Peter Bosse

Actor, presenter and journalist Peter Bosse (1931-2018) was a popular child star of German cinema in the 1930s. The boy with his cheeky face made 28 films.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 9574/1, 1935-1936. Photo: Ufa.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 9845/1, 1935-1936. Photo: Ufa.


German Postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A 1276/1, 1937-1938. Photo: Manassée-Ricoll, Wien / Mondial.

Opera

Peter Bosse was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1931 as the son of silent film actress Hilde Maroff.

After some performances on the children's radio with Ilse Obrig, he entered the film business. He made his debut as the son of the great opera singer Beniamino Gigli in Vergiß mein nicht/Forget Me Not (Augusto Genina, 1935).

The next year he became a popular child star with Schloß Vogelöd/Vogelöd Castle (Max Obal, 1936) with Carola Höhn, and as the small Peter in Schlußakkord/Final Accord (Detlev Sierck/Douglas Sirk, 1936) with Willy Birgel and Lil Dagover.

Another popular film was Das Gäßchen zum Paradies/Paradise Road (Martin Fric, 1936) with Hans Moser, in which Peter won the hearts of the public as a little orphan.

Till the outbreak of the war followed more films, including Solo per te/Only for Thee (Carmine Gallone, 1937) with Opera singers Beniamino Gigli and Michael Bohnen, Frauenliebe - Frauenleid (Augusto Genina, 1937) with Magda Schneider, Mutterlied/Mother Song (Carmine Gallone, 1938) - again as the son of Beniamino Gigli, Asszony a valszuton/Die Frau am Scheidewege/The woman at the crossroads(Josef von Báky, 1938) with Ewald Balser an Magda Schneider, and Robert und Bertram/Robert and Bertram (Hans H. Zerlett, 1939).


With Magda Schneider. German postcard by Das Programm von Heute, Berlin / Ross Verlag. Photo: Cine-Allianz.


German postcard by Das Programm von Heute, Berlin / Ross Verlag. Photo: Europa.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A 1859/1, 1938-1939. Photo: Sandau, Berlin.

Radio

Peter Bosse’s film career ended when WW II started. The Nazis didn’t permit him to act in films anymore on 'account of racial and ideological reasons' according to Wikipedia.

After the war, he followed acting classes and started to work as a stage actor at the Schiffbauerdammtheater in Berlin. Later he switched to the radio and worked for the Berliner Rundfunk. He acted in many radio plays and worked also as a presenter.

He played a few small roles in East German films like the DEFA productions Der Prozeß wird vertagt/The Process is Adjourned (Herbert Ballmann, 1958) with Gisela Uhlen, and the adventure film Der Traum des Hauptmann Loy/The Dream of the captain Loy (Kurt Maetzig, 1961).

He also worked for the GDR television as the host of the long-running child show Unser Sandmännchen/Our Little Sandman (1958-). In the 1990s he founded the radio station 50 Plus (now Spreeradio), for which he was a presenter and the programme director.

So Peter Bosse finished his career where it started, on the radio. Peter Bosse passed away in 2018.


German Postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A 1859/2, 1937-1938. Photo: Sandau, Berlin.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A 2122/1, 1939-1940. Photo: Sandau, Berlin.


Big German card by Ross Verlag. Photo: Joerger.


Big German card by Ross Verlag. Photo: Tobis. Publicity still for Das Gäßchen zum Paradies/Paradise Road (Martin Fric, 1936).


Big German card by Ross Verlag. Photo: Cine-Allianz.

Sources: Thomas Staedeli (Cyranos), Filmportal, Wikipedia (German) and IMDb.

This post was last updated on 20 July 2023.

Photo by Tobis

Tobis Film was a major German film production and distribution company. Founded in 1927 as a merger of several companies involved in the switch from silent to sound films, the organisation emerged as the second leading German studio of the Third Reich.


Adolph Wohlbrück. German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 9840/1, 1935-1936. Photo: Tobis-Europa / Stania. Publicity still for Port Arthur (Nicolas Farkas, 1936).


Leny Marenbach. German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. G 138, 1941-1944. Photo: Star-Photo-Atelier.


Emil Jannings. German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. G 175, 1941-1944. Photo: Star-Foto-Atelier / Tobis.


Monika Burg. German Postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. K 1416. Photo: Star-Foto-Atelier / Tobis.


Fita Benkhoff. German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. W 51, 1941-1944. Photo: Star-Foto-Atelier / Tobis.

The Paris sound film peace treaty

Tobis was founded on 12 May 1927 as a means to capitalise on sound technology. 'Tobis' is an acronym for Ton-Bild-Syndikat (Sound-Film-Syndicate). Tobis had access to a process developed by the record and patent holding company Tri-Ergon-Musik-AG, which placed the sound directly on the filmstrip. This was technique the firm had developed in the 1920s but hadnot immediately pursued.

Tobis became a sound film company on 30 August 1928, when the Tri-Ergon Music AG (St. Gallen) with the Dutch-German H. J. Küchenmeister limited partnership (Berlin), the German Tonfilm AG (Hannover) and the Messterton AG (Berlin) merged into Tobis. The aim of the merger, as the report of the Working Committee noted, was to consolidate the different patents in one hand. Behind the struggle for its own patent was the intention to get rid of the competition by the American company Warner Bros., which used a patent of Western Electric.

Tobis then signed an agreement with Klangfilm to merge into Tobis-Klangfilm. The studio also signed an agreement with the Ufa, which led to Germany's successful entry into sound film production. Tobis-Klangfilm needed films to show to the European public, so late in 1928, it signed contracts with larger French and British film production companies to establish sound film production in Paris and London.

In Paris, at the the Epinay Studios, René Clair made his first, now classic sound films for Tobis-Klangfilm, Sous les toits de Paris/Under the Roofs of Paris (René Clair, 1930) with Albert Préjean, Le Million/The Million (René Clair, 1931) with Annabella, and À nous la liberté/Liberty for Us (René Clair, 1931) with Raymond Cordy. These were lively musical comedies that mixed asynchronous sound with a bare minimum of dialogue. Clair's innovative sound features placed him as a top director in the forefront of the European cinema. And with the rise of the Tobis-Klangfilm studio, French productions increased.

In 1930, the film industries in Hollywood and Germany signed 'the Paris sound film peace treaty' and agreed to carve up the market. Tobis-Klangfilm had exclusive rights for the German-speaking countries, the Netherlands, the Balkan states and Scandinavia, and Western Electric and RCA got the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and the Soviet Union. The rest of the world was declared an open market.


Françoise Rosay. Dutch postcard by Tobis filmdistributie N.V. Amsterdam. Photo: Tobis. Publicity still for the French Tobis film La Kermesse Heroique (Jacques Feyder, 1935). Collection: Geoffrey Donaldson Institute.


Peter Bosse. Big German card by Ross Verlag. Photo: Tobis. Publicity still for Das Gäßchen zum Paradies/Paradise Road (Martin Fric, 1936).


La Jana. German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A 1910/2, 1937-1938. Photo: Atelier Schneider, Berlin / Tobis. Publicity still for Es leuchten die Sterne/The Stars Shine (Hans H. Zerlett, 1938).


Willi Forst. Postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A 3149/2, 1941-1944. Photo: Tobis.


Harry Baur. German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3451/1. Photo: Star-Foto-Atelier / Tobis.

 The second-in-size studio of Germany

After Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, the German film industry gradually came under the complete control of the Nazi Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. During the Nazi period, Tobis-Film was the second-in-size studio of Germany, just after the Ufa. The other two major film companies were Terra Film and Bavaria Film. Tobis produced 100 films in these years. Some Tobis films were released in Germany by the subsidiary Europa Film.

Among the directors of Tobis were Karl Anton, Volker von Collande, Erich Engel, Veit Harlan, Paul Heidemann, Max W. Kimmich, Werner Klingler, Wolfgang Liebeneiner, Wolfgang Staudte, Paul Verhoeven and Hans H. Zerlett.

To Tobis belonged numerous subsidiaries, including Tobis-Cinéma-Film AG, founded on 6 April 1933 in Berlin, which lent and distributed Tobis films abroad. Occasionally, this company also produced films such as the Czech-German drama Das Gäßchen zum Paradies/Paradise Road (Martin Fric, 1936) with the young Peter Bosse and Hans Moser, and the Italian-German war adventure Condottieri (Luis Trenker, Werner Klingler, 1937), starring Luis Trenker.

Tobis also controlled from 1933 until 1938 the dominant Austrian producer Sascha-Film which was then known as Tobis-Sascha. From 1932 it also owned a majority share of one of the main Portuguese producers known as Tobis Portuguesa, a name which the company kept even after the German participation was terminated at the end of world War II.

From 1935 on, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels increased his hold over the large film companies. He was able to claim that the gradual government take-over had been motivated by purely artistic and not commercial reasons. He did not force the film industry to become National Socialists, but instead guaranteed them financial stability. The studios became increasingly the instrument of the Propaganda Ministry.


Camilla Horn. German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A 1777/1, 1937-1938. Photo: Tobis. Publicity still for Fahrendes Volk/
Traveling People (Jacques Feyder, 1938).


Karl Martell. German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 2582/2, 1939-1940. Photo: Quick / Tobis. Publicity still for D III 88/D III 88: The New German Air Force Attacks (Herbert Maisch, Hans Bertram, 1939).


Olga Tschechowa. German postcard by Ross-Verlag, no. A 3071/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Haenchen / Tobis.


Heidemarie Hatheyer. German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3271/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Haenchen / Tobis.


Karl Ludwig Diehl. German postcard by Ross-Verlag, no. A 3344/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Tobis / Binz.

A Nazi Takeover in Complete Secrecy

The definitive takeover of Tobis by the Nazis  was achieved in 1937 with the purchase of the majority of shares. The transactions were carried out as seperate dealings. All happened in almost complete secrecy and the film press scarcely noticedof what happened. In December 1937, Tobis was transformed and given the new title Tobis Filmkunst GmbH. The actor Emil Jannings was appointed Chairman of the Board.

In the following years, Tobis produced several Propaganda films. Der Fuchs von Glenarvon/The Fox of Glenarvon (Max W. Kimmich, 1940) portrays the years of the Irish fight for independence during World War I. It starred Olga Tschechova, Karl Ludwig Diehl and Ferdinand Marian.

Ich klage an/I accuse (Wolfgang Liebeneiner, 1941) is a pro-euthanasia melodrama, in which a successful doctor (Paul Hartmann) is forced to make a heart-wrenching decision after his beautiful young wife (Heidemarie Hatheyer) is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Some of the cast and crew of the film would later face accusations of Crimes Against Humanity at Nuremberg Trials for contributing to the Nazi Action T-4 euthanasia program.

Another Propaganda Film by Tobis is the biographical film Ohm Krüger (Hans Steinhoff, 1941), starring Emil Jannings as the South African politician Paul Kruger and his eventual defeat by the British during the Boer War. The film focused on the theme of colonialism to demonstrate through Britain's history the true nature of the British character, and criticised its imperialism toward the Afrikaans-speaking Boers.

Ohm Krüger won the Mussolini Cup for best foreign film at the 1941 Venice Film Festival, at which the Italian Minister for Popular Culture, Alessandro Pavolini, praised particularly the film's propaganda value and the role of Emil Jannings. Within Germany, the film was the first to be given the honorary distinction 'Film of the Nation' (Film der Nation) by the Reich Propaganda Ministry Censorship Office. Joseph Goebbels also presented Emil Jannings with the 'Ring of Honour of the German Cinema'.

Only one in ten of the produced Nazi films were straight Propaganda, most of them were historical films celebrating an historic past and a glorious future. Tobis also produced a lot light entertainment, such as the musicals by Paul Verhoeven like Renate im Quartett/Renate in the Quartet (Paul Verhoeven, 1939) starring Käthe von Nagy, and the comedies by Kurt Hoffmann such as Kohlhiesels Töchter/Kohlhiesel's Daughters (Kurt Hoffmann, 1942) with Heli Finkenzeller.


Frits van Dongen. German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. A 1290, 1937-1938. Photo: Tobis / Eichberg-Film. Publicity still for Der Tiger von Eschnapur/The Tiger of Eschnapur (Richard Eichberg, 1938).


Hans Albers. German Postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A 2879/1, 1939-1940. Photo: Brix / Tobis. Publicity still for Trenck, der Pandur/Trenck the Pandur (Herbert Selpin, 1940).


Hans Albers. German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A 2879/2, 1939-1940. Photo: Brix / Tobis. Publicity still for Trenck, der Pandur/Major Trenck (Herbert Selpin, 1940).


Emil Jannings. German postcard by Das Programm von Heute, Zeitschrift für Film und Theater G.m.b.H., Berlin. Licensed by Ross Verlag, Berlin. Photo: Tobis / Wesel. Publicity still for Ohm Krüger (Hans Steinhoff, 1941).


Otto Gebühr. German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A 3265/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Tobis. Publicity still for Der grosse König/The Great King (Veit Harlan, 1942), one of the Frederick the Great films.


Otto Gebühr. German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A 3326/1, 1931-1944. Photo: Tobis. Publicity still for Der große König/The Great King (Veit Harlan, 1942).

The Titanic of the Nazis

Joseph Goebbels loathed the Expressionist films of the 1920s, but loved comedies and musicals. He stimulated a film star culture by granting approved film stars a special status in the Nazi party and high salaries. Some stars chose leave to Hollywood, but others like Emil Jannings, Olga Tschechova, Hans Albers, Heinrich George, and Otto Gebühr, embraced their elite status.

Actors who also often worked for the Tobis were Fita Benkhoff, Gustav Fröhlich, Käthe Haack, Heidemarie Hatheyer, Paul Henckels, Lucie Höflich, La Jana, Sybille Schmitz, Eduard von Winterstein and the child actor Norbert Rohringer.

In 1942 Ufa, Tobis, Bavaria and Terra were merged into a single state-controlled industry bringing an end to Tobis' independent existence. Nonetheless, films continued to be released under the Tobis banner. A famous example is Titanic (Herbert Selpin, 1943) starring Sybille Schmitz, depicting the catastrophic sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912.

Titanic was commissioned by Joseph Goebbels with the intent of showing not only the superiority of German filmmaking, but also as a propaganda vehicle which would show that British and American capitalism was responsible for the disaster. The addition of an entirely fictional heroic German officer to the ship's crew was intended to demonstrate the superior bravery and selflessness of German men as compared to the British officers.

The original director of Titanic, Herbert Selpin, was arrested during production after speaking out against the Nazi regime. He was later found hanged in prison. The film was completed by Werner Klingler, who was not credited. Although the film had a brief theatrical run in parts of German-occupied Europe starting in November 1943, it was not shown within Germany by order of Goebbels, who feared that it would weaken the German citizenry's morale instead of improving it. Goebbels later banned the playing of the film entirely, and it did not have a second run.

In 1945, due to increasing difficulties of film production during the later stages of the Second World War, few films released in Nazi Germany. One of them was the Tobis production Solistin Anna Alt/Soloist Anna Alt (Werner Klingler, 1945), a drama starring Anneliese Uhlig as a gifted pianist gives up her career to support her composer husband (Will Quadflieg).

After the war, Tobis became a part of the Ufa, but was dissolved in 1962 along with its parent company. With the fall of the Ufa, the story of Tobis seemed completed. However, producer Horst Wendlandt, who had worked as a cashier for Tobis Film, founded in 1971 a new distribution company which is also known as Tobis. In 2016, the present-day Tobis became an investor in Globalgate Entertainment.


Sibylle Schmitz. German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. G 147, 1941-1944. Photo: Star-Foto Atelier / Tobis.


Will Quadflieg. German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3202/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Foto Binz / Tobis.


Lizzi Waldmüller. German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A 3418/2, 1941-1944. Photo: Haenchen / Tobis.


Lil Dagover. German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3427/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Star-Foto-Atelier / Tobis.


Paul Hubschmid. German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3442/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Star-Foto-Atelier / Tobis.


Irene von Meyendorff. German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3449/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Tobis / Star-Foto-Atelier.


Ferdinand Marian. German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3526/2, 1941-1944. Photo: Wesel / Tobis.


Margit Symo. German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3583/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Tobis.


Elfie Mayerhofer. German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3748/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Star-Foto-Atelier / Tobis.

Sources: Robert J. and Carol C. Reimer (The A to Z of German Cinema), Klaus Kreimeier (The Ufa Story), David Welch (Propaganda and the German Cinema (1933-1945), Douglas Gomery and Clara Pafort-Overduin (Movie History: A Survey: Second Edition), Wikipedia (German and English) and IMDb.

Hilde Maroff

Hildegard Maroff (1904-1984) was a German character actress, who started her film career in the silent cinema. She later managed the career of her son, Peter Bosse, who was a popular child star during the late 1930s. After the war, she was active in children's theatre.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 1717/1, 1927-1928. Photo: Frank.

The awakening of the wife

Hildegard Maroff was born in 1904 in Berlin, Germany.

At the age of 15, she already played a small page role on stage and then she took acting lessons from Meinhardt Bernauer. After a subsequent dance training, the Komödienhaus (the Comedy House) and the Berliner Theater (Berlin Theater) became her first stage stations.

From 1922 on, she also appeared in films. Her first major film role, she received in Kubinke, der Barbier, und die drei Dienstmädchen/Kubinke, the barber, and the three maids (Carl Boese, 1926). She, Erika Glässner and Käthe Haack were the three maids and the barber Kubinke was played by Werner Fuetterer.

Other silent films were Das Erwachen des Weibes/The awakening of the wife (Fred Sauer, 1927), Schwester Veronica/Sister Veronica (Gerhard Lamprecht, 1927) featuring Aud Egede Nissen, and Die drei Frauen von Urban Hell/The Three Women of Urban Hell (Jaap Speyer, 1928). Maroff also appeared in cabarets.


Austrian postcard by Iris-Verlag, no. 831. Photo: National / Verleih Mondial A.G., Wien.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 3762/1, 1928-1929. Photo: Alex Binder.

Paradise Road

In 1929 Hilde Maroff married Dr. Kurt Bosse and she interrupted temporarily her career. They had three children, Ilse (1929), Peter (1931) and Barbara (1935).

At the age of four, Peter Bosse already became a child star and Hilde Maroff managed his career. She then began to accept smaller roles and played three times at the side of her son. An example was Das Gäßchen zum Paradies/Paradise Road (Martin Fric, 1936) with Hans Moser.

During the war, her husband was killed. After the war, she had to take care for their children alone. She worked as a director at the Berlin Märchenbühne and headed the children's drama studio. She also played small roles at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm and the Schillertheater.

Her daughter Barbara worked as a dancer with Mary Wigman, the noted German dancer and choreographer, who was the pioneer of expressionist dance, dance therapy, and movement training without pointe shoes.

After a long illness, Hilde Maroff died in 1984 in her homeplace Berlin. She was 80.


Peter Bosse. German Postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A1276/1. 1937-1938. Photo: Manassée-Ricoll, Wien / Mondial.


Peter Bosse. Big German card by Ross Verlag. Photo: Joerger.

Sources: Wikipedia (German) and IMDb.

Mady Rahl

German actress Mady Rahl (1915-2009) was one of the last of the female Ufa Stars. She was discovered by director Detlev Sierck, later better known as Douglas Sirk. She had a legion of male admirers during the Second World War. The platinum blonde actress had perfect comic timing, vampish good looks and a sultry, smoky voice. On TV, she was the German voice of Lucille Ball. Mady Rahl appeared in more than 120 films and television shows in a career spanning some 70 years.


German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. G 212, 1941-1944. Photo: Foto Baumann / Ufa.


German postcard by Ross-Verlag, no. A 2702/1, 1939-1940. Photo: Haenchen / Tobis.


German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 2552/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Terra.

Darling of the German public

Mady Rahl was born Edith Gertrud Meta Raschke in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1915. During her schooltime, she came in contact with the theatre and took acting lessons from the famous actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge. She also had lessons in singing and dancing. In 1934, she made her film debut in a short comedy Zwei Genies / Two Geniuses (1934) by Detlev Sierck, a young, struggling director who would later become the famous Hollywood director Douglas Sirk.

In 1935, Rahl made her stage debut in Sierck's 'Wandlung' (The Change) at the Old Lyceum Theatre in Leipzig, with Rudolf Klein-Rogge. As his own career began to take off, Detlev Sierck introduced Mady Rahl to the bosses of the Ufa studios in Babelsberg, Berlin. A four-year contract quickly followed. First, she played a small role in Der geheimnisvolle Mister X / The Mysterious Mister X (J.A. Hübler-Kahla, 1936), starring Ralph Arthur Roberts and Hermann Thimig.

Then she got bigger parts in the Pat & Patachon comedy Blinde Passagiere / Stowaways (Fred Sauer, 1936), and in Das Gäßchen zum Paradies / Paradise Road (Martin Fric, 1936) with Hans Moser and little Peter Bosse. Mady Rahl became known to the general public with her role at the side of the legendary La Jana in the circus drama Truxa (Hans H. Zerlett, 1937).

Till the end of the war followed 30 more roles in films like the melodrama Zu neuen Ufern / To New Shores (Detlev Sierck, 1937) starring Zarah Leander, and the musical Hallo Janine! / Hello Janine! (Carl Boese, 1939), with Marika Rökk and Johannes Heesters. Under the Third Reich, Mady Rahl's career continued to flourish. Propaganda minister Josef Goebbels was a fan of lightweight musical comedies, and one of his favourites was Die lustigen Vagabunden / The Jolly Vagabonds (Jürgen von Alten, 1940), in which Mady Rahl played Gisela Merz. It was rumoured that they had an affair, but the actress always denied it.

Other popular films from this period were Meine Frau Teresa / My Wife Teresa (Arthur Maria Rabenalt, 1942), Tonelli (Victor Tourjansky, 1943) with Ferdinand Marian and Winnie Markus, and Die tolle Susanne / The Great Susanne (Géza von Bolváry, 1945). These films made her a darling of the German public.


German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3944/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Foto Baumann / Ufa.


German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. 3747/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Foto Baumann / Ufa.

Harrowing Drama, Horror and SM

After the war, Mady Rahl continued her career in Schuss um Mitternacht / A Shot at Midnight (Hans H. Zerlett, 1949), Die Dame in Schwarz / The Lady in Black (Erich Engels, 1951) with Paul Hartmann, Ober zahlen / Waiter, the Bill (E.W. Emo, 1957) with Hans Moser and Paul Hörbiger, and the authentic war drama Haie und kleine Fische / Sharks and Little Fish (Frank Wisbar, 1957).

To her other well-known films belong Der Page vom Palast-Hotel (Thomas Engel, 1958), the Heinz Erhardt comedy Immer die Radfahrer / Always the Bikers (Hans Deppe, 1958), and the crime film Der Greifer / The Ripper (Eugen York, 1958) starring Hans Albers.

Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen / Darkness Fell on Gotenhafen (Frank Wisbar, 1959) was a harrowing drama about the first month of 1945 when the Russian Red Army broke into the eastern part of Germany and forced millions of civilians to flee. In later years, she also appeared frequently on stage and TV. She was the German voice for Lucille Ball in her shows.

During the sixties, Mady Rahl appeared in a lot of crime and Horror films like the Edgar Wallace crime film Der Fälscher von London / The Forger of London (Harald Reinl, 1961), Die weisse Spinne / The White Spider (Harald Reinl, 1963), the thriller Das Wirtshaus von Dartmoor / The Inn on Dartmoor (Rudolf Zehetgruber, 1964) and Der Hund von Blackwood Castle / The Horror of Blackwood Castle (Alfred Vohrer, 1968). She also appeared in the curious SM film Le Malizie di Venere / Venus in Furs (Massimo Dallamano, 1969) starring Laura Antonelli.

To her later films belong Karl May (Hans Jürgen Syberberg, 1974) with Helmut Käutner and Kristina Söderbaum, and Der Angriff / The Agression (Theodor Kotulla, 1986) with Pascale Petit. Mady Rahl was married three times, first to financier Theodor Reimers, then to film producer Wilhelm Sperber, and finally to architect Werner Bürkle. Mady Rahl died in 2009 in a retirement home in Munich, Germany. She was 84. Her grave is in the Nordfriedhof Cemetery in Munich,


German postcard by Ufa, no. FK 3542. Retail price: 25 Pfg. Photo: Czerwonski / HD-Film / NF.


Trailer Immer die Radfahrer / Always the Bikers (1958). Source: Trailer Tracker Classic (YouTube).

Sources: Telegraph, Thomas Staedeli (Cyranos), Stephanie D'Heil (Steffi-line), Wikipedia and IMDb.

This post was last updated on 28 May 2026.