Are all the Nazis dead yet?
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| SS-Reichsfuhrer Donald Pleasence as Himmler in The Eagle Has Landed |
I was in short pants on the bombed-out streets of Hull when the Fűhrer topped himself. My Grandfather, Karl Kohler, an ancient German from Bielefeld, hated Hitler and the Nazis with a passion. He would have gone home to Germany in the 1930s had it not been for the founding of the Third Reich. Karl hated Hitler for other reasons, the main one being that, as a German, when the Luftwaffe made their nightly visits to Hull, our neighbours, who were collectively a 1940s version of UKIP, wouldn’t let us into the communal air-raid shelter. The tons of bombs raining down on the city were obviously our fault. But we survived, and old Karl, never seeing der Volk or Fatherland again, shuffled off to Valhalla via Hull’s Hedon Road Cemetery at the age of 95 in 1948.
Of course, we were the victorious Allies and we ‘won’ the war. But der Führer and his gang have always had the last laugh. We’ll never be rid of him. I guarantee you that out of 50 TV channels available he’ll be ranting away on five of them whilst I’m writing this. Adolf cheerily proclaimed in Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of The Will“It is our will that this state shall endure for a thousand years. We are happy to know that the future is ours entirely!” He may well be roasting on Satan’s barbecue but if you listen carefully you can hear him chuckling along with Himmler, Bormann and Heydrich, because the concentrated evil of the short-lived Drittes Reich has provided the entertainment industry, (as well as choleric ostriches such as Greece’s Golden Dawn and the EDL) with enough visual inspiration to easily last the next nine centuries. A teenage media student at Lincoln University asked me recently “Are all the Nazis dead yet?” I had to shake my head. The Nazis just won’t die off. They’re a permanent fixture.
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| Alec Guinness as Hitler using 'the Force' |
Time passes, and like the heroes of World War 1 soon the people who experienced 1939-45 will have departed. There may be a few Nazi war criminals still around, but even those who escaped (and there were plenty) will be coming to the end of their South American pensions. What makes the Third Reich such an enduring subject perhaps is its imagery. Stick a swastika on a book cover and people will pick it up. The Nazis wanted to scare us for all time, and they succeeded. Himmler got Hugo Boss, (a firm still doing well in the cyber age) to design those smart SS uniforms. He said “I know there are some people in Germany who become sick when they see these black uniforms, we understand the reason for this, and do not expect we shall be loved by all that number of people.” Well, for a start, he didn’t count on the post-war film industry. From 1945 onwards it provided poor Anton Diffring, who had escaped the Reich in 1936 because he couldn’t stand fascism (and was gay) with a plethora of icy blue-eyed roles from evil SS officers to Wehrmacht Generals.
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| Poor Anton Diffring (left) having to face up to the man who actually DID win the war for the Allies, John Mills, even though the Germans had the best uniforms... |
There’s nothing more satisfying for an actor than playing an absolute baddie, and everyone is transformed when they don that uniform, and there’s nothing better than a leather overcoat of you want people to pay attention. Donald Pleasance as Himmler in The Eagle has Landed, Peter O Toole in Night of The Generals, a whole bunch of UK cinematic luvvies in Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise, the terrifying Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List, and an Oscar-winning master class in the ‘ve heff vays of making you talk’ acting school from Christopher Waltz in Tarantino’s otherwise ludicrous Inglorious Basterds. Let’s not forget Alec Guinness’s turn as Hitler in 1973’s Hitler: The Last Ten Days, which predates Bruno Ganz’s outstanding performance in Downfall by three decades. These days, even the Germans are at it. In fact films about the Nazi period made in Germany are always far more convincing than our chaps goose-stepping about with ‘Chermann’ accents.
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| The ultimate screen Hitler played by Bruno Ganz |
And then there’s the documentaries. The actual Third Reich lasted a mere 13 years, but I reckon of you lumped together all the TV documentaries made about the Nazis, time-wise they would make the Hundred Years’ War of 1337-1453 look like Hitler’s tea break. Thames TV’s The World at War is always rumbling on somewhere, accompanied by Nazi spies, the U-Boat war, the Eastern Front, the Gestapo … the History Channel and Yesterday are replete with this stuff. You can blame the Nazis for a lot of this because with their cock-sure vanity they filmed everything. But what they didn’t film we now ‘recreate’ with actors. On the more serious side, there’s the Holocaust. It needs to be shown again and again, if only to highlight Santayana’s famous words, ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ However, all the grainy, monochrome hours of footage of European genocide did nothing to stop Pol Pot, Karadzic, Milošević, Rwanda, or 9/11, and Heinrich Himmler would no doubt have praised Guantanamo Bay as a model of ‘protective custody’.
Yet as the Germany of 1933-45 recedes ever further into the masonry of history, it blurs into the fabric of ‘entertainment’ to rub shoulders with current revisionist favourites, the Tudors, and the clanking cod-history of Game of Thrones. Perhaps the Nazis will endure in all this because their own particular murderous medieval mind-set took hold in the mechanical age with electricity, radio, film and the internal combustion engine. And, although a dwindling force, it still has living witnesses. So Hitler and his 1,000 year Reich are on a roll.
Now I’m in my 70s, I doubt I’ll be around for the next four decades, but if some keen young TV researcher is reading these yellowed pages in 2045, here’s my prediction made in 2013. Hitler will still be big, but Himmler will be the new star. A few years ago I interviewed the Army Surgeon Hugh Thomas. He had the distinction of being Rudolf Hess’s doctor at Spandau Prison. Thomas is a keen historian, whose books SS-1: The Unlikely Death of Heinrich Himmler, and The Murder of Rudolf Hess were best sellers. He believed the ‘Hess’ in Spandau was a double, not the real deputy Fűhrer. Interviewing Spandau’s Prisoner No. 7 one day Thomas said ‘it’s alright; Himmler’s dead now…’ to which ‘Hess’ replied ‘Is he? Are you sure?’ Thomas’s intricate investigation into Himmler’s ‘suicide’ in May 1945 hints that the dead body of the so-called Reichsfűhrer-SS sprawled on the floor of 31a Ülnerstrasse in Lüneberg could well have been a doppelganger. Ridiculous? When Dr. Thomas tried to access the papers on the case at the National Archives at Kew, he discovered they were embargoed until 2045, and subsequently, 29 faked documents, planted by a fraudulent historian in 12 separate files at some point between 2000 and 2005 haven’t helped.
So, it’s 2045 - are you ready, TV guys? Lights, camera - action!
Are all the Nazis dead yet? Not by a long chalk…