Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity (22 page)

Olga’s lover Jep was still flying missions over England in his Messerschmitt. He always took with him a small case she had given him, containing a photograph of her. ‘The case with the little photograph gives me such happiness, because I always take it with me,’ he wrote to her.
436
He must have had it with him when he was shot down and killed over England in December 1941.

H
itler had learned a trick from Wagner, who had tried to disguise his anti-Semitism in his operas by never actually mentioning Jews by nature or by name. Hitler never gave a direct order for the extermination of the Jews, but made his wishes known by inference or private and unrecorded dictates. However, when on 18 December 1941
Reichsführer-SS
Heinrich Himmler asked Hitler, ‘What do we do with the Jews?’ Hitler replied, ‘
Als Partisanen auszurotten
’ – ‘exterminate them as partisans’. Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer commented that this remark is probably as close as historians will ever get to a definitive order from Hitler for the genocide of millions of Jews.
437

Mass killings of some one million Jews had already occurred before the plans of the Final Solution were fully implemented in 1942, but it was only with the decision to eradicate the entire Jewish population that the extermination camps were built for the industrialised mass slaughter of Jews.

Hitler announced he would no longer watch movies. Eva Braun tried to change his mind. He told her, ‘I can’t watch films while the war is on, when the people have to make so many sacrifices and I must make grave decisions. I must also save my sensitive eyes for reading maps and reports from the front.’
438
He wanted it sound as if he was making a great sacrifice, but he continued to watch movies in his private cinema at the Berghof.

Films took on a new role for Hitler’s people, becoming more than just entertainment or even propaganda. They were a diversion from the terrible truth. ‘The films made by UFA were not propaganda,’ said Wolfgang Preiss:

If the people didn’t
think
, they wouldn’t
wonder
what was really happening on the war fronts, and they wouldn’t
know
that Germany was heading for defeat after the
Führer
had promised them total victory. It was more important for Hitler to maintain his image than for the German people to know the truth, that their
Führer
was not infallible after all.

In Britain and America, films were being made to boost morale and lift spirits; in Germany, they were simply to stop you thinking. Wolfgang Preiss was in one such film, his first –
Die Große Liebe
(
The Great Love
), starring Zarah Leander as singer Hanna Holberg whose lover Paul, a
Luftwaffe
pilot, played by Viktor Staal, must leave for the war, causing Hanna much emotional suffering and giving her the chance to sing several emotional songs. Preiss had a supporting role as Paul’s best friend Etzdorf, who goes with him to the Eastern Front. Etzdorf is killed but Paul returns home from the war and marries Hanna. The final shot of the film is of the happy couple looking to the skies as squadrons of German bombers fly past. It was a film designed to stop the German people from even wondering whether the war was won or lost. ‘Most never knew how bad things were going because of the propaganda that told us we were winning,’ Preiss recalled. ‘So you lived.’ He, like all Germans, had no idea the war was lost: ‘I only know from history. At the time we were not told anything other than Germany was winning the war. The plans were being set in 1941–42 to make the film. Germany was triumphant then. Later – no!’
440

The film’s musical score has a peculiar and secretive history. Michael Jary wrote the melodies and Bruno Balz the lyrics. Jary’s real name was Maximilian Michael Jarczyk, but because his name
made people think he was a Polish Jew, he went into hiding for a while and emerged as Michael Jary to become a respected composer of popular music.

Bruno Balz was arrested several times because of his
homosexuality
. After one spell in prison, he was released in 1936 on the condition that his name would not be credited on any songs he wrote. He also had to marry, and took a wife called Selina. He was arrested again in 1941 – apparently he was found with a Hitler youth – and tortured by the Gestapo. He was about to be sent to a concentration camp, but Michael Jary and possibly Zarah Leander persuaded somebody important – probably Joseph Goebbels – that Balz could write songs to aid the war effort.
441
It is said that within a day of his release, he had written his two greatest songs, ‘Davon geht die Welt nicht unter’ (That Is Not the End of the World) and ‘Ich weiß, es, wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n’ (I Know That Someday a Miracle Will Happen). Zarah Leander sang them both in the film and on record, and they became especially popular with the German troops who were fighting a losing war, which they had been told by Hitler they could still win. Zarah never considered them to be propaganda songs, but actor Will Quadflieg thought ‘Ich weiß, es, wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n’ was ‘propaganda in its best and worst sense because everyone longed for that miracle’.
442
Many Germans listening to the song believed it told them that their
Führer
would defeat the enemy no matter what, because it was Zarah Leander who was singing it. The irony was that Balz had written the lyrics of both songs to reflect his own circumstances, and the songs became underground anthems for homosexuals in concentration camps.

As for
Die Große Liebe
itself, Goebbels allowed its director, Rolf Hansen, to take all the time he needed; it took from September 1941 to March 1942 to make, but it wasn’t as much of a ‘no expense spared’ movie as it might seem. To save money, Hitler’s own SS bodyguard were used as extras, and in the most extraordinary way: Wolfgang Preiss recalled, ‘[Leander] had a scene singing surrounded by women with wings. But they were all
men from Hitler’s SS bodyguard. They were not paid, so this was cheap to do.’
443

Saving money was not the only consideration in using the SS as extras. Zarah Leander had arrived in German films with very un-German-like curves, and had grown curvier. ‘She grew heavy, not fat,’ said Preiss. ‘They had to disguise her growing figure with carefully designed clothes and flattering camera angles – and they made it look as though she was not so big after all.’ Surrounding her with burly SS men dressed as women had the effect of making Zarah look smaller. ‘They had big arms, big shoulders, and they were tall because Zarah was tall. It was carefully filmed, and the only one the audience looked at was Zarah.’ Preiss was shocked when he first saw the SS guards dressing up:

While Goebbels kept a tight rein on the budget – their dwindling funds were being sunk into the war effort – he also insisted on reshoots for some scenes which he felt were inappropriate. ‘That is an example of how Goebbels could control a film,’ Preiss recalled.

It was during the making of the film that Wolfgang Preiss first heard mention of a ‘Hitler film’:

Several prominent filmmakers were given the privilege of trying to get a screenplay completed, and at least three directors would work on the ‘Hitler film’. Rolf Hansen was one of those; he told Preiss he wanted him in it, playing an officer in the
Wehrmacht
.
446

The Hitler film was to have been Goebbels’s cinematic masterpiece, and the conclusion of all his work – the immortalisation of Hitler. ‘He was like Selznick and
Gone with the Wind
,’ said Preiss. ‘This movie had to be bigger than
Gone with the Wind
.’ Rolf Hansen informed Preiss that he had been working on a treatment: ‘Hitler is born – Hitler saves Germany – Hitler saves the world – a three-act drama of Wagnerian dimensions. And music by Wagner. That was decided.’
447

No doubt it was to be filmed in Agfacolor and very possibly in 70mm, twice the size of conventional film, producing a much bigger and wide high-definition image which the Fox Film Corporation in Hollywood had dabbled with in a number of films including John Wayne’s first film,
The Big Trail
, in 1930. Hitler loved film technology and kept a sharp eye on everything Hollywood was producing in regard to special effects and anything new that was technological, such as
King Kong
, which was among his very favourite films and which he had a print of in his collection. He was rumoured to also have a copy of Disney’s
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
because he was captivated by the new animation technology. He also happened to love cartoons. One film he was said to dislike was
Gone with the Wind,
and the morning after treating all his staff to a screening of one of his favourite films – probably a war film or an
action adventure – he was heard to gently chide one of his secretaries, who might have been Eva Braun, ‘I understand you didn’t like the movie last night? I know what you want. You want
Gone with the Wind
.’
448

As well as Leni Riefenstahl and Rolf Hansen, Veit Harlan was also attached to the Hitler film project at some point. On 8 April 1942 Goebbels issued Harlan with a special ID card, allowing him through the back door of the Ministry of Propaganda in Wilhelmplatz in Berlin any time of day or night, making him part of an elite group of people given almost unlimited access to Goebbels. Strong themes throughout Harlan’s films were the cult of death and the cult of fate. In his first colour film,
Die Goldene Stadt
(
The Golden City
) in 1942, a mother dies on the moors, and her daughter feels she has no choice but to follow her mother by killing herself; the film had a profound effect when, in the real world, German families were losing loved ones. Through such films, they were comforted with the thought that death had a real significance.

The problem with the Hitler film was that it could not be realised until Germany had won the war, and so it simmered along. Wolfgang Preiss thought Zarah Leander was to play Eva Braun, although all of the popular actresses of the time were probably considered. Leander was Rolf Hansen’s choice, suggesting he planned to give the film its romantic touch. Exactly what shape the film would have taken remained a mystery, certainly to Preiss. ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘Who knows what was in the mind of Hitler or Goebbels?’

Hitler proved to be very fussy about how he was to be immortalised, especially in regard to who was to play him. ‘That was a big problem,’ said Preiss. ‘No one could play Hitler but Hitler. And one day Hitler would say he would play himself. The next he said it must be a great actor. Then he said nobody could play the part because it was too big, too
great
. No actor was great enough. It drove Goebbels insane, I think.’
449
This might have been enough of a nightmare for Goebbels to omit any references from his diary – though he was thought to have written everything down of
importance, he would not criticise his
Führer
, even in his diaries, which he no doubt expected to publish at some time in the future when the war was won and his place in German history secured.

With or without Goebbels’s enthusiasm or participation, the film milled around for years within the film community, surfacing again during the final stages of the war; but later, after the war, no one owned up to it. Meanwhile,
Die Große Liebe
became a sensational hit when it had a double premiere in Berlin on 12 June 1942 at the German-Palast Cinema and the UFA-Palast-
am-Zoo
Cinema. It went on to be seen by twenty million people and took eight million marks, having cost three million to produce. The Film Censor’s Office deemed it ‘politically valuable’, ‘artistically valuable’ and ‘valuable for the people’, and it became the most commercially successful film of the Third Reich era, making Zarah Leander a bigger star than ever.
450
‘The people loved her,’ Wolfgang Preiss recalled. ‘Wherever she went there were great crowds of fans, so she was mobbed.’