31: Hudsucker's Secret Nazi
During a newsreel describing the great success of Norville Barnes’s invention: the Hula Hoop, a stern and bored looking scientist describes the action of the hoop in a thick German accent.
Ze dinkus is kvite zimple, really. It operates on ze same principle zat keeps ze earth spinning 'round ze sun, and zat keeps you from flying off ze earth into ze coldest reaches of outer space vere you vood die like a miserable shvine. Yes, ze principle is ze same, except for ze piece of grrrit zey put in to make ze whole experience more pleasant
While the film does not give this scientist a name, the shooting script tells us his name is Dr Erwin Schweide. The name is a strange non-joke as “Schweide” is German for “sweat”. After some cursory searches, I have been unable to find any human whose last name is “Schweide”, German by birth or otherwise. This might suggest it’s maybe a play on a character trait, like naming your cartoon French skunk “Pepe Le Peu”, however he is not terribly sweaty either. While he isn’t particularly sweaty, Dr. Schweide is profoundly German. His accent makes this profoundly clear (even without hearing him, his speech is presented in the script complete with his absurdly thick accent), but there’s also something suggesting a very specific kind of German about his appearance in the film. His hair is light and wavy, his nose is long and straight, and despite his slight rotundity his chin is strong. What’s most interesting about this nearly unnamed 40-something year old scientist is the fact that even if Joel & Ethan Coen did not necessarily intend it to be so, he is almost assuredly a Nazi.
At the close of the second World War, the United States government made a calculated and controversial choice. They recognized as their soldiers marched through the former Third German Reich that it was very likely that in the immediate future they would be thrown into conflict with their enemy’s enemy, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They also recognized that Nazi Germany — despite its authoritarian governance and evil and genocidal practices towards its political enemies, its homosexual and trans citizens, and of course Jews and Roma trapped within its conquered territories — was a well organized nation and a formidable military opponent. Therefore, the US faced a choice as it captured Nazi party members as prisoners of war during its occupation of German territory. Should we prosecute these people for their evil deeds, or exploit them for their talents? In a profoundly American decision, the Truman administration decided the answer to this question was “yes”. A great deal of Nazi military officers, government officials, and bureaucrats were captured and brought to trial in the German city of Nuremberg, but a small number of Nazi scientists and engineers in the name of an effort “to assist in shortening the Japanese war and to aid our postwar military research” were quietly set aside by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, earmarked so that they would not be prosecuted for war crimes, but would in fact be eligible for visas for American residency and ultimately citizenship. These men were identified by US officials whose job it was to debrief Nazi party members and determine if they were war criminals: in which case they were to be immediately arrested , if they were harmless petty bureaucrats: in which case they were to be let go, or if they were potential assets to be recruited: in which case their files were marked with a paperclip. This covert operation, called “Operation Paperclip” brought some 1,600 men into the US, most of them rocket scientists. These men, initially recruited to be able to assist in the development of long distance ballistic weapons later ended up becoming founding members of NASA and who ultimately helped put an American on the face of the Moon.
The most notable beneficiary of Operation Paperclip was the unquestionably talented Nazi scientist Wernher Von Braun. Von Braun had been obsessed with the possibility of space travel as a reality from his youth, as an avid reader of the science fiction stories of Jules Verne and an admirer of the rocketry experiments of Max Valier and Fritz von Opel. Von Braun spent his childhood days attaching fireworks to his toy wagons to see how fast they would go and his evenings gazing into his telescopes. He also came from minor German nobility, with his mother being able to trace her ancestry back to kings of England, Scotland, Denmark, and France. After having completed his doctorate in physics in 1934, he knew that he both wanted to continue his experiments in rocketry and needed to find someone who would employ him in this means, and he was drawn to those who wished to remake the good old proud days of Germany before the first World War. While he himself never publicly expressed anti-semetic feelings, he was willing to overlook the party’s bigotry to serve his country and further his experiments, as he signed up for party membership in 1937 and joined the SS in 1940. Von Braun had little political or military aspirations, but he clearly saw the Nazi Party and the SS as places that would give him the resources to further his experiments in rocketry even as those very same pieces of knowledge were used to develop the V2 Rocket program which launched bombs into England and Sweden during the Second World War.
Von Braun’s expertise in rocketry led him to be an obvious candidate for Operation Paperclip, not so much because the US intended to put a man on the moon 25 years after the war ended as because of their anticipation that they’d be sending rockets to Russia within the decade. Between being allowed and encouraged to continue rocketry experiments, the US’s firmly anti-communist stance, and zero danger of persecution for war crimes, Von Braun readily accepted the offer to relocate to the US, first working just outside of El Paso, Texas and ultimately relocating to Birmingham, Alabama where he would do the majority of his work in American rocketry. He never really took to being an American however. Von Braun disliked his American coworkers, American cookery, and American culture. One simply gets the sense that anywhere but Germany would have been equally disappointing to him. Von Braun’s nationalism had led him to join the Nazi party, and here he was serving the country that had destroyed that movement. As a result during his tenure in the United States Von Braun was generally aloof and sometimes openly hostile to forming American connections and friendships. People described him as stern and detached, only really finding peace in his work. Within a year of their arrival in the US, the American Press started profiling Von Braun and his team in Texas, starting with a local story titled “American Cooking 'Tasteless,' Says German Rocket Scientist; Dislikes 'Rubberized Chicken.'” focussing on the scientist’s perpetually displeased demeanor.
Soon enough, the stern and stone faced brilliant german scientist became a trope in American media, brought on by the presence of the V2 Rocket team and their press coverage, first in sci-fi B-Movies like This Island Earth (1955) and Creature With The Atom Brain (1955), and ultimately the most notable example being Peter Sellers’s brilliant portrayal of the title character in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb (1964). Strangelove is a clear von Braun / Paperclip scientist analog, though his focus is on nuclear weapons rather than rocketry. His left hand apparently has a mind of its own, as it at one point delivers a Nazi salute, only for Strangelove to use his right hand to restrain his disorderly Nazi left one. His accent is comically thick, and he’s constantly slipping up and calling the president “Mein Führer”. The cliche continued throughout American cinema, in examples such as Dr. Scott in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Dr. Mortner in the James Bond film A View To a Kill (1985), and Professor Krassman in The Muppet Movie (1979). Eventually the stereotype of the stern and aloof yet brilliant German scientist became so ingrained in American culture that we simply forgot that our real example of this phenomenon were also literal Nazis.*
Let us then ponder our Herr Doktor Schweide once more, with his sandy hair, stern demeanor, and explanation of how a Hula Hoop works.
In the background of his laboratory, Dr. Schweide has a bunch of nondescript science-y things: an oscilloscope, a beaker, a diagram of an atom, and a portrait of Albert Einstein. All of this does not describe a specific discipline so much as the entire concept of science, though we do have a very Von Braunian moment in Dr. Schweide’s incredibly incorrect explanation of how the Hula Hoop works. The “principle zat keeps ze earth spinning 'round ze sun, and zat keeps you from flying off ze earth into ze coldest reaches of outer space vere you vood die like a miserable shvine” is the theory of gravity. The principle of gravity states that any two objects have an attractive force based on their mass and the inverse square of their distance from each other. The Sun is much larger than the Earth, and so its mass keeps the Earth tethered to it, spinning around it rather than flying off in one direction. Likewise, the Earth is much larger than humans, and so its mass keeps us tethered to its surface. In the scheme of “objects large enough to achieve gravitational attraction” however, humans aren’t that much bigger than hula hoops; they do not stay swaying around our hips because our mass is such that they are attracted to them due to the fundamental force of gravitation. Our lives would be profoundly unpleasant if it were so, as every object less massive than a hula hoop such as paper cups, mice, dominoes, wood shavings, light bulbs, pencils, potato chips, flowers, bananas, wasps, pebbles and beans among other things would simply stick to us like glue. The principle of the Hoop is very simply Newton’s first law of motion: an object in motion tends to stay in motion. The momentum of the hoop as it is first tossed against our hips would propel it in the same direction, but for the fact that our hips (or neck, or ankle if you want to get into some advanced maneuvers) impact the curved surface of the hoop, causing it to change directions and orbit our bodies rather than fly away. Wernher Von Braun however was a rocket scientist, a man whose life’s work was figuring out a way to defy gravity such that humans could fly higher. Von Braun, for all his military ballistics work, was ultimately consumed by the idea of space travel, having told record-setting balloon aeronaut Auguste Picard as a young man that he intended to travel to the moon one day. Von Braun would not want to talk about the principle of momentum, he would want to talk about gravitation and space. Dr. Schweide likewise takes this press request and absent mindedly makes it all about him and his work. Of course he hates the press request though, delivering his monologue on gravity in a bored monologue. He remembers though at the last minute that he’s supposed to be likable and pleasant in the eyes of the American public, tacking on the phrase “Yes, ze principle is ze same, except for ze piece of grrrit zey put in to make ze whole experience more pleasant” delivered with the faintest hint of a dead-inside smile breaking through his natural grimace. Dr. Schweide hates this press conference. He hates the fact that a man of his talents is forced to talk about a fad toy. He wants to get back to his work. He wants a quality bratwurst and a real beer, and on some level, he probably just wants Der Führer to be back.
* It is worth noting that this is not to say that every depiction of a German-American scientist from the mid 20th century is meant to be a Nazi. A balding German scientist with a well kempt beard might be a Freud analog. A wild-haired German scientist with a mustache might be an Einstein analog. Both of these men would have been singled out by the 3rd Reich for their Jewish heritage had they not fled Nazi controlled lands prior to the war, to say nothing of other anti-Nazi German scientists who fled the Reich such as Erwin Schrodinger, Max Born, James Franck, and Ludwig Edelstein. In American cinema however, when a mid-20th century German-American scientist is specifically depicted as aloof or cruel or uncaring yet brilliant, that’s where you find the implied Nazi.