Biography

After Adolf Hitler came to power, Harlan - unlike many German film directors - stayed in Germany. He embraced the new Nazi regime and directed several pro-Nazi propaganda films for the new government, with his wife Kristina Söderbaum in the main parts. Considered to be the worst of these was the universally reviled Jud Süß (1940), a virulent anti-Semitic propaganda piece masquerading as a period piece melodrama. After the war, he was charged with crimes against humanity because of this film, but in 1950, after several court trials, was released.

Veit Harlan converted to Catholicism in the last year of his life. Two months later, he died on holiday on the Italian island of Capri.

In 1958, Veit Harlan's niece, Christiane Kubrick, married Jewish American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. She is credited by her stage name "Susanne Christian" in Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957). They remained married until Stanley Kubrick's death in 1999.

A professed National Socialist since 1933, Harlan recommended himself to the propaganda ministry with his movie "Der Herrscher" (1937). That year, Joseph Goebbels appointed Harlan as a leading propaganda director. After the war, in 1949, Harlan was charged with crimes against humanity for his role as director of Jud Süß. The Hamburg Criminal Chamber of the Regional Court (Schwurgericht) acquitted Harlan of the charges; however, the court of the British occupation zone nullified the acquittal. His own defense was that the Nazis controlled his work and that he should not be held personally responsible for its content.

Harlan's son, Thomas Harlan (1929-2010), was an author and film director who created a semi-documentary film, "Wundkanal" ("Wound Passage"), in which his father, played by a convicted mass murderer, is forced to undergo a series of brutal interrogations into his war crimes. Thomas Harlan's final publication, issued posthumously, entitled Veit, was a memoir in the form of a letter to his father, continuing the investigation into his father's actions during the Nazi regime. Thomas was Veit Harlan's son by his first wife, Dora Gerson, who was Jewish and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. One of Harlan's daughters (by his second wife, Hilde Körber), named Susanne, converted to Judaism and married the son of Holocaust victims. She committed suicide in 1989. Veit Harlan was also uncle to Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan.