Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity (23 page)

Incredibly, films and music were often the most important matters for discussion between Hitler and Goebbels even at a time when Germany was facing its most testing time since the outbreak of war – the RAF were attacking Lübeck and Rostock as well as launching the first ‘thousand bomber raid’ on Cologne. Perhaps buoyed by the success Rommel was enjoying in north Africa, Goebbels brought Hitler news of the great box office success of Veit Harlan’s
Der Große König
(
The Great King
), which featured Otto Gebühr in his final portrayal of Frederick the Great. Hitler was also delighted with the new magnetic tape recordings of Germany’s leading orchestras which Goebbels had given him in May, and they agreed that the Berlin Philharmonic was better than the Vienna Philharmonic.
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Goebbels was pleased to report that book sales were up, noting, ‘Never has German cultural life bloomed as now in the third year of the war.’
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All that seemed far more important than what was really going on at the fronts. Culture, they seemed to believe, would solve all problems and bring success. The future of Germany lay in its cult of celebrity.

These were men whose deluded fantasies disguised the terrible truth; the summer of 1942 turned into a season of calm and contentment for Hitler and Goebbels, both men finding peace in their shared delusions. On 23 June, Goebbels visited Hitler and was joined there by Martin Bormann and Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front. The four sat in the garden and enjoyed relaxed conversation. ‘What glorious weather!’ wrote Goebbels. ‘We sit in the garden the whole afternoon, and one has the impression of the most profound peace.’
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By the summer of 1942 Operation Reinhard, the systematic extermination of the Jews, began, while in north Africa Hitler’s forces were defeated at El Alamein, thwarting his plans to seize the Suez Canal and the Middle East. In Europe he was faced with the onslaught from American, British and Canadian forces as well as fighters from occupied territories, while in the east he had to defeat Stalin at all costs. He was dragged from his indolence back to a form of reality to personally manage the war, ignoring all advice from his generals. He was confident that Russia would quickly capitulate. But the battles raged on through the severe Russian winter, and the German forces, lacking proper winter clothing and supplies, began to retreat in the face of a Soviet counter-attack. The war took its toll on thousands of civilians inside Moscow, including Olga Tschechowa’s uncle Vladimir Knipper, who had stubbornly remained there, dying on 12 November 1942.

After a massive defeat at Stalingrad during the winter of 1942–1943, 90,000 German troops, including the field marshal commanding them, surrendered; Hitler had ordered them all to fight to the death and, incensed at their betrayal, blamed them for the change in his fortunes. Increasingly, he was losing not just the war but also his grip on reality.

The Propaganda Ministry encouraged a number of celebrities to attend Goebbels’s important speech on 18 February 1943 at the Berlin
Sportpalast
, to hear him respond to the defeat at Stalingrad in front of a carefully selected audience. At home, millions listened on radio as Goebbels spoke about the ‘misfortune of the past weeks’
and an ‘unvarnished picture of the situation’. Why Goebbels was speaking and not Hitler was due partly to Hitler having taken to hiding at the Berghof.

Goebbels warned that if the
Wehrmacht
was no longer able to hold back the Soviets, the German Reich and then the whole of Europe would fall to Bolshevism. He blamed Germany’s failure on the Jews, warning, ‘We cannot overcome the Bolshevist danger unless we use equivalent, though not identical, methods – total war.’ He screamed at his audience: ‘Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can imagine today?’
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His audience cried out for total war, and the
Deutsche Wochenschau
newsreel cameras captured the reactions of the various celebrities in the audience. Olga Tschechowa buried her head in her hands in disbelief; that clip was never shown in the final edition of that newsreel.
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Goebbels’s concept of ‘total war’ was nothing more than a phrase he had used often since 1939. He had read a book called
Total War
– he had not even thought up the term himself. Books, music, films, the cult of celebrity, the adulation of stars of screen and opera, of the concert hall and the stage, and the fantasy and delusions that sprang from it all – these were the inspiration behind the men who brought the greatest devastation and murder on a near-global scale in the middle of the twentieth century. These were amateur artists who became amateur generals. The German people had no desire for ‘total war’, which would have meant the mobilisation of every man, woman and child, and all areas of industry being devoted to war, meaning the closing of all cinemas, theatres, museums and other places of cultural interest.

Goebbels’s ‘total war’ speech has been recorded as some kind of historic moment in the Second World War, but it turned out to be little more than a footnote in history because his vision was never
fully realised. Civil building projects and cultural plans continued, many individuals maintained their lifestyles, and Hitler himself ignored the concept by insisting that cinemas, theatres, opera houses and museums stay open. Goebbels kept the film studios open and working; he believed that every film somehow served the war effort, and he still hoped to make the Hitler film. His attentions were diverted away from the realities of war, and he played the role he had created for himself as Germany’s most prominent film producer, who was as much of an amateur in that field as he was at managing a world war.

On 27 February 1943 the deportation began of all the Jews still working in German industry – over 10,000 – to the death camps in Poland.

It might seem as though there was a huge gulf between the Final Solution, the Hitler film and Goebbels’s ‘total war’ concept, but they were all aspects of one basic concept: the glorification of Hitler. The Final Solution
had
to be implemented to fulfil the prophecies of both Hitler and Wagner; otherwise they would both prove to be false prophets. The Hitler film
had
to be made, to become a lasting legacy of the life and career of Germany’s star-Messiah – Hitler and Goebbels believed that cinema was the modern medium that would survive the centuries. ‘Total war’
had
to be waged in order to ensure the previous two concepts were fulfilled, because to do otherwise would result in defeat and total failure. Without world conquest, Hitler’s fame would become only infamy. But Germany had not the heart to wage true total war.

Even though funds for making films were dwindling, Goebbels kept pouring Reichsmarks into productions he took a particularly personal interest in. He even tolerated star tantrums and bad behaviour – the cult of celebrity remained one of his priorities. One of the most popular stars was Hans Albers, still depressed over losing his Jewish girlfriend Hansi. He drowned his sorrows in the bottle, which brought out the worst, and sometimes the foolhardy, in him. When, in the spring of 1943, Hitler invited Bulgaria’s King Boris III to Munich, Albers refused to vacate the state visitors’ hotel suite for
the king, saying, ‘I myself am king.’ He was taken for interrogation, which he treated as if it were a performance, asking his interrogators, ‘What do I owe the honour?’ After hearing a succession of accusations, he said, ‘And that was all you have to tell me?’ He then took his hat and left. No further action was taken against him.
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Feeling virtually invincible, he declared, ‘I am God!’ Goebbels considered him so invaluable that he personally approved Albers being cast in the title role of
Münchhausen
, one of Goebbels’s most ambitious film projects, which he had begun before the
Sportpalast
speech. He had insisted on a first-class screenplay and producer Eberhard Schmidt obliged by breaking Nazi laws and hiring blacklisted writer Erich Kästner.

Kästner was famous for his poems and children’s literature, most notably
Emil und die Detektive
(
Emil and the Detectives
) and its sequel
Emil und die Drei Zwillinge
(
Emil and the Three Twins
). A pacifist who was opposed to the Nazi regime, Kästner was interrogated by the Gestapo several times. The Writers’ Guild excluded him, and his books were among those burned on 10 May 1933 because of the ‘culturally Bolshevist attitude in his writings’. Kästner moved to Switzerland where he wrote apolitical, entertaining novels, such as
Drei Männer im Schnee
(
Three Men in the Snow
) in 1934, and it was from Switzerland that he wrote the screenplay
Münchhausen
under the pseudonym Berthold Bürger. Goebbels never knew.

Goebbels ordered the production of
Münchhausen
to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the UFA film studio; he hoped the film would compete with Technicolor Hollywood fantasy family films like
The Wizard of Oz
. It was surprisingly devoid of Nazi politics, although Kästner did successfully slip in one political statement which was obviously lost on Goebbels: Münchhausen, while on the moon, experiences a time warp, and says, ‘
Nicht meine Uhr ist kaputt, die Zeit ist kaputt!
’ (My watch is not broken; it’s time that is broken!). Time was broken in the real world and could not be mended until Hitler was defeated or dead.

Albers did not attend the premiere of
Münchhausen
in March 1943, a month after the
Sportpalast
speech, but the German people
flocked to see it, and for a few hours forgot about the war and Goebbels’s ‘total war’ speech.

In 1943, extraordinarily heavy air raids hit German cities: Duisburg on 14 May, Dortmund on 25 May, Elberfeld on 25 June – razing 870 acres of the city centre to the ground – and Hamburg on the night of 27 July. Despite these indications of the disaster to come, Goebbels maintained his cultural interests, and in advocation of the Nazi cult of celebrity, he had been thrilled to have as a guest at his home one of the authors who he most idolised, Knut Hamsun. Goebbels had been reading the 84-year-old Norwegian writer’s works since his childhood, and was delighted to record, ‘The wisdom of his age is written in his face. His belief in the German victory is completely unshakeable.’
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But either the great author’s wisdom was faltering, or, more likely, Goebbels was lost in his world of illusion, only able to see and hear what he wanted to see and hear.

The first attack on Berlin, by 600 British bombers, came on 24 August. They returned on 1 September and 3 September; then they hit Hanover and Kassel.

Zarah Leander suddenly disappeared from Germany. She had become increasingly pressured by Hitler and Goebbels to become a German citizen, but had always refused. When her villa in the fashionable Berlin suburb of Grunewald was hit in a British air raid, she decided it was time to leave Germany. She departed in secrecy, returning to Sweden to live in a mansion at Lönö, not far from Stockholm, which she had bought with her money earned in Nazi Germany.

Goebbels was furious when he learned she had abandoned the country that had made her a star, and called her a traitor; while in Sweden she was condemned as a Nazi collaborator, and only the Communist Party, to the puzzlement of most Swedes, described her as a ‘true democrat’. By the time she was back in Sweden, her work for the NKVD was over because Germany was losing the war. Also over, it seemed, was her career. Nobody wanted to work with her. She was already reaping all she had sowed in Hitler’s cult of celebrity.

W
hile the war became something from which Hitler wanted to hide, Wagner remained first and foremost on his mind, and when he heard that Winifred wanted to close down her company, he demanded it stayed open and arranged for all of her singers and musicians to be relieved of war service. He became a vital lifeline for Frau Wagner whenever she discovered that any of her performers and musicians had suddenly gone missing; she only had to call him, and he invariably managed to have them returned, although she never enquired where they had been exactly.
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One of her greatest stars was Max Lorenz, famous for his roles as Tristan, Siegfried and Walther. Lorenz was a homosexual, and to mask his sexuality, from 1932 he was married to Charlotte Appel, who was Jewish. When he was arrested because of an affair with a young man, Winifred contacted Hitler, who advised her that Lorenz would not be suitable for the Bayreuth festival. She replied that without Lorenz she might as well close the Festival because, without him, ‘Bayreuth can’t be done’. Hitler withdrew his objections and Lorenz was released.

Lorenz was foolishly open about being married to a Jewish woman, provoking the SS, which had been ordered to turn a blind eye. When he was away from his house, the SS burst in and tried to take Charlotte and her mother, but were foiled at the last moment when Charlotte was able to make a phone call to the sister of Herman Göring, and the SS was ordered to leave the two women alone. Göring stated in a letter of 21 March 1943 that Lorenz was under his personal protection and no action should be taken against him, his wife or her mother.
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Winifred Wagner helped a number of people in danger of being
interned. In the late 1930s, a letter from her to Hitler prevented Hedwig and Alfred Pringsheim, whose daughter Katia was married to Thomas Mann, from being arrested by the Gestapo.
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Winifred’s Jewish builder and his family were also protected by her, as were others who were of special interest to her, especially if they were musicians. It was often done with a simple phone call or telegram to Hitler, and many sought her help at the outbreak of war, hoping that she would have both compassion and influence. She recalled, ‘When war broke out, lots of people were put into concentration camps. I was sent vast numbers of petitions. The ones that seemed reasonably believable to me and also worthy of help, I passed them on.’
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She was selective about who was worthy of help. Although Hitler obliged, she never saw him again as he no longer went to Bayreuth, and she stayed away from Berlin, afraid of the bombs.

Sometimes the cult of celebrity could save lives; at other times, it took them. Ottilie Metzger-Lattermann was a celebrated German Jewish contralto and a performer of Wagner who sang at the Bayreuth Festival, was first contralto with the Hamburg Opera, and performed as a
Lieder
recitalist, often accompanied by Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner. In 1933 she gave concerts under Bruno Walter in Berlin and Otto Klemperer in Dresden. But after Hitler came to power, she performed only for Jewish audiences. In 1939 she and her daughter fled to Brussels, but were later rounded up by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz in 1943. The exact dates of their deaths are unknown, but Ottilie Metzger-Lattermann was probably around sixty-five when she was murdered by the Nazis.

Richard Breitenfeld, a German baritone, sang the role of the count in Act II of Franz Schreker’s
Der ferne Klang
(
The Distant Sound
) at its world premiere at the Frankfurt Opera in 1912. The contralto was Magda Spiegel. Fame didn’t save either of them; both were Jewish. Breitenfeld was murdered in 1944 in Theresienstadt, aged seventy-five; Magda Spiegel died in Auschwitz the same year, aged fifty-seven.

Henriette Gottlieb, a German Jewish soprano, made a name for herself with her performance in the Wagnerian role of Brünnhilde
in the
Théâtre des Champs-Élysées
in Paris during the performance of
Der Ring der Nibelung
in 1928, when she was still a promising young newcomer. She was famous for her numerous performances and recordings of Brünnhilde, but that did not save her from dying in the Łódź ghetto on 2 January 1942, aged fifty-eight.

Hitler would have known of Gottlieb and her work, as he would have also known of others which his delusions, which were born out of his love for opera, sent to their deaths. Hans Tobias Erl was a German operatic bass who, in 1918, began a fifteen-year engagement with the Frankfurt Opera as the first bass, but because he was Jewish he was dismissed from the opera in June 1933 and forced, with other Jews, to gather in the
Festhalle Frankfurt
, where he was made to sing ‘In diesen heil’gen Hallen’ (‘In These Hallowed Halls’). He was deported in 1942 to Auschwitz, and died, probably in the same year.

Grete Forst was an Austrian soprano, who made her operatic debut in Cologne in 1900 in the title role of
Lucia de Lammermoor
, repeating the role three years later at the Vienna State Opera where she was made a member of the company by Gustav Mahler. In an effort to save herself from deportation, she converted to Catholicism in 1940, but on 27 May 1942 she was sent to the Maly Trostenets extermination camp in Belorussia and was murdered on 1 June 1942.

Hitler would also have known of Erhard Eduard Wechselmann, the great German baritone who, on at least one occasion, sang for a Jewish audience with the contralto Ottilie Metzger-Lattermann who, like him, was murdered in Auschwitz.

The Nazi cult of celebrity could, in its twisted irony, save celebrities from the gas chambers, even within the confines of Auschwitz, as in the case of Alma Rosé, an Austrian Jewish violinist from a dynasty of classic musicians. Her father was the violinist Arnold Rosé, who was the leader of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for fifty years from 1881 to 1931, and of the Vienna State Opera orchestra and the legendary Rosé String Quartet. Alma’s mother was Gustav Mahler’s sister, Justine, making Alma Gustav Mahler’s niece.

In 1930 Alma married Czech violinist Váša Příhoda, one of the great violin virtuosi of the twentieth century, but they divorced
in 1935. She continued to follow a highly successful career, and in 1932 founded the women’s orchestra
Die Wiener Walzermädeln
(The Waltzing Girls of Vienna), which undertook concert tours throughout Europe. When Austria was annexed to Germany, she and her father escaped to London, but Alma chose to perform in Holland and found herself trapped there when the Germans occupied the Netherlands. A fictitious marriage to a Dutch engineer named August van Leeuwen Boomkamp did not save her; nor did her conversion to Christianity, and she went on the run, managing to reach France late in 1942. Upon trying to escape to Switzerland, she was captured by the Gestapo.

After several months in the internment camp of Drancy she was deported in July 1943 to Auschwitz, where she was quarantined and became very ill. She was recognised and allowed leadership of the
Mädchenorchester von Auschwitz
(Girl Orchestra of Auschwitz), a pet project of
SS-Oberaufseherin
Maria Mandel. The ensemble largely consisted of amateur musicians, and its primary function was to play at the main gate each morning and evening as the prisoners left for and returned from their work assignments. The orchestra also gave weekend concerts for the prisoners and the SS, as well as entertaining at SS functions.

As the conductor of the orchestra, Alma Rosé had the status of a
Kapo
in the camp, with privileges and comforts including additional food and a private room. The other musicians lived less luxuriously, but were adequately clothed and spared hard manual labour. Thanks to her musical prowess, Alma was held in high esteem by Maria Mandel and Josef Mengele.

The orchestra included two professional musicians, cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and vocalist and pianist Fania Fénelon, each of whom wrote memoirs of their time in Auschwitz. Fénelon’s account,
Playing for Time
, which became a play by Arthur Miller and was later made into a film, depicted Rosé as a cold-hearted autocrat who kowtowed to the Germans for her own self-interest. She also claimed that Alma was abusive to the musicians. But other members of the orchestra, including Anita Lasker-Wallfisch,
disputed Fénelon’s account, maintaining that Rosé’s interest was in protecting the well-being of the women in her orchestra, which not only required that Rosé establish and maintain a high musical standard by any means possible, but also that she placated her Nazi captors. As evidence of her success, her supporters note that, under her residence, not one member of the orchestra was killed, and musicians who fell ill were treated at the hospital, which was unheard of for Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz.

Alma Rosé died in Auschwitz in 1944 aged thirty-eight, probably as a result of food poisoning, though typhus is another possibility. Fénelon alleged that she was deliberately poisoned, but few believe that. Arnold Rosé, grief-stricken by news of his daughter’s death, did not survive long after the war.

In 1943 the Bayreuth Festival played host to wounded soldiers from the front. They arrived in Bayreuth to be welcomed by a
Wehrmacht
band as the League of German Girls handed them bunches of flowers. For Hitler this was Wagner playing his part in the
Führer
’s war. He didn’t consider whether or not any of the soldiers actually wanted to be force-fed Wagner while they recuperated; it was not their decision – it was
his
. Frau Wagner mothered the soldiers, and she saw to it that each and every one of them was well fed and comfortable.

In the festival book, she wrote a short prayer: ‘May Wagner’s music give our soldiers fanatical faith in the victory of our guns.’ Music had become a weapon of war;
462
it was the realisation of Hitler’s dream, that his great idol Richard Wagner become the weapon by which he, as the Messiah/
Führer
, would fulfil his destiny that Wagner had himself prophesied through
Rienzi
.

Leni Riefenstahl had gone back to making feature films, and in 1940 had resumed work on a project she had abandoned when Hitler persuaded her to make
Triumph of the Will. Tiefland
(
Lowland
) was set in the Spanish Pyrenees, but because there were no people with the requisite Mediterranean looks in Germany to act as extras, she used Roma and Sinti Gypsies interned in Maxglan, Austria. She later claimed she had never been in the Maxglan camp, but one of the
gypsies, Rosa Winter, remembered that Riefenstahl came into the internment camp ‘with the police detective’ to choose her extras.
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Filming was laboriously slow, beginning in 1940 on location in Mettenwald in Austria. In the autumn of 1941 the scenes involving the gypsies were finally finished, and the Roma and Sinti were returned to the camp in Maxglan. In 1943 that camp was disbanded and most of the gypsies went to Auschwitz, others to a small part of the Lackenbach camp in Burgenland. Virtually all those who were sent to Auschwitz died there.
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In later years, Riefenstahl made a public statement that all the extras survived and that she had met them again after the war. In 2002 she attempted to sue documentary filmmaker Nina Gladitz for alleging that she did not meet the survivors and that she must have known the gypsies would be sent to a death camp. The suit was dropped.
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Filming of
Tiefland
continued into 1944; Riefenstahl was only able to carry on because Hitler made sure Goebbels, who did not consider her film essential to his plans, gave her all the finance and any other help she needed. When snow fell, she asked Goebbels to send a company of soldiers to sweep it from the roofs; Major Peter Jakob, upon arriving with his men and discovering why they had been sent, told her, ‘You must be crazy! You want my men and me to shovel snow?’ Despite his initial anger, he fell for her, and they married on 21 March 1944; the union lasted only two years. Just before they married, she introduced him to Hitler at the Berghof where she noted that her
Führer
seemed depressed; it was the last time she saw him.

Hitler had a great deal to be depressed about. On 10 July 1944 the Allies had landed in Sicily, opening a new front to the war and leading to the deposition of Mussolini by Pietro Badoglio. On 30 August the city centre of Rheydt, Goebbels’s home town, was destroyed by British bombing. Goebbels pressed Hitler to speak to the nation, but Hitler continued to lose himself in his own fantasies and delusions while the war was being lost. On 8 September 1943 the new Italian government surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, and Hitler’s Germany became ever more isolated.

Goebbels urged Hitler to negotiate with Stalin, but Hitler still believed he could negotiate with the British. Finally Goebbels persuaded Hitler to deliver a speech by radio, and on 10 September 1944 the German people heard their
Führer
’s voice for the last time. Goebbels now came to the same conclusion as Hitler, that they could negotiate with the British, who would surely prefer that Germany remained a National Socialist state than become a Communist one under Stalin. They failed to understand the loathing they had engendered throughout Europe and America.

Perhaps it was impending doom that reunited Goebbels and Magda; their relationship improved while Germany’s situation declined. Perhaps they both knew that the inevitable outcome would result in them sharing a destiny, along with their children, celebrating the cult of death which he and Hitler had so carefully designed and nurtured. Whether or not they yet harboured those thoughts which would certainly occupy them in time, they both maintained a public belief in the final victory, and she dutifully performed for the cameras by doing some work in a factory to contribute to the ‘total war’ effort.

Goebbels maintained his position as the arbiter of taste and banned a 1944 film,
Die Feuerzangenbowle
(
The Fire Tongs Bowl
or
The Punch Bowl
), for ‘disrespect for authority’. Based on the book by Heinrich Spoerl, who also wrote the screenplay, it was the tale of a famous writer, during the time of the Wilhelminian Empire in Germany, going undercover as a student at a small town secondary school after his friends tell him he missed out on the best part of growing up by being educated at home. It was a nostalgic comedy of mistaken identities, but Bernhard Rust, Secretary of Education and a former high school teacher, complained about the way the movie poked fun at teachers, and the premiere of the film was cancelled.