Read Online Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany by Rudolph Herzog - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Rudolph Herzog
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achieving the Nazis’ overall homicidal plan. Initially, the regime was careful to present a lenient face, especially to the rest of the world. The screws, however, would soon be tightened and the comedian from the Catacomb left staring into the abyss.
ONE OF THE MOST portentous things the National Socialists did in the months following the Reichstag fire was to set up the first concentration camps in Germany. The paradigm of the camps was Dachau, near Munich. Set up in March 1933 under the direction of a sadistic commandant named Theodor Eiche,it rapidly achieved a tragic notoriety well beyond Bavaria. At first, Communists, union activists, and Social Democrats were the prisoners most frequently interred and occasionally tortured there. However, they were soon joined by Sinti and Roma, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and common criminals. Dachau was never an extermination camp like Auschwitz. Nonetheless, over the years thousands of people died there—shot or tortured to death.
In the early days of the Reich, the Nazis kept up the pretence that Dachau was a “re-education camp” and that people confined there could hope to be released some day. But it was an open secret that the camp was actually an extralegal space in which torture and murder were allowed. Contemporaries relate that it was common for parents to tell misbehaving children that they would be sent to Dachau if they didn’t shape up. But the public outrage that should have arisen at this example of state terror never materialized. One man, Fritz Muliar, recalls that photos of Dachau were published in Austria in 1937 showing inmates with head wounds. Germans suspected the true dimension of the crimes that were being perpetrated at Dachau, but seeing them, and believing their eyes, would have required action. The public’s reaction to Dachau was silence. Germans kept their mouths shut and looked the other way.
The name of Dachau became shorthand for the entire network of concentration camps—as illustrated by its prominence in the jokes of the time. An only half satirical prayer made the rounds: “Dear God, please make me silent and repent so that I don’t get to Dachau sent.” But many Dachau jokes seem to have been aimed more at accustoming Germans to this new phenomenon than articulating any real criticism of it. The following joke was attributed to Nazi sympathizer Weiß Ferdl:
I took an excursion to Dachau, and boy what a place it is! Barbed wire, machine guns, barbed wire, more machine guns, and then more barbed wire. But I tell you: Nonetheless, if I want to, I’ll get in
.
It is ironic that Ferdl, who used to open the bill for Hitler’s speeches when the Führer was still a relatively unknown agitator, was sometimes credited with anti-Nazi jokes. Though the cabaret performer sometimes allowed himself an equivocal remark, his political orientation was beyond doubt. His reputation as an adversary of Hitler was undeserved and was probably owed to his audience misinterpreting ambiguous passages in his songs.
But there was no need for even a Nazi loyalist to be enigmatic about Dachau, which was never mistaken for a sanatorium. The variety of popular idioms and jokes featuring Dachau as a concentration camp belies many Germans’ assertions after World War II that they didn’t know what was going on there. The following joke, for example, absolutely depends on the hearer’s assumption that a concentration camp is an extralegal realm where prisoners are terrorized and a place where one can be sent at any time for criticizing the Nazi regime:
Two men meet up on the street, and the first one says: “Nice to see you out again. How was the concentration camp?”
The second man replies, “It was great. Mornings we got breakfast in bed, with our choice of freshly ground coffee or cocoa. We did some sports, and then there was a three-course lunch with soup, meat, and dessert. After that we played some board games and took a nap. And
ONE OF THE MOST portentous things the National Socialists did in the months following the Reichstag fire was to set up the first concentration camps in Germany. The paradigm of the camps was Dachau, near Munich. Set up in March 1933 under the direction of a sadistic commandant named Theodor Eiche,it rapidly achieved a tragic notoriety well beyond Bavaria. At first, Communists, union activists, and Social Democrats were the prisoners most frequently interred and occasionally tortured there. However, they were soon joined by Sinti and Roma, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and common criminals. Dachau was never an extermination camp like Auschwitz. Nonetheless, over the years thousands of people died there—shot or tortured to death.
In the early days of the Reich, the Nazis kept up the pretence that Dachau was a “re-education camp” and that people confined there could hope to be released some day. But it was an open secret that the camp was actually an extralegal space in which torture and murder were allowed. Contemporaries relate that it was common for parents to tell misbehaving children that they would be sent to Dachau if they didn’t shape up. But the public outrage that should have arisen at this example of state terror never materialized. One man, Fritz Muliar, recalls that photos of Dachau were published in Austria in 1937 showing inmates with head wounds. Germans suspected the true dimension of the crimes that were being perpetrated at Dachau, but seeing them, and believing their eyes, would have required action. The public’s reaction to Dachau was silence. Germans kept their mouths shut and looked the other way.
The name of Dachau became shorthand for the entire network of concentration camps—as illustrated by its prominence in the jokes of the time. An only half satirical prayer made the rounds: “Dear God, please make me silent and repent so that I don’t get to Dachau sent.” But many Dachau jokes seem to have been aimed more at accustoming Germans to this new phenomenon than articulating any real criticism of it. The following joke was attributed to Nazi sympathizer Weiß Ferdl:
I took an excursion to Dachau, and boy what a place it is! Barbed wire, machine guns, barbed wire, more machine guns, and then more barbed wire. But I tell you: Nonetheless, if I want to, I’ll get in
.
It is ironic that Ferdl, who used to open the bill for Hitler’s speeches when the Führer was still a relatively unknown agitator, was sometimes credited with anti-Nazi jokes. Though the cabaret performer sometimes allowed himself an equivocal remark, his political orientation was beyond doubt. His reputation as an adversary of Hitler was undeserved and was probably owed to his audience misinterpreting ambiguous passages in his songs.
But there was no need for even a Nazi loyalist to be enigmatic about Dachau, which was never mistaken for a sanatorium. The variety of popular idioms and jokes featuring Dachau as a concentration camp belies many Germans’ assertions after World War II that they didn’t know what was going on there. The following joke, for example, absolutely depends on the hearer’s assumption that a concentration camp is an extralegal realm where prisoners are terrorized and a place where one can be sent at any time for criticizing the Nazi regime:
Two men meet up on the street, and the first one says: “Nice to see you out again. How was the concentration camp?”
The second man replies, “It was great. Mornings we got breakfast in bed, with our choice of freshly ground coffee or cocoa. We did some sports, and then there was a three-course lunch with soup, meat, and dessert. After that we played some board games and took a nap. And
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