Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity (18 page)

During 1939 Hitler made his annual visit to Bayreuth, where he recounted the night he and Kubizek went to see
Rienzi
and of the vision that had come upon Hitler.
363

In March 1939 Hitler invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia, despite all his promises to the contrary. He entered Prague with his troops, and occupied the old royal castle overlooking the city. From its window he acknowledged the applause of the hastily assembled crowd; there were few who turned out to greet him like a hero, and no flowers either. Himmler and Heydrich accompanied him for the whole world to see, and it was their henchmen who occupied the country.

A wave of fear swept through Europe as people learned that Germany had mobilised. Nations hurriedly began to organise defences, but no one was properly prepared for the prospect of war.

Four weeks after conquering Prague, Hitler celebrated his fiftieth birthday. Winifred Wagner decorated the
Festspielhaus
and gave him a very special birthday present, Richard Wagner’s original scores for
Das Rheingold
and
Die Walküre
(
The Valkyrie
), which were priceless and irreplaceable; they were lost during the last days of the Second World War.
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Goebbels gave him a collection of 120 films for screening at the Berghof. Hitler often kept all his guests up into the early hours of the morning as he lectured them on whatever film they had just seen.

Marking the occasion was a huge military parade designed by Hitler himself to fire the enthusiasm of the hesitant German public, and to show the world what they faced if they opposed him.

Hitler didn’t need policies when he had all this to give to the German people – an awe-inspiring spectacle to convince them that their country was strong at last. He had a talent for the art of deception, and he made them believe this strength would secure peace. But he had only war in mind. His aims were far more than the unification of German territories. It was the conquest of
Lebensraum
– his living space was to be found by seizing territories in eastern Europe, beginning with Poland. His hope was for a dominion that would stretch all the way from the North Sea to the Urals.

He kept up the deception, and visitors to Berlin met an amiable and relaxed
Führer
, happy to give them all his time. As soon as he had done his duty as Chancellor in Berlin, he retired back to his retreat at the Berghof, which had virtually become his official residence. From there, he could look across the Untersberg Mountain, the legendary resting place of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Hitler said that it was at the Berghof, gazing at the mountains, that he made all his most important decisions. He rarely came to a quick conclusion over any matter, and sometimes spent weeks
mountain-gazing
, allowing months of inactivity.

Few saw the private Hitler but his regular visitors to the Berghof, who were always the same close friends with their wives, aides and secretaries. Eva Braun filmed them on her colour 16mm camera which Hitler had given to her. The development of the 16mm
camera, and the projectors that ran the film stock, long preceded the video and digital camcorders of today in allowing individuals to record and view moments from their personal lives. The film that Braun took of one of these functions at the Berghof can still surprise and fascinate the viewer. The cast included Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, and Joseph Goebbels, who came from Berlin for this friendly get-together. Albert Speer, Hitler’s favourite architect, had a house of his own on the Obersalzberg, so was there more often than most. Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, the dreaded SS chiefs, were dressed in middle-class suits rather than their uniforms of terror. They all laughed and joked on the terrace, full of bonhomie, while Hitler took little part in the fun and games. He emerged looking awkward and inhibited as Eva turned the camera on him, yet Eva caught one surprising moment when Hitler appeared to imitate someone he and his henchmen had been discussing.
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There are some shots of Eva herself, and one can only speculate whether Hitler himself used the camera on her.

The film taken of this jocular gathering is misleading. Recalling the atmosphere at the Berghof, Albert Speer remembered ‘only a sense of oppression and emptiness’ which surrounded Hitler wherever he went. Whenever Hitler left the house, for meetings or mass rallies, which were becoming rarer, the gloominess went with him.

In May 1939 Goebbels went to see Olga Tschechowa performing in the play
Aimée
– ‘The piece was not up to much, but
la
Tschechowa
played wonderfully,’ he wrote.
366
He visited her after the performance, talking and laughing with her and Carl Raddatz before finally retiring late to bed. Ten days later Olga invited Goebbels for Sunday lunch; Goebbels had been working that morning and noted what ‘a beautiful, sunny Sunday’ it was, and he ‘laughed and chatted all afternoon. That does do much good after a day’s work.’
367
Perhaps Olga Tschechowa felt some sympathy for him because of his broken heart – or perhaps she was in the role of ‘Rose Marie’, listening to anything he had to say with greater interest than he ever imagined.

Later that month, Tschechowa was seated next to Hitler at a
lavish garden party given for the diplomatic corps by Joachim von Ribbentrop. That evening she danced with Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister, who broached the subject of her playing Anna Karenina in Italy. As Olga was leaving the party, she heard Goebbels say to Magda that she and Contessa Attolico, the wife of the Italian ambassador, should keep the Italians in the little salon as they are ‘poking their noses everywhere’. Perhaps Goebbels disapproved of the Italians trying to poach
la Tschechowa
.
368

Olga attended an increasing number of Nazi functions, including a huge candlelit reception given by Hermann Göring as part of eight days of celebrations in honour of the Yugoslav regent, Prince Paul, and his wife Princess Olga. Every guest was dressed in the period of Frederick the Great, using costumes from the numerous films that had been made about him. ‘After supper I sat in the garden with the royal couple, and we spoke about my films and my guest appearances,’ she said,
369
later maintaining that her presence had been specially requested by the prince because his half-Russian wife Princess Olga was a fan and had wanted to meet her; this may have been true, but may also have been and attempt to create a smoke screen for her more covert activities.

Olga’s role as a ‘sleeper’ agent was to establish contact with German generals and officials who opposed a war with Russia, but it is thought that she had lost touch with Moscow from 1937 as a result of the purges Stalin had carried out on the Red Army. Her brother Lev Knipper was still active and had continued to travel extensively because of his growing reputation as a composer, earning plaudits in 1934 for his Third and Fourth Symphonies; this allowed him to carry out assignments for the OGPU, most of which were to provide intelligence on émigré intellectuals, and also to report on Russians of German origins within the Soviet Union.

In the summer of 1939 Goebbels and Magda attended the Salzburg Festival, where she confessed that she was having an affair with Propaganda State Secretary Karl Hanke, plunging Goebbels deeper into despair. At the Bayreuth Festival, Magda came close to a public breakdown. Goebbels took the position of the injured party,
which had the effect of lightening his spirits. He also arranged for Hanke to serve in the
Wehrmacht
. Goebbels was now seeing more of Hitler, who, preparing for war, needed his Propaganda Minister and publicist at his side.

I
t was not just the Jews of Europe who had reason to fear Hitler's new laws. In Hollywood in 1938, movie legend Charlie Chaplin received a package sent from Germany. Inside it he found a book,
Juden sehen Dich an
(
The Jews are Watching You
), by Dr Johann von Leers, a vehement anti-Semite Nazi. The book included names and photographs of leading Jews worldwide – activists, bankers, economists, journalists, academics and entertainers – and warned the German people that these people were forming an international network aimed at world domination. In the section named ‘Artistic Jews' Chaplin found his own name and photograph, branding him a ‘pseudo-Jew'.

The book had been sent to him by a filmmaker called Ivan Montague, who was working in Berlin. Chaplin wrote back to Montague, thanking him for the book, a warning that he was on Hitler's hit list of Jews to be murdered; many of the people featured in the book had already been killed.
370

Goebbels mistakenly thought Chaplin was Jewish; it was a common mistake, but Chaplin refused to deny it. He declared, ‘Anyone who denies this in respect of himself plays into the hands of the anti-Semites.' In response to seeing himself on the book's hit list he made
The Great Dictator
, the first film made in Hollywood to satirise Hitler and the Nazis.

When Chaplin first started working on his script in 1938, the United States government was still anxious about stirring up trouble with Hitler, and nearly all the major Hollywood studio heads were cautious in presenting films that were disagreeable to Hitler, Mussolini or Spain's Francisco Franco, for fear of losing income in European film markets. Many of the studio heads warned Chaplin
not to make his film, and Will Hays, the head of the film industry's Production Code Administration, stated anti-Nazi films were in violation of the nation's neutrality stance. The British government announced that it would prohibit its release in the United Kingdom in keeping with its appeasement policy concerning Nazi Germany.

Nonetheless, with more than one million of his own dollars behind the film, Chaplin prepared the story throughout 1938 and 1939, turning Adolf Hitler the
Führer
into Adenoid Hynkel the
Phooey
of Tomania. Filming began in September 1939, Chaplin directing the movie and playing two roles: a simple Jew living in the fictional nation of Tomania, and Fascist dictator Adenoid Hynkel.

A week before filming began, Hitler launched his attack on Poland on the morning of 1 September 1939. On 3 September, England and France declared war on Germany. The world went to war against Germany for the second time.

Unity Mitford was so distraught upon hearing of the declaration of war she went to the English Garden in Munich, took a
pearl-handled
pistol, given to her by Hitler for protection, and shot herself in the head.
371
Miraculously, she survived the suicide attempt and was hospitalised in Munich where she was visited by Hitler, who paid her bills and arranged for her return home. She died in 1948 from meningitis, caused by the cerebral swelling around the lodged bullet, which doctors had decided had was too dangerous to remove. She had succeeded in committing suicide after all, joining the list of women close to Hitler who took their own lives.

Hitler visited the front line in Poland, officially to congratulate the troops, but he had turned the war into a media opportunity and was congratulating only himself. He was followed by Leni Riefenstahl, who arrived in the small Polish town of Końskie five
days after the first attack. She came with a film crew, hoping to film German victories, but all she saw was horror and devastation. She and her crew visited a military base where several
Wehrmacht
soldiers had been shot in an attack; their bodies lay covered in blood. Leaving the camp, Riefenstahl witnessed thirty-one Jews being rounded up to dig the graves for the dead soldiers. Then they were shot. Riefenstahl watched in horror and fainted. She had not imagined the German victory would look like this, and she and her crew left Poland. She nevertheless remained devoted to her
Führer
.

Eight days after the war began, German troops reached Warsaw and began their siege. The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east: Hitler had struck a bargain with Stalin. The precise boundaries had been drawn up; the Soviet part of Poland was to be renamed the Western Ukraine.

After only two weeks of war, Warsaw fell. When Hitler saw the burning city, he was literally spellbound, always overwhelmed by the vision of fire and smoke and devastation, and probably seeing some vision of the world in this destructive state. He warned that this was the fate awaiting all who opposed him.
372

At this time, Lev Knipper was called to active duty by the NKVD, which had superseded the OGPU, and sent into the so-called Western Ukraine. Issued with a Walther pistol, he travelled with a group of Red Army dancers as a cover, but his real purpose was to interrogate Germans picked up by the NKVD; Soviet intelligence was positive that the
Abwehr
, Germany's secret spy network, was infiltrating Soviet Poland, and Lev was said to be responsible for unmasking German espionage as well as identifying an
Abwehr
agent with the codename Alma.
373

Fritz Hippler, who had a high position in the Propaganda Ministry's film office, and scores of film cameramen had been sent by Goebbels into Poland with the
Blitzkrieg
– lightning war – to film the invasion and occupation of Poland which became the documentary
Feldzug in Polen
(
The Campaign in Poland
), which featured breathtaking footage that had cinema attendances in Germany rising dramatically.
374
Hippler remained in Poland to film scenes in
the Jewish ghettos that were set up for a film Goebbels personally commissioned,
Der ewige Jude
(
The Eternal Jew
). The title was the German term for the character of the ‘Wandering Jew,' a figure from medieval Christian folklore who taunted Jesus on the way to Calvary and was cursed to wander the earth until the Second Coming.

There had been a 1934 British film called
The Eternal Jew
which had portrayed the Jews in a favourable light and as the victims of persecutions through the ages. Goebbels liked it so much he wanted it remade with the emphasis on portraying the Jews as wandering parasites; it was a violently anti-Semitic remake.
375
The film had been planned for around a year, and even before the invasion of Poland, Goebbels had called the film ‘the most cutting anti-Semitic propaganda that could be imaged'.
376
The invasion of Poland provided Goebbels and Hippler with the opportunity of filming real Jews in squalid conditions.

Hippler filmed the most abject examples of poverty he could find in Warsaw and Łódź. An early shot in the film shows a pack of rats emerging from a sewer and is juxtaposed with a crowd of Jews in a bustling street in a city in Poland. Over close-ups of Jews with twisted facial features, the narrator – German theatre and voice actor Harry Giese – relates how Jews are the vermin of the human race which spread disease and corruption. Scenes depicted Jews preferring to live in filthy homes, unwilling to spend their riches on better and healthier surroundings. The film portrayed Jews as people who found pleasure only in money and a hedonist lifestyle while the Aryans found satisfaction in physical labour. The Jewish preference for the decadent and grotesque was contrasted to the Aryan's appreciation of culture.

With the assistance of the SS, Hippler forced Jews to slaughter animals and read from the Torah for scenes intended to condemn Jewish religious and kosher laws. ‘The Torah scroll is rolled to the place to be read,' said the narrator. ‘What sort of “truth” does it teach? …This is not a religion – it's a conspiracy against all non-Jews by a sick, deceitful poisoned race against the Aryan peoples and their moral laws.'

Hippler filmed a scene featuring the 24-member
Judenrat
(Jewish Council), which had been set up by the Nazis to be responsible for implementing Nazi orders in the new Jewish ghetto. On 4 October 1939 they appointed as its head Adam Czerniaków, a Polish-Jewish engineer who had been elected to the Polish senate. For his scenes in
Der ewige Jude
he was made to gesticulate wildly because, Hippler said, ‘That is how Jews speak.'

(On 22 July 1942, the
Judenrat
received instructions from the SS that all Warsaw Jews were to be ‘resettled' to the east. Czerniaków went to work immediately to secure exemptions for a number of individuals such as the wives of Jews who had already been exempted because of certain kinds of work – factory workers, hospital staff, sanitation workers, and Jewish ghetto police – but he was unable to secure exemptions for the children from the Janusz Korczak orphanage. The very next day, 23 July, Czerniaków committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill.)

Footage of many notable Jews was included in
Der ewige Jude
, breaking copyright laws which neither Goebbels nor Hippler cared about. Albert Einstein was shown adjacent to a series of images that suggested Jews controlled the pornography industry. Charlie Chaplin was also featured. So was Peter Lorre, featured in a scene from Fritz Lang's
M
in which he played a Jewish child murderer.

The final scene featured footage of Hitler giving a public speech in January 1939 which ended with him saying, ‘If the international finance-Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations into a world war yet again, then the outcome will not be the victory of Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.'

The Nazi publication
Unser Wille und Weg
told the German people that the film revealed ‘a full picture of Jewry' and provided ‘the best treatment of this parasitic race'. The film was complimented for ‘its portrayal of the Jews' vulgar methods and the brutality and all-devouring hatred they exhibit when they reach their goal and control finance.' The uncredited author of this piece urged, ‘We are the initiators of the fight against world Jewry, which now
directed its hate, its brutal greed and destructive will towards us. We must win this battle for ourselves, for Europe, for the world.'
377

Goebbels credited Hippler ‘for his excellent work in the newsreel department',
378
but after the war Hippler – an active Nazi for many years – tried to dissociate himself from the party's actions, particularly in relation to the Holocaust, insisting he knew nothing about the Jews in the death camps. He also disavowed his role in making of
Der ewige Jude
, maintaining until his death in 2002 that he merely shot some of the footage while Goebbels put the film together, and that Goebbels was the creator of the film under Hitler's close supervision – an unlikely scenario because Hitler did not involve himself in the work of his ministers. Hitler approved of films like
Der ewige Jude
but took no part in the making of them. However, Goebbels did work closely with Hippler on editing the film for a year.

Hippler regretted being named director on the film's credits because that resulted in him being interrogated by the Allies, which he thought unfair because he had nothing to do with the killing of the Jews.
379
In a 2000 interview for the German documentary series
Holocaust
, he even said that
Der ewige Jude
was ‘the most disgraceful example of anti-Semitism'.

Like Leni Riefenstahl and other makers of Nazi propaganda films, Hippler was unable to accept responsibility for his contribution to Nazi idealism. The film remains banned from public transmission in Germany except for use as an educational tool, and even then only under the condition that the exhibitors have formal education in ‘media science and the history of the Holocaust'.
380