Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity (13 page)

This may or may not be an embellishment, but Olga did certainly meet Hitler for the first time at this event, as she recounted to Colonel Shkurin of SMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence organisation: ‘When Hitler came to power in 1933 I was invited to a reception given by Propaganda Minister Goebbels where Hitler was also present. I and other actors were introduced to Hitler. He expressed his pleasure at meeting me. Also he expressed his interest in Russian art and in my aunt, Olga Leonardovna Chekhova [Olga ‘Olya’ Knipper-Chekhova].’
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The OGPU, and later the NKVD, hoped Olga’s celebrity status would bring her into contact with people in ‘high places’, and it did. None were higher than Hitler, who now had what he had wanted for so long: to shine brighter than any other star in Germany and leave the hard work to others. His ministers ran the country while he travelled to deliver speeches, receive adulation and generally escape his responsibilities in Berlin.

Hitler’s life had become one of indolence, as recalled by Fritz Wiedemann, his personal adjutant:

Otto Dietrich recalled how Hitler’s indolence caused governmental chaos:

Hitler saw his responsibility as little more than presenting an image of himself to the public as a confident and strong leader whose orations, when he appeared at the Nuremberg rallies in the 1930s, promised a new and powerful Germany. He told a massed crowd of Hitler Youth:

That was all he had to do. There were no policies, just powerful speeches given with tremendous Wagnerian gusto that had his audience spellbound, so that they could do nothing else but be joined with him and his Germany.

The image he projected was of an omnipotent leader who prevailed over a system of total order, but in truth the structure of command in Hitler’s government was ‘very disorganised and rather chaotic’, as Ian Kershaw put it: ‘a remarkable system, if you can call it a system at all of one where there is no collective government but yet where the head of state himself actually doesn’t spend all his time dictating’.
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He had finally found the life he had sought – that of an artist who spent much of his time in leisure, doing the least amount of work and enjoying the perks of the job. On the afternoon of 26 July 1933 he arrived in Bayreuth for a concert and stayed for several days. On 29 July he was the guest of honour at a reception given to him by Winifred Wagner. The next morning he laid a wreath at the Master’s grave, and in the afternoon left Bayreuth for further undemanding duties he had set himself.

On 12 August he took part in a Richard Wagner festival in Neuschwanstein where, during his speech, he referred to himself as completing the plans of King Ludwig II, who had ruled Bavaria from 1864 until his death in 1886. Ludwig was an eccentric who commissioned the construction of several extravagant castles and palaces; he was also a devoted patron of Richard Wagner, sponsoring the premieres of
Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
and, through his financial support for the Bayreuth Festival,
Der
Ring des Nibelungen.
Without the king’s support Wagner would almost certainly not have been able to complete his opera cycle or his final opera,
Parsifal
. It was as if Hitler was claiming credit for the success of the Bayreuth Festival, which in a sense was true, because without continuing financial support from the Nazis the festival might well have closed.

Ludwig told the actress Marie Dahn-Hausmann, ‘I wish to remain an eternal enigma to myself and to others.’
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Hitler was taking his cue from the king, who was revered by Bavarians, although there remains the suspicion that the eccentric Ludwig may have been clinically insane, while some believe he may have suffered from the effects of chloroform used to control his chronic
toothache. Hitler disputed any suggestion Ludwig was insane, and yet Hitler himself was hardly the epitome of sanity.

He continued shirking his formal responsibilities, preferring to spend his time going to the opera and seeing movies. Alfred Rosenberg, leader of the party’s foreign political office responsible for encouraging links between the new regime and Great Britain, was indignant that Hitler shunned a demonstration he had organised in favour of an ice revue.
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It was left to Joseph Goebbels to defend his
Führer
’s inexplicable actions: ‘What we are constantly endeavouring to bring to bear has become for him a system in world-wide dimensions. His creativity is that of the genuine artist, no matter in what field he may be working.’

I
n late 1933 Hitler indulged his creative impulses to instigate and design what would become an annual celebration of the anniversary of the failed 1923 putsch in Munich, turning the disaster into a legendary triumph: ‘9 November 1923 was the most fortunate day of my life.’ The annual celebration began with a march of victory through Munich, during which Hitler laid a wreath in memory of the sixteen stormtroopers who were martyred during the failed coup. The procession continued on to two shrines erected on Hitler’s order in memory of the martyrs, whose names were read out in a roll of honour. Hitler proclaimed that in that hallowed place the fallen heroes had begun their eternal vigil. The solemn spectacle was captured on film, shot from every angle, the whole event carefully planned with Hitler himself virtually directing it as well as starring. Cinema, Hitler had learned, was the greatest form of communication of the twentieth century, and he had by then learned to control and use it to his best advantage. He had himself filmed solemnly paying his respects alone, in long shot, a solitary figure in magisterial isolation.

Hitler was free to be an artist with the whole of Germany as his canvas, putting little effort into governing Germany. Goebbels too had become free to indulge his creative interests by producing films and, more importantly to him, writing books published without fear of rejection.
Vom Kaiserhof zum Reichskanzlei
(1934) was his account of the seizure of power, lifted straight from his diaries. It was published in English in 1935 as
My Part in Germany’s Fight
and sold even better than it had in Germany.
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Goebbels also published a collection of his speeches in a pamphlet entitled
Revolution
of the Germans
, which sold over 10,000 copies in 1934, and a
photo-journalism book,
Das Erwachende Berlin
(
Berlin Awakening
), all adding to his now-considerable income as a minister, making him a wealthy man. He rented a lakeside house in Kladow on the Wannsee for himself and Magda, where they often entertained celebrities of film and music. He bought several new cars, and a motorboat in which he travelled the many waterways around Berlin and Potsdam.

The image Joseph and Magda presented of the ideal German marriage was a sham. He was opinionated, she strong willed, and they quarrelled frequently. Nevertheless, on 13 April 1934 Magda gave birth to a girl, Hilde; Goebbels was disappointed that the baby wasn’t a boy
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and complained that family life was making him ‘unbearably unfree’.
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The freedom he desired was to seduce glamorous actresses, but he was stuck in a marriage that was becoming increasingly miserable, and it was a problem he was becoming desperate to solve.

Hitler had a major problem of his own in 1934. The cause of it was Ernst Röhm, who had long wanted his SA, consisting of four million stormtroopers, to destroy the
Reichswehr
– Germany’s regular full-time army, which was later renamed the
Wehrmacht
– and stage an armed revolution to seize complete power by force.

On 29 June 1934, Hitler struck the fatal blow to the SA: accompanied by the SS, led by Heinrich Himmler, he arrived at Bad Wiessee, a holiday spa town on Lake Tegern in Bavaria, where he personally arrested Ernst Röhm and other SA leaders.

That night became known as ‘the Night of the Long Knives’, during which senior SA officers were arrested and shot, including Röhm. The exact number of men killed remains unknown but it is estimated at between 150 and 200. Goebbels’s propaganda revealed that Röhm and other SA leaders were homosexual, even though Hitler had known for many years of the sexuality of Röhm and many of his SA officers.

A month after the Night of the Long Knives, President
Hindenburg died. The nation mourned the man who had been little more than a figurehead for some time, and was the last obstacle in Hitler’s path. Two days later the
Reichstag
was dissolved, and Hitler became the
Führer
of all Germany. He was where he wanted to be – top of the bill.

At the Nuremberg rally in September 1934, Hitler announced to his party officials that the transfer of power was complete. ‘For the next thousand years,’ he declared, ‘there will be no revolutions in Germany.’ Banners and marching columns moved in endless combinations and patterns through the masses. Hitler understood the power of imagery. ‘A mass rally is designed to switch off the thinking process,’ he declared. ‘Only then would the people be ready to accept the magical simplifications before which all resistance crumbles.’ Instead of policies he gave the people pageantry and spectacle.

Leni Riefenstahl filmed the rally, and this time he gave her all the cameras she needed – no less than forty. The climax of the rally was the homage to the dead. Huge blocks of people formed the long, straight so-called ‘Road of the
Führer
’ down which Hitler walked to the memorial, with Himmler and the new SA chief, Viktor Lutze, behind him. Hitler never commemorated life, but he had learned to how celebrate death. He believed in three basic themes which all such ceremonies needed to project: power, order and solemnity. He had learned this from theatre, opera and most especially Wagner. His inspiration for his cult of death was
Götterdämmerung
, and he harboured morbid thoughts of his own
Twilight of the Gods
.

Leni Riefenstahl had all the imagery she needed to create cinematic magic, and the film she created,
Triumph of the Will
, is still considered the twentieth century’s most effective propaganda movie. She filmed using high cranes, and shot close-ups of individuals otherwise lost among the thousands of ‘extras’. The camera tracked along a line of blond Hitler youth, and adopted unusual camera angles to show the people looking up adoringly to Hitler while he looked down at them with what appeared to be love; in so doing Riefenstahl succeeded in conveying the ‘love’ between Hitler and the people.

From the opening shots of the clouds above the city, moving to float above the assembling masses below, portraying beauty and majesty and capturing the crucifixion-shaped shadow of Hitler’s plane as it passes over the tiny figures marching below – accompanied by Wagner’s
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
– through to the climax with the giant swastika banner fading into a line of silhouetted men in Nazi Party uniforms marching in formation,
Triumph of the Will
is a visual masterclass in screen imagery, and it captivated and seduced the population who hadn’t seen the event in person.

Her images of Hitler turned him into the idol he wanted to be. ‘When Hitler was seen in a film, he was always seen as the public wanted to see him,’ said Wilhelm Schneider, Hitler’s bodyguard. ‘He was really quite different. He himself said, “I’m actually the greatest film actor in Germany.”’
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He was also the film’s unofficial executive producer, and the overriding theme of the film is the return of Germany as a great power, with Hitler as the German Messiah bringing glory to the nation.

With Riefenstahl’s help, Hitler was fulfilling many of his dreams at once: performing, creating an illusion, if not with paint brushes then with the camera, and all the time enjoying the limelight and surrounded by thousands of extras. It was the making of the public Adolf Hitler; it was him as he wished he really was. Nobody was more famous than he. But more than that, he had become the figure of his fantasy, created by Wagner, to be the knight who would save the world, and enhanced all the more by Leni Riefenstahl’s brilliant cinematography, editing and sound. He was literally playing out the role he had created for himself, in a production of his own making, and Germany was his stage; music drove him forward as if life had become transformed into an opera in which he was the star, his cohorts his supporting cast and the nation his cast of unlimited extras.

Riefenstahl denied for the rest of her life that
Triumph of the Will
was a propaganda film. Even as late as 1976 she was on television arguing that the film was ‘purely a documentary with no influence
from the Party’. She later said she hadn’t wanted to do it. ‘I had only ten days to prepare
Triumph of the Will
. I had given it to another director, Walter Ruttmann. I didn’t want to make it. Not because I was against it but I really wanted to act, not direct.’
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The German army was unhappy about
Triumph of the Will
because they had played no part in it, so they commissioned Riefenstahl to make
Day of Freedom.
Filmed during manoeuvres, she turned sabre-rattling into an epic, capturing magnificent celluloid images of men, weapons and machinery, using close-ups to look down the barrels of big guns, and filming horsemen against the sun to create mystical silhouettes which John Ford would emulate in his cavalry Westerns.

Leni Riefenstahl was now a Nazi celebrity. She later denied having had anything to do with politics. Actor Bobby Freitag argued:

Riefenstahl’s friends maintained she was not anti-Semitic and had helped Jews under threat from the SS, such as the family of actress Evelyn Künnecke, whose father had Jewish in-laws. Riefenstahl intervened, asking Hitler to give the Künnecke family special dispensation. He ordered the SS to leave them alone,
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demonstrating that she had influence with Hitler.

But she was anti-Semitic; either that, or curiously naive. When in 1933 Béla Balázs asked her for what he considered to be his share of the profits from
Das Blaue Licht,
she asked her friend Julius Streicher, the Nuremberg
Gauleiter
, to represent her in the claim against her by ‘the Jew Béla Balázs’.

Her influence with leading Nazis, especially with Hitler, began to wear on Goebbels. Their working relationship had begun well,
and he had written in his diary, ‘She is the only one of all the stars who understands us’; but he saw her as a rival for Hitler’s affections.
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Wilfred von Oven, an advisor to Goebbels, recalled, ‘Leni Riefenstahl had a very good relationship with Hitler and she got what she wanted from him.’ For instance, she demanded scores of camera operators for the party congress films, but because there were never enough cameramen, production of other films, for which Goebbels was responsible, virtually came to a standstill. ‘After that he really hated her,’ said von Oven. ‘In response, she published the story that he’d put his hand up her skirt.’
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Not wanting or needing any conflict in his entourage, Hitler invited them to his villa for a reconciliation meeting. He also invited the press. Goebbels and Riefenstahl had no choice but to set aside their hostilities while they were photographed chatting with Hitler on the veranda and strolling with him through the garden. Watching the footage, it is hard to tell if the smiles are sincere or faked for the camera; Riefenstahl had long been an actress, and Goebbels had learned to perform as well.

With the endless conflicts of the German Republic now history, the German people settled into believing they were happy and at peace, but there was still widespread injustice and persecution of minorities, as well as unemployment and lasting humiliation by foreign powers. Despite what was going on behind the barbed wire of the concentration camps, Goebbels worked hard to promote a popular image. Christmas celebrations in the totalitarian welfare state were stage-managed, and Goebbels was filmed handing out presents to children. At a big Christmas party, Santa announced, ‘Now dear Uncle Göring will say a few words,’ and dear Uncle Göring did: ‘I am very pleased that you’ve all come along so that we can celebrate Christmas here together. And now my dear children, we should at this time give our
Führer
a thought.’ Uncle Göring was the cuddly human face of the Nazi Party, filmed handing out sweets and biscuits to children in public.
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The unemployed enjoyed totalitarian welfare, and some were taken on holidays on steamers to Madeira and the Norwegian
fjords; or rather, a select chosen few were taken and filmed, while all the rest hoped in vain their turn would come next.

Hitler encouraged large families, despite his obsession with
Lebensraum
– the ‘living space’ he sought for his ethnic Germans in the territories he intended to seize in eastern Europe. Babies were bred to grow into soldiers; boys and girls were prepared for their roles in the National Socialist state in militarised camps.

Goebbels and his wife Magda played their part by having six children in all: Helga Susanne (born 1 September 1932), Hildegard Traudel (13 April 1934), Helmut Christian (2 October 1935), Holdine Kathrin (19 February 1937), Hedwig Johanna (5 May 1938), and Heidrun Elisabeth (29 October 1940).