Josef Mengele Pt. 1: “Auschwitz Angel of Death”

Listener discretion is advised. This episode features discussions of war, anti-Semitism and eugenics that may be upsetting. We advise extreme caution for listeners under 13. It's not uncommon to desire fame and glory, to etch your name into the history books. And for a lot of people, that goal is a reflection of our vanity, of our need to leave a mark that declares "I was here." It's usually a harmless dream that will come to affect few people but ourselves. But when you combine the ego of someone seeking notoriety for its own sake with the mind of a scientist, things start to get dicey. When that person is a doctor, things can get downright evil. This is Medical Murders, a parkast original. Every year, thousands of medical students take the Hippocratic Oath. It boils down to "do no harm." But a closer look reveals a phrase much more interesting - "I must not play at God." However, some doctors break that oath, choosing to play God with their patients, deciding who lives and who dies. Each week on Medical Murders, we'll investigate those who decided to kill. We'll explore the specifics of how they operate, not just on their patients, but within their own minds, examining the psychology and neurology behind heartless medical killers. I'm Alistair Murden, and I'm joined by Dr. David Kipper, MD. Hi everyone. It's a pleasure to be here to assist Alistair by providing some medical information and insight into the killer's modus operandi. I'm particularly interested in seeing how Dr. Mengele performed all of his atrocities, since this was a contemporary issue while I was growing up. You can find episodes of Medical Murders and all other parkast originals for free on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. To stream Medical Murders for free on Spotify, just open the app and type Medical Murders in the search bar. This is our first episode on Dr. Josef Mengele, also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau's Angel of Death. After he arrived at Auschwitz in 1943, Mengele selected untold numbers of people to be sent to the death chambers. But he is perhaps most infamous for his twisted experiments on twins, serving his warped view of genetic research. No records of these experiments are scarce, chilling accounts tell of the deaths his work caused, and even of cold-blooded murders. Today, we'll look at Mengele's early life and how a mediocre student became a fanatical researcher willing to engineer and participate in mass slaughter. Next time, we'll take a deep dive into Mengele's time at the Nazi death camps, his shocking experiments and the quest to bring him to justice. Or this and more, coming up, stay with us. Growing up in the village of Gunsberg, Germany, Josef Mengele led a pretty charmed life. He was born in 1911, and as the eldest son, Mengele was entrusted by his parents to supervise the transportation of supplies between their successful farm equipment factory and the train station. Village locals remembered him as charming, articulate, and handsome. He also had the heirs of a natural leader, while overseeing shipments at the station, he was thorough and careful, unafraid to give orders, even as a teenager. And by all accounts, he relished the power. If only he were a good student, he might have been perfect. Alas, young Mengele was noticeably unconcerned with education. He was well behaved, certainly, but he lacked the diligence and drive that would propel him to greatness. In other words, his profound mediocrity didn't concern him. As a teenager, he took a shine to the finer things in life. He and his friends indulged their more impulsive sides, spending time driving cars and whiling away hours in cafes and salons. Mengele himself liked to wear expensive suits, showing off the most fashionable cuts. He preened about, seemingly concerned with fast cars and his appearance more than anything else. Later in life, Mengele would paint a different picture of his youth, suggesting he took after his father, who spent long hours stoically working to provide for his family. But in reality, Mengele proved to be more like his beloved mother, Valberga. According to authors Lucette Lognardo and Sheila Cone-Deckel, Valberga could be warm and maternal, or she could behave like a raging bull. Her reactions were impossible to predict. While her husband Carl was the one in charge of their farming equipment factory, it was Valberga who inspired the most fear among their employees. She would make impromptu visits to the factory and unleash her fury upon workers who drew her ire. If things were out of place, improperly cleaned or simply not to her liking, she would fly into a rage. As a bipolar disorder is inherited, this explains a lot about Mengele's behaviors. When we're genetically predisposed to mental illness, stressful events can trigger their worst expressions. People are correct in saying stress is a killer. But as far as we know, Mengele wouldn't demonstrate his own frightening temper until much later in life. Its unpredictable duality would come to be replicated by Mengele as he marched the grim grounds at Auschwitz-Birkenau. For now, he remained charming and polite, mostly contented coast through life on his good looks and his family's money. However, things began to shift towards the end of the 1920s. Germany was still reeling from its World War I defeat and a vindictive wave of anti-Semitism swept through the country, stoked by Adolf Hitler's growing influence. With the emerging Nazi rhetoric came a growing nationalistic fervor, one that even laid back Mengele found irresistible. During his late teens, he became active in the Großdeutsche Jugendbund, or the German Youth Movement. The group advocated for a return to the Germany of old, and there Mengele demonstrated the first glimmers of ambition. He became a local leader within the organization and delivered eloquent speeches. At the age of 19, Mengele fully switched gears. Despite his lackluster showing at school, he decided he wanted to make a name for himself. He finally took an interest in his education and enrolled at the University of Munich in 1930. He'd study medicine and philosophy, hoping to become a famous anthropologist and geneticist. He definitely achieved infamy. You know, Alistair, by the end of the First World War, the fields of anthropology and genetics took on a very interesting shape. At this time, nationalism was on the rise, especially in Germany, and a growing interest in anthropology seemed to spring in part from this movement. Similarly, the 20s and 30s were a very exciting time for genetics, notably marked by the development of the Mendelian model. Gregor Mendel was one of the first scientists to actually study genetics, and he did so in plants, and his findings remain the backbone for all modern genetic studies. What we've learned so far is that Josef Mengele wanted desperately to be included in the scientific community, so he must have been very impressed with Gregor Mendel's work on genetics, and I'm sure there was some degree of envy in the work that he did. But Mengele's ambitions weren't just about advancing scientific discourse and discovery. He wanted to be famous, renowned. Before leaving for university, he told a friend in his hometown, "One day, my name will be in the encyclopedia." Coming up, Josef Mengele sets out on his dark path to infamy. Before we get back to the show, I have a quick podcast recommendation I think you'll really enjoy. It's an all-new Spotify original from Parcast, and it's called "Incredible Feats". Every weekday, comedian Dan Cummins, who you might recognize from the hit podcast TimeSuck, explores a true account of physical strength, mental focus, or bizarre behavior. He goes behind the scenes into the achievements of world record holders like Ashrita Furman, who's broken records on every continent, and athletes like Wim Hof, whose training methods allow him to withstand extreme temperatures for hours at a time, and even people like Juliana Kopka, who was forced to survive alone in a rainforest when she was just 17 years old. Incredible Feats is off-beat entertainment that's sometimes weird, sometimes wonderful, and always surprising. New episodes air Monday through Friday. Search Incredible Feats and follow free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the story. In 1931, Josef Mengele was a year into his studies at the University of Munich. As he pursued his goal of becoming a renowned anthropologist and genetic scientist, a fellow German with grand ambitions was growing in popularity. The global recession created an uncertain atmosphere, allowing Adolf Hitler to expand his influence. He was now the leader of the second largest political party in Germany – the Nazis. Hitler and his followers further spread his ideas of German superiority and scapegoated the Jewish people for any and all problems. As these ideas took hold, anti-Semitism rose in every corner of Germany. Famously, the eventual government response was one of discrimination and murder. But the Nazi party influence was even greater than that. In academics, where we typically rely on cooler, brighter heads to prevail, subjects began to skew to a decidedly bigoted view. Genetics, history, anthropology, biology – all were increasingly affected by anti-Semitism. As was Mengele. It's tragic that hate penetrated the scientific landscape in the 1930s. While it's less overt today, we still have racism and discrimination in the medical community. It stems from a more veiled and systemic problem that bleeds into the world of healthcare. And it's manifested through things like unequal access to education, healthy food, and affordable medical treatment. We're all somewhat at the mercy of the systems and environments we're placed into, so it makes sense, unfortunately, that Mengele focused his studies on anti-Semitism as Hitler's popularity was now growing. As his education continued, Mengele shed his carefree personality and buckled down to focus on his studies and his increasingly hateful views. He wanted to know what science could do about the "light" of Jewishness in Germany. It was around this time that he became aware of the work of social Darwinists. Social Darwinism is the theory that races, or groups of humans, are subject to the same natural selection laws as the plants and animals Darwin observed and wrote about in nature. The innate problem with social Darwinism is that it uses purely scientific theory to promote an unscientific idea. Darwin's observational theory about life's biological diversity can't be responsibly applied to socio-political or economic matters. The approach is just flawed and nonsensical. Despite this, the Nazi's anti-Semitism dovetailed nicely with the pseudoscience of social Darwinism, leaving room for prejudice in what should have been a neutral scientific setting. Perhaps because he'd found something that so interested him, Mengele graduated with highest honors in 1935. After five years at university, he was a certified physician and had a PhD in anthropology, helping him on his way to his goal of scientific fame. Soon after graduating, 25-year-old Mengele secured a position at the University of Frankfurt, working as an assistant to Professor Ottmar Freier von Verschauer. A renowned racial scientist, Verschauer had built, with Nazi funding, the Institute for Heredity, Biology, and Racial Purity. Among his interests, Verschauer was interested in tracing the role heredity played in disease, examining genetic abnormalities and their transfer between generations and looking at environmental factors on genetic defects. Although Verschauer was horribly misguided, studying genetics in relation to our environments can provide valuable insight into curing many diseases. These is, in fact, strongly rooted in genetics or the inherited DNA sequencing of our genes. We now have technology, known as CRISPR, that allows us to go inside a gene and manipulate its DNA so we can fix the broken areas that cause specific diseases, like sickle cell anemia. We have now actually had one case of curing sickle cell anemia based on this technique. Dr. Mengele, interestingly, had something in common with the current technology from CRISPR. Both were trying to understand how genetics played into disease and to human behavior. But of course, as we've seen, valuable science can be abused. Verschauer certainly wasn't using his position to help humanity. The Institute for Heredity, Biology, and Racial Purity helped further the burgeoning eugenics movement and also provided material support to the Nazis by helping implement the Nuremberg Laws. The Nuremberg Laws restricted the rights and citizenship of Jewish people, so Mengele and his colleagues were responsible for determining whether someone was or wasn't Jewish. While the concentration camps weren't yet running, Mengele's choices had an enormous impact on the lives of those he selected. Those he declared Jewish were stripped of their livelihoods along with their citizenship, and many would end up being tortured and killed by the Nazis. In this role, it didn't take long for Mengele to become a valued member of Verschauer's team. In fact, he was soon his most trusted assistant, collaborating with his mentor on various projects to further the cause of Nazi pseudoscience. Over the next few years, Mengele published several academic papers meant to bolster his own skewed scientific opinion. One, studied segments of the jaw in humans from four geographic regions. The differences between the jaws indicated clear racial distinctions, particularly between two European racial groups. Mengele's studies, clearly influenced by his mentor, looked closer at the issue of heredity in physical defects like the cleft palate and abnormalities in ear cartilage. According to author Robert J. Clifton, Mengele's studies, while fairly respectable for the time, claim more than they prove. Working alongside Verschauer was illuminating for Mengele. He respected and admired the professor's work, which so neatly aligned with his own developing, bigoted beliefs. In return, Verschauer mentored his protege, showing him the ropes of the research world and sharing his wealth of experience. In particular, he stressed to Mengele that experimentation on human subjects was perfectly acceptable, indeed preferable when it furthered the scientific cause. Unfortunately, human experimentation has long been a troubling stain on the reputation of many scientific advancements. Actually, racism in medicine contributed largely to human experimentation. And unfortunately, this vulnerable population provided the human resource that we needed to go further with our studies. It made it go quicker because we had human subjects. Human subjects are a lot easier than animal subjects. In fact, around the same time the Nazis were conducting human experiments, the Japanese were conducting biological and chemical warfare tests on prisoners at the infamous Unit 731 facility. Upon the unit's closure at the end of the war, the U.S. government actually kept the data they obtained from this factory of death. The reasoning was allegedly to prevent the communists from getting their hands on the research, but the very premise suggests that some grim, yet useful information was gained from these awful experimentations. This represents a disturbing reminder that important and useful science can often be very messy and compromised. In modern times, human volunteers are only used in testing once a treatment has gone to its final FDA approval stage, like testing vaccines. The benefits of human testing wasn't the only belief Vershua passed along to Mengele. Vershua was also convinced that twins held the key to unlocking mysteries of genetics. He theorized that to truly understand what is passed along via genetics, twins were essential. So for years, he had focused his research almost exclusively on twins. "Experimentation on twins," he told his protege, "would be the holy grail for his work. To have two genetically identical test subjects, one to remain as a helpful control, was ideal." But despite his passion for human test subjects and twins, Vershua was never known to conduct any experiments on living twins. For now, their research was conducted via observations and comparisons between patients. It wasn't ideal, but it was all they could do. Mengele spent long hours in the laboratory, while his mentor carved a higher profile for himself. Vershua made frequent contributions to the literature of the day and wasn't shy about his anti-semitic views. In his writing, he frequently praised Hitler and called for drastic measures to eliminate the Jewish people from German society. In Weimar Republic-era Germany and beyond, anti-semitic beliefs like Vershua's and Mengele's were on the rise. And the more the senior researcher vocalized support for the Nazis and their violent anti-semitism, the higher his profile rose. In the end, his outspoken support would lend scientific authority to the horrific final solution. Later, at the Nuremberg trials, a witness testified that Vershua sacrificed his pure scientific knowledge in order to secure for himself the applause and favor of the Nazi tyrants. Like many Germans, Vershua may have been guilty of falling in line with the Nazi rhetoric to curry favor in the emerging regime. Then again, it's also possible he really was as fanatical as history paints him. Whatever the truth, he had a fervent admirer in Josef Mengele. By 1938, 27-year-old Mengele was working side by side with the most prominent genetics and race scientists in Germany. And he was more than just a colleague. He was a trusted aide and close friend. It's likely Mengele saw Vershua as a father figure. His own father, often kept away from home by his work, wasn't a strong presence in his life. Besides, Mengele's father worked in a factory, which was hardly the kind of career Mengele aspired to. Vershua, the renowned, celebrated researcher, was his guiding light, and he would do anything to impress him. In Mengele, Vershua had an impressionable, ambitious young mind at his disposal. It was only too easy to mold Mengele into a willing, even eager, disciple. In the future, his assistant could perform research of his own, further spreading the gospel of racial purity across Europe. But after three years working under Vershua, Mengele's world was about to change. In 1938, Mengele joined the Schutstaffel, the SS, and received three months of basic training from the Gehrbigsjäger, an alpine infantry troop. And then, in 1939, Germany declared war on Poland. Suddenly, Mengele was no longer just a scientist. He was leaving the laboratory behind and trading his white coat for a stiff, striking uniform. He was going to war. Coming up, Josef Mengele decides who lives and who dies. Now back to the story. In 1939, war broke out in Europe. Soon after, 28-year-old Josef Mengele was sent to work in an administrative position at the SS Race and Resettlement Office. His role was remarkably similar to his early work at the Institute for Heredity, Biology, and Racial Purity, where he determined the racial cleanliness of his fellow Germans. Now, he reviewed citizenship applications for Germans living abroad. Once again, his education was put to use, judging Aryan credentials to determine who was a "true" German. It's not clear exactly what work Mengele did to make these decisions, but given what we know about the Nuremberg Laws and the subsequent decrees about German citizenship, it was likely less science and more paperwork. To the Nazis, Jewish people weren't just a religious or ethnic group. They were an entirely different race. Adherence to Judaism was of little concern. To the Nazis, if someone was of Jewish lineage, they were separate, inferior. According to stifling arbitrary rules, anyone with three Jewish grandparents or two Jewish parents was considered Jewish, as was anyone who belonged to a Jewish religious community or married into a Jewish family. So, Mengele likely predominantly looked at family trees and census information. Mengele remained at the Race and Resettlement Office until June of 1941, when he was shuffled to the Waffen-Schutzstaffel, the military branch of the SS, and sent to Ukraine. Despite his years-long entrenchment in academia, 30-year-old Mengele proved an adept soldier. During his time in the Waffen-SS, he was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class for heroic service on the battlefield. But he wasn't to remain there for long. The following year, he joined the SS Viking Division to become a field physician during World War II. Here, at last, Mengele achieved his goal. He was a doctor treating patients. And it was no doubt a high stress posting. On the battlefield, Mengele held lives in his hands. Unfortunately for his patients, field hospitals were rarely well-stocked with equipment, medication, or personnel. But violence wasn't the only factor making the rookie sweat. Epidemics were so common as to be expected during the humid summers, while the freezing winters brought with them the delightful threats of hypothermia and frostbite. Instead of extensive on-site treatment, field medics would only stabilize wounded soldiers and prepare them for evacuation to a field hospital. While these harsh conditions led to concerns about infection and sterility, the primary focus on the battlefield was keeping people alive. In World War II, being a field medic came with many responsibilities, the most common being brief examinations and applying tourniquets, morphine injections, cleaning wounds, and sprinkling sulfur powder to disinfect, bandaging, and dragging wounded soldiers off the field. While being a field medic is, to this day, incredibly respectable in the military, it's hardly the kind of glory Mengele imagined for himself when he was in medical school. The ramshackle working conditions weren't the only thing Mengele was ill-prepared for. He quickly discovered a grim reality of medicine – doctors can't save everyone. Oftentimes he was forced to make split-second decisions about who to treat. He couldn't save all of his comrades and needed to quickly assess who had the best chance of survival. Though he would later tell friends that he hated these forced choices, it's not difficult to imagine Mengele making decisions informed by his research and prejudices. Which of his comrades would best serve Germany in the future? Whose genes deserve to be carried into the next generation? Perhaps possible, these thoughts ran through Mengele's head while he weighed his options. Who would live? Who would die? The choice was his alone. Doctors are usually associated with saving lives, but many forget that sometimes for that to happen, someone else is going to die. This reminds me of a time I was moonlighting in an emergency room during my residency, and a traffic accident delivered to me three critical patients. As a lone physician, with only one nurse, I had to decide who to treat. After a quick assessment, I chose the youngest person, and to this day I'm still haunted by that experience. Making a life-and-death decision is never purely an objective decision. Some of the variables that doctors have to consider when making a life-and-death decision go beyond age. These variables might be the degree of trauma or acuteness of the illness. They may also unfortunately refer back to people's own prejudices. Weighing all these variables is part of our doctor training. However, it's never an easy decision, and there's always some remorse for whatever that decision is. Having to make that difficult call is a grim reality for doctors, and Dr. Joseph Mengele wasn't excused from this obligation. It does appear, however, that he was somehow protected from these natural feelings. He didn't know it, but Mengele was honing a skill that would serve him well in the near future. But for now, he remained deeply committed to his role. He even earned an Iron Cross first class after rescuing two wounded soldiers from a burning tank that was taking enemy fire. It's unclear how, but sometime toward the end of 1942, Mengele was injured and declared unfit to remain in the field. And so, he was spirited away from the battlefield and returned to his post at the Race and Resettlement Office in Berlin, this time working as part of the team overseeing the concentration camps. After his time in the field, Mengele found the realities of a desk job dull. During this time, he got back in touch with his former mentor, Oatmar von Verschur, who had assumed the prestigious role of director of Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Back in the same city once more, they picked up where they left off, rekindling Mengele's passion for Verschur's research. But Mengele wanted to make a more significant contribution than paperwork. To be the most helpful he felt, he should be using his education and scientific training to advance Germany. And both he and Verschur believed that the most groundbreaking medical research in Germany was going on at the concentration camps. Though the Nazi concentration camps are perhaps best known for their legacy of gas chambers and mass graves, there were other grim practices carried out behind the barbed wire. Since as early as 1939, the camps have been sites for human experimentation undertaken by German scientists. In the name of scientific advancement, prisoners at Dockau were exposed to cholera, diphtheria, influenza, tuberculosis, and yellow fever. Once the inmates were infected, eager doctors injected them with various substances, experimenting with ways to slow or treat the spread. In particular, typhoid fever was zeroed in on at Buchenwald, one of the first-built and largest concentration camps. The deadly illness was a perpetual problem for the German army, and the deaths of prisoners in service of finding a cure was a pittance in comparison – in the eyes of the Nazi doctors, that is. They cared little for trifling matters like medical ethics. Only six months after Hitler became chancellor, the first German sterilization laws went into effect across the country. By the time Mengele was assigned to work in the concentration camps, doctors had moved forward with research efforts to find the best methods of mass sterilization. The 1933 sterilization law permitted the forced sterilization of many living with disability and illness from the deaf and blind communities to those committed to asylums for schizophrenia, epilepsy, alcoholism, and more. But the Nazis wanted to find ways to speed up their eugenics project, eliminating "undesirables" ability to procreate seemed like the logical next step. In particular, this grim research was speeding along at Auschwitz. Men, women, and children, representing a vast, diverse swath of the population, were arriving there every day. For Mengele, it must have seemed like an endless supply of test subjects – one that was only too tempting for an aspiring genetic researcher. Mengele and Wschur knew about the work that was happening at the camps, and they wanted to be involved. For a pair of eugenics-happy scientists, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. At Auschwitz, the possibilities reached beyond even their twisted imaginations. Eager for his protege to be in the thick of the scientific action, Wschur used his considerable clout with the Nazi party to have Mengele assigned to Auschwitz as an SS doctor. And that wasn't all. He also pulled strings to secure grants to fund Mengele's research once he arrived. Soon, everything was in place for their scientific dreams to come true. In April of 1943, Josef Mengele packed his bags and set off for Auschwitz. The train station at Auschwitz was busy at all hours – sometimes thousands of people arrived at the camp in one day, ferried across Europe in cattle cars. The journey to the camp was unbearable, packed into the carriages cheek by jowl with no food or water for days. Those who survived the war would report some mothers driven to killing their own children during this transport, unable to bear their pained cries of hunger and fearful at what waited for them at the end of the journey. When the prisoners finally tumbled out of the trains onto the station at Auschwitz, they were met with a grim sight. SS soldiers patrolled with dogs, ordering new arrivals where to go. Not far from the station, flames and smoke billowed out of massive chimneys, turning the sky red. The Crematorium For each arrival, a high-ranking SS officer waited on the platform to sort the thousands into two groups. The few who would work as slaves at the camp, and those who would immediately die. From April 1943 on, a new face appeared on the platform. 32-year-old Josef Mengele always looked immaculate. As in his youth, he preferred his uniform to be perfectly tailored. His boots, even amongst the filth of the death camp, always gleamed. His white gloves seemed to shine bright even in the dark as he stood on the platform, directing guards where to take prisoners. Left, right, left, right. These ones live, these ones die. The split-second decisions echoed those he'd made on the battlefield, except now, his decisions were based on who looked strong enough to survive forced labour. With a flick of Mengele's wrist, those who looked weak were sent to the gas chambers. He had no use for them. These snap decisions he made, determining a person's life or death, must have given him quite the God complex. As he made his judgments, there were people in the transports Mengele kept a careful watch for. Soon after he arrived at the camp, a new order began ringing out over the din of the arriving prisoners. "Twins! Twins over here!" Guards waded through the throng, searching for twins of any age and directing them towards Mengele. Some were pulled from the lines inching closer to the gas chambers, while others were spotted seconds after they stepped off the train. Some families resisted the separation. After the traumatic journey, few were willing to allow their children out of their sight. Some parents argued or had the audacity to ask for their children to be given food and water as they were dragged away. Mengele had these parents beaten. They were slowing everything down, and that was unacceptable. For their part, the twins singled out by Mengele weren't sure what to think of this officer. Tall and handsome, with a broad grin, he'd save them. Of that, they were sure. But why? Next time on Medical Murders, Mengele settles into his role at Auschwitz and gets to work carrying out the live human experimentation he'd dreamed of for years. This pseudo-scientific research would result in untold deaths and innumerable cold-blooded murders. Thanks again for listening to Medical Murders, and thanks again to Dr. Kipper for joining me today. For more information on Josef Mengele, among the many sources we used, we found the book "Children of the Flames", Dr. Josef Mengele and the untold story of the twins of Auschwitz by Lucette Matalan-Lugnardo and Sheila Kohn-Deckel, extremely helpful to our research. You can find all episodes of Medical Murders and all other Parkhurst Originals for free on Spotify. Not only does Spotify already have all of your favorite music, but now Spotify is making it easy for you to enjoy all of your favorite Parkhurst Originals, like Medical Murders, for free from your phone, desktop, or smart speaker. To stream Medical Murders on Spotify, just open the app and type "Medical Murders" in the search bar. We'll see you next time. Medical Murders was created by Max Kuttler and is a Parkhurst Studios original. It is executive produced by Max Kuttler, sound designed by Trent Williamson, with production assistance by Carly Madden, Kristen Acevedo, Jonathan Cohen, Jonathan Ratliff, and Aaron Larson. This episode of Medical Murders was written by Joel Callan with writing assistance by Maggie Admire, and stars David Kipper and Alistair Murden. Listeners, you don't want to miss Incredible Feats, the all-new Spotify original from Parkhurst. Host Dan Cummins free-falls straight into the weirdest, wildest achievements of all time. New episodes air every weekday. Search Incredible Feats and follow free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.