“Spion für Deutschland” (English title is “Spy for Germany“) is a very interesting film from many points of view. It was made in 1956, a little more than a decade after the end of the war, and was one of the first films – if not the first – to tell an espionage story from the German perspective. Its director, Werner Klingler, had a tortuous and controversial career. He emigrated to the US in the 1920s and began making films there, returned to Germany in the 1930s and worked under the Nazi regime, and later resumed his career in Germany in the 1950s after an unsuccessful attempt to return in Hollywood. The film is interesting not only as a significant episode in the evolution of German cinema’s approaches to what happened during the war, but also because it is a more than reasonable achievement of action thriller entertainment.
The story begins in the summer of 1944, ten months before the end of the war. Nazi super-spy Erich Gimpel is called to the German General Staff who know they are about to lose the war. This loyal officer is given a last chance mission: to go to the United States to spy on the progress of American research on the atomic bomb and try to prevent its completion. He will team up with Billy Cole, an American deserter willing to collaborate. The two men are landed by a German submarine on the east coast of the United States. Before long, American counterintelligence is on their trail. Cole, an alcoholic, quickly proves to be uncontrollable, while Gimpel, in parallel with the execution of his mission, also finds an unexpected romantic interest.
The film is well written and acted. Erich Gimpel is played with aplomb by Martin Held, as a kind of German James Bond, years before the James Bond movies. Nadja Tiller and Walter Giller play the roles of Gimpel’s girlfriend and his accomplice. The two would marry the same year, 1956, when the film was released. The way Berlin and New York in the final year of the war are presented is also interesting. Berlin looks better and more orderly, nothing seems to predict the destruction to come and the fact that the city will be in ruins in less than a year. New York, on the other hand, is more chaotic, but also more authentic. The perspective is German, very different from American, English or French films. Nothing recalls the Nazi war crimes or the ideology that gave rise to them. In one of the scenes, the words of a scientist participating in the Manhattan project sound like a warning of the last hour before entering the atomic age. The idea is interesting, but the screenwriters and the director did not insist on it too much. The final conversion of the hero is not ideological, but due to the late love story and the realization that for the Germans the war was lost anyway. It’s difficult and perhaps wrong to judge the script from a historical perspective, but also hard to completely ignore it. ‘Spion für Deutschland‘ is a document of the era in which it was made rather than of the era in which its story takes place.