April 2006

-e*I*25- (Vol. 5 No. 2) April 2006, is published and © 2006 by Earl Kemp. All rights reserved. It is produced and distributed bi-monthly through http://efanzines.com by Bill Burns in an e-edition only.

Contents — eI25 — April 2006

The Big Red One [montage from The Big Red One, directed by Samuel Fuller], by Ditmar

…Return to sender, address unknown….16 [eI letter column], by Earl Kemp

Curious Couplings 6, by Earl Kemp

Springtime for BushCo and Halliburton, by Earl Kemp

Thea von Harbou and Metropolis, by Andy Sawyer

Use Free Speech Or Lose It, by Richard E. Geis

The Third Reich, by Jim Linwood

Adolf’s First Goose, by Victor J. Banis

If Hitler Had Won World War Two…, by Michael Moorcock

An Interview with Leni Riefenstahl, by Philip K. Cartilege

The Amazing Life and Death of Rudolf Hess, by Christopher Priest

Erotica in France During the Occupation, by Patrick J. Kearney

Elmer Gantry in Darkest Bushworld, by Jay A. Gertzman

My Love Affair With Adolf Schicklgruber, by Earl Terry Kemp

I Was Hitler’s Projectionist, by Wank Schoerner

Satan’s filing clerks and beerhall bores, by Michael Moorcock

If you don’t think the rights-robbing, privacy-invading, Constitution ignoring administration of George W. Bush is anything less than a Hitler-style Gestapo then you’ve got your head stuffed so far up your ass that all that brown stuff is blinding you.

              —Doug Thompson, Capitol Hill Blue, January 23, 2006

THIS ISSUE OF eI is for and in memory of all the patriots, freedom fighters, and insurgents—dead or alive—who fought against the “support our troops” terrorists wherever they intrude.

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As always, everything in this issue of eI beneath my byline is part of my in-progress rough-draft memoirs. As such, I would appreciate any corrections, revisions, extensions, anecdotes, photographs, jpegs, or what have you sent to me at earlkemp@citlink.net and thank you in advance for all your help.

Bill Burns is jefe around here. If it wasn’t for him, nothing would get done. He inspires activity. He deserves some really great rewards. It is a privilege and a pleasure to have him working with me to make eI whatever it is.

Other than Bill Burns, Dave Locke, and Robert Lichtman, these are the people who made this issue of eI possible: Victor Banis, Robert Bonfils, Bruce Brenner,  “Philip K. Cartilege,” Graham Charnock, Brittany A. Daley, L. Truman Douglas, Richard E. Geis, Jay A. Gertzman, Steve Green, John Jarrold, Patrick J. Kearney, Tony Keen, Earl Terry Kemp, Dave Langford, Jim Linwood, Michael J. Lowrey, Lynn Munroe, Michael Moorcock, Christopher Priest, “Wank Schoerner,” Art Scott, Andy Sawyer, Robert Speray, Brice Townley, Peter Weston, and Dave Wood.

ARTWORK: This issue of eI features original artwork by Ditmar [Martin James Ditmar Jenssen], Schirm [Marc R. Schirmeister], and Alan White, and recycled artwork by William Rotsler.

Bush blatantly broke the law by ordering the National Security Agency to spy on Americans without warrants or court review. The only cretins who support this dictator are the brain-dead Republicans who put power above the law and party loyalty above their country.

              —Doug Thompson, Capitol Hill Blue, January 23, 2006

…Return to sender, address unknown…. 16
The Official eI Letters to the Editor Column
Artwork recycled William Rotsler

By Earl Kemp

We get letters. Some parts of some of them are printable. Your letter of comment is most wanted via email to earlkemp@citlink.net or by snail mail to P.O. Box 6642, Kingman, AZ 86402-6642 and thank you.

Also, please note, I observe DNQs and make arbitrary and capricious deletions from these letters in order to remain on topic.

This is the official Letter Column of eI, and following are a few quotes from a few of those letters concerning the last issue of eI. All this in an effort to get you to write letters of comment to eI so you can look for them when they appear here.

Wednesday February 15, 2006:

Enjoyable issue. You're really keeping the flame to the foot of Evan Hunter.

                              —Adam Parfrey/Feral House

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I found the section on "Howard" in the latest eI very interesting.  The shot of Howard was done by me on our trip to Detroit in 1957 (it was in the middle of a major recession and a very depressing place as I remember it).  I didn't do the Cleveland picture but it was done with my old "Argus C3," probably by George Young or Joe Sarno who are not in the picture.  As to the "unknowns": Don Ford is kneeling and reaching up to Ben and P. Schuyler Miller is behind him, Mary Young is the women to the left of Noreen. 

The person behind Jon in the white shirt is Jim Broderick.  The top of the head to my left is Bill Reichardt.  Those are probably the Lavenders since I have a picture of them at the party.  George Young is kneeling in front of Mary.  Fred Profit was probably taking the picture since he was at the party the night before.

                        —James O’Meara

Thursday February 16, 2006:

That's a terrific job you did on Dean Hudson in the new issue of eI.   I knew long ago who had written the books, of course — I think I remember who it was within SMLA who told me — and I knew WHY he was writing them, too, but the part about his picking up the payment in cash was new to me, and adds the whole new angle of tax evasion to the story.  Fascinating.  Never occurred to me to take my payments in cash; I was content to get those nice $1,080 pink checks (practically one a week!) from Reed Enterprises or Blake Pharmaceutical or whichever one of the dummy corporations was paying me.  That $1,080 went a long way in 1962.  Would have gone a lot longer if I hadn't been paying taxes on the money, I guess, but although I have always been as aggressive as possible about shielding my income from taxation, I do make sure to stay within the law while doing it, and I would have felt pretty queasy about getting paid in cash.  Ancient history now, of course.

                        —Robert Silverberg

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Wow, eI is five. Time to send it off to Kindergarten. That first day when it goes off will be the hardest.

Good to see a Howard DeVore tribute. I never got to meet him, but I talked to him twice. Nice guy. Good talker.

That group of fans you spoke of is, how best to put this, FUCKING INCREDIBLE! I know fandom was much smaller back then, so it was much easier for a single geographic area to have a large number of impressive fans, but still, that’s a great group. You mention Evelyn Gold. I’ve seen a few photos of her and she was quite the looker back in the day.

You know, for some reason I’d never heard that you edited a genzine. You know anyone who has copies still in their collection? I always assume that Robert Lichtman does, but usually I end up going through the few collection notes of the Pelz Collection to find more obscure stuff.

You can blame Howard, at least partly, for your WorldCon. From what I understand he had that effect on a lot of people. I’m quite glad he helped you along the road to return so that we might get eI. I seem to have a lot to be grateful for from a man I only spoke to over the phone those two times in the 1990s. 

There’s one of those rich brown stories I’d heard about. I found a stash of Amazings about a year ago and I was hoping to find one of rich’s stories, but I didn’t I found some of his fanzine reviews, but no stories. It’s a good piece, and I love that illustration. Curt Phillips is a great guy and someone should make sure he gets the Big Heart award in the coming years.

The assumption of Reader’s knowing something quote from Vonnegut got me into a lot of trouble. My prof at Emerson, Bill Knott, said that my work required too much outside knowledge. ‘Think of every reader as a slate half-filled, not like a Universal Knowledge Machine as you write for them.’ I came across that quote and I handed it to him with one of my poems. I managed to avoid failing the class by writing nearly twice the required amount and he just gave up with the harsh criticism that he was leveling at me.
I love the Gay Tease cover. The title itself, when looked at with modern vocabulary, is a bit of a tease too.

Wow, I’m reading a lot about Evan Hunter these days. There was a long thing on the Ed McBain novels on NPR that got me reading everything I could find. I even picked up a couple of his books a couple of weeks ago. I know I read Blackboard Jungle when I was in high school. I loved the movie when I was in college. I really should revisit both sometime soon.

You know, reading what Mr. King had to say about Hunter I found myself with deep respect for the man. He actually had deep insight, unlike the things that he writes monthly for Entertainment Weekly or any of the other sources of his words. Sometimes it takes looking at the effect of a real pioneer to slap you to your senses.
Elmore Leonard said three things to me the one time I met him: ‘Which way to the can?’, ‘You with the festival?’ ‘Good to meet a fan.’ That was all. HE was nice about it, certainly nicer than the other folks who came with the movie.

Since I’ve found a relatively frequent source for beat-up copies of various paperbacks of all kinds for readin’, I’m now making it my mission to get all of the Dean Hudson books. Luckily, I know where to find both Casting Couch and The N.U.D.E. Caper for fair prices.
I know I say, or at least hint at, the fact that Kurt Vonnegut is my favorite writer, but every quote you pull from him for eI ends up reminding me of my hundreds of trips where I read his books. I’m never quite sure how you manage, but every one you’ve pulled has some connection to some strange memory. That last quote from Deadeye Dick reminds me that I was reading it the day my Grandma died and I’ve never read the book again.

                        —Chris Garcia

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Great, I really enjoyed eI24. Just spent an hour reading it while I should have been working on my new novel. This is a strange one. I hadn't meant to write a novel, this was supposed to be a short story but it kinda got our of hand and as of this morning I passed 40,000 words — the official MWA/SFWA criterion for a novel as distinguished from shorter forms. Truly an odd experience. Every novel I wrote before now was based on a thorough chapter-by-chapter outline. This one — nuh-huh — it's just happening. I don't know if it will be any damned good or even if I'll be able to sell it, but it has certainly been a new experience for YHOS.

Your tribute to Big Hearted Howard DeVore was truly touching. I first met Howard at the 1957 Midwestcon. Vas you dere, Scharlie?

Also, it might amuse you to know that Eric Schultheis, Steve and Virginia's son, works at Cody's Books. He and Pat both useta work at the main store on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. But the company has added two more locations, and Pat now works at their Fourth Street store while Eric works at their San Francisco store. Eric might be able to ID some more of the people in Noreen's Church Group. And speaking of dear friends who will be missed, Pat and I used to have a standing dinner date with Noreen after Tom Lesser's paperback show closed down on Sunday night. Will try and make it with her son Steve and his wife this year, and hoist a toast in memory of Noreen. God, I still miss Larry Shaw, one of my oldest and best friends in the science fiction world (going back to the mid-1950's). He's been gone for a lot of years, and now Noreen is gone, too.

On the other hand, I did admire Salvatore Lombino, enjoyed his works, interviewed him a couple of times for a local radio station here in Berkeley, and corresponded with him a little. Lovely guy, talented writer. And I was fascinated by the pieces by Lynne Munroe and Tobe Rinkler.

                        —Richard Lupoff

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Congratulations on a truly excellent ezine.  I was proud to be associated with it.  Only one thing should have been done and was not.  I wrote a great deal about the cover art of NB1630 but then we don't show that art.  Was there any reason for that?  I imagine it's too late to add it in now.

                        —Lynn Munroe

Lynn, you are absolutely correct. I should have included the cover scan. To make up for my negligence, I’m doing so right now and repeating the text to go along with it. –Earl Kemp.

NB1630 Lust Dream
The thin line between sex and death has never looked narrower than on this haunting book cover. A nude blonde is being strangled, the killer's hands reaching out as if they are ours. A couple more blondes stand behind her, but wait, look again, one of them has a grinning death mask skull for a face. These deep-seated images are right from the book, the story of a young man who dreams such murders, and then goes out to walk the dark streets, looking for someone to crush...or kill. This is nightmarish, disturbing, adult reading, unexpectedly frightening. Sean is unable to enjoy normal, happy relations. One night it all comes back to him - as a child he had watched his father strangle his prostitute mother to death. And now she haunts his dreams, his days.

Monday February 20, 2006:

Earlier tonight (February 19, 2006) Ed Gorman wrote a letter to Bill Crider's blog http://billcrider.blogspot.com/ that reads in part:

I like Earl Kemp's stuff very much. Way back in the mid-'50s I was reading his fanzine material. I always thought he was one of the cool guys—and still do. But I'm troubled by his piece on the soft-core porn days of Evan Hunter.

I mean the tale's been gossiped about for four decades.  And so on and so on. I just don't see the necessity for sharing all the info on his porno when he'd made it clear he didn't care to acknowledge it. If nothing else, couldn't Earl have waited six months or a year after his death?

Right now Earl's piece has the feeling of an oddly vengeful expose.

                 —Ed Gorman

Then Ed wrote an email to eI, Lynn Munroe, and Bill Cinder stating in part:

I think I overshot here, guys, and I owe you an apology for that. I should have stuck to my one point. In Lynn’s case, you shared information. I can’t carp about that. 

In Earl's case you wrote a memoir that didn't always present Hunter in a fond light.  I guess that rankled me more than I realized.  I also guess it was the tone of the piece that got me more than anything.

Your sketch of working with the Scott Meredith agency, on the other hand, was masterful. There has recently been a fine book published about the Brill building and all the writers and singers who worked there over the years—everybody from Carole King to Neil Diamond—a book packed with lore and legend. Sure wish somebody'd do that about the Meredith agency.

I still say that if a living writer doesn't want certain of his past work revealed, his wish should be honored. I realize that about .0007 of people in the industry agree with this.  Call me old-fashioned.

You guys know how much I admire and enjoy the work you do. You're historians and scholars of a particularly important kind. I guess we agree to disagree on this one subject.

                   —Ed Gorman

Then I replied to Ed explaining my feelings of annoyance at Hunter's position, not anger, and Ed responded in part:

I agree with you about the soft-core era. It was an important time in several different ways in pop history and deserves serious scholarship. Some sf writers did their best work for soft-core markets. Made them confront the humanity they never got to in their sf.

I read an old Westlake a while back (a Midwood I think) and damned if it wasn't a pretty serious take on college life back in the early sixties when girls were either "good" or "bad." I think Westlake is the best crime writer of his generation and it showed he had the stuff from the git-go. Just one more example of there being some interesting and surprisingly good work done in the form.

Hunter was obviously a man of parts, as we all are. If you read Streets of Gold, you see how difficult it was for him to think of himself as equal to all the people he met after coming out of the Navy. A part of him was always that insecure ghetto boy. In a lot of ways, he was Gatsby. In order to keep his career going, he had to reinvent his approach to the marketplace three or four times. And I think he also reinvented himself along the way—again, something most of us do in the course of our lives. That's what I think his aversion to talking about his porn days was about. Gatsby, a bootlegger? Never.

If you see the excellent documentary the BBC did about Hunter, you'll be surprised at both the anger and vulnerability you hear when he's reading his own material. And the melancholy he feels when he takes us on a tour of the combat-zone where he grew up.

Anyway, thanks again for the letter. You have a great fanzine (as you always did) and if I ever finish this novel I'm writing, I'll be happy to do something for eI.    

                   —Ed Gorman

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If Evan Hunter was not a world-class writer, none of this would matter to anyone.  But there are hidden attachments to fame and greatness.

Ed hit it right on the head when he said that Hunter has re-invented himself.  I'm sure he had, and part of that process seems to be convincing yourself that you are no longer that other person.  I've seen it happen to famous writers more than once - John Jakes comes to mind, he is on a high plateau now and in denial about the sleaze he used to turn out for you and Scott Meredith.  He is tripped up though because they put his real name on The Defiled Sister.

Or Dean Koontz, who is in heavy-duty denial about the 30 porno titles he wrote with his wife 36 years ago. Dean has successfully re-invented himself, and I sincerely believe that he sincerely means it when he swears he did not write those books, because I believe he thinks that 1970 Dean Koontz was a different person.  Too bad they accidentally put this real name on Bounce Girl.

It's like those famous movie stars who now deny the porn they made when they were young and hungry.  They can deny all they want, but the movies still exist.  

                        —Lynn Munroe

Sunday February 26, 2006:

I really enjoyed this recent addition to your wild, weird world memoirs. Your zine is opening doors and windows in my mind, in the sense that I am learning new things about your past.  I mean, I have known that you've been in fandom for many a year and done the zine thing since when I just a wee lad in the fifties. Now here I am IN my fifties, and you're still going strong. This is cool.

A nicely written tribute to Howard DeVore. In my own zine a couple issues ago I ran a brief memory bit about Howard. Only met him two or three times, I'm certain of this, at cons over the years, and remember him as such an accessible and friendly person. You were blessed to have known Howard for so long. I certainly wish I could help you identify some of those people in that photo; looks like a typical church group to me. Nice people.

I think you'd get a kick out of knowing that I read rich brown's story yesterday morning while attending a professional conference down in Houston, the Texas Community College Teacher's Association annual convention: the 59th one, at that. The strange dichotomy didn't escape me. A guest professor from Penn State was presenting her paper on challenges we professionals are facing in our 21st century classrooms,  such as students coming from violent homes,  plus being inure to the sex and violence on tv and in movies, and there I was reading this story full of violence and bad language. Besides, I liked the character names: Tucker Wilson, and Fred and Nate. My notes in the margin are "Haskell and Bucklin?" It made the reading that much more enjoyable.

So you were a purveyor of classic smut? Well, somebody would have done it, and a lot of fine writers cut their eye teeth by cranking out shit like that for a steady paycheck as they honed their craft. The Dean Hudson bibliography and your account of digging out the truth about Evan Hunter, aka Ed McBain, were very enjoyable and quite illuminating. The cover art on those books was something else. Not being an aficionado of written porn, I have to admit to a certain amount of non-interest here; but even so, the detective work involved in uncovering the true identities of these writers had to have taken a considerable amount of time. So even though I have little in common with this particular genre of, er, literature, these articles were still interesting to read from a historical perspective. And I've known for years that Ellison and Silverberg (plus other sf writers of note) used to crank this stuff out. Face it: you only learn how to write by writing.

                              —John Purcell

Monday February 27, 2006:

Happy five years with this fine eI fanzine of yours! It has been a deep look into something we kinda grew up with, but couldn’t talk openly about, namely porn and the people around it. It’s been fun, and I hope it keeps going. In the meantime, here’s a loc on issue 24.
Kurt Vonnegut may be pleased or displeased by the report I saw on 60 Minutes a weekend or two ago…according to some scientists who research the world’s climate, even if we were to stop all burning of fossil fuels this instant, the polar ice caps would continue to melt. We are too late to stop it. We will truly take the rap for our own destruction.

One of my few interesting stories is about Isaac Asimov. I met Dr. A. twice…once at a Star Trek convention in Manhattan, and again in Baltimore at a Worldcon. I introduced myself, and admitted that we’d met some years earlier at a Trekcon, he said, “Well, welcome to a larger world.” Howard DeVore’s introducing you to a greater fandom reminded me of that.

Seeing that Evan Hunter/Ed McBain has passed away, I guess his “official” bibliography can be updated. Again, no malice intended, but I think we’d all like a complete record. As with most writers who have written porn and erotica over the years, he may have denied it, but a full record makes for a full understanding of the writer.

                                   —Lloyd Penney

No true American would treat the Constitution with the contempt that spills like toxic bile from the lips of George Bush. No true American would continue to support this maniac as he continues to dismantle what once was the greatest country in the world.

              —Doug Thompson, Capitol Hill Blue, January 23, 2006

Curious Couplings 6

By Earl Kemp

As I wrote in eI19, I have noticed a number of odd coincidences regarding sleaze paperback covers and other publications that have intrigued me. Some of them were reasonable and understandable, some of them were outright criminal theft, and some of them were beneath contempt.

What I propose to do is to run a few of them in some issues of eI to see if I can create real interest in perusing the venture. It is a participation project. You send me jpegs of your favorite duos to earlkemp@citlink.net and I’ll take it from there.

Here then is the next set of examples of Curious Couplings. First there are four covers from the collection of Brittany A. Daley.

Next we have a very interesting addition by Art Scott. He is making reference to some covers furnished by Lynn Munroe in Curious Couplings 1, eI19, inspired by Brigette Bardot. Scott wrote: “that ass could only belong to Brigette Bardot in And God Created Woman (see attached still, the man is Jean Gabin).  Also attached, another version of the same thing, this time by Bob Abbett.”

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We welcome your contributions to this series. Please email your jpegs to earlkemp@citlink.net and thank you very much for participating in this novel and interesting exercise in futility.

I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president. The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected. You all know, of course, that the election was stolen. Right here [Ohio].

              —Kurt Vonnegut, Ohio State University, March 2006

Springtime for BushCo and Halliburton
or
Let’s do the Goosestep Again

By Earl Kemp

I thought it was just me. I have this feeling often and occasionally it’s justified. This time I wasn’t sure so I went online and Googled “Bush = Hitler” and was overwhelmed with the response. There were thousands and thousands of hits from all over the place directly equating fascist dictator George Bush with fascist dictator Adolf Hitler. Only the whole concept of that being a possibility really began many decades ago.

I was born an indentured slave, the property of “The Company,” in a desolate and alien world also known as Arkansas. Only it wasn’t your ordinary Arkansas; it was as remote as the Australian Outback and populated by very Aboriginal people. As the property of “The Company” I was taught two things in “The Company School,” and they were Bible studies that translated into “the proper place of all slaves in the world is to serve their masters and betters with every ounce of their energies and capabilities. Render unto them—the church hierarchy—every penny of your earnings, and have many children so they can be taught the same lessons as you are to further enrich the church.” The second subject was “trees, how to harvest them and make products from them” but over time that turned much more into “how to make paper from trees and NEVER EVER replant a new one anywhere.”

And at the same time, Hitler was royally fucking up the world and I have to admit that he was doing it just a bit more totally and dramatically than George Bush is doing these days, but then there’s still time enough for Bush to exceed Hitler’s wildest dreams of world domination with him calling all the shots doing it just to protect you and me from his mythical demons and at the direct command of his Evangelical God.

Animation publicity stills © Disney Corporation

 As a small child, almost my only contact with the outside world was through short-wave radio broadcasts and newsreels shown at The Company movie theater during Saturday afternoon double-feature grade C Western matinees…with a chapter of the current Buster Crabbe serial, either Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, thrown in for good measure. That’s where I first saw all those superb Walt Disney propaganda animated cartoons in glorious Technicolor. They set the pace for what the federal government of that day wanted me to believe about world affairs.

The newsreels also fed my hunger for world knowledge, but they were just as propaganda laced with obligatory hate messages as were Disney’s cartoons. They did, however, give me a vivid picture of what I was supposed to think the Nazi Third Reich regime in Germany was doing.

And the captive media of today’s USA is doing the very same thing in reverse because of the way they portray the rise of the Fourth Reich and how it affects “Homeland Security” and the “Patriot Act.” About how it’s perfectly okay for Bush, being duly unelected President and all, to spy on all the US citizens just in case they may be trying to help “terrorists.”

But the only “terrorists” I see are the masses of brainwashed US youth blindly following Bush’s orders to kill uncounted and unreported hundreds of thousands of totally innocent Afghanis, Iraqis, and unknown other nationalities. Those same “terrorists” who, at Bush’s orders, kidnap, imprison, torture, and do much worse to anyone Bush’s cohorts identify as “possible threats” to Saving The World For Democracy and Halliburton.

Consider for a moment all the ongoing propaganda about what a terrible thing it is that Iran is flaunting it’s inherent right to protect itself from US “terrorists” by developing its own atomic resources. Where is it written that only the US can destroy the world? How soon before we MUST attack Iran to further save the US (whatever there will be left of it after Homeland Security and the Patriot Act do their dirty work) from being harmed by influences other than the US administration itself?

Surely it has nothing to do with the bankruptcy of the US and Iran’s desires, as the world’s largest oil exporter, to gain some real reward for all their products that keep the fossil-fueled monsters of the world rolling down the roads. Surely it has nothing to do with the fact that the Euro is so much more valuable than the worthless US dollar and the US administration’s fraudulent claim that it has some value. To say nothing about the US’s control over all oil sales and the price of that oil worldwide. Did anyone take note of the billions of “wartime profiteering” Exxon made in the last quarter of 2005 alone? Did anyone complain about $3.00-a-gallon gasoline? Are you ready for $6.00 a gallon? Does Halliburton really need to do all that no-bid-contract oil drilling, piping, and shipping? Does Iraq receive any of that embarrassing obscene profiteering? How much of Cheney’s “deferred” earnings as Halliburton’s “on-leave” boss will ever be revealed?

Iran wants to dump the dollar and replace it with the Euro. China holds the largest amount of worthless US printed-paper script in the world. China alone, should it call in its chips, could crush the US instantly. Japan holds the second largest amount of worthless US printed-paper script…how far behind China would Japan be to demand payment for all those debts owed?

And Bush is daily spending billions of those valueless dollars in inexcusable bloodbaths to Keep America Free!

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I grew up around cities—towns really—with German names like Hamburg, Smackover, and Stuttgart. I was surrounded by blue-eyed blondes. When I looked at those Saturday afternoon newsreels—The Eyes and Ears of the World—I saw hundreds or thousands of really good-looking German hunks marching in perfect order, praising their leader, heiling Hitler, and looking pretty damned good at it too. For some reason I felt I was one of them, not one of the quacking Donald Ducks—Pato Pasqual—I kept getting told I was supposed to be.

I knew, even then, that there was something terribly wrong with me. I had to at least be a closet Nazi to so admire the massive efficiency they seemed to so effortlessly display to the world…as they ran rampant across most of Europe and kept the gas-filled showers running at capacity 24/7.

Did you pay attention to the news of all those “immigrant holding camps” Halliburton had no-bid contracts to build for “Homeland Security”? Can Manzinar be far behind Gitmo? Which one of our neighbors will be the first to be awarded years of detention and torture without recourse, communication, or justice? You? Me…? Feels like I’ve been there, done that, too.

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The images of the Third Reich have always held much fascination for the more perverse US citizens as, indeed, citizens of the entire world. Little wonder that those images have been so prominently featured in every category of popular entertainment, publication, newspapers, and everything else. Even I, as editorial director of Greenleaf Classics, Inc., fell prey to the lure of easy bucks. Two of the best-selling novels we ever published were Third Reich based, and wouldn’t you just know it, both of them were novels about homosexuals…a theme that totally permeated the entire Third Reich period itself from Hitler Youth all the way to proudly upstanding SS and stripped bare brown shirts.

The best of those two novels, Go Down, Aaron, by Chris Davidson (Christian Davies), featured a really stunning cover painting by the all-time grand master artist Robert Bonfils. The second book, Gay Treason, by J.X. Williams (Victor Banis and “Aunt Agatha,” Elbert Barrows), was also a total sellout. (See Victor Banis’ “Adolf’s First Goose,” elsewhere in this issue of eI.)

But we were not alone at Greenleaf in recognizing the value of Nazi-related fiction. Almost everyone jumped on the bandwagon from comic books to the most lurid, salacious trash fiction ever perpetrated by modern man (and woman). Here are some random samples of the type packaging used to attract attention to the wares hidden behind these emotion-grabbing covers.

Films covered every facet of Hitler’s and the Third Reich’s existence. A few, and certainly not all, of the more noticeable movies are (in random as-they-come order): It Happened Here (see Jim Linwood’s article “The Third Reich” elsewhere in this issue of eI), Slaughterhouse Five, They Stole Hitler’s Brain, The Frozen Dead, Tomorrow I’ll Be Scalding Myself With Tea, Zone Troopers, The Boys From Brazil, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Eagle has Landed, The Silent Village, Fatherland, They Saved Hitler’s Brain, The Keep (two different films from different books, one by Michael Mann and the other by Paul Wilson), Went the Day Well?, A Matter of Life or Death (Stairway to Heaven in the USA), and The Prestige.

Television also prominently featured the Nazi themes in shows like: Harlan Ellison’s script for “The City on the Edge of Forever” for Star Trek, “The Eagle’s Nest” from The New Avengers, An Englishman’s Castle, The Tomorrow People, and a story about killing the infant Hitler from Outer Limits.

And, not to be outdone, there were also a rash of comics not just for the kiddies but for the sick at heart as well.

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While Googling “Bush = Hitler,” I found myself admiring anew a man who had thrilled me before, Doug Thompson of Capitol Hill Blue. I think he is definitely one of my new heroes. In his column of February 21, 2006, he wrote:

“Bush is a serious threat to the future of this country and represents a clear and present danger to the peace and security of the United States of America.

“We're not talking about some Presidential horn toad nailing an intern in the oval office. We're not even talking about a paranoid, power-mad President tapping the phones of the opposition party. We're talking about a concentrated effort to undermine the Constitution of the United States, subvert the laws of the nation and destroy the very foundations of this country.

“Bush is a power-mad megalomaniac hell-bent on undermining the freedoms and civil liberties that once characterized this nation, a crazed despot who cares nothing for the truth, human decency or law.

“He is more dangerous than Osama bin Laden and more corrupt than any President in modern history. He is, simply put, a threat who must be removed from office now by whatever legal means necessary to protect the safety of the nation.”

I can’t fault the man. It seems he has the picture clearly in mind. I thank him for saying it for me and for all the others who are similarly inclined.

Tomorrow, the world!

When an opponent declares, “I will not come over to your side,” I calmly say, “Your child belongs to us already.... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”

              —Adolf Hitler, November 6, 1933

Thea Von Harbou and Metropolis*
Ackerman/Metropolis collage by Schirm (Marc Schirmeister)

By Andy Sawyer

In his introduction to the 1963 Ace edition of Thea von Harbou’s novel (on which Fritz Lang’s classic film is based) Forrest J Ackerman, self-styled “Science fiction’s no 1 fan,” gushes over “Metropolis, My Home Town  . . . the most exciting, fabulous city on the face of the earth.” He calls the novel a work of genius, “as thesauric as Shiel, as kaleidoscopic as Merritt . . . as bone-spare as Bradbury . . . as poetic as Poe, as macabre as Machen.” Holger Bachmann, co-editor of a major book of essays on Metropolis in 2000, calls von Harbou “the countess of kitsch of German cinema” and talks of her “mixture of sentimentality, reactionary tendencies, ‘inner’ piety and trivial, populist sensationalism.” Who is right?

As often with these debates, the answer is not clear-cut.

Von Harbou (b. 1888) had been a professional writer since 1915, specializing in screenplays and novels. Her first novel had in fact been published in 1905, and she had carved out a career as a stage actress. Formerly married to Rudolf Klein-Rogge (who played the inventor Rotwang in Metropolis), she married Lang in 1922, and collaborated with him on a number of screenplays. The Metropolis project was begun in 1924, with von Harbou’s novel, written specifically as a development of the then screenplay, serialized in Illustriertes Blatt in 1925 before appearing as a book. The film itself appeared in January 1927. As most fans of the film know, Metropolis was the most expensive picture ever made to that date, and proved to be a box-office flop, despite drastic cuts for the American market. Critical reaction too was mixed: H.G. Wells, perhaps seeing echoes of his own work in it, especially loathed it, calling it “the silliest film” and “stale old stuff” when he reviewed it in 1927. He was still sniping at it ten years later in the preparation for his own Things to Come, when he warned the design team:

“All the balderdash one finds in such a film as Fritz Lange’s (sic) Metropolis about ‘robot workers’ and ultra skyscrapers, etc. etc., should be cleared out of your minds. . . Machinery has superseded the subjugation and ‘mechanisation’ of human beings.”

Nevertheless, Lang and von Harbou continued as a successful creative team until 1933 when (according to Lang’s own account) he was invited to make films for the Nazis. Lang left that same day. Von Harbou (who by that time was separated from him, although they still worked together) stayed. She was to write scripts for directors who were Nazi sympathizers. After the war, she was briefly interned and died in 1954, after having resumed her career as film-writer.

Until the recent release of the digitally enhanced version by the Munich Film Museum, von Harbou’s novel was one of the major publicly accessible sources for the missing parts of the film. In it, we hear, for instance, about the rivalry between John Fredersen and Rotwang for Hel, who died giving birth to Fredersen’s son, Freder. We understand, too, why Fredersen orders Rotwang to give his robot the appearance of the saintly Maria. As well as being a vision of the future, the novel is a psychodrama in which several conflicts intertwine, with Maria, both Virgin and Mother-figure, pacific Madonna and lascivious rabble-rouser, at their heart. While Freder’s oedipal conflicts are to the fore, the novel hints at his father’s own passions. At the beginning, he claims to have put both suffering and sin behind him: at the end, he is almost broken by the apparent loss of his son, claiming to his own mother that he is the “someone to come” who will show the masses where to go.

Von Harbou certainly writes with hothouse fervour:

“Georgi trembled from head to foot. And yet it was not really trembling which seized his resistless body. It was as though all his members were fastened to the soundless evenness of the engine which bore them forwards. No, not to the single engine which was the heart of the motor-car in which he sat — to all these hundreds and thousands of engines which were driving in an endlessly gliding, double stream of gleaming illuminated automobiles, on through the streets of the city in its nocturnal fever.” She incorporates a fervid catechism into the false Maria’s encouragement of the workers’ rebellion:

“Who drinks the water?”

“ . . . We!”

“Who drinks the wine?”

“. . . The masters! The masters of the machines!”

And: “she [Metropolis: the Mother-city] wanted living men for food.”:  “She [the false Maria, leading the workers’ revolt] sang with her blood-red mouth of deadly sin!”  We are also told about the infamous House of Yoshiwara and its sinister boss “September.” Through the drug Maohee, the collective hallucinations of September’s clients are made visible and audible to all as one among them becomes “the embodied conception of the intoxication of them all”: a concept which anticipates Philip K Dick's use of drug-induced reality changes.

When all this is pulled together with the celebrated ending, where Freder, as mediator between “hand” and “brain,” tugs at his father and the workers’ foreman to shake and make up with nothing actually resolved,we certainly have an ideological problem. Many critics of the film have seen this conclusion as at best a glossing-over of its class-warfare theme, and at worst a suggestion of a proto-fascist undercurrent. With Lang himself later disowning this ending, and with his ex-wife’s later collaboration with Hitler’s regime, as well as a whole range of sentimental leader-worship in the novel, it’s tempting to blame everything on Thea von Harbou. Certainly, her book is an odd read for modern tastes: its train of hallucinatory imagery, dislocated sentences, and Gothic medievalism make charges of trivial “piety” and populism easy to make.

Von Harbou’s fevered prose constructs scenes which focus on the oscillations between light and darkness, monochrome and colour, machine and organism, technology and religion in the same way as Lang has Freder sees machinery dissolve into the hell-mouth into which struggling sacrifices are hurled. Take a look at the way the following passages show us first, the physical cathedral in the middle of the machine-city and, second, suggests that the machines themselves are the new gods.

When the sun sank at the back of Metropolis, the houses turning to mountains and the streets to valleys; when the stream of light which seemed to crackle with coldness, broke forth from all windows, from the walls of the houses, from the rooves and from the heart of the town; when the silent quiver of electric advertisements began; when the searchlights, in colours of the rainbow, began to play around the New Tower of Babel; when the omnibuses turned to chains of light-spitting monsters, the little cars to scurrying, luminous fishes in a waterless deep-sea, while from the invisible harbour of the underground railway, an ever equal, magical shimmer pressed on to be swallowed by the hurrying shadows — then the cathedral would stand there, in this boundless ocean of light, which dissolved all forms by outshining them, the only dark object, black and persistent, seeming, in its lightlessness, to free itself from the earth, to rise higher and ever higher, and appearing in this maelstrom of tumultuous light, the only reposeful and masterful object. (p. 20-21)

Deities, the machines – the shining Lords – the god-machines of Metropolis! All the great gods were living in white temples! Baal and Moloch and Huitzilopochtli and Durgha! Some frightfully companionable, some terribly solitary. There – Juggernaut’s divine car! There – the Towers of Silence! There – Mahomet’s curved sword! There — the crosses of Golgotha! And not a soul, not a soul in the white rooms. The machines, these god-machines, left terribly alone. And they were living — yes they were really living — an enhanced, an enflamed life.

For Metropolis had a brain.

Metropolis had a heart.

The heart of the machine-city of Metropolis dwelt in a white cathedral-like building. The heart of the machine-city of Metropolis was, until this day and hour, guarded by one single man. The heart of the machine-city of Metropolis was a machine and universe to itself. Above the deep mysteries of its delicate joints, like the sun’s disc — like the halo of a divine being — stood the silver-spinning wheel, the spokes of which appeared in the whirl of revolution, as a single, gleaming disc.

No machine in all Metropolis which did not receive its power from this heart. (p. 168-9)

The documentary “The Metropolis case” (Disc Two of the Eureka Videos “restored” version) says that “Lang’s supporters always held Harbou responsible for the trash and clichés in his films. Lang always defended her. They were in agreement. For them, the newspaper novel was as valuable as fairytales and legends.”

The only other Thea von Harbou novel I have read is The Girl in the Moon, a translation of Frau Im Mond (1928), which was another Lang/von Harbou collaboration like Metropolis: the film was released in 1929. I’ve so far not seen more than clips from the film (although a DVD was released in the USA earlier this year) but can report that this is a much worse book than Metropolis. It’s melodramatic rather than visionary and reads more like a book-of-the-film. Frau Im Mond (the film) is, however, noted for two things. It was supposed to have been the source for the “10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-Zero!” countdown sequence which is standard in space launches (although  Denny Lien, posting on the Fictionmags list in June 2005,  has recently discovered the same launch sequence in an earlier story “The Great Crellin Comet” by George Griffith  in Pearson’s Weekly, November 1897). Secondly, according to a round-up of rocketry in German written by space pioneer Willy Ley and published in the journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 1934, the Romanian rocket pioneer Herman Oberth was commissioned to construct a “real altitude rocket” by the production company UFA. You’d think they’d have learned from Metropolis. Oberth had to return to Romania, and financial constraints prevented the construction of the rocket. Whatever the merits of the film, this book is sadly ordinary. Were von Harbou’s critics right? Was she a hack writer of no significant talents at best, and a sycophantic sympathiser with evil at worst?

I couldn’t say. She was surely not a novelist of the first rank. And yet . . . I have no idea how the Metropolis reads in the German: I can only compare the translations of the Ace books edition with the extracts in Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann’s Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. But overblown and ideologically unsound though it may be, it doesn’t read like a bad novel to me. It reads like one which perfectly expresses in verbal terms the dynamic collision of forces in 1920s Machine Age Germany that Fritz Lang was expressing in cinematic light, shadow and movement, and the baroque architecture of his sets. One of the worst effects of Hitler’s fascism on culture is that virtually anyone before his rise to power can be accused of proto-fascism as we see implications bubbling from a miasmic soup of images. The film’s ending (which does not, incidentally, appear in the novel) certainly seems to be an ideological betrayal. But then, Forrest J Ackerman, in calling Metropolis “My Home Town,” gives his address in the towers rather than the abyss inhabited by the toilers at the machine-face. When we fantasize about living in the future, we rarely consider that that future has to be constructed by someone: we will just live in it, safely, comfortably and uncaringly. Ackerman, however, in pointing to Shiel, Merritt, Bradbury, and Machen, emphasises von Harbou’s weird and visionary tendencies, and here I think he is closer to the heart of things than most academic commentators on her. We don’t have to agree with what our visionaries make of their visions: indeed, we usually shouldn’t: but in criticising them we should never ignore their aesthetic power.

- - -
*A shorter version of this was published in Matrix as Foundation’s Favourites 14: Metropolis by Thea von Harbou.

I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

              —Kurt Vonnegut, “Vonnegut’s Blues for America,”
              A Man Without A Country: A Memoir Of Life In George Bush’s America

Use Free Speech Or Lose It
Artwork by Alan White

By Richard E. Geis

The attempt by the Justice Department to gather unto itself virtually all American computer e-search data from Google and others in order to find out if kids can or cannot easily gain access to porn sites is probably a crock of pure liquid bullshit.

The Justice Department could test porn filters on its own computers by pretending to be kids.  That should be easy for such infantile minds.  But it's okay, say the feds, because the raw Google search data does not permit them to identify individual Americans.  But if they cannot discern who went to what site, with or without a porn filter in place, why do they need all those trillions of bits of info?

Why get a court order to acquire all that useless data?

In my suspicious mind I suspect the Bush administration is using porn and children as a thin entering wedge.  Today they want masses of useless search data (which guarantees failure) in order to set the info-gathering precedent for later asking Google et al, Congress, and the courts for more particular data and identifications which will assure success in finding sex criminals and law-breaking juveniles.

[You will join the Army and fight for Saudi Arabia or we will send you to jail for watching Teens Sex Romp when you were ten."]  Well, that may be a reach...for the kids, that is.

But once the feds get that end-justifies-the-means precedent in place, they can then more easily ask for and get anarchist, communist, socialist, anti-American, extreme Liberal, "Antisocial," and “eccentric” personal info from the e-search companies. 

One baby step at a time, in the beginning.  And then we'd have Sedition Laws on the books again, made “legal” by Presidential Executive Order or by a cowed, threatened Congress.

Sedition: “Excitement of discontent against the government, or of resistance to lawful authority.” — Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, Second Edition, 1956.

Obviously, under a sedition law I'd be liable for prosecution, as would hundreds of thousands of others.  Maybe millions.

Welcome to the club; see you in the concentration camps.

Unless they have a grandfather clause in the law.  Because I'd instantly stop my agitating against Bush and his government if there was a red timeline in the dust.  I don't think 80-year-old men who can't walk would last long in the camps, even if they are certified U.S. citizens who voted in every election ...er... "election."

Am I taking an extreme position here?  Am I being paranoid and seeing a Terrible Conspiracy under the sofa?  Would George W. Bush really dare attempt a coup?

Bush could attempt to be a religious Hitler.  He certainly would like to be in total control.  "Obey or die!" has such a simple, brutal efficiency to it.  Things get done!  No messy deals or begging...   But not yet, I hope.

There has to be a national emergency, dire economic times, an imminent or beginning breakdown of government before Bush could credibly take over and run the country by Executive Orders and “findings.”

Bush can assert his Commander-in-Chief status all he wants, but if the top Army, Navy, Air generals and admirals (and the officer corps who are almost all individual patriots and freedom lovers and loyal to the Constitution) don't agree with his (supposed) declaration of a National Emergency and assertion of dictatorial power, they would tell him so and he would know the troops and sailors and pilots would not follow him. There would be civil war all over the place.

I suspect that Bush is not the man nor is this yet the right time for a coup.  I think he's too lazy.  But if I'm wrong—- 

Reality will not stop him from trying to continue to remake the world if that is his (or his God's or his controllers’) plan. Power corrupts and creates delusions of "I can do no wrong," especially if saving Western Capitalist Civilization is on the line. Of course that end justifies any means.

There are Signs and Portents to look for:

If we see a strange "election."

If government scare tactics (furthered and exploited by big media) are used.

If a "terrorist attack" is blown out of proportion and those responsible and blamed are assumed, not proved.

If dissent and demands for more information are shouted down and protestors put in jail.

Then the tragic game will be played out.

But I think, instead, that Bush will be humiliated and dejected by the voters' rejection of the Republicans this year and will not dare proceed with The Plan.

Forget immediate dictatorship in the United States.

Unless there is massive, successful vote stealing this year, Bush's presumed plans for glorious control of the United States in the name of God are headed for the dumpster and he is headed for a return to alcoholism and drugs.

How frightful! How delightful!

George Bush is so dumb, it wouldn't surprise me if he thought Peter Pan was a washbasin in a whorehouse.

              —Kurt Vonnegut, September 17, 2005

The Third Reich*
My Part in its Downfall

By Jim Linwood

“So how would you like to join the SS next Sunday?”

Pat Kearney put the question to me during a party at the Kingdon Road Slan-Shack in December 1962. Situated in North London, 5a Kingdon Road, West Hampstead, was part of a large terraced Edwardian house shared by Bruce Burn, Alan Rispin, Dick Ellingsworth, and myself. We played host to some of the less conservative elements in Anglofandom in the early sixties, including, at one time or another, Les Spinge editor Dave Hale, Mike Moorcock, Barry Bayley, George Locke, Ivor Mayne, Chris Miller (founder of the Oxford University SF Group), Ken Potter, Tony and Simone Walsh, Cliff Teague, Rog Peyton, and assorted girlfriends. The most significant event — although we didn’t realise it at the time — occurred one evening when a breathless Moorcock crashed into the communal kitchen announcing: "I've got New Worlds." The card school paused for a moment and then resumed play, not knowing then how those four words would change forever both the fannish world we knew and science fiction almost beyond recognition.

The position Pat was offering me was that of an extra in the amateur alternative-world film It Happened Here; an ambitious project that postulated a successful German invasion of Britain in 1940, and the subsequent collaboration of the populace in helping the Nazis establish the New Order. The project had begun as a hobby on 16mm in May 1956 by an 18-year-old trainee film cutter, Kevin Brownlow together with a student and militaria collector, Andrew Mollo, aged sixteen.

In the Summer 1962 issue of Film, Brownlow wrote:

“The first film I made, The Capture, was based on a Maupassant story about the Franco-Prussian occupation. It was a failure and I wanted to make another occupation film. I’d just gone into the film industry as an office boy and walking from the laboratory. I saw a car draw up outside a delicatessen. Some Germans jumped out and began conversing with each other and it seemed vivid and odd. That was the click. In the beginning it was supposed to be a sort of Hammer film about what it might have been like in London, but slowly the interest of the situation developed and I realized that to give it any validity, it must have political meaning. Otherwise it would be just a romp in Nazi uniform. No anti-fascist film has ever shown exactly what it is. And it is so long since the war that most people think of it as concentration camps and great horror without realizing that they have vast fascist potential in themselves”

The initial abortive efforts had been a schoolboy's impression of Nazism, full of blood and thunder, which would culminate in the destruction of northern England in an American atomic attack. After teaming up with Andrew, Kevin scrapped his original footage and recommenced the project, dogmatic that it should be look 100% authentic with histrionics replaced by detached political analysis. What emerged was a stark, bleak film based on the premise that most of the British population would either quietly acquiesce to, or openly collaborate with, the German invaders — as did most citizens of occupied countries during the war. Kevin launched a recruitment drive for actors, extras, and technicians who would give their services free and, although this produced some oddballs like genuine English fascists and ex-SAS men who wished to relive their past glory, the cast and production team was comprised almost entirely of enthusiastic amateurs. When a particular type of face for a scene was not available from amongst the extras, Kevin often cajoled an innocent bystander into donning a German uniform and leering into the camera. Pat, Bruce Burn, and several other London fans had supported the film almost since its conception; an in-group joke about Pat's enthusiasm and the shoestring budget is the battle scene in which Pat the German soldier shoots Pat the Partisan. Because Pat attended most of the shooting sessions, Kevin considered that his familiar face was becoming a liability and so he became to be more frequently used as background fodder or as a grip, a function he greatly preferred. Pat's long devotion to the project was finally rewarded by his name appearing on the credit titles.

Kevin's attitude to the project was tough and uncompromising: "We made no concessions to the fact that everyone was working for nothing. When someone came on a session, we expected him to give his heart to the picture, regardless of personal comfort. It Happened Here was a labour of love, made by people who liked each other, and who understood each other. It was carried to completion by enthusiasm." The amateur had become a hard-boiled demanding director.

The only paid professional actor in the cast was Sebastian Shaw, a star of ’30s and ’40s cinema, who was now primarily a stage actor. He played the key role of the anti-fascist Dr. Fletcher for a nominal fee.

After Andrew pointed out that the uniforms Kevin was originally using were a costumier's invention, a request for authentic militaria brought forth on loan from private collectors sufficient uniforms, weapons, and vehicles to equip a regiment — quite terrifying in retrospect. Dogged by men from the Ministry of Works, the uniforms and regalia were used to startling effect in marches down Whitehall, mass rallies in Trafalgar Square, and an eerie Nazi funeral rite. The police were only too eager to turn a blind eye to such carryings-on by an apparently professional company; expecting the usual “consideration” at the end of a day's shooting. Sometimes things didn't go according to plan, however. What was to be a spectacular shot of a Jagd-Panther tearing up the Wiltshire countryside had to be abandoned at the last minute when a man from the Ministry of Defence appeared from nowhere saying: "You can't do that there here." Not content to show an immobile panzer, Kevin faked its movement by filming it from a mobile ancient wooden dolly at an angle to exclude the road — the final result, with added sound, was quite realistic. When watching the film it’s hard to believe that no stock footage was used throughout, everything was done for real.

The picture's most effective images are those of blitzed, occupied London with propaganda posters on every wall urging support for the war effort. German soldiers being photographed besides familiar landmarks, pub-brawls between collaborators and ex-servicemen and the brilliantly conceived newsreel with Frank Phillips, the wartime newsreader, providing the commentary. All of which created an atmosphere of totalitarianism far more evocative than the television or cinema adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four and reminiscent of the real occupation and France and the Low Countries.

By 1962 the funds on the pocket-money production were virtually exhausted, and it was feared that the six-year-old project would have to be shelved: however, an angel in the form of Tony Richardson of Woodfall Films appeared who, seeing the commercial possibilities, agreed to provide the money to blow-up the 16mm film to 35mm. After being assured that the existing footage could be blown-up for the commercial cinema screen, Kevin and Andrew went on to complete the picture on 35mm with reel-ends from Dr Strangelove kindly donated by Stanley Kubrick — years of almost insane enthusiasm had finally paid off.

In the course of making the film Kevin and Andrew deliberately adopted a documentary style, thinking that it was unnecessary to underline the horrors of Nazism; instead leaving the audience to draw its own conclusions — a decision that was to cause problems when production was completed. The simple plot — such as it is — sees the German occupation through the eyes of a District Nurse, Pauline Murray (both the name of the actress and the character she portrays) who, blaming partisans for provoking a Lidice type retaliation massacre by the Germans in Wiltshire, moves to London to continue her profession, believing that "collaboration" is the only way of restoring law and order. Her enrolment in the Immediate Action Organisation brings her into conflict with her friends and civilians, who associate her uniform with the terror of the New Order. After helping her friends shelter a wounded partisan, she falls under suspicion and is posted to a "nursing home" in Wales. Pauline is told that the home is a rest centre for Russian and Polish workers suffering from tuberculosis: only when she finds a ward empty of the men, women, and children she had "inoculated" the previous night does she realise its true purpose. She finally resists and is arrested. During her return under escort to London she falls into the hands of the partisans and American liberators, and is spared execution because the Army of Liberation urgently require medical aid. The film's final scene is its bleakest: English collaborators are rounded-up and machine-gunned down, as were the Wiltshire villagers at thebeginning of the story. A clear reflection of a remark made earlier by Pauline's friend, Dr Fletcher: "The most appalling thing about Fascism is that it takes Fascist methods to get rid of it."

It didn't take much persuading to make me seek my fame and fortune in the movies: this was, after all, the beginning of the swinging sixties with its rise of the working-class hero. If Albert Finney, Michael Caine, and Tom Courtney could make it, so could I. Sunday morning; and Pat and I reported for duty at the Albany Street Territorial Army drill hall in a Camden Town redevelopment area. The drill hall, which was the IAO recruitment centre in the film, was the only building left intact in the half demolished area: what the Luftwaffe had failed to achieve 20 years previously had been accomplished by the builders George Wimpey and Sons. Pat sought out Kevin Brownlow amongst the confusion of arc-lights, cameras, and cables to introduce me as the latest recruit. Kevin, who was busily taping distances for focus, was a studious looking intellectual with an Oxbridge accent. He launched into a vivid running commentary of his clash on location the previous week with a professional film company: "There was Howard Keel running through Regent's Park chased by these fellows dressed up as Triffids, trying to look terrified, but looking as if he was about to burst into song at any moment. Then our German marching band passed in front of the Triffids and the cameras playing the Horst Wessel. The director flung his megaphone on the ground shouting, "Get those Nazi bums outa here! cut.Cut.CUT!"

Kevin directed us to the changing room where we were to be kitted out with our English SS members uniforms, and returned to his focusing problems. I was sized up by the casting-and-costume girl and handed a shirt, trousers, and a pair of jackboots — all in black. Pat scowled when handed his usual plain outfit.

"I've been coming here for three years and I'm still a private," said Pat with hurt pride. "Your first time, and they make you an officer"

"It's the blue eyes and the blond hair, you Irish communist degenerate," I replied, after affixing the double lightning-flash insignias to my epaulets.

I should have kept my mouth shut about typecasting until l'd put the uniform on; from the size of the trousers into which I dropped my skinny legs, I deduced they were once worn by Hermann Goering, and the shirt— which just reached my navel — was probably Goebbels'. Both gentlemen were not overly keen on personal hygiene judging from the BO that emanated from the garments. The jackboots showed no signs of the mystique given to them in lurid metaphors — just a pair of shrunken wellies — which, after I'd shaken them to ensure that no escaped Nazi war criminals were lurking within, I painfully inserted my legs. Looking at my transformation in a mirror, I decided that I wasn't quite master-race material.

Pat's hurt look of disappointment suddenly vanished from his face as he noticed a stocky, middle-aged man enter the changing room.

"Look." he said with excitement. “It's Frank Bennett."

Frank Bennett was one of the real Nazis in the cast, a member of Colin Jordan's British National Socialist Movement. He was a well-known figure in the King’s Road, Chelsea, wearing a leather raincoat and exercising his bull-terrier, Baldur. The dog was named after Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth and Gauleiter of Vienna. Bennett claimed to have shaken Hitler’s hand during the Berlin Olympics and had escaped internment during the war by joining the Merchant Navy so he wouldn’t have to kill Germans. Andrew and Kevin met him at a party at which he become immediately enthusiastic about the film.

"I shall play Hitler," he had proclaimed.

Although he did affect a little moustache and hair brushed down one side of his face, he bore a closer resemblance to Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army than the Fuehrer. Pat introduced me and (having shook the hand that shook the hand of Hitler) I began an un-subtle line of anti-Semite baiting.

"I know a Jew called Bennett, any relation?"

"If I had one drop of Jewish blood in me," thundered Frank. "I would cut my throat to let it out!"

He then went on to explain — as most racists will — that it wasn't any individual Jews he disliked but the entire race; not realising, of course, that there is no such thing as the "Jewish Race" any more than an "Aryan Race". To prove his point he told me of an incident that occurred when the unit was filming on location near a remote Surrey village. Bennett went down to the local pub in the evening to celebrate Hitler's birthday. Upon discovering that the man who had just bought him a drink was Jewish, Frank emptied his pint onto the floor explaining:"I never accept drinks from Jews, but to show this is nothing personal let me buy you a drink. What will you have?"

"A double whiskey," said the Jew.

Pat later told me that Frank had turned up for shooting the next morning with a black eye and badly bruised face. He was immediately cast as a SS casualty which gave him the sudden inspiration: "I have this idea for the final scene of the film. Pauline can prostrate herself with grief over my body, and you can end with a close-up of her tears falling onto my face."

Frank left us to preen before the mirror and place a suitably arrogant look on his face whilst we moved on to take up our positions for the morning's first take. My career in the movies was about to begin.

The take we were to participate in is the scene in which Pauline collects her work permit from the IAO building — seconds in the finished picture, which represented a whole morning's work. The office, which was crowded with 55 men and collaborators, was to be filmed through the doorway: as Pauline entered I was to leave a moment later. Although the extras in this scene were little more than props, Kevin gave each one of us our "motivation." I was to stand in front of Pat, who was seated behind a desk, and chide him for his inefficiency, threatening him with a transfer to the Russian front. Everyone was happy with their roles, except for one girl extra, who burst into tears crying: "But I can't feel the part, I just can't feel it."She only had to give Pauline her papers.

We went into rehearsal and I started doing my shtick with back to the camera — poor Pat was out of frame. Within seconds he was badly over-acting; trembling and fidgeting, his eyes bulging with fear; trying to cringe beneath his desk. Only when Kevin shouted: "Okay, that's fine," and Pat continued his Oscar-winning performance did I realise that it was I who had been doing the over-acting: smashing my fists down on the desk — doing a precognitive Basil Fawlty impersonation. Pat was genuinely terrified. The scene was then shot for real, the microphone, luckily, not picking up my rantings; after shouting "Cut" Kevin pranced around saying:"Marvelous. Bloody Marvelous."This was, I gathered, one of the few occasions when a first take had been entirely successful. When viewing my exit from that office, years later, I wondered how anyone with such a large nose could have been chosen as a member of Hitler's Elite.

As we awaited further directorial instruction, Pat and I chatted with the film's superstar, Pauline Murray, a doctor’s wife from Wales, who had begun as an extra and was chosen for the lead because of her perfect forties face. She was a pleasant, unassuming person, always eager to talk with anyone connected with the production and give encouragement to nervous newcomers. It wasn't until the film was completed that Kevin discovered that she suffered from frequent attacks of migraine — often going through scenes in intense agony.

The take was so successful that Kevin told everyone to get lost for two hours whilst the equipment was set up for the afternoon's shooting. Pat, and several other members of the cast, suggested that we find the nearest pub and give the locals a scare by swaggering up to the bar in our SS clobber. I tagged along, nervously expecting to be arrested under the Public Order Act, which had been introduced in the thirties to prevent Oswald Mosley's bully-boys aping the Brownshirts: or worse, attacked by the lunch-time boozers. However, as Camden Town had a large Irish population, I hoped we might escape serious injury by being mistaken for a local IRA outing. As we entered the chosen pub and faced the incredulous stares my heart sank into my left jackboot, flipped over a couple of times, and resurfaced palpitating at three times its normal rate.

We were greeted with utter, amazed silence.

The ersatz SS ordered a round of ale, deciding that demanding Schnapps would be taking the masquerade too far. The tension was finally broken when a Cockney voice called out: "Ere, do you lot think Hitler's still alive then?"Everyone in the bar convulsed with laughter and we explained that we were not what we seemed, merely extras in a film. Pat, ever willing to expound his political views, told of a recent encounter at an anti-fascist rally during which his expensive Pentax camera was smashed either by Jordan's thugs or the police — Pat often confused the two.    

Everyone started recalling their wartime adventures; with taking pill-boxes single-handed a firm favourite and screwing frauleins running second. We left the pub slightly drunk to the strains of the unbowdlerized version of Colonel Bogey.

The scene shot in the afternoon was to be the background to Pauline leaving the IAO building depicting a flurry of Teutonic efficiency with extras rushing around trying not to bump into each other. Kevin took me to one side and briefed me for my role:"You're an arrogant Nazi beast, see. The Sturmbannführer has asked you to come to the parade-ground to discipline a slovenly private..."Overhearing this, Pat winced remembering his previous ordeal.

I was told to take up a position at the top of a flight of stairs and descend furiously When the action started; Kevin gave me a large key telling me to beat the metal handrail rhythmically with it as I came down, ­an idea shamelessly lifted from Joseph Losey's prison film, The Criminal.

As we went through several rehearsals it became apparent Kevin wasn't satisfied with the performance, particularly mine. "Your friend has a curious schizophrenic way of walking,"he told Pat. Nevertheless, he went for a take, and then another one before calming down. Unlike the morning session this scene, because it was in long-shot, was filmed silent. So we did the whole thing over again for post-synchronised sound; dodging amongst the microphones, trying to make as big a din as possible. All this effort, I later discovered, was wasted; the scene never appeared in the completed film — my schizophrenic walk ended up on a cutting-room floor.

When we left the drill hall after the day's shooting, Pat became his wild, excitable Irish self again, urging me to join the crew on location in Surrey the following weekend.

"It's the big battle scene with the Americans; we've got this crate full of Schmeissers and.…"

"No thanks," I said, looking forward to a less strenuous weekend. "Start the liberation without me."

Pat managed to secure on loan the celebrated newsreel sequence from It Happened Here for a sneak preview at the following year's convention at Peterborough. Ron Bennett sportingly offered to introduce it saying, with tongue firmly in cheek: "Any fans present who are of the Jewish persuasion may find certain scenes in our next item offensive…."The newsreel was a close facsimile of actual Nazi propaganda films made for occupied countries; showing that despite the machinations of "certain international financiers"which resulted in two world wars, Englishmen and Germans are brothers. The "natural camaraderie" of the two countries being demonstrated by a film-within-a-film of the Flanders truce of Christmas, 1914 and the football match in no-man's land. The actual truce was never filmed, but Kevin's cleverly faked, sepia tinted sequence, shot with a 1922 hand-cranked Kodak, effectively captured the atmosphere and irony of the event. The newsreel also contained a staged reconstruction of a pre-war Oswald Mosley fascist rally. Mosley was uncannily portrayed by a young Australian, Barrie Pattison who, after returning to Australia, was to become a major influence on John Baxter’s film education. Barrie became pre-occupied with vampire films and wrote about their history in his 1975 book The Seal Of Dracula. He was also involved in the production of Hammer’s Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb (1971) and the Australian horror film Zombie Brigade (1986).

The preview was generally well received; but Beryl Henley berated Pat for associating himself with such a disgraceful film as"Every Englishman would die fighting rather than submit to Alien rule."No mention was made of what Englishwomen might have done.

The film was finally completed in May 1964 — eight years after its conception — and the search for a distributor was begun by hawking the finished product at the Cork Film Festival, around Wardour Street, and several press shows. The British newspaper critics' appraisals were the usual pompous, smart-ass remarks made by that band of licensed poseurs ­critics who had previously panned Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate — only Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard saw what the makers' intentions were and the technical difficulties they had encountered. The foreign critics were mostly politically motivated in their reactions: the Russians liked the film but considered it "uncommercial",whilst the Germans disliked it intensely because it came uncomfortably close to the truth; however, individual Europeans who had firsthand experience of German occupation said it was like reliving the whole thing over again. A major obstacle was erected by The Board of Deputies of British Jews who, whilst applauding the film's motives, thought that the six-minute improvised scene in which the real Nazis (including Frank Bennett) propounded their views to Pauline might influence immature minds. In fact in this scene the fascists' opinions were so self-condemning and ludicrous that at the Odeon Leicester Square showing the audience burst into derisive laughter, drowning out Bennett and his cronies who had come along to applaud. One of the least of Kevin and Andrew's worries was a bill for £360 from a German music publisher who had the copyright on the Horst Wessel Lied.

United Artists finally offered to promote and distribute the film on condition the offending six minutes were removed: under protest, but sick of all the harassment, Kevin and Andrew accepted - they no longer had any say in how their baby was packaged and marketed.

 It Happened Here had its first commercial run at the London Pavilion — a West End cinema specialising in lurid movies — in May 1966 following Thunderball; it was an enormous success, running for six weeks before being transferred to the Gala Royal and then disappearing — almost without a trace — into the art-house circuit and television. The substantial profits made by United Artists were swallowed up in promotion costs, claiming that the trailer cost more than the film itself — or so they said — Kevin, Andrew, and all others involved in the production got nothing.

For the directors the film became a foot in the door of the movie industry; Andrew became technical advisor to almost every historical and war movie made since 1966; you name it and he was there making sure the swastikas pointed the right way, most recently in Polanski’s The Pianist and Hirschbiegel’s Downfall. Kevin retained his independence and went on to direct small budget films like Winstanley the story of a seventeenth-century leader of "Diggers" (again with Andrew as his co-director and Pat in a larger role) and writing several books on the history of the cinema as well as directing and producing documentaries. The UKA Press have recently reprinted Kevin’s 1968 book How It Happened Here.

Sebastian Shaw continued his professional career and appeared as Anakin Skywalker (Darth Vader) in Return of the Jedi in 1983. Both Sebastian and Pauline Murray died in 1994. No one knows what became of Frank Bennett. One rumour placed him on the run in Eire with charges of bigamy hanging over his head: another has him resurfacing in Egypt as an advisor to anti-Zionist groups.

As for the fans involved; previously when It Happened Here occasionally resurfaced at the National Film Theatre or on television they nudged their wives and offspring saying, "Hey. That's me, that was." Now, with the recent release of Brownlow’s original, uncut version in a new DVD edition, made from a pristine print, they can freeze-frame their moments of glory.

“Several hundred people gave up their spare time for this film. We cannot name them all so we can only offer them our deepest gratitude.”

Kevin Brownlow
Andrew Mollo

Bibliography:                   

Kevin Brownlow, How It Happened Here, Secker & Warburg, London, 1968. (Re-issued by The UKA Press, 2005).
Personal communications: Pat Kearney – Jim Linwood, January 2006.
Personal communication:  John Baxter – Jim Linwood,  January 2006

- - -
*This is a revised and expanded version of an article that appeared in the 1984 Mexicon Programme Book to accompany a showing of It Happened Here. Special thanks to Pat Kearney for refreshing my memory over certain incidents and providing additional anecdotes. Thanks also to John Baxter for the background on Barrie Pattison.

                        —Jim Linwood.

Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our Fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.

              —Abraham Lincoln

Adolf's First Goose

By Victor J. Banis

When Earl Kemp first mentioned to me that he was planning an issue of eI devoted to Nazis, my first thought was of Adolf, as I am sure everyone's was, and I could imagine right off the sort of things that people were going to write about the man, you know: he came to power in what was generally regarded as a corrupt election; right off the bat, he launched a war, with the result that a great many people died who needn't have otherwise; and occupied some other countries (for the sake, though, of bringing them freedom and a better way of life—let's face facts, Czechoslovakia didn't even have a bratwurst worth the name up till then); while on the home front, he launched a program of domestic spying, warrantless arrests, holding people prisoner without due process, and even torture.

Well, hinky dinky parlez vous, some people always look at the negative side, don't they?

But I like to think of the other Adolf, when he was younger and just one of the guys, nervous and boy crazy—who wasn't?—waiting all excited for Christmas to come, dreaming of Mister Right, and settling for Mister Right There, and the phone calls to Mother, all of those things that never get mentioned any more when people write about the man.

And I began to wonder what it would be like if someone wrote about him who was one of those people who always look on the positive side—say, someone like Bob Newhart, for instance. How would Bob Newhart imagine that young Adolf….

#

Hello, Mother? Hi, how are you? Uh, it's your son, Mom. Now, Mom, we've been through this before, this really is your son. Mom, why do you need me to tell you my name? Oh, it's a test? You want to see if I know it? Ha ha, Mom, you're still a card.

It's Adolf. Adolf. A as in Auschwitz, D as in Das Rehingold, O as in Oberhausen, L as in patent leather, F as in…Well, I know patent leather doesn't start with an L, but lackleder does, I just think patent leather sounds, oh, I don't know, more Cole Porter, don't you? Can you imagine trying to rhyme with lackleder? Ha ha. Horse fedders?

Lederhosen? You're not just suggesting that because of that old nonsense about what supposedly happened in Vienna, are you? Now, Mom, I told you, that business with those Austrian soldiers, it wasn't what it looked like. My suspenders broke, the ones that hold the lederhosen up, that's why they were down around my ankles that way. It was just bad luck, is all, that photographer coming along when he did. If I had ever been able to get those roses scrubbed off, no one would have recognized me, probably. Anyway, Hermann, you remember my friend, Hermann, don't you? Hermann took care of all that. That rotten Jew won't be publishing any more of his smutty snapshots, that's all I can tell you.

Anyway, it's Adolf. Well, those are words that ordinary people use. Everybody I know uses them. Okay, right, you might have a point there, maybe some of them aren't. Regardless, the thing is, it's Adolf.

Now. Mom, you do so have a son named Adolf. I lived with you for fourteen years, out there on Flegel Road, north of town. The white house with the green shutters and the big pear tree.

No, that was my brother, Hans. No, I'm not saying I never did that, I'm saying I never did it out on the front porch where everybody could see when they went by. Yes, that was definitely Hans. He always was the show-off. I was the one who used to put on your dresses and stage little fashion shows for the children in Sunday school, and…hello, Mom? Hello.

Mother it's your son Adolf again don't hang up, please this is costing me money. Gee, this connection isn't real good, Mom, what's that you said, the little what? Mom, I don't think that's a word you should use about your own flesh and blood, do you? Okay, I guess you could say if the combat boot fits, it you want to look at it like that. Mom, have you ever thought that maybe you played some part in how I turned out? I was the only boy in school with sausage curls and those little roses painted on his cheeks. No, I know it wasn't my face, but once two or three of those Jewish boys saw them, and, well, you know how word gets around in a little town like that. That sort of thing marks a guy, don't you think? Well, how else was I going to earn lunch money, Mom, there aren't a lot of jobs for a skinny little fourteen year old.

No, I haven't been arrested again. Mom, that was t