Hans was 21 when he joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party in 1931. It wasn’t ideology that drew him in—Hans barely understood politics. For him, and most of his friends, it was a way to be provocative, to stand out in their dull, working-class town.

They were tired of lectures from the older generation about responsibility and the sanctity of democracy. The Nazi rallies, with their absurd uniforms and bombastic speeches, were hilarious to Hans and his friends. They mocked the seriousness of it all, joining up as a form of rebellion. “Let’s give the old farts something to clutch their pearls over,” one friend joked, clinking his beer stein against Hans’s.

By 1933, Hitler rose to power. The jokes became real, but Hans and his friends were still too naive to see the danger. "Who takes this clown seriously?" they asked, laughing at Hitler’s ridiculous mustache and melodramatic speeches. They had no idea the role they and thousands like them had played in his ascent.

Then came the draft.

Hans’s conscription letter arrived on a cold morning in 1939. “Frontline duty,” it read. Most of his friends received the same orders. The joke was over, and the laughter faded. The Führer, now their unquestioned leader, needed soldiers to fuel his ambitions of conquest. Hans had been deemed disposable—part of the cannon fodder for Hitler’s war machine.

By 1941, Hans and his friends were stationed on the Eastern Front, the deadliest theater of the war. Starving, sleepless, and frostbitten, they faced wave after wave of Soviet soldiers. One by one, Hans's friends fell. Peter, the loudest joker of them all, was cut down by machine-gun fire. Klaus, who had laughed the hardest, was blown apart by a grenade. By the end, Hans was the last of his group, clutching a letter from his fiancée, Elsa, as he bled out in the snow.

Back in their hometown, the women left behind formed a fragile bond. Elsa, Greta, Anneliese, and the other widows met every Sunday afternoon for tea. At first, they found solace in shared grief, speaking softly about the husbands and brothers they’d lost. But as the years dragged on, their conversations turned to bitterness and regret.

For forty years, the women met. And for forty years, every meeting ended the same way—with a group cry. Their lives had been shattered, their futures stolen, all because of a "joke." The young men who had joined to provoke, to protest, to laugh at the absurdity of it all, had handed their nation over to a madman. And in doing so, they had sealed their own fates—and the fate of their country.

By the time Hans's fiancée, Elsa, passed away in 1981, her final words were recorded by her granddaughter: "Remember, the joke is never worth the punchline."