Telling a joke about Hitler could get you executed, but that was not always true. Early in the Nazi rise to power, satire aimed at Hitler circulated fairly openly, and the film traces how that tolerance narrowed year by year until mocking the regime meant hard labor in a camp or a death sentence. Survivors and witnesses who lived through the period describe specific comedians who paid that price, their recollections carrying the weight the archival record alone cannot. Two German comedians recreate the actual jokes people told at the time, restoring the punchlines to material that usually survives only as a grim footnote in history books. The film's second half follows humor onto the streets as Allied bombing turned the war against German civilians, tracking how gallows humor became a way to keep functioning under bombardment and defeat. The arc runs from jokes as semi-tolerated nuisance to jokes as capital crime to jokes as survival mechanism, using comedy as a narrow but revealing angle on life inside the Third Reich.