Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany (23 page)

Jews in Amsterdam seem to have known about the gas chambers. That is suggested by the following joke, which refers to Abraham Asscher and David Cohen, the two heads of the Jewish Council in the occupied Dutch capital, who were often accused of collaborating with the Nazis:

This sort of extremely black humor was not all that rare. Coco Schumann, a German-Jewish jazz musician who survived Auschwitz, later recalled that even Jews in concentration camps told jokes in an attempt to cheer themselves up.
That testimony is backed up by letters written by a Jew from Amsterdam in the holding camp Westerbork.

Some six million Jews were murdered during the Third Reich. Among them was Fritz Grünbaum, who had been interned in various concentration camps since the Nazi takeover of Austria. Grünbaum was particularly unlucky because of his physical appearance. He was slight of build and had the sort of face that called to mind anti-Semitic stereotypes, making him an ideal object for Austrian Nazis’ racist hatred. They wasted no time in arresting the clever, self-effacing comedian and sending him to Dachau in Germany. He would never see his wife again—they would be reunited only in death.

Grünbaum, who was in his mid-fifties, was forced to do hard labor in the camp, but he never lost his sense of humor, and he performed cabaret routines in his scant free time to cheer up himself and his fellow inmates. The other prisoners showered him with applause and small gifts. In September 1938, though, he was transferred to Buchenwald, where he was held in even more severe conditions. He managed to survive the food shortages of the
first wartime winter, but he had the misfortune to be recognized by one of the guards, who knew him from his Austrian cabaret days. From then on, Grünbaum had to make the SS men laugh on command or face a beating—a sadistic punishment if there ever was one. His fellow prisoners conspired to shield him from work in the stone quarries, which he would scarcely have survived. Instead, he was assigned to repair socks in a knitting factory. But that job did not last; the camp commandant decreed that knitting was too easy a job for Jews. The SS made him clean latrines, as part of what they called Column 4711. The guards showed “pity” only once: after they tormented Grünbaum’s colleague Paul Morgan to death,
they allowed Grünbaum and chanson singer Hermann Leopoldi to bring their friend’s body to the gates of the camp.

No amount of coercion can completely rob a born comedian of his sense of fun. About the systematic undernourishment of inmates, Grünbaum used to joke that not eating was the perfect cure for diabetes. But his flippant gallows humor could not conceal the fact that Grünbaum was growing progressively weaker. In October 1940, he was transferred back to Dachau; by that point,
he was already suffering from tuberculosis of the stomach and intestines. He gave his final performance behind barbed wire, telling a couple of coarse jokes and singing some of his most famous couplets. After that appearance, an eyewitness reported, he collapsed from exhaustion. A few days later, he unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide. On January 14, 1941, the star comedian died. The coroner’s report cynically registered the cause of death as “coronary paralysis.”

That same year, the fortunes of the German comedian-director Kurt Gerron also began to change for the worse. Up until 1937, Gerron had been able to make films while in exile in the Netherlands, and he was also responsible for the Dutch-dubbed version
of Disney’s
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. He had built a new life for himself away from his home country and proved he was capable of surviving. But in 1940 Holland was conquered by Nazi Germany, and the occupiers began ratcheting up the pressure against Jews and political enemies. Gerron was already on the Nazis’ blacklist. Regarded by the fascists as a stereotypical Semite, he had made an involuntary guest appearance in the notorious Nazi movie
The Eternal Jew
, whose director had simply appropriated footage from another film in which Gerron had acted. A voice-over explained to viewers how this footage demonstrated that “film Jews” such as Gerron loved to play dubious characters in hopes of achieving a comic effect. The German Office of Public Information ordered that this instructive film be screened in all Dutch cinemas.
The Eternal Jew
would be the last time that Gerron would be seen in a film in wide release.

Gerron’s stage career was also drawing to a close. Together with his friend Otto Wallburg, who lived in the same Amsterdam boarding house, Gerron had performed in a number of émigré cabaret evenings. Under German occupation, Jewish comedians and actors were only allowed to appear in the Joodsche Schouwburg, a theater in the city center, which had been known as the Hollandse Schouwburg before the German invasion. Now the Nazis wanted to see the stage used for shows by and for Jews. The neoclassical building on the Plantage Midenlaan would soon achieve tragic fame, when it was used as an assembly point for deportations. In 1943, after the theater had been closed, Gerron, too, would end up back there—the very place where he had once given acting lessons. From there he was taken to the Westerbork holding camp on the Dutch-German border. The trains leaving Westerbork headed east, most directly to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

While interned at Westerbork, Gerron ran into two old acquaintances, emcee Willy Rosen and comedian Max Ehrlich. On orders from the camp commandant, who fancied himself a minor patron of the arts, the three men were forced to form a cabaret trio. Their first show,
Da Capo!
, was performed for an audience comprised partly of inmates and partly of guards. The Westerbork cabaret became a somewhat ghoulish institution. Former inmates recalled that performances were always scheduled one day in advance of deportations. We will never know whether the commandant, Konrad Gemmecker, came up with this arrangement out of pure sadism or whether he truly wanted to distract the prisoners from their impending doom. Gemmecker, however, was not known for kindheartedness.

In 1944, Gerron was once again crammed into a cattle car. He would never see Germany again. He was taken to the Terezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto in what is now the Czech Republic. His reputation as a filmmaker and actor had spared him a direct trip to Auschwitz. Famous prisoners were often given a short stay of execution before they were shipped off to the extermination camps. Gerron had also, as was noted in his file, served Germany honorably in World War I, which was perhaps another reason why he was not immediately sent to be gassed.

The place where Gerron spent his final days bears a horrific historical legacy. In peacetime, this former outpost of the Austrian Empire had been a sleepy garrison town, but the Nazis converted it into a concentration camp. There Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s nefarious deputy, had built a model ghetto for Jews forcibly moved from there from other parts of Europe. The “ghetto” was a trick to convince foreign observers that the Nazis were treating Jews well. Theresienstadt was a false front behind which the Final Solution could proceed undisturbed. In order to ensure
that commissions of foreign observers left with a positive impression, Heydrich’s henchmen made all sorts of calculated “improvements.” To temporarily alleviate the chronic overcrowding, the SS would deport large numbers of Jews to Auschwitz before commission visits. Cafés were hastily set up on camp grounds, and the commandant ordered prisoners to stage operas. The aim was to create the impression that Jews had it better than many frontline soldiers.

Among those fooled by such cheap tricks were a contingent of Red Cross observers sent at the behest of Danish government. As always happened, the minute these delegates departed, the cafés and theaters were dismantled. The reality of Theresienstadt had nothing whatever to do with coffeehouse charm. Concentration camp life was terrible, inhumane, and potentially deadly. Only a small minority of the approximately 144,000 inmates survived their mistreatment at the hands of the SS. Epidemics took a heavy toll, and the prisoners were chronically undernourished. In the year 1942 alone, 16,000 inmates died of starvation and illness. By the time Gerron entered this “waiting room for hell,” thousands more people had been sent from it to certain death in Auschwitz.

Gerron’s reputation preceded him, and soon after his arrival the former UFA director founded a new cabaret in Theresienstadt—on the orders of the commandant, an SS man named Karl Rahm. A temple of popular entertainment fit in perfectly with the cynical plans of the SS, that is, using the camp to keep up appearances. Gerron named his cabaret The Carousel, suggesting the gaudy fun of a merry-go-round. Yet the terrible truth was that in Theresienstadt only one merry-go-round turned mercilessly; it flung those on the Nazi’s death lists straight to Auschwitz.

Despite his constant fear of being deported there himself, Gerron went about his new task calmly and methodically. There
was no shortage of suitable performers for the theater in the Jewish model ghetto. The crème de la crème of the Jewish theater and art scene were interned in the former garrison—from star composers to top-rated emcees, glamorous chanson singers, and acrobatic artists. The Carousel has been described as the premier German-language cabaret of the 1940s. Nor was Gerron averse to taking the stage himself. But the Golden Twenties were long gone. The comedian, who had once starred in the stage version of
The Blue Angel
, was now playing only to emaciated inmates in prison stripes, watched over by brutal SS men wearing their death’s-head insignia.

On one occasion, the troupe was ordered to perform in a space in which dozens of naked corpses had been piled up. The players were horrified, but the performance was not canceled. Since the actors shied away from the dead bodies, Gerron summoned the camp’s blind inmates and had them form a human chain. Protected by their disability from the sight of their gruesome burdens, they passed the corpses from hand to hand, out of the hall and down the stairs, where a man with a wheelbarrow took them away. The show went on that very evening. This grotesque dance of death in the middle of death’s way station made a bizarre prelude to the acts that evening; a paradigm of the thoroughly schizophrenic attempt to elicit laughter in a place of immeasurable horror. Gerron, who had nothing left to lose, devoted himself to his productions with all the energy at his disposal.

GERRON’S SHOWS were so successful that in the summer of 1944 the SS made him a new offer. For the first time in four years, he would once again take his seat as a film director. The title of the project was
Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from
the Jewish Settlement Region
. The idea for the film came from SS leader Hans Günther and was given a budget of 35,000 marks. Every last cent of it had been confiscated from Jews—an ironic detail much to the taste of the Nazis who had conceived this movie, an especially perfidious piece of propaganda. The film would depict the concentration camp as a utopia, a kind of sanitarium for Jewish “guests.” Once more, the deception was aimed at foreign observers, especially those from neutral countries. The script included scenes to be shot in Theresienstadt’s nonexistent cafés and nightlife boulevards. Shots of a hospital and other social amenities were also planned. Naturally, the pseudodocumentary would not mention that inmates were being sent in droves to Auschwitz.

Gerron became an involuntary Nazi collaborator, and carried out his enforced task with his usual thoroughness and energy. In fact, he had little choice. In one scene from the film, Gerron himself appeared in front of the camera, performing together with a music duo and comedy trio on an open-air variety stage outside the ghetto walls. Gerron’s last performance as a cabaret artist, committed to celluloid that day, has been lost—the film survived only as a 20-minute collection of fragments. It gained international attention after the war under the title
The Führer Gives the Jews a City
. It’s unclear how the film got this cynical title, since it was not released by the SS. Most probably it was named by the inmates themselves. Coco Schumann, who survived both Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, recalls that camp prisoners were constantly telling jokes,
each more blackly humorous than the last. So the idea that they could have come up with the outrageous title is not implausible.

The backstory of the Theresienstadt documentary ended, as things always did in the nightmarish world run by Himmler, in a tragedy. One by one, the actors who had pretended in front of the
camera that they lived in a paradise were deported to Auschwitz and murdered. In late October 1944, it was Gerron’s turn. Some witnesses reported that the comedian-director bore what was essentially a death sentence with pride and stoicism. Others say he fell to his knees and begged a guard to spare him before the cattle cars rolled out. Whatever the case may have been, he was taken from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz on October 28, 1944, and sent to the gas chambers immediately upon his arrival. He was murdered together with his seriously ill colleague Otto Wallburg, whom the Nazis had captured in occupied Holland.
On October 30, two days after these two great stars of the Weimar Republic met their pitiful, horrific end, the final solution program in Auschwitz was permanently suspended.

Gerron’s last film was completed by Czech cameraman Karel Peceny and edited by Peceny’s countryman Ivan Fric. The fake documentary has rarely been screened in public. In any case, it never fooled anyone. By the latter days of World War II, before the film was ever shown, the Nazis’ crimes against humanity had already become known to the foreign public.

IN THE IMMEDIATE aftermath of World War II, hunger and chaos ruled Germany. The former “master race” was fighting for sheer survival, and most people weren’t concerned about what had taken place in the past. Time passed, and Germany was divided, with the West experiencing the “economic miracle” of the 1950s and East concentrating on making “actually existing socialism” a reality. West Germans didn’t want to remember, and East Germans were freed of any responsibility for doing so, since the official line of the Communist state was that fascism had been a Western phenomenon. Perhaps that was why the postwar period—the late ’40s and early ’50s—produced few new political jokes in either the West or the East.