Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany (18 page)

Bizarre as it may seem, Germans found the “Tran and Helle” sketches hilarious. But that doesn’t mean they agreed with Helle’s didactic statements. In fact, more often than not, the opposite was true. Nazi spies reported that the series was so popular because most people sympathized with Tran, the defeatist, whereupon Goebbels immediately canceled it. After the failure of this attempt at humorous persuasion, the fascists never again tried their hand at political sketches—a similar series called “Liese and Miese” was
called off in the conceptual stage. Astonishingly enough, after World War II, Jupp Hessels, the actor who had played the Nazi ideologue Helle, claimed he was an apolitical person who never suspected the sketches were anything but harmless entertainment.

DESPITE ALL THEIR propagandistic twisting and turning, the Nazi leadership could not conceal the fact that the war had gone sour. The first hints of a turning tide came during the winter of 1941–42, when the insufficiently equipped Wehrmacht suffered a series of costly defeats in the vast expanses of Russia. In particular, the generation of Germans who had experienced two-front warfare in World War I began to suspect that Hitler had overextended himself in attacking the Soviet Union. But it wasn’t just the specter of Verdun that created unease. Many Germans saw a parallel with Napoleon, who had suffered a crushing defeat in wintertime Russia. Moreover, the gigantic, icy Soviet empire was only one of the enemies the German field commanders had to face, and it was becoming evident on other fronts—for example, in Egypt—that the German army had reached the limit of its materiel and personnel. The full might of Göring’s Luftwaffe was unable to defend German cities from aerial attack. German cities had been under bombardment since 1940, and by 1943, the Allies were flying bombing missions around the clock. Göring had once famously remarked that if an enemy aircraft ever entered German air space, you could call him Meier. By 1943, wisecrackers among the populace were calling him exactly that, and the notoriously arrogant field marshal had no one but himself to blame.

The course of World War II changed irrevocably with the bloody defeat of German forces in Stalingrad in late January and February of 1943. The demise of the Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army
permanently disposed of Hitler’s boast that he was the “greatest field general in history.” Henceforth, the Führer’s claims of infallibility would be measured against reality. Hitler himself stubbornly refused to acknowledge the facts and responded to disaster with incessant calls on Germans to persevere. But Hitler was not the only one who grew even more irrational when faced by the ever-widening gap between the true state of affairs and Nazi wishful thinking. The entire National Socialist leadership, now on the defensive, began lashing out. By the time Goebbels made his notorious “total war” speech on February 18, 1943, total war was already a bloody reality on all fronts. In effect, Germany’s bloodthirsty aggression was in great part directed against its own army. Tens of thousands of German soldiers were needlessly sacrificed abroad, while on the home front the SS took command.

Outward and inward radicalization proceeded hand in hand. During the intoxicating series of German victories early in the war, the fascist legal system had made only moderate use of measures designed to intimidate skeptics. Now death sentences were handed out fast and furiously to “those who undermine defensive strength.” The sentences and executions that followed were based on a nefarious emergency wartime ordinance thought up by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. The text of the ordinance was left purposely vague:

Starting in 1943, the Nazi judicial system made liberal use of what amounted to a blank check for arbitrary state violence. Judges were creative in their interpretations about what sort of statements counted as “public,” and courts decided that even critical comments made in family circles fell under Keitel’s ordinance.

Judges and prosecutors relied on the help of a small army of eager informers who delivered hundreds of fellow citizens critical of the regime to the gallows throughout the remaining years of the war. Sometimes the informer was a building superintendent or a neighbor trying to settle an old score. In extreme cases, children even informed on their parents. Nowhere in German society were people safe from these unofficial Nazi “deputies.” Without informers, who were of course encouraged by the state, the regime could have never achieved the level of coercion it did over its own citizenry. The Gestapo itself, although widely feared, lacked the personnel necessary to keep millions of people under its thumb. Instead of beefing up the secret police, the Nazis came up with a perfidious system whereby tips could be passed all the way from nosy neighbors to the highest levels of the Gestapo.

IN HER ANALYSIS of Nazi secret police files, the historian Meike Wöhlert has given us a good picture of what happened to people who were handed over to the Gestapo for telling defeatist jokes. In most cases, they were interrogated and then released. Further consequences were rare. Even in those cases where individuals were sent up before special political courts, the trials usually ended with mere warnings. Jokes did not normally fall under Keitel’s emergency wartime ordinance, but rather were subject to a far milder law concerning malicious remarks.
The small minority of wits who were remanded to “protective custody” were
typically released after five months in prison. Nazi authorities treated political criticism—“defeatist remarks”—as a felony and political humor as a misdemeanor.

Nonetheless there were a few exceptional cases in which the telling of jokes was seriously prosecuted in order to get rid “racial comrades” who had fallen out of favor. One of these cases, from the final years of the war, merits further attention: that of the Viennese actor Fritz Muliar. This committed Nazi detractor had been drafted in 1940 and sent to fight in France. When his fellow soldiers learned of his theatrical background, he was ordered to stage an evening of entertainment for the troops. This was hardly unusual. Other performing artists were assigned this task, which was aimed at maintaining morale, and a number of comedians who had successful careers after the war had performed in army cabarets. It was expected that such people would provide apolitical, unchallenging humor that would distract soldiers from the everyday hardships of war. From the beginning, however, Muliar refused to adhere to this unwritten rule. Controversial humor, as Muliar recalled in an interview for this book, went down well:

Muliar refused to take that advice. His work in occupied France brought him into contact with French locals who had no love for their conquerors. According to one French joke, the Nazi Party acronym NSDAP stood for “Nous sommes des Allemands provisoires” (“we are the provisional Germans”), and the jokes told
by such “provisional Germans” were cutting, anti-German and full of resentment. Muliar was always ready to assist the French, helping them smuggle refugees across the border and supporting other subversive activities. He also retold French jokes among German troops.

An Austrian comrade, a high school teacher from Vienna’s first district, reported him to the authorities. A short time later, while standing watch over a fake airfield full of prop airplanes, Muliar was arrested. He was imprisoned in Auxerre and charged with violating Paragraph 5 of the emergency wartime ordinance. Specifically, he was accused of undermining troop morale with defeatist utterances and jokes. And indeed, the young soldier had hardly been circumspect, publicly remarking, “
Goebbels is a whoremonger, Hitler a criminal, and the war a lost cause.”

It was an open secret that the officers in Muliar’s unit were just as blunt in their humor, but they could get away with it. Muliar had already attracted the disapproving attention of party authorities because of his contact with the French and his membership in an Austrian nationalist movement. The jokes he had told made a handy excuse to put the young rebel on ice. Muliar was sent into solitary confinement for seven months, during which time his situation remained torturously uncertain. When he was let out, to stand trial by the military court of the 10th Luftwaffe division, the judge was surprisingly lenient, having apparently concluded that Muliar’s remarks did not reflect any deep-seated political convictions but were instead an expression of youthful rowdiness. He was given a four-month prison term for “undermining defensive strength” in addition to a further four-month sentence for an act of theft he had not committed.

But the relief Muliar felt was short-lived. As soon as he arrived back in prison in Auxerre, his case was reopened. The highest
military judge in the division, General Field Marshal Huge Sperrle, had found Muliar’s sentence far too mild. Muliar was told he would be retried and that the prosecution would ask for the death penalty. After receiving the news, the 22-year-old sat down in his cell and composed his last will and testament. Part of that will was a heartbreaking letter to his family, accompanied by
instructions that his gold watch and his copy of Goethe’s
Faust
be given to his friend Kurt Jelinek.

On December 12, 1942, Muliar’s long wait came to an end when he was taken to Paris and forced to appear in front of a military court. And once again he was spared, sentenced to “only” five years in a reeducation prison. This term was later commuted to “frontline parole.” He was sent to the Donets Basin in Ukraine, where he had to serve in a division for military prisoners that was little better than a suicide commando. Miraculously, Muliar survived the war, despite being forced to advance through minefields. He himself figured he was a goner. Decades after the war, he recalled, “Back then I believed I was never going to be able to laugh again.”

SERVING IN A suicide squad on the Eastern front was no doubt hellish, but at least Muliar lived to tell the tale. A certain Marianne Elise K., who worked as a technical draftswoman in Berlin, was not so lucky. A colleague in the armaments factory where she worked reported her to the authorities for telling the following joke:

Marianne K. was hauled up in front of the notorious People’s Court, which had for some time been making a hated name for itself by handing out harsh sentences. The court’s president, Roland Freisler, who more than anyone else personified Nazi state judicial terror, sat in person over her trial. The judgment he rendered on June 26, 1943 read:

Marianne was executed by guillotine. The court rejected her defense that she was bitter about the fact that her husband had fallen in a senseless war of aggression. On the contrary, the court found that her status as a war widow aggravated her crimes.

The People’s Court made it a point of pride to take no account of individual suffering. Freisler’s predecessor, Otto Georg Thierack, had given the incoming president clear instructions:

Freisler embraced these words and enforced what they enjoined to the letter. As the war progressed, the number of cases heard and of
death sentences handed out by Thierack and Freisler’s court rose dramatically. In 1942, the year in which it became clear that the fortunes of war would turn against Germany, the death toll increased tenfold.