Let Them Fight: A Comedy History Podcast · Jacob Trimmer and Tim Groeschel

Ep. 605 Gustav Wagner

·1 hr 45 min·10 clips

Michigan accidentally created genius by replacing Rice Krispies with Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

The episode opens in weather hell. One host is sweating through Southern California while the other is dealing with a frozen outage, a generator, and jokes about becoming a Bond villain just to survive the heat and cold. Then the show turns to Wagner. The conversation treats him as one more Nazi coward trying to outrun the war by slipping away to Brazil, taking on the new name Gunther Mendel, and trusting nobody would look too hard. Stangl gets dragged in too. The hosts connect the two men through their escape to Brazil, where Wagner works as a helper for a wealthy Brazilian family, marries a local widow, helps raise her children, and settles in a town outside Sao Paulo. The name is a joke. So is the idea that a man like that could simply blend in and expect a clean second act. Stangl does not fare any better. His choice to register with the Austrian consulate in Brazil gets treated as an almost comically dumb mistake. The hosts stay venomous, and they also veer into a profanity-laced rant at Christianity and other religious nonsense. The tone never goes formal. That is part of what gives the episode its momentum, because the banter keeps the researched details moving instead of freezing them into a lecture. Every new bit of biography becomes another chance to show how pathetic, self-protective, and deeply unserious these men were in the face of mass murder.

As heard by us

A sharp, mocking episode about Nazi escape and reinvention that keeps the sarcasm in step with the reporting.

Let Them Fight uses Gustav Wagner as a blunt entry point into Nazi escape and reinvention, and it does not treat the subject gently. The hosts start in loose banter, then settle into Wagner and Stangle: Wagner renames himself Gunther Mendel, works for a wealthy Brazilian family,…

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Why you'd press play

You want a furious roast of Gustav Wagner's escape to Brazil.

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