Hitler's Madman
      
Director: Douglas Sirk
Year: 1943
Rating: 5.5
Of course, Hitler had many madmen. In fact, an entire nation of madmen. When the end came, only the top planners and those that gave the orders were tried, but they were all guilty of crimes against humanity. Much of this film is rather clunky, but at the conclusion it gets powerful as the Nazis execute an entire town of 199 men. And you have to wonder not just about the insane Himmler's who gave the orders, but the men on the machine gun who pulled the trigger sending innocent helpless men to their deaths. Were they not just as guilty? Should they not have been tried too? Were they not madmen also? You get to that point where a man who was likely a simple farmer or baker can pull a trigger sending 199 men to their grave by creating the Other. Making them foreign, a sub-species not worthy of life.



"An infestation" (Trump). You say things like "I'm angry about young American girls being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens" (Trump) or "Haitians are eating your cats, dogs and pets" (Trump) - and then when you put children in cages where they are sexually abused people aren't outraged or when you round up 15 million people door to door and put them into concentration camps, people will stay quiet. There is a long history of first dehumanizing a group of people by religion or race or ethnicity and then killing them. The Nazis made a science of it.



In the case of this film, the madman is Reinhard Heydrich who among the evil was truly a psychotic. He planned the Holocaust, organized Kristallnacht and executed thousands of Jews and non-Jews. In this film, the plan to kill him is haphazard and amateurish while in reality it was planned in England between the Brits and the Czech in Exile government. It was called Operation Anthropoid and after a few plans could not be pulled off, two men got him in his open car, but almost missed as one of them had his gun jam and the other missed with his thrown explosive. The shrapnel got Heydrich but it looked like he would live until sepsis killed him days later. Then came the reprisals. In Lidice 199 men executed, 195 women deported to concentration camps and 95 children taken prisoner of which 81 were murdered in gas vans. The nearby village of Lezaky was also destroyed. Lidice is more famous though because of the poem about it from Edna St. Millay called the Murder of Lidice. At the end, the dead recite it.



When this film was made in 1943 most of the details of the assassination were not known, so they made it up. It was produced by PRC in one week but Louis B. Mayer liked it so much that MGM distributed it. It is directed by Douglas Sirk (after Americanizing his name) who had left Germany in 1939 after marrying a Jewish woman. He had been married previously but to a woman who joined the Nazi Party. In one scene, the German appointed mayor of Lidice learns that his son died on the Russian front. In a strange coincidence, Sirk's son died in the same way. Sirk had been a big deal in the theatrical world in Germany and had directed a number of films but it took four years before he was able to direct this film. It shows none of the style that he was to become famous for. Propaganda pure and simple.



Heydrich is portrayed by John Carradine giving it his evil best - interesting that Carradine has a strong resemblance to Heydrich. Other players are Alan Curtis as the Czech dropped in from England, Patricia Morrison is his girlfriend, Ralph Morgan her father and Edgar Kennedy as the woodsman who sings as they execute them all. If you don't blink, you will notice a woman who looks a lot like Ava Gardner in the scene where Heydrich is picking out acceptable women to send to the front as comfort women. And that is because it is Gardner. The scriptwriters were exiles from Europe as well. 

Dead, dead,

Until the ashes of Lidice

Not tell you how they are caught

Of all in the morning one day in June

Caught and shot and put out of the way ...

(At least that's what they say)

Tell you anything to eat or drink

A morsel of food, a drink of

Before you think, before you think

What is the best way

Keep hating your country from the enemy-

Keep it by slanting bit by bit

On what is the death of it-



The whole world holds in his arms today

The murdered village of Lidice,

As the murdered body of a young child

Happy and innocent, caught in the game,

The murdered body colored, and violated,

Tortured and mutilated, of a helpless child, -