Hitler's Taste in

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 345, 1 February 1946, Page 19

Hitler's Taste in

Films WONDER if I was as wrong as some persons on the extreme left seem to think I was in not being very enthusiastic about Mission to Moscow? I wouldn’t raise the issue again if it were not for a recent report in the New York Times that official files unearthed in Hitler’s Chancellery reveal that the Fuehrer, Goebbels, and other high-rank-ing Nazis were rabidly interested in American films and meticulously . reported on those they were able to see, Apparently they saw a good many: the Hollywood pictures, which were stolen or duplicated by the Nazis in Lisbon and other neutral ports, were screened for the Fuehrer in surprisingly large doses. These files show that although Watch on the Rhine, The Moon Is Down, and Five Graves to Cairo (in which Erich von Stroheim played ‘Rommel) were classified as "Hetzfilms," or hatredarousing pfoductions, Hitler heartily recommended Mission to Moscow with the note "unbedingt sehen" (see it by all means)! One might, of course, argue that Hitler must have approved of this film because it strengthened his propagandist story that the’ war was caused by a Bolshevik conspiracy and that Britain and the U.S.A. had gone as red as Russia. All the same it makes one wonder; and those extreme Leftists who uncritically applauded Mission to Moscow, and flayed anybody who didn’t, are now seen to have been in curious company. Stalin, himself, of course, did not like the picture, * at Fs THER interesting facts concerning Hitler's film taste emerge from these Chancellery files. For instance, he |was completely ecstatic about The Blue Angel (the early film with Marlene Dietrich, mostly banned outside Germany). Oddly enough, one of his favourite film tunes was "Danke ‘fuer die Erinnerung" (Thanks for the Memory), which the Nazis stole from a Bob Hope picture and published as an original German song. Westerns left Hitler cold, but Ten Gentlemen from West Point drew a good notice, to which Der Fuehrer added, "Well photographed." Although, as the report states, Hitler patiently sat through hundreds of films, some were "abgebrochen" (broken off, or stopped). Among these were Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife and Shanghai Gesture. And in the case of the Joe Louis-Max Schmeling championship fight pictures,

Hitler was ruffled to the extent of commenting, "The Fuehrer agrees with the Propaganda Minister, the fight film must be forbidden."