Sticks and stones... so to speak

Speaking of odd and colorful stories that you wouldn’t be able to make up—or that might strike you as unlikely—here’s an, er, oddball anecdote from the memoirs of Heinz Linge, With Hitler to the End, which I read earlier this week.

Heinz Linge was Adolf Hitler’s valet or body servant for ten years. He interacted with Hitler daily, often being the first to see him in the morning, and accompanied him everywhere (in an introduction, historian Roger Moorhouse notes that millions of people probably recognize Linge’s face without even knowing it, so often is he standing just behind Hitler in photographs). He was also the first man into Hitler’s chambers in the Führerbunker following Hitler’s suicide, and the man who personally lit the fire to cremate Adolf and Eva Hitler’s bodies.

The point is that Linge was really, really close to Hitler, in the way of personal servants. When he was captured by the Russians during the attempted breakout from Berlin, his proximity to Hitler made him a person of intense interest. Which leads to this unexpected item:

In Russian captivity under interrogation I was often asked if I had seen Hitler’s genitals, and if so had they been normal. I had no idea why the Russians wanted to know this, but I told them what I knew. Naturally I had not seen Hitler fully naked even once. When the Russians interrogators [sic] alleged that Hitler ‘had only had one ball’ I had to laugh, and for doing so they gave me a whipping.

Anyone who was once a fourth-grade boy with an interest in history and a healthy appreciation of potty jokes will recognize here a joke that, for Linge, has gone horribly wrong. Stalin and the Soviets really had no sense of humor.

Again—you couldn’t make this stuff up.

I conclude with a hilarious Armstrong and Miller sketch on this very topic that, like so much of their stuff, brings together formal perfection with lowbrow humor in a way that hits my comedy sweetspot.