Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany (6 page)

The punch line gained extra pungency from the fact that the city of Braunschweig had elected a Nazi local government very early, in September 1930, and had indeed given Hitler, who was born in Austria, German citizenship. Naturalization, of course, had been a key prerequisite for Hitler becoming German chancellor.

From the beginning, Braunschweig’s fascist rulers had played
a crucial role not only in the party’s rise to national power but also in its attempt to bring the Protestant Church into its fold. The Weimar Republic had secularized the German state. State subsidies to churches had been reduced, and in many parts of Germany religion no longer played a dominant role in the schools. That had angered many German clergy. The Nazi government in Braunschweig reintroduced school prayers and paid outstanding subsidies. Those policies had their desired effect. One third of Protestant clergymen in Braunschweig joined the Nazi party, and before long the cross and swastika were blazoned side by side on church publications.

After assuming power on the national level, the Nazi leadership continued and even expanded such church-friendly policies. Official acts of state always featured religious trappings, and Hitler never tired in his speeches of thanking God for his newly acquired power. This was little more than maneuvering, of course, to get the church in step with Nazi ideology, but such masterpieces of propaganda paid long dividends. Some pastors even began appearing in the pulpit wearing brown shirts and jackboots. Skeptics had once joked: “Hitler is powerless against incense (religion) and garlic (supposed Jewish influence).” Hitler, however, proved them wrong.

The Protestant Church was hardly a monolithic institution, and a schism soon opened up between the Nazi “German Christians,” led by a Protestant pastor named Ludwig Müller, and the opposition “Emergency Association of Pastors,” led by Martin Niemöller. Müller, a personal acquaintance of Hitler, was appointed Imperial Bishop. He wasn’t known for his intellectual prowess and was certainly no match for his opponents from the traditional church, particularly Niemöller. He was given a number of unflattering popular nicknames and became the butt of a
host of more or less successful jokes:

Another quip from the time was that the Imperial Bishop had such thick skin he didn’t need a backbone. Despite Müller’s shortcomings as the head of the “German Christians,” the Nazis reached an arrangement with both Catholic and Protestant churches, although threats were still constantly needed to ensure that no one disturbed this artificial harmony.

Clerics who were critical of the regime enjoyed sympathy among the populace, since they were the only ones in society left after the initial period of purges and bullying who continued to represent an alternative system of belief to Nazism. One joke praised the Catholic bishop of Münster, Count Clemens August von Galen:

Von Galen earned the nickname “the Lion of Münster” for his fearless resistance against Nazi educational policies and euthanasia programs. Germans admired him for taking a stand, despite the risk of retribution, against the murder of retarded persons, a
policy that outraged many people at the time. A Nazi ministerial counselor tried to justify the program by arguing that the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” had been not the word of God but rather “
a Jewish invention” aimed at “denying their enemies an effective defense in order to dispose of them all the more easily.”

Von Galen survived the Third Reich, but countless other clergymen were killed in what was known as the “pastors’ block” of the Dachau concentration camp. The persecution of men of the cloth who criticized the regime may have inspired a number of satirical riffs on religious holidays. Examples include “Maria Incarcerata” and “Maria Denunciata.” The Latin of the Lord’s Prayer was also parodied, with the line “et ne nos inducas temptationem” (lead us not into temptation) changed to “et ne nos inducas concentrationem”—a clear reference to the concentration camps.

The crimes the Nazis committed during the Third Reich were only possible because the German courts had also been brought into line. In 1935, authority over the judicial system was transferred from the federal states to the central government. As soon as they seized power, the Nazis began systematically preparing German lawyers and judges, traditionally a conservative lot, to function in a state not based on the rule of law. The Association of National Socialist Attorneys trained young judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers. The new doctrine of the German legal system was that judgments should be rendered in the interests of the government, and there was no need to stick too closely to laws. “The healthy opinion of the people” was elevated above legal guarantees, the phrase
healthy opinion
serving to whitewash the justice that the fascists meted out as they pleased. At least some German citizens watched in consternation as the Nazis ran roughshod over the German constitution—a concern reflected in the sardonic rumor that the following laws were about to be decreed:

Indeed, some people during the Third Reich wondered why the government felt it needed a legal system at all. Right from the start, there were crass cases of injustice, and measures taken to terrorize enemies were both extreme and arbitrary.

One joke played on this very point, and its punch line had a twisted logic:

Yet even in the final stage of World War II, even while they murdered thousands of Jews every day in Eastern Europe, the Nazis were unwilling to do without the pretence of legality, for instance in the form of judgments handed down by the notorious People’s Court. In 1933, the Nazis were already thinking in terms of what Hitler called a “legal revolution” and began laying the groundwork of their new system for administering injustice. Laws were constantly issued that turned German citizens into arbitrary victims of state authorities. As early as February 28, 1933, they adopted their infamous idea of “protective custody”—a concept that
allowed them to incarcerate their political opponents without trial. The basic judicial principle, cynics joked, was now brutality before legality.

The Nazification of the government, the church, and the judicial system was accompanied by fascist purges of Germany’s cultural edifice as well. Within the first few months of Hitler’s assumption of absolute political power, Goebbels claimed similar authority over culture through his newly created Ministry of Propaganda. Anyone who wished to work in Germany as a writer, an artist, or an actor was required to join the Reich Chamber of Culture or one of its subordinate organizations. Those who remained outside or were excluded from this state association were effectively prohibited from working. Moreover, the Nazis didn’t handle artists they considered a nuisance with kid gloves. By the spring of 1933, some 250 well-known German authors, including Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Stefan Zweig, had been stripped of their citizenship and the works of “enemy” writers were being publicly burned, in theatrical spectacles featuring bizarre “campfire speeches” by Nazi agitators. Meanwhile, instead of voicing their opposition to the book burnings, other prominent cultural figures, like the actor Gustav Gründgens and the writer Gerhart Hauptmann and including, sometimes, even personal friends of the persecuted writers, were pledging their fealty to their new leaders. Behind closed doors, many of these artists may have complained about the banal monotony of the “Pitiful Chamber of Culture,” but most of them simply adapted to the times.

Goebbels was equally eager to achieve a quick and smooth Nazification of the German press. Opposition newspapers were banned, and others were forced out of business by state subsidies handed out to rivals. The Ministry of Propaganda took care
to ensure that some semblance of journalistic variety remained, but only in layout and appearance—not in the centrally dictated, strictly nationalistic content of the articles.

As strange as it might seem today, many Germans at the time actually applauded the eradication of the free press. The Munich cabaret performer and early Nazi sympathizer Weiß Ferdl, for example, wrote a song praising Nazification and comparing it to the Nazi campaigns against jazz and other forms of “nigger music.” The text might read like a parody today, but during the Third Reich it was sung without irony. Its “humor” consisted of a play on
Gleichschaltung
(literally, “same-keeping”), the German term for bringing everything into line with Nazi interests and ideology:

Ferdl wrote these verses the year after Hitler became chancellor, and
they are one of the many examples of cultural figures declaring their loyalty to the Nazis in those early days.

During that period, however, some people still resisted Nazification. Many respectable middle-class citizens shook their heads at the Nazis’ provocative, drastically anti-Semitic publications. But there was little significant revolt among the Germans, who considered themselves a people of “thinkers and poets,” as the Nazis set about remaking the German press and German culture in their own image. Their resistance extended only to hiding the works of the great German-Jewish writers in the second rows of their bookshelves, and perhaps allowing themselves a small sarcastic joke in private about the banality of Nazi culture. One sadly untranslatable example of such a joke revolves around a schoolteacher having his pupils practice comparatives and superlatives using three Nazi newspapers. In the punch line, one pupil responds that
Der Stürmer
, the virulently anti-Semitic organ of
the SA, is at its best when applied most intimately—that is, used to wipe one’s ass. The pattern of the joke is typical for the Nazi years: the punch line is a naïve, unthinking remark put into the mouth of a child, a circumstance that takes some of the sting out of an insult aimed at Nazi culture and would have allowed the joke-teller to protest his innocence, if accused of fomenting political discontent.