...and he said he'd explain it if we got him a mess of beer. So we did. He drank it all and then he told us about Adolf Hittler and all the problems he had in Germania. Here's what he said, kind of.
 
This all happened way back in the twentieth century, starting in the 1920s. There was this dude named Hittler who wanted to be Presdent of Germania because he had an idea about how to fix everything. The way everything was at the time was depressed. Actually, everybody in the whole world was depressed. The Amerians were depressed because they had recently outlawed booze. The Yukayers were depressed because they always are. The French were depressed because they had discovered that French women didn't have any boobs. The Ittalians were depressed because they had a Presdent named Mussoloni who had pretty much put the Mafia out of business, so no big funerals, no sexy car chases, you know. The Roussians were depressed because they'd recently had a Revolution so the people could own everything, and now the people owned everything and had just discovered it wasn't much. Some palaces that were too big to live in, a few ballerinas, and a whole bunch of fields. Even the Jappanese were depressed, though nobody could figure out why.

Hittler's idea about fixing everything was called National Socializing. It was a big idea, because if it worked it was going to fix everybody, maybe for good. He wanted to have a giant party, called the Snazi Party,

and invite everybody who liked the idea. The party was going to feature beer and lots of it. Hittler thought it would make everything brighter, maybe to the point where everything in the world would suddenly burst into color, and all the dull, dreary black and white would go away. He also had a hunch that the Germans were the best in the world at drinking beer and that if they kept it up long enough, everybody else would be under the table, leaving everything on the table to Germania. He called this part of his idea Biebensraum, meaning "drinking room," and he explained it to people all over Beerlin until he thought they understood him well enough to join the party spontaneously if he got the ball rolling. So he tried to overthrow the govenment in a beer hall in 1923. The government didn't happen to be in the beer hall at the moment, so the plot failed, and Hittler got sent to prison. After this, the people in the government called him "The Beer Hall Putz." They thought he was funny.

But Hittler was no quitter. In prison he wrote a book called Mein Kupf, meaning "My Cup." In the book he explained that he wasn't funny, but serious, and to prove it he was planning to kill everybody who didn't come to his party, especially the Jews, who are no good at parties because they don't drink much and just eat all the chicken salad. He was also planning to have cool uniforms for everybody who accepted his invitation, including lightning bolts and eagles and really big boots.

When he put it like that, a lot of the Germans who had laughed at him before started to change

their mind and think it might be a good idea to join the Snazi Party and be a Snazi beer drinker with Hittler. Once he got out of prison, everybody started joining in, and pretty soon Hittler was Presdent of Germania. This was in, like, 1933. Everybody loved him, including the kids, and he loved everybody back, except for the ones who acted like they didn't approve of the party. To keep them from spoiling everything, he hired a bunch of bouncers called the Gestoppo. It was their job to round up all the party poopers and put them in study hall, which was held in a place called a concentration camp. Since nobody had any fun at all in the concentration camps, more and more people joined the party,
 

which kept getting rowdier all the time. One night, it got so wild that the Germans burned down all the Jewish churches. Other times, they'd have so much beer that it seemed like a good idea to burn all the books that weren't about drinking beer, or beat up all the people who weren't drinking beer. Naturally, lots of the furniture was getting smashed, and Hittler's idea about Biebensraum began to seem like it might help.
 
By 1938 everybody was drunk enough to agree that Hittler should start getting Germania some more drinking room. So he decided that Austrica was a good place to start, which was okay with the Austricans, because when they saw the Germans show up with all their tanks full of beer, they decided they were thirsty too, and maybe the world would burst suddenly into color if they had a few tall frosty ones.
 

Then Hittler decided that Germania also needed a place called Checkoslovakia, which was when the other nations in Yurrup said they thought maybe the Snazi Party was getting out of hand. The Yukayers had a Presdent named Neville Chumperlin, who everybody thought was a good choice to calm Hittler down, so they had a little get together, and Neville told Hittler that Germania didn't need Checkoslovakia, and Hittler told Neville that he should lighten up and have a beer, which Neville did. After that, Neville saw that Germania really did need more Biebensraum, and he went back and explained that to the other nations in Yurrup, who said okay. That's when Hittler announced it was time for Poleland to join in the fun. But Poleland said no, they were too depressed to party, and maybe another time. The German tanks showed up anyhow, and Hittler forced all the Poles to have some beer, which was a strategy called Schlitzkrieg, meaning "Party Time, Ready or Not..."

By now, the Yukayers had had enough. They didn't like the idea of National Socializing,

because their idea of a good time was getting together with a few of their depressed friends and drinking-usually scotch, brandy, or gin-in morose silence inside some dark panelled room until they passed out. They didn't want the world to burst into color, either. The last time it did that, in 1914, the color was red, and the Yukayers didn't like red very much because they had used up their supply of it a long time ago. So they empeached Neville Chumperlin and replaced him with Winson Churchill, who made a big speech about how all he had to give the Yukay was "brandy, sweat and tears." That sounded great to the Yukayers and they told him to go right ahead and do it. Which is when the thing called World War II started.

The Germans had all those tanks and planes and soldiers filled with beer, and all the Yukayers had was an old Presdent filled with brandy.

Not only that, the Ittalians had decided to help Hittler instead of Churchill, because Mussoloni had showed them how great beer tastes with pizza.  The Germans were really good at the Schlitzkrieg thing, and when it was time for the party to find a new location, German soldiers jumped out of planes and landed just as the tanks were rolling in with their next beer. With a strategy like that, it wasn't long before Biebensraum took in a lot of new countries, including Franch, Norwegia, Belgiun, Flemia, Hollan, and you know, most of Yurrup.
 
Hittler tried his Schlitzkrieg on the Yukay too, but he couldn't get the tanks in there because of the English Channel, which didn't have a Chunnel under it yet,

and so the Yukay fighter pilots shot the beers right out of the hands of the Germans before they could even land. Eventually, Hittler got tired of this and decided to do a Schlitzkrieg on Roussia instead, where he figured the Roussian people might be tired of having not much and want a few beers instead. It all went pretty well for a while. The Roussians weren't allowed to party with anyone but Communists (who only drink vodka), because their Presdent, whose name was Stahlin, would kill them if they did. So the Roussians got right out of the Germans' way and let them have a big chunk of the Soveit Union to throw their elbows around and throw up in. It was starting to look like Hittler was going to have all the Biebensraum he wanted.
 

 

 
But the truth was, the party was already almost over for Germania. There were three problems. First, the Jappanese had started a party of their own in the South Paficic, which got Ameria and Presdent Rosevelt involved, and now they were planning to invade Hittler's Yurropean Biebensraum and bring in a lot of cheap, watery Amerian beer.

Second, Presdent Stahlin had run out of patience with all the German partiers in his country, and he wasn't going to let them into his favorite Roussian city, called Stahlingrad. Third, Hittler had had way too much beer himself, and he was starting to get funny in the head. He had this recurring nightmare about a little girl in a red coat, and he was convinced that if she showed up in Germania, the whole country would have to be destroyed. So he took a lot of his best soldiers out of action to look for her. In the end, this was an obsession that would cost him everything, which is why it came to be known as the Holocost.

The invasion of Yurrup was called B-Day, and it started in Franch, where General Eisinghower took about a million Amerian soldiers armed with all the beer they'd made in Ameria since the Presdent did away with Prolibition to save the capitalist system. The Amerians raised more hell than the Germans could, because every party can only last so long, and the Germans were not only hungover but, worse than that, they were finally running out of beer. Meanwhile Presdent Stahlin had flagged the Germans at Stahlingrad, and they were all running home to Germania to get an aspirin.

And then Hittler's nightmare came true. The Amerians were dropping bombs all over Germania, including Beerlin,
 

and when the great German breweries were turned into rubble, people started to see-here and there, then everywhere-a little girl in a bright red coat, picking through the ruins. Hittler was so terrified that he buried himself under- ground in a bunker and eventually either shot himself or ran away to a country he'd prepared for himself in South Ameria. Whichever it was, the war was over. Yurrup took away all of Germania's Biebensraum, including the half of Germania Stahlin wanted, and hanged all the Snazis they could find, which was about twelve. It turned out that nobody in Germania had ever really wanted to drink beer at all. They only went along because Hittler told them they had to.
 
Nowadays, the Germans still do drink beer, but it doesn't mean they're Snazis. The Snazis were different.  Like that business about the little girl in the bright red coat. That was crazy, and none of the Germans ever believed it for a second. Like the Holocost, it's nothing but Hollywood fiction. Germania is all better now. Everything's back to shades of gray, the way they always wanted it to be. And whatever anyone wants to say, it's simply not true that Germania has, or ever has had, a drinking problem.