Rachel Bloom’s episode of Drunk History is here. In what makes perfect sense, her episode tells the story of the capture of Adolf Eichmann, the “architect” of the Holocaust. As her husband, Dan Gregor, tweeted, “My dog, my wife, my people’s history, my Weird Al. A great day in TV history.”
The episode, airing June 26, is part of a Drunk History season 5 episode all about heists. While the capture of Eichmann isn’t really a heist (in the Ocean’s 8 Sandra Bullock sense of the word), it was still a monumental undertaking, with many moving parts, that many worried wouldn’t succeed. In the episode, Bloom, wrapped in her blanket sitting next to her dog (who keeps licking herself, which Bloom continues to comment on), says, “It’s weird to tell a story about Nazis and be so cozy.”
What’s so great about Bloom’s re-telling in Drunk History is that she hits all the key points of the story (the main players, how they kidnapped Eichmann and snuck him onto an El Al plane, how he was found by Holocaust survivors), without losing her sense of humor. As Bloom recounts, Issar Harel, head of Mossad, told David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s Prime Minister, that they needed to go after Adolf Eichmann because, “Let’s nail this f*cking motherf*cker to the wall like a f*cking moose who’s been hunted.”
Other great lines include, “The Eichmann kids are fucking stupid,” and, “Argentina is like, really bad about extraditing Nazis. They, like, don’t give a shit for some reason. I don’t know why. I don’t know why!” and, “We’re gonna have to milk-carton Adolf Eichmann!”
Watch the full clip here (and prepare yourself for Weird Al as Adolf Eichmann):
(One key historical correction that the history major in me has to write: Lothar, the dad of Eichmann’s son’s girlfriend, doesn’t tip off the Mossad, as Bloom says, but tells Fritz Bauer, a Jewish district attorney in West Germany and Holocaust survivor. Bauer passed the information along to Harel because he didn’t believe West Germany would act.)
As she ends the story, cheering with her glass of rosé (or what looks like rosé, we can’t totally tell), Bloom says, “Fuck the Nazis, man. I’m alive. I’m 97.4 Ashkenazi.” Fuck the Nazis, indeed.