But as Wilder’s star was rising, so was that of the Nazis—a danger that the director, though Jewish, did not at first take seriously. Only when he witnessed a group of SS men beating up an old Jew did he decide to get out. In his case Goebbels seems to have made no effort to retain him. On the night after the Reichstag fire he and his lover, Hella Hartwig, boarded a train for Paris. Among their neighbors at Paris’s Hotel Ansonia were the actor Peter Lorre, the composer Friedrich Hollander, and Wilder’s writing partner, Max Kolpe. Wilder saw Paris only as a stepping-stone to Hollywood, whose films he had admired for years. In December 1933 he jumped at the chance to go to California to work on a movie called Pam Pam. Later he would claim: “My dream all along was to get to Hollywood, which would have happened even without Hitler.”
What surely would not have happened without Hitler was the transformation of the German film industry into a plaything and instrument of the government. After taking over UFA and expelling most of its Jewish artists, Goebbels worked hard to cultivate the stars who remained. His favorites were the actor Emil Jannings, the director Veit Harlan, and the actress-turned-director Leni Riefenstahl, who he said was “the only one of all the stars who understands us.” Goebbels invited his film friends on boating parties on the Havel and to elegant dinners at his Berlin town-house, located, to his dismay, on Hermann-Göring-Strasse. Although recently married to the blond beauty Magda Quandt, he made a point of personally interviewing all the up-and-coming actresses. Word went out in the Berlin film community that aspiring actresses could get ahead only via the randy little doctor’s casting couch.
Goebbels and Hitler were determined to exploit Berlin’s renowned film industry for purposes of “enlightenment” and wholesome diversion. Movies would at once mobilize and anesthetize the Volk. UFA’s giant production facilities at Neu-Babels-berg outside Berlin churned out 1,100 films between 1933 and 1945, about 90 percent of them pure entertainment pictures. Among the latter were a number of films celebrating German nature as a bower for the racially pure soul. Producer Arnold Franck’s Das verlorene Tal (The Lost Valley) and Ewiger Wald (Eternal Forest) fall into this category. UFA also made inspirational films about the Nazi Party. Hans Westmar, Einer von Vielen, eulogized the life of Horst Wessel; SA-Mann Brand glorified the storm troopers’ love for their Führer; and Hitlerjunge Quex told the story of a young man from a communist household who dies at the hands of the Reds because of his fierce loyalty to the Hitler Youth. Although these films seem comically sappy today, they went over extremely well in the film palaces of the Third Reich, including those of “cynical” Berlin.
In the early years of the Nazi era, Leni Riefenstahl emerged as the regime’s most important maker of propaganda films. It was unusual for a woman to wield such powerful influence in the Third Reich, but Riefenstahl was no ordinary woman. Knee-bucklingly beautiful, she was also firm-willed, skilled in her craft, and a master manipulator of the men who flocked around her. A native Berliner, she had first come to notice in the capital during the early 1920s as a dancer at the Deutsches Theater. She then went on to star in a number of “mountain films,” including The Holy Mountain, The White Hell of Piz Polil, and The Blue Light, whose “mystical” portrayal of mountaineering managed to impress both Hitler and Pope Pius XI. Broadening her repertoire, she played a heroic woman pilot in SOS Iceberg, one of the first films about the Titanic disaster. She undoubtedly would have continued to devote herself exclusively to acting had not Adolf Hitler envisaged another use for her talents.
