Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany (19 page)

“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 of 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:

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.

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:

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:

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:

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, claiming 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:

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: