Veit Harlan

Veit Harlan was born on September 22, 1899 in Berlin, Germany.

After studying under Max Reinhardt, Veit Harlan first appeared on stage in 1915. In 1935, he stopped acting and became a director. Film critic David Thomson asserts that Harlan was only able to attract Goebbels' attention because so much directorial talent had emigrated from Germany after the Nazis had taken power.

Veit Harlan found out his interest into the acting in his school time and he began as an extra at the "Deutsches Theater". At the beginning of the 1920s he got bigger parts at the theater and soon became established as an actor. In 1935, he stopped acting and became a director. The son of German dramatist Walter Harlan, Viet Harlan directed his father's noted works, "Die Kindsmagd" (The Child's Maid) and "Das Nürnbergische Ei" (The Nurmeberg Egg), after they were adapted into movies in the 1930s. His most notorious film was Jud Süß (1940), which was made for anti-Semitic Propaganda purposes in Germany and Austria. In 1943 it received UFA's highest awards.

Harlan's son, Thomas Harlan (1929-2010), was an author and film director who created a semi-documentary film, "Wundkanal" ("Wound Passage"), in which his father, played by a convicted mass murderer, is forced to undergo a series of brutal interrogations into his war crimes. Thomas Harlan's final publication, issued posthumously, entitled Veit, was a memoir in the form of a letter to his father, continuing the investigation into his father's actions during the Nazi regime. Thomas was Veit Harlan's son by his first wife, Dora Gerson, who was Jewish and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. One of Harlan's daughters (by his second wife, Hilde Körber), named Susanne, converted to Judaism and married the son of Holocaust victims. She committed suicide in 1989. Veit Harlan was also uncle to Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan.

A professed National Socialist since 1933, Harlan recommended himself to the Propaganda ministry with his movie "Der Herrscher" (1937). That year, Joseph Goebbels appointed Harlan as a leading Propaganda director. After the war, in 1949, Harlan was charged with crimes against humanity for his role as director of Jud Süß. The Hamburg Criminal Chamber of the Regional Court (Schwurgericht) acquitted Harlan of the charges; however, the court of the British occupation zone nullified the acquittal. His own defense was that the Nazis controlled his work and that he should not be held personally responsible for its content.

After Adolf Hitler came to power, Harlan - unlike many German film directors - stayed in Germany. He embraced the new Nazi regime and directed several pro-Nazi Propaganda films for the new government, with his wife Kristina Söderbaum in the main parts. Considered to be the worst of these was the universally reviled Jud Süß (1940), a virulent anti-Semitic Propaganda piece masquerading as a period piece melodrama. After the war, he was charged with crimes against humanity because of this film, but in 1950, after several court trials, was released.

He was a director and actor, known for Die goldene Stadt (1942), Der große König (1942) and Jud Süß (1940). He was married to Kristina Söderbaum, Hilde Körber and Dora Gerson.

In 1951, Harlan sued for an injunction against Hamburg politician Erich Lüth for publicly calling for a boycott of Unsterbliche Geliebte (Immortal Beloved). The District Court in Hamburg granted Harlan's suit and ordered that Lüth forbear from making such public appeals. However, the lower court decision was ultimately overturned in 1958 by the Federal Constitutional Court because it infringed on Lüth's right to freedom of expression. This was a landmark decision because it clarified the importance of the constitutional civil rights in disputes between individuals.

In 1958, Veit Harlan's niece, Christiane Kubrick, married Jewish American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. She is credited by her stage name "Susanne Christian" in Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957). They remained married until Stanley Kubrick's death in 1999.

The documentary Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suess (2008) by Felix Moeller explores Veit Harlan's motivations and the post-war reaction of his children and grandchildren to his notoriety. He claimed the Nazis forced him to shoot Propaganda movies, such as Jud Süß (1940), although many former crew members and colleagues contradicted him.