When being Hitler’s guard was a literal drag…

Quick segue here, but this story is too good. In 1942, Die Grosse Liebe came out, Goebbel’s Magnum Opus other than Triumph of the Will. The Nazi propaganda minister was really into this movie and wanted it to be a huge success swaying the emotions of the German people back to believe in winning the all-out war. Movies back then had a double release: they came to the cinemas and the songs in them also came out on record at the same time. Songs were specifically made to be positive, easy to get into and some epic. This movie features the songs “Davon geht die Welt nicht unter” (the world doesn’t collapse because of that) which was the lighter bit and the epic “Ich weiß, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n” (I know, one day a wonder will happen), being the epic one. This one had a bombastic scene in the movie where the then superstar Zarah Leander sings it in front of a wall of splendid ballet dancers:

The issue here was that Miss Leander was curvy and the dancers in comparison incredibly lithe and petite. This didn’t give the scene enough gravitas and took some of the limelight away from her. The solution that Goebbels offered on the spot of the shoot was to replace the dancers with members of Hitler’s personal guards. So what you see in the scene is burly men in drag. Well, you would, but the editors made very sure that there is no closeup of the chorus but only of Zara Leander.

It is a shame that there aren’t more behind the scenes shots of that, as the pissed facial expression of some of them is excellent.

My favourite is the last one that looks eerily like Eric Idle in his Monty Python days in drag.

You can watch the full movie on archive.org with English subtitles. It is a piece of propaganda trash, but also very well made.