Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany

by Rudolph Herzog

  Jews were not only moneygrubbers, according to Nazi wits, they were also Communists—another anti-Semitic cliché. The following joke, recorded by a housewife in Westphalia, was very popular. It was probably invented by a Nazi newspaper editor:

  Trotsky, Lenin, and Litvinov are walking through a small Russian town, and the children on the street shout, “We know who you are, we know who you are.” Trotsky turns proudly to his companions and says, “You see how famous we are. Even kids recognize us.” Whereupon the children run away, shouting, “You’re Jews, you’re Jews.”

  Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, like Trotsky, did have a Jewish background, and that made him a favorite target for anti-Semitic propagandists; the Nazi press referred to him as “the Jew Finkelstein.” To the Nazis, Litvinov embodied everything that was wrong with the world and was living proof of the intrinsic connection between Bolshevism and Jewishness. In Germany, he was seen not as a human being but as a grotesque two-dimensional parody of one—an evil cartoon.

  There were even jokes that laughed at anti-Jewish violence, and these were told not just by hardcore Nazi party supporters, but also by hordes of willing opportunists and March violets. According to one example, recorded in a variety of sources, the word RADIO stood for “Rein Arischer Darf Itzig Ohrfeigen”—“a pure Aryan is allowed to box Isaac’s ears.” Fervent Nazis by no means had a monopoly on this kind of tasteless cynicism. The violent fantasies of most Nazis were shared by many “nonpolitical” Germans. The constant stream of anti-Semitic propaganda likely contributed to this, but ordinary Germans seemed to have come up with the majority of anti-Jewish jokes on their own—a troubling indication of a fundamental animosity toward Jews and Jewishness.

  By no means was humor in Nazi Germany confined to “whispered jokes” critical of the regime. The majority of jokes about contemporary affairs were entirely harmless and without any political message. But there was also a plethora of jokes colored by National Socialist ideology, although after World War II nobody wanted to remember those. In contrast, judging by the recollections of those who were there, popular humor that was openly critical of the government was relatively rare.

  Some of these more daring political jokes did survive, however, though many can be understood only by reconstructing their original historical context. One topic that particularly inspired the German imagination was the country’s withdrawal from the League of Nations, one of Hitler’s early “coups” in the realm of foreign policy. The Weimar government had fought hard for years for German membership in the League, but now German nationalists believed that the long-drawn-out disarmament negotiations in Geneva had brought their country nothing but disadvantages. Many Germans still felt a sense of shame over their defeat in World War I and saw the victorious nations’ demands for reparation as draconian. The Nazi government was especially outraged that the victors wanted to impose a kind of parole on them: France, in particular, demanded that Germany should only be allowed to raise an army comparable to those of other European powers after a four-year period of good behavior. Hitler, who derided the League as little more than a debating club, responded by provoking a diplomatic spat and withdrawing his representatives.

  He then confirmed the legitimacy of this surprising move by holding a plebiscite. The Nazis won the vote by an overwhelming margin. It was effectively the end of the League.

  Hardly anyone in Germany shed a tear over the demise of an organization they saw as an instrument of German subordination. The following joke makes that abundantly clear:

  During a meeting of the League of Nations in Geneva, a package was delivered containing the note: “For distribution and use.” The package was full of nooses.

  Another joke began with the idea that a restaurant was serving a new League of Nations cheese. When asked what that was, the waiter responded: “a cheese that melts away on its own.”

  The jokes about the League of Nations were a mixture of defiance and megalomania. Completely frustrated by the Geneva negotiations, Germans had greeted Hitler’s childish gesture as a liberating blow. They liked the notion, propagated by their Führer, that withdrawal from the League was a sign of their renewed vigor and independence. And when Germany commenced its massive rearmament program, which violated a host of international agreements, new jokes arose, full of nationalist boasting:

  What does it mean when the sky is black? So many planes are in the air that the birds have to take to the ground.

  Later, in the early phase of World War II, when Nazi Germany enjoyed success, the wags in the street made fun of the country’s defeated enemies: “The Pope has arrived in Warsaw. He’s giving Poland extreme unction.”

  The humor of the Third Reich was that of the victor and reflected the arrogance that comes from the belief that one has been proven right. The feelings of inferiority that had accrued during the Weimar period disappeared in the intoxication of Nazi military triumph. Humility was off the agenda, as more and more Germans began putting on superhuman airs and looking down with contempt at their supposed inferiors. Popular jokes celebrated the leaders of an empire that was supposed to last a thousand years and heaped scorn upon the vanquished:

  Who is Germanys greatest electrician? Adolf Hitler. He connected Austria, cut off Russia, electrified the entire world, and is still the one flicking the switches.

  A similar gag, about German photography, had Hitler pressing the button and Mussolini doing the developing—and as for deposed Czech president Edvard Benes, well, the German word for making photographic prints was also a slang term for turning one’s tail.

  The humor of many professional joke-tellers was equally supercilious. A moderator of a TV program for Nazi state television (which never got beyond the experimental stage) was filmed threatening critics in a series of puns about internment in concentration camps. There’s no record today, so we’ll never know whether the following routine, which was performed with a grin, actually made the studio audience laugh:

  Let’s return to the topic of music. I’m glad almost all of us are playing to the same rhythm. And even if there are some queer pipers whistling out of tune or beating a different drum, it’s no big deal. They’ll be given some further instruction in a “concertation camp” until they’ve learned their do-re-mi’s and accustomed themselves to keeping proper time.

  Hitler and his cohorts liked the idea of using cabaret routines to threaten dissidents. The pompous dictator who loved to pose publicly as an emperor also had his lighter side: he enjoyed popular entertainment and crude jokes. Hitler was reputedly often consumed by laughter at the bon mots of his friend and photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, whom he repeatedly invited to share evenings of jokes with himself and Goebbels. The Nazi leadership who ruthlessly turned their goons on Jewish comedians and opposition cabaret performers were not at all immune to humor, as long as it toed the party line.

  Even the ever suspicious Minister of Propaganda had nothing against a performer like Rudi Godden making fun of degenerate modern art in the fascist cabaret troupe Die acht Entfesselten. Nor was there any need for Nazi spies to monitor Tatzelwurm, the troupe that took over the space previously used by the banned Catacomb. Hitler and Goebbels made frequent public appearances in Germany’s temples of light entertainment; variety theaters were allowed to stay open even in the final phase of World War II; and popular performers were exempted from military service, thanks to a “Führer’s list” personally drawn up by Hitler. For the amusement of Germany’s leader, Goebbels staged private galas that featured comely dancing girls and Nazi comedians. Hitler and his entourage often stayed up until the wee hours of the morning laughing at the conformist jokes of stylish cabaret performers like Jupp Hussels and Manfred Lommel.

  In the weekly newsreels, the Nazi leaders of course went back to behaving like the serious movers and shakers of the world they fancied themselves to be. The only occasions on which Hitler displayed his individual sense of humor, which was based on insults, were his attempts to make his enemies
laughable. He called British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain the “umbrella fella,” Roosevelt a “cripple,” Churchill a “drunk,” and Duff Cooper, Britain’s minister of war, a Bavarian dialect term that translates roughly as “inflated chicken.”

  HITLER’S BIZARRE sense of humor displayed his utter inability to make fine distinctions, and he wasn’t the only one in Nazi Germany who suffered from this deficiency. Even professional film comedians told terrible jokes. One of the fascists’ favorite entertainers was Munich singer and actor Weiß Ferdl, who had been in close contact with the Nazi leadership since the 1920s. In the Third Reich he became a huge star. Besides recording Reich-friendly songs, the Bavarian performer acted in a series of supremely shallow comedies. The idiotic highpoint was the 1939 film The Laughing Doctor, in which Ferdl, playing a country physician, mugged his way through a simpleminded plot. This thigh-slapping humor was gussied up with blondes in dirndls and a supporting cast who looked like the product of centuries of Alpine incest. The conformist German press sang their praises of this example of Bavarian pseudo-comedy, choosing Ferdl as their particular darling. That, combined with the Führer’s own enthusiasm for it, meant a quantum leap in the singer’s career. Hitler arranged a private screening of The Laughing Doctor at his Obersalzberg mountain retreat.

  Comedian Karl Valentin was infinitely more talented than Ferdl, but he did not enjoy the dubious favor of the ruling elite, who considered his subtle, anarchic folk humor at odds with mainstream Nazi values. Valentin also had a reputation as a left-winger, although he refrained from making political statements and sent the Cultural Chamber a letter disavowing critical jokes that had been attributed to him. But his protestations got him nowhere. In 1936, his completely apolitical film The Inheritance was banned for “sordid tendencies.” Karl Valentin and Liesl Karstadt, his partner from many a slapstick classic, were forbidden to work. It was an ignominious, unworthy end for the best comedy duo Germany ever had. Valentin, the leading light of German humor on film, today considered Germany’s Charlie Chaplin, withdrew deeply embittered from the public eye.

  IN PLACE OF the clever slapstick they had banned, Goebbels and his minions filled German cinemas with lowest-common-denominator fascist “comedies” produced by directorial dilettantes such as Carl Froelich and Wolfgang Liebeneiner. Card-carrying Nazi Party members who demonstrated loyalty in public were able to go far in the glitzy world of the state-run UFA film studios, no matter how slim their talent. The jobs vacated by Jewish artists driven into exile had to be filled by someone. The rigorous political purges in Germany’s entertainment industry gave rise to some absurd situations. In 1934, audiences were still enjoying films and hit songs made by Jewish artists whom movie moguls had already been forced to emigrate. Film companies, which were still largely in private hands, defended their schizophrenic policies by saying they couldn’t afford to simply throw away all films in which Jews had participated.

  By 1935, however, German cinema had been thoroughly Nazified, and movies with Jewish actors disappeared from theaters. The Imperial Chamber of Culture took care that German actors who were considered politically unreliable, like Werner Finck and Karl Valentin, got no work, and state film subsidies were subject to tight control. If a producer made himself unpopular with the Nazi elite, the latter simply turned off the money. By the end of the 1930s, most of the film industry had been nationalized, and all scripts under consideration had to be submitted to the notoriously suspicious Goebbels. Proactive censorship allowed the Propaganda Minister to get filmmakers on board with the party line before they started production. Naturally, the results of such a system were abysmally stupid.

  Ninety percent of all films made during the Third Reich were insignificant, superficial comedies intended to distract Germans from state terrorism and, later, the hardships of war. They seemed to be completely apolitical: audiences seldom saw even a Nazi salute or a swastika flag; the realities of life under the Reich were systematically filtered out. The storylines featured the stock twists and turns of romantic comedy, and the Aryan casts went through the prescribed motions until the inevitable happy ending. It’s difficult to imagine today how people could have found this sort of state-controlled kitsch amusing. Yet German moviegoers seemed to enjoy them, and few noticed that in fact they were subtly laced with propagandistic messages.

  A GOOD EXAMPLE is the work of Heinz Rühmann, who was also one of the most popular singers and actors after Hitler’s defeat. His film Quax, the Crash-Happy Pilot, which suggested that flyboys in the German air force led a pretty jolly life, came out when the Luftwaffe desperately needed human material on the Eastern Front. And the Rühmann vehicle Hooray, I’m a Father was made because Goebbels wanted to motivate Germans to have more children. “The Führer needs soldiers,” Goebbels remarked cynically. “It’s not a particularly good Rühmann film, but in wartime, it serves its purpose.”

  Rühmann himself never publicly commented on the implicit political messages of the films he made in the Third Reich. His rather tedious autobiography ignores the topic altogether, describing Quax as a “movie entirely in the spirit of my love of flying,” Rühmann’s hobby. On the other hand, it would be incorrect to say Rühmann was a die-hard Nazi. He didn’t especially curry favor with the Nazi leadership, but neither did he try to distance himself from those in power. An Allied committee after the war concluded that he was a conformist who had let himself be blown along in the prevailing winds of the Nazi era—an accurate assessment of Rühmann’s political passivity. That he continued to make films in Nazi Germany although his wife, Maria Bernheim, was Jewish and his friend Otto Wallburg was forced into exile and then murdered shows timidity, tunnel vision, and careerism, but not necessarily any sympathy with Nazi ideology.

  Rühmann biographer Torsten Körner has pointed out that the actor did not owe his success to any one political system. His ability to embody the “little man on the street” had already made him a star in the Weimar Republic, and he retained his popularity after Hitler and Goebbels fell. His attitude toward the two Nazi leaders, who furthered his career, must have been ambivalent at best. Surely he would have been shocked when the propaganda minister called upon him to divorce his wife, and any sympathies he may have had for the Nazi Party could hardly have been increased when the SS organ Das Schwarze Korps pilloried him for being married to a “full-blown Jewess.” Against this backdrop of threats, he compromised, never daring to break with the regime that tried to impinge to such an extent on his personal life.

  Following Göring’s advice, he divorced Bernheim and arranged a fake marriage for her with Swedish actor Rolf von Nauckhoff, to whom he gave a sports car as an expression of his gratitude. Bernheim was allowed to emigrate to Sweden, where she spent the war safe and sound. Since Rühmann’s marriage had been on the rocks anyway, one can hardly accuse him of behaving improperly, especially as he paid her a generous monthly alimony. Later, when he got remarried, to the actress Hertha Feiler, he invited Maria to his wedding. The Nazi elite probably weren’t all that thrilled that the new wife of Germany’s beloved comedy star was a “quarter Jewess,” but this time there were no consequences. The authorities gritted their teeth and remained silent.

  Nonetheless, there was much that was contradictory in Rühmann’s personal and career choices. On the one hand, he once tried—in vain—to intervene to prevent the execution of an acquaintance. On the other, he lent his talents to more than one morally dubious film, including The Gas Man, a 1939 movie in which he played a low-level civil servant who gets caught up in the machinery of Nazi legal system. The real message of the film, which purported to be a light comedy, was that those who didn’t play ball with the system would get punished. In the first act of the film, a stranger gives Rühmann’s character some money. Rühmann is suspicious and tries to report the incident but ends up being sent to answer for himself at the office for Aryan identification. Having tried to do the right thing, he then decides to spend the money, but his new life of luxury attracts susp
icion, and he is called in for Gestapo interrogation. In the end, a court discovers that the whole affair is a harmless prank, and Rühmann is acquitted instead of being sentenced to death for betraying his responsibility to the state.

  This “light entertainment” makes for fairly creepy, not to say uncanny, viewing today. The party elite didn’t like it—they disapproved of the inclusion of so many everyday details about the Nazi state, and The Gas Man was rarely screened. The state film studio UFA even had to cut a scene, at the insistence of deputy head of the Nazi party Rudolf Hess, in which Rühmann performed an unacceptably sloppy Hitler salute. Rühmann himself clearly did not enjoy participating in overly propagandistic films and tried to avoid being conscripted into battle on the entertainment front. Whenever he was called upon to propagate Nazi ideology, he tried to keep his appearance brief. But despite his efforts not to be co-opted into the regime, he maintained a close friendship with Ernst Udet, a Nazi Luftwaffe commander, who shared his passion for flying. In the middle of wartime, Rühmann was allowed to continue flying as a hobby pilot—a rare privilege. The relationship between Germany’s most famous comedian and the Nazi leadership remained enigmatic. Certainly, he had no one but himself to blame for the post-war accusations he faced that he had actively supported the Third Reich.

  BUT THE NAZI entertainment industry produced films that were far less appetizing than even The Gas Man—or than the Wehrmacht comedy Concert by Request, in which Rühmann made a fleeting appearance. The absolute nadir was Hans H. Zerlett’s anti-Semitic musical Robert and Bertram. Based on a Gustav Raeder farce that had not been anti-Jewish, the story revolved around the adventures of a pair of vagabonds, played by the comedians Rudi Godden and Kurt Seifert. They meet a German girl named Lenchen whose father wants to marry her against her will to one of his creditors. Lenchen is in love with a handsome fellow named Michel, and in order to save her, the two vagabonds sneak into a costume party held by Commercial Councilor Ipelmeyer, a Jew, and steal the family jewelry. Since Ipelmeyer’s gains are ill-gotten, this is not viewed as a crime. Lenchen’s father is able to pay off his debts, and the overjoyed girl gets to marry her beloved Michel.