[Nazi Labor Minister] Ley visits a factory and, after taking a tour, he asks the director about political views among his work force. “Do you still have any Social Democrats?” “Yes, around 80 percent.” “What about Centrists?” “Sure, around 20 percent.” “But that means you don’t have any National Socialists?” “Of course we do. They’re all Nazis now.”
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:
Tünnes and Schäl are walking across a cow pasture, when Tünnes steps in a mound of cowshit and almost falls down. Immediately he raises his right arm and yells, “Heil Hitler!” “Are you crazy?” asks Schäl. “What are you doing? There’s no one else around here.” “I’m following regulations,” Tünnes answers. “Whenever you step into anywhere, you’re supposed to say ‘Heil Hitler.’ ”
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:
Hitler visits a lunatic asylum, where the patients all dutifully perform the German salute. Suddenly, Hitler sees one man whose arm is not raised. “Why don’t you greet me the same way as everyone else,” he hisses. The man answers: “My Führer, I’m an orderly, not a madman!”
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:
A drunkard passes a vendor on the street who is crying, “Heilkräuter!”(“Medicinal herbs!”). “Heil Kräuter?” he ponders. “We must have a new government.”
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 buil
ding 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!”:
A father and his son are sitting at the dinner table. The son asks: “Papa, who started the Reichstag fire?” The father answers: “Ess, ess [SS], and quit asking so many questions.”
Other jokes in this vein took the form of riddles:
Q. Who set fire to the Reichstag?
A. The brothers Sass [SA+SS].
Q. What’s the different between a regular army and an SA unit?
A. In the army they say, “Ready, get set, fire!” In the SA they say, “Get ready and set fire!”
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:
On the evening of February 27, Göring’s assistant arrives out of breath at his boss’s office and yells, “State Premier Göring, the Reichstag is on fire!” Göring looks at the clock, shakes his head in surprise, and says, “What, already?”
“Yesterday, Göring was seen in Leipzig Street.” “Really? Where was the fire?”
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”:
Since all the federal states have been brought into line, we are once again one people. There are no longer any Prussians, Bavarian, Thuringians, or Saxons. Instead, we’re all Braunschweigers.
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:
When Goebbels published his book From the Imperial Court to the German Chancellery, the Imperial Bishop couldn’t rest until he’d written a work of his own. The title was: From Leading Light to Dim Bulb.
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 arrangem
ent 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:
In one of his sermons, Count von Galen criticized the educational programs of the Hitler Youth. A member of the congregation interrupted him: “How can a man without children dare to speak about education?” Von Galen countered, “Sir, I’m not going to tolerate any criticism of our Führer in my church.”
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:
Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany Page 4