Fresh Hell Podcast

Stern is now spending millions, historians are cautiously warning them, and Konrad Kujau is sitting at home frantically producing more and more volumes while simultaneously convincing everyone that this all makes perfect sense.

What could possibly go wrong?

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Gerd Heidemann follows up on the supposed Hitler diaries and finally meets the man behind them. Money starts changing hands in ways that should probably raise a few questions.

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This week, we start a story that begins with a boat, takes a detour through a small village in East Germany, and ends up with one of the biggest media scandals in German history.

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In 1853, Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria goes for one of his regular walks in Vienna. It’s something he does often enough that people know where to find him, and on that day, someone does.

A young Hungarian tailor named János Libényi steps forward and tries to stab the emperor in the neck. The attack doesn’t go as planned, the emperor survives, and within seconds, two men step in and stop it.

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This week we’re in January of 1919, in Boston’s North End. People are still recovering from the First World War and the 1918 flu, the area is packed with people, noise, and a molasses tank that never should have been there in the first place. 

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When we first started Fresh Hell, people kept asking us to cover the Boston Molasses Flood. So…here we are. And because Annie researched this one, we’re not taking the direct route.

Part 1 is less about the disaster itself and more about everything that led up to it, because as always...none of this happened in a vacuum. We’re in Boston’s North End, one of the oldest and most crowded neighborhoods in the city, and we’re going way back. Fires, smallpox, the Salem witch trials, rum, slavery, baseball...it’s all in here!

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After everything he survived as a child at Spiegelgrund, Friedrich ends up back in prison in the 1970s, where he is sent for a psychiatric evaluation. It's hard to believe what would happen next!

This is the part of the story where things don’t resolve neatly, and where the idea of justice becomes complicated, delayed, and in many ways incomplete.

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In Part 3 of Friedrich Zawrel’s story, we follow him through detention, sentencing, and a harrowing journey along the Danube as the Third Reich falls apart in its final weeks.

After multiple escape attempts, Friedrich is arrested again...this time landing in the Nazi youth justice system. 

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In Part 2 of Friedrich Zawrel’s story, we meet the doctors of Spiegelgrund.

Dr. Ernst Illing and Dr. Heinrich Gross were psychiatrists working inside Vienna’s infamous children’s institution during the Nazi period. Under the banner of “racial hygiene,” they helped run a system that targeted children considered disabled, difficult, or socially undesirable.

In this episode we look at their backgrounds, their roles within the Nazi medical system, and how ordinary medical careers became intertwined with one of the regime’s most disturbing programs.

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