Fresh Hell Podcast

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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Friedrich Zawrel grew up in Vienna during the Third Reich. As a child, he was labeled “difficult” and “unmanageable” by the authorities. That was enough to place him inside the Nazi welfare and psychiatric system...a system that decided which children were worth keeping alive.

In this episode, we look at Friedrich’s early life and how he ended up at Spiegelgrund, the children’s ward in Vienna where hundreds of young patients were imprisoned, abused, and murdered as part of the Nazi “child euthanasia program".

Friedrich was one of the few who survived. This is his story!

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Vienna, 1940. On the hills above the city stood a children’s psychiatric institution called Am Spiegelgrund. Officially it was a place for treatment, observation, and care. In reality though, it became part of the Nazi system that classified vulnerable children as “unfit,” subjected them to medical abuse, and in hundreds of cases sent them to their deaths.

This episode focuses on the historical background: how a modern medical system was abused as mechanism for sorting, controlling, and ultimately killing the most vulnerable children in society.

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In 1660, a respected estate steward left the English market town of Chipping Campden to collect rent and never came home. His bloodstained belongings were soon found by the roadside, and suspicion quickly fell on his servant, John Perry. What followed was a chain of confessions, accusations, arrests, and a trial that ended in execution.

There was only one problem....Nearly two years later, the supposedly murdered man walked back into town alive.

BUT...where had he been?!

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