Paul Henreid

One of the deeply moving aspects of Casablanca is that it is full of people who were actually refugees from the Third Reich. And one of the things you learn is that those people came from all walks of life. It did not, in the long run, matter if you were rich or poor. It didn’t matter how long your family had lived where you lived. What mattered was that you were in some way undesirable to the regime, and you weren’t going to be allowed to survive that. Some people were able to escape, some small portion of the millions were spared. This month, we will be considering a few of them.

Paul Georg Julius Freiherr von Hernreid Ritter von Wasel-Waldingau was the son of a financial advisor to Franz Joseph I. His father had been born Carl Hirsch, but he converted to Catholicism in 1904, before his son was born, in order to avoid Austro-Hungarian anti-semitism. It didn’t work; his son was kept out of the German film industry, which he was entering just as the Third Reich came to power, because of his Jewish ancestry. He was rejected from the National Socialist Reich film Chamber twice, once personally by Joseph Goebbels. He was, in fact, declared an official enemy of the Third Reich and had his property seized by the government.

Conrad Veidt vouched for Henreid to the British government, keeping him from being deported as an enemy alien and likely saving his life. In 1940, he moved to New York and dropped the “von.” He then moved to Los Angeles. He initially signed with RKO Pictures but then moved to Warner Bros. His first two movies for the studio were his two most famous roles. First, he appeared in Now, Voyager with Bette Davis, where he would become iconic for lighting two cigarettes and giving one to Davis. And then there was Victor Laszlo.

There’s a lot to be said about Victor Laszlo, some of which would be said by When Harry Met Sally . . . . He is something of a cipher, though. We don’t know much about him other than that he’s a fierce anti-fascist, much as Henreid himself was. But he’s clearly such a potent symbol of liberation that the entire Nazi mechanism in the city of Casablanca is geared toward capturing him, presumably to have a big show trial and execute him as an enemy of the state. One assumes that Henreid own death would have been less public but no less certain.

The problem, of course, was that the US government declared anti-fascists to be pro-Communist. Henreid would end up blacklisted for several years in the early fifties, unable to make studio pictures. He went abroad. He made independent films in the US. And even after he was allowed back into studio productions, he never fully recovered his career. He directed in TV, including being hired by Alfred Hitchcock for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. And, yes, given the state of the industry in the ‘50s and ‘60s, he directed episodes of a few Westerns. What do you do?