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Veit Harlan - Biography

Less well-known today than his film-making contemporary Leni Riefenstahl, Veit Harlan, director of Jud Suss (1940) one of the most notorious films in cinematic history, was arguably the more valuable to the Nazis than Riefenstahl in terms of the number of German people who saw his popular propagandistic films.   The films he made throughout the 1930s and 40s helped establish and reinforce both the anti-semitism that allowed an entire nation to stand aside and watch as a proportion of their population was systematically exterminated, and a fierce nationalistic pride that saw them follow their megalomaniacal leader into war.   Harlan would later claim that films like Jud Suss were made under duress, and after his death many of his family would argue that he showed no signs of anti-semitism, but even if this is the case, the content of Harlan’s cinematic legacy will always overshadow the undoubted technical skill and abilities of the director.

 Harlan was born in Berlin on the 22^nd September 1899, and led an unremarkable childhood.   Showing an interest in stage acting, he studied under the Austrian theatre director Max Reinhardt before making his stage debut in 1915.  After WW1, he appeared on the Berlin stage where he met and married Jewish actress and cabaret singer Dora Gerson.   The marriage was short-lived, however, ending in divorce in 1924, possibly because Dora left Harlan for a Jewish man.   Dora and her family would later die in Auschwitz.

 Harlan made his first film appearance in 1927 and worked steadily as a film actor throughout the late 1920s and early 30s.   In 1929 he married Hilda Koerber.   She would give Harlan three children – a son, Thomas, and two daughters, Susette and Maria – but this marriage too would end in divorce in 1938, this time because of Harlan’s strong political beliefs.

 Within a year, Harlan was married again, this time to Swedish-born actress Kristina Soederbaum, who would appear exclusively in his films, and would remain with him until his death.   By now, Harlan had given up acting to concentrate on writing and directing.   In 1937, Joseph Goebbels had appointed him as one of his major propaganda directors, and he produced a number of anti-semitic box-office successes before he was commissioned to direct the infamous Jud Suss.

 We may never know with any degree of certainty just how much of a willing participant Veit Harlan was in the production of these films.   He would claim in later life that the Nazis forced him to shoot them, although this claim was contradicted by former crew members.   While Harlan was without doubt a willing advocate of the National Socialist ideology, there is evidence that he went to some lengths to avoid participating in the making of Jud Suss.   He initially complained about the quality of the script and then, when his complaints were dismissed, volunteered for war service.  Goebbels would have none of it; he declared the making of Jud Suss a wartime duty, meaning any refusals to take part in its production – or attempts to avoid participation – could be interpreted as an act of desertion.

The film told the story of the rise and fall of Joseph Suess Oppenheimer, an 18^th Century Jewish financier and adviser to the Duke of Wuerttemberg.  In previous screen and stage incarnations, Oppenheimer had been shown in a sympathetic light, but in Harlan’s film he is portrayed as a corrupt and oily character whose political machinations allow the duke’s city to be overrun by Jews.   The film was a huge success, receiving in 1943 one of UFA’s highest awards, and prompting the film critic Karsten Witte to call Harlan the ‘baroque fascist.’   Years later, in Felix Moeller’s documentary Harlan: In the Shadow of The Jew Suess, Harlan’s youngest son, Kaspar, while accepting his father’s insistence that he made the film under duress, would plaintively ask, ‘Why did he have to make it so well?’

 At the end of the war, Harlan was accused of being a ‘fellow traveller’ by an Allied denazification committee and charged with aiding the Nazis and participating in the anti-Semitic movement.  He denied both charges and, in Hamburg in 1947, the proceedings ruled that he was ‘unbelastet’ (untarnished) by the past.   The decision caused an outcry, and in 1948 two organisations representing victims of Nazism filed an application with Hamburg’s chief public prosecutor to press fresh charges based on Allied Control Council Law No. 10 (crimes against humanity).   Following an investigation by Hamburg Regional Court’s public prosecutor’s office, Harlan was charged with ‘having contributed as an accessory to the commission of crimes against humanity by means of persecution based on race, and having been associated with the planning of such crimes.’

 Harlan’s trial on these charges opened in Hamburg on 3^rd March 1949.   Victims of Nazi anti-semitic persecution gave evidence, amongst them Norbert Wollheim who testified that propaganda films such as Jud Suss had spread terror amongst the Jews living in Nazi Germany.   Despite the evidence given against him, Harlan was found not guilty of the charges on 23^rd April 1949.   An appeal was lodged, and was heard by the High Court of the British zone on 12^th December 1949.   Once again, on 29^th April 1950, Harlan was found not guilty.

 Finally free of the charges against him, Harlan was able to return to making films.  However, in 1951 he was involved in another court action, this time as the plaintiff, which would result in a landmark decision in relation to constitutional civil rights in disputes between individuals.

Hamburg politician Erich Lüth had been calling for a boycott of one of Harlan’s films, an act which prompted Harlan to take out an injunction against the politician.   Lüth appealed, and the injunction was lifted by the Federal Constitutional Court as it was ruled to have violated his freedom of expression.

Harlan continued to work steadily, directing an average of one film a year throughout the 1950s.   In 1958, his niece, actress Christiane Susanne Harlan married young director Stanley Kubrick, whom she met on the set of Paths of Glory.   The couple would remain together until Kubrick’s death in 1999.

Veit Harlan died of pneumonia while on holiday in Capri, Italy, on 13^th April 1964, just two months after becoming a Catholic.

In February 2010, Oskar Roehler's Jud Süss - Film ohne Gewissen, a film about Ferdinand Marian, the star of Harlan's infamous Jud Süss, was booed when it played at the Berlin Film Festival.

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