Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity (21 page)

Olga did eventually fall from Goebbels’s good graces when her mother Lulu publicly snubbed him at a theatre.
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Goebbels had a new favourite to fawn over, Marika Rökk, a blonde Hungarian singer, dancer and actress born in Cairo to a Hungarian architect, Eduard Rökk, and his wife Maria Karoly. Marika had danced at the Moulin Rouge in Paris as one of the Gertrude Hoffman Girls, and the troupe toured several American cities and performed on Broadway, leading to Marika’s film debut in the American movie
Sailors Leave Home
in 1930. Soon after, she signed a contract with UFA to star in several operettas including
Leichte Kavallerie
(
Light Cavalry
), but her breakthrough was in
Kora Terry
, directed by Georg Jacoby, whom she married. The film featured several dance routines which were quite revealing for the time – perhaps that’s why Goebbels fixated upon her. What he didn’t know, however, was that she was funnelling information to Soviet intelligence.
420

He decided Rökk would be the first female star to appear in a film using Germany’s new Agfacolor system, designed to compete with Hollywood’s Technicolor. It produced a dream-like pastel quality, emphasising golden and warm tones.
Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten
(
Women Are Better Diplomats
) was the first Agfacolor film, and proved to be a tremendous success; it cost 2.8 million marks to make and earned 7.9 million when released in 1941.

There is no evidence that Marika Rökk had an affair with Goebbels, but he would have undoubtedly attempted to encourage her to grace his casting couch, as he did with all the starlets who came to UFA and were known as ‘
Goebbels-Gesfielinnen
’ –
Goebbels’s playthings. Insiders joked that he did not sleep in his own bed but in his own big ‘
Klappe
’, the slang word for ‘mouth’ which also meant ‘clapperboard’.

During the war years Heinz Rühmann, the non-political actor and Zarah Leander’s friend, finally gave in to pressure from Goebbels to make a film that would be of use to the Third Reich. Under the direction of
Reichsfilmkammer
President Carl Froelich, Rühmann played the title role in
Der Gasmann
, about a gas meter reader who is suspected of foreign espionage. Rühmann was a favourite actor of Anne Frank, who pasted his picture on the wall of her room in her family’s hiding place in Amsterdam during the war, where it can still be seen today.

On 16 July 1941, Hitler addressed a meeting of his ministers, including
Reichsmarschall
Hermann Göring, to discuss how the occupied Soviet territories were to be administered. Hitler declared that the Soviet territories west of the Urals were to become a ‘German Garden of Eden’, and that ‘naturally this vast area must be pacified as quickly as possible; this will happen best by shooting anyone who even looks sideways at us.’
421

Göring and
Reichsführer-SS
Heinrich Himmler understood this to mean they had the authority to proceed with the
Endlösung der jüdischen Frage
– the Final Solution of the Jewish Question.
SS-Obergruppenführer
Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office, received written authorisation from Göring to draw up and submit a ‘comprehensive draft’ of a plan for the Final Solution.
422

Goebbels’s predictions that German troops would be in Moscow by Christmas were looking more realistic as Moscow was bombed for the first time on 22 July 1940. Field Marshal von Bock’s Army Group Centre with 1.5 million men swept towards the Russian capital, and within days food was short in Moscow. There, Olga’s uncle Vladimir Knipper, one of Moscow’s leading opera singers, received a free lunch of soup and potatoes each day at the Central House of Workers in the Arts.
423
He had the chance to leave Moscow with a group of actors from the Moscow Art Theatre, including
Aunt Olya Knipper-Chekhova, which was being evacuated to the Caucasus. Knipper refused to leave his precious piano and books behind, and he stayed.

In Germany, Hitler was planning the rest of his war against Russia; his inspiration was still
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
. He said in 1941, ‘Let’s learn from the English who, with 250,000 men in all, including 50,000 soldiers, governed 400 million Indians. What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us.’ It was hardly a realistic approach to modern warfare, but he was so caught up in his own fantasy that he pressed on. On 30 September, Operation Typhoon was launched against the Russian capital.

With the enemy at the gates, Lev Knipper urged Uncle Vladimir to evacuate, but Vladimir still refused to leave his beloved piano and books. Meanwhile Lev and his wife, NKVD agent Mariya Melikova, were assigned a special mission that would involve Lev’s movie star sister. The mission was to kill Hitler.

Expecting the Germans to occupy Moscow, Lev and Mariya were to ‘defect’ if the opportunity arose, with Lev claiming that he had been persecuted for being a German and an artist, and declaring he longed only to work with the liberators and most especially to be reunited with his sister, the famous German film star Olga Tschechowa. All Olga had to do was verify Lev’s story about his German background and perhaps appear in Moscow at the same time as Hitler. With eleven men especially assigned to him, all equipped with remote control grenades, explosives and guns, Lev was to use Olga to get close enough to Hitler to kill him. It was like a plot out of a movie, but this was a real plot – to kill Hitler, and Olga Tschechowa was the star. That was really the extent of Olga’s participation, and it is very likely that she never knew what Lev intended to do, or that she was even being used, because Moscow didn’t fall. Siberian divisions and tanks which had been held in reserve launched a series of counter-attacks, and the Germans fell back.

Apart from this being the moment when Moscow was saved and the tide of the war turned against Hitler, it also meant that Hitler
would never come to Moscow. The trap set by Lev and his men was cancelled. Nevertheless, Lev and Mariya received medals from the NKVD for the defence of Moscow. (Only after the war was it discovered that had Moscow fallen, Hitler never had any intention of visiting Moscow.)
424
An alternative plan was drawn up to assassinate Hitler, and as before it involved Olga Tschechowa. Lev and Mariya would ‘defect’ and make their way to Berlin, where they would use Olga to get close enough to Hitler to kill him.

Olga later claimed that everyone – and that would include the Russians – greatly overestimated her close links with Hitler, yet less than a year earlier, on 23 December 1940 when she was in France to see Jep, she received a large Christmas parcel from Hitler via the German embassy in Paris. The parcel contained cakes, chocolate, assorted nuts and gingerbread, plus a card bearing his portrait, with the message ‘Frau Olga Tschechowa, in sincere admiration and veneration, Adolf Hitler’ and personally signed by the
Führer
.
425
There was every chance that at some point she would find herself at another Nazi reception which Hitler would attend, and Lev must have hoped that as her brother and a celebrated musician, he would be able to meet Hitler in person, then kill him.

While Soviet forces were driving the
Wehrmacht
back by over 200 miles in the harsh condition of the Russian winter, Goebbels, unable to bring himself to note in his military situation reports the retreat of some of General Guderian’s men,
426
was in Vienna for the 150th anniversary of Mozart’s death. In his speech at the State Opera on 5 December, he declared that Mozart’s music was one of the things ‘our soldiers were defending from the wild onslaught of eastern barbarism’.
427
Culture and celebrity were major factors in Hitler’s war.

The next day, Goebbels listened to the Mozart
Requiem
as conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler in rehearsal with the Vienna Philharmonia and Opera Choir, and instantly decided it could not be broadcast. ‘Right now we need funeral music which is heroic, but not Christian or certainly not Catholic,’ he thought.
428
Goebbels could manage his cult of death, but not Christian faith.

In America, isolationists had long campaigned to keep America out of the war. In Germany, efforts were made to assure Americans that the Nazis were not the enemies of the United States, and that they even counted some Brits among their friends. As proof, they presented celebrated British writer P. G. Wodehouse on Berlin radio.

It was in June 1941 that the voice of Wodehouse was heard over the radio in America, broadcasting from Berlin. When his broadcasts, in which he recounted with humour his time in an internment camp with seemingly friendly German guards, were heard in Britain, he was immediately denounced as a traitor and a Nazi sympathiser in Parliament. British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden accused Wodehouse of having lent his services to the Nazi war propaganda machine, and Conservative MP Quintin Hogg compared him to William Joyce, the Brit nicknamed ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ who made pro-Nazi broadcasts. Wodehouse’s works were banned by the BBC, and public libraries withdrew all his books.
429
It certainly seemed to anyone hearing his broadcast or reading the texts that he was on friendly terms with the Germans and possibly a Nazi sympathiser, but the truth was not that cut and dried.

Wodehouse and his wife Ethel had been living in Le Touquet in France since 1934, long before the war, but the speed of the German advance in May 1940 had taken them by surprise, and they were arrested and interned in Tost in Upper Silesia in Poland; he later quipped, ‘If this is Upper Silesia, what must Lower Silesia be like?’
430

He was released from internment shortly before his sixtieth birthday – the Geneva Convention ensured that civilians aged sixty be freed – and taken to Berlin, where he made five broadcasts based on the witty stories with which he had entertained his fellow civilian inmates. He believed that in doing so he would be admired as showing himself to have ‘kept a stiff upper lip’ during his internment,
431
but instead he proved to be ‘mistaken, foolish and naive’,
432
and had been unwittingly manipulated.

Dr Paul Schmidt, the head of the private office of German
Foreign Secretary Ribbentrop, thought that releasing Wodehouse a few months early would please the Americans, show that Germans were civilised and help keep America out of the war, but Goebbels refused to agree to Wodehouse’s release.

Another Paul Schmidt, director of the German Foreign Office’s American department and an admirer of Wodehouse’s novels, had recently read the article ‘My War with Germany’, which Wodehouse had written for the
Saturday Evening Post
. Schmidt thought a broadcast by Wodehouse to America along the same light-hearted lines as the article would serve the German Foreign Office’s purpose, and this time Goebbels agreed. Wodehouse knew nothing of all this, only that on 21 June 1941, he was released quite unexpectedly and taken to Berlin. He had received many letters and food parcels from American fans and believed the broadcasts would allow him to thank America. But Goebbels had decided to portray Wodehouse as a Nazi sympathiser, and he began a campaign to persuade all neutral, foreign journalists in Berlin, especially American and Swedish ones, that this was the case. Goebbels also rebroadcast the talks to the United Kingdom, without the knowledge of the German Foreign Office.

The Wodehouses lived in Germany under supervision for just over two years, in the Hotel Adlon in Berlin during the winters, and for the rest of the year with friends in Degenershausen in the Harz Mountains. In September 1943, Wodehouse and his wife were allowed to move to Paris, where they stayed unsupervised at the Hotel Bristol until the Allies liberated Paris in August 1944.
433

Wodehouse’s reputation never fully recovered from accusations that he had agreed to the broadcasts in return for his freedom, and he went into exile in America; he was still vilified by some when he died in 1975, but he was a victim of his own naiveté and, most of all, of Joseph Goebbels, who knew how to make the greatest profit from his cult of celebrity.
434
Wodehouse’s was not the only voice heard on American radio speaking of Germany. Winifred Wagner’s daughter Friedelind had left Germany in 1939 in protest
at Hitler’s regime, and in 1941 went to America to agitate against him. Speaking to Germans on American radio, she said, ‘German listeners, you may find it strange that I am speaking to you from New York. But believe me, I didn’t leave Germany lightly. I only went away when the murderous intentions of the current German regime had become clear.’ She urged all Germans to resist Hitler. Those who agreed with her either remained silent or were sent to concentration camps.
435

At around the same time the Japanese launched their attack on Pearl Harbor, effectively bringing America into the war. Meanwhile, in Moscow, Lev Knipper and his wife Mariya were preparing to make their way to Germany via Iran, Turkey and Bulgaria, feigning defection and using Lev’s role as a composer as cover; their intention was to establish themselves in Berlin, persuade Lev’s famous sister Olga to use her contacts and influence to enable them to help them come into contact with Hitler, and kill him at close range.

As Stalin began to realise that Hitler was now facing defeat from east and west, he began to imagine that Hitler’s death might mean the Western Allies would prefer to make peace with a new German regime and leave the Soviet Union to fight a massive European and American armed force. He cancelled Lev’s mission. Had he not done so, Lev and Mariya would have failed because Hitler, brooding over his dire circumstances and wondering what destiny really had in store for him, made the decision to cut himself off from the world of movies and film stars altogether. There would be no more star-studded functions or even private affairs at which the likes of Olga Tschechowa would be present – and without Olga Lev and Mariya had no chance of getting up close to their target.