Excerpts From the Diary of a Simple Filmmaker

The first time I met the Fuhrer, I was admiring my beautiful body in the mirror in the Ladies’ Room of the Adlon Hotel in Berlin, when he came in, with Mussolini, Goebbels, Speer, Goering, Himmler, Adm. Horthy and von Ribbentrop. I will always believe they had wrongly thought it to be the Men’s Room.

“Ach! Excuse us!” he stammered in that way I would learn to know so well--but not too well--and retreated like a schoolboy, much abashed. I thought nothing more of it and went on to attend the premiere that evening of my new film, “Amazon Pilots of the Zugspitze.” When it came to the dance sequence on the glacier, as one, the audience--which included Enrico Fermi, the king of England, Garbo and my mother--fainted.

Another success! Too bad poor Sepp could not be there to share it; but I had, in the excitement, completely forgotten to raise his bail money! I have often wondered, in the years since, if Sepp found the happiness that had always eluded him, or if he ever thought about the 50 Reichsmarks he still owed me. Somehow, the I.O.U. has survived to this day.

Imagine my lack of surprise when, the next day, a new Mercedes, wrapped in a red ribbon, appeared in front of my tiny villa in the woods near the Reichschancellery. I was so busy editing the dailies for my newest film (retitled “Victory of the Ruthless” by the Propaganda Ministry, despite the fact I had intended it as a high-school hygiene documentary), that I failed to notice the card attached to the steering wheel. “Just put it in the car park,” I told my devoted assistant--I think her name was Irmtraud. So many cars had been delivered, from so many men so tiresomely pursuing me!

It was then that the telephone rang. “Nice wheels, nein?” I was hypnotized, entranced by that voice, at once crude and seductive, and have often wondered since how I ever managed to blurt out a request for 400,000 Reichsmarks and the use of the Luftwaffe for my new film project before agreeing, in a daze, to have tea with this strange man, of whose politics I knew nothing, while knowing that I would despise them if I ever asked.

The ritual was always the same: Hitler would order oat tea and kelp cakes and a liter of vegetable juice for himself and nothing for his guests--and then stick Goebbels with the bill.

Goebbels, crafty in all things, would have packed the pockets of his leather greatcoat with candy bars and pastries and stand behind the Fuhrer, munching them out of his eyesight. He was insanely jealous of my sitting in the Fuhrer’s lap at those boring teas, little knowing that I had sprained my ankle while filming “Flying She-Devils of the Arctic Mists” in 1928, and was in agonizing pain.

Nonetheless, after tea, the Fuhrer would always make the same joke. “Goebbels, you take a hike, while we take a walk.” I shall never forget hobbling beside him as he confided his innermost thoughts, and will wish to my dying day that I had listened more carefully--but then, amnesia has run in my family for many generations, as I was later able to convince the Denazification Tribunal.

I had been so preoccupied in preparing for my film on nude Gypsy horsemen of the Spanish plains that World War II was already in its final stages before I realized that those loud bangs I had been hearing from my windowless editing room were not midnight street repairs but bombs, ruining all the cinemas in Berlin.

It was now that I decided that I hated the Fuhrer, who had brought devastation to the film industry and, as I later discovered, much else besides. I was writing him a note, telling him how I really felt, when Bormann barged into my simple little bunker. “Three Reichs and you’re out, kitten--Adolf’s gone to Valhalla and I’m off to Paraguay!”

I often wish I could bring back that moment and tell Bormann--who never liked my films--what I thought of him.

It was around this time that I found myself dining at U.S. Army Headquarters with Generals Patton and Eisenhower, who appeared not to know who I was and who rebuffed my offer to make a documentary film of the hanging of the Nazi war criminals.

It was Eisenhower, I later learned, who issued the order confiscating the meager few gold bars I had buried in my garden, mistaking them for mulch bags in the chaos that engulfed the film community.

I had had my mother press my best gown, and rubbed his leg all evening, and screened the only remaining print of “Air Maidens of the Blue Ice”--for this. But a film maker must accept betrayals, cruelty and misunderstanding as consequences of being a true Artist. Within hours, I was on the phone to Hollywood.