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

listening to swing, which the Nazis rejected as “nigger music.”They greeted one another with the words “Swing heil!” And because the German greeting was actually an Italian import, onejoke had Il Duce greeting Der Führer on a state visit with the words “Ave, Copycat.”
    Perhaps the best takeoff on the Hitler greeting, however, was that of a performer from Paderborn: he taught his trained chimpanzees to extend their arms in Nazi fashion. (According to the performer’s son, the chimpanzees enjoyed doing this.) Every time the animals saw someone in uniform, even a postman, they would give the Nazi salute. This dadaistic coup of the Paderborn comic, who was a committed Social Democrat, attracted the ire of his “racial comrades,” who reported him to the authorities. A directive was soon issued forbidding apes from using the Hitler greeting, withthe penalty for noncompliance being the “slaughter” of the animals. When it came to expressions of respect for their leader, the Nazis did not have much sense of humor.
    ON FEBRUARY 27, 1933, a catastrophic fire destroyed the Reichstag, and the Nazi leadership recognized the event as an opportunity, which they proceeded to exploit with instinctive assurance. It was the beginning of the process by which the Nazis silenced their political opponents and destroyed the democratic system. Göring was the first Nazi leader at the site of the fire; Hitler arrived shortly thereafter. While the remains of the building were still smoldering, the two decided to blame the disaster on the Communists and Social Democrats: they would claim the blaze had been set deliberately, as the first act of an incipient left-wing revolt.
    In fact, political blunders by their leadership and their declining popularity with the masses had so weakened the German Communists that they could hardly have mounted an effective nationwide resistance to the Nazi regime. But Göring and Hitlerweren’t interested in distinctions between real and imaginary threats. They alertly seized the moment and had some 4,000 Communist functionaries arrested, including the party’s leader, Ernst Thälmann. They also struck out at opposition writers, doctors, and lawyers. The morning after the fire, Hitler appeared before the aged Paul von Hindenburg and painted a most melodramatic picture of the situation. Cowed by the chancellor’s Grand Guignol scenario, the last president of the Weimar Republic signed the Enabling Act, making Hitler virtual dictator and effectively terminating the rights guaranteed by the Weimar constitution. Under this emergency rule, the government could order arrests at will and was freed from any legal checks and balances. The use of the death penalty was expanded, and the government was charged to ensure “order” and “security” wherever necessary, a provision that curtailed the rights of the individual local states that made up Germany and created a monolithic central authority.
    The speed and efficiency with which the Nazis enacted their measures after the Reichstag fire has perennially given rise to speculation about who the real arsonists had been. After World War II, there were persistent rumors that Göring himself had ordered the blaze, and even directly after the fire, many Germans entertained similar suspicions. What people believed had less to do with the few available hard facts of the case than with individuals’ own political views. The same was true of the foreign press. Some foreign journalists immediately accused the Nazis of having set the fire themselves, while others simply chronicled the controversy aboutthe identity of the true culprit.
    The Nazis eventually blamed a Dutch Communist, a confused and partially blind man named Marinus van der Lubbe. But few of those who were critical of the Nazi-led government believed that van der Lubbe, using only a handful of household fire starters,could have ignited the fire that destroyed such a massive structure. “Eight days