Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany

by Rudolph Herzog

  The film’s slender plot was merely a pretense to run the gamut of anti-Semitic clichés. Ipelmeyer, who with his crooked nose looks like a Stürmer caricature, constantly lusts after the ballet dancers at his costume party and makes a series of sordid advances. His servant, played by Robert Dorsay, accompanies the proceedings with a stream of idiotic commentary in pseudo-Yiddish. Ipelmeyer’s obese wife waddles through the tasteless luxury of their mansion, and the banker’s various friends are equally repulsive figures. Zerlett, the director, boasted in an interview about the film’s “strong anti-Semitic tendency,” adding, “Of course, the six featured Jewish roles had to be played by non-Jews, but the makeup is so lifelike that no one will doubt that my Semites are genuine.”

  Zerlett’s remarks were published in the magazine Film-Kurier on January 17, 1939, roughly two months after the Kristallnacht pogrom. Film historian Klaus Kreimeier has rightly called Robert and Bertram an “advertisement for death,” and it’s hard to interpret Zerlett’s sorry excuse for a movie as anything else. It was made around the same time as the notoriously anti-Semitic historical drama Jud Süss, a huge popular hit, and it wasn’t long before cattle cars full of deported Jews began rolling eastward. The Final Solution had begun, and the connection between the flood of anti-Semitic films and genocide can hardly be denied. Kreimeier writes:

  The fact that by 1942 this genre had run its course can be attributed to the fact that the killing machinery was running at full speed. Propaganda had done its job. The Nazi leadership had to have assumed that the mass deportations would not go unnoticed by the general populace, and the mass exterminations were probably a public secret. But thanks to factors that included a series of several very successful films, the German people had been psychologically prepared. That, in any case, was how the political leadership and their minions in the film industry saw the situation.

  The distorted image of Jewishness at the center of Robert and Bertram’s comic plot was not just a reflection of crude beer-tent anti-Semitism. It was part of a coolly planned, larger strategy. A seemingly harmless comedy was a far more effective means of infusing poisonous propaganda than the weekly newsreels. Audiences laughed and did not expect any political message. But the humor in question made them receptive to the campaigns that led to the persecution, ostracism, and extermination of Jews.

  The cover of Putzi Hanfstaengel’s 1933 book Hitler in World Caricature.

  In Hanfstaengel’s book, the caricatures were all accompanied by “corrective” glosses. (Photo Credit 21a)

  The caption reads: The chief of a tribe of wild headhunters in full war dress after the Battle of Leipzig. (Photo Credit 21b)

  A caricature by E. O. Plauen (Photo Credit 8)

  Fritz Peter taught his chimpanzee to do the Hitler salute. (Photo Credit 18)

  Werner Finck, around 1935 (Photo Credit 7)

  The cast of the Catacomb (Photo Credit 5)

  Weiß Ferdl. (Photo Credit 1)

  Karl Valentin. (Photo Credit 2)

  Willi Schaeffer’s Cabaret of Comedians (Photo Credit 6)

  A 1933 Pfeffermühle program. (Photo Credit 19)

  Fritz Grünbaum (left) and Oskar Sima in A Song, A Kiss, A Girl from 1932. (Photo Credit 24)

  Kurt Gerron, 1927. (Photo Credit 22)

  The rubric “Something to Laugh About” from Der Stürmer

  A Stürmer caricature. (Photo Credit 27)

  Kurt Gerron in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, Fall 1944. (Photo Credit 23)

  V. HUMOR AND WAR

  AFTER A FEW YEARS of deceptive calm, during which the German leadership continued to assure the world of its peaceful intentions, developments came fast and furious. In the initial phase of German expansion, Hitler achieved bloodless victories that bolstered his fantasies of omnipotence. He annexed Austria and met no resistance. Girls holding flowers and other newly-found citizens of the Third Reich greeted German troops with cheers; the people who received German citizenship on Vienna’s Heldenplatz were eager to take part in what looked to be a great National Socialist adventure. But soon the arrogance with which faraway Berlin ruled over their country reawakened old feelings of inferiority toward their much bigger neighbor. The Nazis installed Josef Bürkel as their district leader in Vienna—an alcoholic party hack from the Rhine who neither understood nor wanted to understand Austrians. The Viennese soon dubbed Bürkel the “beer director,” and amongst themselves began to speak insultingly of all Germans. Still, despite such frictions, the Nazis achieved 99 percent of the Austrian vote in a referendum on the annexation.

  Franz Dannimann’s compilation of wartime jokes includes a piece of graffiti that appeared on the sides of buildings in the Austrian capital: “Only the dumbest calves elect their own slaughterers.” But the vast majority of Austrians had willingly sacrificed their homeland—as far as they did view the Austrian state, created in 1918, as a homeland—on the altar of Greater German nationalism. They only recovered from their intoxication with the onset of World War II and the prospect of their own demise.

  Nonetheless, some jokes that survive provide evidence of wounded national pride—the predominant theme in Austrian political humor under Hitler:

  After the annexation, a Nazi district leader visits a school in Linz, where the students have carefully rehearsed questions and answers. The district leader calls on little Seppl Ebeseder: “Who is your father?” “Adolf Hitler.” “Who is your mother?” “Greater Germany.” “Very good! And what do you want to be when you grow up?” “An orphan.”

  What popular Austrian humor ignored, however, were the violent anti-Semitic pogroms that commenced immediately after the annexation. Jewish professors were forced to clean street gutters with toothbrushes, and while the cultured elements in the Austrian populace did not laugh at such instances of humiliation, many took part in cruelties meted out to Jews.

  This terrible persecution was directed precisely at those Jewish citizens who had done the most to enrich Austrian society. Among the victims of the public harassment and waves of arrests were the cream of Austrian cabaret. On the day before German troops marched in, Fritz Grünbaum had mounted the stage of the Simpl Theater, where a short circuit had knocked out the lights, with the words: “I see nothing, absolutely nothing. I must have stumbled into Nazi cultural policies.” Twenty-four hours later, the comedian was running for his life. But his plan to seek refuge in Czechoslovakia was thwarted when the border was closed. His former stage partner, Karl Farkas, tried to persuade him to make a second attempt, but Grünbaum refused. Farkas escaped alone. And on May 7, 1938, the flagship Nazi newspaper Der Volkische Beobachter reported, “We’ve got Grünbaum.” The cabaret comic, the paper went on, would now have an opportunity to “revisit all the jokes he made.” They meant in Dachau.

  While the noose was gradually tightening around Jews’ necks in Austria, Nazi officials in Berlin were feverishly preparing new acts of infamy elsewhere. So far, German expansion had been bloodless, but now the German economy was being prepared for a second phase: bloody wars of conquest. The Nazis raised the funds needed for armaments by collecting taxes and through its Winter Relief Fund (Winterhilfswerk), which was supposed to go for economic stimulus and social programs. Germans may have believed they were saving up to buy one of the newly introduced Volkswagens, but Hitler was also using their savings to build tanks. Göring was charged with drawing up an economic Four-Year Plan, but instead of bolstering the civilian sector, he spent the money at his disposal on 3,300 warplanes.

  The populace was not compensated for the financial sacrifices they made with any visible social benefits, and eventually it became clear that there was something fishy going on, as the following quip illustrates:

  What should the German people use to keep warm, if the Four-Year Plan stipulates that wood is needed for more important tasks? The answer is simple. We’ll clothe ourselves in a cozy new textile made from the cobwebs in Hitler’s brain, the webs of lies told by Goebbels, and the delicate thread of the German pe
ople’s patience.

  That patience was constantly being tried by Nazi appeals for voluntary donations. But the money collected door to door by so-called charities like the Winter Relief Fund mysteriously disappeared. Some people scoffed that Catholicism and National Socialism had finally discovered something in common:

  The Catholics say: pray every morning, pray every noon, pray every evening. The National Socialist says: Pay every morning, pay every noon, pay every evening.

  Others joked that Volkswagens’ indicator lights should be made out of Winter Relief Fund donation cans—people were always quick to get out of the way of those.

  Yet despite Hitler’s rearmament programs and his unscrupulous, vampire-like sucking at the people’s pockets, the Führer led Germany into war only half prepared, and even a half-committed response from the West might well have spelled the end of the Nazi empire before it began. The strength Hitler liked to project abroad grotesquely belied the actual power structure in Europe in 1939. Hitler’s power was simply the power of suggestion, but it had the desired effect. None of the political principals at the time realized that when he flexed his muscles he was bluffing.

  The only sign of the enormous pressure the Führer had put himself under and his fear that he might have overplayed his hand was a new exaggerated animosity toward critics and pessimists. Hitler’s sudden sensitivity, itself an indication of his frayed nerves, had dire consequences for those who laughed at his expense. “The making of political jokes is a useless remnant of liberalism,” Goebbels wrote in the Völkischer Beobachter. Ever the attentive servant of his master, the propaganda minister had noticed how thin-skinned the Führer had become.

  Those cabaret artists who had remained in the Third Reich had no idea a clampdown was coming. Having been miraculously released from a concentration camp, Werner Finck was performing at Berlin’s Cabaret of Comedians, which was under the direction of Willy Schaeffers, who was known for toeing the party line. Schaeffers had hired Finck on condition that he refrain from political references in his act. Finck had sworn he would do exactly that, but began referring to his performance on stage as “half throttle”—a suggestion that his humor was being self-censored and that audiences should read between the lines.

  In one sketch, for instance, a woman asked Finck for the time, to which he responded: “I’m not allowed to talk about that.” That drew a grin form the audience, who knew the comedian had been muzzled. Finck also made sly references to the general dangers of speaking one’s mind under a repressive regime with party spies potentially lurking everywhere. One of his favorite jokes was:

  A guy goes to the dentist, who says, “Open your mouth, please.” The guy answers, “No way. I don’t even know you.”

  Nazi apparatchiks soon got wind of the fact that Finck was implicitly criticizing the government gag he had supposedly accepted. In January 1939, “cultural inspectors” who served as spies for the Propaganda Ministry reported that the state and the party were being openly mocked at the Cabaret of Comedians. Finck did not suspect the trouble he was in. Despite having received a few warnings, he was later to write, all seemed quiet on the “Goebbels front.”

  That quiet was deceptive: Goebbels, determined not to be flouted again by his rival Göring, was preparing a renewed attack on Finck within the General Staff. “Political jokes will be eradicated, ripped out by the very roots,” Goebbels noted in his diary. The opening salvo of his campaign against humor was to strip Finck and three colleagues of membership in the Imperial Cultural Chamber and forbid them to ever work again. The reason given in the official justification was that they “lacked any positive attitude toward National Socialism.” The severity of this blow completely surprised Finck, who now also worried, not without justification, that he would be sent back to a concentration camp.

  As 1939 wore on, he learned from confidential sources inside the Propaganda Ministry that old scores were about to be settled and he was to be removed from society altogether. He knew he had to act quickly and decisively. With a new world war already in full swing, going into exile was no longer an option. How could the comedian escape the bloodhounds of the powerful Goebbels, whom he had so terribly angered? Finck decided that the best defense was a good offense and volunteered for the military.

  This clever maneuver put him beyond the reach of the Propaganda Ministry, but not other perils. Not only could Finck have been killed by the enemy, he also had to watch his tongue among his fellow troops, given the rules, instituted in 1938, concerning “defeatism” among the ranks. This legislation, which bore the bureaucratic title “Wartime Special Punishment Ordinance,” was the brainchild of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, a sycophantic devotee of Hitler. It essentially gave the Nazis carte blanche to murder anyone they defined as “opposition.” According to paragraph 5, the punishment for “undermining the armed forces” was death—that is, those who questioned the war or made defeatist or critical statements could be put before a firing squad. (Women offenders were to be guillotined—ostensibly at the express request of the Führer.) The criterion for determining who was undermining or acting to the detriment of the war effort was “healthy popular sense.” The authorities took the measure of that, so they could be completely arbitrary. The ordinance was another means of tightening the screws and keeping people in fear of the totalitarian state.

  THE THIN SKINS of the Nazi leadership and their harsh laws against criticism and defeatism reflected the fact that they had a hard time getting Germans enthused about the war. The veterans of World War I knew only too well the horrors of a two-front conflict. Most Germans felt uneasy about Hitler’s plans for the invasion of Poland, an act that would lead to a military confrontation with England and France. Morale was poor, despite the constant barrage of propaganda. Heinz Rühmann had landed a hit with the upbeat ditty “Nothing Scares a Seaman,” which people sang and whistled on every street corner. But whether that song really kept Germans holding on throughout World War II, as it was later credited with doing, is an open question. In any case, the Nazis could not force the people to break out in wild hurrays over going to war. The fearful memories of Verdun lay too deep for that.

  So the leadership decided instead to pull in the reins and silence critical voices, if necessary, by legally sanctioned murder. But the people, shocked by so many ominous developments, one following on the heels of another, could not completely hold their tongues. Hitler’s mad foreign policy maneuvers and the popular suspicion that war was becoming inevitable caused a surprising number of Germans to shake their heads and even to quit the Nazi Party.

  For years, the Nazi leadership had tried to curry favor with England to clear the way for an unopposed conquest of territory in Eastern Europe, but Hitler’s overtures had yielded nothing but a minor naval treaty. Furious at being rebuffed by these stubborn English, and driven by mistaken tactical considerations, the Führer decided instead to treaty with his ideological archenemy, the Soviet Union. For decades, he had ranted and raved about the Bolshevik threat. But in 1939 he threw his principles out the window for the sole purpose of avoiding a two-front war while he overran Poland. The Soviet Non-Aggression Pact—which Hitler would scrap two years later—actually encouraged the Western European powers to resolve on a full-force strike at the next act of war perpetrated by Germany. In the short term, Hitler’s pact with Stalin temporarily staved off the need to fight on two fronts, but in the long term, it would lead to military catastrophe.

  Military consequences notwithstanding, this rapprochement with an enemy made it difficult for Hitler to explain his actions to his own people, and a number of popular jokes went the rounds questioning the Führer’s credibility:

  Hitler’s gift to [Soviet Foreign Minister] Molotov at the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact was an autographed edition of Mein Kampf with editorial changes made by the Führer himself. He crossed out all the anti-Russian bits.

  A similar joke played on the meaning of the words mein Kampf—“my battle”: Stalin was planning to
write an autobiography, Your Battle, My Victory. The joke called to mind the fact that under the Non-Aggression Pact, the Soviet Union would get the eastern half of Poland.

  The official state propaganda machine paid such sarcastic jokes little regard and continued to praise the unholy alliance with Stalin as an act of strategic genius. The pact essentially divided up the spoils before the victory. It was clear that real deeds would have to follow Hitler’s diplomatic somersaults. Events had developed a fatal dynamic of their own. A joke that made the round before the start of World War II accurately anticipated what was to follow:

  It’s July 1939, and three Swiss are talking about where they want to go on vacation. They agree that it’s time to see Germany. One says he wants to go to Munich, and the second says he’d like to visit Berlin. The third pipes up: “I’m going to Warsaw. “But Warsaw isn’t part of Germany,” the other two object. The third says: “My vacation’s in October.”

  The man who recorded this joke, Ralph Wiener, correctly notes that it contains an element of Nazi wish fulfillment. And it’s likely that its author was convinced of the propriety of a German attack on Poland. In any case, the joke is evidence of German megalomania, an attitude that had begun to take root in the new fascist popular community. The earlier uneasy reaction to Hitler’s bellicose posturing had not been based on moral objections but on fears that the trauma of 1918 would be repeated. That concern was finally wiped away by Nazi Germany’s successful campaign against France in 1940. The vast majority of Germans basked in that bloody triumph. But their glee at the success of Germany’s blitzkrieg was short-lived. The attack on Poland had isolated Germany from the community of nations. Germany fought largely alone in its war against the rest of the world. Its biggest ally was Italy, hardly a military powerhouse.