Patrick Bade
The Film Industry in the Third Reich

Patrick Bade - The Film Industry in the Third Reich

- Well, you can see on the screen the cover of a very lavish volume that came out in 1935, that celebrated the history of the German film industry. In fact, this is volume two, as you can see, , “Der Tonfilm,” the sound film. So it’s a reminder that actually, sound film technology was really very new. The Jazz Singer, of course, is 1927, but the first full-length German sound films were not ‘til 1930. And it’s also in this volume that the political dimension of the film industry is emphasised that of course, Hitler, and in particular Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, took an intense interest in the industry. And there’s plenty of propaganda in this book. It stresses that film is expected to play a very important role in the, “National revolution,” that took place after 30th of January 1933. And it says that the Goebbels in particular had an intense personal interest in all of this. And you can see him quoted here, that he’s , “I’m convinced that the German film will only conquer the world when it becomes completely German.” It’s a kind of Make Germany great again message from Goebbels. Goebbels’ interest in the film industry wasn’t just aesthetic. The studios of Neubabelsberg, there was a special shams that separates, set aside for him with a bed and a wash basin where young actresses were, so to speak, tested out by the Minister of Propaganda. And of course, he had a notorious affair with the very beautiful Czech film star Lida Baarova that was eventually ended on the direct orders of Hitler. You see her there on the west left hand side. Here are these studios, they were the biggest and technically the most sophisticated studios in the world outside of Hollywood.

And you can see the details here of 11 enormous studios. And the book, as I said, sound was relatively new, and I’m sure you are all very familiar with the film, ‘Singing in the Rain’. And there’s a recent movie called, “Hollywood Babylon,” set in the same period of the early sound movies that get a lot of humour out of all the problems or from producing sound to movies. And we get quite an interesting technical explanations of how it all works from this volume over here is the movie that’s usually credited with launching a sound revolution. Amazingly, this is an illustration from this Nazi book. So we have the Jewish performer, Al Jolson, in blackface, problematic these days for very different reasons from the ones that the Nazis would’ve had with this movie. More illustrations of how the sound system works and with the, this is the composer with the stopwatch to put precise amounts of music into the film. Now, in the early days of sound movies in Europe and in Hollywood, the studios were very worried that the dialogue in a particular language is going to restrict the appeal of movies. So a lot of movies were shot in different language versions. In Hollywood, there were, I mean, for instance, Greta Garbo’s sound debut in 1931, and Christie was shot in an English version and a German version. And Garbo spoke fluent German so that she could actually star in both. But very often there are interesting differences between the versions in one language and another.

And usually the French versions were more explicit, more sexy than the English or even the German versions. As you can see here, you’ve got the German version at the top and the same scene in a French version underneath. Now, of course, there were films that were crudely and directly propaganda. This film, Hans Westmar, is a fictionalised account of the life and death of the Nazi activist and martyr Horst Wessel. He was elevated to be the great Nazi martyr. He was actually assassinated by communists, and similarly, this film, “Hitlerjunge Quex” is about a working class boy in a communist family, who’s horribly mistreated by his family, brutal communist family. And he goes over to the Nazis and is eventually murdered by the Communists. Now, the most famous propaganda films are the Leni Riefenstahl’ documentaries. And I know that David has talked about these in detail, so I’m not going to say very much about them. They’re very famous for their technical innovations, and she, whether you like her or not, and I can’t imagine many people would like her. She’s credited with introducing all sorts of innovative visual ideas. In her two documentaries, “the Nuremberg Rally,” “Triumph for the Will,” and her documentary about the 1936 Olympics. After the war, she claimed to have never been a Nazi and not to have known about the Nazi claims.

Well, I think it’s technically true that she wasn’t a Nazi party member. She clearly schmoozed with Hitler, as you can see in this photograph, probably for career reasons. And her claim that she didn’t know about Nazi crimes is absolutely untrue and provably untrue. I find this one of the most extraordinary photographs dating from the Second World War. This is right at the beginning of the war during the initial invasion of Poland. She was tasked with making a documentary about this, and she was present when a whole village of Jews were murdered. They were made to dig their graves, and they were machine gunned into the graves. And she was unaware that, you know, one of part of her team of photographers had caught her witnessing this and look at the expression on her face. What we know from that is, first of all, she knew about horror, and secondly, she knew it was wrong. And you can see that she is appalled that she managed to get over it and continue her career. And here is the opening sequence of the Triumph of the Will, which I think is actually, it’s a very, very long time since I’ve seen the whole film, I’ve only seen excerpts and I think the opening scene with this plane hovering over, flying over Nuremberg, descending through the crowd clouds, is actually beautiful and moving and disturbing in equal measure. And then these scenes of this extraordinary event choreographed, I think we can use that word by Albert Speer, it’s like a giant ballet. Where of course the individual is subsumed into the crowd in a very disturbing and frightening way. The Olympia film in 1936, which of course didn’t turn out as Hitler hoped, mainly because the Germans didn’t win any or hardly any medals.

But it’s a very beautiful celebration, you could say, of the human body, particularly the opening scene. I really like the opening scene where you probably David showed it to you, where we see Greek statues at sort of before our eyes turning into living human moving human bodies. These stills from. Now the film of late Leni Riefenstahl that she regarded as her masterpiece, is called, “Tiefland.” And it’s inspired by an opera by Oigan del Bear. And it tells, it’s a kind of a Nazi theme, I suppose. It tells a story of a shepherd who is a real child of nature. And he lives up in the mountains and he dis descends into the Tiefland, the town below. And the contrast is between his innocence and his purity and purity of nature and the corruption of the city below. This film cost enormous sums of money and of course it was interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War. And she had to shift her filming from the Spanish , where it’s supposed to be set to the Austrian Alps instead. And it was only completed and released after the the Second World War. It’s a beautiful film to look at. I mean, what one you have to give credit to Leni Riefenstahl for having extraordinary eye and being a wonderful photographer. It’s no masterpieces of film I can assure you of that.

It’s, as I said, visually stunning, the wonderful photography of the alpine landscape and enhanced by the music of Oigan del Bear. She plays the central role of the heroin. And that was probably a mistake ‘cause I think she was really too old to be playing this part. And you see her here surrounded by supposedly Catalan peasants from the Pyrenees. But because they shifted the filming from Spain to Austria, Austrian villages obviously didn’t look very convincing as Catalan peasants. And appallingly, she borrowed several families of gipsies from a concentration camp just to provide the right kind of background to her. And then at the end of the shooting of the film, they were returned to the concentration camps where most of them were murdered. Again after the war, she denied all of this and denied any knowledge of it, but I think it’s pretty proven. Another very notorious propaganda movie, a documentary again, it’s called, “Feuertaufe.” And this is a documentary of the initial invasion of Poland. And I have watched this movie, I do have it on DVD and for a long time it was forbidden and suppressed of the war. It is fascinating in an appalling way. It was shown at the German embassy in Oslo days before the invasion of Scandinavia. In fact, it was shown in embassies around neutral Europe. And it’s very clear that it was shown as a warning, you know, that, “If you resist, we will completely destroy you ruthlessly.” It’s again a film with really stunning visual aspects, particularly the opening of the movie.

And I read, when I was researching my book on music in the Second World War, I read, of course, the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman, who’s the hero of whose life, whose memoirs were turned in the film, “The pianist.” And he vividly describes the cloudless view blue skies and the sinister beauty of these German aircrafts, sort of silver metallic objects gliding flying through the sky as they attacked Poland and Warsaw here. And there’s some really extraordinary aerial sequences in the opening of this film. Now these are, of course, the two most notorious Nazi propaganda movies and only to be seen, obviously, I think these days for serious research reasons. I’ve seen excerpt on both of them. I have not forced myself to sit through the whole thing. I really don’t think I could really stand that. But, “Jud Suss” is based on a novel by the Munich writer, Lion Feuchtwanger. It was the best seller and its the original novel is a Denunciation of Antisemitism, tells the story of the court Jew in the 18th Century who was horribly tortured and hanged after the death of his master. And that film that the novel was in the early 30s, was made into a film in Britain that, with the same title, “Jew Suss,” that was following very much Leon Lion Feuchtwanger’s original intentions. But obviously this film, the Nazi film is a complete subversion of the novel and turns the whole thing around. So that, “Jud Suss” being, instead of being the victim, the innocent victim and the hero of the movie now becomes the vile antisemitic stereotype.

The, “Der ewige Jude,” Eternal Jew, was a documentary, if you could call it that, a compilation obviously lies, but a very brilliant piece of documentary filmmaking as I can see, even from the excerpts of this film that I have seen. And so this film was seen by, its estimated over 20 million people in the right and in occupied Europe during the Second World War. So it certainly had a very widespread and very malign influence, again, posters for the eternal Jew. But having said all this, and we’ve done all the propaganda stuff, actually the vast majority of films made in Nazi Germany were feel good light, frothy entertainment movies. They were designed to soothe the public and soothe their fears. And it’s very much in contrast. If you remember when I talked about films in Weimar, Germany, how dark and disturbing many of them were. Well, apart from the out and out propaganda movies, the Nazi film industry was not about disturbing people, certainly not about making them think. And this is the queen of the entertain movie industry in Germany, the 1930s. This is Lillian Harvey, and I wonder how many of you have even heard of her? She’s sort of become a forgotten figure.

But for two years, from 1931 to 1933, she was the number one film star in Europe, more popular than any Hollywood stars. She was huge, absolutely hugely popular. And she was half German, half English, completely bilingual in those languages. And she also had fluent French, which actually made her very useful in these early days when they were making movies in different language versions. She could star in all three versions. I think she was quite strongly anti-Nazi. In 1933 when the Nazis took part, she left German and she went to Hollywood for two years. She was there from 1933 to 35, made several movies but the Americans didn’t take to her in the way that Europeans did. And so she came back to Europe, I suppose, with her tail between her legs and went back to Nazi Germany and continued making films there right up till 1939. She was highly suspect to Goebbels and the Nazi authorities because of her friendship with Jews and with known homosexuals. And at one point she was even arrested and interrogated, but she stuck with it. I suppose that’s where she could earn a living as a still a major film star in Nazi Germany. He, this is actually 1931, so that’s pre-Nazi. And then she was teamed up in 11 movies in the 1930s with Willy Fritsch. Willy Fritsch and Lilian Harvey were like the sort of Fred and Ginger of Nazi Germany. And they’re very lighthearted, very charming. I’m going to show you at the end, or Emily’s going to show you a clip from the film, it looks kind of with a wonderfully silly song. I wish I was a chicken. I would have such a nice life because I wouldn’t have very much to do. And it’s just silly, but nice.

Another huge star in the later 30s was Ilse Werner. It’s a curious thing that really all the big female stars of the Nazi cinema were not German given this huge emphasis on everything, German being better. So there is Lilian Harvey, who is British. Ilse Werner was Dutch, Marika Rukk, who will come to in a minute was Hungarian and the biggest star of all Zarah Leander was Swedish. But Ilse Werner in fact never even took a German passport until well after the war. And she was regarded by Goebbels as being the ideal of German womanhood. And she was pretty and she was charming and she could sing quite nicely and she could dance a bit and she could whistle. That was her gimmick in all her musical movies. She did a lot of whistling and she was so associated with the rejuvenation, even though she didn’t, I mean, she appeared in Goebbels concerts, his lunch concert that he arranged for the entertainment of the troops. But I don’t think she appeared in any explicitly propaganda movies. Nevertheless, she got at the end of the war. She was for a couple of years. She was forbidden to appear in movies, , but like Carrie Ann, like everybody else, really, she was rapidly forgiven once the Cold War started. And she continued with her career and she wrote an autobiography in the 1970s with the, to my Mind, extraordinary title, It will Never be like that again.

And clearly meaning that it was so wonderful during her early career in the Nazi period. But she didn’t really see obviously didn’t see the irony of giving a title that will never be like that again. Well, we hope that it’ll never be like that again. This is another hugely popular star of the Nazi film industry. This is Marika Rukk. She could certainly sing and dance in a very athletic, hyperactive way. And I hope to be able to show you an excerpt from one of her movies at the end of my talk. Yes, this is 1944 movies. So we’re really in the last stages of the second World War. And the, the title is “Die Frau meiner Traume,” the Woman of My Dreams. It’s unbelievably over the top lavish. It was the first full length colour film to be made in Germany. It costs an absolute fortune. And as you’ll see from the excerpt, I hope at the end, it’s really trying to, a lot of these entertainment movies, they’re looking at Hollywood and trying to do it bigger and better. So it’s trying to out Busby Berkeley, completely over the top with these very, very lavish scenes with dozens of beautiful girls. I think, the Girls as Harps is a direct quote from Busby Berkeley movie. Now this is a very fascinating story. This is Paula Negri, who you might well know because she had a very important career in Hollywood. She was Polish. I mean, she claimed to be from an aristocratic background, but most people think she was Jewish. She had a very successful career in silent movies in Germany in the early 20s before going off to Hollywood, where for a short time, she was the main rival to Gloria Swanson.

But when sound came into the Hollywood movies, she had such a thick accent that that was really the end of her career in Hollywood. But as it turned out, Hitler was a huge fan. She was his favourite film star in the 1920s. So she was invited to make movies in Germany. So she goes back 1934, but there’s a problem. Yes, of course she speaks German, but she doesn’t speak German, German, she speaks Yiddish. I presume they had to give her some allocution lessons before she made her movies. Goebbels was absolutely incensed because when she met him, she pronounced his name Dr. Gabbels instead of Dr. Goebbels with a heavy Yiddish accent. But she made a couple of movies that were quite successful before going back again to America. She made a couple more movies in Hollywood and then also famously turned down the role of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard that eventually went to her former rival Gloria Swanson. But this is the big star of Nazi Germany. This is Zarah Leander. She was Swedish, as I said, a very beautiful woman. I think you can see that. She was intended to be Nazi Germany’s answer to Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich wrapped up in one and like those two, she had such an extraordinary face. It was a face made up, made for closeups on the big screen. And she’s like, Garbo, she doesn’t really have to act. I think of the Garbo at the end of Queen Christina. And she said to the director, I know she’s standing in the pro of a ship and the the face is in close up. And she said to the Ruben Mamoulian, “What shall I think of?”

And Ruben Mamoulian says, “Think of nothing.” And I think probably Zarah Leander spent quite a lot of time in front of the movie cameras thinking of nothing. But with cheekbones like that, and with a face like that, you don’t actually need to think anything 'cause the people will read the emotion into your face. She was spotted in a production at the Mary Widow in Stockholm by Max Hansen, a star that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. And that she was then went to Vienna where to sing in the Mary Widow there, Fran of course, was still alive. And actually she had a very deep voice, which her voice has being described as a whiskey baritone. And Lahar was really astonished at the transpositions that she asked for there to be lower actually sometimes than the baritone-tenor who sings the part of Danilo. And then she made a couple of movies in Austria and then she’s picked up by the German film industry. And her first big hit was, “Zu neuen Ufern,” which is at 37, that’s 1937. And the Brits had sort of at that point woken up to the threat from Nazi Germany. I think you can say that the change came in 1936 and the Germans also began to perceive the Britain not as an ally, but as a threat. And this is a movie, which is, it sat in, partly in London and partly in Australia. And it has a decidedly anti-British and very anti-Australian. Australians, if anybody’s listening, I recommend it just because you’ll have a very good laugh at the way Australia is depicted by Nazi filmmakers. Then 1939, she made a film called, which is a very, very fictional version of the relationship between the composer Tchaikovsky and his patroness Nadezhda von Meck.

'Cause in real life, they actually never exchanged a single word with one another. Their relationship was entirely by latter. And they certainly never had a love affair. And Tchaikovsky of course, in any case, was homosexual. So it’s a very strange choice of a subject, but it should have been an important clue to politicians around Europe. How was it that Nazi Germany was, this was a very, very lavish, very, very expensive movie at a time when most people thought that Russia and Germany, Hitler and Stalin were inveterate enemies. So it should have been a clue that there was something in the offing, of course, when the non-aggression pacts between Russia and Nazi Germany, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pacts, that was signed on the 23rd of August in 1939. And it opened the way, of course, for the German invasion of Poland and the Second World War. And it was a huge shock. It was really a bomb going off, a political bomb going off. But actually this movie, which had been in the making for a year was premiered a couple of weeks before the pact was signed. So clearly Goebbels knew what was coming politically with between Communist Russia and Nazi Germany. And there’s lots of very lavish Russian local colour in the movie with the orchestras of ballet likers and so on. So here is this notorious, dreadful, cynical pact between communist Russia and Nazi Germany, of course, turned out to be a big mistake on the part of the Russians. Now Zarah Leander’s last movie before she went back to Sweden and abandoned her German film career was also her biggest hit. It’s called, “Die grosse Libe,” The Great Love.

And that was the, in Europe that was the most seen film of the entire second World War. Remember that of course in occupied Europe and Germany, there are no Hollywood movies coming. So this movie was shown around Europe. On the right hand side, you’ve got an image of the wonderful art deco palatial cinema in Paris. It’s a cinema I passed very often, it’s close to where I live, which during a war was actually reserved for German language films and German military personnel. So the movie tells the story, it opens with the performance of Zarah Leander. I mean, you couldn’t really say that Zarah Leander acts, Zarah Leander is, and she’s always really herself plays herself . And in a way, I suppose you could say the same of Greta Garbo. And she is picked up in the metro system by a young German fighter flyer. And they go back to her place and then he’s stuck 'cause of a bombing raid. And they spend the night together and they fall in love and then he disappears and she thinks that he’s just treated her as the one night stand and she’s very upset. But actually it turns out he’s been away bombing London. And when she finds that out that’s, you know, all is forgiven and then they’re going to get married. But he doesn’t turn up to the wording and she’s very huffy about that until she discovers that actually he’s been invading Russia. So once again, all forgiven.

But then she thinks he’s shot down and she thinks he’s dead. Oh, this is a very extraordinary scene in the movie. I mentioned, was it last time, the strange amount of homoeroticism that you find in Nazi are kind of suppressed, hidden homoeroticism. And you find it in quite a number of these movies that there’ll be a subplot. There is the main relationship, of course, between the hero and the heroin and they have to get together at the end. But there’s often a kind of really, kind of yearning intense subplot of bromance between the male character and his sidekick. And there’s still, you can see here, I mean the dialogue is so Freudian, it’s really extraordinary. This is his best friend, who explains to him why he doesn’t like women can’t have a relationship with women and it’s all to do with his mother or whatever. But there is this kind of simmering undertone of homoeroticism. But this is the most extraordinary scene in the film. And I hope to be able to show it to you at the end. And it features the song of the Second World War in Germany. I mean, most countries will, you know, I mean in England, of course, every everybody who’s old enough to remember the war or just after we’ll all know the song will we’ll meet again, dunno where, dunno when. That is the song of the war for us. And the song of the War for Germany is actually the words are almost identical. It’s a song of separation that we know that one day we will get back together again. And it’s the climax of the movie.

The song itself has an interesting history. The words were written by a poet called Bruno Bz and the music by a composer, Michael Jary. Michael Jary was Polish and it seems he was Jewish but managed to cover it up and have a career all the way through the Nazi regime and hiding his Jewish ancestry. And Bruno Bz was gay and he was actually arrested and he was in a concentration camp and probably, you know, destined for a gas chamber. But Zarah Leander and Michael Jary said, “We want him for this movie, 'Die grosse Libe’ , we need his songs.” And so he was released and actually while he was in prison, he had written the a poem which they use for this song. And his poem was, it was a personal expression of his longing for his gay lover that he’d been separated from. There’s a very interesting post-war interview with Zarah Leander about this song. And she says, “Well, you know, a song that make different things to different people.” And she said that, you know, to the Nazis , “I’m unwounded machine and I know that one day there’ll be a miracle and we will win the war and rule the world.” That’s what they thought it meant. But it meant different things to different people. And when they came to film this scene, you can see how lavish it is. And there are 45 angels behind Zarah Leander. She was a very tall woman. She was a big woman. So they had to find 45 women of roughly the same height who wouldn’t be dwarfed by Zarah Leander. What could they do? Somebody came up with the absolutely brilliant inspiration of using Hitler’s personal bodyguard.

So you’ve got 45 Nazi bodyguards dressed in drag in these 90s as angels. And when I think in the excerpt you’re going to see the curtain opens and you see them like this. That’s the opening moment. Then this is Zarah singing her big song. When the camera moves towards her, the angels close their wings. And it’s only when the camera at the climax of the song pans back again. You have to look very carefully. If you’ve got a good quality, big screen, you’ll be able to see this, that when the wings open, these are some very strange looking angels who do not look very angelic. Two more movies to talk about. Right at the end of the War, the devastation, of course, German cities absolutely pulverised and reduced to to ruins, but they were still making these lavish movies. One movie, which is to this day an absolute cult movie, is, “Die Feuerzangenbowle,” starring Heinz Ruhmann. And it’s a very lighthearted comedy about a man from a very wealthy background who had a private, who was privately educated. He meets friends to drink a Feuerzangenbowle. And they’re all reminiscing about what fun they had at school. And he says, “Oh, I missed out on that ‘cause I was privately educated.” So he decides to dress up as a young, he was actually 42 when he made this movie, Heinz Ruhmann. And he pretends to be a student and he goes back to school with lots of hilarious adventures. It was a movie that initially the Nazis wanted to ban because they thought it was disrespectful for authority and they didn’t want to encourage that.

So Ruhmann actually took it to Goring, Hermann Goring and he showed it to him personally and Goring found it funny and he liked it, so it was allowed to be released. And it remains in Germany, one of the most loved films of the 20th century. I do have it and I’ve really watched about half of it, I must admit 'cause I don’t find it that hilarious. But over the years, so many of my journal students said, “Oh, you must watch 'Die Feuerzangenbowle.’ It’s really a wonderful movie and if you want you can watch it on YouTube.” And the absolute last film, German film to be completed and premiered during Second World War was, “Kolberg.” And it’s a historical epic movie set in the Napoleonic Wars about a French no, about a German, small German city that is besieged by the French and refuses to surrender so clearly in the last stages of the Second World War, this was a film with a very strong political message for the German populists that they had to hang out to the bitter end and resist the allies. So this became an obsession of Goebbels and it’s again, it’s another film that was filmed entirely in colour and was by far and away the most expensive film ever made under the Nazi regime. And even in, you know, at this crucial point in the Second World War with the Russians advancing towards the borders of Germany, thousands of soldiers were taken away from the eastern front to appear in this movie. And there were scenes with snow, as you can see here. And it was filmed in largely in the summer of 1944. So in fact, they had to import thousands and thousands of bags of salt and sprinkle it around so that it looked like snow.

And the film was finally ready to be released in January, 1945. So it was had twin premieres on the 30th of January. So three days after the liberation of Auschwitz, this film was premiered in Berlin. And again, very symbolically it was premiered simultaneously in a cinema in La Rochelle. ‘Cause by this point, January, 1945, nearly all of France has been liberated, but the Germans did hang on in a couple of naval bases including La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast. And so that’s Emily, if you could bring on the three excerpts I’ve chosen to show that would be wonderful. Good, so we’ll start off with the top one. This is . I wish I were ahead. I wouldn’t have much, I would have no problems in life. This is the, was sung by Lillian Harvey and Willy Fritsch. Right, Emily, I think we can move on. We’ve probably had enough of that. So now what we got next, I think it’s the, yes, it’s, “Die Frau meiner Traume,” the woman of my dreams with this incredibly lavish, over the top imitation of Busby Berkeley. And let’s move on to this amazing final scene of with Hitler’s bodyguard all dressed up in drag. I think that’s probably it. I hope the sound was better, it was for me. I couldn’t get much sound out of that, but anyway, you get the idea.

Q&A and Comments:

So, Hi Clive, good afternoon to you. Babylon Berlin? No, there’s a film called Hollywood, which has just come out, I saw it in Paris recently, it’s about Hollywood, not Berlin. Or is it just called Babylon? That might be, yes, it might just be called Babylon.

Q: “Did Hitler and Goebbels extreme interest in developing film, German film history come from their anti-Semitism?”

A: No, I think they had, well, no, the answer to that is I think they certainly, they wanted to get rid of the Jews and that they were very hostile to the influence that Jews had in the film in industry. But no, the interest was something quite separate. They saw its its value for controlling the masses.

Q: “Do I know who the poster artists are? Not of the ones I showed you today.”

A: No, I’m afraid I don’t. No, I think those, it wasn’t made in Dutch, it was made in German, but I’m sure there were aversions around Europe with different subtitles and different languages.

What’s up to this, it’s jumping around. No she wasn’t. She was, as I said, she was paired in 11 movies with Willy Fritsch. But the certainly, she’s with Heinz Rumann. So she did make movies and she made movies in France too without Willy Fritsch.

Q: “Were there any films comparable to, 'Gone with the Wind’?”

A: Not really, no. I mean there was, there were films that were comparable in terms of, I mean, as I said, like, “Kolberg” with, and I suppose the Zarah Leander films, they were very, very lavish. I don’t think there’s anything quite like, “Gone with the Wind,” though.

“Marlene Dietrich left Germany in 1931, she went to Hollywood and of course she was, they tried to lure her back again and she was absolutely resolute in not going back and being very anti-Nazi.” Oh, Clive, yes. Wunderbar by you it is most, there are songs by Zarah Leander that I actually like and I find funny enough, I think as is actually quite a moving song. Wunderbar, which is recorded postwar is unbelievably terrible. And there was a capital radio in the 1970s had a competition for the worst record ever made. And she was rated number two. But I thought that was unfair. I thought she should definitely have won first spot for the most awful record ever made.

Q: Yes, this is, yes. After the shooting of, “The Blue Angel,” in 1930, Dietrich moved to America and made, what was her first film there?

A: I think it was Morocco.

“The Horst Wessel needed his, ever used in a Nazi area movie.” I’m not sure about that. That they were actually, oddly enough, when they made that movie that I talked about, the Nazis were actually squeamish about that. That’s why they insisted that the name of the hero should be changed from Horst Wessel to Hanns. What was it Hanns? I’m trying to remember it, Meissner, yeah.

Q: “Why did Zarah Leander leave Germany?”

A: This is a very interesting question, Shelly, and you’ll get different answers from different people ‘cause you could read her autobiography, but I don’t, she left 1942, 'cause she left exactly the moment that the war changed and she had a lavish villa outside of Berlin and there was a bombing raid and it was damaged. And that was, I think she was smart enough to realise that the wind had changed and she better clear out with all her goodies while she could, there’s a very amusing story about how she managed to get her collection of our antiques back to Sweden. There is a theory and apparently there is some documentary evidence for it that Zarah Leander was always a Russian spy and that she was actually working for the Russians throughout the whole period. I’m not sure if I believe that or not. I’m not sure if, I think she was bright enough to be a Russian spy. If you read her autobiography, she comes across as a complete nitwit.

“Right up to the final defeat, Nazis subsidised the film and theatre in.” You are right. Also the orchestras and and opera houses. They invested a huge amount in culture.

Q: “Whatever happened to Lillian Harvey after the war, 'cause once she left Germany in '39?

A: She made a couple of movies in France after the fall of France, She went to America where nobody was interested in her by this time. And of course she had very negative associations. So she retired and she spent the rest of her life in the south of France, which is not such a bad place to end your life.”

This is Margaret saying, “Retiring to the French reviewer and she died in her villa at camp kept apparently she was alcoholic and she died of liver failure, which doesn’t suggest that she was very happy at the end.” Yeah, I so agree with you Jack, that that the clip, I dunno well it came across you, we we’re showing you tonight, but is pure Mel Brooks. It really is. And and the last scene, I don’t really have time to describe it. You can get it by the way, you can get it, you can get it on DVD and you can also see clips from it on YouTube. It is just hilarious.

Oh right, “Zarah Leander yuck records.” Thanks Clive.

Q: “Was Hedy Lamarr in?”

A: She was in a Czech movie, a film called Ecstasy, which actually I’ve just seen recently in Paris. Very notorious movie. It’s first ever serious movie to feature full fun-full nudity and a female orgasm. I don’t think she was in any German movies. Oh, she was Jewish, of course, that would’ve made it difficult. So no, I think Ecstasy is the only movie that she made before she went to America. And that’s true Conrad right. Well presumably he had to leave 'cause he had a Jewish wife. He wants to keep her. But there were people who left simply because they were appalled by Nazi Germany. to the new coasts with the Australian angle. I used to have a New Zealand friend sadly died, but he used to, he found that movie absolutely hilarious. He was rocking with laughter at the way Australia was depicted by the Nazis.

Q: “So is that it fight was in ?”

A: Yes, of course. I mean it’s sad, isn’t it? That these people who had the courage to leave Nazi Germany and who objected the Nazis like Walter Slezak for instance, they all landed up having to play Nazis in America movies.

Louise Suite is, I can’t do it, I’ll ask, write to either Judy or Emily or Lauren and they will be able to put you in touch with one another. I don’t have the the means to do that, right.

Thank you all very much and well, I’m going to finally have my last, get rid of the Nazis on Tuesday evening when I talk about jazz in the second World War and Nazi Germany. Thank you everybody, bye-bye.