Did Marlene Dietrich participate in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial 75 years ago?
We're pleased to share this contribution from Horst Zumkley. You can also read it in German at Werner Sudendorf's Alte Filme site.
I. The first trial before the International Military Tribunal against the main war criminals of the Nazi regime was held in Nuremberg 75 years ago, from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946. The trial, which made legal history, was a major media event from the outset, with some 250 accredited newspaper and radio reporters from around the world [1].
The author Eva Gesine Baur writes in her biography of Marlene Dietrich that Dietrich took part in the Nuremberg Trial on November 27, 1945; the idea of a visit there was suggested to her by Billy Wilder (Baur, 2017, p. 311). Dietrich had been sitting on the guest balcony in American uniform and in the evening she had been smiling and signing autographs in a pompous bar, surrounded by a swarm of people (p. 312).
Six months later, in his double biography about Dietrich and her sister Liesel, Heinrich Thies also writes that in 1945 Dietrich "witnessed for a few hours how things actually happened at the Nuremberg Trials. The Americans had secretly provided her with a seat in the visitors' gallery" (Thies, 2017, p. 303). As source for this he cites the Baur book (Thies, 2017, p. 405).
If this was true, it would be real and not unimportant news in the biography of Marlene Dietrich, which has remained completely unknown so far.
Except for the Baur biography, I was not aware of any references, reports, testimonies or evidence that mentioned, confirmed, or substantiated this trial visit: Neither in the Dietrich’s autobiography nor in her many interviews, neither in the the Dietrich biography by her daughter Maria Riva nor in the book and documentary by her grandson J.David Riva is there anything about it. And there is no mention of it in the many Dietrich biographies (e.g., by Bach, Higham, Spoto, Sudendorf, Walker); nor in the exhibition catalogue of the "Memorial Hall Oberhausen" (2016), which documents Dietrich's resistance activities against the Nazi regime.
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