Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany

by Rudolph Herzog

§1 It is prohibited to listen intentionally to foreign broadcasters. Violations will be punished with re-educational imprisonment. In milder cases, this can be reduced to mere incarceration. The radio receivers used will be confiscated. §2 Whoever intentionally disseminates news from foreign broadcasters of the sort that may endanger the German people’s capacity for resistance will be subject to re-educational incarceration and, in extreme cases, death.

  But despite the number of spies among the populace and the unsavory show trials in which people were sentenced to death for violating this law, few Germans changed their radio habits. German radio was full of triumphant reports—even as the Wehrmacht was put more and more obviously on the defensive, journalists spoke of “adjusting the frontlines” and “planned rear-flank movements.” Though hardly free of propaganda, the BBC was a much more reliable news source. In Berlin argot, Goebbels’s mendacious radio addresses quickly became known as “Clubfoot’s Fairy-Tale Hour.”

  But even those who saw through Nazi propaganda had to acknowledge the Nazis’ expertise in using the media for their own purposes. Besides radio propaganda, the importance of which Hitler had recognized early on, there were weekly newsreels devoted entirely to spreading Nazi ideology. Goebbels’s fondness for cinema inspired him to risk an experiment in filmed political humor, and in early years of the war, the Propaganda Minister had comic sketches included in the weekly newsreels. The first such series was called “Tran and Helle” and was based on a simple formula. A stubborn fellow with a shaved head named Tran (played by actor Ludwig Schmitz) would run through litanies of complaints, read books by Jewish authors, or buy oranges on the black market, that is, do everything possible that a good racial comrade would call wrong. Then the dapper party loyalist Helle would bring the “defeatist” back into line. Often Helle’s “well-intentioned” bits of advice were laced with threats. This was the case in a sketch about listening to foreign broadcasters:

  HELLE: That’s great that you finally bought a radio receiver. Now you’ll know what an interesting age we live in. You can follow the major announcements of the empire.

  TRAN: And maybe I can tune in occasionally to foreign broadcasters.

  HELLE: What? You want to listen to foreign radio?

  TRAN: Sure, foreign news. From London, for example.

  HELLE: London?

  TRAN: Yeah. Do you know how to get London?

  HELLE: I don’t know how to get London, but I know what you’ll get if you succeed.

  TRAN: And what’s that?

  HELLE: The clink, even prison!

  TRAN: And if no one finds out?

  HELLE: It doesn’t matter if someone finds out or not. A good German doesn’t do things like that.

  TRAN: But you have to be aware of what’s around you.

  HELLE: Of course, the foreign broadcasts tell the truth pure and unadulterated. Haven’t you ever heard about the news system used by our enemies? If you did, you’d know that everything they say is intended to weaken our capacity for resistance.

  Bizarre as it may seem, Germans found the “Tran and Helle” sketches hilarious. But that doesn’t mean they agreed with Helle’s didactic statements. In fact, more often than not, the opposite was true. Nazi spies reported that the series was so popular because most people sympathized with Tran, the defeatist, whereupon Goebbels immediately canceled it. After the failure of this attempt at humorous persuasion, the fascists never again tried their hand at political sketches—a similar series called “Liese and Miese” was called off in the conceptual stage. Astonishingly enough, after World War II, Jupp Hessels, the actor who had played the Nazi ideologue Helle, claimed he was an apolitical person who never suspected the sketches were anything but harmless entertainment.

  DESPITE ALL THEIR propagandistic twisting and turning, the Nazi leadership could not conceal the fact that the war had gone sour. The first hints of a turning tide came during the winter of 1941–42, when the insufficiently equipped Wehrmacht suffered a series of costly defeats in the vast expanses of Russia. In particular, the generation of Germans who had experienced two-front warfare in World War I began to suspect that Hitler had overextended himself in attacking the Soviet Union. But it wasn’t just the specter of Verdun that created unease. Many Germans saw a parallel with Napoleon, who had suffered a crushing defeat in wintertime Russia. Moreover, the gigantic, icy Soviet empire was only one of the enemies the German field commanders had to face, and it was becoming evident on other fronts—for example, in Egypt—that the German army had reached the limit of its materiel and personnel. The full might of Göring’s Luftwaffe was unable to defend German cities from aerial attack. German cities had been under bombardment since 1940, and by 1943, the Allies were flying bombing missions around the clock. Göring had once famously remarked that if an enemy aircraft ever entered German air space, you could call him Meier. By 1943, wisecrackers among the populace were calling him exactly that, and the notoriously arrogant field marshal had no one but himself to blame.

  The course of World War II changed irrevocably with the bloody defeat of German forces in Stalingrad in late January and February of 1943. The demise of the Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army permanently disposed of Hitler’s boast that he was the “greatest field general in history.” Henceforth, the Führer’s claims of infallibility would be measured against reality. Hitler himself stubbornly refused to acknowledge the facts and responded to disaster with incessant calls on Germans to persevere. But Hitler was not the only one who grew even more irrational when faced by the ever-widening gap between the true state of affairs and Nazi wishful thinking. The entire National Socialist leadership, now on the defensive, began lashing out. By the time Goebbels made his notorious “total war” speech on February 18, 1943, total war was already a bloody reality on all fronts. In effect, Germany’s bloodthirsty aggression was in great part directed against its own army. Tens of thousands of German soldiers were needlessly sacrificed abroad, while on the home front the SS took command.

  Outward and inward radicalization proceeded hand in hand. During the intoxicating series of German victories early in the war, the fascist legal system had made only moderate use of measures designed to intimidate skeptics. Now death sentences were handed out fast and furiously to “those who undermine defensive strength.” The sentences and executions that followed were based on a nefarious emergency wartime ordinance thought up by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. The text of the ordinance was left purposely vague:

  Undermining defensive strength is punishable by death, and this punishment applies to whosoever publicly calls upon and encourages others to refuse to serve in a German or allied army and otherwise tries to weaken or undermine the will of the German people and their allies to preserve themselves.

  Starting in 1943, the Nazi judicial system made liberal use of what amounted to a blank check for arbitrary state violence. Judges were creative in their interpretations about what sort of statements counted as “public,” and courts decided that even critical comments made in family circles fell under Keitel’s ordinance.

  Judges and prosecutors relied on the help of a small army of eager informers who delivered hundreds of fellow citizens critical of the regime to the gallows throughout the remaining years of the war. Sometimes the informer was a building superintendent or a neighbor trying to settle an old score. In extreme cases, children even informed on their parents. Nowhere in German society were people safe from these unofficial Nazi “deputies.” Without informers, who were of course encouraged by the state, the regime could have never achieved the level of coercion it did over its own citizenry. The Gestapo itself, although widely feared, lacked the personnel necessary to keep millions of people under its thumb. Instead of beefing up the secret police, the Nazis came up with a perfidious system whereby tips could be passed all the way from nosy neighbors to the highest levels of the Gestapo.

  IN HER ANALYSIS of Nazi secret police files, the historian Meike Wöhlert has given us a good picture of what happened to people wh
o were handed over to the Gestapo for telling defeatist jokes. In most cases, they were interrogated and then released. Further consequences were rare. Even in those cases where individuals were sent up before special political courts, the trials usually ended with mere warnings. Jokes did not normally fall under Keitel’s emergency wartime ordinance, but rather were subject to a far milder law concerning malicious remarks. The small minority of wits who were remanded to “protective custody” were typically released after five months in prison. Nazi authorities treated political criticism—“defeatist remarks”—as a felony and political humor as a misdemeanor.

  Nonetheless there were a few exceptional cases in which the telling of jokes was seriously prosecuted in order to get rid “racial comrades” who had fallen out of favor. One of these cases, from the final years of the war, merits further attention: that of the Viennese actor Fritz Muliar. This committed Nazi detractor had been drafted in 1940 and sent to fight in France. When his fellow soldiers learned of his theatrical background, he was ordered to stage an evening of entertainment for the troops. This was hardly unusual. Other performing artists were assigned this task, which was aimed at maintaining morale, and a number of comedians who had successful careers after the war had performed in army cabarets. It was expected that such people would provide apolitical, unchallenging humor that would distract soldiers from the everyday hardships of war. From the beginning, however, Muliar refused to adhere to this unwritten rule. Controversial humor, as Muliar recalled in an interview for this book, went down well:

  “Whenever I told jokes that didn’t precisely toe to the party line, there was lots of laughter. And of course, that made me more and more audacious … A master sergeant, an Austrian named Müller, once warned me to be a bit more cautious because things could change in a hurry.”

  Muliar refused to take that advice. His work in occupied France brought him into contact with French locals who had no love for their conquerors. According to one French joke, the Nazi Party acronym NSDAP stood for “Nous sommes des Allemands provisoires” (“we are the provisional Germans”), and the jokes told by such “provisional Germans” were cutting, anti-German and full of resentment. Muliar was always ready to assist the French, helping them smuggle refugees across the border and supporting other subversive activities. He also retold French jokes among German troops.

  An Austrian comrade, a high school teacher from Vienna’s first district, reported him to the authorities. A short time later, while standing watch over a fake airfield full of prop airplanes, Muliar was arrested. He was imprisoned in Auxerre and charged with violating Paragraph 5 of the emergency wartime ordinance. Specifically, he was accused of undermining troop morale with defeatist utterances and jokes. And indeed, the young soldier had hardly been circumspect, publicly remarking, “Goebbels is a whoremonger, Hitler a criminal, and the war a lost cause.”

  It was an open secret that the officers in Muliar’s unit were just as blunt in their humor, but they could get away with it. Muliar had already attracted the disapproving attention of party authorities because of his contact with the French and his membership in an Austrian nationalist movement. The jokes he had told made a handy excuse to put the young rebel on ice. Muliar was sent into solitary confinement for seven months, during which time his situation remained torturously uncertain. When he was let out, to stand trial by the military court of the 10th Luftwaffe division, the judge was surprisingly lenient, having apparently concluded that Muliar’s remarks did not reflect any deep-seated political convictions but were instead an expression of youthful rowdiness. He was given a four-month prison term for “undermining defensive strength” in addition to a further four-month sentence for an act of theft he had not committed.

  But the relief Muliar felt was short-lived. As soon as he arrived back in prison in Auxerre, his case was reopened. The highest military judge in the division, General Field Marshal Huge Sperrle, had found Muliar’s sentence far too mild. Muliar was told he would be retried and that the prosecution would ask for the death penalty. After receiving the news, the 22-year-old sat down in his cell and composed his last will and testament. Part of that will was a heartbreaking letter to his family, accompanied by instructions that his gold watch and his copy of Goethe’s Faust be given to his friend Kurt Jelinek.

  On December 12, 1942, Muliar’s long wait came to an end when he was taken to Paris and forced to appear in front of a military court. And once again he was spared, sentenced to “only” five years in a reeducation prison. This term was later commuted to “frontline parole.” He was sent to the Donets Basin in Ukraine, where he had to serve in a division for military prisoners that was little better than a suicide commando. Miraculously, Muliar survived the war, despite being forced to advance through minefields. He himself figured he was a goner. Decades after the war, he recalled, “Back then I believed I was never going to be able to laugh again.”

  SERVING IN A suicide squad on the Eastern front was no doubt hellish, but at least Muliar lived to tell the tale. A certain Marianne Elise K., who worked as a technical draftswoman in Berlin, was not so lucky. A colleague in the armaments factory where she worked reported her to the authorities for telling the following joke:

  Hitler and Göring are standing atop the Berlin radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to put a smile on Berliners’ faces. So Göring says: “Why don’t you jump?”

  Marianne K. was hauled up in front of the notorious People’s Court, which had for some time been making a hated name for itself by handing out harsh sentences. The court’s president, Roland Freisler, who more than anyone else personified Nazi state judicial terror, sat in person over her trial. The judgment he rendered on June 26, 1943 read:

  As the widow of a fallen German soldier, Marianne K. tried to undermine our will to manly defense and dedicated labor in the armaments sector toward victory by making malicious remarks about the Führer and the German people and by uttering the wish that we should lose the war. By these actions and the fact that she claims to be Czech when she is in fact German, she has excluded herself from the racial community. Her honor has been permanently destroyed and therefore she will be punished with death.

  Marianne was executed by guillotine. The court rejected her defense that she was bitter about the fact that her husband had fallen in a senseless war of aggression. On the contrary, the court found that her status as a war widow aggravated her crimes.

  The People’s Court made it a point of pride to take no account of individual suffering. Freisler’s predecessor, Otto Georg Thierack, had given the incoming president clear instructions:

  In general, the judges of the People’s Court must accustom themselves to seeing the ideas and intent of the state leadership as primary and the human destinies that depend on them as secondary.

  Freisler embraced these words and enforced what they enjoined to the letter. As the war progressed, the number of cases heard and of death sentences handed out by Thierack and Freisler’s court rose dramatically. In 1942, the year in which it became clear that the fortunes of war would turn against Germany, the death toll increased tenfold.

  Year Death sentences

  1937 32

  1938 17

  1939 36

  1940 53

  1941 102

  1942 1192

  1943 1662

  1944 2079

  “Defeatists” like Marianne K. were almost invariably executed, and the court did not distinguish between everyday citizens and people who were well known. One of the court’s victims was the internationally renowned pianist Karlrobert Kreiten, who was summoned before a judge after prophesying that the Nazi government would soon have one head fewer. Even the personal intervention of world-famous conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, could not avert Kreiten’s fate. The announcement of the pianist’s execution was celebrated in a Berlin daily newspaper with a sarcastic editorial bearing the headline “Artist—Example and Role Model.” The author o
f that article was a journalist named Werner Höfer, who despite his Nazi past would go on to make a career in West German television in the 1960s. He was even allowed to host a popular morning TV show and serve as a programming director.

  Another prominent “defeatist” was the actor Robert Dorsay, who had achieved fame playing a charming ladies’ man in a number of UFA comedies. Along with his acting abilities, Dorsay was very skilled at telling jokes—something he did on every possible occasion. It was his wont to make fun of Hitler and Goebbels at glamorous UFA parties, and not all of his jokes were harmless. One played on the German idiom “to bite into grass,” meaning to push up daisies:

  At a procession of the Führer through a city, young girls line the streets carrying flowers. One of them hands Hitler a bunch of grass. “What am I supposed to do with this?” Hitler asks. “Eat it,” the girl answers. “People are always saying that better times will only come when the Führer bites into grass.”

  Dorsay doesn’t seem to have considered that not everyone would find such jokes funny. He ignored a couple of judicious warnings and explicitly refused to join the Nazi Party. It was clear to everyone: Dorsay had no time for the Nazis.

  In return he was systematically punished. UFA bosses saw to it that he was not given any more major roles. In the anti-Semitic comedy Robert and Bertram, he appeared fleetingly as a Jewish servant who could have been a caricature from Der Stürmer—a sign of how far his star had fallen. But even this halfhearted attempt to curry favor by sinking to the most primitive anti-Semitic depths could not slow his professional demise. During the war, Dorsay was forced to accept poorly paid engagements as a frontline cabaret performer, and even the worst film roles were beyond his grasp. Despondent, he vented his frustrations over beer and wine in the commissary of one of Berlin’s leading theaters. One day, Dorsay was amusing his table with the latest Führer jokes, and promptly got reported to the authorities by a government counselor who happened to be in the room. In August 1943, a special military court sentenced him to two years’ reeducation incarceration. But as Dorsay was preparing to serve that sentence, his case was still making waves.