During the Third Reich, several actors and filmmakers moved to Hollywood to escape having to make propaganda films for the Third Reich. Fritz Lang, the director of Metropolis and M , two extremely influential early films, came to the US and made a few westerns; Marlene Dietrich, an early sex symbol, renounced her German citizenship and starred in many Hollywood films. Before the War, Hollywood was competing with Germany to make the best films in the world – before sound it didn’t matter what language movies were in, and the first actor to win the Best Actor Oscar was German. Fast forward to the present day, and we see that Hollywood still has an appetite for German talent. Little known fact, some of our favorite movie stars tried to defect to the Nazis. In 1981, Wolfgang Peterson wrote and directed Das Boot , a film about forty Nazi soldiers on a submarine. Unusual for a Nazi film, we are not supposed to hat...
Malcolm Coates