By the summer of 1943, the state was frantically trying make people show solidarity by adopting ever more brutal punitive measures for skeptics. Heinrich Himmler, who had just been appointed Minister of the Interior, canceled all the sentences handed out by special courts—he apparently viewed them as too lenient. On October 8, Dorsay was retried, and the verdict this time around was death. Less than three weeks later, the actor was executed by guillotine.
The Völkischer Beobachter and other Nazi-run newspapers laconically passed on the news of his execution:
Treason punished by death: Berlin, November 1, 1943. The actor Robert Stampa a.k.a. Dorsay was sentenced to death for recurrent agitation against the Reich and for severely undermining our defensive strength. The sentence has already been carried out.
In the next-to-last year of the war, Robert Dorsay’s name could once more found on posters. Not film posters, but blood-red announcements on advertising kiosks, put there to ensure that everyone knew how the popular wisecracker had met his end.
THE CASE OF Robert Dorsay once again illustrates the double standards that were applied in the Third Reich to critical political jokes. Some joke tellers got off with a warning, while others were sent to prison or, in extreme cases, put to death. The reason for the inconsistency, as Wöhlert has shown, was not the arbitrary nature of Nazi legal verdicts. The judges were acting systematically on orders that emphasized the defendant’s attitude over his actions. Someone like Dorsay, who was known as a critic of the regime, could expect a much harsher sentence if brought up before a court than a committed National Socialist who told the same joke. This guiding principle of the Nazi judicial system can be traced back to an order from Hitler himself, as passed on by Heydrich in 1936.
The draconian punishments handed down by the People’s Court were aimed at making examples of certain individuals and could hardly have failed to have at least part of their desired effect. As the number of death sentences increased, so did people’s feeling of being under threat when they told jokes critical of the regime. Yet this does not mean, as has been so often suggested, that laughter in the Third Reich was deadly. Merely telling a political joke did not put the joke teller’s life at risk. The real risk arose when the Nazis were looking for an excuse to remove an unwanted member of the community. What mattered was not the “misdemeanor” itself, but the overall picture the authorities made of a defendant’s attitude toward National Socialism. A good example is a joke that appeared in a number of official protocols:
Two pictures, one of Hitler and one of Göring, are hanging on the wall of a school with a space left in the middle. A teacher asks, “What should we use to fill the gap?” A pupil stands up and says, “A picture of Jesus. The Bible says he was nailed up between two criminals.”
A Gestapo and special-court file from 1933 refers to the telling of this joke as a misdemeanor. But when a priest critical of the Nazis told a variation of the joke in the final years of the war, the People’s Court, which had assumed responsibility for the case, handed down a death sentence. The irony was that in the priest’s version the meaning of the joke had been concealed so that only those with a firm knowledge of the Bible could grasp it:
A mortally wounded soldier is about to die and calls a nurse. He says, “I’m going to die as a soldier and I’d like to know for whom I’ve given my life.” The nurse answers: “You are dying for the Führer and the German people.” The soldier asks, “Can the Führer come to my bedside?” The nurse says: “No, that’s not possible, but I’ll bring you a picture of him.” The soldier tells her to put it on the right-hand side of his bed and then says, “I was in the Luftwaffe.” So the nurse brings him a picture of Göring and puts it to the left of the bed. Then the soldier says, “Now I can die like Jesus.”
What led to the death sentence was not the content of the joke, but the biography of the priest who told it.
Joseph Müller was a Catholic, born in 1884 and raised by deeply conservative and religious parents. Like many other young men of his generation, he volunteered for the German army in World War I and returned home wounded and traumatized, after fighting in France and Romania. He studied theology in Freiburg and Münster and was appointed a priest in 1922. He immediately showed an aptitude for youth work and by the 1930s was giving as many as 17 hours of religious instruction a week. The melancholy, at times depressive clergyman blossomed whenever he had the opportunity to win over young people for the church. Politics were part of what he taught, and he often warned his pupils against chasing after “spectres,” that is, extreme political positions.
This inevitably brought on conflict with the local Nazi faithful, who preferred to see their children in the Hitler Youth and the German Girls’ Association, rather than in Sunday school. Besides, over time Müller opened his house and yard not just to children but also to Polish forced laborers. Ostensibly, they were there to do gardening work, but this was just a pretense so that they could take part in the Mass. That violated the law, as did his public “defeatist” insistence that Germany would never be able to win the war.
Although he had never been officially in trouble with the authorities, Müller no longer had a clean record in Nazi eyes. He began his last assignment near the city of Hildesheim on August 1, 1943, with a number of secret black marks against him. Müller probably would not have known how precarious his situation was. His friends described him as naïve, and his immediate superior reported that he was only moderately intelligent and lacked “intellectual flexibility.” Nonetheless, he quickly made friends in his new home, and decades later people still praised his kindness. He did not realize that a local carpenter who often carried out repairs in his rectory was a fanatical Nazi.
About a month after his arrival, Müller had a conversation with a local schoolteacher, and the teacher told him the joke about the dying soldier. He had heard it in a pub, where it reportedly elicited hearty laughter from a group of farmers present. On his way home, Müller accidentally bumped into the carpenter and his father, who was feeling ill. To cheer up the old man, and possible as a bit of revenge on the carpenter, who often made cracks about religion, Müller told the joke he had just heard. The carpenter proceeded immediately to the local Nazi group leader and denounced the priest.
It was the stone that signaled an avalanche. The denunciation was passed on to the Hildesheim Gestapo, and secret police officers appeared at one of Müller’s services and began demonstratively taking notes. The priest was hauled in for interrogation. Afterward, he was released, because the Hildesheim Gestapo was waiting for instructions from the Main Reich Security Office in Berlin, which had also taken an interest in the case. The machinery of state injustice, the perfidious system that depended on informers like the young carpenter, sputtered into action. Critical clergymen had been atop the Nazis’ black list for a number of years, and in 1942 another priest who had worked in the bishopric of Hildesheim had been murdered in the “priests’ block” of the Dachau concentration camp.
Over the next three months, Müller was repeatedly summoned for Gestapo interrogation. During those interviews, he repeatedly stressed that he never intended to make a joke at the Führer’s expense, but rather had seen the story of the dying soldier as a parable of Christian willingness to sacrifice that might have cheered up the carpenter’s father. He maintained this ineffective line of defense in the months that followed, steadfastly refusing to reveal the name of the person who had told him the joke. Meanwhile, the People’s Court had gotten involved in the investigation and was insisting that the “defeatist” be arrested. By that time, the carpenter regretted what he had done and had secretly met with Müller in a neighboring village. The carpenter recanted his statement and asked that the investigations be halted, but without success. Müller was arrested in his rectory on May 11, 1944.
Witnesses reported that the police entered the house through the back door to prevent Müller from fleeing. At first, he was held in Hildesheim, but after a few days, the authorities, claim
ing that they had to treat him for acute stomach pains, transferred him to a prison in the Moabit district of Berlin. On July 15, he was presented with the charges he would face at the People’s Court. His trial for “undermining defensive strength” commenced three weeks later, only a few days after the failure of another attempt to assassinate Hitler, this one led by Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg. The defendant could hardly have faced the court at a more inauspicious time. Four courageous members of Müller’s parish who had offered to testify on his behalf were refused admittance to the court.
The trial, over which Roland Freisler himself presided, quickly turned into a travesty. Freisler repeatedly interrupted Müller’s attempt at a defense in order to berate the priest. Müller’s brother Oskar would later report that the judge even interjected religious jokes during cross-examination:
Freisler manipulated the testimony as he pleased. It needs to be recorded that during the cross-examination of witnesses Freisler could not resist making cutting, cynical jokes and hostile remarks against Christianity, the Pope, Catholic bishops, and priests. This turned directly blasphemous, when a witness related a joke that mocked the Christian belief in heaven and hell, as Freisler himself helped the witness find words of common scorn. The method of recording evidence also made it clear that the Nazis had kept the priest under observation because they feared that his work—what they meant was his restless zeal among parish youth—would have undone everything the party had built up there.
Oskar Müller’s report suggests what was really being tried was not the transgression Müller was accused of committing, but rather a belief system that contradicted National Socialism.
Even in the middle of his wildest outbursts, Freisler was able to argue coherently. As court protocols reveal, his worst ravings were still articulate. He was also a keen observer, and by the time of Müller’s trial he must at least have suspected that Germany would be defeated in World War II. By 1944, that much was obvious to every clear-thinking person. But Freisler allowed his rationality to be overridden by an almost religious faith in the Führer’s promises of final victory. Anyone who challenged this faith shook the tenuous foundations of Freisler’s entire belief system. By the penultimate year of the war, the gulf between reality and Nazi wishful thinking was such that it took significant mental exertion to bring the two together. For Freisler, representatives of Christianity were nothing less than heretics who threatened him with an alternative to National Socialism.
That was likely the reason for the judge’s hysterical pedantry and scornful tirades against “Bible huggers.” Müller’s trial was not really about a joke or the “defeatist” utterance of an individual. It was about mounting a desperate defense of an extreme and therefore vulnerable position, namely, that in the end, through sheer force of will, National Socialism would defeat every enemy. Amid the signs of general social disintegration that had commenced with the latest failed assassination attempt against Hitler, the death penalty was the only outcome Freisler could entertain for the Müller trial. Only the shedding of blood, so the judge reasoned in his verdict, could repair the sickness in the “inner front.” As was so often was the case with the trials Freisler heard, the Müller proceedings concluded with an orgy of yelling. Oskar Müller wrote:
What followed was one of Freisler’s enraged outbursts, in which he pelted the defendant with all sorts of accusations of collusion, hostility, and destructive intention toward National Socialism in the midst of a war for survival. Like a worm, Freisler raged, the defendant had bored his way into the marrow of the German people and undermined its will to self-defense. There was only one way to expiate such a sin: the death penalty.
At 1 p.m. on September 11, 1944, Müller was taken to the guillotine and beheaded—and as usual in Nazi Germany, every minute detail of the execution followed an exact protocol.
A bill for the costs of the execution was sent to Müller’s heirs, who were forbidden from holding any sort of memorial service. In the last town where Müller had served, the owner of a pub was given the “friendly warning” that she could be the next to face capital punishment, since there was too much talk about the priest in her establishment. Even in the final months before the demise of the Third Reich, the state apparatus of repression remained fully functional. But Roland Freisler would only survive Joseph Müller by a few months. Nazi Germany’s most notorious hanging judge was killed in an air raid in early February 1945.
BY 1944, Germany had irrevocably lost the war. Even the commander of German forces on the Western front, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, admitted in September of that year that the Nazi empire’s military collapse was a mere matter of time. After the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, there was no holding back the enemy, and by August 25, American and French resistance troops had liberated Paris. The Allied army was growing in number and achieved victory after victory. In particular the Third Army, under General Patton, was quickly gaining ground and pressing forward from Metz in Alsace to the Mosel River in Germany. In August, the Seventh Army under General Patch had landed on France’s Mediterranean coast and was speeding its way up the Rhone. Meanwhile, the British-Canadian First Army under Field Marshal Montgomery had liberated Brussels and Antwerp. These Allied forces with their gigantic columns of tanks were advancing sometimes as much as 50 miles a day.
The Wehrmacht could do little to slow down their enemies, and the Führer senselessly squandered what resources the German military had left. Instead of countering the advances of Allied troops with flexible maneuvers, Hitler simply ordered the Wehrmacht to dig in and hold out, just as he had ordered them to do at Stalingrad. Contrary to all military logic, key locations were held so long that German units there were surrounded and fell to attrition. Such human losses didn’t concern the Führer. He was working on a fantastical plan for a counterattack that would ultimately seal the destruction of his army.
Elsewhere in the theater of war, on the periphery of the hopelessly overstretched Nazi Empire, the situation was even graver. Despite the much heralded deployment of General Rommel, the so-called Desert Fox, to Northern Africa, that region fell to the British. Hitler probably never fully comprehended the strategic significance of this loss. The populace saw the situation more clearly and began referring to “Tunisgrad,” harking back to the Stalingrad fiasco. The worst situation, though, was on the Eastern front, where a gigantic Soviet force was massing. The Red Army’s Summer Offensive, about which hand-wringing German generals had warned Hitler, swept across Eastern Europe. By August, vanguard Russian units had worn down the German Army Group Center, seized the crucial oil fields of Romania, and reached the border of Eastern Prussia.
Within a matter of weeks, the war had reached German soil and could not be beaten back, so Goebbels’s propaganda machine tried a new method of bolstering public morale. Rumors were strategically sown throughout the press that German scientists were working on a “miracle weapon” that would turn the tide of the war at the last minute. There was a bit of truth to this. By June 1944, the V1 “flying bomb” was complete, and in September, the V2—the world’s first liquid oxygen–powered ballistic missile—followed. Both represented significant technological breakthroughs, but they were not nearly effective enough to have a noticeable impact on the balance of power in late World War II. The V1 usually missed its targets and was so slow that it could be easily intercepted by British warplanes. The V2 could fly at four times the speed of sound but consumed enormous resources and usually buried itself on impact and thus inflicted less than the intended damage. Some 10,000 forced laborers had worked themselves to death in an underground concentration camp, Dora Mittelbau, to produce the infernal weapons, which were developed by physicist Werner von Braun. One of the awful ironies of the German missile program was that more people died making V2 rockets than were ever killed by them.
It is unclear how many Germans believed the fairy tale about a “miracle weapon.” Some surely did, since with every German military defeat, people clutch
ed at any straws of hope or comfort. But there was also an indeterminate number of “defeatists” who didn’t share the faith. The popular imagination recast the V in the rockets’ names, which stood for “retaliation,” as the initial for “retardation,” “desperation,” and even “failure.” Jokes circulated about other, even newer miracle weapons, such as the V3, which could fly 4,000 kilometers and bring back prisoners; the V4, a hundred-man tank with four people inside and 96 to push it from behind; and the V5, a massive white flag that Germans were to wave when Allied troops came into sight.
A more militarily significant miracle weapon was the XXI submarine, which could remain submerged for up to 100 hours at a time. These vessels could indeed have inflicted serious damage on the Allies—if they hadn’t entered mass production far too late to affect the course of the war at sea. In the end, the story of German submarines in World War II remained one of catastrophes, human losses, and floating coffins. Once again, there was no bridging the gap between propaganda and reality. This became the fodder for a joke that was recorded in a number of variations:
Have you heard that the Navy has a new miracle weapon?—No. What is it?—A two-man submarine with 1.4 meter-thick walls of rubber.—To protect it against being detected by sonar?—No. It will cruise around the coast of England and erase the island.
Most ordinary Germans were more concerned with sheer survival than with Goebbels’s propagandistic chimeras. Germany had been under aerial bombardment since 1940. Film clips from 1942 may have depicted Berlin as happy city, but in reality the German capital was slowly but surely being transformed into a heap of rubble. People joked that Rommel would soon be appointed Berlin’s Nazi district leader since he was so effective in the desert.
Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany Page 14