Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity (19 page)

Der ewige Jude
's reputation exceeds its commercial failure. Goebbels had made two versions, one for the public with many of its more explicit scenes, such as the slaughtering of animals, taken out, while the full unexpurgated version was seen by party activists. The public were not drawn to it, even at a time when cinema attendance was at an unprecedented high; it was withdrawn in Dresden after less than a week. Goebbels, disappointed with its reception, did not even refer to its commercial failure in his diaries.
381

By 1940 Hitler was at the peak of his power. He had gone from being a homeless drifter in 1914 to being ruler of the continent. But that was not enough for him. His goal was to extend the Reich to the Ural Mountains in western Russia, running from the Arctic Ocean to the Ural River and north-western Kazakhstan. It is the boundary between Europe and Asia, and everything on the western side of the border was to belong to him.

He looked westward, and at the beginning of April 1940 his forces swept into Denmark and Norway. A month later he marched against the old mortal enemy, France, then Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Many Jews who had fled to those countries from Nazi Germany found themselves in the very trap they had attempted to escape. German singer and actress Dora Gerson, whose first husband was one of Hitler's favourite film directors, Veit Harlan – they married in 1922 and divorced in 1924 – was a star on screen, in cabaret and on record. After 1933 she began recording music for a small Jewish record company; she also recorded in Yiddish, her 1936 song ‘Der Rebe Hot Geheysn Freylekh Zayn' (The Rebbe Has Bidden Us to Be Merry) being a favourite of European Jews in the 1930s. One of her most memorable recordings from this era was ‘Vorbei' (Beyond Recall), an emotional ballad which subtly memorialised Germany before the rise of the Nazi Party.

In 1936 Gerson, her second husband Max Sluizer and her relatives fled Nazi persecution in Germany and settled in the Netherlands, but on 10 May 1940 the family was caught again in the Nazi net when Germany invaded the Netherlands. Jews there were subject to the same anti-Semitic laws and restrictions as in Germany. In 1942 the Gerson family attempted to escape, but they were seized trying to flee to Switzerland, and sent by rail to Westerbork and then to Auschwitz. On 14 February 1943 the family died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz: Dora Gerson at the age of forty-three, her
husband and their two children, Miriam Sluizer, aged five, and Abel Juda Sluizer, not yet three.
382

Stopping his advance through France outside of Dunkirk, allowing the main body of the British Expeditionary Force to escape across the Channel during May and June 1940, Hitler accepted the French plea for an armistice, signed on 21 June 1940, and then drove into Paris for his first view of the city. After driving for three hours through the silence of empty streets he left, but the dream of his lifetime, he said, had been fulfilled.

In a prison in Paris was the former owner of the Pathé studio, Bernard Natan; his real name was Natan Tannenzaft, but he changed it to hide his Jewish identity.
383
Born in Romania in 1886, he left after the First World War to settle in France to become involved in the film industry. In France he made so-called ‘stag' films – hardcore pornographic shorts – but these were distinguished by their attention to plot, editing, costumes and overall production professionalism. He moved into mainstream cinema and worked as a publicity stringer for Paramount during the early 1920s. He developed his own production company, Rapid Film, and became a member of the executive committee of the Cinematographic Employers' Federation. By 1926, his film laboratory was highly regarded, and he established a marketing firm.

Natan was, despite his rather sordid beginnings, a pioneer of modern cinema. He is credited with having laid the foundation for the modern film industry in France, and helped revolutionise film technology around the world.
384
In 1928, he predicted that sound would have a major impact on the film industry and, realising that none of the big French studios were prepared for it, bought out the financially troubled Pathé-Cinéma, renaming it Pathé-Natan, and equipped it to produce talkies. He built two sound stages, and also financed and produced films for other studios.
385
Many of his films attracted attention for their political content, such as his 1934 film
The Last Billionaire
, which ridiculed Hitler and caused rioting among French Nazi sympathisers. The French press attacked
Natan for his stewardship of Pathé, and there were veiled references to Natan's homosexuality.
386

Pathé-Natan did well under Natan despite the world economic crisis. As well as investing in technology for sound films, he also launched two new cinema-related magazines,
Pathé-Revue
and
Actualités Féminines
, to help market Pathé's films. He also funded the research of Henri Chrétien into the development of the anamorphic lens – this later became the technology that became known as Cinemascope, followed by Panavision, and is still the most widely used system of creating widescreen pictures, in the cinema, on DVD and on TV.

He even established France's first television company in 1929, Télévision-Baird-Natan. A year later, he purchased a radio station in Paris and formed a holding company, Radio-Natan-Vitus, to run what would become a rapidly increasing radio empire.

In order to finance the company's continued expansion, Pathé's board of directors, which still included Charles Pathé, voted in 1930 to issue shares worth 105 million francs. But with the depression deepening, only 50 per cent of the shares were purchased. One of the investor banks collapsed, and Pathé was forced to follow through with the purchase of several cinema chains it could no longer afford to buy. The company began to lose more money than it could make.

In 1935 Pathé was bankrupt, and the French authorities indicted Bernard Natan on charges of fraud. He was accused of financing the purchase of the company without any collateral, of bilking investors by establishing fictitious shell corporations, and negligent financial mismanagement. He was even accused of hiding his Romanian and Jewish heritage by changing his name. He was imprisoned in 1939, and was behind bars when France fell to Hitler.

He was freed in September 1942, but almost immediately the French government handed him over to the Nazis, who were rounding up Jews for deportation. Natan was sent to Auschwitz on 25 September, and died there the following month. Hitler had his revenge for Natan's 1934 film
The Last Billionaire
.

After France fell, Leni Riefenstahl sent Hitler a telegram of congratulations: ‘With indescribable joy, deeply moved and full of warm gratitude, we are experiencing with you my
Führer
yours and Germany's great victory. Offering congratulations is not enough to express to you the feelings that move me.'
387

Hitler returned to Germany in triumph; his entry into Berlin was greeted with flowers and jubilation. For many Germans the war had seemed senseless at first, but Hitler's victories resulted in an almost unanimous flood of adoration and adulation, and also respect, for this was the man who had eradicated the humiliation of the First World War.

This was to be the last triumphal procession of his career.

France, in German hands, had become the place to see and be seen. Zarah Leander went to Paris in 1940 to be filmed signing autographs for the occupying German troops. Photographs of her posing with German soldiers and officers were seen back in Sweden.
388
Winifred Wagner also went to Paris in 1940 on an official mission along with singers from her opera house and conductor Herbert von Karajan to perform Wagner's works in celebration of Hitler's victory – a musical conclusion of a six-week campaign of warfare that would engulf much of the world;
389
Richard Wagner appearing right at the heart of the Second World War. He was even hijacked by Charlie Chaplin in his film
The Great Dictator
, which was premiered in New York in September 1940 to great acclaim and went on achieve to big box office. While Goebbels had been supervising the making of
Der ewige Jude
, Charlie Chaplin had been making
The Great Dictator
in Hollywood. Chaplin's film opened in the UK in December; the British government now welcomed his satire on Hitler as essential propaganda.

In one of the film's most famous scenes, Hynkel dances with a large, inflatable globe while dreaming of being Emperor of the world and listening to the Prelude to Act I of Wagner's
Lohengrin
. Suddenly the globe pops, and the music ends. Chaplin was prophesying the downfall of Hitler as the great bubble burst to the strains of Wagner. Hitler was incensed, but Chaplin's name was already
marked for death. Chaplin's prophecy proved more powerful than the one Hitler received from Wagner.

The Great Dictator
might never have been made if Chaplin had not begun work on it as early as he did; he later stated that he would not have made the film had he known the true extent of the Nazis' crimes.
390
But Hitler feared Chaplin's masterpiece because he understood the power of the moving picture. With Goebbels, he would respond with a film even more powerful, but one which would be reviled for decades to come.

‘H
itler knew the power of films,’ observed Wolfgang Preiss. ‘He was probably the first leader of a country to use the medium of moving pictures to inspire and even indoctrinate. Joseph Goebbels too knew the power of film, and that movie
Jud
Süß
became the opinion of the German nation. The strength of power that a film can have is terrifying.’
391

In November 1939 Goebbels commissioned a new film adaptation,
Jud Süß
. It originated from an 1827 novella of the same name by Wilhelm Hauff, a writer of historical romances. His original story was based on the true tale of Joseph Süß (or Suss) Oppenheimer, a Jewish financial advisor to Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg in Stuttgart. Oppenheimer established a duchy monopoly on the trade of salt, leather, tobacco and alcohol, and founded a bank and a porcelain factory;
392
in the process he made many enemies. When Duke Alexander died, Oppenheimer was arrested and accused of fraud, embezzlement, treason, lecherous relations with the court ladies, accepting bribes, and trying to re-establish Catholicism. The Jewish community unsuccessfully tried to ransom him, but at his trial, despite no evidence being offered against him, he was sentenced to death. He refused to convert to Christianity and was led to the gallows on 4 February 1738, where he was given a final chance to convert to Christianity but refused.
393

The short story was turned into a full-length novel by German-Jewish playwright and novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, and it was translated into English as
Power
. There followed a 1927 stage production in Germany, which was then translated into Yiddish and produced by Maurice Schwartz for New York’s Yiddish theatres in 1929. There was also a 1920 London production, by Ashley
Dukes, a Broadway play in January 1930, and then a new Berlin production in 1930 by Paul Kornfeld. None of the published stories or stage productions was anti-Semitic.

The first film version, based on Feuchtwanger’s novel, was made in Britain in 1935.
Jew Süss
starred Conrad Veidt, Emmy Göring’s former co-star, as Oppenheimer, and was directed by Lothar Mendes. While the film condemned anti-Semitism, the British censors did not allow it to criticise persecution of the Jews; knowing that anti-Semitism was growing in Germany under the Nazis, Britain did not want the film to become a diplomatic incident. It found little success in America or Europe, and was banned in Vienna. The world at that time cared little about the plight of the Jews. Goebbels was adamant that ‘a new film version had to be made’.
394

When Goebbels set his mind on turning
Jud Süß
into a Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda picture, he commissioned Ludwig Metzger to write the screenplay, but he found Metzger’s draft of the script to be insufficiently anti-Semitic. He assigned playwright Eberhard Wolfgang Möller to work with Metzger; Möller’s task was to ensure that the script met Goebbels’s ideological objectives.

Veit Harlan was assigned to direct the film. Harlan had not been directing for long, and in fact had started out as an actor who studied under Max Reinhardt and made his stage debut in 1915 aged just sixteen. In 1922 he married Jewish actress and cabaret singer Dora Gerson (who later died at Auschwitz with her family, as documented in the previous chapter). After she left him to marry a Jew, Harlan married actress Hilde Körber, with whom he had three children. They divorced over political differences when he supported National Socialism. After directing Swedish actress Kristina Söderbaum in two films, he married her in 1939.

Söderbaum had left Sweden in 1933, after both her parents had died, to enrol in a theatre school in Berlin. She became a top star of German cinema, specialising in Aryan maiden roles. Harlan completely possessed her; she made films only for him, and in almost all of their films together he made her perform dangerous
stunts that most other actors would have baulked at. Filming
Opfergang
(
The Great Sacrifice
), he waited until the waves of the North Sea were big enough, then made her ride into it on her white horse; it was November and the sea was freezing. In the same film, she rode a horse into a cage containing six tigers. ‘He gave her personal feelings scant regard in his professional life,’ said Harlan’s son Casper.
395

Goebbels appointed him as one of his leading propaganda directors in 1937, when Harlan made
Der Herrscher
(
The Ruler
), which laced drama with ideological content and propagated the Nazi cult of the genius. It starred Germany’s most famous actor, Emil Jannings, who taught Hitler how best to use his voice when speaking to an audience. His character spoke of the state as being ‘our national community’, and of a conviction that from among the common workforce would come the man ‘who is born to lead, [who] needs no other teacher than his own genius.’ It was a direct reference to Hitler.

After reading Harlan’s script ideas for
Jud Süß
, Goebbels wrote on 15 December 1939, ‘Harlan reworked brilliantly the Jew Süss film. This will be
the
anti-Semitic film.’

There was no question that Kristina Söderbaum would play the female lead because she was Harlan’s wife and she was in all his films. She also had considerable box office appeal. As the archetypal naive, childlike woman with natural blond hair and Aryan looks, Söderbaum had become one of the highest paid female stars of German cinema. She embodied purity, and Harlan exploited her qualities and charisma to enhance the kind of dramatic, sentimental and somewhat gloomy films he leaned towards. Her characters usually died, and Söderbaum was nicknamed ‘the water corpse’ because in 1938’s
Youth
, she made a beautiful corpse found lying in a river; in
Jud Süß
, her body was ferried across the river by
boatmen
; then in
The Great Sacrifice
in 1942, her spirit appeared to pass through gates into a heavenly ocean.

Her son Casper Harlan felt Söderbaum should not be reproached for her part in
Jud Süß
. She had ‘gone through thick and thin with
[Veit Harlan] and done everything that he told her to,’ he said. ‘My mother’s strengths didn’t include her intellect or her analytical abilities. She had no idea what she had done there.’
396

Söderbaum, however, said that she
did
understand, and was shocked by Harlan’s decision to make
Jud Süß
. She recalled, ‘He came home, pale in the face, said, “I’ll tell you about it later.” And then he told me that night, after lights out. He said, “Yes! I have to make the film.” And I sat up straight and said, “You simply cannot do this!”’ Over the years following
Jud Süß
, she was at pains to emphasise that she was not anti-Semitic: ‘It was a well-known fact that anti-Semitism was present in Germany. And it was after 1938 and I began experiencing those terrible things. I wasn’t in Berlin on
Kristallnacht
, but it was 1938 and even if you’d seen nothing, you still knew that people were being persecuted.’
397

Harlan’s claim that he was ‘coerced’ by Goebbels to make
Jud Süß
was dismissed by his own granddaughter, Jessica Jacoby, who believed her grandfather hoped that by fulfilling this commission he would be allowed to continue making films: ‘It wasn’t fear that drove him,’ she said. ‘He was working with material that meant something to him, and he moulded it to perfection because of this … Scruples? No, he certainly had none.’ Harlan’s son Jan described him as ‘an ambitious man who got himself the career he wanted.’
398
After the war, Harlan would claim that he rewrote the script so that it was less anti-Semitic than the Metzger/Möller script; but it was Harlan’s idea to add an important sequence designed to increase the audience’s hatred for Süß in which he is responsible for the execution of a blacksmith.
399
Despite this, Casper Harlan said his father ‘was certainly not anti-Semitic. And certainly not a Nazi. He spoke so derogatorily about Nazis. He can’t have been one.’ Harlan’s daughter Maria Körber said her father had many Jewish friends. ‘They loved him. Our doctor was Jewish. We had Jews all around us.’
400

Yet Jessica Jacoby said, ‘I believe that [Veit Harlan] really had a huge problem with Jewish culture and with the Jewish religion.’ When his first wife Dora left him and married a Jew, ‘this hurt
his ego.’ For
Jud Süß
, ‘He draws on all of the anti-Jewish imagery and depictions throughout the centuries. Thus all his resentment and rejection of this culture finds expression this way.’ Veit Harlan, and his reasons for making
Jud Süß
, remains an enigma for his whole family.

The lasting controversy split Harlan’s family. Another son, Thomas, believed his claim that he made the film against his will, but he could not understand why his father coerced his wife to make a film he felt to be ‘reprehensible’. ‘Why put her in a position where she will do something immoral that I want to avoid?’ asked Thomas Harlan. ‘She’s a free woman. Goebbels can’t give her orders.’ But Goebbels
could
order any actor to be in a film, or suffer the consequences. Ferdinand Marian, who played Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, was forced to play the vile title role.

Marian led a private, very secretive life which belied the image he built as a Nazi supporter and ardent anti-Semite. The son of a Viennese opera singer, he abandoned his studies to be an engineer to work as an extra in theatres in Austria and then Germany. His first film was 1933’s
Der Tunnel
(
The Agitator
), by which time he was thirty-one, but his big breakthrough was in
La Habanera
in 1937 with Zarah Leander. His career was completely overshadowed by
Jud Süß
, in which he gave a highly exaggerated performance of the caricatured materialistic, immoral, cunning and untrustworthy Jew Joseph Oppenheimer.

Marian’s personal life bore no resemblance to his role in
Jud Süß
, or the appearance such a role gave him. He had a half-Jewish daughter from his first marriage to Jewish pianist Irene Saager. His second wife Maria Byk’s former husband, theatre director Julius Gellner, was also Jewish, and Marian and Byk protected him from reprisals by hiding him in their home at great risk to themselves. Marian’s only reason for taking on the role in
Jud Süß
was fear of reprisals which would have probably led to his secret being uncovered.
401

While Ferdinand Marian’s Oppenheimer was shaven and wore gentile clothing, all the other Jewish characters were visually
stereotyped to look ‘alien’ – that is, non-German – such as the character of Rabbi Loew, as played by Werner Krauß (Krauss). Krauß was a classical actor, famous for his sensational demonic portrayal of the title character in
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
in 1920, and for his Shakespearean roles on stage. In 1933 he performed with the Vienna
Burgtheater
in
Campo di Maggio
(
100 Days of Napoleon
), which was written by Giovacchino Forzano and Benito Mussolini, another dictator who considered himself an artist. Krauß was subsequently received by Mussolini and became acquainted with Joseph Goebbels, who appointed him Vice President of the
Reichskulturkammer
theatre department and also gave him the title of
Staatsschauspieler
– State Actor. A dedicated Nazi, Krauß was personally appointed by Hitler to be his cultural ambassador. He played a succession of stereotypical Jewish characters, which led to his casting as Rabbi Loew in
Jud Süß
, and in 1943 he played a ‘particularly loathsome’ Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice
at the
Burgtheater
.
402

If it is true that Veit Harlan made the film because he was ordered to by Goebbels then, as Thomas Harlan wondered, ‘Why did he have to make it so well?’
403
Veit Harlan exploited the Jews of the ghettos of Prague and Lublin for crowd scenes, and sent a postcard from Lublin to Thomas saying, ‘You can’t imagine how glad the Jews are to work with me.’ Thomas later wondered if his father ‘really believed that those people who were soon to be killed would have been so happy to be allowed to celebrate their religion in peace one last time? What did they know of their end? What did my father know of it?’
404

Jud Süß
opened in September 1940 and was seen by around twenty million Germans, and another twenty million people watched it throughout Europe. A week after the premiere, Heinrich Himmler released an official communiqué demanding that all SS and policemen see the picture: ‘I wish that measures be taken to ensure that all SS men and policemen see
Jew Süss
during the winter.
Reichsführer-SS
, Heinrich Himmler.’

Lion Feuchtwanger was incensed at the way in which his novel had been manipulated and distorted, calling the film a ‘
Schandwerk
’
(‘shameful work’). In 1941 he wrote an open letter to the film’s leading actors, expressing his shock that they would agree to participate in Goebbels’s propaganda film.
405
Jessica Jacoby called
Jud Süß
‘a call to persecute and kill the Jews in Germany and the rest of Europe’. Thomas Harlan said the film ‘became a murder weapon’.
406
While Wagner was the driving force behind Hitler’s madness,
Jud Süß
was part of the Nazi programme to drive German people to intense hatred of the Jews; in German cinemas, audiences yelled ‘Kick the Jews out!’ when Oppenheimer introduced Jews into Stuttgart, which they found threatening to their way of life. The film is considered the most reviled film in cinema history.

There is much more to
Jud Süß
than a controversy and hate-stirring. Like most – if not all – of the films commissioned by Joseph Goebbels from the late 1930s to the end of the war, it is a reflection of Hitler: his deluded belief in his own infallibility, his philosophies that sprang more strongly from Wagner than from any other inspiration, and his penchant for covering up the truth with the biggest of lies.