Marlene Dietrich's uncompromising rejection of the Nazis and her commitment on the front lines – A lesson in decency and the fight against fascism
Marlene Dietrich was born on December 27, 1901, in Berlin-Schöneberg. She became a global phenomenon through film classics such as Shanghai Express, which made her an international star almost overnight, and through songs like the anti-war ballad “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” whose German version—Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind—she made famous far beyond the stage. Style icon, screen legend, singer, lover, diva. But also a woman of principle. Her life reads like a case study in how radiance can coexist with rigor—and how a public persona can be sharpened into moral stance.
Dietrich began her career with training under Max Reinhardt at the Kammerspiele. She honed her smoky voice and unhurried, half-lidded gaze in the nightclubs, revues, and cabarets of the Weimar “Golden Twenties.” At the same time, she was building a reputation in the flourishing film industry: from 1923 on, she appeared in a string of silent films such as Tragedy of Love (Joe May) and The Perils of the Bride’s Year (Fred Sauer), and in early talkies like I Kiss Your Hand, Madame (Alexis Granowsky). In those years she perfected the nonchalant, faintly androgynous elegance that would become her signature—cool, controlled, and quietly subversive.
Her overwhelming breakthrough came in 1930, when she played “Lola Lola” in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel—a performance that opened the doors to Hollywood and sealed her myth. That cinematic peak was also the end of her Berlin chapter. One day after the premiere, on April 1, 1930, she left Germany. She would return only as a guest, never again as a citizen.
The Nazis’ Calculation—and the Icon’s No
After Hitler seized power in 1933, Dietrich saw immediately what the moment demanded. Her resistance was not symbolic; it was operative. As early as 1933, she and the director Ernst Lubitsch pooled their networks and resources to create an informal but effective relief fund for Jews and political dissidents, providing material support and helping secure escape routes. Lubitsch, who had Jewish roots himself and was among Hollywood’s earliest émigrés, later carried this moral initiative forward in formal guise as president of the European Film Fund, founded in 1938.
At the same time, the National Socialists intensified their efforts to win the world star back. Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, tried personally to lure Dietrich “home to the Reich” with offers so lavish they bordered on delirious—complete creative freedom, a guaranteed triumphant comeback, the full apparatus of state adoration. Rumor had it that she was even promised a victory parade through the Brandenburg Gate.
That is how Dietrich later summed up her unblinking contempt. She refused categorically. Her position was not for sale. When the supposed triumphal march was mentioned, she answered with a condition that exposed the regime’s moral rot: “Only if my husband can ride with me.” Her husband, Rudolf Sieber, had Jewish roots. In a single sentence, she forced the Nazis into an insoluble propaganda contradiction—and made clear that her loyalty lay with the people they were hunting.
Renouncing Citizenship and War Service as Prinziple
After years of active exile and practical support for those persecuted, Dietrich took the final formal step in 1939: she gave up her German citizenship and became an American. In Nazi Germany, this was officially framed as treason. The hate sheet Der Stürmer responded on cue, spitting its antisemitic logic across the page: “The long association of the German actress Marlene Dietrich with Jews has made her character un-German.”
In the Third Reich she was branded a “friend of Jews”—a slur she wore as a stark confirmation of where her moral compass pointed. In a time when the state tried to redefine belonging as obedience, Dietrich insisted that decency was the only nationality that mattered.
Instead of singing for Hitler, Dietrich spent the war years performing for Allied soldiers at the front and speaking on the radio against Nazi propaganda. Her commitment was neither theatrical nor opportunistic; it was physically grueling, emotionally costly, and unwavering. She sang in tents, hospitals, and makeshift stages close to the fighting, offering a kind of steadiness that rifles could not.
Her engagement did not grow out of political ambition, let alone a desire for sainthood. It grew out of a radical sense of ordinary decency—a logic she repeated later with brusque clarity. Asked why she was an anti-fascist, she said simply: “Out of decency.” Asked if it took courage to take a stand, she replied: “Does it require courage? No.” For Dietrich, resistance to injustice was not heroism; it was the bare minimum of being human.
She also rejected the postwar alibi that Germans had been deceived. Her questions were those of a witness who refused to let sentiment smother responsibility. “But almost everyone knew what was going on. How could one fail to see there were concentration camps? … Didn’t the Germans see it? Didn’t they ask questions? What happened to the people the police took away, the ones never seen again?”
Her choice of the Allied side was a choice for freedom. She saw in the young American soldiers, fighting for a cause that was not theirs by birth but was theirs by conscience, the deepest kind of sacrifice. Even confronted with the devastation in Germany, her moral arithmetic did not shift: “How could my heart break when Hamburg was bombed, if it had already broken when bombs fell on London? I was on the side of the innocent; they had to win.”
The Echo of History—and the Pain of Returning
After the war, Dietrich made Paris and the United States her main homes. When she returned to West Germany from 1960 onward as a celebrated guest, the visits exposed the country’s unresolved fractures. Her concerts were hailed, yet she was also met by a portion of the public with insults—“traitor,” “fatherland betrayer”—and even spittle. The hostility hurt, but it did not soften her. If anything, it sharpened her refusal to let a nation bargain its way out of guilt.
On the question of forgiveness, she drew a line that was as simple as it was merciless:
Still, Dietrich continued her humanist mission despite German hostility. Her appearance in Israel in the 1960s testified to that unbroken obligation. She sang anti-war songs there, including her German rendition of Pete Seeger’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone, at a time when the German language was officially avoided in Israel. It was a deeply moving gesture of humanity—one that did not ask for forgetting, but insisted on memory as the ground of peace.
Into old age, Dietrich remained committed to confronting Nazi crimes. Her reflections on morality, war, and exile were preserved for posterity in Maximilian Schell’s Oscar-nominated 1984 documentary Marlene. Her later efforts on behalf of legal accountability, documented in her exchanges with activists such as Beate Klarsfeld, show how her notion of decency extended beyond the arc of her own life.
The Lasting Legacy: Art, Conscience, Reckoning
Dietrich’s career demonstrates that artistic genius and moral backbone are not mutually exclusive. Exile did not diminish her craft; it grounded it, giving her work a new kind of depth. For her, glamour was never mere surface. It was a tool—seductive, visible, untouchable—and therefore political.
That moral depth is evident in her late roles as well. In Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), she played the wife of an accused Nazi judge. The part required her—against the grain of her own antifascist biography—to inhabit the perspective of a German woman who had indirectly sustained the system. The performance became a cinematic demand to confront individual complicity, a theme that fit her own convictions with almost frightening precision: “How could one fail to see there were concentration camps?”
Her continued advocacy for the legal reckoning with Nazi crimes underscores the same point: her “decency” was not a pose but a practice. The diva of exile remains an icon of art and conscience, her life a bright, unyielding witness against antisemitism, opportunism, and moral complacency.
This article is part of the campaign "Glamour and Resistance," realized within the framework of the funding program for the Fight against Anti-Semitism in Berlin.
We thank the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion for the support that enables us to highlight Dietrich's legacy of civil courage and decency.
