One of Hollywood’s last anti-Nazi movies, Hotel Berlin, was released by Warner Bros. on March 17, 1945, less than two months before Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender and the end of World War II in Europe. Recently screened on the Turner Classic Movie channel, it was adapted from Vicki Baum’s eponymous novel.
Directed by Peter Godfrey and starring an accomplished cast, it takes place in a busy luxury hotel in Berlin bedecked with swastika flags and a portrait of Adolf Hitler hanging behind the reception desk in the lobby.
Judging by the first scene, during which an Allied air raid sends guests scurrying into a bomb shelter, the war is going badly for Germany. “We are getting no more than we deserve,” says Johannes Koenig (Peter Lorre), a distinguished German scientist who despises the Nazi regime.
Morale is sinking by the day and influential Germans who can pull strings are making plans to leave the country with forged U.S. passports. Speaking of his forthcoming flight, a government official tells a colleague in an ironic tone that he will be an upstanding anti-Nazi once he lands safely in the United States.
Ordinary Germans are also fed up. Gazing at a portrait of Hitler on a wall, a soldier blurts out, “I’d like to see him hung in a different way.”
The hotel is abuzz with intrigue and romance.
Martin Richter (Helmut Dantine), a member of the German underground movement, has just escaped from the Dachau concentration camp and found refuge in the hotel. Thanks to one of its employees, he masquerades as a hotel waiter. Hot on his trial are two ardent Nazis, Joachim Helm (George Coulouris) and Hermann Plotke (Alan Hale).
The other characters include Armin von Dahnwitz (Raymond Massey), an anti-Hitler German army general who usually wears a stereotypical monacle over his right eye; Baron von Stetten (Henry Daniell), Dahnwitz’s friend and a German Foreign Office official; Lisa Dorn (Andrea King), a German actress whom Dahnwitz hopes to marry; Tilli Weiler (Faye Emerson), a hotel employee who lusts after material goods, and Otto Kauders (Kurt Kreuger), a German Air Force officer who tries to woo her.
The most significant figure in this workmanlike film is Dahnwitz, the subject of a nation-wide manhunt since his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler. He has no regrets. “It was the only way to save our country,” he says, later adding that Germany is under the sway of “political fanatics” and will lose the war.
Being a loyal friend, Von Stetten gives him notice that the Gestapo is about to arrest him. He advises Dahnwitz to take the honorable way out and shoot himself, but Dahnwitz has no intention of committing suicide. He intends to commandeer an airplane and fly to neutral Sweden, hoping that Dorn will accept his marriage proposal and join him in exile.
Dorn, who seems ambivalent toward the Nazi regime, fobs him off. But after she meets Richter and agrees to help him, she expresses a desire to leave Germany. “I hate the Nazis and everything they stand for,” she exclaims. Perhaps she is in awe of Richter, who believes there are “some good Germans left” for Germany’s transition from fascism to democracy.
Tilli Weiller presents herself as a materialist who hungers after new shoes and coffee, both of which are scarce in wartime Germany. In pursuit of these goods, she is willing to be a Nazi informant. Nonetheless, she remains loyal to her unseen Jewish boyfriend.
There are two direct references to Nazi antisemitism.
Sarah Baruch (Helene Thimig), the mother of Weiller’s boyfriend, offends a Nazi functionary after he catches her without the dreaded yellow star on her clothes. Koenig, in an explicit reference to Nazi genocide, talks about the machinery of extermination at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Hotel Berlin ends with a written declaration signed by Allied leaders Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin: “Our purpose is not to destroy the German people — but we are determined to disband all German armed forces, break up the German General Staff, eliminate all German industry used for military production, bring all war criminals to just and swift punishment, and wipe out the Nazi Party and Nazi laws from the life of the German people. Germany must never again disturb the peace of the world.”
As American propaganda films go, Hotel Berlin is reasonably plausible and interesting.
