Thye Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee May 28, 2000

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War stories

Rare Hitler footage unearthed in Milwaukee attic

By Dave Daley
Special to the Journal Sentinel

World War II has been analyzed, dissected, memorialized and, thanks to novelists, film and cable TV, virtually re-enacted countless times. Certainly on this Memorial Day weekend, many thoughts are turning to wartime, the memory of Jews killed in the Holocaust, and honoring American military efforts.

But as familiar as the outlines of the war have become, there are still surprising details awaiting discovery.

Some of those details are locked in a Cudahy bank vault: homemade movies of Adolf Hitler and other top Nazis, believed to have been taken by one of Hitler's personal pilots and seized near Hitler's Alpine stronghold by a Milwaukee GI as World War II was ending.

I watched about two hours of the grainy, black-and-white films. They are a fascinating peek into Hitler's inner circle and the German high command from 1934, just after Hitler took power, to mid-1940, when the German army overran France.

One sequence shows Hitler with a magnifying glass, examining a document just handed him as he gets out of a car. The image-conscious Hitler rarely was seen in official films in an unfavorable light -- der Fuhrer had no weaknesses -- and the segment is believed to be one of the few showing Hitler's bad eyesight.

The homemade films also reveal how hard Hitler's image-makers worked to make him look bigger than life. For example, Hitler is shown making a presentation to a German soldier, who is standing in a low spot while Hitler looms over him, the official photographer off to the side and behind Hitler, shooting from an angle that shows the towering Hitler and the soldier only from the waist up.

For more than 50 years, the 10 reels of films, which add up to 2 hours and 39 minutes, sat in a dusty attic, because the GI who owned them vowed they'd never be made public while he was alive. But after his death in 1997, his family decided to bring them to light.

How valuable the films will turn out to be is still unclear, but one authority calls their footage of Hitler and his generals in Poland at the start of World War II "unique."

"These are behind-the-scenes glimpses that certainly add importantly to . . . very familiar scenes of Hitler . . .," says Raye Farr, director of the film and video collections at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and an expert on World War II newsreel-type films.

While the Milwaukee GI who obtained the films is dead, his family still wishes to remain anonymous, said Kevin Tschohl, a Cudahy businessman who is representing them.

The GI was a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division, the first U.S. unit into the Berchtesgaden region in southern Germany as Hitler's Third Reich was collapsing in early May 1945. A postcard-pretty resort area, the Berchtesgaden was then the site of Hitler's mountain retreat, dubbed the "Eagle's Nest."

The 101st Airborne guarded Hitler's compound as well as an SS barracks and the luxurious private homes nearby of top Nazis like Martin Bormann and Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering.

Beneath Hitler's compound, the soldiers found rooms stocked with fine crystal, silver cutlery embossed with Hitler's initials and Hitler's library and film collections. As German soldiers surrendered, their American captors were handed all kinds of war souvenirs: Nazi flags, Luger pistols, ceremonial SS daggers.

The Milwaukee GI apparently obtained the films of Hitler from the Berchtesgaden region at this time. "He must have liberated this (the films) from one of these little resorts," Tschohl says, calling them "war booty."

A longtime friend of the family, Tschohl said he first saw the films 15 years ago when the ex-soldier showed them in his home to family and close friends. But the ex-soldier, a staff sergeant awarded both the Purple Heart for war wounds and two Bronze Stars, refused to do anything more public with the films until after he died.

One reel shows Hitler touring the front lines in September 1939 after Germany's blitzkrieg attack on Poland, the invasion that touched off World War II. Behind Hitler is Erwin Rommel, at the time in charge of Hitler's security, his fame still ahead of him as the field marshal in charge of the Afrika Korps.

They also include footage of the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Winter Olympics, held in southern Germany in the Austrian Alps, with Hitler on a viewing platform surrounded by other top Nazis.

Another segment from a battlefield in France in the spring of 1940, after the German army decimated the French, shows an SS intelligence officer inspecting a captured French Charbis tank.

The homemade nature of the films is clearly evident in another sequence showing top-ranking officers answering a call of nature by the side of a plane at the Polish front, then sticking out their tongues as they turn around and find they're caught by a photographer.

Farr said some of the most important film documentation of the Nazi period was shot by Germans with home movie cameras. "I'm sure a great deal has been lost, or has never surfaced," she added.

Farr, who viewed the films in January in Milwaukee, said she was not aware of any other film footage of Hitler at the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Winter Olympics. She says the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is interested in obtaining the films -- or copies of them -- for its collection.

One reason the late GI's family is considering a new home for the films is the hope a museum or collector could continue researching them, Tschohl said.

Discovering who shot the home movies nearly became an obsession for Tschohl, 42, who runs Dad's Shop, a family tailor business in Cudahy.

First, Tschohl transferred the films -- 65-year-old acetate and very fragile -- to videotape that he watched over and over, committing faces and places to memory.

Tschohl quickly discovered the films were a mixed lot: scenes of Hitler and other top Nazis as well as personal films of one individual, a man who appeared throughout the 10 reels, both in a German military uniform and in dapper, civilian clothes.

The mystery man also appeared to be a playboy of sorts, shooting footage of half a dozen different women outside resorts and vacation spots. This man, Tschohl said to himself, is the owner of the movie camera that took all these films.

Then Tschohl, a UWM dropout with no experience in historical research, began haunting local libraries. In books and videos, Tschohl confirmed some of the better-known faces in the films, including such top Hitler lieutenants as Rudolph Hess, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels.

But the name of the mysterious film-taker eluded Tschohl for close to 10 months. When he hit a dead end with materials on top Nazis, Tschohl switched to histories of the 101st Airborne. He pored over hundreds of World War II books and videos and contacted authorities on the war at Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Finally, Tschohl was able to identify an obscure face on the films as the Nazi Third Reich's sports minister. A light bulb went on: Tschohl remembered his mystery filmmaker was shown in one segment in a captain's uniform, stepping down from an airplane that had "XI Olympiad 1936 Berlin," along with the Olympic rings, painted on its side.

Armed with that link, Tschohl said he went back to the Milwaukee Public Library's rarities section, the room where he had started research many months before, and discovered that a Capt. Gaim was chosen in late 1935 to fly the German Olympic Committee on a public relations tour to European capitals.

Tschohl believed he finally had his man (right): Ludwig Gaim.

Gaim, an Austrian, was a World War I fighter ace and a winner of the Austrian silver medal of valor for aerial combat. Gaim also was awarded the Iron Cross twice during World War I.

Born in 1892 in Deggendorf in northeastern Bavaria, by 1920 Gaim was married -- to a woman born in Berchtesgaden -- and had a daughter.

In the 1930s, Gaim worked for Lufthansa, the German commercial airline, and by 1937 was living in Berchtesgaden, the same area where the Milwaukee GI found the Hitler films.

Gaim also was an early member of both the Nazi party and the SS -- the Schutzstaffel, or Hitler's personal guard unit -- entering both in December 1931. (By the end of the war he would earn both the SS ring and the SS dagger, highly prized by those around Hitler.)

In 1937, when Hitler needed an additional pilot, Gaim was recommended. Hitler's chief pilot was Hans Baur, who became a general; Hitler often flew with two planes, Baur piloting one, Gaim the other.

Gaim's access to Hitler and his inner circle is clear. Gaim is listed in one book as one of the few people allowed to eat in Dining Room #1, closest to Hitler's dining room, at Hitler's wartime headquarters in East Prussia, the "Wolf's Lair."

The films Gaim shot end in May-June 1940, probably because security around Hitler tightened as the war spread throughout Europe, Tschohl said.

A year later, in December 1941, Gaim was severely injured in an airplane crash at Orel, Russia, suffering a crushed kidney, two broken ribs, contusions and a broken leg. At the time, Germany was throwing every available German aircraft into a massive effort to resupply the German Sixth Army, surrounded at Stalingrad by the Russians, which may explain Gaim's presence in Orel then.

His injuries made Gaim an invalid for close to two years. In September 1943, in a document to Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, Gaim was recommended for promotion to full colonel, a rank he was awarded in November.

In January 1944, Gaim, his health improved, asked for duty back at Hitler's headquarters. The request noted that Gaim was remarried -- to a woman 20 years younger. Gaim, who had not been living with his first wife for three years, asked for the divorce, citing irreconcilable differences.

Gaim was given medical clearance for security duty at Hitler's headquarters but later that month, an SS general told Gaim to retire. A month later, Gaim, by now age 52, was assigned to a reserve unit outside Munich, made up mostly of older men. Hitler's staff had said there really was no need for Gaim's pilot skills because by 1944, Hitler was not flying.

The records on Gaim end in 1944 in Munich, with Gaim applying for a disability card, and what happened to Gaim by the war's end is not clear. Tschohl said military records do not list Gaim as killed in action.

One intriguing footnote: The reels in the Cudahy bank vault may not be the only Gaim films that have survived.

In the fall of 1998, another American veteran of World War II made public four reels of amateur movies of Hitler. The soldier, Herbert St. Goar of Chattanooga, Tenn., said that he was given the films around October 1945 in Munich by a man who claimed he was one of Hitler's pilots and claimed to have taken the movies himself.

St. Goar, in a U.S. Army intelligence unit, said as he was questioning the man, the German volunteered he had the films and took St. Goar to his home in Munich where the films were buried in his backyard.

Interviewed this February, St. Goar, now 82, said that after all these years, he does not remember the name the man gave him. But this could have been Gaim.

St. Goar's films, showing Hitler touring occupied Paris, visiting war wounded and meeting with Benito Mussolini in Rome, are now stored at the federal archives in Berlin in a room kept at minus 7 degrees Fahrenheit so the films will not deteriorate, St. Goar said.

The German magazine Der Spiegel published photographs from the films in October 1998 and last year German TV broadcast a documentary, "The Third Reich in Color," that included footage from his films, St. Goar said.

Beyond the Holocaust museum's interest, Tschohl says he also has had contact with private collectors about selling the films. The family, Tschohl said, is considering all options.

Kevin Tschohl can be e-mailed at [email protected]

Related index: Hitler