Dead funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany

By Brian Bethune - Monday, May 2, 2011 at 11:35 AM - 0 Comments

In the spring of 1943, a woman in a German armaments factory told a joke to a fellow worker: Adolf Hitler and Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring are on top of the Berlin radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to put a smile on the faces of Berliners. So Göring says, “Why don’t you jump?” Pretty good joke, actually, though the archives of the Nazi People’s Court don’t record whether the armaments worker, a depressed war widow identified as Marianne K., had a laugh from telling it. But the court was not amused—it had her executed by guillotine. In his subtle and eye-opening exploration of a totalitarian state’s unpredictable responses to discontent and opposition, Herzog (son of famed film director Werner) writes of others who shared Marianne’s fate, but also of quite a few who got off more lightly.

Much depended on how secure the Third Reich was feeling—in 1941, when the Wehrmacht ruled from the Atlantic to the Urals, the People’s Court sentenced 102 people to death for so-called “defeatist” utterances. The next year, as the tide of war began to turn, 1,192 were executed, and the numbers kept rising for the rest of the war. A joke treated as a misdemeanour by the Gestapo in 1933—an image of Christ should be placed between wall-mounted pictures of Hitler and Göring, since Jesus died “nailed up between two criminals”—sent a priest to the guillotine in 1944. But strong anti-Nazi humour, Herzog shows, was actually rare before the military situation deteriorated. Until then, anti-regime jabs were largely concerned with Nazis taking all the plum jobs, not with their policies. And those policies were no secret. Herzog demolishes the idea that Germans didn’t know what the Nazis were up to: there were many, many concentration camp jokes. Germans under Hitler seemed to find it natural, and kind of funny, that “troublemakers”—including Jews and dissidents—should end up behind barbed wire.

Is the Pope Catholic?

By Brian Bethune - Monday, April 18, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 36 Comments

Franco Origlia/Getty Images

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, not according to confounded Vatican watchers. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was already 78 years old when he became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. He was widely seen as the arch-conservative doctrinal enforcer, the sharp spear point wielded by his charismatic rock star predecessor—Joshua to Pope John Paul II’s Moses, in the words of one Jewish scholar. The consensus opinion was that Benedict would provide a quiet, business-as-usual continuance of John Paul’s 27-year reign and, given his age, a brief pontificate that would allow the 1.1 billion-strong Roman Catholic Church time to catch its breath and consider its future options.

No one, it seems, asked Benedict what he thought of the caretaker idea.

From inflaming the Islamic world by quoting medieval anti-Muhammad remarks to welcoming disaffected Anglicans into the Roman fold, becoming personally embroiled in the clerical sex-abuse scandal, endorsing the (sometimes) use of condoms, writing a passage in his newest book exonerating Jews from the charge of killing Christ, and a host of less headline-grabbing initiatives (including a casual acceptance of the theory of evolution), Benedict—as he celebrates his 84th birthday and sixth anniversary as Pope (April 16 and 19, respectively)—continues to be far more active, innovative, and outright newsworthy than expected.

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Food as a weapon of war

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 6 Comments

Henry Guttmann/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Death by starvation is appallingly quiet, historian Lizzie Collingham notes in her massive study, The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food. But from an enemy’s point of view, it’s just as effective as by any other means. In a book densely stuffed with statistics, two stand out starkly: 20 million starved to death overall (more than the 10 million plus civilians who died from deliberate atrocity or collateral damage, more even than the 19.5 million military casualties) and the mere 56 Chinese POWs in Japanese hands who survived until 1945. The Japanese high command was fanatical enough to believe its army could win a war on the basis of fighting spirit alone—to the extent that 60 per cent of Japan’s 1.7 million military deaths were due to starvation—and it is not hard to imagine what befell thousands of their prisoners.

The conventional view of the last world war has always been that it was a war of the big battalions, a titanic struggle determined by how many ships, bombers and fresh cannon fodder could be poured into the fight. But food, The Taste of War makes clear, was absolutely central to the Second World War: as a cause, as a chief preoccupation of the combatant nations, and as a weapon. Japan and Germany went to war over it, at least in part—the lebensraum of Nazi dreams was a vast agricultural breadbasket, an eastern European recreation of the American Midwest. Hitler also obsessed over keeping the home front as well-fed as the armed forces, because he believed Germany’s collapse in the previous war was directly tied to the hunger brought by the Allied blockade.

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Spooks with shady pasts

By Jen Cutts - Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 3:23 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Sohn/AP

Germany’s foreign intelligence service is looking into its past—and turning up Nazis. After admitting last year that “about 200 former Nazi criminals” were in its employ after the Second World War, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) is in final talks with a team of historians who will be given access to the spy service’s files to create a public record.

The BND’s president, Ernst Uhrlau, campaigned for years for greater transparency, facing opposition both from inside the organization and from Germany’s government. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s staff had blocked Uhrlau’s efforts, but relented after the finance and foreign ministries opened up about their own shadowy pasts. Exploring the intelligence files could be embarrassing for Merkel’s CDU, potentially confirming suspicions that Konrad Adenauer, the party’s founder and West Germany’s leader from 1949 to 1963, was aware of employees’ Nazi pasts.

Former chief inspector Georg Wilimzig’s squad murdered thousands during the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Former SS captain Johannes Clemens was involved in the execution of 335 civilians in Rome in 1944. Both were hired by the intelligence agency after 1945.

Why didn’t you do something?

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 4 Comments

Peter Andrews/ Reuters

Like most lawyer-authors, Bernhard Schlink, a prominent German jurist, began his writing career with what he knew: crime fiction. Not run-of-the-mill mysteries, mind you. His featured Gerhard Selb, a convinced Nazi prosecutor turned guilt-ridden, seventysomething private eye. And the pun in his protagonist’s name—selb means “self” in English—didn’t refer to Schlink himself, but the entire German nation. Then, in 1995, Schlink broke from type with The Reader, a literary novel that drew both acclaim and scathing criticism, for the same reason—his portrayal of a concentration camp guard with a human face—as well as an Oscar-winning film version in 2008. Now 65, and retired from the law, Schlink is still working through the themes that have dominated his working life—guilt, memory, reconciliation, the burden on succeeding generations—most recently in a series of lectures given at Oxford, now published in Guilt About the Past.

For Germans of his age, children of the wartime generation, writes Schlink, who was born July 6, 1944, two weeks before Claus von Stauffenberg narrowly missed killing Hitler with a suitcase bomb, the past has always been alive. Sixties rebellion was as rife in West Germany as elsewhere, but reaction to the Third Reich was at the heart of that generation’s rebellion against its parents. As more facts emerged about the war, young people confronted their parents, even those not personally guilty—like Schlink’s own father, removed by the Nazis from his post as a theology professor. Why didn’t you do something? was as potent a question about the war years as, What did you do?

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I demand an apology for your demand that I apologize

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 5:21 PM - 52 Comments

Days after stirring outrage by claiming the Bloc were courageous “résistants” against — well, actually, they’re on the payroll of the Canadian state, aren’t they? — Gilles Duceppe has attempted an intricate recovery move, never before tried in competition.

Responding to those who found the comparison’s implied corollary — if the Bloc = résistance, then Canada = Nazis — in poor taste (not to say insane), Duceppe refused to go with the old “I’m sorry if you were offended” routine on which lesser politicians often rely. Rather, he has elected to play the more daring “I’m offended that you were offended.”

More daring and, when you think about it, more authentically Blocquiste.

UPDATE: Bloc continuing to demand $2.2-billion more in federal transfers. Do you have any idea how much it costs to run a good resistance movement these days?

Germany censors its neo-Nazis

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 2:10 PM - 12 Comments

After the death of Rudolf Hess—Adolf Hitler’s deputy during the Third Reich—in 1987, skinheads began descending annually on his hometown of Wunsiedel, to march in his honour. But the residents of Wunsiedel fought to keep neo-Nazis from their streets, sparking a decades-long legal battle. German courts banned the march in 1991, but overturned the decision in 2001. In 2005, the march was again outlawed, but a prominent far-right lawyer, Jürgen Rieger, challenged the constitutionality of the ruling. Before he died in October, Rieger argued, “Stalin killed over 30 million people, but he can be glorified.”

Now, it seems the dispute has been settled once and for all: the country’s Constitutional Court has determined that when it comes to glorifying Hitler’s regime, the right to assembly does not apply. According to the court, “Given the injustice and terror the Nazi dictatorship caused, this exception is inherent to the rules limiting propaganda approving the historic Nazi dictatorship.”

Reaction to the ruling has been mixed. Those who seek to ban Germany’s far-right National Democratic Party, which many say is sympathetic to the Nazi cause, see it as delivering them closer to their goal, while others deride the ruling as unnecessary, akin to civil rights curtailments imposed on suspected terrorists. According to Russell Miller, co-editor-in-chief of the German Law Journal, the decision is consistent with “Germany’s postwar consti–tutional tradition of militant democracy,” which protects “against those who would use their liberties to undermine the democratic order.”

It remains to be seen what effect the decision will have on other neo-Nazi events. Earlier this year, some 6,000 neo-Nazis descended on Dresden for an annual march, making it one of the largest far-right assemblies Germany had seen in decades.

Sorry, Poland

By Paul Wells - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 48 Comments

And suddenly there we were in the midst of another international controversy. We have grown used to this sort of thing here at Maclean’s, whose editor once said, “If you don’t think you’ve gone too far, you haven’t gone far enough.” This can be a pretty rock ’n’ roll place to work. But just this once, the uproar wasn’t one we meant to cause. It’s worth the tale. Here’s the tale.

In our issue of Nov. 16, “Our Biggest Ever” university issue, we carried a long, thoughtful feature by Katie Engelhart about the imminent trial in Munich of John Demjanjuk, who is “charged with 27,900 counts of accessory to murder for his role as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.” Without in any way making excuses for atrocity, Katie’s four-page article managed to air some of the discomfort with trying Demjanjuk, who is 89, visibly feeble, and was not a senior figure in the Nazi mass-murder apparatus in the first place. Sensitive stuff, but Katie is a very good young reporter and that’s not where the trouble lay.

No, the trouble was in three phrases I didn’t even notice when I read the article. Engelhart wrote that Demjanjuk had been mistaken for “a notorious sadist at Poland’s Treblinka death camp.” She refers again to “Poland’s Treblinka death camp,” and notes that Demjanjuk, who was Ukrainian, “served at three Polish camps.” Well, did we ever hear from the Polish Embassy and Polish Canadians after that. The comments under the story when we published it online were furious. The letters were angrier. “This is not acceptable that you spread absurdity that slanders Poland and Polish citizens!!!!” one letter began, under the subject line PROTEST AGAINST YOUR LIE. Almost simultaneously I received a plaintive email from my friend Sylwia Domisiewicz, the press and protocol officer at the Polish Embassy in Ottawa. “I just got bombarded by emails and phone calls from the Polish-Canadian community,” she wrote. We would be getting a letter from the ambassador, she said. To whom should they send it?

I forwarded Sylwia’s email to our senior executive editor, Peeter Kopvillem, who knows a thing or two about murderous foreign occupations, being Estonian. This kicked off a correspondence between Maclean’s and the embassy, and the letter from the ambassador appears elsewhere in these pages. But I’m spending more time on this issue because it is an example of the insistent demands of horrible memory.

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