
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She s my cherry pie.
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Yeah, I ve tried it with cheese, like they say, but it s not very good.
2
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I think that s typically apple pie that s supposed to have cheese on it.
2
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So I just like straight cherry pie.
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Cherry pie, cool drink of water, it s a sweet surprise.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I ve tried it with a cool drink of water, too.
2
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It s good.
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SPEAKER_02
It s better with just water than, say, like, Coke, because Coke s sweet taste competes with the sweetness of the cherry pie.
2
SPEAKER_02
So they re pretty much right on, except for the cheese.
2
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They say it ll make a grown man cry.
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I m here to tell you that s the truth.
2
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Oh, boy, that song and that video, so dumb, but also very titillating for a very young Chuck.
2
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You know, have you seen the Rush documentary?
2
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Oh, sure.
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Did you know that Sebastian Bach from Skid Row, it was Skid Row, right?
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He was, well, Warrant s saying Cherry Pie, but yeah, Sebastian Bach was Skid Row.
2
SPEAKER_05
I know.
2
SPEAKER_05
Okay.
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But like, it s just a huge leap from Skid Row to Warrant.
2
SPEAKER_02
Give me a break.
2
SPEAKER_02
But Sebastian Bach was from Warrant, right?
2
SPEAKER_05
Uh, no, no, no.
2
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He was Skid Row.
2
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Oh, that s what I mean.
2
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Yeah, Warrant was Janie Lane, if I m not mistaken.
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Yeah, you re right, man.
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You got it.
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The poor man s Brett Michaels.
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Yeah, in a way.
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And sorry, Janie, I really didn t mean that, but I couldn t leave it.
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But Sebastian Bach from Skid Row is one of the greatest and longest-standing Rush fans of all time.
2
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That s right, he was all over that.
2
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Yeah, I think he joined their fan club in like seventh or eighth grade, he said.
2
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And I love that right now somewhere Brett Michaels is walking around playing that on repeat to his family.
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Did you hear that?
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Did you hear what Josh said?
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He thinks I m better than the Skid Row guy.
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SPEAKER_02
No, you mean Warrant.
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It doesn t matter.
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All right, so we re talking about Nazi gold, and we were saying before we started talking about warrant and everything that there is gold that is unaccounted for, that was stolen by the Nazis, that just kind of vaporized after the war.
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Gold s not supposed to do that.
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It s one of the things that people love about gold is it doesn t just vaporize into thin air.
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It s really easy to keep track of if you want to.
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And so people started looking for gold or looking for clues.
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And one of the big clues that people started following was local rumors and legends.
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Like in Merkers, there were plenty of rumors and legends that there was gold hidden in a mine nearby.
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In Dimdar Hills.
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Exactly.
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And so the people hearing local legends has really kind of fueled
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hunt for hunts for Nazi treasures for almost a century now.
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Yeah.
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So we re going to go through a bunch of these.
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There s one called Lake Toplitz.
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Yeah.
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It s a very lovely place, I m sure you looked up pictures.
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But people and treasure hunters have been looking for this gold in Lake Toplitz ever since, and this is very much fact, a bunch of Nazis retreated there in the Austrian Alps in the final months of the war.
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U.S.
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troops were closing in fast and Germany was about to collapse and so they transported a bunch of boxes to this lake
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military vehicles, and then horse-drawn wagons even, and they dumped them in the lake.
2
SPEAKER_05
So I think that part is definitely true, right?
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Yes.
2
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From what I could tell, it was reported on like that is fact.
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What was in the boxes was what s up for debate.
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Exactly.
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Some people say that s the Nazi gold, about $5.5 billion worth.
2
SPEAKER_05
Other people said, no, I think some of this stuff are documents where they were basically confiscated from Jewish victims about where their assets were hidden and what Swiss bank accounts they could loot maybe.
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I saw also artwork
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They think that was sealed artwork.
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Also, there s a rumor that there s 300 pounds of morphine in those boxes that was contributed by, I think, Albania s president, because he didn t want it to fall into the hands of the allies.
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Well, one thing they know is down there because they actually found some of these in 1983 was Hitler had the idea at one point, hey, let s sabotage various countries by creating counterfeit money of those countries.
2
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Yeah, it s a pretty smart plan for a dirty Nazi.
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I know.
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So they created just hundreds of million dollars worth of British pound notes.
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And in 1983, a German biologist by accident discovered a lot of these British pounds in the lake.
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What did we talk about that in like how counterfeiting works maybe?
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Maybe.
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It does sound familiar, though, for sure.
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We definitely talked about that plan.
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And remember, there was like a Jewish printer who was a Holocaust prisoner, a prisoner of a concentration camp, I can t remember which one, who turned out to be like this master counterfeiter.
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Yeah.
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Like, because the Nazis trained him to or forced him to.
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If I remember correctly, it was our counterfeiting episode.
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Yeah, and in 1959, I talked about the 1983 find, but in 59, they recovered 700 million pounds of these counterfeit notes from that lake.
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SPEAKER_05
So some people say that s all that was down there.
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Other people say there may still be gold down there.
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SPEAKER_05
And Austria actually still to this day has a problem.
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About 10 divers a year illegally dive in that lake looking for that treasure.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and what s interesting about this lake, aside from the fact that there might be Nazi treasure in it, which is interesting enough to make the lake remarkable and noteworthy, but in addition to that, this lake has a kind of a strange hydrology in that the top half of it is freshwater, the bottom half is saltwater, and they re separated by density.
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And in the middle of these two layers,
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is like a layer, a floating layer of ancient logs that have fallen into the lake and been preserved over time.
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And so you can only dive so far before you hit this layer of logs.
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And some divers, I think five divers have at least have died in this lake looking for Nazi gold.
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And at least one of them got tangled up in this layer of logs.
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It s a really dangerous place to dive.
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But the fact that you can t really see past this layer of logs
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is one of the things that keeps people coming back and keeps this legend alive because they can t thoroughly search this lake and show conclusively, no, there s no gold here.
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Leave this place alone.
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Stay away.
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Amazing.
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It is pretty amazing.
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And then the other thing about it, too, is this is a really remote location that was used by Nazi officers, high-ranking Nazi officers, and for missile testing.
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It seems like a really odd place just to dump counterfeiting.
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fit pound notes.
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Like you could dump those just about anywhere.
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So I don t know, maybe there is something to it.
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SPEAKER_00
You gonna get your scuba gear ready?
3
SPEAKER_01
I got my flippers on already.
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You can t see, but I ve got them on.
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SPEAKER_00
All right, we re gonna move now to an eastern German town along the Czech border called Deutsch-Katharinenburg.
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It sort of looks like the alphabet when it s on a page.
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It s a lot of letters in a row.
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But there are people there that think, not only is there gold here, but possibly the Amber Room, which was this, you just look up pictures of the Amber Room, it s pretty amazing.
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This chamber of honey and linseed and cognac-infused amber panels, gold-framed mosaics, marble, precious stones.
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And it was a gift of Prussian King Frederick Wilhelm I to Russia s Peter the Great,
3
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once called the Eighth Wonder of the World, and it disappeared during World War II.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the Nazis plundered it from Russia, from the USSR, and they took it back to Germany, back to Königsberg, which was, I think, now a part of Russia again, but at the time during World War II, it was part of Germany or Prussia.
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And they had it on public exhibit for like four or five years.
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And then at the end of the war, it just vanished.
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And no one s seen it since.
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And there s a lot of people who say, well, it was destroyed in air raids.
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Other people say it was sunk on a ship that was secretly carrying it.
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It s just lost.
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SPEAKER_01
But there s a pair of treasure hunters at Deutsch-Katharinenburg who searched in the area because they were sure that among other things, the amber room panels were buried there in that town.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and this is probably the worst ending to a potentially cool story ever, but there was a pair of searchers searching for this stuff.
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SPEAKER_00
One of them s father was a German Air Force officer in World War II, and in his personal notes, this son thought that he d found the exact coordinates of this treasure.
3
SPEAKER_00
So he got together with another treasure hunter who was
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He was a mayor, in fact, of a nearby town.
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And they thought that they had discovered through radar this big rectangular underground space about 60 feet down.
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And when I was reading this, dude, it was so juicy.
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I was like, oh boy, what happened?
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They didn t ever tell anyone.
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No one knows if they found any treasure.
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They didn t say anything about it.
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SPEAKER_00
Apparently, they had an acrimonious split in 2008, and that s just sort of the end of the story.
3
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Yeah, I guess the other treasure hunter was staying in the mayor s town, and the mayor kicked him out of town.
3
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It was that acrimonious.
3
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that s it.
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The last I heard was that they didn t find anything in 2008, or they didn t ever search for it.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right.
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Yeah, it was a little lame, but worth putting in there, I think.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, no, it s worth putting in there.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s just, it has no good resolution.
3
SPEAKER_01
No, it s, yeah, no.
3
SPEAKER_01
But you read a lot of fiction, so you can deal with that, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_01
So in Poland, southeastern, southwestern Poland, in a little corner down there, there s something, there s a range of mountains called the Owl Mountains.
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And there s a long-standing and widespread rumor that s been there for a very long time.
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I would say roughly since around the end of the Second World War, that would be my guess, that there is a ghost train, a Nazi ghost train, loaded with jewels, gold, weapons, art, basically everything you can think of that the Nazis would have plundered or pillaged, loaded onto this train, driven into a tunnel in the mountain, and left there hidden.
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and that it s still there.
3
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And people have been looking for it for a very long time, again, since probably about the end of World War II.
3
SPEAKER_01
But the thing that s kept this treasure hunt alive, Chuck, is there really is a vast, unmapped network of tunnels in the Owl Mountains that the Nazis dug there in World War II.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so again, some of this is based in fact, so that s what ll keep any sort of urban legend alive if part of it is true.
3
SPEAKER_00
And they did, they dug these tunnels of mine shafts between 43 and 45.
3
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It was called the Raisa Project, which means giant.
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in German, and no one knows why.
3
SPEAKER_00
Some people say it might have been one of their weird secret weapons programs.
3
SPEAKER_00
Some people say it may have been potentially where Hitler was going to hole up for his last stand.
3
SPEAKER_00
But it was very, very secretive, even among the SS, because if you worked on this tunnel, you had to sign a confidentiality agreement, which just sounds funny for some reason.
3
SPEAKER_00
Everything about the SS was so secretive, it would just be implicit.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right, and what are they going to do, like take you to court that you violated your NDA or something?
3
SPEAKER_01
It is odd, isn t it?
3
SPEAKER_00
You know what they would do.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, they d just shoot you.
3
SPEAKER_01
I wouldn t think they would need a signed agreement for that.
3
SPEAKER_01
These are the Nazis we re talking about, you know?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so they were not allowed to have their family members within 40 kilometers radius of this area.
3
SPEAKER_00
And these tunnels were dug by forced labor from concentration camps nearby.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it might have been a place for gold and may still be, but the Soviets ruined all that in 1945 when they came knocking at the door and the Nazis fled and basically blew up their own tunnels behind them.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and I want to say there s a really good New Yorker article about the hunt, I think it s even called The Hunt for Nazi Gold, about this particular legend and people looking for it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they take a second, I think it s really worth pointing out here too, is
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, people who start looking for treasure, no matter what the provenance of the treasure is, just get so wrapped up in the treasure and the legends and the myths and everything that it s easy to forget things like, well, you re running around a tunnel network that was dug by people who were literally worked to death.
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SPEAKER_01
over the course of weeks they were worked that hard.
3
SPEAKER_01
They died digging these tunnels that hold maybe this legendary treasure that is the only thing you can focus on when you re talking about that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s definitely like a part of the problem that comes along with the job is
3
SPEAKER_01
you know, forgetting, like look, having blinders on that you forget the reality of the situation.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s definitely, it s important to remember this, that, you know, some of this gold we re talking about was pulled from the teeth of dead Holocaust victims, you know?
3
SPEAKER_01
You just got to remember that too.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like Bill Paxton in Titanic.
3
SPEAKER_00
He needed that reminder from the old lady.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like, you re all pumped up looking for this jewel.
3
SPEAKER_00
People died here, man.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s get it together, Paxton.
3
SPEAKER_00
R.I.P.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that was so jarring when you told me that that first time a few months back.
3
SPEAKER_00
Did I break you that news?
3
SPEAKER_01
You did.
3
SPEAKER_01
You broke it hard.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, according to this legend, as far as the Owl Mountains go, there was this ghost train, like you said, and it was a freight train loaded with all kinds of valuables, artwork, jewels, gold bullion, bars of gold, and they drove that thing in this thing, and it never came out in those tunnels.
3
SPEAKER_00
The other part of this story that is rooted, in fact, is there were Nazi trains that carried tons and tons of gold and valuables and jewelry and paintings.
3
SPEAKER_00
There was one in particular called the Hungarian Gold Train that was intercepted by Allied forces in 1945.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you got a real train that happened, you ve got these real tunnels that were dug, and all of a sudden this rumor of the ghost train takes root.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the idea that those two things have come together in the Owl Mountains, though, that s the thing that s never been shown to be true.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s right, and not from a lack of looking.
3
SPEAKER_01
No, not at all.
3
SPEAKER_01
No, there s a lot of people looking for that there.
3
SPEAKER_01
This one s actually my favorite, weirdly, probably because it s a shipwreck.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m just so fascinated by shipwrecks.
3
SPEAKER_01
So the ship I m talking about is called the SS Minden, and it was a German merchant vessel.
3
SPEAKER_01
And back in, I think, 1939, it was disabled by the British Royal Navy off of the coast of Iceland, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And what s so mysterious about this is that the Minden s ship register shows that it was just carrying resin from Brazil.
3
SPEAKER_01
I didn t see what kind of resin, but you can do all sorts of industrial stuff with resin from making adhesives to plastics to whatever.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then that was it, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
But the thing that makes the sinking of the Minden so mysterious is that the ship s captain, rather than let it fall into British hands, sunk it himself.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he sunk it in 7,700 feet of water off the Icelandic coast, and that s where it lay, undiscovered, until I believe 2017, when a mysterious ship showed up and started looking around the Icelandic coast, and it believes that it found it.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, it s definitely a little odd to sink a ship
4
SPEAKER_03
full of resin only.
4
SPEAKER_03
It raises a little bit of suspicion.
4
SPEAKER_03
Like you said, even though you can do some things with it, it kind of stuck out to me as like, hmm, what else is on that boat?
4
SPEAKER_03
But yeah, in 2017, the Coast Guard in Iceland boarded a vessel of the Seabed Constructor.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s like an unnervingly bland name.
4
SPEAKER_03
It s so boring.
4
SPEAKER_03
It s not like the, well, now I can t, all boat names are kind of dumb.
4
SPEAKER_02
The Hercules of the Sea.
4
SPEAKER_02
That s what I would name my boat.
4
SPEAKER_03
Sure.
4
SPEAKER_03
So they intercepted it.
4
SPEAKER_03
They said, hey, what are you guys doing here?
4
SPEAKER_03
And they said, oh, well, this boat has been leased by a group of British folks who are searching for the wreck of the SS Minden.
4
SPEAKER_03
And they were like, what?
4
SPEAKER_03
You re like, haven t you heard that that was just full of resin?
4
SPEAKER_03
And they said, clearly not because we re spending $100,000 a day to lease this boat, which frankly is not that great of a deal, but we couldn t talk them down any.
4
SPEAKER_03
So that, I mean, if someone is spending $100,000 a day, that means, that makes me think they know something that we don t know.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and so the Icelandic press actually reported that they think that they know something we don t know, so much so that they interviewed the crew, and the crew said the official story is that they re looking for a couple hundred million dollars worth of gold that they believe was hidden in the safe on that ship, but that the real story, the real prize for what they re looking for, is only known to a handful of people, high-ranking people, on the boat.
4
SPEAKER_02
And that it was left at that, which, man, the Icelandic press knows how to spin a mystery, if you ask me.
4
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I mean, that really added this extra air of mystery on top of everything else, which is, oh, sure, we think there s $100 million plus in gold, but we re really there for another secret reason.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, if $100 million worth of gold is your decoy cover story, man, you re on to something impressive.
4
SPEAKER_02
I can t wait until they raise that thing, because from what I could tell, everything pointed to the fact that they did successfully find the Minden, that that is the Minden they found.
4
SPEAKER_02
But as far as I know, they have not gone down and salvaged it at all.
4
SPEAKER_03
Get James Cameron on it.
4
SPEAKER_02
Who knows?
4
SPEAKER_02
Maybe, I mean, the Amber Room was sunk, and maybe it happened to be on the S.S.
4
SPEAKER_02
Minden, so maybe we ll have the Amber Room back in the next 10 years.
4
SPEAKER_02
Well, hey, man, you said today s magic second ad break word, James Cameron, which means we re now obligated to take our second message break.
4
SPEAKER_02
Do you want to take it now?
4
SPEAKER_02
Or shall we have taken it three minutes ago?
4
SPEAKER_02
No, let s take it now.
4
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
4
SPEAKER_02
We ll be right back, everybody.
4
SPEAKER_03
Wanna learn about a pterosaur?
4
SPEAKER_03
Then call a pterodactyl!
4
SPEAKER_03
How to take a perfect poop?
4
SPEAKER_03
It s all about fractals!
4
SPEAKER_03
Genghis Khan!
4
SPEAKER_07
Attila the Hun!
4
SPEAKER_03
The Lizzie border murders and the cannibal runs!
4
SPEAKER_07
Gonna explain everything till your brain explodes!
4
SPEAKER_00
It s Chuck!
4
SPEAKER_00
And Josh!
4
SPEAKER_07
It s Stuff You Should Know!
4
SPEAKER_04
Word up, Jerry!
4
SPEAKER_04
Guess what, Mango?
4
SPEAKER_04
What s that, Will?
4
SPEAKER_04
So iHeart is giving us a whole minute to promote our podcast, Part-Time Genius.
4
SPEAKER_05
I know.
4
SPEAKER_05
That s why I spent my whole week composing a haiku for the occasion.
4
SPEAKER_05
It s about my emotional journey in podcasting over the last seven years, and it s called Earthquake House.
4
SPEAKER_04
Mango, I m going to cut you off right there.
4
SPEAKER_05
Why don t we just tell people about our show instead?
4
SPEAKER_05
Yeah, that s a better idea.
4
SPEAKER_05
So every week on Part-Time Genius, we feed our curiosity by answering the world s most important questions.
4
SPEAKER_05
Things like, when did America start dialing 911?
4
SPEAKER_05
Is William Shatner s best acting work in Esperanto?
4
SPEAKER_05
Also, what happened to Esperanto?
4
SPEAKER_04
Plus, we cover questions like how Chinese is your Chinese food?
4
SPEAKER_04
How do dollar stores stay in business?
4
SPEAKER_04
And of course, is there an Illuminati of cheese?
4
SPEAKER_04
There absolutely is.
4
SPEAKER_05
And we are risking our lives by talking about it.
4
SPEAKER_05
But if you love mind-blowing facts, incredible history and really bad jokes, make your brains happy and tune in to Part-Time Genius.
4
SPEAKER_04
Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
4
SPEAKER_06
Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception.
4
SPEAKER_06
I m Andrea Gunning, and now we re sharing an all-new story of betrayal.
4
SPEAKER_06
Stacey thought she had the perfect husband.
4
SPEAKER_06
Doctor, father, family man.
4
SPEAKER_06
It was the perfect cover for Justin Rutherford to hide behind.
4
SPEAKER_07
They led me into the house, and I mean, it was like a movie.
4
SPEAKER_07
He was sitting at our kitchen table.
4
SPEAKER_07
The cops were guarding him.
4
SPEAKER_06
Stacey learned how far her husband would go to save himself.
4
SPEAKER_07
I slept with a loaded gun next to my bed.
4
SPEAKER_00
He did not just say, I wish he was dead.
4
SPEAKER_00
He actually gave details and explained different scenarios on how to kill him.
4
SPEAKER_07
He, to me, is scarier than Jeffrey Dahmer.
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A new season of Bridgerton is here.
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And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
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Is Betrothal written in the stars for the eligible bachelor?
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All right, Chuck, so there s places where you can physically go to search for legendary gold.
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You can also just enter the international gold trade, and you can turn up, alarmingly, Nazi gold that was kind of lost, you could put it, after the war.
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Yeah, this is really interesting.
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In 1946, as part of reconstruction and restoration all over Europe, there was a committee forum called the Tripartite Gold Commission, or the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold.
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And this was formed by the US, by the French, and by the Brits.
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And basically, the whole jam here was,
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Let s find all this gold.
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Let s account for all this gold that we discovered as allies, and then let s redistribute it back to where we – if we can trace it such to where it was looted.
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to the banks and central banks.
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And even if we can find out human individuals, that would be even better.
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That and it was strictly to, I believe, strictly to the European central banks that had a claim to having been looted from after the war.
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And then in the late 90s, there was a real push to try to
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compensate the survivors and the heirs of the Holocaust who also had been robbed too.
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So a lot of gold that some countries still had claim on as part of this London conference on Nazi gold that was held in 1997, some of the countries that said, well, actually we re still owed a lot of this gold.
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They said, okay, well, we ll take a portion of this gold and divert it to humanitarian groups who will use it to
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for reparations to Holocaust victims, which is pretty cool.
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The big outlier in this was a little tiny country that remained neutral during World War II, at least on paper, Switzerland, who not only, it turns out, was secretly assisting the Nazis in laundering their gold in exchange for money that the Nazis could go use to fund its war machine,
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They hung on to this Nazi gold and from what I can tell still have all of the Nazi gold that they had after World War II, including gold that was made from that Zahn gold, melted down personal effects and gold teeth that Switzerland apparently still has in its gold reserves and is not willing to give up.
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Yeah, that was really surprising.
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This all came out because of a historical paper that was part of that conference.
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It showed that the U.S.
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had a lot of this gold that they melted down after the war and did return to the central banks in Europe as part of an effort to stabilize their economy there.
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But finding out that Switzerland did this and that Switzerland was neutral and that the Geneva Convention, which explicitly bars this kind of thing, comes from Geneva, Switzerland.
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is like the ultimate irony here.
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And it s, I just want to know if there s more to this.
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There s got to be something else, right?
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They re good people.
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Sure.
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But I mean, countries do bad things for sure.
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You know, even if there are good people that live there, there s, I mean, from everything I could tell, it came out in the 90s that it was pretty clear Switzerland had served as money launderers for the Nazis without anybody realizing it for decades.
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Yeah, it is pretty shocking for sure.
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I think the thing that gets me, though, is the idea that there s a lot of gold in the international gold trade today that can be traced back to missing Nazi gold, that it s not necessarily buried in the side of a mountain in Poland or
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under a small town along the German-Czech border, that it s out and about.
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It s being used as currency or as a commodity today in the international gold trade.
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That, to me, is the most astounding part of all of this.
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Yeah, how do you trace gold?
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They have a very strict system for it, but it s only as strict as how it s observed.
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So, like, for example, in 2019, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which spent a lot of time hunting down Nazi war criminals in the, I think, starting in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, they accused Venezuela and specifically the administration of Nicolas Maduro
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of trafficking in Nazi gold that he sold over the course of his administration so far, something like 77 tons of gold.
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And they re like, you know what?
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We re pretty sure that that was Nazi gold that was transferred late in the war to Spain.
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and then on to South America to help fund a Fourth Reich, a rebuilding of the Nazi regime among the war criminals living there.
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And they think that this was some of that gold and that Maduro s been selling it to kind of bankroll his country and his regime.
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Wow.
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Isn t that nuts?
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It is nuts.
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This whole thing is nuts.
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Yeah, it is.
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Absolutely.
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I can t remember how I came across this.
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I think it was a HowStuffWorks article.
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There s a couple on them.
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And I just started digging further and further.
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And it s just one of those things where it just takes such a great left turn.
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Great meaning like just surprising and unexpected, where it s like you re going from treasure hunters arguing and kicking one another out of little towns
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kicking around mountains in Poland to the international gold trade trafficking in Nazi gold still.
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It s just a crazy story.
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Yeah, it s pretty mind-blowing and disappointing in a lot of ways.
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Yeah, for sure.
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Because again, remember, a lot of that gold, those gold bars are melted down gold teeth taken from Holocaust victims, or gold wedding rings taken from Holocaust victims, and now they re used as part of an international form of currency.
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Yeah.
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Boo.
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Boo.
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Well, that s it.
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You got anything else?
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I got nothing else.
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If you want to know more about Nazi gold, there s a lot you can read.
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It s quite a rabbit hole you can go down if you want to.
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So you could start by going to HowStuffWorks.com and checking out their articles on it.
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And since I said HowStuffWorks, it s been a while.
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That means it s time for a listener mail.
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That s right.
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I was thinking that would be a good movie.
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about World War II era Nazi gold hunters, but it s sort of like Three Kings already did that, but that was the Gulf War.
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Yeah.
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And then also there was that one Museum Men.
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I think they were brought in to kind of make sure that the paintings that were looted were not damaged or whatever.
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I didn t see that.
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What was it called?
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It wasn t called Museum Men.
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What was it?
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Almost positive it was Museum Men.
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Was it?
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Will you look that up while I read Listener Mail?
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All right.
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Because that s a terrible name.
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I agree.
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I m going to call this, we cited someone that we probably shouldn t have cited, and this is from Anonymous.
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Hey guys, really enjoyed this show this week on universal basic income.
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Just a heads up, you cited the conservative economist Charles Murray and his justifications for introducing UBI to the American economy.
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I m sure you didn t realize this, but Murray is a particular favorite of white supremacists, oh boy, for his views on genetics and their contribution to social inequality between whites and people of color.
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He has a book called The Bell Curve that is often cited as data-proven evidence for white supremacy.
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It s also largely been debunked as pseudoscience.
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Wow, he links to a Southern Poverty Law Center s write-up for our own reference.
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And he says, I will no doubt keep on listening, guys.
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I m sure it was unintentional.
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Please take more care, though, in curating your sources, especially if it might throw your narrative for a loop.
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And that is from Anonymous.
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And boy, Anonymous, you are right.
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We had no idea.
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should have done a little bit more digging there.
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So please everyone realize, and anyone that listens to the show probably realizes, we certainly did not mean for that to be the case when we cited Mr. Murray.
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Now we kind of biffed that one big time.
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No offense intended.
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Hopefully you didn t take it and thank you for a very measured and level and even-handed correction.
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That s right.
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It was very kind.
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And by the way, Chuck, it s Monuments Month.
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Yeah, I knew there was something about it that didn t sound right.
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But there is a show called Museum Men that s been on since 2014.
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Is it about sexy docents?
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Kind of.
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They make displays for museums.
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They re craftsmen, craftspeople.
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Okay, so museum men, monuments men, two different things.
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That s right.
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And if you want to get in touch with us, you can join us on the internet, send us an email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
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Guess what, Will?
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What s that, Mango?
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I ve been trying to write a promo for our podcast, Part-Time Genius, but even though we ve done over 250 episodes, we don t really talk about murders or cults.
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I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy.
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We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food and how do dollar stores make money?
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And then, of course, can you game a dog show?
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So what you re saying is everyone should be listening.
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Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
5
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A new season of Bridgerton is here.
5
SPEAKER_06
And with it, a new season of Bridgerton, the official podcast.
5
SPEAKER_06
I m your host, Gabby Collins.
5
SPEAKER_06
And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
5
SPEAKER_06
Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix.
5
SPEAKER_06
Then fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton, the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
5
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Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday.
5
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Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception.
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I m Andrea Gunning, and now we re sharing an all-new story of betrayal.
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Justin Rutherford, doctor, father, family man.
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It was the perfect cover to hide behind.
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Detective Weaver said, I m sure you know why we re here.
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I was like, what in the world is going on?
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Listen to Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.