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  • gibmiser@lemmy.worldtoNew York Times gift articles@sopuli.xyz•Goebbels Ends Careers of Five 'Aryan' Actors Who Made Witticisms About the Nazi Regime
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    Goebbels Ends Careers of Five ‘Aryan’ Actors Who Made Witticisms About the Nazi Regime

    Feb. 4, 1939

    BERLIN, Feb. 3.—Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels today ended the professional careers of five “Aryan” actors and cabaret announcers by expelling them from the Reich’s Chamber of Culture on the grounds that “in their public appearances they displayed a lack of any positive attitude toward National Socialism and therewith caused grave annoyance in public and especially to party comrades.” The five include perhaps the best known German stage comedians who survived previous Chamber of Culture purges and still dared to indulge in political witticisms—namely, Werner Finck, Peter Sachse and “The Three Rulands,” represented by Helmuth Buth, Wilhelm Meissner and Manfred Dlugi. Their expulsion means that they are henceforth forbidden to appear before the public in Germany.

    Besides motivating this action in an official communiqué, Dr. Goebbels also publishes a long article in the Voelkischer Beobachter in which he denounces them as “brazen, impertinent, arrogant and tactless" and generally imitators and successors to Jews. Simultaneously he denounces the “society rabble that followed them with thundering applause—parasitic scum, inhabiting our luxury streets, that seems to have only the task of proving with how little brains people can get along and even acquire money and prominence.”

    As regards the details of the “crimes” of which the five are accused, Dr. Goebbels mentions that they made political witticisms about the colonial problem, the Four-Year Plan and Chancellor Hitler’s monumental building program and one of them even raised the question of whether there was any humor left in Germany today.

    What amused the public most, however, and presumably roiled the National Socialist authorities most—although Dr. Goebbels does not mention it—is that they deftly, but unmistakably, caricatured some gestures, poses and physical characteristics of National Socialist leaders—sometimes with bon mots that made the rounds of the country.

    Dr. Goebbels says that the National Socialists proved during their struggle for power that they had a keen sense of humor that could kill opponents with ridicule. But as National Socialism proposes to remain in power 2,000 years it has neither the time nor the patience to apply that method to the "miserable literati.”

    If the anti-German press of Paris, London and New York, Dr. Goebbels says, or the democratic governments in Western Europe, should now again complain about the lack of freedom of opinion in Germany it does not matter, “for after all during the last year the Fuehrer reconquered 10,000,000 Germans for the Reich."