Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity (14 page)

It is curious that all the children’s names began with ‘H’. Some believe this was in tribute to Hitler but Magda’s mother, August Behrend, insisted that Magda merely continued a tradition begun by her first husband, Günther Quandt, of naming his children – he had two with his first marriage, Helmut and Herbert, and one with Magda, Harald – after his first wife,
258
but
her
name was Antoine, so Magda’s mother’s explanation cannot be true. It seems unlikely that the jealous Joseph Goebbels would have allowed his children to be named with an ‘H’ because Magda’s previous husband had decided it should be a tradition. Naming them in honour of Hitler seems the more likely explanation.

Magda and the children became popular features in magazines and newsreels, and letters arrived from all over Germany seeking her advice and often intervention in matters of housing and child custody. Goebbels had little interest in his first son, although he had become exceptionally fond of his eldest daughter, Helga.

There was another Nazi couple whom the people could celebrate. Hermann Göring married Emma Sonnemann, who had been an actress at the National Theatre in Weimar. She became Emmy (changing her name from Emma) Köstlin when she married actor Karl Köstlin in late 1916; they later divorced. She made her film debut relatively late, aged thirty-eight, in
Goethe lebt!
(
Goethe Lived!
) in 1932, and starred in
Guillaume Tell
(
William Tell
) in 1934
with Conrad Veidt. Veidt was a major star of German cinema, and one of the casualties of the anti-Semitic laws governing the arts. He was not Jewish, but his first wife Ilona was, and when he had to fill in the form to ensure he was racially pure in order to continue working in German films, he put his ethnic background down as ‘
Juden
’. He quickly fled Germany in 1933, another refugee in the mass exodus from the German film industry, with his second wife, Felicitas. They settled in England where Veidt starred in the 1934 British film
Jew Suss
. He became a British citizen in 1939 and is best known for his role of Major Strasser in
Casablanca
.

Emmy’s marriage to Göring on 10 April 1935 in Berlin Cathedral was a major state affair – a movie star marrying royalty, with the best man being the greatest of all men, Hitler, who, along with Goebbels, could only dream of marrying a major celebrity like Emmy. Göring actually did it. It clearly irritated Goebbels, who, judging the sumptuous event beforehand, noted, ‘I must keep myself simple and not allow this pomp-hysteria to disturb me.’
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Goebbels liked to think himself above all that.

Emmy promptly gave up acting, instead serving as Hitler’s hostess at many state functions and assuming the role of First Lady of the Third Reich; this created animosity between herself and Eva Braun, who felt that position belonged to her.

Being married to one of the richest and most powerful men in Europe, Emmy became a bigger celebrity than she ever was as an actress, and received constant public and media attention.
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Because her husband owned mansions, estates and castles in Austria, Germany and Poland, as well as confiscated art and a share of the wealth stolen from Jews, she enjoyed a lavish lifestyle.

Hitler’s own love life was still far from perfect or in any way stable. Eva was a green-eyed lover who became sick with jealousy even when Hitler experienced the mass hysteria that always greeted him. But she was unable to give him up, and when she learned that Hitler had become close with an English girl, 21-year old Unity Valkyrie Mitford, a member of the aristocratic Mitford family (her sister Diana was married to Oswald Mosley, leader
of the British Union of Fascists, and Unity herself was a public supporter of Fascism and had come to Germany with the express purpose of meeting Hitler), she was again driven to suicide. On 28 May 1935, she took an overdose of sleeping pills. ‘I’ve decided to take thirty-five of them. This time it must really be a certainty,’ she wrote. She was found in time, and Hitler began to pay her more attention again. ‘Through her suicide attempts she procured his company,’ said Herbert Döhring. ‘She was the driving force in their relationship.’
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Hitler arranged for the substantial royalties from widely published and popular photographs of him taken by Hoffmann’s photo studio to pay for a villa for her in Munich. This income also provided her with a Mercedes, a chauffeur and a maid.

Not all the top Nazis enjoyed the company of glamorous females – Heinrich Himmler shuffled his feet and was gauche and uneasy in female company whether famous or not
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– but having beautiful film actresses around the leaders of the Reich had become almost a lifestyle. ‘All those men – Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, they liked beautiful actresses,’ said Wolfgang Preiss. ‘They liked to be with movie stars. But only Herman Göring married an actress.’ Goebbels didn’t stop trying to bed the actresses he helped in their careers. Preiss, like many who worked in films during the Third Reich, was aware that Goebbels had his own ‘casting couch’ – ‘Goebbels, you know, much enjoyed the company of film actresses.’ Some certainly slept with Goebbels;
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Jenny Jugo was one of them.

Jugo was a very beautiful actress who had been starring in films since 1924. Her popularity was considerable, and she had made thirty films by the time Goebbels began running the film industry. She went on to make many more, possibly in part due to her affair with Goebbels, although her popularity had shown no sign of waning. Curd Jürgens thought it wasn’t ‘a classic case of the star sleeping with the studio head to get the best parts’, but that Jugo was a victim of ‘sexual coercion’.
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Another actress who may have been one of his casting couch conquests was Irene von Meyendorff, who with her parents had
fled to Germany from her home town of Tallinn in Estonia following the October Revolution. As a teenager she became a volunteer film editor at UFA where, as a beautiful nineteen-year-old, she was suddenly given a role in a film in 1935, and began a flourishing career in films and plays. Her sudden film stardom may have had something to do with Joseph Goebbels, of whom she said, ‘
Ach, der mit seinen Regenwurn!’
(‘Oh, him with his little worm!’), suggesting she had experienced his casting couch technique.

Goebbels tried hard to promote himself as the arbiter of culture while at the same time using his position to acquire the sexual favours of glamorous women. He made most of the important decisions about what could and could not be enjoyed by the German people in all areas of the arts, but not all his efforts succeeded. In 1933 he commissioned the
Thingspiel
– a form of outdoor theatre which combined music, speech and movement, performed in Greek-style amphitheatres – intended to be reminiscent of the
Thing
, a meeting place of ancient Germanic tribes where the
Volk
gathered. The
Thing
sites were built in natural settings among rocks, trees, lakes, ruins and hills, often in locations of historical or mythical significance. Some were built in cities, in areas surrounded by trees.

Goebbels was trying to set in motion a range of films and plays about Hitler, and from this quest came Richard Euringer’s
Thingspiel Deutsche Passion
(
The German Passion
), which performed to considerable success in the summer of 1933 and was hailed as the model of National Socialist drama. In this German passion play, Hitler appears as a resurrected unknown soldier with a crown of thorns on his head, coming into a world ruled by profiteers, stockholders, intellectuals and proletarians because he ‘had mercy on the people’. As he faces crucifixion, he gives them the miracle of ‘
zu Gewehr und Gewerk
’ (‘Warfare and Workfare’) and reconciles the living with the war dead in the great people’s community. He ascends into heaven saying, ‘It is finished!’
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Hundreds of
Thing
sites were planned but only around forty were completed because
Thingspiel
proved only to be a short-lived cult, faltering as early as 1935 and giving Goebbels cause to reflect on the
Nazi penchant for expressing its many ideas and beliefs as ‘cults’. Speaking in September to propaganda officials at Nuremberg, he said that he would ‘only hope that we will keep words like “cult” or “
Thing
” or “mysticism” out of our linguistic usage for at least ten years.’
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Some of the sites that survived the Second World War came to be used as venues for classical and rock concerts.

By 1935 Goebbels, having become Hitler’s favoured advisor on all major issues, had become a rather isolated figure, feared even by officials of the party.
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He and Hitler were also very close friends, attending concerts and watching films together. Hitler went on boat trips with Goebbels, and often visited the various homes of Goebbels and Magda; he particularly enjoyed her company, and that of their daughter Helga. However, although Goebbels was constantly astounded by what he considered to be Hitler’s mastery of foreign policy, he was personally mortified by the prospect of war, which he saw as an increasing probability.

Outside of enjoying friendships, art and leisure, and whatever sexual gratification he could achieve, Hitler occasionally set his mind to the work of turning Germany into the land he envisaged, and in September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws –
Nürnberger Gesetze
– were ratified at the annual Nazi rally. There was now a clear legal method of defining who was Jewish and who was not. Those with four German grandparents were ‘German or kindred blood’, while those descended from three or four Jewish grandparents were Jews. A person with one or two Jewish grandparents was a
Mischling
, a crossbreed who was deprived of German citizenship – although legally a
Mischling
was a revocable preliminary Reich citizen who had virtually no rights and was forbidden to marry Germans. Sexual relations were made illegal between Jews and Germans, Jews were prevented from participating in civic life, and Jews could not convert to Christianity.

Actor Gustav Friedrich had initiated a self-help organisation in 1933, called the
Reichsbund christlich-deutscher Staatsbürger
nichtarischer
oder nicht rein arischer Abstammung e. V.
(Reich Federation of Christian German Citizens of Non-Aryan or Not Purely Aryan
Descent). Initially it attracted only 4,000 members,
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but in October 1934 the name was shortened to the more manageable
Reichsverband der nichtarischen Christen
(Reich Association of Non-Aryan Christians) and in 1935 it elected literary historian Heinrich Spiero, a ‘state citizen’, as President; as a consequence the federation’s journal was improved and the membership rose to 80,000 by 1936 – unsurprisingly, given the precarious legal position all
Mischlinge
were in.
269
The organisation would undergo a further name change, but to no avail as it was soon outlawed by Hitler. A new organisation sprang up in 1937,
Vereinigung
1937 vorläufiger Reichsbürger nicht rein deutschblütiger Abstammung
(1937 Association of Provisional Reich Citizens of Not Purely German-blooded Descent), but Hitler quickly prohibited any ‘state citizen’ from being a member, which meant Spiero could no longer lead; without him, the organisation faded and dissolved in 1939.

Not long before the Nuremberg Laws were passed in September 1935, Olga Tschechowa somehow came to learn of the details and grew concerned for her daughter Ada, who was at risk of being a
Mischling
– her paternal grandmother, Natalya Golden, had been Jewish. This was a time when she could expect no assistance from Goebbels, so in August, a month before the law was ratified, her sister wrote to Mikhail Chekhov’s Aunt Misha to send a ‘certain document’ which Misha and Mikhail both signed, testifying that the entire Chekhov family was of Russian Orthodox descent. In the document, Mikhail’s mother became ‘Natalya Galdina’,
270
and in this way, Olga Tschechowa’s daughter Ada was saved.

At all other times Olga appears to have been at liberty to call upon Goebbels to discuss her ‘worries and joys’ and ‘professional concerns’, as he noted in his diary.
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To him she was always ‘a charming Fraulein’.
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Although she did not frequent the Reich Chancellery or the Berghof, she was at many of the major Nazi receptions, which always aroused a great deal of publicity. The Soviets perceived her to be the ‘prima donna of the Nazi film industry’.
273

N
ow that he had achieved his goal – to be undisputed leader of all Germany – Hitler’s thoughts turned to what he perceived to be his destiny as prophesied by Wagner. His euphoria at his triumph put him in the mood for Wagner, and as he listened to the prelude of
Parsifal
, he entered a state of meditation, uttering, ‘One can serve God only in the garb of the hero.’
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Inspired by Wagner, foreign politics was next on his to-do list – and then war. In violation of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler introduced conscription and began to rearm Germany. On 7 March 1936, he sent his troops into the demilitarised Rhineland.

In the summer of 1936 the Olympic Games were held in Berlin, giving Hitler the chance to play host to the whole world, which suspected him of governing by terror. He presented a pleasing portrait of a peaceful nation in busy contentment, which was so convincing that during the opening ceremony most of the nations, including the French but not the British, joined in the Hitler salute. The whole event was captured on celluloid by Leni Riefenstahl, recording Hitler’s arrival into the stadium as if he were entering a giant arena like a Roman emperor, as the masses stood and gave the Nazi salute to the sound of trumpets. Riefenstahl always filmed Hitler’s best side – his left – and, as often as possible, in an aura.

She maintained she had no interest in politics, just art – ‘I am only interested in what is beautiful,’ she said. But Hitler and Goebbels were governing through art and culture, so she was perpetuating that government even if she didn’t realise it. In filming the Olympics, she wanted to portray heroes and heroines, regardless
of their nationality or colour. It was such a mammoth task that she spent two years editing
Olympia
into a four-hour-long film.

Not all the footage could be used. Hans Ertle, a leading camera operator who became Riefenstahl’s lover for a period of time, captured a moment when a woman from the crowd managed to reach Hitler and threw her arms around him and kissed him while he struggled to break free. The SS converged on Ertle in an attempt to confiscate his camera and the offending film, but Riefenstahl stepped in and assured them that they would have the film after she had cut the scene out. The forbidden footage was not seen publicly for many years. Nor was disturbing film Ertle shot of Hitler as he sat watching the swimming, constantly swaying back and forth in his seat, rocking to and fro – an image of a deranged man. Ertle kept the footage and what the audiences of 1936 never saw was eventually revealed in the ‘Leni Riefenstahl’ episode of the documentary series
Hitler’s Women
.
275

Riefenstahl loved filming athletes in motion – strength and beauty, she called it – and after the games were over she spent weeks filming tiny scenes of athletes to insert into the Olympic footage. Her tracking camera captured a near-naked man running and throwing a javelin; she filmed him to look just like a classical Greek Olympian, a perfect example of strength and beauty, and the perfect Aryan shape. Even if unwitting, she produced a film that served its propaganda purpose. Watching the film upon its release Klaus Bölling, who was a member of the Hitler Youth, and some like-minded friends left the cinema thinking, ‘If a nation has heroes like these who won so many gold medals in Berlin in 1936, then we Germans really can’t lose the war.’
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When Riefenstahl had finally completed the first part of
Olympia
in 1938, it was premiered on Hitler’s forty-ninth birthday, her birthday gift to him; he was overwhelmed by it. Goebbels, who had never recovered from Riefenstahl’s rejection and their subsequent feud, had to swallow his pride and announce her as a winner at the German film prize ceremony that year for
Olympia
.

It was during the Berlin Olympics that Goebbels met the
woman who would cause the biggest scandal of his life and almost bring down his career. He had made the most of his fame and wealth, and in March 1936 had bought a villa at Inselstrasse 8 in Schwanenwerder, on the outskirts of Berlin. He already had a summer house at Kladow, and before long he would also have a secluded log cabin on the Bogens Lake, near Lanke, where he then built another house in the woodlands there especially for guests; his lake house would become his retreat, where he could entertain artists and people from the world of cinema, theatre and music. It just so happened that film star Lída Baarová was living close to his house in Schwanenwerder.

Lída Baarová, born in Czechoslovakia on 7 September 1914, had studied acting at Prague Conservatory and made her film debut at the age of seventeen in a Czech film,
Obrácení Ferdyše Pištory
. After becoming engaged to German actor Gustav Fröhlich, star of Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
in 1927, she starred with him in several films. She turned down an offer from Hollywood in 1935 and moved in with Fröhlich at Schwanenwerder.

In June 1936 Goebbels met Baarová for the first time
277
and was instantly attracted to her, which isn’t surprising as she was a very beautiful young woman. Ironically Goebbels preferred dark-haired, more exotic-looking women, than the blonde Aryan types he promoted in films and propaganda. He pursued Baarová for many months. She wrote in her autobiography
The Sweet Bitterness of My
Life
, ‘His voice seemed to go straight into me. I felt a light tingling in my back, as if his words were trying to stroke my body.’ They met often, and even though it was at the start a platonic relationship, she kept her liaisons with Goebbels a secret from Fröhlich. Most importantly, they were kept secret from the public; Goebbels was the patriarch of the ideal German family, and his image could not risk being sullied.

Hitler too had to maintain his public image – that of a single man dedicated only to the Third Reich in order to make him appealing to women. His female fans were never to know that he had a young mistress. His private life was as stage-managed as his speeches,
and he felt it was vital that he maintain his image in the same way Hollywood studios did for their younger stars, whose appeal was bolstered by their carefully crafted unmarried and romantically unattached images. They were forbidden to go on dates that their studios hadn’t arranged, and under no circumstances were they to marry without consent from the studios; it was thought their appeal to the fans would only last if they remained ‘available’. Hitler believed this was true of himself. His godson Egon Hanfstaengl confirmed, ‘He was at pains to conceal his relationship with Eva Braun for the simple reason that German women were not supposed to know that he had formed an attachment. They should all be able to fantasise that one of them could still win him.’
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Goebbels was behind the propaganda machine that created the illusion of the
Führer
who was married only to his people – and they to him.

The German people had no idea about Braun’s relationship with Hitler until after the war, yet in 1939 a story was published in America, in
Time
magazine, that Eva Braun and Hitler were an item; they even predicted that Hitler intended to marry her. It reported, ‘Mr Adolf Hitler has at least partly supported Miss Eva Braun for several years, and last spring she hopefully confided to intimates she expected him to marry her within a year.’

In November 1939, pictures of Hitler and Braun sunning themselves on the terrace at Berchtesgaden were published in
Life
magazine, and an article appeared, written by a ‘Richard Norburt’, who was a source ‘inside Germany which we have always found dependable’ – he was someone who didn’t want his true identity known to Hitler. It read:

Calling Eva ‘Evi’, the report noted with the flair of a Hollywood gossip columnist, ‘Hitler also favours Evi’s special Thuringian potato dumplings.’
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‘Richard Norburt’ added:

By 1936, Eva Braun was at Hitler’s household at the Berghof near Berchtesgaden whenever he was in residence there. She was never allowed to attend when business or political conversations took place, though Albert Speer recalled that Braun was allowed to be present during visits from old party associates. But when other dignitaries of the Reich, such as Cabinet ministers, appeared at the table, she was ‘banished’. Speer recorded that ‘Hitler obviously regarded her as socially acceptable only within strict limits.’ Speer sometimes kept her company ‘in her exile’; he felt sympathy for ‘her predicament [and] soon began to feel a liking for this unhappy woman, who was so deeply attached to Hitler’.
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Officially she was known as ‘Miss Braun’, one of several secretaries. She was most unhappy when beautiful actresses were invited to the Berghof, and while he showered attention on them, she was pushed into the shadows.

Cameraman Walter Frentz, who shot much of the film of Hitler we see today, once told Eva as they took a stroll, ‘You’re the most envied woman in Germany,’ to which she replied, ‘Mr Frentz, I’m just a prisoner in a golden cage.’ She could have set herself free – if she had really wanted to – but she stayed. She wrote, ‘Me, the beloved of the greatest man in Germany and on earth.’
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Speer said, ‘Eva Braun will prove a great disappointment to historians.’
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She was a keen photographer, and for her birthday in 1936 Hitler gave her a cine camera. She was already an accomplished stills
photographer, thanks to Hoffmann, and became enthusiastic about making films. Home movie cameras were new and expensive, but Hitler was keen on the technology, and he knew the potential of mass communication through film.

The public face of Hitler was all that Germany, and indeed the rest of the world, was allowed to know about him. Every private moment, even the occasional off-guard event, was carefully concealed. The
Führer
’s image had become more important to him than his duties, and he disliked appearing in Eva’s films because the many masks he wore in public were off. He might have been flattered by the attention of a young woman, but he occasionally admitted that he considered himself too old for her, and in one shot of colour film she took of him, he said to her in a kindly manner, ‘What are you filming an old man for? I should be filming you.’
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Braun’s private 16mm home footage revealed a Hitler the world didn’t know.

He had a private cinema installed in the basement of the Berghof where he would treat his intimates with the latest films, both from home and abroad. Goebbels had given him a number of Mickey Mouse cartoons as a birthday present.
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Hitler would watch movies deep into the night; one of his favourites was the 1935 Hollywood movie
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
, set at the height of the British Empire in India. ‘He liked this film’, wrote Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, ‘because it depicted a handful of Britons holding a continent in thrall. That was how a superior race must behave and the film was compulsory viewing for the SS.’
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Herbert Döhring, a member of Hitler’s SS bodyguard from 1936 to 1943, watched the film several times along with other members of his SS guard, recalling:

The film reinforced Hitler’s belief that the British rule in India was evidence of the superiority of the Aryan race. Wagner was not his sole inspiration; Hollywood also had its influence over him. His life had become increasingly separated from reality and was becoming almost like a film but in real time – had cameras always been present it would have been the first reality show – and he was billed above the title.

Hitler loved films so much that as busy as he was – or pretended to be – he insisted on seeing almost every new film. Alfred Zeisler said that Hitler had a standing order to have every new film, German and foreign, delivered to the Chancellery. The ones he seemed to enjoy the most were the American musical comedy films and crime pictures, although he frequently enjoyed biographical films, especially those of persons involved in wars.
Viva Villa
, about Pancho Villa, gave him great pleasure and he had it shown a number of times. Any film he enjoyed would have to be shown repeatedly.
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Albert Speer never forgot how Hitler kept all his guests up into the early hours of the morning as he lectured them on whatever film they had just seen.