A Day at the Barn with Hitler
Ein Tag am Stall mit dem Führer, later retitled A Day at the Barn with Hitler, was a sticker book first published for German children as a conscription mechanism in 1942 by the Volkssturm militia of the Third Reich. It was the first of six books in a propaganda series that would become known as Franz der Volksheimwerker, or as it is more commonly known by non-Arayan audiences, Bob the Builder.
History[edit | edit source]
The book was conceived in 1941 by a think-tank of Nazi propaganda officials operating under the Volkssturm. Their objective was to create a child-friendly publication that would describe to kids all the wonderful opportunities they would receive as a Volkssturm conscript working at a concentration camp- good food, spacious rooms, an ample salary, and multiple daily opportunities to take out aggression over past German inferiority in the form of gunning down imprisoned Jews at random.
After the war, as the Allies were combing through former Nazi assets, the series was discovered by employees of the British Broadcasting Corporation, who decided to reinvent Franz as a new character, Bob the Builder, and rerelease the sticker books in the United Kingdom in 1949. The publication was met with mixed reviews. Despite the fate of the Jews during the war, much of Britain remained vehemently anti-Semetic and the series was met with sizeable acclaim. Of course, the graphic nature of its contents drew criticism, as well. Supporters of having the book banned cited its Nazi origins, its inherent racism, and the images on its stickers, which, among other graphic sights, depicted people being executed in eleven different ways.
Catapulting from the first book, the Bob the Builder franchise exploded in popularity in Britain and was sold in the mid-1980s to Nickelodeon, an American television corporation. Bob's image was gradually cleaned up in reaction to changing societal attitudes and increasingly whiney liberals, and the modern series trades Jew-burning ovens for suburban homes and starving inmate laborers for friendly, talking construction vehicles. Few of today's viewers know about the series' bloody origins.
Summary[edit | edit source]
Chapter 1: Good Morning![edit | edit source]
The story begins with Franz, the chief construction supervisor at "der Stall", a common nickname for the Auschwitz concentration camp, beginning his morning as always- by pouring himself a cup of hot coffee, taking a steaming shower, changing into his Swastika-emblazoned dress uniform, and meandering out onto the balcony of the officers' residence building to pick off two or three roving prisoners at random with his trusty Machinenpistole 40 submachine gun. After a breakfast of pancakes with strawberry syrup, he strolls out to survey the new wing of the huge oven complex under construction. It's almost done! The oven chambers themselves are complete, and all that remains to be finished is the brickwork on the outside of the building. Franz notices one of the Jewish inmates is working especially hard bricking the south wall. He walks over, smiles cheerfully, and greets the man with the traditional construction corps motto- "Can we build it?" The man beams a wide grin, and responds, "Yes, we ca- !", but before he can finish the sentence, his brain explodes out of a hole where his right ear was a moment before. Franz holsters his Luger and tells the other workers to carry the corpse to the first oven. Now they can finally test it, to make sure it's working right! Franz flips the switch and listens to the roar of the fire. When the cycle is done, he opens the door cautiously. There's nothing left but ashes. It works! Hooray! Der Führer Adolf will be pleased!
Chapter 2: Hello, Führer![edit | edit source]
Later in the morning, Franz hears some good news. Adolf is coming to visit! Adolf drives up to Franz's residence hall in a shiny black car with little flags mounted on either side of the hood. Franz's cheeks get a little red when Adolf opens the backseat door of his car and bumps it into a pile of rotting corpses. He orders a crowd of nearby inmates to clean it up. However, they don't do it fast enough and are executed by firing squad, ironically creating yet another corpse mound. After ensuring sniper guards are in place on the rooftops to messily dispose of any captives who draw too near, Adolf and Franz take a walk to the new oven complex. Adolf is very pleased. He exclaims, "Franz, if this Reich of ours does not last until the end of time, may I have only one testicle!" Franz, who had watched Adolf's porno flick Scheisse mit Führer only the day before, doesn't have the heart to tell him.
Chapter 3: The Final Solution![edit | edit source]
Now that the ovens are all working, it's time to carry out Adolf's Final Solution! Franz helps Hitler take the Jews to the concentration camps with his machines, but the action doesn't start until Chapter 4...
Chapter 4: The Holocaust[edit | edit source]
Bob and Hitler kill 6 million Jews. And 5 million other losers...