The article has gone around the web, usually with a brief snippet, a quotation that probably bears too much weight to get its point across. Certainly the snippet is enveloped by an online smirk.
But the article from the February 4, 1939, New York Times is worth reading from beginning to end.
Then consider the context for the article and the events that followed, both in Germany and in the world. Reflect for a moment on more recent events in the United States, testing to see how clearly old news has become repackaged and made disturbingly anew.
The “Three Rulands” were hardly innocent members of a Nazi resistance, but their mocking of Hitler’s utopian monumentalism and Albert Speers’ designs was just too much for the brittle Führer to take. As Jon Stewart said, satirists are the “banana peel in the coal mine.” When the Fearless Leader slips, it’s funny.
And the Fearless Leader can’t stand the sound of laughter.
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
“Goebbels Ends Careers of Five ‘Aryan’ Actors Who Made Witticisms About the Nazi Regime,” The New York Times, February 4, 1939, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1939/02/04/issue.html.
Josef Westner, “Rulands” (article in German), Comedian Harmonists, n.d., accessed September 23, 2025, https://www.comedian-harmonists.net/?page_id=1121.
