Humour finds a way even in the most difficult of times. It survived under the nose of Nazi police, across prisons, ghettoes and concentration camps. And it will survive again.
A short story on ‘Whisper Jokes’ that once challenged the Third Order.
Under the Nazi Germany government from 1933 to 1945, Hitler had controlled almost every aspect of life in Germany. In 1934, the new Nazi government enacted a law that essentially termed telling and listening to any anti-Nazi joke as an act of treason.
Between ‘33 and ‘45, 5000 death sentences were executed, a chunk of them for anti-Nazi humour. Regulations like Gleichschaltung and Reichskulturkammer were formed to control the work of all artists – including comedians.
A striking example is Joseph Müller, a German Catholic priest and outspoken critic of the Nazi regime. He was arrested and tried by the People’s Court, ultimately executed in prison.
His crime? Telling a political joke.
The joke went like this:
A fatally wounded German soldier made a final request to his chaplain—’Place a picture of Hitler on one side of me and a picture of Göring on the other. That way, I can die like Jesus—between two thieves.’
Chantelle deMontmorency, in her paper, noted that a Gestapo and special-court file from 1933 classified the telling of this joke as a misdemeanor. However, when Joseph Müller repeated the same joke in 1944, he was tried by the People’s Court and sentenced to death.
Several aspects of Müller’s identity made him a threat to the regime—he was not executed merely for a political joke but for holding a belief system that stood in direct opposition to Nazi ideology.
How many of you can spot the pattern? The playbook is clear.
But Humor survived. The jokes, often expressed with a touch of hope, voiced criticism against the totalitarian regime. The jokes bloomed into a secret token of non-conformity, a form of minor resistance and a survival method.
Thus whisper jokes were born. They were the kind of jokes that was told in secret in Nazi Germany that criticized Hitler’s regime. They are often short, dry and cannot be told in public – a veiled manner to tell the truth about the political situation.
They demonstrated that not all Germans succumbed to Nazi propaganda, and, by addressing topics like Nazi concentration camps, they also reveal public awareness of the horror. We have compiled a few of the best ones.
“How was life at the concentration camp?” – “Oh! It was lavish.” “But the other man told me a different story” -“yeah! That’s why they picked him up again.”
Hitler visits a lunatic asylum.
The patients give the Hitler salute. As he passes down the line he noticed a man not saluting.
“Why aren’t you saluting like the others”, Hitler barks.
“I’m the Doctor, not a lunatic”, comes the answer.
Hitler and his chauffeur take a drive in the countryside. They drive over a pig. The chauffeur went to face the farmers but came back with a basketful of gifts.
“What did you tell the farmer?”, Hitler was shocked.
“I just said, ‘Heil Hitler, the pig is dead!’
As deMontmorency noted on humour helped bring people together in the concentration camps, “By laughing at the Nazis, Jews set up distinctions between victor and victim, them and us. Thus, they created a bond amongst each other, as those who laughed together.”
Whisper jokes most certainly didn’t make any real dent into the Nazi oppression system but the laughter could make one go during the cruelest times and in the most devilish places. The Nazis did everything they could to dehumanize the oppressed, yet they could never silence their laughter.
Today, just as then, when stand-ups are vandalized for speaking against power, comedy remains one of the last threats in a world that’s sold out.
The joke is on Hitler, and it is damn funny.
Sources:
The cover illustration in Tweet 1 is by Lucas Varela. The image in the last tweet is also inspired by his illustration.
deMontmorency, C. (2020). The Joke is on Hitler: A Study of Humour under Nazi Rule. uvic.ca/humanities/his
Seligman, Z. (1995). Trauma and drama: A lesson from the concentration camps. academia.edu. academia.edu/115340232/Trau
David Crossland, Did You Hear the One About Hitler?”. Spiegel.
