In Weimar Germany, there was a popular cabaret joke about a man who repeatedly tried to assemble a baby carriage from a factory, ..but kept ending up with a machine gun. Any truth to this story?
This is paraphrased from Margaret Macmillan’s lecture series on the treaty of Versailles:
“There was a famous joke that was being told at the end of the 1920s, about the man who worked in a factory that made baby carriages. And his wife was expecting a baby. He worked on one bit of the assembly line just dealing with one small bit of the baby carriage. So he said to his wife I'll smuggle out some pieces and I'll get the people on the other bits of the assembly line to smuggle out some pieces. And so they all smuggled the pieces out and he put them together and he kept on putting them together and he kept on getting a machine gun.”
I *assume* this is hyperbole, but is there any truth to it? Were there factories in Germany that claimed to make innocuous items (ie baby carriages) but were (secretly) making weaponry?