Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People

by Julia Boyd

A few weeks later, on 9 March 1931, Charlie Chaplin arrived in Berlin to promote his last and most successful silent movie – City Lights. ‘Your mother wouldn’t rest until she got hold of him,’ Rumbold wrote to Constantia, ‘and he is coming to dine and do a play with us tonight. We shall attract a lot of attention.’6 He was right. The Pathé News clip reporting Chaplin’s arrival in Berlin bore the caption: ‘Kings might almost envy reception delirious crowds gave famous screen comedian.’ Thousands of people lined the streets all the way from Friedrichstrasse station to the Adlon Hotel, where he stayed in the royal suite as a guest of honour. However, not all those greeting him were friendly. In the mistaken belief that Chaplin was Jewish, Nazis gathered outside the Adlon to yell abuse at him, while a group of communists threatened to smash the Adlon’s windows if he didn’t receive their delegation.7 The Nazi rhetoric was echoed in the National Socialist newspaper, Der Angriff, edited by Goebbels, which called him the ‘Jew Chaplin’ whose ‘typically Jewish screen figure was leading German youth away from the heroic ideal of the manly German Siegfried’, thus ‘undermining the future of the German race’.8 Such was the virulence of the Nazi campaign that Chaplin left Berlin early, missing the premiere of his film.

Nazis incorrectly label Charlie Chaplin as Jewish and he is driven out of Germany.