Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity (15 page)

His love of films was noted even in Hollywood where Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr wrote a tidbit of gossip for
Photoplay
magazine in 1937 called
Der Führer and the Brothers Marx
.

In his private cinema his closest friends also watched Eva’s home movies, which she edited herself. Hitler was fascinated with technology, and when he had the advanced technical aspects of the latest 16mm camera explained to him, he said, ‘Every German must have one. Every aspect of the nation’s growth would be captured.’
289
He may have been the first person ever to envisage a day when every household would have a camera that took moving pictures.

Braun was forbidden from attending the Nuremberg rally in 1936, but Lída Baarová was there, sitting just a short distance from Goebbels, who had been obsessed with her since they first met, inviting her onto his yacht and taking her on long chauffeur-driven trips. He asked her to come to hear him speak at Nuremberg and said that he would touch his face with a white handkerchief during his speech as a sign of his devotion.
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She suddenly panicked and decided to leave Berlin, but Goebbels sent a messenger to catch up with her at the station, presenting her with roses and his picture. She recalled, ‘He was a master of the hunt, whom nobody and nothing could escape.’
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By September 1936, Goebbels was deeply in love with Baarová and wrote in his diary, ‘A miracle has happened.’
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She later insisted, ‘Yes, Goebbels fell in love with me but I didn’t love him.’
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He phoned her incessantly, and whenever Gustav Fröhlich answered, he gave his name as Herr Müller and left an innocuous message.

Finally, in front of a blazing fire inside his log cabin on the shores of Lake Lanke, he kissed her for the first time; ‘I have never in my life been so inflamed with love for a woman,’ he wrote.
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They met whenever he could get away from Magda, usually at his log cabin where he would amuse her with impressions of Hitler. He also confided to her some of his doubts about Nazi ideology.

Towards the end of her life, Lída Baarová insisted that she finally gave in to him out of fear. ‘I was afraid of him and what he would do because I kept turning down his offers, although he always behaved charmingly and was always very nice to me.’
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Goebbels clearly did not recognise that Baarová’s love was not all it seemed. He wanted to be with her, but knew a break from Magda would reveal him to be a fraud in his depiction of being the ideal German husband, which in turn would bring to an end all the wealth and power he had worked so hard for. He might have been a romantic, but he was also a pragmatist. There were many problems in the marriage, and he and Magda came close to separating a number of times, but somehow they always managed to pull back from the brink.

When Goebbels summoned his favourite movie stars, they were expected to drop everything and attend. Personal proximity to the political leaders became a determining factor for the success of film actors, and Goebbels operated an informal system of listings which decided how frequently an actor would be cast. The five categories extended from ‘to cast at all costs even without a vacancy’ – for Zarah Leander, Lil Dagover and Heinz Rühmann, for instance – to ‘casting under no circumstances’. Hitler considered film stars so vital to the image of the National Socialist government, and to him personally, that in 1938 he granted generous tax concessions for prominent film actors and directors; they were allowed to deduct 40 per cent of their income as professional expenses.

The price those in the top category paid was their presence whenever and wherever it was required. Olga Tschechowa, who was named
Staatsschauspielerin
(State Actress) in 1935, was more concerned with finishing the day’s filming than being at a Nazi event. One morning she received an invitation to attend one of Goebbels’s numerous receptions that very evening, and she decided to ignore it. But her director persuaded her that the studio and all who worked there could not afford for her to snub Goebbels, on whom they all depended for their careers.

She left the studio earlier than the usual 7 p.m. that day. A car from the propaganda ministry was waiting to take her straight to the reception in Wilhelmstrasse. En route she demanded that the driver stop to allow her to buy a rose to brighten her dress;
when she arrived at the reception, she received a curt greeting from Magda Goebbels: ‘So late, Frau Tschechowa.’
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The purpose of the reception was for Hitler to talk about his expectations of the arts, and he harked back to his experiences as a young painter. When he spoke privately to Olga, talking about her film
Burning Frontiers
, ‘Hitler flooded me with compliments,’ she recalled, impressed that he made an effort to be charming. He displayed an ‘Austrian courtesy’ while Goebbels got by on his ‘polished intellect’ and a sunray lamp.
297

Nothing was more important to Hitler than being in the company of famous women – Zarah Leander, Leni Riefenstahl, Olga Tschechowa were just a few – and yet he was always the centre of attention. He didn’t speak of politics, but of art; not of conquest, but of the cinema; and while it all seemed innocent if egotistical, there was a darker and seamier side to Hitler’s ‘Austrian courtesy’ that few would come to know about or, if they did, admit to.

On 19 December 1936 Olga Tschechowa surprised everyone, including her family, by getting married again. She had fallen for a Belgian businessman, 41-year-old Marcel Robyns. Perhaps at the age of thirty-nine, Olga had suddenly begun to feel a gap in her life now that she had all she could want from being a film star. It had been a whirlwind romance and she had been swept off her feet.

Fearing the marriage would strip her of her prized German nationality, a few weeks before the wedding she sought help from Joseph Goebbels, asking if he would to talk to Hitler about it. ‘I will do it gladly,’ Goebbels wrote in his diary. ‘She is a charming woman.’ Consequently, the day before the wedding, Hitler invited her to a small breakfast reception in the Reich Chancellery where he gave his permission for her to retain her German nationality.
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There could be only two reasons why Olga wanted to retain her German citizenship: to maintain her position as a
Staatsschauspielerin
, which was now essential to her career, and to remain a ‘sleeper’ agent; her heart, after all, was still in Russia, not Germany, and so were many of her family.

After the wedding ceremony at the register office in Berlin-Charlottenburg, Olga and Robyns went to Brussels to settle into
his apartment on the Avenue des Nations, where she took on the subsidiary role of hostess for her husband’s boring business dinners. She quickly became despondent, and when her sister Ada came to visit in January 1937, she chose to return with her to Berlin for a couple of weeks’ respite. She spent as long as she could there, even doing a play,
Der Blaufuchs
(
The Blue Fox
). Robyns came to see it and basked in her glory, but behind his back, her family had nicknamed him ‘Herr Tschechowa’. His mother, daughter and a governess were brought with him to Berlin, and moved into the apartment that Olga had provided for her own mother, daughter and sister, at Kaiserdamm 74. Sister Ada wrote to Aunt Olya in Moscow, ‘Our Belgians have turned the whole household upside down. It’s a mystery to me why Olga married him, as she has to pay for everything with her own money.’
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Before long, an exasperated Olga sent Robyns back to Brussels while she remained in Berlin. She divorced him in 1938, and when Goebbels heard the news, he wrote, ‘Well, that’s Life!’
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Almost immediately, she embarked on an affair with actor Carl Raddatz, with whom she was filming
Befreite Hände
(
Freed Hands
); he was fifteen years younger than she. He was amusing and a regular visitor to her new house at Gross Glienecke, where she found peace away from the family apartment. It was a simple, single-storey wooden house, and easy to drive to from Babelsberg.
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But for all her private bliss, she remained at the beck and call of Hitler and Goebbels. For Olga Tschechowa, and other leading women of the Third Reich, celebrity offered not just the usual trappings of fame but the additional burden of being part of an increasingly menacing political machine which would include murder in its cultural revolution.

H
itler was a big fan of Marlene Dietrich. Herbert Döhring, Hitler’s caretaker, recalled, ‘We saw a lot of American and English films which weren’t shown publicly. He always praised Marlene Dietrich for her work as an actress. But he called her a hyena. He didn’t like her because she left Germany.’ Nevertheless, Hitler told those around him, ‘No one’s as good as her’, and was convinced that she had been talked out of returning to Germany by Hollywood.
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To counteract what he saw as an American conspiracy, he tasked Joseph Goebbels with getting her back to Germany in what would be a huge propaganda coup. In November 1937 she returned to Europe, but got no closer to Germany than Austria. En route she stopped in Paris, where a Nazi envoy met her to persuade her to come to Germany to meet with Goebbels. ‘That would be a big win for us,’ Goebbels wrote in his diary. Concerned for her mother still in Berlin, Dietrich gave a diplomatic response, writing to Goebbels, ‘Unfortunately meeting not possible at present because of long term contracts.’ Receiving this missive, Goebbels wrote in his diary on 12 November, ‘Marlene Dietrich can perform in Berlin only in a year’s time but she is firmly committed to Germany.’
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Goebbels continued to make overtures to her, but she saw through his intentions to make propaganda out of her. She was not merely an opportunist taking advantage of what Hollywood could do for her; she wanted to work in Germany, but, unlike others who remained to become a part of the Third Reich’s film industry, she remained in self-imposed exile. ‘She hated the Hitler regime,’ said actress Brigitte Mira. ‘She was smarter than a lot of others.’
304

Dietrich’s continued presence in Hollywood and Hitler’s
admiration for her aroused suspicions that she was a German spy, and the FBI questioned her. She told them that she thought Hitler was ‘not a normal human being’, describing his ‘evident feeling’ for her as ‘a tick for me’. Convinced that she admired Hitler in return and was pretending to oppose the regime so she could spy for him, FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover had his agents compile a huge file on her; the file remained open until 1967 when it was finally concluded that she had not been a Nazi sympathiser. She took out American citizenship in 1937 or 1939 (sources differ on the year), sending a clear message to Hitler, ‘so there are no misunderstandings’.
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UFA wanted a replacement for Marlene Dietrich, and Zarah Leander from Sweden was their choice. Born Sara Stina Hedberg on 15 March 1907 in Karlstad, she had studied both piano and violin as a small child, and sang on stage for the first time at the age of six. Despite her talents, she had no intention of becoming a professional musician: she wanted to be a star dancer.
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From 1922 to 1924 she lived and worked as a secretary in Riga in Latvia, where she learned German and met Nils Leander, whom she married in 1926; they had two children. In 1927 she became a showgirl, and in 1929 was engaged by the entertainer and producer Ernest Rolf to tour in cabaret; she sang ‘Vill ni se en stjärna?’ (Do You Want to See a Star?) which in time became her signature tune. In 1930 she starred in cabaret in Stockholm and made her first records, including a cover of Dietrich’s ‘Falling in Love Again’. She had a deep throaty voice but was arguably a much better singer than Dietrich. She appeared in two films in 1931, mainly just singing, and had her breakthrough on stage as Hanna Glavari in
The Merry Widow
in 1931, by which time she had divorced Nils Leander.

She continued to build her career, singing on stage, making films in Scandinavia, and performing with the Swedish revue
artist-producer
-songwriter Karl Gerhard, who was a prominent anti-Nazi, and also pro-Communist and a regular visitor to Moscow. Covert reports by Soviet agents went from Germany to Russia through neutral Sweden; behind the secret traffic were Zoya Rybkin and her husband Boris Rybkin, who both worked for the NKVD out of
the Soviet embassy in Stockholm. Their Swedish contacts included Karl Gerhard, whose popularity in Moscow opened all kinds of doors for him.
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He introduced Leander to left-wing groups and in 1934 wrote her a song, ‘I skuggan av en stövel’ (In the Shadow of a Boot), which condemned the Nazi persecution of the Jews. She became the voice of opposition to Hitler, although this might not have been her actual intention according to Finnish journalist and historian
Carl-Adam
Nykop, who said, ‘She sang, she always said, “because it’s my job. They give me the text and I sing the text as best I could.”’
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Whatever her motivations, ‘I skuggan av en stövel’ was immensely popular in Sweden, especially among the anti-Nazis to whom it appeared that she had taken sides against Hitler. She received offers from Hollywood, but as a mother of two school-age children she ruled out moving to America because, she said, she feared the consequences of bringing the children with her such a great distance and subsequently finding she was out of work. It was a most unusual attitude for someone so ambitious, suggesting she actually valued her family life above career. Despite the political situation, Austria and Germany were much closer geographically, and Leander was already well versed in German, so she went to Vienna where in 1936 she was a sensation in the world premiere of
Axel an der Himmelstür
(
Axel at Heaven’s Door
), a parody on Hollywood in which she played a star not unlike Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo.

She starred in an Austrian film in 1937,
Premiere
, which was popular in Germany, and very quickly UFA offered her a contract. UFA was as good as most Hollywood studios, and she realised that this could be the way for her to achieve the stardom she had worked so hard for, but she turned down the offer because she didn’t want to leave Sweden. There were also offers from Britain, and she was screen-tested singing in English. She decided to make the move to Germany after all, and signed with UFA. It was assumed by many in Sweden that she was only going to make one or two films, and then come home.

Leander quickly realised how badly UFA needed her, and
demanded and received a higher fee than was normal. ‘She came from Sweden to make films in Germany. She wanted to be a star, and Germany had very few stars,’ recalled actor Wolfgang Preiss.
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She would earn 200,000 Reichsmarks over two years – a German worker earned barely 2,000 marks a year. Half her fee was paid in Swedish crowns. She was suddenly the highest-paid film star in Germany, earning more than Hans Albers, Germany’s biggest male star. In the opinion of actor Will Quadflieg, ‘She came [to Germany] from Sweden to earn money – she did it very cleverly and very well.’
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She insisted she had no interest in politics and went to Germany for one reason only – to work, make money and be a star. But Germany at that time asked much more of any artist than just turning up on time and getting the work done: their terms meant becoming a Nazi sympathiser, or in other words, to look away from what was really happening. To be a star in Hitler’s Germany you had to fuel Goebbels’s propaganda machine, which had only one aim – to promote Nazism, which in essence meant to promote Hitler.

Because of her song ‘I skuggan av en stövel’, Goebbels considered Leander an ‘enemy of Germany’, and he criticised her in his diary: ‘I think this woman is very overrated. I wish there were no Swedes.’ He seemed particularly suspicious of her, but the German people disagreed with him and took her to their hearts; her first German film,
Zu neuen Ufern
(
To New Shores
) was a huge success in 1937.

She was a new kind of star in Germany. ‘She was quite different from the “ideal German woman”,’ observed Wolfgang Preiss:

Being different to the usual Aryan type of actress was in her
favour; German women were expected to be faithful
mothers-in
-waiting, and Goebbels insisted that vamps be played only by foreigners. Zarah Leander fitted the bill of the German vamp. She also had a good singing voice, with a low, appealing husky tone to it. She quickly became Germany’s biggest star, and Marlene Dietrich was forgotten. Actress Ilse Werner recalled of Leander, ‘When she joined UFA she was groomed as a star. She had people around her who just looked after her.’
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UFA had the same kind of control over its stars as the big Hollywood studios had over theirs. When she was sent on a visit to Holland, she was given a list by the studio of what she was to wear – dresses, hats, shoes, jewellery, hairstyles – and they told her what to say. Zarah said to them, ‘I say what I like, don’t I?’ They informed her she was to say only what
they
wanted her to say. It had nothing to do with Nazism; UFA was Hollywood on the Rhine. But she quickly discovered that becoming a UFA ‘diva’ had its advantages and she always had the best table, often in a separate room, in the best restaurants, and when she took her two children shopping at the
Kaufhaus des Westens
store in Berlin, the department store was closed to the public just so she could shop in privacy.
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She met Goebbels for the first time at a party, where he said to her, ‘Isn’t Zarah a Jewish name?’

She replied, ‘Yes, but what about Joseph? Isn’t that a Jewish name?’

He was stunned. Then he laughed and said, ‘That was a good answer.’

He accepted that Germany now had a new star, and he courted her presence whenever the opportunity arose simply because she was an attractive and famous woman. But he was not an enthusiastic fan as Hitler was. ‘She was one of Hitler’s favourites,’ said Preiss. ‘He spoke of his admiration for her.’
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Herbert Döhring, Hitler’s caretaker, recalled, ‘Hitler called her a world-class actress. He was a passionate admirer of her many films. I remember him praising her in front of the whole audience. He was enthusiastic.’
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Hitler coaxed his dog Blondi to impress and entertain his inner
circle of friends, secretaries and officers with her ‘singing’, telling her, ‘Sing lower, Blondi, sing like Zarah Leander!’ Blondi howled like a wolf.
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But despite his adoration of Leander, Hitler refused to grant her the honorary title of
Staatsschauspielerin
– State Actress. She said she was obliged to dine with him at least once, and because he was short and she tall, he didn’t approach her until she was seated.
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Neither spoke about politics; their main topic of conversation was his hairstyle, and she noted how he kept sweeping his fringe off his forehead.

The Soviet diplomat Valentin Berezhkov, who worked as an interpreter for Vyacheslav Molotov at negotiations with the Nazi leaders in 1940, said that at each diplomatic event he attended, Zarah Leander was always at the
Führer
’s side.
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This would seem an exaggeration as Hitler would hardly have had Leander at his side at
every
important diplomatic meeting, but it does suggest that Leander met Hitler more often than she would later admit. She was adored and feted by a number of Nazi leaders. Rudolf Hess listened obsessively to her records, and Hermann Göring tried to seduce her in Swedish.
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She made one hit film after another, and she was also enormously popular in France where she dubbed her own films into French. ‘They wrote films for her,’ recalled Preiss. ‘They were not pictures about real life.’
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Her films were sentimental melodramas with emotional songs that sold on records all over Europe. She became such a huge star that whenever she was driven to public events such as a premiere, she was always flanked by policemen on motorcycles to protect her from adoring fans who packed the streets, clamouring for her. Every day after filming, she returned to her house to be greeted by newspaper photographers. She was in the limelight wherever she went, whatever she did, but she didn’t allow success to go to her head. ‘She was pleasant to her co-stars,’ said Wolfgang Preiss. ‘She liked to drink and smoke and could be a lot of fun. But she knew she was the star.’
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A huge star like her was an important propaganda tool. ‘Goebbels knew that, and he had her do a lot of things for the Third Reich.’
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She was happy to be filmed collecting for the winter relief fund.

In the opinion of Ingrid Segerstedt-Wiberg, who served in the Swedish resistance, ‘She didn’t hesitate to be used.’
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Leander gave the strong impression of being a supporter of Hitler and his regime. ‘I would say she was a Nazi sympathiser,’ said Preiss.

She became a regular guest of Goebbels, who was, after all, her boss, and she seemed fascinated by him, saying he ‘was an extremely interesting man’.
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She found him intelligent and cultured, and he also made her laugh. ‘One of the reasons Zarah liked Goebbels was because he had a sense of humour,’ said Preiss: