Karen Liebreich

Karen Liebreich’s The Black Page: Interviews with Nazi Film-Makers was published in spring 2017.

From The Blog
15 September 2017

Margot Hielscher, the German TV actress and Eurovision star, died on 20 August, aged 97. A singer and general forces’ sweetheart during the Second World War, she was also probably the last surviving woman to have had an affair with Goebbels. She had been working in the film studio at Babelsberg as a costume designer when she caught the propaganda minister’s eye. Her first role was as a handmaid to Mary Queen of Scots in the anti-English Das Herz der Königin (‘The Queen’s Heart’, 1940); she went on to star in Frauen sind Keine Engel ('Women are no Angels', 1943), singing the title song which became her signature tune. She was still a large-eyed, striking and very well-preserved brunette when I interviewed her in the early 1990s.

Typing for Goebbels

Karen Liebreich, 16 February 2017

Brunhilde Pomsel​, one of Josef Goebbels’s secretaries, died on 27 January. I interviewed her in 1991 for a BBC TV series on Nazi film propaganda. In 2011, Bild ran an ‘exclusive’ interview with her, claiming it was the first time she had spoken since the war, but they got very little from her. By then she was a hundred years old. She said she had been obliged to take the...

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