Hitler Lives (Warner Bros., 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

tLast night I was curious about Don Siegel’s second Warner Bros. short, Hitler Lives (of which there’s some confusion as to the title: it’s also referred to in some sources as Hitler Lives?). So I looked it up on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEYeJKCFQgA and it turned out to be a fascinating 17-minute document. Its main argument was that Germans were inherently warlike and wanted to rule the rest of the world by force. The documentary, written by Saul Elkins (also co-writer of Sievel’s first directorial effort, Star in the Night) and narrated by Knox Manning in the voice-of-God tones that had become de rigueur for mass-market documentaries since the fabulous success of The March of Time newsreels starting in 1935 (their narrator was the spectacularly well-named Westbook Van Voorhis, who survived until 1968), argues along the lines of the so-called “Pan-German” plot. The film argued that Germany had made at least two previous attempt to conquer the world: under Otto von Bismarck in the 1860’s and 1870’s; under Kaiser Wilhelm in World War I; and under Adolf Hitler in World War II. Manning’s narration describes German history, and especially Germany’s relations with the rest of the world, as a cycle of “war, phony peace, war, phony peace, war.” The film explicitly warns the rest of the world not to be fooled by Germany’s lilting music (there’s a stock shot of Wilhelm Furtwängier conducting the Berlin Philharmonic), sunny outdoors and overall apparent friendliness to letting their guard down; the Germans,the film says, are just waiting, planning and searching for the next opportunity to rebuild their military and take a fourth run at world conquest. It was a sentiment expressed quite openly in the last days of World War II and its immediate aftermath – most notably in Treasury Secretary Henry J. Morgenthau’s plan for a postwar Germany that would be allowed to be only an “agricultural and pastoral” country with no industrial base.

tThe Western line about Germany spectacularly changed within a year or two as Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union emerged as the U.S.’s major enemy and worldwide threat. Winston Churchill famously proclaimed that an “Iron Curtain” had descended over Eatern Europe, and Stalin – who’s depicted in this film in a chilling stock shot of the founding of the United Nations as one of the good guys who had helped save the world for peace and democracy – now replaced Hitler in American demonology as the over-arching villain whose evil regime needed to be contained at all costs. One of the means of containing it was to build a strong, peaceful, republican Germany out of the three Western occupation zones (the U.S., Britain and France) that would serve as a buffer state between Russia and France/ So the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949 and, amazingly given all the predictions of various Allied political leaders, has lasted until now and become a stable democracy from which we could learn lessons. (Among the things I like about the German political system that I wish we could adopt was a parliamentary government and proportional representation, which makes founding alternative political parties a sensible strategy. In Germany, once you win five percent of the vote nationwide you get representation in the legislature equal to the total percentage of the nationwide vote. So if you’re a German and you vote for the Green Party, you get what you wanted – more Green Party members in the Bundestag, the German legislature – while if you vote for the Green Party in the U.S. you only hurt the Democrats and thereby help elect more Republicans.)

tWhat’s most interesting about Hitler Lives from today’s perspective is the shots of the nast five minutes or so of Hitler’s symp-athizers in the U.S. as well as our own crop of wanna-be dictators. There are a lot of pre-war clips of people who fit into one or both of those categories, including Huey Long and someone I think was Fathe rCharles Coughlin (illustrating a passage in Manning’s narration that claims even some clergymen disgraced themselves and the principles of their religion by embracign fascism or its sympathizers), as well as a number of others my husband Charles would probably more readily recognize than I did. In an era in which one of America’s two major political parties has openly abandoned belief in democracy – what we hear from modern-day Republicans is that either they won or the election was stolen – this part of Hitler Lives is more relevant than ever.