Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun by Jeffrey Sackett

population is huge. Mine is small, only 15 million. In such a war Czechoslovakia would be wiped from the face of the earth!"
    Mao nodded sympathetically and then said, "Sacrifices must be made."
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    Lenin, the father of Soviet Communism, was once asked if he enjoyed listening to music (which meant, of course, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, etc.) "Yes," he replied, "but I do so infrequently. It makes one soft. You can't listen to music and then go out and smash heads."
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    The bizarre racial theories of Nazi Germany involved a detailed system of racial categorization, with everyone in the country fitting into some place in the descending nomenclature from Aryan at the top to Jew and Gypsy on the bottom. The ancient Aryan race of blond-haired, blue-eyed giants no longer existed, the Nazis said, because of interbreeding with lower forms of humans over the millennia. (This ancient race actually never existed at all, of course.) This explains why Hitler, for example, despite his piercing, hypnotic blue eyes, had brown hair, or why Herrmann Goering, through robust and powerful, was only 5'8".
    But a problem arose with Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda and one of the most powerful men in Germany. He was short, skinny, dark haired and sallow-complexioned. After racking their brains for an appropriate description, the regime's anthropologists came up with a category to which Goebbels and Goebbels alone belonged: he was ein Nachgedunkelte Schrumpfgermane , which translates roughly as "a dwarf-like Germanic who darkened."
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    Hermann Goring, Hitler's right hand man, was a jovial, jolly, boisterous, violent, drug addicted thug who seemed unable to avoid giving his critics straight lines. For example, in March of 1933 (two months after Hitler became German chancellor) he attended a reception at the American embassy in Berlin to celebrate the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt, and his attempt at an insult was thrown right back at him. "So!" he said to the American ambassador, William Dodd, "you have a new president! Do you think your country will do well being ruled by a cripple?"
    "A physical cripple?" asked Dodd blankly. "We'll get on fine. And as for being ruled by an emotional cripple, how will you do?" Goring's face grew red as a beet, and he stormed out of the embassy.
    A few years later Goring hosted a dinner for a number of European ambassadors, but even though he was the host he arrived late. "I am terribly sorry," he said to the assembled guests. "I was detained. I was hunting."
    "Oh?" said the British ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps. "Animals?"
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    Italo Balbo was marshal of the Italian air force and was thus responsible for proposing the annual aviation budget. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that Balbo was popular and Mussolini was jealous, Il Duce chose to be displeased with the 1934 budget proposal. When he was peremptorily summoned to Rome for a meeting with his boss, Balbo knew he was in for a reprimand. He was not prepared, however, to find that Mussolini had ordered all the seats other than his own removed from his office, so that Balbo would have to stand like a frightened school boy before an angry principal to receive his rebuke. This Balbo's sense of self-respect would not tolerate. He walked into the office, quickly assessed the situation, strode forward, and promptly sat down— on Mussolini's desk!
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    Even though he ruled Italy for decades, there was never during his rule a street named for Benito Mussolini in Italy . The words Via Mussolini never appeared on a street sign anywhere, for one very simple reason: the Italian word Via means street; it also means "away with."
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    Stalin had always been paranoid, but as he grew older his paranoia grew more and more intense. It was generally known among his closest associates (those he had not yet killed) that the slightest hint of suspicion on Stalin's part might result in a death sentence.
    On one occasion in the