Cold Open: Operation Greenup! An operation carried out by a special group of men many have called the “real life Inglorious Basterds,” a reference to the 2009 Quentin Tarantino film in which a group of US Jewish soldiers plot to assassinate high-up Nazi leaders. Operation Greenup wasn’t EXACTLY like the Hollywood blockbuster. No one was catching Nazis and carving swastikas into their foreheads., Hitler doesn’t get sub-machine gunned down in a burning theater that also gets blown up - gotta love Tarantino’s over-the-top death sequences. There was no assassination plan. BUT - a lot of daring, cinematic, and incredibly courageous moments did go down. There WAS a cast of characters that feel more like Hollywood creations than real people. It WAS an amazing, high risk, high stakes operation that did truly involve some Jewish men risking their lives, parachuting in behind enemy lines to quote “Kill some nazis.” They may not have been pulling off executions in the woods, but they did help give the Allies valuable intel that saved a whole bunch of lives. The short version of their story is this: two Jewish refugees to the United States, living in Brooklyn - Frederick Mayer, 23, and Hans Wynberg, 22, end up in the Office of Strategic Services - the OSS - forerunner to the CIA, and parachute deep behind Nazi lines into the Austrian province of Tyrol [ ti-roll] in February of 1945. Their mission: to compile reports on German rail traffic over the Brenner Pass between Italy and Austria. And make sure the German’s don’t havea. secret Alpine Fortress. Any intel they could glean there would help shape the Allies’ plans for a final WW2 showdown with Nazi Germany. A third man also parachuted in with them: Franz Weber, a Wehrmacht [ vair-mahkht] lieutenant who has belatedly come to his senses about the tyrannical, antisemitic, sociopathic nature of Adolf Hitler and his war. Operation Greenup ended up bringing the Allies important information that shattered some troublesome propaganda that Germans had concentrated a large number of men and weapons in the south that could have extended WW2’s bloodshed by months, leading to possibly tens of thousands of additional deaths. Not only that, but after being captured and tortured by Gestapo agents and refusing to give any intel, Frederick Mayer also negotiated the peaceful surrender of Innsbruck, the Tyrolean [ ti-roll ian] provincial capital, to the US 7th Army on May 3rd, 1945, saving even more lives. He even ended up getting - after withstanding some brutal torture where he gave up zero secrets - some of his captors to surrender to him. Dude was a gutter fighter - which will make sense by the end of this episode. Operation Greenup was one of the OSS’s most successful intel missions of WW2. And we’re sucking this little known but very important piece of history right here, right now, on another World War, always fun to rehash the Nazis going down, military edition, of Timesuck. PAUSE TIMESUCK INTRO I. Welcome! A.Happy Monday: Happy Monday, Meatsacks! How are you doing? Able to enjoy the summer? Or - for your Southern hemisphere Suckers - getting in any skiing or doing anything fun this Winter? I’m Dan Cummins, the Master Sucker, Whipple Class Action Lawsuit Defense Attorney, Maybe It’s Giants with David Hatcher Childress executive producer and showrunner, better parent than Fred or Rose West, and you’re listening to Timesuck. B.Tour Dates?: Symphony of Insanity standup comedy tour almost here. Go to dancummins.tv to get links to tickets in Spokane, Cleveland, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Portland, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Denver, San Francisco, Columbus, Tampa, and more - so many stops coming up this Fall started in August. Less shows per market because, well, I’ve got Bad Magic Productions to run now. C.Merch: No new merch for a change, BUT - if you’re hearing this right after it comes out, there is a 4th of July Sale. Happy belated 4th by the way. The same runs until Tuesday, July 6th, at midnight Pacific Time. Use code 'freedom20' at checkout for 20% off site wide, space lizards get 30% off with SL code. D.Additional Announcements: And - last quick announcement - HOT SAUCE! The Bit Elixir team of Kris Pockell and Zak Steele - designers of the Timesuck app and Bad Magicians - are hot sauce lovers, and now they have a hot sauce company - Elixir Sauce Co. They just made a batch of three sauces. Smoky Ghost Hot Sauce – They grow the ghost peppers, and they are hot as fuck. The sauce itself is hickory smoked goodness. It might blow your dick and/or lady ween off. Smoky Habanero Hot Sauce – The exact same recipe as the Smoky Ghost, just with habaneros instead of ghost peppers. Little less hot. Still could blow off some bits. Garlic Jalapeno Hot Sauce – They’re least hot. It’s green, and made with shallots, garlic, and jalapenos. It’s still spicy, but less chance of shitting fire. You can throw it on your eggs in the morning. Timesuckers get 10% off at checkout with the discount code Timesuck Go to elixirsauce.com to get some of their first, FDA approved batch, before it’s gone. Love being surrounded by so much entrepreneurial-ness. E.Segue to Topic: NOWWWW - show. Now we’re diving back in to World War II and covert military operations. Operation Greenup sounds like something out of a spy novel. I have no doubt that certain spy novel authors have taken a great deal of inspiration from some of the real shit that went down in this operation in 1945. It FEELS like a movie. Some spy thriller. One of the things that makes it so cinematic is its cast of characters. Recent US immigrants, European Jews Mayer and Wynberg has just escaped almost certain death at the hands of the Nazis years earlier. And now they were Hell bent on destroying the regime that had persecuted them and their families. And then there was the third musketeer - Lieutenant Weber, a German soldier on the run from a death sentence for desertion. And there was the support staff of locals who helped these three men once they left Allied support to parachute in behind enemy lines - like Anna Niederkircher, the mother of Weber’s fiancée, who gave the team shelter, support, and protection from the Nazis at the risk of her own life, and who once cried out, both in despair and defiance, “If Hitler wins the war, then I don’t believe in God anymore.” The men of this operation - and everyone who helped them - were risking their lives behind enemy lines to fight the biggest evil that anyone alive had ever encountered in the 1940’s in their lifetimes - a megalomaniacal dictator who led a regime that had already executed millions of innocent men, women, and children. A regime that wanted to kill so many millions more - to wipe the Jewish population - and many other peoples - off the fucking planet. To eradicate anyone who didn’t fit Hitler’s arbitrary definition of “Ayran.” Fred Mayer and Hans Wynberg had already escaped Hitler’s clutches once. They’d made it out. And now they’d volunteered to go BACK into Nazi territory to help save others who hadn’t escaped. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/operation- greenup-real-inglourious-basterds About as noble and courageous as it gets. So much yip, yip, yaw in this one. Hail Motherfucking Nimrod - and (Mario) here we go! PAUSE TIMESUCK INTERLUDE II. Intro/Establish Premiss: A. The OSS: Another pretty straightforward narrative today. No complicated story structure needed. Gonna go over who the OSS was - since it was this organization that formulated Operation Greenup. Then, in the Timeline, we’ll meet the core Operation Greenup trio, and some others integral to their mission - as we march through the the deeds they did that earned them the title of “the Real Life Inglorious Basterds.” And that’ll be our swashbuckling show today. So the OSS - the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA. The organization that planned Operation Greenup and in many ways, shaped what the US military and national security system looks like today. We’ve talked about the OSS in numerous sucks, but, it’s been a minute and due the sensory-overload, uber-connected Information Age times we live in, where we have a ton of new info thrown at our brain-meat every day, and most of our brains - mine included - don’t have the ability to retain even CLOSE to ALL of it - I think they're worth reviewing. Formed by an FDR Presidential military order on June 13th, 1942 as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - the OSS was the forerunner to the CIA and influenced the creation of the US Army Special Forces in the early 1950s and Navy SEALs in the early 1960s. The SEALS owe part of their legacy to OSS Maritime Group operatives. To understand the OSS - and thus many of the modern government organizations it turned into - we have to understand how things worked before there was the OSS. The most basic form of intelligence gathering - spying - goes back to the very beginning of America’s founding. Of course it does - basically every nation in the history of nations have used spies to gather intelligence on their enemies. The ancient Greeks had spies. George Washington had spies during the American Revolutionary War. The Culper Ring was a network of spies organized by Washington and Major Benjamin Tallmadge.