Uncle Kruger

Hans Steinhoff (1881-1945) Bavarian film director born in Marienberg on 10 March 1881, Hans Steinhoff abandoned his medical studies to become a theatre actor and director, before embarking on a new career in the cinema in 1922. A prolific, if frequently mediocre film maker (more than forty productions), whose choice of themes under the Third Reich was often dictated by opportunism, Steinhoff became widely known as the director of the first Nazi film, Hitleriunge Quex, the story of the Hitler Youth martyr Heinz Norkus. Made in 1933 at the dawn of the Third Reich, at a time when the Nazi dictatorship was not yet firmly consolidated, the film is interesting chiefly as a document of the prevailing mood of the times and Nazi readiness to integrate the communists into the national community. Steinhoff’s other films tended to be on the heavy side, grandiloquent but lacking in imagination, though his cinematic biographies,Robert Koch (1939), Ohm Krüger (1941) and Rembrandt (1941). were not devoid of merit. The Krüger film, which starred Emil Jannings (q.v.) in the title role, denounced English barbarity and the concentration camps in the Transvaal at the end of the nineteenth century, being screened at the very time that Hitler was preparing for his ‘Final Solution of the jewish Question’ in Europe. One of the best Nazi Elms from the technical standpoint, it was highly recommended for its ‘political and artistic value’ by Goebbels (q.v.) and was awarded the prize as the outstanding foreign film at the Venice Biennale (1941). Steinhoff died in an aeroplane accident at Luckenwalde in 1945. —Robert Solomon Wistrich, Who’s who in Nazi Germany.