Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity (24 page)

The film starred one of Germany’s most popular actors, Heinrich Rühmann; determined to save the film, he used his contacts with Nazi leaders to go over Goebbels’s head and have the picture screened for Herman Göring, who then made a direct appeal to Hitler to have the ban lifted. Hitler cared nothing for schoolteachers, and
to Goebbels’s chagrin he ordered the film be released. To save face, Goebbels insisted that scenes be reshot to make every scene, in his opinion, perfect. It was to become one of the most popular films of Rühmann’s career, described by critic Georg Seeßlen a ‘masterpiece of timeless, cheerful escapism’.
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As an ironic footnote, because the film’s premiere was delayed so long, by the time the movie was on general release, the German army had suffered massive casualties and some of the actors in the film had been drafted and killed on the battlefield.

At a time when the men of Germany were being called upon to sacrifice their lives on the war fronts, certain film stars were put on a list of ‘indispensable actors’, called the
Gottbegnadeten
list (‘God-gifted’ list). Assembled in September 1944 by Goebbels and Hitler, it was a 36-page list of artists considered crucial to Nazi culture which excused certain individuals from military service during the Second World War. A total of 1,041 artists, architects, music conductors, singers, writers and filmmakers appeared on it. Goebbels listed about 640 motion picture actors, writers and directors on an extended version of the list, including Willi Fritsch and Werner Johannes Krauß, who had played Rabbi Loew in
Jud Süß
. Among the musicians included were Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzern, Carl Orff, Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Wagnerian baritone Rudolf Bockelmann. Each listed artist received a letter from the Nazi Propaganda Ministry certifying his or her status. The only non-German on the list was Dutch actor Johannes Heesters.
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Heinrich Rühmann was on the list, but Goebbels ordered him to take basic training as a pilot in revenge for going over his head. Rühmann was spared having to take part in the war effort, possibly due to intervention by Göring. But while the cult of celebrity had its perks, it was also rife with danger – Goebbels was not someone to be crossed.

The Soviet Union continued to steadily push Hitler’s forces into retreat along the Eastern Front throughout 1944. On 6 June that year the Western Allied forces landed on the Normandy beaches of France. Many leading officers in the German military knew that
defeat was inevitable, and some even conspired to remove the
Führer
from power. A plot involving some of Germany’s highest-ranking officers was hatched; but on the day Hitler should have died, 20 July 1944, the suitcase bomb planted in Hitler’s headquarters in Poland, the
Wolfsschanze
(Wolf’s Lair), was accidentally moved underneath a heavy conference table so when it exploded, the table deflected much of the blast away from Hitler. He was injured, but survived to order reprisals and inform the people over the radio that providence had ensured his survival. He now found a new form of entertainment: he ordered that the executions of all those found guilty of the plot to kill him – they were hanged from meat hooks – be filmed so he could watch them in his private cinema in the Berghof.

The ‘Hitler film’ project remained a curiously open secret – and one to be completely forgotten, denied and buried for many years – but it continued to surface within the state-run film industry from time to time. Wolfgang Preiss was reminded of it again in 1944.

The purge on those who did not embrace the cult of celebrity continued. In 1944 stage and screen actor Kurt Gerron, who had starred in
Der Blaue Engel
(
The Blue Angel
) opposite Marlene Dietrich, was interned at Theresienstadt where he made what would prove to be
his last film – as a prisoner. The Nazis forced him to feature in a propaganda film to demonstrate how humane conditions were at the concentration camp.

Gerron had been a military doctor in the First World War, and became an actor in 1920; he was famous for originating the role of ‘Tiger’ Brown in the Berlin premiere production of
Die Dreigroschenoper
(
The Threepenny Opera
), in which he sang ‘Mack the Knife’. A Jew, he had escaped Nazi Germany in 1933 with his wife and parents, travelling first to Paris and later to Amsterdam where he kept on working as an actor at the
Stadsschouwburg
; he also directed films. He was offered work in Hollywood several times at the behest of Peter Lorre and Joseph von Sternberg, but kept refusing and remained in Amsterdam. After the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, he was held in the transit camp at Westerbork and then sent to Theresienstadt where he ran a cabaret called
Karussell
to entertain the inmates. His final film is alternatively known as
Theresienstadt: Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet
(
Terezin: A Documentary Film of the Jewish Resettlement
) and
Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt
(
The Führer Gives the Jews a City
); it remains the only film made by the Nazis inside a concentration camp.

Theresienstadt, promoted as the ‘model’ ghetto, was established by the Nazis in 1941 in Terezin, a town in the former Czechoslovakia. Goebbels intended to use the film as evidence to show to the International Red Cross and the world that Jews were well treated in the camps. But it was an elaborately staged hoax, presenting a completely false picture of camp life, and upon its completion the director and most of the cast of prisoners were put on the camp’s final transport to Auschwitz,
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among them Kurt Gerron and the members of jazz pianist Martin Roman’s Ghetto Swingers. Gerron was killed immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz on 15 November 1944. Orders from Heinrich Himmler closed the gas chambers at Auschwitz the next day. Pianist Martin Roman and guitarist Coco Schumann survived the Holocaust.

Also in the Theresienstadt camp was Czech composer Viktor
Ullmann, who might have hoped that the fact he was a Roman Catholic would have spared him – his Jewish parents had converted to Roman Catholicism before Viktor’s birth. Educated in Vienna, Ullmann’s musical talents led him to Prague where he was mentored by Alexander von Zemlinsky, under whose direction he served as a conductor at the New German Theatre of Prague until 1927. His composition for piano
Schönberg Variations
brought him the Kertzka Prize. He spent time in Stuttgart but was forced to flee Germany in 1933 and returned to Prague. By the time he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, on 8 September 1942, his list of works had reached forty-one opus numbers and contained an additional three piano sonatas, song cycles on texts by various poets, operas, and the piano concerto Op. 25, which he finished in December 1939, nine months after the entry of German troops into Prague. Only thirteen printed items survive, which he published privately and entrusted to a friend for safekeeping.

He remained active at the camp as a composer and pianist, and performing concerts with other prominent musicians interned there such as Gideon Klein and Hans Krása. Ullmann wrote, ‘By no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon. Our endeavour with respect to arts was commensurate with our will to live.’
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The Nazis cynically promoted the artistic achievements and activities in the camp to deceive the International Red Cross. Once the inspectors left, most of the inmates were sent to their deaths, as was Viktor Ullmann, who was deported to the camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau where, on 18 October 1944, he was murdered in the gas chambers. Most of the work he completed in Theresienstadt was preserved and continues to be performed at concerts around the world.

The camp’s first commandant, Rudolf Höss – not to be confused with Rudolf Hess – testified at the Nuremberg trials that up to three million people had died there: 2.5 million gassed, 500,000 from disease and starvation,
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a figure since revised to 1.1 million; around 90 per cent of them were Jews.
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Others deported to
Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet POWs, about 400 Jehovah’s Witnesses and tens of thousands of people of diverse nationalities.
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Those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labour, disease, individual executions and medical experiments.
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There is no definitive figure for how many died either in the extermination camps, from forced labour or in mass killings. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, in 1933 there were approximately nine million Jews in Europe; by 1945, the Nazis had reduced that number to about three million. As many as 200,000 Roma gypsies died, and the number of physically and mentally handicapped persons, homosexuals and Polish intellectuals accounted for at least another 200,000. This totals about 6,400,000 victims of the concentration camps.

The Nazis also killed between two and three million Soviet prisoners in labour camps or executions, as well as any number of non-Jewish Poles and Soviets who died in forced labour due to malnutrition, unsafe work conditions, disease and experimentation. In Russia and many other parts of the Soviet Union, many were killed in mass open-air shootings and buried in large pits. In Poland, large numbers of Jews perished in the ghettos.
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More than sixty million people in total may have died during the Second World War. That was the human cost of Hitler’s ambition to be an artist, and of his delusions of a divine calling that came through the operas of Richard Wagner. Hitler’s Nazi cult of celebrity came at a price so obscene it is inconceivable.

F
or those in the camps, life was hell on earth. For Berliners, life in 1944 had become another kind of living hell, with constant air raids by day from the American Army Air Force and more by night from the RAF. The terror, as well as age and illness, took its toll on Olga Tschechowa’s mother Lulu Knipper, and she died in Berlin on 9 May. Olga moved from her Kaiserdamm apartment in West Berlin to live in her wooden dacha at Gross Glienecke, where she could escape the worst of the bombing; she took with her the large stained-glass panel bearing the Knipper arms.

By late 1944, the Red Army had pushed German forces back into western Europe while the Western Allies advanced on Germany, stalled only by Germany’s attempt to defeat them in the Ardennes. Even at this critical time, Hitler believed that films were so vital to the war effort – and to his personal image – that while he closed theatres – and also schools – in 1944, he decreed that cinemas remained open – which they did to the very end of the war. In Berlin,
anti-aircraft
units were posted especially to protect the city’s cinemas. Few films were being made at Babelsberg because of the air raids, and food was running low in Berlin and throughout Germany, so most films were made elsewhere. In October, Olga Tschechowa escaped Berlin for a while to make
Melusine
in the ski resort of Kitzbühel in the Austrian Tyrol.

While dining at her hotel, Tschechowa met Hitler’s personal adjutant, Julius Schaud, who regaled her with all the gory details of the attempted assassination of Hitler at the
Wolfsschanze
; Schaud had been there and was rendered almost totally deaf by the explosion. Olga was shocked to learn that supplies of food and
ammunition were being delivered to the Berghof while Hitler’s own people were going hungry.
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When she wasn’t filming, Olga travelled from city to city throughout Germany, performing at theatres and raising morale. While in Cologne, her hotel was hit by a British bomb and burned down, leaving her without her belongings; she had to return to Berlin by train wearing her stage costume. Back home, she faced the same hardships of the less affluent Berliners, eating whatever was available and, worse as far as she was concerned, allowed only 3 gallons of car fuel each month. She asked Goebbels if she could have extra rations of fuel for her Fiat Topolino and was furious when he refused her request. Even Goebbels could do little to
overcome
national shortages for one of his favourite film stars, and she had to take the S-Bahn suburban train like everyone else. To get to work each day at the studio, she walked up to 6 miles.
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Her life was made bearable by the presence of a new young man, Albert Sumser. They met at a party in Wannsee near Potsdam, where he was serving as a signals officer. When he first saw her, he did not recognise her; he was the only man to stand up when she entered the room. He told author Antony Beevor that he ‘did not even dare to think about making an advance towards this beautiful woman’, but she came over to him and talked, gave him her card and invited him to call her. He arrived at her house bringing ‘instead of red roses’ a brace of wild duck he had shot. His good manners and practical gesture was much appreciated by Olga, and the two became lovers ‘on her initiative’. When he fell ill, she walked the 6 miles through the Königswald forest to Potsdam to see him, bringing what food she could gather.
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The war was almost lost, though the Nazi government was not admitting it. In 1943, Goebbels had commissioned Veit Harlan with a film project intended to inspire Germans to fight to the end.
Kolberg
was an historical costume epic about the Pomeranian town’s resistance against Napoleon in 1807. America had its Alamo, the British Empire had its Rorkes Drift, and Germany had its Kolberg. The film was a call to all Germans to never surrender to the enemy
but to die as martyrs; this was Hitler’s message, conveyed to the masses as entertainment, and it was Goebbels’s own watchword – ‘total war’. Goebbels believed the historical events in the film would make suitable propaganda for the circumstances Germany now faced.
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The film glorified the ideal of fighting to the death, which is what Hitler and Goebbels hoped the people of Germany were prepared to do. Harlan later commented that Hitler and Goebbels were ‘convinced that such a film was more useful than a military victory’.
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Despite the lack of materials, which were poured into the war, Goebbels gave Harlan virtually unlimited resources, including the use of an estimated 10,000 soldiers as extras for the huge battle scenes. It was the most expensive film made during Hitler’s rule, costing eight million marks, and taking a year to shoot. Goebbels wrote on 2 December 1944, ‘I tell the
Führer
about the new ‘Kolberg’ film, describe a few scenes from it, which move him almost to tears.’

The film that Hitler and the public eventually saw was not entirely the picture that Harlan had made. When Goebbels first saw the film, he had what Harlan described in a 1963 interview as ‘a choleric fit’ and called it ‘a pacifist film’, and in his delusional state told Harlan that ‘pacifists are always ruled by non-pacifists’. What shook Goebbels were the scenes of the horror of war – scenes of doors being torn down to make coffins, of water contaminated by corpses, of a grenade exploding in a house where a woman has just given birth and the newborn is buried alive. To Goebbels this was sadism, and he demanded cuts in the film, to which Harlan objected: ‘I can’t portray heroics if I don’t show how heroic people are and how terrible their circumstances.’ Goebbels disagreed, and ordered the offending scenes be removed.
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It was the last film to be given a lavish Nazi premiere, which was held on 30 January 1945 at a temporary cinema in Berlin, following the last radio address Hitler ever gave. That evening it was screened privately for Hitler at the Reich Chancellery as well to the men serving at the naval base at La Rochelle. It was released in the
cinemas still standing in Germany until the end of the war, when it was withdrawn and banned until 1965.

As Germany headed inexorably towards destruction, Hitler embraced the coming catastrophe, and on 18 January 1945 he returned to Berlin, a city in ruins, as was much of Germany, along with large areas of Europe and the Soviet Union. In mid-February, he took cover from the intense air raids in the shelters that he had ordered Albert Speer to build in 1941 beneath the bomb-damaged Reich Chancellery. It was a virtual catacomb divided into two sections – the ante-bunker and the so-called
Führer
Bunker, linked by a single short corridor. The ante-bunker was for staff accommodation, while the
Führer
Bunker was for Hitler. It had twenty small rooms, all sparsely furnished, including a living room, a study and several bedrooms. From the
Führer
Bunker, he managed the war towards its inevitable outcome. Those about him expected him to take full control, but what they observed was a man who was lethargic, who preferred playing for hours with his dog Blondi and who for much of the time seemed absent minded and unable to make decisions.

On 1 February 1945, Olga Tschechowa returned to Berlin from Prague where she had been filming
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– by then many German films were being produced in Prague, which had remained virtually untouched by the war. That same day, the Red Army under Marshal Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front crossed the frozen River Oder and seized bridgeheads on the west bank. With the Red Army within 60 miles of Berlin, Olga was naturally concerned for her family. Her daughter Ada had married gynaecologist Wilhelm Rust, and they had a four-year-old daughter, christened Olga but called Vera. Wilhelm had been called up to serve as a
Luftwaffe
doctor attached to the headquarters of General Stumpff in the north. Ada and Vera lived in Olga’s Gross Glienecke house
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while Olga stayed with her niece, Marina Ried – daughter of Olga’s sister Ada Knipper – and her husband just outside of Berlin.
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On 7 March, Hitler made a final visit to his front line troops at the Ninth Army headquarters on the River Oder. Visibly ill and
with his grip on reality loose, he ordered his troops to fight to their dying breath. That same day, Eva Braun arrived in Berlin to join him in the
Führer
Bunker, pledging her loyalty and refusing to leave as the Red Army closed in.

On 20 March Hitler was filmed for the very last time, decorating boys of the Hitler Youth for bravery. His left hand visibly shook, giving rise to speculation that he suffered from Parkinson’s disease. He remarked on several occasions that his hands shook so much he could barely hold his pistol. ‘If I was ever wounded,’ he said, ‘none of my staff would be willing to give me the
coup de grâce
.’
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His health was in a terrible condition. He suffered from irritable bowel syndrome, skin lesions and an irregular heartbeat as well as the tremors.
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Some of his conditions may have been caused by the amount of medication he was given by his regular physician, Dr Theodor Morell, which included ‘Dr Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills’, which contained strychnine and atropine – Hitler couldn’t bear body odours and especially his own propensity for flatulence – as well as injections of pulverised bull testicles in grape sugar because Hitler feared impotence. Dr Morell prescribed massive doses of dexedrine, caffeine, cocaine, pervatin, prozymen and ultraseptyl.
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It was not just his left hand that shook but the entire left side of his body. When he sat, he held his right hand over his left, and kept his right leg crossed over his left to hide the constant shaking. When walking, he shuffled slowly, his posture bent forward.
Feldmarschall
Heinz Guderian wrote that Hitler’s ‘mind, to be sure, remained active – but there was something weird about this activity, for it was dominated by constant wanderings, a mistrust of humanity and dictated by the efforts to conceal his physical, mental and military collapse’.
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For much of his life Hitler had lived in fear of cancer, probably because it was the disease that killed his mother; his fear increased with age. He also suffered from terrible nightmares, and would sometimes wake up as if he were suffocating, possibly due to his fear of death. With thoughts of suicide now in his head, perhaps he concluded that not only would he attempt to induce his own
Götterdämmerung
, but bring his increased mental and physical sufferings to an end too. While he feared death, he never feared suicide, and maybe that was because suicide would be of his own making, whereas death by illness or injury would only serve to prove he was mortal after all; that was the conundrum he couldn’t live with. He turned his mind to one final objective: his own
Götterdämmerung
as he headed towards the abyss, hastened by the Soviet advance upon Berlin.

He began working for destruction with almost as much energy as he had worked for conquest. He fled from reality into the world of Wagner’s operas; Hitler’s caretaker Herbert Döhring remembered Hitler having around 500 gramophone records of Wagner in the bunker,
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losing himself in the narcotic effect of the music he loved, disabling him of sympathy for anyone and of conscience for anything.
Götterdämmerung
became his own personal score for the coming apocalypse, and he wanted to take the whole world with him into the abyss.

He ordered that all essential supplies and foodstuffs throughout Germany be destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of the Russians. He cared nothing for the suffering of ordinary Germans, or about the displacement of millions throughout Europe, as he had cared nothing for the millions of Jews, Slavs and other groups sent to extermination camps. He ordered the destruction of all German industrial infrastructure before it could fall into Allied hands. Believing that Germany’s military failures had forfeited its right to survive as a nation, he executed his scorched-earth policy, the Nero Decree – his identification with Nero was about to be fulfilled. He entrusted this mission to Albert Speer, now his Armaments Minister, who secretly disobeyed the order.
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Almost at the last, Goebbels tried to demonstrate that he still had control over the lives of Germany’s film stars by having Hans Albers blacklisted. Albers had starred in a film which the navy had requested as a memorial to their heroes, but the film’s director, Helmut Käutner, had something different in mind.
Große Freiheit Nr. 7
(
Great Freedom No. 7, or Port of Freedom
as it was known in
the UK) told of a ‘singing sailor’, Hannes Kröger, played by Hans Albers, who works in a Reeperbahn club close to Große Freiheit, a street in Hamburg in the St. Pauli red light district. Sailors were depicted as drunks, Hannes was dependent on the bottle, and the girl he loved smoked cigarettes and slept with shipyard workers.

Most of the film was shot in Prague’s Barrandov Studios from May to November 1943 to escape the bombing on Berlin. Far from the German capital, Käutner was free to make a vastly different film to the one the navy and Goebbels had in mind, depicting the bitter farewells and melancholy of sailors on shore leave; there was not even a sign of a swastika until the very end, and even then it was hardly noticed on the flagpole of the windjammer
Padua
.

Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was furious with the outcome, as was Goebbels, who demanded many changes. Despite a year of editing, the movie was deemed unsuitable and banned in Germany, although it was premiered in Prague on 15 December 1944. Goebbels, clearly looking for a scapegoat, held Hans Albers responsible for the fate of this film, which was to have honoured the navy, and banned him in April 1945 for ‘insulting the German sailor’ – as if any of that mattered by that point. Albers had survived Hitler, the Nazis and Goebbels. (Almost the moment the war ended he drove through the ruins of Berlin in his white limousine at walking pace, greeting people who were stumbling over the rubble; women swarmed around his car, calling his name and crying.)
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