In fact, the Nazis had trouble cementing their partnership with Europe’s other main fascist dictatorship. Initially, Mussolini was extremely skeptical about Hitler’s ambitions, in particular the Führer’s plan to form Germans into a “racially pure herd.” The event that forged the alliance was the second Italo-Abyssinian war, a brutal and hopelessly anachronistic colonial endeavor for which Hitler provided raw materials. The German populace did not fail to note the attempts of the two regimes to come together. In one popular joke, Göring is sent to Abyssinia and telegraphs back to Berlin: “Emperor has fled—stop—his uniform fits me—stop—Hermann.”
Mussolini repaid Hitler for his support by accepting Germany’s annexation of Austria without protest, and by 1939, shortly before the start of World War II, the relationship between the two states had flourished to the point where Italy agreed to a “pact of steel” that bound it militarily to Germany without restriction. Foolishly, Mussolini promised to join his larger ally in the event of any kind of warfare, offensive as well as defensive. With a single stroke of the pen, he sealed his own fate, although afterward he seems to have realized how carelessly he had thrown in his lot with the warmongering Führer. In any case, despite the pact, signed at the time with martial decisiveness, Italy did not take part in Germany’s campaign against Poland, and Mussolini only participated in hostilities against France once it became clear that Hitler would emerge victorious. Mussolini sent the first troops to France one week before the grande nation capitulated, and while German tank divisions were rolling toward Paris, Italian soldiers were straggling in the suburbs of Menton, on the French-Italian border.
Mussolini, who had hoped to receive a part of France as a reward for this timely assistance, was promptly nicknamed “the imperial harvest helper.” In the eyes of many Germans, Italy was a completely unreliable and opportunistic ally. Wisecrackers sneered that Mussolini had declared of Gaul: “I came when I saw that he had conquered.” But Italy stood by Germany throughout the rest of the war, plunging with its ally into the abyss. To make up for his past failings, Mussolini supported every one of Hitler’s subsequent murderous ventures, although he was motivated less by bad conscience or concern about his reputation than by his own fantastical dreams and boundless greed. He believed that all of Europe would become fascist, and he wanted a big piece of the pie.
In 1940, Italian troops invaded Greece, but soon ran into difficulties and had to be rescued from defeat by hastily deployed German units. That only confirmed German prejudices about the weakness of the Southern European mentality and provided fodder for a further series of jokes, like this one:
When the Wehrmacht High Command received word that Italy had joined the war, one general opined, “That will cost us an extra ten divisions.” When informed that Italy was fighting on Germany’s side, he sighed, “Ouch, make that twenty.”
There was good reason to regard Italy as a military featherweight, although it had nothing to do with Southern European mentality. The modest might of the Italian army aside, Germany’s ally only went to war begrudgingly. Except for Mussolini, no one in the Italian ruling class was very enthusiastic—neither the king nor the military nor the industrial leadership supported Il Duce’s military adventure. One untranslatably obscene joke in Germany had Mussolini ordering the removal of toilets from Italian rail cars because “the Italians don’t give a shit about the Axis.” That punch line was an accurate assessment of the morale among Italian troops.
Most German jokes against their ally, however, revolved around the idea that the only thing Italy’s military did well was retreat. One joke, common among German soldiers, played upon the Italian tendency to call in help when things went wrong:
In Italy there’s a new dance craze. It’s called the Retreat and it goes like this: You take one step forward, then two steps back, spin around your axis, and hide behind your partner.
But after their own initial series of triumphs, German troops didn’t have much luck themselves, and there was little reason to point fingers at their weaker ally.
The German campaign against England, in particular, failed to yield any notable success. The air battles, which Germany hoped would establish its superiority in the skies, ended in a fiasco. The strategy developed by Göring, who was in charge of the Luftwaffe, simply didn’t work, and bombarding civilian targets in English cities only strengthened English resolve. This was all the more true in 1940 when Winston Churchill replaced the indecisive Neville Chamberlain. Churchill’s “Blood, sweat and tears” speech lent European opposition to Hitler a powerful voice and bolstered the morale of Britons, who set about turning their nation into a fortress. Hitler was repeatedly forced to postpone Operation Sea Lion, the planned German invasion of the British Isles.
Jokers among the German populace quickly noticed that, in the case of England, Hitler could not follow up his bellicose posturing with action:
After defeating France, Hitler stands by the English Channel, gazing over at the enemy and wondering why an invasion is proving so difficult. Suddenly, Moses appears next to him and says: “If you hadn’t persecuted my people, I would have showed you the trick I used to part the Red Sea.” Hitler’s bodyguards arrest him and torture him until he confesses, “I only need to hold the staff God gave me over the water, and the waves will recede.” “So where is this staff,” Hitler screams. “Give it to me!” Moses shrugs and says: “It’s in the British Museum.”
In Churchill, Hitler had found an adversary as determined as he was. Nonetheless, most Germans weren’t worried about their military prospects during the first half of World War II. On the contrary, the speed with which the Nazi Empire was growing infused even hardcore skeptics with enthusiasm for the conflict. Only a very few were worried that German strength was being dispersed in a variety of offensive wars or felt concern that German death squads pursued their malevolent work in the countries that had capitulated.
One of these few was the first person to try to assassinate Hitler. The Munich-born clockmaker Georg Elser was a pacifist with unusual prescience who saw where Hitler’s megalomania would lead and tried to kill the Führer with a bomb made from stolen dynamite. Acting alone, Elser detonated the device on November 8, 1939, at a large Nazi Party event in Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller, where Hitler was the main speaker. The attempt failed because Hitler had shortened his speech in order to catch a train to Berlin and had already left the building.
Ironically, many Germans believed the bombing was another stunt staged by the Nazis themselves. Kurt Sellin, who published the first postwar collection of wartime German jokes, recorded the following quip:
The attempted assassination of Hitler in the Bürgerbräukeller left 10 people dead, 50 injured, and 60 million fooled.
It seems strange that Germans would interpret a bombing in which several high-ranking Nazis were killed as an attempt by the party to put one over on the populace. On the other hand, there was little Germans thought Hitler incapable of, including killing his own comrades, so perhaps their suspicions were sincere. Many people regarded the Night of the Long Knives and even the Reichstag fire as Nazi propaganda spectacles. In this case, however, they were mistaken. The assassination attempt had been genuine, the work of a single man of conscience. Elser was quickly arrested and sent to Dachau, where he was murdered in 1944, when his contemporaries had finally begun to see clearly, as he had long before, the infernal path that Hitler had chosen to go down. But in 1940 the vast majority of Germans were intoxicated by Hitler’s early military success, and Elser’s would long remain the only attempt to assassinate the Führer.
When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, more people began to see dark clouds on the horizon. Even Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, felt that extreme steps were now necessary to avoid a two-front war. Shortly after the launch of Hitler’s suicidal Operation Barbarossa in Eastern Europe, Hess, on his own initiative, decided to negotiate a peace deal with England. On May 10, 1941, he commandeered a plane and flew to Scotland, where
he was immediately arrested. It was a crazy thing to do, the act of an unstable man who had lost all sense of reality, and Hess’s precise motivation remains unclear to this day. When Hitler learned of what his deputy had done, he declared Hess mentally ill and issued an order that he be shot—should he ever return to Germany.
The German people had their own, comic take on Hess’s exploit. One joke has Churchill greeting Hess, “So you’re the madman,” to which Hess responds, “No, I’m just his deputy.” (In reality, Hess never got to talk to the prime minister.) Other jokes played on the suspicion that Hess’s real mission had been to flee Nazi Germany. A parody of a child’s bedtime prayer ran: “Dear God, please make me crazy so I, too, can fly to Scotland.” And wisecrackers alluding to the failure of Germany’s strenuous efforts to conquer the British sneered that Hess was the only German who’d ever succeeded in invading England.
There was no end to the variety of jokes involving Hess as a lunatic in an age of collective lunacy, or as a madman who was the only German with a clear head. Previously, Hitler’s unassuming deputy had attracted little attention; now, he was center stage, in the spotlight. Instead of delivering a peace deal, he had provided priceless fodder for wartime humor. This example is particularly macabre:
Two old acquaintances run into one another in a concentration camp. “Why are you in here?” asks one. “On May 10, I said Rudolf Hess was crazy,” the other answers, “and yourself?” “On May 15, I said Hess wasn’t crazy.”
This joke shows how aware Germans were in 1941 of the terrible power exercised by the Nazi state. But few rebelled against Nazi excesses, because of fear, indifference, or basic National Socialist convictions.
The signs were clear, however, that Nazi Germany had passed its zenith. In attacking its archenemy-turned–temporary ally to the east, Germany had overreached itself. The Soviet Union, with its vast territory and immense military resources, was a wall against which Hitler would bang his head for the next four years. Once again, Germany began by conquering territory, but within in a few months, its advances slowed and then stopped altogether. What followed was the darkest period of the Third Reich, and in that period an empire was radicalized, internally and externally, to an extent previously unknown in history.
LONG BEFORE Hitler proceeded to his Final Solution, people abroad knew that Jews were being cruelly discriminated against and persecuted in Germany. But it was not a topic much canvassed in the general culture of the world outside; for example, films of the prewar years made little mention of these injustices. In the age of appeasement, the political situation was too precarious for such accusations, and in the 1930s the only moviemaking nation to be truly active on the propaganda front was Germany itself. The most powerful world influence on public opinion, Hollywood, had little interest in producing films that were harshly critical of the Nazis, though the studios’ reasons had less to do with political sympathies than with practical, economic considerations. Although few people wanted to admit it, the American film industry depended on the European market, and in a time haunted by fascist terrorism and fears of a new war, no one in Europe wanted to see “problem films.” Audiences craved diversion, and Hollywood provided them with tailor-made escapist fantasies, light entertainment in every conceivable form.
The American people themselves maintained an embarrassed distance from the unruly, self-destructive nations of “Old Europe,” and the problems of the European continent seemed especially far away to those basking in the southern California sun. In 1936, only five percent of Americans overall could conceive of their country going to war against Germany. And instead of telling the truth about Germany’s rearmament and racist insanity, Hollywood had its stars doing dance steps. Only with the onset of World War II did the big studios begin to mobilize audiences. Here, too, economic considerations played a major role. After the German invasion of Poland, the European market had drastically shrunk. Many films could not even be distributed within wartime Europe. Meanwhile the mood in America had turned patriotic, and even the calculating studio bosses began to realize that the United States might not be able to avoid entering World War II.
ONE STAR of the American film industry had recognized, much more quickly than his colleagues, just how dangerous the German threat was. Charlie Chaplin had been involved in World War I, too: with his film Shoulder Arms, the world’s most famous comedian had marched to the front against the Kaiser’s Imperial Germany. No one knew how to use humor as a weapon more perfectly than Chaplin, and he was born to create a cinematic parody of—and warning against—the absurdly inflated imagery of the Nazis.
A number of strange coincidences connected Chaplin with Hitler. Not only did they wear the same mustache, but also they were born only four days apart. Surprisingly, Chaplin did not come up with the idea of playing the role of the psychopathic dictator on his own; it was suggested to him by his fellow director and producer Alexander Korda. In his memoir, Chaplin described his reaction to Korda’s suggestion:
And now another war was brewing and I was trying to write a story for Paulette [Goddard]; but I could make no progress. How could I throw myself into feminine whimsy or think of romance or the problems of love when madness was being stirred up by a hideous grotesque—Adolf Hitler?
Alexander Korda in 1937 had suggested I should do a Hitler story based on mistaken identity, Hitler having the same mustache as the tramp: I could play both characters, he said. I did not think too much about the idea then, but now it was topical, and I was desperate to get working again. Then it suddenly struck me. Of course! As Hitler I could harangue the crowds in jargon and talk all I wanted to. And as the tramp I could remain more or less silent. A Hitler story was an opportunity for burlesque and pantomime. So with this enthusiasm I went hurrying back to Hollywood and set to work writing a script. The story took two years to develop.
Chaplin’s ambitions were cemented by the fact that German journalists were constantly going after him in their propaganda organs, with Goebbels’s press referring to him as “the little Jewish tumbling figure” or simply as “repulsive.” Chaplin could hardly wait to pay the Nazis back for their insults.
The final script for The Great Dictator was completed the same day England declared war on Germany, and the project, in which Chaplin had already invested half a million dollars, went into production shortly thereafter. The story was simple but clever. Chaplin plays a Jewish barber who has lost his memory in World War I and is released from hospital after years of fruitless treatment, only to find Tomania (Germany) completely changed. The barber knows nothing about the political rise of the Nazis or their anti-Semitic pogroms, an ignorance that leads to a series of absurd situations. Chaplin also plays the megalomaniacal Tomanian dictator, Adenoid Hynkel, and the scene jumps back and forth between the ghetto and the autocrat’s palace. Hynkel delivers a number of bizarre speeches to the masses in jumbled pseudo-German, bosses around his henchmen Herring (Göring) and Garbitsch (Goebbels), and engages in ridiculous competitions with his Italian ally and rival, Benzino Napaloni. Because the Jewish barber and the Tomanian dictator look exactly alike, the plot turns into a comedy of mistaken identities. The barber takes over Hynkel’s office, sends the tyrant to a concentration camp, and makes a speech pleading for peace and lambasting the misanthropic, racist policies of his doppelganger. A scene from the first draft of the script that showed the dictator’s Jewish wife undergoing cosmetic surgery in order to look like a stereotypical German Frau was left out because it was considered too drastic.
Chaplin immersed himself in his work on the set. He had viewed copious material from the weekly German newsreels and sucked up details like a sponge. In order to play both roles equally plausibly, he shot the Hynkel and barber scenes at separate times, first tackling the ghetto sequences before moving on to the ones in the dictator’s palace, which he filmed in December 1939. By March 1940, he was able to inform his studio bosses that the movie was a wrap. There had been worrisome signals from the U.S. State Department wh
ile the film was being shot, and the appeasement-era British government, too, fretted that a film depicting Hitler as a buffoon might not be such a good idea and threatened to ban it from being shown in the U.K. Chaplin had legitimate reason to be concerned the film might never see the light of day.
But then events took a dramatic turn, as Chaplin later described in his autobiography:
Before I had finished The Dictator England declared war on the Nazis. I was in Catalina on my boat over the weekend and heard the depressing news over the radio. In the beginning there was inaction on all fronts. “The Germans will never break through the Maginot Line,” we said. Then suddenly the holocaust began: the breakthrough in Belgium, the collapse of the Maginot Line, the stark and ghastly fact of Dunkirk—and France was occupied. The news was growing gloomier. England was fighting with her back to the wall. Now our New York office was wiring frantically, “Hurry up with your film, everyone is waiting for it.”
The Nazi government launched a full-scale diplomatic campaign to stop Chaplin’s project at the last minute. But although many Americans still sympathized with Germany, its efforts were in vain.
Chaplin’s troubles, however, were far from over. Before the film’s premiere, he received letters from people who threatened to throw stink bombs or even shoot bullets at the screen. He went ahead anyway, and the film was a huge popular hit, making more money than any of the comedian’s other movies. The press was less enthusiastic; some critics accused Chaplin of throwing his lot in with the Communists. Many objected in particular to the sentimental speech by the Jewish barber at the end of the film, addressed directly to the audience. The naive pacifism it expressed was probably what led Chaplin to cautiously distance himself from The Great Dictator after World War II. He later said that if he had known then the extent of the Nazis’ crimes, including Auschwitz, he would have never made the movie.
Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany Page 11