Who was Robert Maxwell?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio.

**Josh** (0:11)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the Great Man version of History edition.

**Chuck** (0:23)
Yeah, Great Man, except he's, this is an interesting episode because Robert Maxwell was kind of a horrible person. In a lot of ways, he achieved a lot of things. He also did a lot of terrible things.
So it was interesting. I didn't know much about this guy at all, and I can't remember if I heard about him because he's the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, but I don't...

**Josh** (0:50)
Which makes him even worse.

**Chuck** (0:52)
Well, yeah, I mean, yeah. I'm not sure where this came from though, because this one was like a year and a half ago that we requisitioned the article and it had just been gathering dust.
And so we dusted it off and now we're going to talk about this jerk.

**Josh** (1:07)
Yeah.
Great man history, by the way, is a way of interpreting history through the leaders, political and social, military leaders, like the people who make history happen rather than society or individual people. The problem is, is that those great men usually are not great people personally speaking, and this is a really good example. He was revered because he was super rich. But he was also, I have to say, a very interesting person. I think he was a big liar in a lot of ways, but stuff that he claimed that could be proven was still pretty nuts.

**Chuck** (1:49)
Yeah, for sure. I mean, he was just the broadest overview. He was a tycoon. He was a bully.
He escaped Nazi Germany's wrath. He was a decorated British soldier. He was a member of parliament. He was also a crook who stole from the pensions of companies he started, and a lot of terrible business dealings. It sounds like it was a pretty awful husband and father at the same time.

**Josh** (2:16)
Well, there's the episode.

**Chuck** (2:19)
Well, let's talk about him. He was born Jan Ludwig Hoke in 1923 in Solatvino, which was Czechoslovakia at the time. It's now Ukraine. But he was very poor. He was raised very poor from a big family. His father seems like was a pretty awful guy too.
So behind every awful person is usually an awful parent or two. You know?

**Josh** (2:47)
It's intergenerational.

**Chuck** (2:49)
Yeah. That's the way it generally works.

**Josh** (2:51)
Yeah. So and that's why I never had kids.

**Chuck** (2:55)
Oh, no.

**Josh** (2:57)
So yeah, he said at one point, I was never young. I never had that privilege. And it was basically because his family was so poverty stricken and his father was such a jerk that he wasn't, he didn't have much of a childhood, but he did remember that he loved his mother like his whole life from childhood on. And he would use her as an example of what his children needed to aspire to, you know, this woman who could handle raising all these kids in these terrible conditions and still, you know, be beloved.

**Chuck** (3:29)
Sure. I mean, suffered from hunger as a child and had some disordered eating as an adult and that sort of gorging himself on food. And his wife, his later wife Betty, would say that, you know, she thinks that all came back from the hunger that he had as a child.

**Josh** (3:44)
Yeah.

**Chuck** (3:45)
He was Jewish. He was from a Jewish family. And like I mentioned earlier, he managed to escape the, I think kind of the only member of his family to escape the Nazis in March of 1939 when they invaded Czechoslovakia by cutting off his side locks and like getting the heck out of there. And for a lot of his adult life, like I don't know if he denied it, but never came forward as being Jewish, like changing his name and everything.

**Josh** (4:16)
Yeah, he was low key Jewish for a lot of his life until later on when he was talked into, I guess coming out, I don't know what you would call it in that sense.

**Chuck** (4:26)
Yeah.

**Josh** (4:27)
But you said that he escaped the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia, and he definitely did, but very quickly turned right around and went back to join the Hungarian underground in Budapest.
And he was essentially trying to move people escaping like him further on to safety, because Hungary still wasn't safety. It was better than being in Czechoslovakia, but you still needed to keep moving, and he was going to help people. And almost immediately, he was captured and held and tortured as a member of the Czech resistance, which is not what you wanted the Nazis to consider you.