Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany (5 page)

Tellingly, in the months after Hitler came to power, the ranks of the Nazi party swelled. People from across the political spectrum ended traditional allegiances and joined the NSDAP, and conversions from Communism were particularly frequent. Both Hitler himself and the populace took bemused note of the numbers of so-called March violets, latecomers to the Nazi party. One popular joke ran:

In general, jokes from the early years of the Third Reich amounted to little more than harmless teasing of the regime and could be told in public without fear of reprisals. “We weren’t anxious,” recalls Carl-Ludwig Schulz from Berlin, who lived through the period. “But there was a kind of political correctness in Germany, and it began leading to concrete acts of oppression once the war started.”

JOKES THAT TOUCHED upon Nazi brutality were very unusual. It was much more common for Germans to laugh at Nazi habits and customs, which had their ridiculous side. One prominent example was the Nazi insistence on the “German greeting,” the raised-arm salute that Hitler had copied from the
Italian fascists. Nazi propagandists never tired of encouraging Germans to demonstrate their loyalty in this way. “When you as a German enter a place,” the slogan of one such campaign ran, “your first words should be ‘Heil Hitler!’ ” Only the most ardent Nazis felt comfortable using the new greeting, but it was quickly made mandatory for all public buildings and all government situations. The people of Cologne soon came up with a joke concerning the ritual, using two figures from local folklore, Tünnes and Schäl:

But the intentions behind the greeting were no laughing matter. The salute and the words “Heil Hitler” were a litmus test by which Nazis could find out whether someone was an ally or a potential enemy. Former Social Democrats or Communists were not always enthusiastic about making the bizarre gesture, but those who failed to do so could face serious consequences. In one case, the authorities took a child away from his parents after he had repeatedly failed to give the greeting in school. That, however, was in 1940, when political tensions had already been ratcheted up and Germans had gotten used to the custom. In the early years of the Reich, most people still found it unsettling and made it a mainstay of political humor. One joke suggested that as long as Germans ran around saying “Heil Hitler,” there weren’t going to
be any more “good days”—since the greeting “Heil Hitler” replaced the more typical “good day.” One of the funnier jokes of the time was the following:

Less amusing were jokes punning on the two meanings of the word
heil:
“hail” and “heal.” In one of them, a doctor at another asylum, responds to “Heil Hitler!” with “Heal him yourself!”

Many jokes about the greeting used the same pun. The following joke (mistakenly ascribed to Munich comedian Karl Valentin) is one:

The many parodies of the “German greeting” may have allowed those who did not identify all that closely with Nazi ideology to avoid using the offending original phrase. It was common to say “Drei Liter” (“three liters”) when entering bars or to elide “Heil Hitler” into “Heitler.” The most original parody came from a group of young men who called themselves “Swing Kids;” they rebelled against the spirit of the time by growing their hair long and listening to swing, which the Nazis rejected as “nigger music.”
They greeted one another with the words “Swing heil!” And because the German greeting was actually an Italian import, one
joke had Il Duce greeting Der Führer on a state visit with the words “Ave, Copycat.”

Perhaps the best takeoff on the Hitler greeting, however, was that of a performer from Paderborn: he taught his trained chimpanzees to extend their arms in Nazi fashion. (According to the performer’s son, the chimpanzees enjoyed doing this.) Every time the animals saw someone in uniform, even a postman, they would give the Nazi salute. This dadaistic coup of the Paderborn comic, who was a committed Social Democrat, attracted the ire of his “racial comrades,” who reported him to the authorities. A directive was soon issued forbidding apes from using the Hitler greeting, with
the penalty for noncompliance being the “slaughter” of the animals. When it came to expressions of respect for their leader, the Nazis did not have much sense of humor.

ON FEBRUARY 27, 1933, a catastrophic fire destroyed the Reichstag, and the Nazi leadership recognized the event as an opportunity, which they proceeded to exploit with instinctive assurance. It was the beginning of the process by which the Nazis silenced their political opponents and destroyed the democratic system. Göring was the first Nazi leader at the site of the fire; Hitler arrived shortly thereafter. While the remains of the building were still smoldering, the two decided to blame the disaster on the Communists and Social Democrats: they would claim the blaze had been set deliberately, as the first act of an incipient left-wing revolt.

In fact, political blunders by their leadership and their declining popularity with the masses had so weakened the German Communists that they could hardly have mounted an effective nationwide resistance to the Nazi regime. But Göring and Hitler
weren’t interested in distinctions between real and imaginary threats. They alertly seized the moment and had some 4,000 Communist functionaries arrested, including the party’s leader, Ernst Thälmann. They also struck out at opposition writers, doctors, and lawyers. The morning after the fire, Hitler appeared before the aged Paul von Hindenburg and painted a most melodramatic picture of the situation. Cowed by the chancellor’s Grand Guignol scenario, the last president of the Weimar Republic signed the Enabling Act, making Hitler virtual dictator and effectively terminating the rights guaranteed by the Weimar constitution. Under this emergency rule, the government could order arrests at will and was freed from any legal checks and balances. The use of the death penalty was expanded, and the government was charged to ensure “order” and “security” wherever necessary, a provision that curtailed the rights of the individual local states that made up Germany and created a monolithic central authority.

The speed and efficiency with which the Nazis enacted their measures after the Reichstag fire has perennially given rise to speculation about who the real arsonists had been. After World War II, there were persistent rumors that Göring himself had ordered the blaze, and even directly after the fire, many Germans entertained similar suspicions. What people believed had less to do with the few available hard facts of the case than with individuals’ own political views. The same was true of the foreign press. Some foreign journalists immediately accused the Nazis of having set the fire themselves, while others simply chronicled the controversy about
the identity of the true culprit.

The Nazis eventually blamed a Dutch Communist, a confused and partially blind man named Marinus van der Lubbe. But few of those who were critical of the Nazi-led government believed that van der Lubbe, using only a handful of household fire starters,
could have ignited the fire that destroyed such a massive structure. “Eight days before the election, and then a crass stunt like the Reichstag fire,” wrote Viktor Klemperer in his diary. “
I can’t imagine anyone believes in Communist culprits instead of a contract job commissioned on behalf of the swastika.” And another contemporary, Rolf Rothe, noted, “This young fellow van der Lubbe, how could he alone have ignited the Reichstag? No person could have caused such a massive stone building to burst into flames! No one believed that. It would have been completely absurd!”

The mystery surrounding the Reichstag fire was perfect fodder for comedians. Before long, people were circulating countless jokes that unmistakably, if with varying comic success, played upon the idea that the Nazi themselves had caused the fire.

These jokes fell into two groups. The first group blamed the SA and the SS, which many Germans hated and feared, for the catastrophe. One such joke involved a pun on the letter
S
, a homonym for Ess, German for the familiar imperative “Eat!”:

Other jokes in this vein took the form of riddles:

The second group of jokes assigned the blame not to Nazi thugs, but rather to Göring himself. There were a number of good reasons why he was singled out. He was known as a man of immediate and cold-blooded action. As state premier of Prussia, he also controlled the executive branch of government, of which he made ample, unscrupulous use. But in the show trials after the fire, aimed at exposing the “Communist plot,” Göring’s appearances were so clumsy that people began to doubt his honesty. One of the accused Communists, Georgi Dimitrow, mounted a vigorous defense, and his eloquence repeatedly forced Göring into a verbal corner. In the end, the Communists were acquitted—a serious embarrassment for the Nazi leadership.

The trial let the genie out of its bottle, and the Nazis had no means of containing it. During the proceedings, Dimitrow had voiced the suspicion that the Nazis had started the fire themselves, and since the trial was being broadcast live on radio, there was no way such statements could be simply suppressed. Doubts concerning Göring’s role in the blaze were brought directly into Germans’ living rooms and became the subject of a variety of witticisms:

Time has destroyed much of the evidence, and witnesses’ testimony was contradictory, so there is no way of knowing whether
Göring really was responsible for the destruction of the Reichstag. We can assume that neither Hitler nor Goebbels planned the arson, since both reacted with shock when they heard the news that the building was in flames. In light of the most current research, the most probable, if also least spectacular, scenario is that van der Lubbe did indeed set the fire on his own.

There is little reason to believe that any political party contracted him to do so. The Communists had no motivation, and there is no hard evidence of Nazi involvement. What is clear is that from February 27, 1933, onward, the SA and Göring, who occupied one of the highest offices in the German government, were surrounded by ugly suspicions that were kept alive in innumerable jokes. Nonetheless, despite their anger at the outcome of the show trials and the damage to their own reputation, thanks to the fire the Nazis had taken a decisive step toward consolidating their rule. The party was able to maintain the pretence that Hitler had accrued power by entirely legal means, even as it dismantled the Weimar Constitution, and to generally rely upon the maxim that never is a people more ready to accept injustice than at the beginning of a new dictatorship.

IN THE MONTHS following Hitler’s assumption of extraordinary power, the Nazis were assiduous in eradicating the protections offered by the German legal system. Their goal was to see all of society brought into line with Nazi ideology, if not voluntarily then forcibly. One of the first steps was the ordinance “For the Protection of the German People,” issued on February 4, 1933, allowing the new government to ban publications and assemblies by their political opponents. Hitler warned journalists against making “mistakes” in their reporting, accompanying the
warnings with the direst threats of what would happen if they failed to do so. Other measures followed, one after another. The red, black, and gold flag of the Weimar Republic was replaced by the swastika, and the federal structure of Germany was abolished by decree.

The Nazis were particularly unscrupulous about eradicating hubs of local power and centralizing political authority. In Bavaria, Himmler and SA chief of staff Ernst Röhm forced the local state premier to step down, and Göring took violent measures against anyone who opposed the “national uprising” the Nazis were propagating. The speed with which events were proceeding, the increasing license enjoyed by the SA, the combination of patriotic agitation and naked brutality had the desired effect on the German populace. The new regime presented two faces: one euphoric and one dark and threatening. Those who were proof against fascist enthusiasm were systematically bullied into submission. That inspired the following witticism, playing on
braun
, German for “brown”—the color associated with the SA—and
schweigen
, “to remain silent”: