Zarah Leander

Zarah Leander ranked as the foremost singing film actress throughout the Nazi era. Originally named Zarah Hedberg and hailing from Sweden, she advanced from modest provincial vaudeville and operetta engagements to secure a foothold on the Viennese stage by 1935, where she performed in Ralph Benatsky's Axel an der Himmelstür. After Marlene Dietrich departed for Hollywood in 1930, Berlin's UFA studios searched persistently for an adequate successor. Although her acting skills remained modest, Leander blended Dietrich's sultry sensuality with Greta Garbo's Nordic reserve, while her vocal abilities surpassed those Dietrich had displayed in operetta repertoire; these attributes persuaded UFA to offer her a contract in 1936.

Leander first achieved major popularity with two pictures helmed by Detlef Sierck, who later adopted the name Douglas Sirk in Hollywood: Zu Neuen Ufern (1937) and La Habanera (1937). Sierck recruited Ralph Benatsky to score the initial film, and by the second he had crystallized Leander's signature persona—an alluring foreign performer who overcomes deception to reclaim her standing through unforeseen circumstances. Although Sierck departed Nazi Germany shortly after completing La Habanera, the same narrative pattern sustained Leander's preeminence across her subsequent nine productions, among them the major successes Heimat (1938) and Es War Eine Rauschende Ballnacht (1939).

Leander departed from type in Die Grosse Liebe (1942) and attained her peak commercial triumph. Cast as a music-hall performer caught between a possessive composer and a military officer, she starred in a film whose songs, composed by Theo Mackeben, included the hits "Mein Leben für die Liebe" and "Ich Weiss, Es Wird Eimal ein Wunder Geschehen." Despite heavy censorship by both Allied and Axis authorities, the picture subtly captured the weariness and longing for peace shared by many Germans during the Second World War.

While shooting Damals (1943), Leander received a directive from Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda. Her 1936 UFA contract had channeled her earnings into a Swedish bank account, yet Goebbels now demanded renegotiation in Reichsmarks, German citizenship, and forfeiture of her Swedish assets and enterprises in exchange for property in East Prussia. With her Berlin residence already destroyed by bombing, Leander returned to Stockholm, terminating her reign as Germany's leading operetta star; the Nazi regime itself collapsed soon afterward.

For the following fifteen years Leander encountered limited professional prospects. She managed her Swedish holdings, among them a fish cannery, and appeared sporadically in lesser films, yet her prior association with the Nazi film industry damaged her standing, prompting many compatriots to brand her a collaborator. In 1958 she staged a return via the Viennese premiere of Peter Kreuder's operetta Madame Scandaleuse. From that revival until her retirement in 1972, an older Leander was embraced as a revered figure across German-speaking countries through stage and television appearances, though she rarely returned to the screen. She published the memoir Es War so Wunderbar, and several documentaries have examined her career both before and after her death at age 74 in 1981.