Part One: Peter Rachman: King of the Slumlords

0:05 Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And before we start our episode today, I wanted to make a note of something. Those of you who have been watching on the Netflix since we started recording from the new room, which we're mainly doing because the old room, it's always like 15 degrees colder. And I just got tired of recording in those temperatures. But I've got some new wall art.

0:29 And you can see this piece here was made by a very good friend of mine named Nova, who is four years old, going on five. And I just wanted to give a shout out to her and make sure that everybody on Netflix got to see her wonderful art. She's very talented.

0:42 Great job, Nova.

0:44 You know who else is talented? Our guest today, Kevin. Kevin, welcome to the show. How are you doing, man? Good.

0:50 Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate you You're calling me talented. That's very special.

0:54 You are.

0:55 You are talented. We've been working with you for the last couple of months now. You've been doing weeks. Months. Time flat circle.

1:02 Months.

1:02 Yeah.

1:03 Months.

1:04 It's been more than two weeks. I know that. And those are the only two time frames that exist in my life is more than two weeks and less than two weeks.

1:10 Yeah. Fair enough.

1:11 Like Sophie and I have been partners for well over two weeks.

1:14 Yeah.

1:14 Yeah. So you've been helping us out on It Could Happen Here, and you also have work of your own that you're doing that I think you should plug right now before we.

1:23 Get into the story. Yeah, plug your sub stack and shit, man.

1:26 Yeah, my sub stack is called Last Week in Hell, I guess,. substack. com if it matters to people, but it's got a cool logo of a gas mask, and I write about politics and a bunch of activism things, and then I also... Freelance with different places. And I guess my pluggables is I'm at Kevin H. Foster on basically everything. Yeah.

1:52 Now, Kevin, I'm going to guess by the fact that you're a journalist and you're a younger person that you're a renter. Is that accurate?

2:01 Unfortunately, yes.

2:03 Nobody likes being the worst 30 years of my life. But if you if you take out the Oxford English Dictionary, which I know you keep on you at all times, Kevin, as do we all. I have I have the entire OED tattooed on. That's why I never wear short sleeves. It's nothing but words and very tiny font. It's unreadable.

2:24 It's like the full Ben Affleck back tattoo, but it's your entire body.

2:29 It's my entire body. And it is on my back in the shape of a phoenix like Ben's. But if you take to the OED to find synonyms for the phrase scummy landlord, you will encounter the real world word rockmanism, which stands for the exploitation and intimidation of tenants by unscrupulous landlords. Now I'm going to guess... At least half of our audience has experienced Rockmanism in their lives.

2:53 I have. Why, yes.

2:54 I guess everyone else has on this call. We've all had to endure some Rockmanism. And as I'm sure you've concluded on your own, the term Rockmanism has its origins in the name of a man whose last name was Rockman. Oh, no.

3:09 Sure as shit wasn't a woman.

3:11 No, it was definitely not a woman. His name was Peter Rockman. And the most told version of his life story is, is that he was such a scummy landlord that after he died, and he's a UK fellow, or he didn't grow up in the UK, but that's where he was a landlord. He was such a scummy landlord that after he died, his very name became a byword for every other scummy landlord in the world.

3:36 Wow.

3:36 This is partly true. Wow. Peter Rockman was a real slumlord in real life London during a brief stretch of the post-war period. And he definitely counts as a bastard by any stretch of the imagination. But there's also bigger bastards in this episode because the only reason his name became a watchword for scummy landlord, he was not the biggest or the scummiest landlord of his era. He was the one who happened to be a Jewish immigrant who died young. And so they kind of pushed all of the blame for being shitty landlords in England onto him.

4:08 Unfortunately, very classic, but all right.

4:11 Yeah, not super surprising. He is more interesting than the bigger, scummier landlords. I will say that. This guy has, I mean, he fought in World War II. He's got some fun stories that happened to him. But yeah, it's not entirely fair to... put all of rockmanism on this one guy, but he also wasn't innovator. Like one thing about him, while he wasn't the biggest of the scummy landlords, he was one of the more influential ones because he was a really creative guy. He kind of have to be coming into England as a refugee from the Holocaust.

4:43 Right? God.

4:51 So this is going to be a very British story. And like all great British stories, it begins far away in Lubav, which at this point in time, I think, is in Poland. I don't believe it's there now. I'll need to double check that, actually. I thought I had that in my script. But it was a part of Poland in 1919 when Peter was born, Perek Rachman, to a Jewish family in Lubav on August 16th, 1919. Hey everybody, Robert here. Lvov has actually been possessed by a bunch of different countries over the years, but it is currently part of Ukraine. It's also usually pronounced Lviv now, like L-V-I-V instead of L-V-O-V. Anyway, there you go. Now, my sources for these episodes include two biographies, one written by

5:39 Shirley Green in 1979 called Rockman, and another from like this year by Neil Root called Slumlord. And up until the release of Root's book, no one knew what Peter's parents' names had been because he only ever gave one interview in his life to the press. And record keeping in Poland right around the mid-century was real poor for some inexplicable reason. Yes. Not a lot of great birth certificates kept. Anyway, Root's dogged research has revealed that Peter's parents were likely David and Golda Rockman, according to the application Peter later filed for British nationalization. He would claim to friends and colleagues that his dad had been a dentist, but Root could find no Rockman registered as a dentist in that

6:24 part of Poland at the time. David Rockman is listed in a 1935 to 1936 address book as a kupiak or merchant, although given the realities of life at the time, particularly for Jewish people in communities in Poland, he might have been a dentist and they just marked him down as a merchant because racism? I don't actually know. It's entirely possible he actually was a dentist, and that's just not how he got listed.

6:47 In the phone book. How do you go from dentist to landlord? I guess we don't know, but.

6:51 That's that's the tale we're going to be telling the day. He does at least initially try to become a dentist. So Shirley Green's book claims that the Rockman children, Peter and his unnamed brother, who may not have existed. There's a lot of this is a guy who when he does talk about his life, he's lying a lot of the time. So we don't know if he really had a brother. It's not like unlikely, but there's no document.

7:14 There's no evidence at all that this guy ever existed. But Peter and his unnamed possible brother grew up and were expected to inherit and expand their father's dental office, right? Like that was the expectation in the 1920s and 30s when they were like becoming adolescents and turning into men, right?

7:31 Like that's just kind of what she did at the time. Their mother came from a wealthy glassmaking family who were in the vodka bottle business, which is a good business to be in in Poland. So they had some money, right? These are not poor people. Shirley writes of Peter's youth, From all indications, Rockman went to an excellent school and took full advantage of the opportunities it offered. He was unusually intelligent, with a quick mind and a retentive memory that made learning a pleasure rather than a chore. And unlikely as it may seem, he was also physically attractive.

7:59 Although fat was to obliterate his features as an adult, basically his nose was straight and fine, his mouth small and well-shaped, his eyes slightly slanting and intensely blue. She has a crush on him. This is one of those weird biographies where you can tell the biographer kind of wanted to fuck her subject because she talks about him being hot a lot.

8:16 I just like how you were like, as unlikely as it may seem. And I'm like, I don't exactly know why, but that was definitely the vibe that I got from hearing about.

8:24 Him for the past 10 minutes. When this guy grows up, he will be compared to looking like a Bond villain by Ian Fleming's wife, right?

8:32 Oh, wow.

8:33 Someone who's got some reason to say it. He's fat and balding as a rich older guy, right?

8:40 Gotcha.

8:40 So the fact that in the 70s, he was a more famous figure. So I think she's writing for those people to be like, you won't believe this knowing the pictures of him that you've seen, but he was a good looking guy as a young man.

8:50 Is that what landlording does to you?

8:53 Yeah, landlording really wears you out. Yeah. there are only four existing photos of rockman so basically and basically no one who knew him in poland seems to have survived the war everyone that this kid grows up with is annihilated in the holocaust right so there's there's no way to know what he looked like as a kid that's the thing i find interesting about shirley's book is that like you can't know that what is this based on there's no pictures of him you didn't talk to anyone who knew him back then right um I think, I don't know. I don't know why she does this. We have vanishingly few details.

9:27 I'm having flashbacks to learning about Henry Kissinger being just a hot shot. And I'm like, I don't want to know this.

9:35 Yeah, that he was a sexual icon for a period. No, that's not helpful to me. That doesn't improve my ability.

9:40 Doesn't make me feel good about the world in any way.

9:44 It makes me feel, like, better about every time I haven't, like... attractiveness is based on so many things that have nothing to do with like anything, but the weird mores of the time, right? Like, it's a, it's a bizarre, uh, social construct that we've created. And you can really tell that by the fact that people used to want to fuck Henry Kissinger in large numbers.

10:11 I don't like being reminded of that. Thank you.

10:14 I'm sorry.

10:15 Yeah. Popped in.

10:17 Yeah.

10:18 Speaking of popping in, we have vanishingly few details about Rockman's childhood and pre-war life. Even Root's book barely spends a couple paragraphs on that stuff. Green argues that, quote, Because he winds up losing everything in the war, the fact that he starts off as wealthy doesn't really help him much, right? This is a rich kid, but he doesn't benefit from being a rich kid because the Holocaust happens, right?

10:52 So his only benefit is that he does grow up with a cultured education that signposts him as someone of means, right? Even though he's going to lose everything very shortly. Green describes Peter as growing up unapologetically Jewish, but also considering himself Polish more than anything. And as she describes it, pre-war Lvov was an unusually open-minded place. Quote, There are elements of truth to that. You will find other people who write about Lvov somewhat like this. But that paragraph alone does not fairly depict the racial conflicts in that part of Poland or Poland as a broader thing. I wouldn't say they were fully integrated because, again, the Holocaust happens, right?

11:47 I don't know about that.

11:49 Yeah, that might be putting it a little too far, right? By the late 1930s, Lwów did host one of the largest Jewish communities in Poland, which suggests it was a lot safer than many other nearby cities for Jews, but that doesn't mean it was safe or had a long established tradition of tolerance. I'm going to quote now from an article on Lwów for the Holocaust Historical Society. Following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I, this would have been right around when Peter was born, and the Polish occupation of the area on 22nd November 1918, the Jews of Lwów were targeted in a pogrom in which hundreds of people were wounded and approximately 100 were murdered. In subsequent years, Jewish relief

12:25 organizations worked prodigiously to rehabilitate the community. So right around the time he's born, there's a pogrom, right? This is a place that's a lot better to be a Jew than many in the area, but I wouldn't call it safe.

12:38 That's bleak, man. Yeah.

12:40 This is the good place? Yeah, this is genuinely one of the better places to be, right? Yeah. Eastern European history, the first half of the 20th century is a nightmare. It doesn't get a lot better in the second half. I mean, it does get a lot better, but it's still not great.

12:57 Yeah.

12:58 I think a more accurate read about the situation in the city of Rockman's birth is that it did host a huge Jewish population and there were open-minded citizens who supported that community as well as bigots who wanted them wiped out. In his book, Root cites the global home for Jewish genealogy who note in their write-up on the city, active anti-Semitism was widespread, one reason being that the Poles and Ukrainians each accused the Jews of helping each.

13:20 Other, right?

13:20 There's a nationalist struggle between people of Polish and Ukrainian descent and the Jews wind up Not just in the middle, but blamed by both sides for like, well, you're secretly in line with the Ukrainians. No, you're secretly in line with the Poles, right? There's no winning.

13:32 This is fascinating. There's no winning. This is funny because part of my background is Polish-Ukrainian, so it's just a strange background.

13:42 There's not really many groups you'd have wanted to be a part of in this part of Europe in this period of time. But like being a member of the Jewish community is certainly the toughest card to draw. Or, you know, Roma too, right? I would put them both in a similar, like it's just rough. It's just going to be rough for everybody. Green notes that by 1937, when Rockman is age 18, he had grown into a good looking, confident and popular young man because she just really likes talking about how hot he is. He is noted as having loved the theater and also games of chance, which he played regularly. Her book continues. He was a born organizer, unable to sit idle for any length of time or allow others to sit idle while he was around.

14:20 All his interests were active rather than reflective, and his adolescence seems to have passed by without any of the self-examination that might have stood him in good stead when faced with colossal reversals of fortune. Life was for enjoying, not analyzing, and he had no quarrel with the plans that his parents had made for him, entering medical college to study dentistry, just as his brother had done before him.

14:39 His future seemed assured, but like so many other promising futures, it was about to be shattered. So this is a kid where if the war hadn't happened, he probably would have grown up to be like a fairly affluent dentist, like his father. He and his brother would have both been dentists. They would have been fine, right?

14:52 Can I... Can I ask, does games of chance mean that he has potentially a gambling problem?

14:57 He's got a gambling problem. He's got a gambling problem. I don't know if he has a problem. I think he probably has a problem. I think he probably has a problem.

15:06 To be fair, I feel like there was some report that has stuck in my mind that said that there's a very.

15:12 Very high rate of suicides.

15:15 For dentists so I don't know if he would have been fine yeah I don't know if.

15:19 That was true back then too though like.

15:20 Yeah that's fair enough but every time I hear somebody wants to become a dentist that article pops in my head I'm like oh boy are you sure yeah wow teeth are kind of gross I don't know mouths no I don't.

15:35 Know I guess I've only ever had careers where there's like a high suicide percentage in them so I'm not a great judge on that sort of thing um Now, unfortunately for Peter, 1937 was pretty close to the worst possible time to become an adult as a young Jewish person in Poland. In the years leading up to the war, Germany had slowly pieced its army back together and annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia with only token resistance at most from the rest of Europe. And one of Hitler's enablers in this period was Poland's foreign minister, Joseph Beck. From 1935 to 1939, Beck backed Germany's play against Czechoslovakia by complaining about the mistreatment of Polish minorities there. which dovetailed to

16:17 German claims about the same mistreatment for ethnic Germans, right? This is a big part of why Germany needs to annex Czechoslovakia is there's so many Germans there and they're not being treated well. It should be part of, you know, that's, and Beck is backing Hitler's play because he thinks it'll keep Poland safe, right? That like, well, maybe if we feed Hitler, some of these, some of these smaller countries.

16:37 Classically worked out.

16:39 Yeah, it doesn't work out that way, right? Beck supports Hitler during the Munich Agreement of 1938, which seemed to work out at first since Poland was allowed to invade and take Teschen, which was an industrial district in Czechoslovakia. People do forget about this part of the run-up to World War II, that when Germany takes Czechoslovakia, Poland gets a little bit of it, right? This is going to be kind of similar to what Hitler does with Stalin, where he's like, yeah, we'll split Poland with you. Of course, we'll never invade. Buddy, guy, come on.

17:09 Right?

17:10 Yeah. Why would I do that? So this is going to be, like I said, something of a mirror of what's going to happen next to the USSR. And this does happen like the next year, right? Germany and the USSR invade Poland and, you know, split it between themselves. Beck slightly redeems himself during the run-up to war. He refuses to make Poland into a German puppet state and hand over a bunch of territory to the Reich. But it was too little too late. When the Peter Rockman was in Warsaw, where he'd recently enrolled as a medical student.

17:42 So his country gets invaded right as he's starting medical school, right? Now, even with Neil Root's very welcome digging, there's a lot about Rockman's life in this period we still don't know. I don't really know exactly what he did next, but he leaves Warsaw and he flees eventually back to Lvov to be with his family. In 1949 after the war, he would claim that he and his brother had immediately started working as partisans, fighting alongside the Polish military, taking pictures and gathering information about troop movements and supplies. This may have been true, although Green proposes he invented his own part in this as a result of his bruised ego after the war. She says his brother probably was

18:24 working as a partisan because his brother is– And Green seems to think this is probably true, but that Rockman lies about having helped his brother because he feels bad about the fact that he didn't do anything, right? That seems kind of believable to me.

18:42 Yeah.

18:43 Right?

18:43 Yeah, it definitely seems possible.

18:45 Seems very human to me, although it's also very possible he fought as a partisan, you know? Root's extensive research has been unable to dig up any evidence that his brother existed. However, again, we are talking about like a young Jewish guy in East Poland in 1939. The fact that there's not documentation of his life isn't weird. His book cites research by the Jewish Historical Institute into the destruction of records pertaining to Laval Jews during the war and notes that in the spring of 1949, Workers in the Muranow district in Warsaw found Jewish death certificates from 1939 to 1941 from Lvov. The collection, compromising roughly 10,000 items, is shocking evidence of often partly burnt, sometimes illegible documents

19:25 of extermination of the Jewish nation. So it's not weird that we don't have– if his brother exists, we don't have documentation of him because it was deliberately– they annihilated the evidence of a lot of people that they killed, right?

19:35 Germans were not into archive.org.

19:39 No, no, no, no. People talk a lot about like how much record keeping they did and that underestimates how much record keeping they destroyed, which is also a big part of what the Nazis did. So at other points, Peter would claim to have joined the Polish army as a volunteer and fought briefly against the Russians. I think this is untrue, though. What is undeniably true is that Rockman's entire family is going to be interned in concentration camps and annihilated during the Holocaust. As far as we know, he loses everyone. There are none of his relatives left by the end of the war. As far as we know, there's no one who knows him left alive from his childhood by the end of the war. I mean, I'm sure there were some relatives. But, like, he never makes

20:20 contact with anyone again.

20:22 Is this going to be one of those complicated ones where we have to decide? Yeah.

20:27 Oh, no. It's hard not to be on this guy's side and want things to go well for him with a start like this, right? Peter is the only rockman to survive the camps, and Shirley Green argues that he only survived because he was, quote, too powerfully built for his strength to be wasted. In other words, he's put on a work detail and that allows him to survive, right?

20:49 I think her wording here is a little weird and I chalk it up to the crush I think she had on him.

20:54 Yeah, a little bit.

20:56 Because she follows this up by acknowledging he was five foot six with small hands and feet. So he's not– no one would call him– obviously, they're strong, short people, but you wouldn't call that a powerful build, right?

21:06 Did they say like his weight? Is he like stout or like a small hand and feet?

21:10 He's certainly later in life. He does have wide shoulders, right? And she says a heavy build, but she also describes him as slender as a young man. I don't know that she knows what he looked like as a young man.

21:20 This is weird, man.

21:22 It's kind of weird. He is conscripted into a road gang and Green writes that he only managed to escape the concentration camp because of this. And that is accurate, right? That because he gets put into a work gang, he doesn't wind up interned in a camp with his family. He would later claim that during this time he would occasionally see a German– and he's building a road into Russia from Poland, right, as a part of this work gang.

21:47 One of the roads, in fact, that the German invasion during Operation Barbarossa is going to go down. He would later claim that during this time he would occasionally see a German officer visit the road gang in his big shiny staff car. Green writes, quote, instead of despising his captors as inferiors for dragging civilization back to the Dark Ages, he is said to have sworn to himself that he would own a car even bigger and shinier one day.

22:10 If that's true, that's a really weird reaction to seeing a Nazi when you've been put on a work gang.

22:15 I want to give him benefit of the doubt and chalk it up and be like, you're experiencing some really rough trauma right now.

22:23 I can't judge you for almost anything you would do in this circumstance, but that is peculiar.

22:28 That would be, that's crazy.

22:30 That would be like if one of us was like covering a riot and we were like, wow, that ice officer's Jeep. Wow, that ice officer's car. Look at that car that ice officer just got in after work. Wow, I really wish I'd have that one. No, it's fucking weird, dude.

22:46 Andrew Tate's balaclava that he wears.

22:49 What a nice balaclava.

22:51 If only I had Andrew Tate's satin purple shirt and capris he wore when he got arrested in Florida.

22:58 God.

22:59 I do feel like I could pull off Capri, Sophie.

23:01 I do, too. You know what else you can pull off, Robert?

23:05 An ad break?

23:07 Yeah, buddy.

23:08 Possibly. And we're back. So Green describes how the Germans, during the time when he's in this work gang, also forced him to, quote, undergo a sterilization operation. There's no evidence for that last part, especially because, and this is the weird part, Green talks about him and he would sometimes talk about working on a work gang that the Germans were manning. But the region that he lived in during this period of time was taken over by the Soviet Union. And Root's book says that Rockman was conscripted to forced labor by the Soviet Union, not the Germans, which makes more sense because the Russians are occupying Lvov at this point. And he does claim that he fought the Russians. I don't know why Green makes it the Germans.

23:56 And I think it's because Rockman would sometimes claim it was the Germans. He may have just done this because like, oh, if I tell people I was like forced into a work gang by the Soviets, that'll confuse them because they don't really know that much about the war. Everyone knows Poland and Nazis.

24:09 So this is all during the war still and we don't know if it was- Just.

24:12 The very start. Yeah. We don't know what work gang he was on really. I think Root's probably right that it was a Russian work gang because that was a thing that happened too. And because Lvov was occupied by the Soviet Union during this period of time.

24:25 Wait, does that mean that the Russians built the road into their own territory for.

24:30 I mean, the Russians were sending trains full of resources, fuel, and raw materials to Germany. The last set of trains going from the Soviet Union to Germany carrying raw resources arrived the day of Operation Barbarossa. The Germans waited to start until this last train came in because they needed the shit. There were some bad decisions made by the Soviet Union during this part of the war. Yeah.

24:55 Also really uncomfortable with, quote, undergo a sterilization operation, unquote.

25:01 Nope.

25:03 I don't know what that. Yeah. I mean, he never has kids. So people will write about like maybe he was sterilized during the Holocaust or maybe like the privations he endured rendered him sterile. I think it's just likelier he either was sterile or just never wanted to have kids.

25:16 That or some power it be was like one scummy guy is enough.

25:23 One Rockman is enough.

25:24 One Rockman's enough. We don't need to keep that gene pool going.

25:27 I don't know. That's unfortunately close to what the Nazis were saying, Sophie, so I'm not going to go there.

25:33 All right, all right, all right.

25:34 Let's not compare Sophie to the Nazis in video and audio.

25:40 So Root writes that he escaped a stint doing forced labor for the Russians but was found and taken prisoner by Russian forces and transported to the notorious and deadly remote Siberia, where, as he wrote in his British naturalization application, he was made to do forestry work. And this is why I think Root was right is we do know– one thing we know about him is that the Russians sent him east to Siberia, and he worked in like a gulag, right? We know that about him. And that makes it a lot likelier that he was working on a road gang that the Russians were operating. Because if he was working on a Nazi road gang, how would he have gotten transport? The Germans weren't sending people to Siberia.

26:15 No.

26:18 So this was not a nice experience. The gulags were not nice places. But being sent to one almost certainly saved his life, right? Because as awful as gulags were, and many people did die in Siberian camps like this, they weren't death camps. The USSR was not trying to murder every Polish Jew or even everyone they sent to these camps. And so while Peter's experience there was horrific, it was also survivable, right? It was way more survivable than staying home would have been, right? Yeah. Because his family stays back home in Lvov and they wind up in the camps, right?

26:49 Yeah.

26:50 In the worst case. I guess for an idea of how bad his situation is, being sent to a gulag is like a break of really good luck for this guy. Forced labor in Siberia is a win. Yeah.

27:03 Are you going to be around the trees, maybe?

27:06 Yeah.

27:07 Yeah. At least there's trees.

27:08 I don't know.

27:09 I guess.

27:09 Hopefully.

27:11 He would go on to make some pretty horrific claims about his experiences as Root's book outlines, quote, bitterly cold and along with many others facing near starvation, Rockman would later account that he was forced to eat excrement to survive. He reportedly qualified that by saying to people he knew in London, I never ate German shit. At least no one can say I ever ate that.

27:31 That's kind of badass, honestly. That's a pretty, like, bad statement.

27:38 I did look into this a little. I haven't run into any other stories. I've run into allegations of, like, cannibalism in the gulags and even in, like, some of the camp. People who are starving will do almost anything. I have not ran into other stories about eating poop to survive. The research, I don't think that that would actually, it might fill your belly though. So maybe if you were really that starved, it doesn't have much nutritional value because it's shit, right?

27:58 Yeah, I was going to say, do you know, have you thought about this?

28:03 I mean, I've read a lot of concentration camp and other like narratives of people who have wound up in horrible starvation situations. And I have read a lot about like people literally eating dirt or leaves that had no nutritional value just to like fill their stomachs or ice or like snow just to like fill their stomachs. So stuff like this does happen, right? It's not going to sustain.

28:23 Don't take this as a survivalist tip, kids. But yeah, stuff like that definitely does occur. I don't know. Maybe he made that up because it was a really good anecdote to tell. I don't know. Yeah, this is first reported in Shirley Green's book, and she is repeating a story Rockman told to a bunch of his friends and girlfriends while alive that said, I don't know why he'd lie about this, right? It's a good anecdote, but it's also not like, It's not like a cool thing to brag about.

28:52 Bark or something.

28:52 Yeah.

28:53 I don't know if I'd really want to be like kind of human set up eating myself a little bit. Yeah.

28:59 I don't know that I'd lie about that if it hadn't happened.

29:01 I don't know if I'd talk about if it did happen, but you know.

29:05 Yeah.

29:05 I don't know that I would talk about it if it did happen, but Rockman clearly does.

29:10 Good on him, I guess.

29:11 Yeah. Root notes that Rockman's girlfriend later in life claims he told her many stories about his frenzied efforts to maintain some sort of hygiene when he was interned by the Russians. He's a very hygienic guy after the war. And part of it's because he kind of goes a little crazy at how, like, filthy everything is when you're in a fucking gulag. His girlfriend, relating the stories he told her, said he used to delice himself and throw in the insects on the fire listening to them pop as they exploded in the flames he made clothes and shoes out of newspapers so this is a win again this is lucky but it's really bad.

29:51 I feel like i keep hearing these things and i'm I'm like, I don't know if I would have told this story, but you know, fair enough.

29:58 For this to be the only reason you survived, like that really shows what a nightmare it was to be a fucking Jew in Poland this.

30:06 Period of time.

30:07 Like, yeah, this was like a really lucky break. Green notes that he claims to have been beaten regularly by guards and by other prisoners, and he would argue that's what made him sterile. Uh, one poll that she interviewed who knew him during this period of time claimed by the time they'd finished with him, he was practically a eunuch. Um, so maybe that's it. Maybe he was just like beaten badly enough that like he was not able to have kids.

30:31 However, that's dark.

30:33 I don't know. Like whatever damage he suffered to his, you know, reproductive organs during this period of time, he is going to have a lot of sex later in life. So it doesn't do that.

30:42 Good for Rockman. That's a good name for. Yeah. Good.

30:48 Yeah, I'm not going to make that joke right now. Within days, German and Ukrainian forces spread lies that Ukrainian political prisoners had been murdered by Jews in the NKVD's dungeons in Lvov. This was used to justify a pogrom, which between June 30th and July 3rd, 1941, cost 4,000 Lvov Jews their lives. Rachman's parents and family may have died then. Surely some of them did. They also may have been sent to the Janowska concentration camp, where 35,000 to 40,000 Jews would be murdered later in the war.

31:31 It's also possible they were sent to Belzec and murdered there. They may have even died in March of 1942, when German forces executed 5,000 Jews who were too old or sick to labor. We don't know, and Rockman would never learn of his family's fate. This is something that haunts him the rest of his life, is that he can't find out what happened to his mom in particular. And obviously, like, that would haunt you. Yeah. In July of 1941, Peter's internment ended. General Sikorski, the leader of Poland's government in exile, made a deal with Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky. The Sikorsky-Maysky agreement saw 250,000 Polish prisoners of war released from Russian custody so that they could fight against the German invasion.

32:10 Things are so bad in the early days of Operation Barbarossa that Stalin was like, yeah, man, get them out of the gulags and put a gun in their hands. We have no other options. Things are very bad.

32:22 Do they even have guns for all of them? Like?

32:25 Probably not because I think they're going to get armed largely by the Brits. I'm not 100% sure where their weapons come from during this period of time. I know that once he's mobilized with a bunch of other Polish former POWs, he travels to Tashkent where he joins the Polish army in exile under the command of General Władysław Anders.

32:42 This force left the USSR, passed through Iran and Palestine. And while it was in Palestine, which again is part of the British mandate, right? The British are governing Palestine at this point in time. it's integrated into the British army, right? So even though this had been part of the Russian resistance, for whatever reason, it's decided these forces would be better off fighting as part of the integrated British military forces.

33:07 So they're integrated into the British army and renamed the Polish Second Corps. I don't fully know the reason why these guys are sent to Palestine to fight under the Brits rather than the Russian front. But also Peter wouldn't have been known, right? Nobody's explaining this to these guys, right? They're just going where they're sent.

33:24 Were the Soviets just like, we don't want to deal with this right now?

33:27 It may have been that they didn't trust these guys enough to want them in a crucial part of their front, but also 250,000 guys is 250,000 guys. If we give them to the British, it'll put pressure on the Germans somewhere else, and that will still help us, right? It may have just been that.

33:41 I suppose if you had people in the gulag, you're like, I don't know if we should really put these next to our.

33:47 I don't know if we want these guys in Stalingrad, right? Yeah. Green writes that Rockman was elated to have escaped Russia and have a chance to fight for the Poland he still loved. However, his patriotism, and he seems to have been a very patriotic guy at this point, is very quickly quashed by the anti-Semitism of his comrades, which has not been reduced at all by the fact that they're fighting the Nazis. Although most Poles deny it, there seems little doubt that the regular officers of the Polish army regarded all Jews as cowards and incapable of fighting. They constantly disparaged them in front of the other men. And so successful were they in belittling their abilities that when the second corps passed through Palestine, about 80% of them

34:27 melted away into the local population, right? That like, they're just like, I just, I don't want to be in this situation. This isn't that much better, right?

34:35 Yeah.

34:37 Rockman stays though, which says something about him, right? Although all this abuse saps his morale and Green writes that he withdrew into himself, inwardly seething with anger and bitterness. She describes how his horizons narrowed to sheer self-interest and that the effect of this rejection may have influenced his behavior far more than any physical hardships. He did receive the Polish War Medal for his service, which was issued to anyone who served for a set length of time.

35:02 But Peter did not end the war with any cool stories or any vengeance. You know, we talked about Robert Maxwell's youth, right? Gill and Maxwell's dad, which like. There was a period of time where he's basically living in glorious bastards. He's committing war crimes against the Nazis. Peter doesn't get that kind of, to the extent that that provides any catharsis, he doesn't really get it, right?

35:22 All he got was the eating shit thing. That's, damn, that sucks.

35:28 You would have hoped he'd gotten to kill at least one of them, right? Yeah, goddamn. I mean he may have– he fights in Italy for a while and he gets promoted to cadet officer in 1945. But Green– and I think his– the thing he was useful at was not his fighting, right? Green writes that what he managed to do well– and he managed to prove himself indispensable to his comrades by using his powers of organization to gather luxury supplies like chocolate and soap and coffee– and provide them to his comrades, right? In other words, he was really good at logistics and like the shady kind of logistics where you're gathering and requisitioning stuff from the civilian population.

36:07 Maybe you're handing them some guns. Maybe you're just taking it, right? It's probably not sketchy what he's doing to get this stuff.

36:16 He will become a landlord later.

36:18 Yeah, we're seeing the landlord breaking through. He makes himself so useful providing luxuries to his comrades that he gets a private room while most of his unit is still camped out in tents, right? Like a room in an actual like building. Wow. As Green describes it, by the end of the war, Rockman had made a place of acceptance for himself in the unit that had initially been very bigoted against him. Quote, he was genuinely popular, provided he kept his place. Everything about him was regarded with friendly condescension. When he dished out the canteen rations, if any of the Russian soldiers in the unit complained, his voice would squeak with emotion as he would shout, go back to your German friends then. If you think you'll

36:55 get better from Hitler, go back and get it from him. This hatred provided something of a stock entertainment. So did his Jewishness, which brought him in for nonstop teasing, apparently taken in good part. If that sounds cruel, it was explained, you must remember that it was the Jews themselves who created the atmosphere. They never thought of themselves as Polish, and they always thought that we Poles despise them. This is a quote from one of his comrades. So I don't know if we should take that literally, right? This is somebody after the war trying to explain why he was such a racist to the Jews in his unit.

37:22 I was going to say, this sounds like definitely an anti-Semite. You know, it's actually still the Jews' father.

37:28 Yeah, I don't know if they brought it on themselves. I think you guys were just assholes. I think you guys were huge dicks to these people for no real reason.

37:37 Yeah, just racism, you know.

37:39 Just racism.

37:40 Yeah.

37:40 By the end of the war, he'd had no contact with any of his family. And for obvious reasons, Rachman is not eager to return to post-war Poland. Who can blame him? I wouldn't want to go back either. And unfortunately, this is like another, I guess you could call it like one of the Nazi successes in this war is that even among the Polish Jews who survive, a lot never want to return.

38:06 Right?

38:06 Because they saw all of their neighbors turn against them and murder a lot of their family.

38:10 Members, right?

38:11 Why would you go back, right? Since he'd served in the British army, he was stationed in Britain after the end of the war. And in November of 1946, he transfers to a unit in the British military that's called the Polish Resettlement Corps, right? This is a special British military unit made up of Polish forces who wanted to resettle in the United Kingdom after the war. There was an understanding that like, A lot of you aren't going to want to go back for obvious reasons. And you did fight for the British Empire, so we should probably make a place for you here, right? Technically a stateless refugee, Rockman received an alien registration certificate. And after this point, he becomes, in essence, a permanent legal resident of Britain.

38:53 But he's never a citizen, right? Like he has– he's not even naturalized. Like he's a– he's got like a permanent visa, right? Yeah, something like that. Yeah. alien resident visa or something like that, I guess you'd call it. During this next period of his life, he bounces around a few normal jobs. He works as a trainee toolmaker, and then he's a laborer at an aircraft production factory.

39:17 And this is what takes him to East London for the first time. He's going to be in East London for a while before he winds up on the West side. Peter Rockman was ultimately discharged from the Resettlement Corps in February of 1948. So his serviced the military does last a few years after the war and it's here that I should zoom out and talk a little bit about how post-war Great Britain looked because as Americans we have a tendency when we think about the post-world War two period it's a time of like affluence and hope it was a real boom period for us and And that's because the U.S. ended World War II with literally half of all of the wealth on Earth, right? Just in our country. I didn't pull that out of my ass,

39:54 that the actual statistic is about half of all of the wealth on the planet was in the United States at the end of the war. England is not doing so well, right?

40:03 No.

40:04 The country is devastated by the wars. And not just because she'd had to spend a catastrophic amount fighting the war, but because her greatest cities had still been heavily damaged by years of German bombing and rocket attacks. Bomb sites were still being cleared and bombs removed well into the 1950s.

40:21 Many thousands of Britons lost their home during the fighting. And to make matters worse, after the war, they experienced a baby boom, just like the US did. So Great Britain has the baby boom without any of the money and without any of the massive construction of housing. Initially, they're going to have to do that. But this causes a huge issue in the country. There's just not enough housing for everybody, right? Peter Rockman is spending a lot of this in these group homes.

40:48 Well, that feels familiar.

40:51 Right.

40:51 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The end result of all of this is that Peter Brockman enters a Britain in which huge numbers of people are homeless. The government estimated at least 750,000 new homes would need to be built to address the crisis. After the war, Parliament passed the New Towns Act in 1946, which led to the construction of a ton of precast reinforced concrete homes. These were much faster to build than traditional dwellings, but even that was not enough to alleviate the crisis. Many Britons moved into caravans, which are basically RVs or trailers, right? And again, Rockman's living in like group homes and dormitories for a big chunk of this. The UK Science and Media Museum also notes that, quote, neglected or cheap and disused vehicles such

41:34 as railway carriages or trolleybuses were used as homes. They were weatherproof and comfortable and must cheaper than running a conventional built home. So people are like, desperate enough that they had to get creative. They're living in like decommissioned trolleys and trains because there's just no housing, right? You're seeing how the situation is being created in which a landlord could do very well.

41:56 I just keep having these feelings of like, look how far we haven't come from.

42:02 Oh, at the very end, we're going to have a stat dump that really makes that point.

42:07 Oh, man, Robert, don't tell us that.

42:10 It's okay. This is mainly bad for our friends over in the UK, so obviously it doesn't affect us at all because the world's not interconnected.

42:17 You know what is interconnected, though, Robert?

42:20 The sponsors of our podcasts? Yes, yes. They're deeply connected to everything in the story, especially the Third Reich, you know? Which is why I'm a big fan of Mercedes. You know, Mercedes. If you need engines built for a bunch of tanks and armored vehicles that you're going to use to invade Russia...

42:38 I mean... It didn't work the last time, and it probably won't work when you do it, but I don't know. Use Mercedes anyway. And we're back.

42:53 So.

42:54 Rockman couldn't help but notice the fact that there was not nearly enough housing to go around and that it was easily the most valuable commodity in the country after the war. Next to like, well, fresh meat was also a pretty valuable commodity, right? The fact that there was not enough housing would have been obvious during his own struggles to find a home, but it would also have been a constant topic in the news. In 1950, Clement Attlee's labor government committed to build 200,000 new homes. Churchill's conservatives chose to up that to 300,000 And by 1953, that many new homes were being constructed per year. The housing boom in Great Britain would last more than a decade.

43:30 But even so, it is not keeping up with the growing population. These are huge numbers of houses to be constructed, and they're still behind, right? They're still behind the eight ball every step of the way. Green describes Rockman's living situation at the end of the 1940s, working at a veneer factory and living in, quote, Dickensian rooms that were still lit by gas and destitute of any floor coverings.

43:51 Their bedsitters had no facilities for washing or cooking, and beyond empty grates, no facilities for heating. He and his roommate would steal cast-off cuts of veneer from the factory and burn them for warmth. So they're like burning, which is like this fucking paint style. It can't have been good for you to just be burning this stuff and inhaling these fumes. But that's how poor they are, right?

44:14 Is that they're like burning veneer for warmth?

44:17 God, you get out of the gulag. I shouldn't be laughing.

44:19 It's rough.

44:20 You go to war and then all of a sudden you're, Jesus, this guy just can't catch a break.

44:25 No, not yet.

44:26 Not yet.

44:27 He leaves this last job after eight months and leaves the East End for the West End, where London historian Gary Powell writes that he, quote, became involved in Soho's crime and prostitution rackets. And there's some missing here. We don't get him explaining it. I think what happens here is he's like, you know what? A sucker's game is working for money. That's bullshit. I'm going to get into gambling and pimping. Game's a chance.

44:52 Game's a chance.

44:52 Game's a chance in pimping. Yeah. And it was, Gary Powell alleges, this illicit money that first allowed Rockman to start purchasing properties, which he funded by working as a pimp. This matter is up for some debate. Neil Root describes him as taking a more acceptable route. taking a job at a property management office in late 1950 and working his way up to a management position by 1952 when he saves up enough money that he's able to buy.

45:21 He's buying what we would call today distressed properties, right? And it's definitely true that he works in this place. It's also almost certainly true that some of the money he's making to buy these houses comes from money he's making illicitly, right? Both of these things are accurate. Root makes it clear that Rockman was heavily involved in the underworld, too, although in a somewhat different way than Powell describes it. Quote, It's around this time that Rockman became close to Gloria, a tall, redheaded prostitute, as detailed by Shirley Green in her biography. A police officer, now deceased, who was working in Notting Hill during Rockman's time, compiled a report of what he had learned about him, and this was supplied

45:56 as research for this book by the writer and journalist Mark Olden. The policeman thought that Gloria's surname was Davenport, but this could not be verified, and Gloria may well not have been her real name. In any event, Rockman seems to have been associating with prostitutes, but there was no evidence that he worked as a pimp. As the report states, it was at that time that he started to befriend prostitutes, not only availing himself of their services, but also trading with them and even lending them money.

46:19 He was well-liked by the Frail Sisterhood, who report that his main catchphrase was, don't worry when they were late with rent or repaying loans. There was never any evidence that he took earnings of prostitution from any prostitute as a ponce. A ponce is an old-timey Britishism for pimp, right, in this period of time. So at least from that era, it's less that he was, he was definitely making some money gambling, but he wasn't a pimp so much as he was just like his entire social circle was prostitutes, which is a cooler guy.

46:46 That's kind of like, not so bad, you know, pro sex work, maybe hopefully helps out with the hope, maybe.

46:54 Yeah. You get mixed reports about whether or not he was really helping with the rent, so to speak. Um, Gloria's pimp was a West Indian guy, right? Uh, and he fell in love with her and suggested, and she suggested at least the story he would tell us that he falls in love with this, this prostitute. And she's like, you should start like buying and renting out homes, right?

47:17 Because you're a white respectable looking guy who can buy property and you could sublet it to all of my friends who are also sex workers. and have trouble finding a landlord who's not an asshole. That's one version of the Rockman story. We don't actually know what's true here. It is entirely possible that he's basically working as a pimp for these people. But, you know, at least Root's research suggests it's something a little more nuanced. In an article for the New York Review of Books, Carol Phillips gives an account that sides somewhere between these two versions of what happens. She writes, And British law at this time considered two girls doing business out of the same flat to be a brothel, right? So they would crack

48:14 down if there was more than one girl working out of the same apartment. But one girl working out of one flat could pass without incident if her neighbors didn't complain.

48:23 That's incredible, Robert.

48:27 British laws are crazy. Recent changes to policy had led London police to aggressively arrest and crack down on both brothels and streetwalking, right? For the first but not the last time, Peter Rockman took a look at these laws and found a place for himself to make a fortune. Quote, and this is Carol Phillips, Rockman's girls paid him their official rent and then handed over additional cash in payment for this consideration, which allowed them to work more safely off the streets. Although Rockman certainly had sex with some of his girls, though according to his biographer Shirley Green, never against their will nor in lieu of rent, he was unsentimental about it. Mandy Rice Davis, his ex-girlfriend, or

49:04 his ex-girlfriend, claimed, Sex was not a passion with him, but something functional, like drinking a glass of water. Now, I think that kind of neatly explains the discrepancy between was he a pimp or was he just a friend? He's not directly a pimp, but he's the landlord to... basically an apartment building where everyone there is a prostitute and they're paying him out of their cut of their earnings.

49:26 So it's kind of pimping with like an extra step.

49:29 This feels like an abusive love bomb type thing where he's like, oh, yeah, don't worry, it will be good. This isn't really sexual to me. I'll take care of you. Yeah, I own this building where you're, yeah, just sounds bad.

49:46 And again, that doesn't mean, he may also have been, because he seems to have been very popular with a lot of people who lived in kind of the underclass of London in this period of time. So it may have been that he was still a better option than they had from anyone else. That can be true, and it can also have still been not a great situation for him.

50:03 Ethically lesser of two evils the harm reduction right pimp.

50:08 He's their version of getting sent to the gulag instead of a death camp where it's like well, this is better Now again When you read kind of some of the versions of this where he's just like hanging out with all of these Prostitutes and like helping him out He can seem like dangerously close to being a cool guy in an article for unseen histories Neil Root makes it clear that this was not the case and Rooms were also rented to sex workers, and these women were charged the highest rents, which they sometimes would have to pay to have an inside space to do business. But they were also sometimes intimidated and victimized. So Ruth will also note that he wasn't directly a pimp, but he's also not always nice to his tenants, right? He couldn't

50:51 be harsh when he needed to, and he was also charging them the high end of the scale because they were working from home, so to speak, right? Yeah. So I wouldn't call this a great moral sitch, even if it is like a better deal than they were getting from anyone else, right?

51:05 Yeah.

51:06 Now, London in this period also had very strong rent control laws. And these made it basically impossible to raise rents or evict tenants, right? If you live there and have been living there, you pay the same rate that you've been paying and you can't be evicted. And this is great for the people, right? But it makes rental properties a terrible investment. Unless... you can find a way to force your tenants to move. Then you can charge the new folks whatever the fuck you want, right? And so as he's buying these distressed properties that he's going to fill with sex workers, they're all filled with other people who have a rent control situation, right? So he's got to force other people out of these buildings before

51:44 he can fill them with his quote unquote friends. Andy Edwards summarized in an article Rockman's first home purchase this way and how he cleared out the former tenants. Seven of the eight rooms were already occupied by rent-paying tenants who were protected by the current rent controls and therefore immune from eviction. Rockman is alleged to have rented out the one unoccupied room to a party of eight West Indian musicians who were encouraged to party. This led to the white tenants quickly terminating their tenancies and being replaced by West Indian immigrants who were charged higher rents, right?

52:13 In other words, and when we say West Indian, we're talking about like a lot of people from like Jamaica, right? The Caribbean. And these are generally black people, right? And so- What he realizes is that if I move a bunch of black people into the only spare space or one of the spare spaces in this building and I tell them– sometimes he would like– he's alleged to have like paid them or given them a break on rent to party late at night. It will make everyone else want to leave, right?

52:36 Yeah.

52:38 You know, he's kind of just taking advantage of the racism of these white tenants. That is a big part of what's happening. Although it's also fair to say, you might just want to leave in if you're not a racist, if someone's paying like a band to play music at all hours of the day inside of your apartment building.

52:51 So I'm not going to say only racism leads to these people leaving, but a lot of it is racism. And it's interesting because I think probably what Green says is accurate, that this is a guy who because of his life experiences is not at all judgmental about people. He doesn't really think that he doesn't have a moral issue with prostitution and he's not a bigot, right? He's not like a racist against these black people or any of the non-white people that he's moving into these spaces, but he understands racism. And he's very willing to take advantage of it to profit, right? And this is going to contribute, as we'll talk about in part two, to this kind of like boiling undercurrent of racial resentment from

53:32 white people against West Indian immigrants, right? Because he's deliberately putting them in a situation to have conflict with these white people, right?

53:41 Yeah.

53:43 And we'll talk about that and what happens later in part two. But we're done with part one. Are you feeling, Kevin?

53:50 Good, good. I'm doing what I can to keep up. I'm like so immersed in this piece of shittery that is also has such a like... Crazy origin. It's always tough when the origin is literally the worst possible thing you could have happen to you.

54:09 Like, you want this guy to succeed and do well, and then it's like.

54:13 Ah, but not like that. He's a few steps away from being on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff for being a pro-sex work awesome dude that was helping people out after going through hell, but he seems like a piece of shit.

54:31 Yeah. And it's tough because there are– you will get a lot of quotes from like West Indian immigrants too who are like Rockman was like the only guy who would rent to us because all of the other landlords were so fucking racist, right? And so there are a lot of people that like legitimately got by and were able to make a life for themselves because Rockman offered them a place. But he wasn't doing it out of the goodness of his heart. And he was deliberately stoking racial tensions in order to make more money for himself in a way that's going to cost some of these people quite dearly later on. So we'll talk about all that.

55:05 You got any pluggables to plug before we roll out here?

55:08 Yeah. Check me out on Substack at Last Week in Hell and Kevin H. Foster on all the social things.

55:16 Excellent. All right. Well, we will be back in– On Thursday, except for everyone on this call, we'll be back in like five minutes because that's how we actually record these things.

55:26 Figured.

55:27 But yeah, pretend it's otherwise, you know, and wait for us. We'll be there.

55:31 All right.

55:35 Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.