Nazis: Those Little Scamps Just Won’t Quit

by Jim Washburn

We saw the last 15 minutes of Inglourious Basterds the other night. Man, those poor Nazis! Every time you turned around, one was getting scalped, bludgeoned, incinerated or riddled with machine gun fire, by Jews! No wonder the Nazis didn’t like them.

Between Basterds’ Eli Roth dispatching Nazis with a Louisville Slugger, Tom Cruise attempting to blast Hitler into oblivion in last year’s Valkyrie and Daniel “007” Craig hatin’ on krauts with a machine gun in Defiance earlier this year, I’m beginning to worry that audiences, particularly younger ones, might start feeling sorry for the poor, beleaguered Nazis.

It’s weird that, with World War II now 64 years behind us, the first word out of so many people’s mouths is “Nazi.” Nazi health plan. Nazi nationalization of GM. Nazi Goreng. What are kids to think when people liken their likable new president to Adolf Hitler, or are branding “Nazi” on a plan that would provide healthcare to the helpless and needy? If I were a kid, I’d think, “Gosh, Nazis must be cool!”

I thought they were hilarious when I was young. That’s when Hogan’s Heroes was on TV, where the German dunderheads were constantly outwitted by their POW camp guests. It was bungling Germans all down the line, from Charlie Chaplin, through Spike Jones’ raspberry-inflected “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” through Warner Brothers’ cartoons, through the Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos comics, where German bullets were no match for British commando Percy Pinkerton’s red bumbershoot. In so many of these depictions, the Nazis scarcely seem capable of cooking a bundt cake, much less six million of their fellow human beings.

Nazi Goreng

The soldiers fighting them in the trenches got a far different view, though even there Americans used humor to lessen the horror. (Please read Bill Mauldin’s Up Front book of his wartime cartoons and memories. I loved it when I was five and love it more now. There’s some hard stuff in there, it’s war, and one story is nearly the stuff of Tarantino’s fever-dream movie: it’s about a scout who’d slip into German camps, and slit one sleeping guy’s throat, but not the guy next to him, just to keep them all terrorized. The book is otherwise full of heart, showing the begrimed but noble side of humanity that can also prevail in war.) Even after the Allies came upon the death camps, and after all the war dead were counted, Nazis were as often the subject of mirth as they were reviled.

They were always good for a laugh. One Halloween my parents weren’t going to let me go trick or treating. I’d kicked in a bathroom cabinet door because they’d punished me for my little brother drinking cleanser, like I was supposed to police his choice of beverage. My folks relented at the last moment, leaving me no time to make a costume. So I dabbed on a black toothbrush mustache, combed my hair in that stupid crow’s wing look of Hitler’s, and hit the streets with my friend Dave, who was dressed as the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

It’s a pairing you don’t see every day, Poppin’ Fresh and Adolf Hitler on your doorstep, though I suppose it beats Mormons. The combination had frisson; we got several odd looks along with the candy. And at a couple of households, the door was answered by older couples with European accents, for whom Hitler was so clearly not a joke that they couldn’t accept what they were seeing.

“Oh look, it’s Charlie Chaplin, little Charlie Chaplin!”

Even at age 12 I had a sense of having transgressed into the faux pas patch, and did my best to replicate the Little Tramp’s waddle as I left their doors. You’d think that I would have got the message after the first house, but I was blinded by candy. Evil is banal, I will tell you soon.

Don’t go trick or treating as Hitler, kids. It’s wrong, plus this year you’ll probably be running into lots of kids in Bear Jew costumes, just looking for a reason to pound snack-size Snickers up your butt with a plastic bat. Hitler bad, Vandals good.

What’s the opposite of Nazis? I’d say Beatles. The four Liverpudlians likely heard air raid sirens in their mother’s wombs, and they emerged into the caked rubble of a city that had endured some of the heaviest German bombardments of the war. That’s what they grew up with, and they had a better idea.

I do like it, though, that before they caught on to peace and love, the nasty young Beatles goaded their Hamburg audiences with taunts about losing the war.

As a kid, it struck me that there were also Beatle-Nazi similarities, that part of the impact of both was due to their distinctive head-to-toes aesthetic. The Nazis had their Hitler salute and goose-stepped, the Beatles shook their heads and bowed at the waist. The Beatles had their mop-top hairdos, the Germans their flared helmets. The Beatles wore collarless gray suits, the krauts had tailored gray uniforms. The Beatles wore pointy boots with Cuban heels, Nazis wore jackboots. The Beatles played Rickenbacker and Hofner instruments that looked strikingly different from more common makes, while the German’s “potato masher” hand grenades, toggle-topped Luger pistols and MG-42 machine guns had a visual flair lacking in the Allies’ weapons. Those Germans really knew how to mach schau.

It seemed modestly absurd in 1985 that the protagonist in Don DeLillo’s White Noise headed a “Department of Hitler Studies” at his college. Now, I don’t know. I spend a lot of time thinking about Hitler and the Nazis. The more you study them, the more you understand the banality of evil. These guys were dunderheads of the highest order.

Some people think there is such a thing as pure evil: that it’s a force in the world, like light, or that Satan wields a poison baton beneath our feet. I think evil is just a concentrated form of fear and stupidity. We people are scared; scared of the dark; of other people; of what an uncontrolled moment might hold. So some people try to control everything, some with a corporation or army.

Have you seen the movies of Hitler at home? A total putz. He’s like the creepy guy who comes up at a wine tasting to tell you you’re supposed to hold the glass by the stem. The earliest angry Hitler rant that anyone recalls him making was not aimed at Jews or communists, but at the instructors who had twice rejected his application art school in Vienna. How could those fools not recognize his genius!

Who knows, if they’d accepted him, maybe he’d be painting dolphin murals today.

Something that should be in a movie: Hitler’s school friend, August Kubizek, was the person who’d witnessed Hitler’s art school outburst. Kubizek, then a budding conductor, wrote a book about his youth palling around with Hitler. One chapter is called “Adolf Writes an Opera,” and is about a still-fuming Hitler sitting at Kubizek’s piano—sitting being all he knew how to do on the thing—and suddenly pounding out arrhythmic, atonal bricks of notes, shouting to Kubizek, “Write it down! Write it exactly as I am playing it!”

And to this day, Hitler is getting residuals on Cats.

What if he’d been turned on by Django Reinhardt instead of Wagner? What if his service in the First World War hadn’t messed with his head? What if he’d been born later, and could have worked out his aggressions in a punk band?

 But instead of being the neighborhood asshole, he became the biggest asshole in history. Even if you believe that every soul can be redeemed, Hitler’s the guy where you hope there’s a hell so that he can writhe in its oily flames forever. I’d shoot him. You’d shoot him. Babies would sit up in their cribs to shoot him. He’s that awful.

What’s everlastingly creepy is that he got a nation to follow him. It wasn’t just Germans. There are American books from the late 1930s with cautionary titles like You Can’t Do Business with Hitler, making the case against Hitler’s thugs, because many American companies, notably Ford, thought Nazi dollars spent just fine.

It was business, just banal old business. There was a Depression on; runnin’ scared, gotta make a buck anyhow you can.

Back to the Beatle side: I’m not much of a lyrics person and often hear things wrong. When John Lennon’s “Instant Karma” came out, in the part where he sings, “Instant karma’s gonna get you, Gonna hit you right in the head ...” I thought he was singing “There’s a cop’s gonna get you, Gonna hit you right in the head,” even though it was, gee, the title he’s singing right there. I like to think I’ve brought a similar level of perception to my 25 years as a rock critic. In my defense, cops were hitting a lot of people in the head back then.

I do think I understand what “Instant Karma” means. It isn’t that you do something bad and then something bad happens to you. It’s that you do something bad, and that act changes you. You can’t steal from another person without also stealing your self-respect. You can’t dehumanize another person without dehumanizing yourself. Eventually you’re cut off from the world, cut off from yourself, and you’re walking around in the worst, most inescapable prison there is, your own calcified soul. Hitler was living in a bunker long before he physically moved into one.

There’s little satisfaction in knowing this: Whether a guy’s committing genocide or just cutting you off in traffic, he’ll probably never be conscious of what a sad, constricted life he’s leading, and he’ll go to the end of that life still screwing other people over.

I wish Dick Cheney would shut up. I’m not comparing Cheney to Hitler. In a column a few years ago, I did call Bush the NASCAR Nazi (it appears to be my most read and reviled column on the web), and he wasn’t even trying to bring healthcare to a desperate nation. There was that little matter of him telling the Big Lie to put us in an unnecessary war, which has cost over 100,000 lives and our national reputation, as has our Cheney-built torture policy. Somehow America had survived the British, the Nazis, the Japanese, the Soviets, and others without adopting torture, yet the Bush administration nods off when a handful of terrorists attack us, and suddenly 225 years of U.S. moral standing is obsolete?

That’s some bad stuff. How many lives had those 100,000-plus lives intersected with? All those lives are scarred and darkened by what we’ve done. You’d think that Cheney would be chastened by all the innocent lives his administration had killed, or by having his fingerprints all over the outing of a covert CIA employee. Instead he dares to say that Obama is damaging the agency; that he’s playing politics (as if any sane person can see a political advantage to the Obama administration opening this can of worms, not to mention that under Cheney and Karl Rove’s guidance, the Bush administration politicized every branch of government, even Justice); that Obama’s making the country more vulnerable to attack.

After the things he’s done, every time he opens his mouth in front of a microphone, the press should be asking him about those 100,000-plus lives, about his lies and deceptions in office. But they don’t. It takes too much background; there’s not enough ink; they’re scared of asking questions the other reporters aren’t. Evil is banal.

You can tell by looking at his face that instant karma’s got him, and that he’ll never know it. All you can do is be grateful you don’t live in a prison like his, and can do all you can to avoid it.

Even when people do Hitlerian things, I don’t think I’ll liken them to Hitler anymore. It took years and a lot of deaths before anyone started comparing Bush to Hitler. Now, Obama’s barely out of the chute before people are calling him a Hitler, for trying to bring us a smattering of the compassionate, sane health care that civilized nations enjoy. You know, when you start with Hitler, you really don’t leave yourself much room to up the ante.

Jim is writing a book about something, and is pleased as punch to be appearing on FourStory. Jim is me, by the way. Hi. Be sure to try my “Liquid Hitler Hot Sauce,” the only sauce made with live Jerusalem beetles.

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