Marlene Dietrich
Though she was born and raised in Germany, even making her name as a movie star in her native land, Marlene Dietrich moved to America and sided with her adopted homeland in the Second World War. She carried on making films but entertained the troops too. According to Dietrich, this was her way of helping out in the fight against Hitler. But still, some people continued to doubt which side she was on. The FBI certainly did. They feared she might be a Nazi spy, as the bulky file they built up on the superstar shows.
It was the Agency’s Director, J. Edgar Hoover, in particular who feared there could be a Nazi spy operating in the heart of Hollywood. From 1942 up until 1944, Hoover ordered that Dietrich be followed everywhere she went. He also had his agents open her mail in the hope of finding evidence to prove his suspicions. Of course, none was ever found. In fact, Dietrich did more than most to prove her loyalty to America. In February of 1944, she agreed to spy on the land of her birth. While in Europe, supposedly on trips to entertain the American GIs, she would gather information on possible subversive activities and report back to her spymasters upon her return.
But, while the FBI’s investigations failed to turn up any evidence of Dietrich being a Nazi agent, they did learn a lot about her personal life. And much of this ended up in the file. The agents who followed the Hollywood actress noted that she was “promiscuous, albeit in a rather cool and glamorous manner”. They also noted, with evident alarm, that Dietrich not only enjoyed affairs with male actors, she even had liaisons with women.
Today, 150 pages of the FBI’s file on Dietrich are available for the public to read. Frustratingly for the historian, however, part of the file was destroyed in 1980, 12 years prior to her death. Could these pages have shed more light on what information she learned while spying for the Americans in Europe? Could they even have shown whether the US government ever took Dietrich’s comments about wanting to help assassinate Adolf Hitler seriously? Sadly, we’ll never know. Dietrich died in 1992, aged 90, having lived a fascinating and complex long life.