Nazis are not funny

“My father was a reformed Jew. In fact he was so reformed he was a Nazi."

--Woody Allen

WHY NAZIS ARE NOT FUNNY

Most of you are probably not old enough to remember this, but there was a TV show back in the 1960s called Hogan’s Heroes. It was the story of American soldiers and French resistance fighters who ran a covert resistance operation out of a prison camp behind German lines.

Sgt. Schultz, Hogan, Colonel Klink

The concentration camp officer was Colonel Klink played by Werner Klemperer, who lampooned the idea of a cultivated German officer. Bob Crane, and ex-DJ was Hogan. Every week a crew of brilliant comedians skewered the foibles of the Germans, especially Col. Klink and his lovable comic sidekick Sgt. Schultz whose big laugh line was “I know nothing! Nothing!”

The show was hilarious. Every week my brothers and I would gather around the TV for a new episode. Even my mother watched the show. It turned out she had a sentimental connection. The stereo typical French guy “LeBeau” was played by a talented French song and dance man, Robert Clary. My mother later confessed that she had dated him back in the 1950s. Robert Clary was a short guy who could do a brilliant Jerry Lewis impression.

Hogan’s heroes was hysterical not because Nazis are funny, but for how it made fun of the Nazis and their “just following orders” mentality. The Nazis are not funny.

My father worked in network TV at the time. He an executive producer on Batman and a lot of other network shows. He never watched Hogan’s Heroes with us.

My father had been in the French Navy, where he saw action at Dunkirk. His show business career started during the war when he made propaganda broadcasts for the BBC after the French Navy had been destroyed by the Germans at Dunkirk.

Evacuation of Dunkirk

Dunkirk was not funny. When the armies of the Nazis swept through the neutral country of Belgium the French Navy was stranded on the beach along with some 300,000 or so English soldiers. My father was not among those saved by the brave fishing schooners of operation Dynamo. He was captured on the beach and held prisoner in a concentration camp.

When the prisoners were allowed a game of football one day my father and his friend Renée ran down the beach chasing the ball into the weeds and barbed wire. With the help of Renée my father jumped the barbed wire. In the chaos of the football game he wasn’t missed. He managed to escape to England on a fishing boat run by the resistance. He never watched Hogan’s heroes with us. For him, the Nazis just weren’t funny.

In a recent competition for the funniest commercial in Europe, one of the judges commented that many of the German commercials were somehow flat. There is a stereotype about the Germans that they’re just not funny, or have no sense of humor. It’s an interesting point.

It may be true. I can’t think of any funny Germans off the top of my head.

The lack of sense of humor may have something to do with the fact that during the second world war all the funny people were either killed, deported, or exiled.

I understand that some people have an ax to grind about the Rothschilds and so on. But I think I could make a pretty good case that the funniest people in the world are Jewish.

The Marx Brothers, arguably the funniest people, were Jewish. Without batting an eye or looking it up on Google, I can tell you that the funniest writers of the 20th century were Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Neil Simon. All Jewish. They wrote for the Sid Caesar show, Johnny Carson, and later for movies and Broadway plays. Funny people like Jackie Mason, Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, and Billy Crystal practically invented stand-up comedy. They were all Jewish.

The Marx Brothers

During the second world war numerous composers artists, musicians, thinkers, scientists, philosophers, intellectuals, and funny people were rounded up for extermination by the Nazis. Based on Hitler’s racial theories, the Nazis had a four point program for Jews: registration, deportation, concentration, and extermination.

They rendered into so the greatest composers and poets of their day. Maybe somewhere along the line, they lost their sense of humor. What they did wasn’t really funny. Maybe if they hadn’t deported and exterminated an entire generation of funny people, the Germans would have a better sense of humor today. But German commercials today are just not funny. They have little sense of humor because they gassed the funny people and made them into bars of soap. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2982639/Bar-soap-fat-Jewish-Holocaust-victims-removed-eBay-Dutch-owner-sale.html

Bar of Soap made from human fat by Nazis

Nazis are not funny. The KKK is not a joke. Guys marching with tiki torches and swastikas screaming racist and anti-Semitic slogans are not funny. It’s time to take them seriously.

Young people today lack the tools to see this point. They have no sense of history. The purpose of television and social media is not to educate, but to make them forget, to lull people into a false sense of security. Hypnotized by the screen in front of them, they forget the past and lose consciousness about the future. The most wonderful thing is not the cell phone in your hand; the most wonderful thing is the fact that everyone is going to die but no one believes he is going to die. After all if we believed that death was imminent, we might change our behavior.

Actions have Consequences

We might consider that compassion is an important value. Violence and racism sin against compassion. The law of karma, of action and reaction, means that our sins will certainly follow us after our death. Hedonism and selfishness are not appropriate values in a civilized society. And yet, hypnotized by handheld screens, and caught up in a web of social networks, young people are easy prey to the consumer society which demands that they forget the past and disregard the future. In a place where only immediate pleasure is valued, it is easy to forget what the Nazis stand for and what the Nazis did.

Those who remember history are naturally nervous about Nazi-ism. They don’t think Nazis are funny. My father was not a Jew. But since the Nazi-led German soldiers branded his arm with the name and number of his prison registration, he didn’t think the Nazis were funny either.

Nazis are clever enough that they don’t begin by calling for the extermination of a race. They began with ridicule. They begin by ridiculing immigrants and people who have different beliefs or different skin colors. In the United States, they begin with the Terrorists. Then they go after the Muslims. After the terrorists and the Muslims it’s the Mexicans. Pretty soon they focus on inner-city crime, the drug war, welfare mothers and juvenile delinquents.

As it turns out, law enforcement for the war on crime tends to focus on people of color and racial discrimination. Organizations formed to protect the rights of minorities are singled out for attack. In the end it becomes clear that the same power structure is going after minority religions, people of color, immigrants, foreigners, and Jews. The erosion of personal liberty and rights are rationalized by the need for national security. Wasn’t that the program of the Nazis?

As a member of a minority religion--I am a Hare Krishna devotee--I am concerned about the tendency towards Nazi ideas and racial theories now sweeping the United States. I think it is time to speak out. I am reminded of Martin Niemöller, a Protestant minister during the 1940s. Niemöller had qualms about the Nazi program, but he didn't speak out until it was too late.

Niemöller is perhaps best remembered for the quotation:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

It's dangerous to speak out. Speech has consequences. We speak out at our own peril. When I was a kid in school, the Americans were busy napalming children in Vietnam. For those of you unfamiliar with Napalm, it was a solid form of gasoline developed by Dow chemical. The gasoline jelly was dropped along with incendiary devices on military targets in Vietnam as part of the bombing campaign called "Rolling Thunder." When burning gasoline jelly was dropped on your skin, there was no way to put it out. You would run around shocked by the flames that consumed you while your friends tried to put you out. But the jelly would stick to your skin and the gasoline fire resisted water.

Most people didn't speak out against the Vietnam War. Such talk undermined our patriotic effort to spread democracy and save the world. Anyway, it didn't matter if a few children were burned, they were "collateral damage." After all, they were inferior human beings who didn't know what was good for them, or even worse, they were "commies." Anyone who said otherwise was a "commie sympathizer: or worse, a "hippie".

At that time the anti-war people embraced a "commie"poet named Yevgeny Yevtushenko. He wrote a poem about the Nazi atrocities at a place called Babi Yar.

[Translator's note:

Yevgeni Yevtushenko’s poem, written to expose the inhumanity of Babi Yar, and the subsequent injustice of the government’s refusal to raise a monument to the thousands of Jews executed there by the Nazi troops, produced a tremendous effect in Russia. I learned this poem by heart when I was very young, without understanding anything except the basic ideas. Recently, I saw a copy of it, and remembered. I still cannot read it without tears.” --Benjamin Okopnik ]

BABI YAR

By Yevgeni Yevtushenko
Translated by Benjamin Okopnik, 10/96

No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.
I am afraid.
Today, I am as old
As the entire Jewish race itself.

I see myself an ancient Israelite.
I wander o’er the roads of ancient Egypt
And here, upon the cross, I perish, tortured
And even now, I bear the marks of nails.

It seems to me that Dreyfus is myself. *1*
The Philistines betrayed me – and now judge.
I’m in a cage. Surrounded and trapped,
I’m persecuted, spat on, slandered, and
The dainty dollies in their Brussels frills
Squeal, as they stab umbrellas at my face.

I see myself a boy in Belostok *2*
Blood spills, and runs upon the floors,
The chiefs of bar and pub rage unimpeded
And reek of vodka and of onion, half and half.

I’m thrown back by a boot, I have no strength left,
In vain I beg the rabble of pogrom,
To jeers of “Kill the Jews, and save our Russia!”
My mother’s being beaten by a clerk.

O, Russia of my heart, I know that you
Are international, by inner nature.
But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
Abused your purest name, in name of hatred.

I know the kindness of my native land.
How vile, that without the slightest quiver
The antisemites have proclaimed themselves
The “Union of the Russian People!”

It seems to me that I am Anna Frank,
Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April,
And I’m in love, and have no need of phrases,
But only that we gaze into each other’s eyes.
How little one can see, or even sense!
Leaves are forbidden, so is sky,
But much is still allowed – very gently
In darkened rooms each other to embrace.

-“They come!”

-“No, fear not – those are sounds
Of spring itself. She’s coming soon.
Quickly, your lips!”

-“They break the door!”

-“No, river ice is breaking…”

Wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar,
The trees look sternly, as if passing judgement.
Here, silently, all screams, and, hat in hand,
I feel my hair changing shade to gray.

And I myself, like one long soundless scream
Above the thousands of thousands interred,
I’m every old man executed here,
As I am every child murdered here.

No fiber of my body will forget this.
May “Internationale” thunder and ring *3*
When, for all time, is buried and forgotten
The last of antisemites on this earth.

There is no Jewish blood that’s blood of mine,
But, hated with a passion that’s corrosive
Am I by antisemites like a Jew.
And that is why I call myself a Russian!

Бабий Яр

Над Бабьим Яром памятников нет.

Крутой обрыв, как грубое надгробье.

Мне страшно.

Мне сегодня столько лет,

как самому еврейскому народу.

Мне кажется сейчас -

я иудей.

Вот я бреду по древнему Египту.

А вот я, на кресте распятый, гибну,

и до сих пор на мне - следы гвоздей.

Мне кажется, что Дрейфус -

это я.

Мещанство -

мой доносчик и судья.

Я за решеткой.

Я попал в кольцо.

Затравленный,

оплеванный,

оболганный.

И дамочки с брюссельскими оборками,

визжа, зонтами тычут мне в лицо.

Мне кажется -

я мальчик в Белостоке.

Кровь льется, растекаясь по полам.

Бесчинствуют вожди трактирной стойки

и пахнут водкой с луком пополам.

Я, сапогом отброшенный, бессилен.

Напрасно я погромщиков молю.

Под гогот:

'Бей жидов, спасай Россию!' -

насилует лабазник мать мою.

О, русский мой народ! -

Я знаю -

ты

По сущности интернационален.

Но часто те, чьи руки нечисты,

твоим чистейшим именем бряцали.

Я знаю доброту твоей земли.

Как подло,

что, и жилочкой не дрогнув,

антисемиты пышно нарекли

себя "Союзом русского народа"!

Мне кажется -

я - это Анна Франк,

прозрачная,

как веточка в апреле.

И я люблю.

И мне не надо фраз.

Мне надо,

чтоб друг в друга мы смотрели.

Как мало можно видеть,

обонять!

Нельзя нам листьев

и нельзя нам неба.

Но можно очень много -

это нежно

друг друга в темной комнате обнять.

Сюда идут?

Не бойся - это гулы

самой весны -

она сюда идет.

Иди ко мне.

Дай мне скорее губы.

Ломают дверь?

Нет - это ледоход...

Над Бабьим Яром шелест диких трав.

Деревья смотрят грозно,

по-судейски.

Все молча здесь кричит,

и, шапку сняв,

я чувствую,

как медленно седею.

И сам я,

как сплошной беззвучный крик,

над тысячами тысяч погребенных.

Я -

каждый здесь расстрелянный старик.

Я -

каждый здесь расстрелянный ребенок.

Ничто во мне

про это не забудет!

«Интернационал»

пусть прогремит,

когда навеки похоронен будет

последний на земле антисемит.

Еврейской крови нет в крови моей.

Но ненавистен злобой заскорузлой

я всем антисемитам,

как еврей,

и потому -

я настоящий русский!

1961
Евгений Евтушенко. Мое самое-самое. Москва, Изд-во АО "ХГС" 1995.

Nazi SS Women at Babi Yar

**************************************************

NOTES
—–1 – Alfred Dreyfus was a French officer, unfairly dismissed from service in 1894 due to trumped-up charges prompted by anti- Semitism.

2 – Belostok: the site of the first and most violent pogroms, the Russian version of KristallNacht.

3 – “Internationale”: The Soviet national anthem.