Likewise, once contemporary witness recalled walking by Berlin’s heavily damaged Sportpalast auditorium and hearing a schoolmate call out: “Look, they’ve burned down Bumleg’s stage.” Bumleg was a hardly complimentary nickname people had given the clubfooted Goebbels, who had urged the German people to commit themselves to “total war” in a 1943 speech delivered in the Sportpalast.
Berlin suffered hugely as the full force of the war reached Germany. Göring’s Luftwaffe was in tatters and could offer little protection against Allied air raids, which involved as many as 1,000 warplanes. Göring had always boasted that no enemy aircraft would ever reach German air space, and this was one of the few things the German masses ever truly held against the portly air force commander. Toward the end of the war, as popular humor turned increasingly black, the following joke was recorded in Berlin:
The Nazis’ rule is over, the verdicts have been spoken, and Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels are hanging from the gallows. Göring turns to Goebbels one last time and croaks: “I told you everything would be decided in the air.”
In general, jokes about the Nazi political leadership became more and more insulting. One popular joke, variations of which were recorded in Vienna, Cologne, and Berlin, was aimed straight at the Führer:
Hitler and his chauffeur are driving through the country, when there’s a crash. They’ve run over a chicken. Hitler says to his chauffeur: “I’ll tell the farmer. I’m the Führer. He’ll understand.” Two minutes later, Hitler comes up rubbing his behind from where the farmer kicked him in the ass. The two men drive on, and a short time later there’s another crash. This time they’ve run over a pig. Hitler tells his chauffeur: “You go in this time.” The chauffeur obeys, but it’s an hour before he comes out of the farmer’s house, and when he does, he’s drunk and is carrying a basket full of sausages and other gifts. Hitler can’t believe his eyes. “What did you tell the farmer?” he asks. The chauffeur says: “Nothing special. I just said, ‘Heil Hitler, the swine is dead.’ ”
By the end of the war, Hitler had been brought down to earth. The fictional farmer was not the only one for whom he was no longer the pseudo-divine Führer, but a swine.
Still, the majority of Germans continued to believe the enemy leaders were those in London, Moscow, and Washington. Night after night, hour after hour, gigantic squadrons of Allied bombers flew waves of attacks on German cities. The Luftwaffe having proved so inadequate, local leaders in Berlin and Hamburg built huge citadels with radar-guarded anti-aircraft guns to shoot down enemy planes. That prompted one unknown wisecracker to compose new lyrics for a well-known soldier’s song:
On the roof of the world
There’s an anti-aircraft unit
They shoot the whole night through
But they never hit shit.
Popular civilian songs were also parodied. One of them was “Es geht alles vorüber, es geht alles vorbei,” a big hit for German chanson singer Lale Andersen in 1942. The original lyrics were:
Everything will pass
Everything will be through
But two people in love
Will always stay true.
Lucy Mannheim, a German Jew who had emigrated to London, sang a revised version of the song for the German-language program of the BBC:
Everything will pass
Everything will be through
First goes Adolf Hitler
Then the party goes, too.
Every year a December
Is followed by a May
First Adolf Hitler will leave
Then his henchmen will go away.
The anti-Nazi version of the song became an underground hit in Germany, and various verses were sometimes recited without melody as a poem or a joke—instances were recorded in a number of secret police and Gestapo files. Mannheim’s propaganda song was easy to remember and clever, so that it may well have been the most effective product of the BBC German-language satire division.
Nonetheless, in 1944, nothing was over just yet. Along with the sound of Allied bombers, there was the incessant drone of Goebbels’s propaganda with its fantasies of “retaliation.” The “retaliation” for the Allied destruction of German cities, however, mainly consisted of sacrificing the rest of the Wehrmacht in a senseless offensive in France. The German army was so decimated by that point that on September 25, 1944, Hitler was forced to call up a “Volkssturm,” or “popular offensive.” This consisted of Hitler Youth members and of men up to sixty who had previously been deemed unfit for military service but who now received a crash course in the use of anti-tank weaponry. This pathetic militia didn’t stand a chance against the well-trained, well-equipped soldiers of the Red Army and Western Allies. By the end of the war, 170,000 Volkssturmers were reported missing, most having presumably been killed.
This inspired a macabre take on a popular German nursery rhyme:
Fly away, June bug,
Your father’s gone to war
And they’ll draft your grandpa too
For retaliation here,
Fly away, June bug!
Other jokes were equally bleak. In one, a man who’s digging around in a cemetery with a spade is asked if he’s recruiting new members for the Volkssturm. In another, even that option is exhausted:
What has gold in its mouth, silver in its hair, and lead in its bones? A member of the Volkssturm.
Another joke proposed that the Volkssturm was in fact the long-awaited miracle weapon, since when the Russians caught sight of Germany’s new fighting force, they’d all die laughing.
No doubt the sight of pensioners (“late-vintage Hitler Youth” was another crack) and teenagers in uniform inspired pity among civilians. People remarked ironically that soon those born in 1943 would be rolled out to the front in their baby carriages, or that Hindenburg had applied for a leave of absence from Saint Peter to join the men of his year, who had also been called up. Despite the rough tone of these jokes, they were born of desperation, and not scorn for the unfortunate cannon fodder.
There were other signs as well that told the civilian populace that the end of the war was at hand. Fearing a repeat of the shortages and starvation of World War I, Hitler had always seen to it that Germans had enough eat. This was done in the interests of maintaining morale on the home front and not out of actual concern for people’s welfare, but whatever the reason, German-occupied territories were ruthlessly plundered to keep Germans well fed. People in Poland and Ukraine in particular suffered under these measures. But as the war progressed, and Germany yielded more and more of this territory and bombing campaigns cut off supply routes, the food situation worsened. German civilians may not have suffered anywhere near as much as people in occupied countries, but they were still forced to tighten their belts.
Considerable popular ire was directed at the shortages, while most Germans studiously ignored the fact that huge stretches of conquered territory had been bled dry to keep Germany suitably nourished. In Vienna, residents approached rationing with their typical caustic humor:
Hitler calls a meeting with Göring, Goebbels, and Food Minister Herbert Backe. Hitler says to Göring: “How long will our planes and fuel last?” “Five years, my Führer,” Göring answers. Hitler turns to Goebbels: “How long can your propaganda keep the people in line?” “Ten years, my Führer,” Goebbels answers. Hitler then turns to Backe: “And how long can you kept us fed?” “Twenty years, my Führer,” Backe says. Hitler is delighted. “Then we can keep waging war for a long time yet,” he says, whereupon Backe timidly raises his hand. “Um, I only meant the four of us.”
The Allies’ strategy of wearing down the German people’s will with constant aerial bombardments hadn’t worked, but the populace was now afraid their enemies would starve them to death. Another joke played both on worries about food and the sandbags with which people tried to barricade themselves during air raids.
Churchill takes a reconnaissance flight over Germany. When he returns, he sighs: “There’s no u
se trying to starve out the Germans. They’ve hoarded so many provisions, the sacks are coming out their cellar windows.”
Night after night, the civilian population, which by that point basically consisted of women, children, and invalids, would seek the safety of cellars. In the early days of the air raids, warning sirens would sound a half hour in advance of an attack, but in the final months of the Third Reich, people were lucky if they got a few minutes’ notice. Anyone who couldn’t get to a bunker or a cellar was left alone, defenseless, to face carpet-bombing.
An anonymous diary writer described the mood and the humor of those who sought refuge in the flickering emergency light of German cellars in the final days of the Third Reich:
10 p.m., in the basement. After my evening soup, I lay on my bed for a while and then proceeded on down. The entire cellar community was already there. There was little shooting today, and although it’s about the hour for it, there’s been no bombing. People are nervously cheerful and begin to tell stories. Mrs. W. exclaims: “Better a Russian on your belly than an American on your head.” The joke doesn’t fit well with the mourning she’s wearing. Frau Behn crawls through the cellar, “Let’s be honest, shall we? None of us are virgins anymore.”
At the end of the war, eastern Germany was subject to more than bombardment. The Russian “miracle weapons” were also approaching—batteries of primitive rocket launchers that the Germans called “Stalin organs” for their high-pitched yowling whine. These devices were anything but precise, but they could fire up to 54 rockets simultaneously, and their effect was devastating. Residents of Berlin came up with morbid names for city districts and locations, such as “Rubblefield,” “Rag Palace” and “Bomb Crater West,” that reflected the devastation. People greeted one another on the street with “Have a shrapnel-free night,” or “Stay well and tend my grave.”
In the final months of the war, reality was like a film being played in fast motion. Hitler’s last-gasp Western offensive failed pathetically after a month, and the last act was drawing near. The Red Army overran the coal-rich region of Silesia, prompting Armaments Minister Albert Speer to remark dryly to Hitler, “The war is lost.” On April 9, 1945, the East Prussian city of Königsberg (Kaliningrad), which Goebbels once called a fortress, capitulated after suffering near total destruction. Two weeks later, the battle for the German capital was raging. The Red Army had to take the city arduously, street by street. All the “defeatist” jokes had quite obviously done nothing to undermine public morale. In Vienna, too, German resistance was fierce—people fought for every house in the district of Simmering. But despite all these efforts, Hitler’s Germanic state was growing smaller by the day.
The populace took the last developments of the Third Reich with gallows humor:
One guy says to another, “Tell me, what are you going to do after the war?”—“I’m finally going to take a vacation and see all of Germany.”—“And what are you going to do in the afternoon?”
Another question people began asking, in the face of obvious inevitable defeat, was what would become of Hitler. That gave rise to the following joke, alluding to Hitler’s habit of saluting by raising but not extending his right hand.
Why does Hitler have such a funny way of doing the Hitler greeting? After the war, he wants to become a waiter.
On April 30, 1945, all speculation was over. The Russians had fought their way to the Imperial Chancellery, and there, hidden four stories underground, Hitler shot himself in the head.
No jokes about Hitler’s suicide have survived. No matter how much his pseudo-divine aura suffered in his final months, the populace was shocked by the Führer’s death. With an incomprehensible, almost childish faith, many Germans had continued to worship their leader until the very end. No one seems to have felt in the mood to make any funny remarks.
Heinz Rühmann in The Gas Man (1939) (Photo Credit 3)
Ludwig Schmitz and Jupp Hessels in a “Tran and Helle” skit (Photo Credit 4)
To Be or Not To Be, 1942 (Photo Credit 12)
A break on the set during the filming of The Great Dictator, 1940 (Photo Credit 14)
Fritz Muliar, around 1941 (Photo Credit 9)
The 22-year-old Muliar’s last will and testament (Photo Credit 10)
The announcement of the death sentence handed down to Marianne K. (Photo Credit 17)
Joseph Müller, circa 1943, and a list of the charges leveled against him in the People’s Court (Photo Credit 16)
The bill sent to Müller’s family for his execution (Photo Credit 16)
A mild verdict passed against someone who told an anti-Nazi joke (Photo Credit 20)
The actor Robert Dorsay and the announcement of his execution, addressed to his wife (Photo Credit 25)
(Photo Credit 26)
VI. HUMOR AND ANNIHILATION
THE DARKEST CHAPTER of the Third Reich began in the shadow of the all-consuming war in Eastern Europe. Hitler implemented a brutal policy of “freeing” the German people from groups of human beings he considered “vermin” and “parasites” and charged his best organizer, Heinrich Himmler, with carrying out this murderous task. The SS leader was given the title Imperial Commissioner for the Reinforcement of Germanity, and his assignment was to put Hitler’s idea of creating additional living space for Germans in Eastern Europe into practice in the occupied countries. The plan was to resettle Germans on the broad plains of Ukraine and Russia, where they were to farm the land like their Germanic ancestors. The populations who presently lived there were to be driven into exile or enslaved.
As for Jews who lived in Germany and Eastern Europe, the Nazis devised an infernal “final solution” to their presence. The technical details were planned at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. The full settlement endeavor—“General Plan East”—was only to commence after the war; for now, the extermination of European Jews was given top priority. With astonishing criminal energy, Himmler and his henchmen perfected their techniques for murder. Every time the Wehrmacht advanced into new territory, a wave of thugs followed, ready to carry out pogroms and mass executions.
As strange and as tasteless as it might seem today, these anti-Semitic orgies were the subject of jokes at the time. The tellers, however, were not uninvolved Germans or those carrying out the murders, but the Jews themselves, who used humor to try to keep up a brave front in the face of impending catastrophe. Even the most hopeless situations lost some of their ability to terrify, if one laughed at them. Astonishingly, a number of these jokes were preserved by people who survived the Holocaust. Austrian-French author Manés Sperber recorded the following drastic, deeply tragic example:
A Jewish village in Eastern Europe has been victimized by the most horrific sorts of attacks, pogroms, and mass shootings. One of the villagers escapes to the neighboring town and tells everyone what’s going on. He’s asked: “And what did you do?” He answers: “Last time, we recited all 150 psalms instead of the usual 75. And we fasted on the Day of Atonement.” “Good work,” came the answer. “You can’t just sit around doing nothing.”
This joke reflects widely held belief that Jews let themselves to be led like lambs to the slaughter. But the punch line isn’t really critical of them. The naiveté and innocence of the Jews in the joke throws the bloodthirsty crimes committed by the world around them into sharper contrast.
The compilations of Jewish jokes by writer Salcia Landmann contain examples based on the mass shootings carried out by the Nazis in Eastern Europe:
The Gestapo is about to shoot some Jews when the commanding officer walks up to one of them and growls, “You almost look Aryan, so I’ll give you a chance. I wear a glass eye, but it’s not easy to tell. If you can guess which eye it is, I’ll let you go.” Immediately, the Jew answered, “The left one!” “How did you know?” asks the Gestapo commander. “It looks so human.”
While “action units” were carrying out mass liquidations on the eastern front, the SS was feverishly at work on the next stage of their
annihilatory program. Hitler was not content to kill only the Jews of Eastern Europe—he wanted to eradicate Jews throughout all of Europe. Per an ordinance of September 1, 1941, all persons of “Jewish blood,” regardless of whether they were German, Dutch, or French, had wear a yellow Star of David in public. The idea was to give Jews a visible stigma that made it easier to exclude them from the rest of the community.
Those required to wear the star were essentially forced to run the gauntlet every time they stepped into the streets of their hometowns. Still, many Jews reacted to the daily insults with humor. French Jews, for instance, quickly dubbed the star the “pour le Semite” (“only for Jews”), as if it were a badge of honor. But the ordeal of discrimination was nothing compared to the fear of being deported to the east. The Nazis cynically called the deportations, which commenced in early 1941, “resettlements” and “transfers of residence.” None of those resettled, though, ever came home.
In Germany, people studiously kept silent about the disappearance of their former neighbors, although nobody believed the myth that they had been sent east to some special, paradisiacal Jewish village. Jews themselves were of course painfully aware of what was really happening, as the following joke shows:
How many types of Jews are there? Two: optimists and pessimists. All the pessimists are in exile, and the optimists are in concentration camps.
It’s possible that nobody understood exactly how horrific the Jews’ situation in Eastern Europe was and that few comprehended the hellish dimensions of the system Himmler and Eichmann were constructing. But it was obvious to all that deportation was a journey with no return. Conditions in German concentration camps had been deteriorating ever since the beginning of the war. In 1939 there were no highly organized mass exterminations, but thousands died in the camps from malnutrition and disease. Those who were detained there existed in dire and inhumane circumstances.
Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany Page 15