Read Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity Online
Authors: Michael Munn
German film star Ferdinand Marian had a secret Jewish daughter from his first wife, and he hid a Jew in his home; to protect himself he agreed to play the immoral and untrustworthy Joseph Oppenheimer in
Jud Süß
.
Classical Shakespearean actor Werner Krauß, famous for playing grotesque stereotypical Jewish characters such as Rabbi Loew in the film
Jud Süß
, was a dedicated Nazi, personally appointed by Hitler to be his cultural ambassador.
Joachim Gottschalk, the romantic leading star, had a Jewish wife and son; when Goebbels ordered his family be sent to a concentration camp, Gottschalk and his family killed themselves.
Actress and singer Renate Müller fell or was pushed from a
third-storey
window of a hotel in Berlin. Her death remains a Monroe-type mystery as the suspicion remains that she may have been silenced to protect one of Hitler’s most perverted secrets.
Lída Baarová, seen here with Raoul Schránil in
Za tichych noci
(
In the Still of Night
), was Goebbels’s mistress, causing a scandal that threatened to engulf Hitler’s regime.
Hans Albers, seen here as the eccentric and colourful
Münchhausen
, sacrificed his own happiness to save his Jewish girlfriend by allowing her to marry a Norwegian and escape to Switzerland.
Lil Dagover was one of Hitler’s favourite movie stars and among the few on an elite list Goebbels drew up which UFA studios was ordered to ‘cast at all costs’.
The Bayreuth
Festspielhaus
, designed specifically by Wagner for the performance of his own operas, was the temple where Hitler worshipped his ‘god’, and became Hitler’s control centre for his aggressive policies.
Wagner’s
Rienzi
told the story of the white knight who became the people’s saviour. Hitler declared that it was ‘in that hour’, when he saw the opera for the first time, that he received his personal revelation to become the saviour of Germany.
Swedish actress and singer Zarah Leander found fame and fortune as one of Germany’s biggest movie stars and was a personal favourite of Hitler, who remained blissfully unaware that she was a Soviet sleeper agent.
Hungarian born Marika Rökk found fame in a series of filmed operettas at UFA while funnelling information to Soviet intelligence.
An embodiment of Aryan purity, Swedish actress Kristina Söderbaum became one of the highest paid stars of German cinema. She said that her part in
Jud Süß
, directed by her husband Veit Harlan, ruined her life.