There is a scene in The golden finger, the third James Bond film, where Bond lures Auric Goldfinger into a bet by betting a “lost” Nazi gold bar. It’s unclear if this is meant to imply that Goldfinger has a Nazi past. In any case, the German actor who played it did.
When the nation of Israel found out about this, they banned the film. Two months later, he lifted the ban after confirming that Fröbe had helped a Jewish woman and her son during World War II.
Before The golden finger, Gert Fröbe had mostly appeared in German films like the 1958 It happened in broad daylight, in which he played a murderous child. He landed the role of Goldfinger opposite Bond star Sean Connery, even though he doesn’t speak English. As a result, almost all of his lines in the film are voiced by English actor Michael Collins. Despite this, Fröbe and the film received critical acclaim when it premiered in the UK and US in 1964. It was also a commercial success and is still one of the highest grossing Bond films. , adjusted for inflation.
A troubled Nazi past
Gert Fröbe
Arthur Grimm / United Archives / Getty Images
The golden finger was initially popular in Israel too, when it made its debut there in the fall of 1965. Then in December, the London Daily mail published an article on Fröbe with the headline: “Of course I was a Nazi!” It is not known how the subject of his Nazi past was approached, but Reuters reports that a journalist asked Fröbe – who played Nazi General Dietrich von Choltitz in an upcoming film – whether Fröbe would have made the same decision as Choltitz to refuse Adolf Hitler’s order to burn Paris.
Whatever the reason, Fröbe told reporters that he joined the Nazi Party in 1929 at the age of 16 and then helped a Jewish woman during the war. Fröbe said he grew up in the depressed mining village of Zwickau in Saxony and became a Nazi because he believed Hitler could improve the economy, according to the German newspaper. Der Spiegel. Even then, the Nazi promise of economic prosperity that Fröbe found so appealing was anti-Semitic; Hitler blamed the Jewish Germans for the country’s economic problems and sought to uplift the “Aryans” at the expense of the Jewish people.
Showing films that might contain former Nazis was already a concern in Israel, which is why it banned many German-language films until 1967. When West German cinema resumed after the war, “all the filmmakers, all the directors, all the publishers, all the stars had played some role in the Third Reich, ”says Tobias Hochscherf, media professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Kiel, Germany. So even in the early 1960s, most German films “were made with stars or actors of the Third Reich”.
Brief Israeli ban on “Goldfinger”
Gert Fröbe and Sean Connery in “Goldfinger”, 1964.
LMPC / Getty Images
Israel responded to Fröbe’s admission by banning The golden finger and all of his upcoming movies, including Is Paris Burning?, the film in which he would play Choltitz. In addition, the Justice Ministry said that if Fröbe visited Israel, he could prosecute him as a former member of the Nazi Party, the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported.
But Israel lifted the ban only two months later, in February 1966. The Israeli Film Censorship Board made the decision after receiving evidence that Fröbe quit the Nazi Party in 1937, two years before Hitler quit ‘invites Poland, triggering World War II. It was also reported that his conscription as a Nazi soldier later in the war was “a punishment for helping to distribute anti-Nazi brochures,” according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency.
Another factor was that Fröbe’s claim about helping a Jewish woman during the war seemed true. After Israel banned Fröbe’s films, a Jewish man named Mario Blumenau told the Israeli Embassy in Vienna that Fröbe helped Blumenau and his mother obtain a version of food stamps during the war. “I think he was a decent person, but not a hero,” Hochscherf says of Fröbe’s actions.
More, The New York Times reported that several film producers have appealed to Israel to lift the ban. Many Israelis wanted to see The golden finger, then an internationally popular feature film, and Hochscherf notes that audience demand may have also contributed to the decision to bring the film back to Israel.
James Bond controversies
Fröbe’s Nazi past is not the only controversial aspect of The golden finger. Before its US premiere, an American censor threatened to ban the film because of a dispute over “Pussy Galore”, the name of Honor Blackman’s character.
In the decades since the film’s release, Bond’s behavior has also come under criticism, particularly his treatment of women and the sexual assaults on Galore. Despite all the controversy, The golden finger remains one of the most famous films in the Bond franchise. After all, it contains one of the most recognized quotes in movie history – spoken by Goldfinger, spoken by Frobe and voiced by Collins: “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”
