"The Quiller Memorandum," Anti-Nazi Revival Film

The "Quiller Memorandum" was released way back in late 1966. It starred newly acclaimed actor George Segal,* well known actors Alec Guinness and Max von Sydow, and increasingly popular actress Senta Berger. Much of the film was shot in (then) West Berlin, so you get something of a view of 1960's West Berlin. With World War Two over for 15 years by the dawn of the 1960s, the decade saw a burst of memoirs, documentaries and films about the war, and also its legacy, "the Cold War," including a divided Germany, which was literally divided by walls and barbed wire fences.** The 1960s saw a proliferation of spy/secret agent films, the most prominent of which were the James Bond films. So what does all of this have to do with "The Quiller Memorandum?" Absolutely nothing! Well, very little, and that "little" being the spy part. The movie is not about spies trying to gather information on the communist government in East Germany, or even in Moscow. Nope! It is about democratic forces trying to prevent a revival of Nazism in West Germany. Yep! While the end of World War Two moved further into the past, participants from that era, on all sides, began to want to tell their stories about the war, thus the memoirs and films. Notice I did say, "on all sides," and some Germans, and even some non-Germans, seemed to long for the time when a chorus of "Sieg Heils" rang from public venues in Germany and Europe. While many Germans of the 1960s just went about their every day lives earning a living, raising their children, and shipping Volkswagens to the U.S., where they were highly popular, there were those who plotted for a "Fourth Reich."

In those times, there were still many unanswered questions about the Germans (including Austrians) and some prominent Nazis who were unaccounted for from the end of the war. Stories circulated at times about close former Hitler aide Martin Bormann, whose body had not yet been found in Berlin, where he supposedly had either been killed by Soviet fire, or where he had died at his own hand.*** Could Bormann lead the Nazi revival? And some even thought Hitler himself had escaped the ruins of Berlin and had been transported by submarine to South America, where he awaited the right moment to launch a Nazi takeover of Germany. Remember, while these things seem ridiculous to us today, back in those times, these possibilities were not seen as quite so farfetched. Today's cynicism about government invasion of citizens' privacy was getting a strong boost back then, as schemes hatched during the war to keep military operations secret, or to uncover enemy attempts to hide such plans, and then the covert operations during the Cold War to find out secrets of foreign governments, made many people shudder, with some even having disturbing episodes in their minds about CIA operatives following them, or trying to use them for some secret mission. All of this led some to speculate that Hitler or Bormann could well have been alive, since some believed governments would never have admitted what they knew about the former Nazi nutcase. Further, the tension between many democratic nations and the Soviet Union made some people feel, in retrospect, that maybe the Western Powers should have made a separate peace with Hitler and then allied themselves with his forces against the Soviets. These ideas were not really all that far out of the mainstream back then, and the very troubling part of it is, people DID KNOW about the overwhelming war crimes and crimes against humanity of the Nazis, as these crimes had been well documented. Fear can make people react in some strange ways, and in the 1960s, fear of war with the Soviets, even nuclear war, was always on many people's minds, at least to some extent.

"The Quiller Memorandum" is available on DVD and is well worth the watch. I am not going into the plot or the general flow of the film. I will only again say, it is about democratic forces trying to get information on active Nazi operatives in Berlin so that these folks could be rounded up, thus keeping the pro-democracy forces ahead of the Nazis. Like the war then raging in southeast Asia, in Vietnam, it was not always easy to tell who was a friend and who was an enemy. I'll leave things right there!

* George Segal's performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," earned him an Oscar nomination. That movie was released earlier in 1966.

** Berlin too was divided by the famous "wall." The reason for this division was that Berlin was located within the Soviet Occupation Zone in Germany (by the 1960s commonly known as East Germany), but the city itself was divided into occupation zones, and the East German Communist government had built a wall beginning in the summer of 1961 to keep other people from breaking into their paradise, or at least that was the reason given by the Communists, if I recall correctly from my then childhood days. Of course this was a bunch of malarkey, and many an East German trying to get to the West was shot and killed by East German border guards. I guess it can be said that Berlin was the epicenter of the tensions between the Soviet Union, along with its satellite states of eastern Europe, and the United States and its western European allies during the Cold War.

*** For more on Bormann and his death see: http://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2011/09/german-leaders-of-nazi-erabormann.html  


                                   
WORD HISTORY:
Spy-This word, used as both a noun and as a verb, goes back Indo European "spekh," which had the notion of  "to look, to observe, to inspect." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "spehonan," which meant  "to look, to watch closely, to gather information by observing (thus, "to spy, to scout")." This gave Frankish, the dialect of the Germanic tribe the Franks, "spehon," with similar meaning. As Frankish blended with the Latin-based dialects of what is generally now France (named after the Franks), this produced French (named after Frankish), "espien," meaning "to observe closely, to spy." The Germanic word also gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "spyrian," which meant "to search for, to track, to check into, to find out." "Apparently," the French word blended with the native English word in the 1200s, but with the emphasis on the then predominant French meaning of "spy," to produce "spien," which later became "spy." German has "spähen" (to scout, to peer),^ Low German Saxon "spigeneren" (to spy), Dutch "spieden" (to scout, to spy), West Frisian "spehen" (archaic, but with similar meaning), Danish "spejde" (to scout, to spy), Icelandic "speja" ("apparently archaic," meaning "to scout, observe"), Norwegian "speide" (to scout, to peer), Swedish "speja" (to scout, to spy).

^ German also borrowed a form from French and thus the language also has "spionieren" (to spy), a word which was perhaps borrowed by Frisian, as it has similar; of course, Frisian may also have borrowed it directly from French.