The Sound of Music is a musical with music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, and a book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. It is based on the 1949 memoir of Maria von Trapp, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. Set in Austria on the eve of the Anschluss in 1938, the musical tells the story of Maria, who takes a job as governess to a large family while she decides whether to become a nun. She falls in love with the children, and eventually their widowed father, Captain von Trapp. He is ordered to accept a commission in the German Navy, but he opposes the Nazis. He and Maria decide on a plan to flee Austria with the children. Many songs from the musical have become standards, including "Do-Re-Mi", "My Favorite Things", "Edelweiss", "Climb Ev'ry Mountain", and the title song "The Sound of Music".
Lohengrin, WWV 75, is a Romantic opera in three acts composed and written by Richard Wagner, first performed in 1850. The story of the eponymous character is taken from medieval German romance, notably the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach, and its sequel Lohengrin, itself inspired by the epic of Garin le Loherain. It is part of the Knight of the Swan legend.
Johann Georg Elser was a German worker who planned and carried out an elaborate assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking Nazi leaders on 8 November 1939 at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. Elser constructed and placed a bomb near the platform from which Hitler was to deliver a speech. It did not kill Hitler, who left earlier than expected, but it did kill 8 people and injured 62 others. Elser was held as a prisoner for more than five years until he was executed at Dachau concentration camp less than a month before the surrender of Nazi Germany.
Marguerita Maria Christians, known as Mady Christians, was an Austrian-born German-American actress who had a successful acting career in theatre and film in the United States until she was blacklisted during the McCarthy period.
The Mortal Storm is a 1940 American drama film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was directed by Frank Borzage and stars Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart. The film shows the impact on Germans after Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany and gains unlimited power. The supporting cast features Robert Young, Robert Stack, Frank Morgan, Dan Dailey, Ward Bond and Maria Ouspenskaya.
Georg August Friedrich Hermann Schulz, better known as Heinrich George, was a German stage and film actor.
Kathrine Kressmann Taylor or Kressmann Taylor was an American writer, known mostly for her Address Unknown (1938), a short story written as a series of letters between a Jewish art dealer, living in San Francisco, and his business partner, who had returned to Germany in 1932. It is credited with exposing, early on, the dangers of Nazism to the American public.
Carl Esmond was an Austrian-born American film and stage actor, born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. Although his age was given as 33 in the passenger list when he arrived in the USA in January 1938, in his naturalization petition his birth year is stated as 1902. His stage names were Willy Eichberger and Charles Esmond and finally Carl Esmond. He trained at Vienna's State Academy of Dramatic Arts, and made his film debut in the operetta The Emperor's Waltz (1933). He was active in the Viennese genre of shallow romantic comedies so popular in the Austria of the interwar period.
Libertas "Libs" Schulze-Boysen, born Libertas Viktoria Haas-Heye was a German Prussian noblewoman, who became a resistance fighter against the Nazis. From the early 1930s to 1940, Schulze-Boysen attempted to build a literary career, first as a press officer and later as a writer and journalist. Initially sympathetic to the Nazis, she changed her mind after meeting and marrying Luftwaffe officer Harro Schulze-Boysen. As an aristocrat, Schulze-Boysen had contact with many different people in different strata of German society. Starting in 1935, she utilized her position to recruit left-leaning Germans into discussion groups which she hosted at her and Harro's apartment, where they sought to influence their guests. Through these discussions, resistance to the Nazi regime grew, and by 1936, she and Harro began to actively resist the Nazis. During the early 1940s, whilst working as a censor for the German Documentary Film Institute, Schulze-Boysen began to document atrocities committed by the Nazis from photographs of war crimes forwarded by soldiers of the Sonderbehandlungen task force to the Film Institute.
Address Unknown is a 1938 short novel by Kathrine Taylor. The story, told entirely in letters between two German friends from 1932 to 1934, describes the rise of the Nazi Party and the growing acceptance of what would become the Final Solution in Germany and how the ideology had the power to profoundly change relationships.
Walter Buch was a German jurist as well as an SA and SS official during the Nazi era. He was Martin Bormann's father-in-law. As head of the Supreme Party Court, he was an important Party official. However, due to his insistence on prosecuting major Party figures on moral issues, he alienated Adolf Hitler, and his power and influence gradually diminished into insignificance. After the end of the Second World War in Europe, Buch was classified as a major regime functionary or Hauptschuldiger in the denazification proceedings in 1948. On 12 September 1949, he committed suicide.
Josef Wagner was from 1931 the Nazi Gauleiter of Gau Westphalia-South and, as of December 1934, also of Gau Silesia. He was also the Reichskommissar for Pricing from October 1936. In 1941, he was dismissed from his offices, then expelled from the Nazi Party (NSDAP), imprisoned by the Gestapo, and likely executed around the time of end of the war in Europe.
Kessler is a television series produced by the BBC in 1981, starring Clifford Rose in the title role. The six-part serial is a sequel to the Second World War drama series Secret Army, set in contemporary times.
The Passerby is a 1982 French-West German drama film directed by Jacques Rouffio, based on the 1936 novel on the same name by Joseph Kessel, and starring Romy Schneider and Michel Piccoli. It was Schneider's last film.
Peter van Eyck was a German-American film and television actor. Born in Prussian Pomerania, he moved to the United States in the 1930s and established a career as a character actor. After World War II, he returned to his native country and became a star of West German cinema.
Manfred Freiherr von Killinger was a German naval officer, Freikorps leader, military writer and Nazi politician. A veteran of World War I and member of the Marinebrigade Ehrhardt during the German Revolution, he took part in the military intervention against the Bavarian Soviet Republic. After the Freikorps was disbanded, the antisemitic Killinger was active in the Germanenorden and Organisation Consul, masterminding the murder of Matthias Erzberger. He was subsequently a Nazi Party representative in the Reichstag and a leader of the Sturmabteilung, before serving as Saxony's Minister-President and playing a part in implementing Nazi policies at a local level.
Resisting Enemy Interrogation is a 1944 United States Army docudrama training film, directed by Robert B. Sinclair and written by Harold Medford and Owen Crump. The cast includes Arthur Kennedy, Mel Tormé, Lloyd Nolan, Craig Stevens and Peter Van Eyck. Resisting Enemy Interrogation was intended to train United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) crews to resist interrogation by the Germans.
Martin Kosleck was a German film actor. Like many other German actors, he fled when the Nazis came to power. Inspired by his deep hatred of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, Kosleck made a career in Hollywood playing villainous Nazis in films.
Friedrich Karl Freiherr von Eberstein was a member of the German nobility, early member of the Nazi Party, the SA, and the SS. He was elected to the Reichstag and held the position of the chief of the Munich Police during the Nazi era. Eberstein was a witness at the Nuremberg Trials.
The Traitor is a 1936 German film directed by Karl Ritter. The film revolves around foreign agents who infiltrate the German arms industry, helped by German traitors. However, they are defeated due to the combined efforts of the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo.
