Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity (26 page)

On 29 April Hitler said goodbye to his loyal staff members in the conference hall. His impending suicide was no surprise to those around him. Traudl Junge recalled that Eva often said, ‘The
Führer
will tell us when he’s going to kill himself.’ That day Eva told them all, ‘You’ll cry later today,’ and they knew that the time had come.
510

On 30 April 1945, Soviet troops were within a block or two of the Reich Chancellery. Hitler gave one last prediction – that he would be cursed by millions – then he and Braun committed suicide. Braun bit into a cyanide capsule; Hitler possibly did likewise, but also shot himself in the head with his Walther PPK 7.65mm pistol, said to be the same pistol that his niece Geli Raubal had used in her suicide.

Hitler had wanted to ensure that when his time came he would die without fail, and he knew that some people who had shot themselves in the head sometimes survived, such as Unity Mitford, and he didn’t want to. He had consulted the SS surgeon Ernst Gunther Schenck about the best method of committing suicide; Schenck recommended hydrogen cyanide. The army medical service had been ordered to produce these capsules in vast quantities since
November 1944. To be sure that a cyanide capsule would work, Hitler tested it on his dog Blondi, who promptly died.

The bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun were carried up the stairs and through the bunker’s emergency exit to the bombed-out garden behind the Reich Chancellery where they were placed in a bomb crater, doused with petrol and set alight. It was hardly the twilight of the gods he had envisioned. His death was announced over the radio as if it were a heroic end. ‘The
Führer
’s headquarters have announced that our
Führer
Adolf Hitler this afternoon in the Reich Chancellery, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany.’

Still alive inside the bunker were Joseph Goebbels and his family. Magda believed that, without Hitler and National Socialism, the world was not one where she and her children should live. Her adulation of Hitler and her belief in his messianic teachings compelled her to take the lives of all of her children. She put them to bed in the room the children shared inside the bunker, drugged them with morphine and then poisoned them with cyanide. The mother of Hitler’s Germany had murdered her own children – the Holy Mother had become Herod, massacring the innocents. Then she and Goebbels took poison, and the Nazi Holy Family came to an ignominious end.

On 2 May, Berlin surrendered.

When a newspaper reporter called Winifred Wagner with the news that Hitler had married Eva Braun, she responded, ‘That’s a typical journalist’s lie.’ She could accept his death, but not the fact that he had married someone other than her.
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American troops entered Bayreuth, which had finally become victim to bombing and shelling; Villa Wahnfried was partially reduced to rubble. Wagner’s city became occupied, and a GI discovered the Master’s grand piano with no one to play it now. Winifred called it ‘desecration’ and fled to her country house.
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The end, when it finally came, was only a mere reflection of the grand operatic finale Hitler had envisaged for himself, but in his own mind he probably thought it really was
Götterdämmerung
. Sir Ian Kershaw reflected on ‘this really macabre end’:

It wasn’t the way Hitler had wanted it. He had wanted his great sacrifice to end in glorious flames. Instead he came to a squalid and sordid end. He had made one final prediction, that he would be cursed, which did come true, though not as he must have meant it – he was cursed by millions, not because they misunderstood him but because he misunderstood himself. He thought himself ‘the martyr deserted by everyone,’ said Preiss. Perhaps in his own mind, Hitler really had burned on a pyre like a legend. ‘I am sure he would have wanted that made as a picture, but there was no one to make it.’
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O
n the night of 29 April 1945, when Olga Chekhova was collected by two Soviet officers and driven into the night, she was taken straight to the headquarters of Marshal Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front, based in the former military engineers school at Karlshorst on the other side of Berlin. She spent the night there, then in the morning she was interrogated by Colonel Shkurin of SMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence organisation. Later that day, 30 April, she was put aboard a plane and flown to Moscow. She finally arrived home twenty-five years after leaving.

Viktor Abakumov, head of SMERSH, put her into an NKVD safe house in central Moscow. Abakumov was later charged of ignoring ‘Communist moral principles’ because he used these safe houses for illicit affairs with ‘actresses, cheating wives, secretaries and foreign visitors’;
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he was obsessed with film stars, but there is no evidence that Olga slept with him, though it is possible she did, under duress or otherwise; she later wrote to him, addressing him as ‘Dearest Vladimir Semyonovich’ – Vladimir was his pseudonym – and asking, ‘When are we going to meet?’
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She spent time
playing
chess with the officers, who looked after her and escorted her to her interrogation sessions where they hoped to discover what she could tell them about Hitler; Stalin was obsessed with finding out the source of Hitler’s power over the German people.

Tschechowa knew that if she wrote a diary it would be discovered by agents, and so she began to write one specifically so she could record:

It isn’t known whether she was ever told about Lev’s plan to use her in his unrealised mission to assassinate Hitler, but for the rest of her life she neither saw Lev nor communicated with him in any way. Although she had been treated well, the six weeks spent in Moscow were a considerable strain upon her, and when she was flown back to Berlin during the last week of June she looked ‘exhausted and shaken’, according to Albert Sumser.
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In recognition of her services, the SMERSH chief in Berlin, General Vadis, saw to it that she was given a large house, Spreestrasse No. 2 in the town of Friedrichshagen east of Berlin: its previous owner had been moved out by an armed brigade. From her new home, she looked out over water and willows.

On 24 July her son-in-law Wilhelm Rust simply turned up at Olga’s house where her daughter and sister and their families all lived. He had been captured by the British and interned in a POW camp in Denmark, where he had worked as a doctor, then was transferred, at his own request, to a British POW camp at Braunschweig in Germany. There the British provided him with documents, an ambulance, medical supplies and a medical assistant who was also a POW, and he drove back to Berlin to be reunited with Ada and daughter Vera.
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Olga maintained contact with the NKVD, and in 1949 she and her family were suddenly moved to a new apartment in Charlottenburg in the western sector.
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She continued making films, retired in 1974, and published her memoirs. She died in Berlin on 9 March 1980.

In Sweden, Zarah Leander’s fortunes slowly improved. At first she was shunned, but gradually she managed to land engagements on the Swedish stage, and eventually toured Germany and Austria, giving concerts, making new records and acting in musicals. She was always met by an eager audience who had not forgotten her. She also appeared in a number of films and television shows.

She was often asked about her years in Nazi Germany, and although she willingly talked about her past, she stubbornly rejected allegations of her having had sympathy for the Nazi regime,
insisting
that her position as a German film actress had been that of an entertainer working to please an enthusiastic audience in a difficult time. She repeatedly described herself as a ‘political idiot’ and, like Olga Tschechowa, never revealed her connections to the Soviet secret service. She continued to be very popular in Germany for many decades after the Second World War, and was interviewed several times on German television. She died of a stroke on 23 June 1981. In 2003, Värmland Opera House erected a bronze statue in her home town of Karlstad, where she began her career. After many years of discussions, the town government accepted this statue on behalf of the first local Swedish Zarah Leander Society.

Lída Baarová had been living and working in Prague since she fled there following her affair with Joseph Goebbels, but in April 1945 she decided to move back to Germany to live with her current lover, Hans Albers, in his house on the shores of Lake Starnberg. She never arrived because she was arrested by American military police and imprisoned in Munich.

Hans Albers had been expecting Lída, but after she failed to appear, he settled into an uncertain future, banned from working, as were most who had worked under Nazi rule and were considered Nazi sympathisers. Then in 1946, his former girlfriend Hansi Burg, in a British army uniform, returned to Germany, and the couple were reunited. In 1947 Albers was allowed to return to work, as was his friend Willy Birgel, and the two of them continued to be among Germany’s top stars into the 1950s, making several films together. Albers and Hansi Burg remained together until his death in 1960.

While Albers found happiness again, Lída Baarová was extradited to Czechoslovakia, where she was tried for her life for working with the Nazis. She escaped death when she was able to prove that she had been working in Germany before the war broke out. She was sent to prison where she was visited often by an infatuated fan,
Jan Kopecký, who was related to an important Czech politician. Through his connections he was able to arrange for her release in 1949. They married and moved to Austria, but when she fell ill he emigrated to Argentina, while she stayed behind to recuperate in a sanatorium. When she had recovered she attempted a comeback, but her co-star Anton Walbrook, an ardent anti-Nazi, refused to work with her, and she fled to Argentina to join her husband. But the marriage was all but over, and she lived alone and in poverty. She settled in Italy in 1952 where she resumed her film career, and divorced Kopecký in 1956 and married a Swedish physician; they divorced in 1980. In 1995 she made a documentary about her life,
Lída Baarová’s Bittersweet Memories
, which was also the title of her autobiography. She suffered from Parkinson’s disease and died in Salzburg in 2000.

As soon as the war was at an end, the victors looked for those responsible. The generals, the ministers, and everyone who had a hand in the Nazi regime and especially the death camps, were rounded up and put on trial. American screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who had been assigned by the US Navy to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) for intelligence work while attached to John Ford’s documentary unit, was the officer sent to arrest Leni Riefenstahl at her chalet in Kitzbühel, Austria. He really only wanted her to identify the faces of Nazi war criminals in German film footage captured by the Allied troops. She claimed she was unaware of the nature of the internment and extermination camps, but when she stated she had been forced to follow Goebbels’s orders under threat of being sent to a concentration camp, Schulberg asked her why she should have been afraid if she did not know concentration camps existed. When shown photographs of the camps, Riefenstahl reportedly reacted with horror and tears.

The officer who interrogated her, Irving Rosenbaum,
remembered
her as ‘a broken woman’, observing that ‘she did not fit the picture that we might have had of her as a Nazi collaborator, as a friend of Goebbels or Hitler.’ But the officer was not convinced by her performance of one who knew nothing. His impression was
that she understood everything but rejected it, ‘and in rejecting it I think she partly thought she vindicated herself to herself’.
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From 1945 to 1948 she was held in various American and French detention camps and prisons, and was for a while under house arrest. She was tried four times by various postwar authorities, but was never convicted for her alleged role as a propagandist or for the use of concentration camp inmates in her films. Branded ‘a Nazi sympathiser’, for the rest of her life she felt she was unjustly persecuted; she argued that she was only an artist. ‘It destroyed me,’ she said in 1998. ‘It’s horrible. When one likes working, as I do, and is so obsessed, and keeps trying to find new ways and is boycotted. I couldn’t make a film for half a century. It’s like a death.’
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She tried unsuccessfully to resume her career as a filmmaker. In 1956 she started work on
Black Freight
, planning to play the lead herself as well as direct. While scouting locations, she almost died from injuries received in a truck accident. She woke up from a coma in a Nairobi hospital and finished writing the script there; but filming was thwarted by uncooperative locals, the Suez Canal crisis and bad weather. She only made some test shots before the financiers pulled the plug.

She later said that her biggest regret was meeting Hitler: ‘It was the biggest catastrophe of my life. Until the day I die people will keep saying “Leni is a Nazi”, and I’ll keep saying “But what did she do?”’ She won more than fifty libel cases against people accusing her of having any knowledge of or anything to do with Nazi crimes, and maintained her innocence until she died on 8 September 2003.

Veit Harlan paid the penalty for making films for the Third Reich, especially
Jud Süß
. In May 1945 he had been named the number one Nazi film director by both international and German newspapers; this came as an honour from newspapers at home, but as an accusation from newspapers abroad. Towards the end of the war Harlan did not want either the accusation or the acclaim, so he wrote a 23-page statement claiming that his life and that of his wife had been under threat from the Nazis to ensure his compliance,
and that he had been under an ‘obligation to obey orders’. This remained his defence during his trials after the war ended, when the denazification commission banned him from making films; he directed several plays under a pseudonym.

In 1948 he was prosecuted in Hamburg for making
Jud Süß
; he was the only filmmaker charged with committing Nazi crimes. His defence was that he had been forced to make
Jud Süß
and had no choice. This was very much like the scenario he had presented in the film in which Oppenheimer made the same kind of defence, saying, ‘I am merely the faithful servant of my master.’ In the scene, Oppenheimer was laughed at. Harlan was despised but cleared of all charges related to
Jud Süß
, because the court could find no direct connection between the film and Nazi war crimes. Allegedly the judge, Dr Tyrolf, had been a Nazi. Having been found
innocent
, Harlan was free to make films again, but public opinion was against him, and his personal appearances and premieres were met with protests and boycotts. He defended himself at every opportunity, stressing that he’d been used by the Nazis and by the ‘demonic Goebbels’.

He returned to work with smaller budgets, but using themes and styles that were stuck in the 1930s. He attempted to make a
statement
about judgement in
Hanna Amon
in 1951, in which Kristina Söderbaum played a character devoted to her brother who finds that the whole village where she lives has wrongly judged her to be incestuous. The persecution Harlan faced during the 1950s helped him to maintain his view that
he
was a victim of the Nazi era.

Over time, Harlan and his family were able to maintain a relatively normal and prosperous existence in a Bavarian village where they lived and where friends from the film industry came to visit. But the shadow of
Jud Süß
never lifted, and Söderbaum admitted that the film ruined their lives. The couple was often met with
demonstrations
on the street and sometimes pelted with eggs.
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When they went to the
Hamburger Kammerspiele Theater
in Hamburg, which until 1941 had been used by the
Jüdischer Kulturbund
– the Cultural Federation of German Jews – they were seen in the
audience by actress Ida Ehre, who had reopened the theatre on 10 December 1945. Ida Ehre was Jewish and had attempted to escape Germany with her husband and daughter, but their ship, bound for Chile, was forced to return to Hamburg because of the outbreak of war. Ehre was eventually arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp at Fühlsbüttel.
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When she realised that Veit Harlan and Kristina Söderbaum were in the audience, she stood on stage and ordered them to leave.

Harlan died from heart failure at the age of sixty-four on 13 April 1964 while holidaying on Capri. Kristina Söderbaum died aged eighty-eight on 12 February 2001. Her acting career never recovered after the war, but she was successful as a fashion photographer. Her last film appearance was in
Night Train to Venice
in 1994 opposite Hugh Grant.

Almost everyone associated with
Jud Süß
suffered the
consequence
of being a part of the most reviled film of all time. Ferdinand Marian was banned from working until August 1946, when he celebrated the news that he had been given permission by US film officer Eric Pleskow to work again. On 7 August he borrowed a car and drove towards Munich to collect his denazification papers, and was killed when he crashed near the village of Dürneck in Bavaria.

His
Jud Süß
co-star Werner Johannes Krauß, who had delighted Goebbels and many of the anti-Semites in Germany with his portrayal of loathsome Jewish characters, lived out his days
following
the war in virtual obscurity in Vienna, and made only three more films before he died in 1959.