Read Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany for Free Online Page A

Socialists?” “Of course we do. They’re all Nazis now.”
    In general, jokes from the early years of the Third Reich amounted to little more than harmless teasing of the regime and could be told in public without fear of reprisals. “We weren’t anxious,” recalls Carl-Ludwig Schulz from Berlin, who lived through the period. “But there was a kind of political correctness in Germany, and it began leading to concrete acts of oppression once the war started.”
    JOKES THAT TOUCHED upon Nazi brutality were very unusual. It was much more common for Germans to laugh at Nazi habits and customs, which had their ridiculous side. One prominent example was the Nazi insistence on the “German greeting,” the raised-arm salute that Hitler had copied from theItalian fascists. Nazi propagandists never tired of encouraging Germans to demonstrate their loyalty in this way. “When you as a German enter a place,” the slogan of one such campaign ran, “your first words should be ‘Heil Hitler!’ ” Only the most ardent Nazis felt comfortable using the new greeting, but it was quickly made mandatory for all public buildings and all government situations. The people of Cologne soon came up with a joke concerning the ritual, using two figures from local folklore, Tünnes and Schäl:
    Tünnes and Schäl are walking across a cow pasture, when Tünnes steps in a mound of cowshit and almost falls down. Immediately he raises his right arm and yells, “Heil Hitler!” “Are you crazy?” asks Schäl. “What are you doing? There’s no one else around here.” “I’m following regulations,” Tünnes answers. “Whenever you step into anywhere, you’re supposed to say ‘Heil Hitler.’ ”
    But the intentions behind the greeting were no laughing matter. The salute and the words “Heil Hitler” were a litmus test by which Nazis could find out whether someone was an ally or a potential enemy. Former Social Democrats or Communists were not always enthusiastic about making the bizarre gesture, but those who failed to do so could face serious consequences. In one case, the authorities took a child away from his parents after he had repeatedly failed to give the greeting in school. That, however, was in 1940, when political tensions had already been ratcheted up and Germans had gotten used to the custom. In the early years of the Reich, most people still found it unsettling and made it a mainstay of political humor. One joke suggested that as long as Germans ran around saying “Heil Hitler,” there weren’t going tobe any more “good days”—since the greeting “Heil Hitler” replaced the more typical “good day.” One of the funnier jokes of the time was the following:
    Hitler visits a lunatic asylum, where the patients all dutifully perform the German salute. Suddenly, Hitler sees one man whose arm is not raised. “Why don’t you greet me the same way as everyone else,” he hisses. The man answers: “My Führer, I’m an orderly, not a madman!”
    Less amusing were jokes punning on the two meanings of the word
heil:
“hail” and “heal.” In one of them, a doctor at another asylum, responds to “Heil Hitler!” with “Heal him yourself!”
    Many jokes about the greeting used the same pun. The following joke (mistakenly ascribed to Munich comedian Karl Valentin) is one:
    A drunkard passes a vendor on the street who is crying, “Heilkräuter!”(“Medicinal herbs!”). “Heil Kräuter?” he ponders. “We must have a new government.”
    The many parodies of the “German greeting” may have allowed those who did not identify all that closely with Nazi ideology to avoid using the offending original phrase. It was common to say “Drei Liter” (“three liters”) when entering bars or to elide “Heil Hitler” into “Heitler.” The most original parody came from a group of young men who called themselves “Swing Kids;” they rebelled against the spirit of the time by growing their hair long and