Ursel’s bravado was remarkable enough, but how did Ilse do it?
Throughout the Third Reich, she lived, so she repeatedly told me, as if she had nothing to fear. She didn’t go into hiding or take an assumed name. She didn’t try to get herself certified as Aryan, or marry into a new identity. Emigration – with which I think Ursel briefly toyed when her former Berlin acting teacher suggested she join her in Hollywood – was out of the question.
On the contrary, Ilse continued to dwell with brazen normality at the heart of Hitler’s Berlin. She worked as a photographer on Budapesterstrasse until her atelier was bombed in 1944, openly advertising her services and counting high Nazis among her satisfied customers. She spent the ever more dangerous years from 1935 to 1942 with a card-carrying Nazi, with whom she waltzed at Babelsberg while other Hybrids of the First Degree were undergoing gradual social death. She survived the war in Berlin, collecting the food coupons to which Aryans were entitled and dealing with the myriad officials who interfered in citizens’ daily lives, without once being menaced by a knock on the door – all while other half-Jews were cowering in basements until a rumour, a random enquiry, or a neighbour’s unusual glance forced their courageous hosts to throw them to their fate. She gave birth to a son, fathered by Harald Böhmelt, in Berlin’s Franziskus clinic in the summer of 1942, a few months after the Holocaust was set in train. The worst harassment she suffered was the ogling of men or their dull proposals of marriage – of which her unpossessable beauty attracted a steady stream.
She knew about the innumerable decrees, some of them all the more gruesome for their bizarreness, such as the ban on Jews owning carrier pigeons or buying soap and shaving cream; and she saw the assembly points where knots of the doomed were awaiting deportation. But the invitations to glittering evenings never abated, even as Jewish lives were being smashed to destruction. It was as if she was hiding herself by flaunting herself.
One of Ilse’s clients, a First World War fighter pilot ace called Ernst Udet, who was helping Göring build up the Luftwaffe, regularly invited her to the debauched parties he threw. Udet was a star of 1930s Berlin who moved easily between affairs of state and bohemian free-spiritedness, and felt much at home among the film producers, composers, and actors with whom Harald and Ilse mixed. He had swagger, she said, but didn’t strut with the grim earnestness of Hitler’s senior henchmen. His face wasn’t laminated with privilege like Göring’s; nor did he slyly conceal private sensual pleasures behind a public show of rectitude. He became rich at a time of economic depression from his bestselling autobiography and from films that became world-famous, packed with his low-flying stunts. One of his most daring numbers, Ilse reported, was to fly under a bridge and then snatch a handkerchief from the ground with his wing tip. Udet was his own man; he loved women and soft drugs, and he made little secret of it.
So too did another of her clients, an actor called Heinrich George, a former communist who had effortlessly converted to Nazism and entertained Party bosses, artists, and businessmen in the living room at his villa near the Wannsee, where statues of Hitler and Stalin glowered at each other from opposite corners. ‘I moved over from him to him,’ he would stammer, a glass of champagne listing in his hand, while his guests lounged on soft cushions, cuddled in corners, or watched films projected onto a wall-to-wall screen.
Then there were the splendid evenings at Ufa’s studios in Babelsberg, just outside Berlin, where films like The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich’s talkie, had been made, and where the roaring Twenties, with their bohemian cheek and cynical humour, had found their way into celluloid – but which was now a diligent valet of the Nazi worldview. Though it swarmed with Party members and had of course dismissed its Jewish directors and actors, it seems that nobody at Ufa knew about Ilse’s ancestry. Dancing on Böhmelt’s arm with delicious impunity before and into the early part of the war, Ilse felt that Babelsberg was like a utopian space insulated from politics, a world unto itself of dizzying safety.
Indeed, between Kristallnacht and the outbreak of war, Ilse even found herself accompanying Böhmelt to the Führer’s official residence in Berlin, where Hitler was throwing a party for a handful of favoured artists, designers, architects, and composers – no more than sixty in total. As she recounted it in her matter-of-fact manner, as if not even a moment as surreal as this could faze her, she and Harald were stunned by the opulence of it all, less because much of Germany was still suffering from grinding poverty than because it echoed the order that emanated from the Führer and that was in turn reflected in the perfection of every detail: the furniture, the carpets, the coasters, the saucers, the lampshades, the Turkish cushions, the marble ashtrays, and the clichéd sculptures of ideal male and female forms. Not to mention the caviar, which particularly impressed Böhmelt with its shiny, briny, gold-black radiance. Endless varieties of meat and vegetables and fish were laid out on Meissen dishes in the light of shimmering candles. Aromas seeped indoors from a spotlit patio as bottles of champagne and German Rieslings criss-crossed the room, carried in the grip of white gloves. Hitler himself chatted vivaciously, but his attention, Ilse reported, seemed far away. He ate nothing and drank nothing. He was withdrawn as only a god can be. Or perhaps he was bored.
At the same time, Ilse and Harald consorted with many figures unbeloved of Hitler. They were close to Werner Finck, co-founder of the political cabaret Die Katakombe (The Catacombs), where Isa Vermehren, Ursel’s friend, had found work and which, Finck relates in his memoirs, he had conceived in Harald’s house.30 They spent many weekends with Otto Dix, the ‘degenerate’ artist, whom Ilse found cheerful, despite his stunted career. She often saw the banned writer Erich Kästner, author of such international bestsellers as Emil and the Detectives, who called her ‘my chauffeur’ because she ferried him around in her car and who enervated her with his mother-worship, his pessimism, and his back-seat driving.
Most of these people had time on their hands: Finck had seen his cabaret closed by Goebbels in 1935 and was then briefly interned in a concentration camp. Kästner, who had gone to see his own books burned in the presence of Goebbels in 1933, couldn’t publish under his real name. Other writers, like Hans Fallada, with whom Böhmelt had collaborated in making the film Kleiner Man – was nun?, and Peter Franke, were keeping a low profile. Ilse would join groups of them for weekends in the lovely Harz mountains, or at Finck’s cottage near Potsdam, or in the Reeperbahn amusement district of Hamburg, where they whiled away long evenings at the then-famous dance hall, Ballhaus Trichter.
But what none of these people knew was that, by 1941, Ilse had another life. A dangerous and almost entirely secret one.