Aggrieved

I saw my enemies, and they are worms.

— Adolph Hitler 

You have to wonder why a powerful world leader would waste his time settling grievances with celebrities.

Until you realize, it's déjà vu all over again.

Celebrity-obsessed, Adolph Hitler loved to pal with famous actors and filmmakers, often inviting them to the Old Chancellery to drink Cokes (his beverage of choice) and screen movies after dinner.

Even more than watching celebrities on the screen, Hitler loved watching Hitler, and after his appointment as chancellor in 1933 took quick steps to enshrine himself on celluloid, telling his minister of "public enlightenment," Josef Goebbels—an equally avid movie buff—to find him a qualified director.

Goebbels first invited "Metropolis" director Fritz Lang—Hitler's favorite filmmaker—to try his hand. "Give us great Nazi films," Goebbels told him; but Lang, raised by a Jewish mother, politely declined—and boarded the night train for Paris.

So Goebbels turned to Leni Riefenstahl, who, borrowing heavily from "Metropolis," made "Triumph of the Will" the following year. 

Riefenstahl's film purported to be an inexpensive newsreel covering a party rally in Nuremberg; it was anything but. Hitler gave her an unlimited budget that allowed the director to stage and shoot multiple takes of lavish sequences, using sixteen camera crews and banks of aerial searchlights loaned by the Luftwaffe. Although the movie's big star was real, the crowds and parades—and even the buildings—were not.

"Triumph of the Will" was a smash, turning Hitler into a hero throughout the fatherland. (Thank goodness the technology was lacking for "Der Lehrling.")

But, sadly, overnight stardom and the adoration of millions didn't dampen Hitler's resentment of celebrities who crossed him, and the thin-skinned autocrat began keeping a personal blacklist of the hundreds of cultural "undesirables" he planned to liquidate.

On Hitler's blacklist were names familiar from stage and screen: Jack Benny, Myrna Loyd, Jack Warner, Charlie Chaplin, Victor Borge, Noel Coward, Bertolt Brecht, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf... and Moe, Larry and Curly.

Not the likeliest social critics, nonetheless in 1940 The Three Stooges starred in "You Nazty Spy!", the very first Hollywood film to satirize der Führer—and an act of defiance that marked them for "moider."

NOTE:"You Nazty Spy!" opens with the following disclaimer: "Any resemblance between the characters in this picture and any persons, living or dead, is a miracle." The same applies to this blog post.