by Ed Sikov
Because this is one of Billy’s most treasured stories, it’s even more dubious than usual, especially since the gunshot-that-turns-out-to-be-a-popping-champagne-bottle has been such a recurrent trope in his films. Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht, Der falsche Ehemann, and The Apartment aside, there’s also the fact of postwar army life in Germany to consider. “We had an alcohol ration that would absolutely choke a horse,” Sally Taylor declares. “Even in Bad Homburg—it was ten bottles a month per person. I used to think, ‘Who can drink ten bottles a month?’ We’re talking hard stuff. General McClure never was without liquor in his life. He had a closet full of it. No way did he ever send Billy out to get any liquor. That house was loaded with it. So you can scratch that one.”
The liberation of enemy booze was obviously the least of Billy’s tasks. Because Wilder knew his way around the German film and theater communities, he was particularly qualified to oversee the army’s de-Nazification program as it involved the entertainment industry. At Bad Homburg, Wilder and others supervised the interviewing of former Nazis to determine, in David Freeman’s turn of phrase, “which ones were the least undesirable.” Wilder knew or knew of many of these actors, directors, and other personnel. He remembered some personally and had heard about the exploits of others from fellow émigrés. One of the men Wilder interviewed was the actor Werner Krauss, known for his knack for doing horrible Jew impersonations in films like the notorious Jud Süss. Anton Lang was another. Before the war, Lang had played the role of Christ in the Oberammergau Passion Play. By the late 1930s he’d removed his stigmata and joined the SS. The Oberammergau’s director asked Billy to recertify Lang, who hoped to be able to dust off his cross and return to Golgotha. Wilder told him yes, Lang could act again, but only on one condition: “that in the Crucifixion scene you use real nails.” (A variation: “Six of the apostles were Gestapo men and the carpenter was a storm trooper. I said, ‘Yes, as long as the nails are real.’”)
Apart from conducting de-Nazification interviews, the death camp documentary occupied much of Wilder’s time while the search for his mother and grandmother took the rest. Neither came to anything.
The Red Cross simply had no information about Billy’s family. And it was most uncertain whether any details would ever surface.
Concurrently, Wilder was trying as best he could to make a film that would prove—perhaps to himself—exactly what the Germans had done to the Jews, but thanks to the army, even that concrete task proved to be beyond his control. In the third week of June, Davidson Taylor urged that Billy take over the film from a Russian filmmaker, Sergei Nolbandov, who had also been trying to assemble the vast amount of footage into something usable. Nolbandov had had little success. The extent of the horror, combined with literally miles of raw footage, confounded his attempts to organize it into a coherent and effective documentary. So Taylor proposed a shift of personnel. It was Billy Wilder, he recommended, who really should “be in charge of the script, the material shot so far, the material shot in the future, and the cutting and recording of the film until its final approval for release.” Together with some other writers, Taylor suggested, Wilder could “begin at once to prepare a script for the film at Bad Homburg.” The documentary would later be “assembled at the Geiselgasteig studios using German cutters, film, materials, and technicians under Mr. Wilder’s supervision.” Once the film was completed, Taylor advised, Billy would bring it back to Bad Homburg for final approval.
One of Billy’s most revealing stories about his time in Germany after the war concerns a test screening of the film in progress. The OWI, worried that German audiences would perceive an atrocity documentary merely as trumped-up Allied-Jewish myth making, decided to gauge audience response in a controlled screening. (Some accounts even claim that the idea for this test screening was Wilder’s own, the result of his experience sneaktesting films in Hollywood, but PsyWar had been test-screening material even before Wilder arrived at Bad Homburg.) In any event, Wilder himself reports: “The preview occurred in the autumn of 1945 in Würzburg. First we showed an old film, a harmless operetta with Lilian Harvey. Afterward, we asked the audience to remain seated and watch the following film. We told them there were preview cards and pencils outside with which they could write their opinion of the picture they were about to see. There were 500 people in the audience; at the end, only about 75. Not one card was filled out, but every pencil was stolen.” Wilder has even claimed that he convinced the OWI to work with the food-rationing office in Frankfurt to make it impossible for Germans to get bread or meat without seeing the film, which would eventually be titled Todesmühlen (Death Mills).
In point of fact, the test screenings PsyWar arranged for Todesmühlen and KZ, a preliminary, two-reel atrocity film, were as successful as these documentaries’ nauseating, demoralizing subject matter allowed them to be. German audiences were generally receptive to these movies, a fact that Wilder himself reported at the time. The production history of Todesmühlen is necessarily murky; there were too many people and too much footage involved—and too many governments and military officers. The Allies recorded and collected at least 600,000 feet of film taken by American, French, British, and Soviet correspondents, newsreel photographers, and cameramen. By December 1945, six separate versions of Todesmühlen had been assembled in various locations. Wilder did work on at least one of these versions, but his was not the one that was finally released. At the end of June 1945, General McClure expressed his eagerness to see Todesmühlen completed, but for reasons that only someone attuned to military logic could ever comprehend, McClure remained convinced that Wilder’s time and expertise were better spent on other activities for the Film Section—managerial activities unrelated to filmmaking. The completion of Todesmühlen was once again postponed. Handed one of the world’s leading film directors, a man supremely capable of making a stinging anti-Nazi film specifically for a German audience, the United States Army put him to work doing something else.
PsyWar had been screening a variety of films for select German audiences in the occupied territories, after which individual audience members were interrogated and the crowd as a whole was polled. It was nothing out of the ordinary, then, when Wilder and Davidson Taylor attended a screening of KZ on June 25 in a four-hundred-person theater in Erlangen, just north of Nürnberg. They reported their experience of the screening in a memo to McClure. The film had been playing in Erlangen for a week, Wilder and Davidson noted, and the theater was filled to 90 percent of its capacity except for the final day of the run, when attendance dropped to 65 percent. The audience did resent seeing nothing but propaganda, they acknowledged, but that was scarcely surprising. When asked, the German moviegoers said they would prefer an additional entertainment feature as part of every program.
Still, Wilder and Davidson’s report is clear: “There was standing room only at the performance we attended. The people are extremely anxious to fill out the questionnaires. Many volunteer their names, which are not required. No individual who has been asked to give an interview has declined.” Wilder and Davidson continue:
The audience was respectful but scarcely enthusiastic…. The audience had expected that a picture called Cowboy would be the last film on the program. [Cowboy was an innocuous feature about the real function of American cowboys as seen through the eyes of a British child.] When the title KZ came on the screen there was a gasp throughout the audience. There were expressions of shock and horror audible throughout the picture. When the title “Buchenwald” came on the screen, the audience spoke the word almost as one man. The atmosphere was electric throughout the film, and a palpable feeling of incredulity ran through the audience when the narrator said that the wife of the commandant at Belsen had made lamp shades from tattooed human skin. We have footage showing this collection of tattoos and why it was not included I cannot say.
There is no mention of stolen pencils and fleeing Germans in Billy’s memo. The only irony Wilder and Davidson reported to McClure is that after b
eing presented with images of mass murder the grisly likes of which had never before been recorded on celluloid, the audience at Erlangen actually stayed in the theater waiting for Cowboy to start—“except three women who looked rather ill.”
Encouraged by the test screening of KZ, Wilder kept pressing for the go-ahead to make the longer and more extensive Todesmühlen, but army brass continued on its static and unproductive course. In fact, even the precise nature of Wilder’s mission in Germany was still unresolved as late as June 26, a fact that Paley noted in a letter to McClure. One idea being floated at the time was to put him in charge of distribution and exhibition in occupied Germany, but Paley urged that given Billy’s background as an internationally renowned writer-director, he should be making films, not trafficking them. “The atrocity film we now have in mind is much larger in scope than the one originally intended,” Paley observed. “It now calls for someone of exceptional production experience, such as Mr. Wilder now has.” One can see Billy’s own hand clearly in this military paper trail, for two days later, Davidson Taylor fired off a letter of his own—this time to Paley—recommending that the colonel’s frequent guest for cocktails and dinner “be made Chief of Film Production” in occupied Germany. Yet another letter from Taylor reported that Billy had no experience in distribution and exhibition but was most anxious to make the as-yet-untitled Todesmühlen: “He is peculiarly equipped to make the atrocity film, and it is worthy of his talent in every way.” Taylor also recommended that film production be split off from distribution and exhibition, with Wilder heading production. And still nothing came of it. Wilder reedited the ending of KZ after attending the Erlangen screening, but this fairly minor revision appears to be the only concrete film production work the army actually allowed him to complete in Germany in 1945.
He had come to Germany to find out what had happened to his mother, and after all of his inquiries, he found … nothing. Even the ghastliest of concrete details would have been preferable to the void of disappearance he encountered. Wilder traveled to Vienna at some point that summer and stayed in relative comfort in the Hotel Bristol, but he gained no new facts to anchor him. He learned only that Eugenia Wilder Siedlisker no longer existed. Her name, along with the names of his stepfather and grandmother, did not appear on any lists of the dead. Genia simply ceased.
What Wilder knows is only what history books can offer: after the Anschluss, the Nazis strongly encouraged the Jews of Vienna to depart, and when the beatings, burglaries, and everyday harassment weren’t encouraging enough, they forcibly deported most of them to Krakόw. Based on this scant information, Wilder came to believe that his mother and grandmother returned to Krakόw and either died in the ghetto there or were crammed into cattle cars and shipped to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz. When he watched those miles of unedited atrocity footage in London and Bad Homburg, that is what he saw. He also found, none too surprisingly, a distinct lack of culpability among the Germans and Austrians to whom he spoke: “I never met a single Nazi. Everyone was a victim, everyone had been a resistance fighter.” One reason he was not surprised was that he knew these people well, having spent the first twenty-seven years of his life with them. He knew, even as a child, that Christian Germans and Christian Austrians would never forget or ignore the fact that he was a Jew. He felt it in Krakόw, he felt it in school at the Juranek, on the streets of Vienna and in the offices of Ufa. And he understood in a most visceral sense that if he hadn’t run for his life they’d have murdered him, too.
He has described the German people—and humanity as a whole: “I know the decent ones, I know the indecent ones, I know the ones who stood outraged—but within them there was a little jubilation: one Jew less. But then, I don’t think the world behaved very well after it became public knowledge that they had concentration camps. I think it could have done more. I could have maybe saved my mother—but I didn’t dare because then there would have been one more.” The last sentence is crucial. Billy Wilder was a survivor, but he paid a price for it in guilt.
Even then, these remarks were made after many years had passed. What he was feeling at the time is less clear. Sally Taylor recalls that Billy kept a Bible by his bed at Bad Homburg. She mentioned this detail to someone else at the compound and got a facetious reply: “Ha! He’s getting gags out of it.” Then again, this was somebody else’s joke, not Billy’s.
And yet Wilder didn’t lose his sense of humor in the summer of 1945. If anything, World War II served as fodder for new jokes. For Billy, as for innumerable other Jews, the late Adolf Hitler soon began serving as a ready punchline for almost any occasion. For instance, Wilder claims that while he was traveling in Stuttgart he saw a nun who looked just like Hitler. It really was Hitler, Wilder convinced himself. The Führer had not committed suicide in his bunker after all and was making his way through Germany in a clever disguise, heading in a wimple toward points unknown. Billy imagined the triumphant headlines—“Film Director Apprehends Hitler on Stuttgart Street!”—but then found himself confronted with a more likely worldwide news flash: “Film Director Assaults Nun!” Billy prudently decided against making a citizen’s arrest and let Sister Hitler go on her way.
Americans could not enter Berlin through most of the summer because it remained under Soviet control, but Wilder was able to fly over the city with a cameraman. “It looked like the end of the world,” he said. His remark is not offhand. At the end of the twentieth century there are two categories of human beings on the planet: those who were born into a world inured to images of fire-bombed Dresden, decimated Berlin, the gas chambers and crematoria and burial pits of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, and the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the one hand, and, on the other, those to whom such images had once been unimaginable. Billy Wilder fell into the second category. Just as the footage of Bergen-Belsen’s landscape of corpses was categorically unlike anything he had ever seen, so the unbroken miles of gutted, fire-bombed buildings and rubble he saw in Berlin had no meaningful point of comparison. The destructive technology of World War II had no parallel, and neither did its effects. When Wilder said that the city in which he had worked and played for seven years had come to resemble the end of the world, we can take him at his word.
There was also the smell. “The summer of ’45 was very, very hot—it was the hottest summer in Berlin that anyone could remember,” he said. “Thousands of corpses must have lain under the wreckage; the stink in the heat was intolerable. The dead swam in the Landwehrkanal; in the vegetable gardens lay putrefying corpses.”
Billy Wilder never had a very high opinion of the human race. Its essential goodness tended to escape him. As Paul Kohner said, the dogs were chasing him by the time he was twenty-five, and no one could quite understand why. In the summer of 1945, Billy found visible proof.
In August, when Berlin was reopened to the Americans, French, and British, Wilder was reassigned there. When he and his young army driver were finally able to enter the city, or what was left of it, Wilder directed the driver to take him directly to the Soviet sector—to the cemetery where his father lay buried. Pummeled into ruin in the final days of the war as the Red Army advanced, building by crumbling building, into the center of Berlin, the Jewish burial ground was now littered with toppled and half-blasted headstones, burnt trees, tank tracks, and weeds. An old, emaciated rabbi and a one-legged gravedigger (who, according to the ever-ironic Billy, closely resembled Conrad Veidt) met them and told them that Max’s grave would be difficult to find. Indeed, Wilder could not locate his father’s tomb in the mud and debris. The rabbi then told Wilder the harrowing story of his recent life: he and his wife had actually survived the war in Berlin itself, living underground for four long years in the heart of the Third Reich. When the Soviet liberators appeared in April, they rushed outside to greet them, whereupon the rabbi watched in horror as their “liberators” raped and killed his wife.
Berlin in the hot late summer of 1945 was a bizarre landscape of rubble, Allied soldiers, starv
ing Germans, and cocktail parties. In spite of the mass destruction and the stench of rotting bodies, the conquering Allied armies found a way to have a lot of fun. For the winners, Berlin was an ongoing cocktail party held in the surreal setting of an impromptu and overheated morgue. One of Wilder’s assigned army drivers, Richard Deinler, remembers this string of celebrations well. Billy knew many of the German film and theater people, of course, and rather than make his young driver sit in his jeep and wait for him, Wilder generously took Deinler along with him to the parties. “They were always brown-nosing him,” Deinler notes, none too surprisingly. After all, the Germans were eagerly trying to survive the rehabilitation program Wilder was helping to lead. They were angling for jobs. Thus the Jew from Krakόw and Beverly Hills found himself with a lot of new German friends. But Wilder was not easily fooled. Deinler remembers his boss taking him aside at some point during these evening soirees, scanning the room, and quietly pointing out all the Nazis to his amazed young driver.