When the Nazis Seized Power, This Jewish Actor Took on the Role of His Life

On an evening in May 1934, a crowd filed into an auditorium in the port city of Szczecin, now in northwestern Poland. The city was then known as Stettin, and it was the capital of the state of Pomerania in Nazi Germany. The audience hunted for their seats beneath the chandelier. The houselights of the Stadttheater dimmed and the curtains opened to Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.

The title role of Hedda, Ibsen’s tragic antiheroine, was played by Agnes Straub, the celebrated leader of the touring ensemble that bore her name. Throughout the first act, the auditorium was hushed. But when the actor playing Judge Brack, the play’s lustful old bachelor, emerged from the wings with his walking stick, eyeglass and thick mustache, the house erupted in jeers and boos.

The actor playing Brack was Leo Reuss, the cast’s sole Jewish member, a handsome man with a sculpted jaw and dark eyes. Like Straub, Reuss was a familiar presence on the German stage. They were both regulars in the cabarets and leftist theaters of Weimar-era Berlin, and they had been romantically entwined since the 1920s. Now they were on the road with Straub’s company, captivating critics and packing out provincial theaters.

But Germany was darkening rapidly. Hitler had seized power a year earlier, and culture was central to his mission. Without Nazi-approved art, Hitler argued in the foreword to the program for the Stettin theater’s 1933-4 season, Germans would lose “the better part of their blood. Their downfall will only be a matter of time.” The Stormtroopers, or Sturmabteilung, probably organized the antisemitic hecklers that evening. Interrupting Jewish performers had been a tactic of theirs since the 1920s, and two months earlier, the Stormtroopers’ cultural office had issued a diktat to its members warning them about certain theaters. The list had also specified certain performers, including “the Jew Leo Reuss.”

The cast staggered through the heckles to complete the four acts of Ibsen’s tragedy. But in the days afterward, Straub received messages from the next theaters on the tour: “Is Leo Reuss Aryan?” the director of a theater in Zoppot, today’s Sopot in Poland, wrote in a telegram before a forthcoming show, “If not, we will request another actor.” From then on, Reuss agreed to work backstage.

In September 1935, the Nazi government passed the Nuremberg Race Laws, a set of legal decrees that outlawed sex or marriage between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans, forbade Jewish households to employ non-Jewish women under 45, and declared that only Germans of “Aryan” blood could be Third Reich citizens. Reuss and Straub’s relationship had become illegal. He soon left Germany for Vienna.

Less than three years later, in March 1938, Germany annexed Austria, and the situation for Jews there became dire. When Reuss arrived, however, in late 1935, Vienna still had a vibrant Jewish community free from the racist Nuremberg Laws. Ten percent of the city’s residents were Jewish, and they were especially prominent in the arts.

The problem for Reuss was that Austria’s ruling nationalist party didn’t consider him Austrian. Although he’d grown up in Vienna, his birthplace was Galicia—a region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was absorbed into Poland after World War I. Austria now deemed Reuss stateless, which meant he had no right to work in Vienna. So Reuss decided to hide in plain sight.

Aware that his years on the stage would make him easy to recognize, he used all his training to transform himself, from the color of his hair to his dialect, and he continued auditioning for roles. By becoming the sort of person antisemites tended to idealize, he would force his audience to confront the absurdity of the racial ideology that was on the verge of destroying Europe.

Reuss was born on March 30, 1891, to Ernestine and Samuel, a veterinarian, in the small town of Dolina in Galicia, today in western Ukraine. His original name was Mauriz Leon Reiss—which he would later change to Reuss, a less identifiably Jewish name. When Reuss was a small child, his family moved from Dolina to Vienna along with hundreds of thousands of other immigrants from the empire’s distant outposts, all landing in the imperial metropolis as the 19th century came to a close.

a young main a suit — A portrait of the artist as a young, openly Jewish man. Austrian National Library

A bearded man in a tuxedo talks at podium — Reuss after his transformation into the Alpine farmer. To complete the ruse, Reuss dyed every hair on his body blond and made sure his director saw him in a state of undress. Austrian National Library

The teenage Reuss became the leader of an empire-wide socialist youth organization and was kicked out of school for attempting to recruit the son of a powerful conservative functionary. After seeing Josef Kainz, one of Vienna’s most successful stars, onstage at the Burgtheater, Reuss felt compelled to become an actor. His father offered him money to go to medical school, but Reuss used that money to enroll in the University of Music and Performing Arts. When his father found out, he turned Reuss out of the house. The boy moved into a hut at a community garden and survived on stolen vegetables.

After graduating from theater school, Reuss was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army and sent to fight in the First World War. In the Battle of Galicia, he took Russian rifle fire and won a medal for bravery. During a brief period of leave, he married Stefanie Magdziarz, the daughter of a Viennese tobacconist he’d known since his school days.

In 1918, Reuss returned to Vienna to find his world ruined. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy was no more. The city was beset by food and fuel shortages. Many theaters had closed. Reuss already had a young daughter, Margarethe, and in 1920, Stefanie gave birth to a son, Hans. He tried to support the family as an actor, working under the renowned director Emil Geyer. But the job didn’t last long. Reuss fell in love with Geyer’s wife, the German actress Ellen Neustädter. Leaving Stefanie and the children in Vienna, Reuss stole away with Neustädter, first to Hamburg, and then to Berlin, where Reuss quickly built a name for himself in the city’s expressionist theater scene. His acting style was highly physical. He aimed to portray his characters by exaggerating their features, like a caricaturist.

By the mid-1920s, he was working with the socialist playwright and director Bertolt Brecht, and was praised by Joseph Roth (an author who would later write The Radetzky March, a classic novel about the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) for being the only cast member who was not screaming. His total devotion to his art worried some onlookers. “His face is pale because he cannot sleep,” wrote the author of a profile of Reuss in a publication produced by the Volksbühne, a prominent theater in Berlin. “His voice is hoarse from so much talking.”

He met Straub in rehearsals for a production of The Merchant of Venice. The two began an affair—to the horror of Neustädter, who took her own life.

After Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933, Jewish performers quickly lost work, and Reuss was running out of money. He continued to exchange letters with the children he’d abandoned, and in the summer, he wrote to his daughter, Margarethe, who was now 16. He begged her to send proof he’d been recognized for his service in the First World War. It worked. Reuss was granted a special performance permit. He continued to work until his performance in Stettin was disrupted by antisemitic thugs two years later.

By winter 1935, Reuss was on the verge of giving up on life completely. His brother tried calming him with brandy. “I had a nervous breakdown after a few horrible days,” Reuss wrote in a desperate letter to his friend Karl Kraus, the Viennese satirical writer, in April 1936. Reuss had starred in Kraus’ thrilling experimental play The Last Days of Mankind a few years earlier in Berlin—but now nobody would hire him. In spring, he left Vienna for the mountains.

Three performers in costume — Reuss (right) plays Napoleon in his final European performance in 1937. Austrian National Library

Cover image of the Smithsonian Magazine November 2024 issue

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $19.99

This article is a selection from the November 2024 issue of Smithsonian magazine

Reuss moved into a large wooden Alpine house, perched above a valley and surrounded by jutting peaks. Straub had bought the house in 1931, and done the decorating, and there was a bust of her in the living room. “An altar to St. Agnesia,” he joked. The couple had enjoyed the house as a country retreat, a sanctuary for learning lines. Now Reuss was alone, and not on vacation.

As a last-gasp effort at professional survival, Reuss resolved to transform himself into an Alpine farmer. Over the spring and into the summer, Reuss grew a beard and perfected the local dialect. He bleached his body hair from head to toe.

In the evenings, Reuss liked to play tarot cards with Kaspar Altenberger, a local farmer Straub had paid to look after the house. Reuss disclosed his plan, and Altenberger offered to help. He lent Reuss his own identity papers—his passport and baptismal certificate. Reuss had a new official persona. Probably to protect Altenberger, though, Reuss agreed he would layer an extra stage name on top of his assumed identity. If the authorities demanded his papers, he’d give them the passport of Kaspar Altenberger. But to his audience, he would be known as Kaspar Brandhofer.

Later that summer, Reuss, with white hair and a full beard, made his way down to the valley. The last of the edelweiss flowers were blooming in the high meadows. His destination was the Salzburg Festival, a summer celebration of music and drama held in Mozart’s hometown. The festival had been founded by Max Reinhardt, perhaps the most important director in Germany and Austria at the time. Reuss had never worked with Reinhardt (who was also Jewish, and would flee to Hollywood in 1938). Disguised as Brandhofer, Reuss probably went to Salzburg to introduce himself to the great impresario.

It was harder than he’d expected. Thanks to a recent diplomatic agreement between Austria and Nazi Germany, which was ten minutes from the border by car, this year’s festival was the first in four years that could take place without fear of Nazi disruption. This meant the city was crowded with American tourists, decked out in traditional dirndls and lederhosen. The festival’s headline performance was Wagner’s comedic opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and the Great Festival Hall was packed. It was impossible to spot Reinhardt in the crowds, and Reuss retreated to his mountain house. He would have to find another way to smuggle Brandhofer to the top of the theater world.

performers acting out a scene — Reuss (pointing, right) in his younger years in 1925, performing in Berlin with his longtime romantic partner Agnes Straub and Friedrich Kayssler, seated. AKG Images

In August, Reuss wrote a letter to Reinhardt’s wife, Helene Thimig. “Dear Madam! I am a farmer in good circumstances, but this stale fact stifles my life force. I have known since I was a boy that I have to be an actor,” he wrote. “Now I ask: hear me for ten minutes, whether before a rehearsal, after a performance in the dressing room, to see if it’s worth bringing me in front of Professor Reinhardt.”

Thimig replied by inviting Reuss to audition for her husband in Leopoldskron, their lavish rococo palace on a lake in Salzburg. The next Saturday afternoon, Reuss, playing Brandhofer, strolled through the palace gardens where parts of The Sound of Music would later be filmed. He passed an outdoor theater, marble vases and baroque fountains, and stepped through the door. Reuss and Reinhardt spent five hours together. The supposed farmer performed monologues from William Tell, Macbeth and Goethe’s Faust. By 9 o’clock that evening, Reinhardt was seriously impressed—and apparently oblivious to the fact that the man before him was playing a role within a role.

Reuss left the palace with an effusive letter of recommendation. And then he did something more daring still.

Crossing the border into Nazi Germany with his false papers, Reuss traveled to Berlin, where he auditioned for Hamlet at the Deutsches Theater. His arrival interrupted a rehearsal, and the audition did not go well. The director, Heinz Hilpert, quickly recognized Reuss behind the beard and Austrian costume. “That wasn’t a farmer from Innsbruck,” one of the actors later recalled Hilpert telling a member of the cast. “That was a Jewish actor, Agnes Straub’s man. … The sweat was running off his forehead. I saw his fear of death.”

Reuss fled Berlin before the German authorities found him. Using Altenberger’s papers, he crossed back across the Alps into Austria, where he was less well known. He arrived in Vienna in the fall of 1936 and took a room in the Hotel Holler, an elegant building in the city’s museum district. He was still posing as a farmer, and the sight of a man apparently plucked out of an Alpine meadow attracted curious looks in the midst of all the traffic, the fancy silverware, the cosmopolitan crowds.

At the Josefstadt Theater, Reuss auditioned for Ernst Lothar, a director in his 40s with a rotund face and slicked-back hair. Not long before, Lothar had refused to audition Reuss as Reuss—but he was delighted to consider this unknown mountain farmer. Reuss told Lothar that while tending to his cow-belled herds upon the pastures, or felling wood, he would always carry a script in the pocket of his lederhosen. He enjoyed reciting monologues to the surrounding peaks.

Lothar later noted that Brandhofer had exaggerated gestures and facial expressions, “as is usually the case with amateurs.” Nonetheless, the director added, the novice “showed quite astonishing gifts.” Where Reuss was often self-aggrandizing, during the audition he played Brandhofer as self-deprecating, worrying aloud that he was 40 years old and perhaps it was too late to break into the theater.

“You definitely have to try it!” shouted a man from the auditorium. That voice belonged to Emil Geyer—the theater’s assistant director who had worked with Reuss 17 years earlier in Vienna. It was Geyer’s wife, Ellen Neustädter, who’d run away with Reuss in 1919 and then taken her own life in Berlin.

Geyer decided to keep quiet, for reasons he articulated in a letter to a friend. “Of course it is Reuss,” Geyer wrote. “And yet, it is not. It is a man attempting to knock over the hocus-pocus of discrimination. If he is discovered and punished I shall have a revenge I do not need. … [Reuss] is no longer a human being who has wronged me but a symbol of human beings who have been wronged.” Geyer was also Jewish, and would be arrested by the Gestapo in 1942, deported to Mauthausen concentration camp, and shot while trying to escape.

Lothar offered Reuss the job, and Reuss moved into a room rented from a concert pianist, all while continuing to embellish his role as Brandhofer. He carried a Nazi newspaper to rehearsals, and at mealtimes he struggled to use cutlery. He sharpened table knives on a whetstone attached to his watch chain. During rehearsal breaks, he socialized with the backstage staff. Hans Thimig, Max Reinhardt’s brother-in-law who also worked at the theater, later recalled overhearing one of these conversations and watching Reuss break down in tears. “I’m just so homesick, so awfully homesick, when I think of my calves,” Reuss told a porter. “It’s terrible.”

The play Reuss was rehearsing was based on Fräulein Else, a novella by the Austrian Jewish author Arthur Schnitzler, best known for writing the novel that became Stanley Kubrick’s erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut. The story centers on a 19-year-old girl alone on vacation at a mountain hotel who receives an urgent letter from her mother in Vienna. Her father is facing prison unless a large sum of money can be procured within three days. Reuss had been cast as Herr von Dorsday, an elderly antique dealer who agrees to write a check on one condition—he must see Else naked first. At the story’s climax, Else fakes madness in the hotel’s music room and undresses before a crowd of guests, among them von Dorsday. Just before the first performance, Lothar walked into the dressing room to wish Reuss good luck. The actor sat in front of his mirror, completely nude. It was important that the director notice that every single hair on his body was peroxide blond.

After the play opened at the Josefstadt Theater in early December, Brandhofer’s performance was the talk of the town. “Excellent, masterly, marvelous!” whispered the dramatist Richard Beer-Hofmann as he watched Reuss perform. The mountain man was profiled in the newspapers. Critics lauded his performance—one called him an actor with “a gripping, unusual intensity.”

But later that week, an actor who had once shared a dressing room with Reuss in Berlin was in the audience. Heinrich Schnitzler, the son of the man who’d written the novella, was also the play’s producer, and he recognized Reuss instantly. During the intermission, he rushed to Thimig’s office.

“Do you know who that is?” said Schnitzler.

“Well, a farmer,” said Thimig.

“It’s Reuss! The actor!” said Schnitzler. “I give you my word of honor, it’s him.” After the performance, Schnitzler went up to Reuss and confronted him.
Reuss didn’t deny it.

Thimig then confided to Lothar that the Alpine farmer was Reuss. In Lothar’s memoir, he wrote he would have been willing to keep the secret, but a group of actors insisted on informing the public. The theater published a notice in the press explaining that Kaspar Brandhofer was in fact the actor Leo
Reuss. The theater allowed him to continue in the role, and they changed his name in the playbill to Kaspar Brandhofer-Reuss. “I believe that if someone is completely focused on being other,” said Reuss, in an interview published in the Viennese daily Das Echo after his unmasking, “they will be seen as other.”

The revelation was a scandal, but Reuss had many supporters. “There can be no question of fraud in this case,” wrote Egon Friedell, a well-known Austrian intellectual. “The whole theater is a fraud. It’s just usually called something more polite: illusion. If, as in the present case, the illusion is extended to the actor’s private life, that only enriches the theater.” The right-wing press, though, which had sung the praises of Reuss’ performance a few days earlier, now saw confirmation of characteristic Jewish duplicity and demanded that the government charge Reuss with fraud.

On January 19, 1937, Reuss—still with his blond beard and wearing an elegant black suit—entered a Viennese courtroom to defend himself against charges of using false documents. It is unclear exactly how the authorities came to realize that Reuss had been using Altenberger’s identity; the publicity may have sparked an investigation. An audience packed with actors, directors, photographers and journalists looked on as Reuss’ lawyer presented the judge with an 11-page letter Reuss had sent him before opening night. The judge read it aloud: “If I die, naturally or voluntarily, or if someone discovers and makes public I am not who I now seem to be, I ask that you make the following lines known to the public, so that this beautiful world, which has become ugly, may learn how hideously it acts.” The judge read on as Reuss described his anguish at being denied his vocation. “I am the actor Leo Reuss, expelled from Germany because of his not-quite-right ancestors. I say ‘actor’ because I am an actor with my heart and soul, with blood and every bodily sense, and my life loses its meaning for me if I am not allowed to be one.”

A man stands before a judge — Reuss, left, stands before a judge (and a crucifix) in January 1937. “Hardly any other theater affair has caused as much of a stir in recent times,” a local newspaper report declared. Theatre Museum, Vienna

The judge, however, was unmoved, and Reuss received 48 hours of jail time and two years of probation, along with a fine of 100 shillings. “Do you accept the verdict?” asked the judge. “I accept,” Reuss said, in a bold response the court reporter compared to a gunshot.

After the trial, Reuss worked for a few months under his real name in small Yiddish theaters. The Viennese cultural elite that had so warmly welcomed Kaspar the farmer cast out Leo the Jew.

But one especially influential person had taken note of his multilayered performance at the Josefstadt Theater. Louis Mayer, another Jewish man born in Eastern Europe, had already made a name for himself as the founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios in Hollywood. While Reuss was busy trying to prove himself on European stages, his Jewish peers had crossed the ocean and founded the studios that launched the American movie industry.

In the summer of 1937, Reuss signed a contract with MGM Studios. In September, after one last performance in Vienna (playing Napoleon at the Theater an der Wien), he immigrated to Los Angeles with his two adult children, who took on the names Margaret and John. Reuss restyled himself yet again, taking the name Lionel Royce.

a scene from a black and white film — In his new life as Lionel Royce, the Austrian-accented actor was regularly cast as a Nazi. Above right, he played a German officer in the 1942 spy thriller *Unseen Enemy.* Everett Collection

In 1939, Royce starred in the first anti-German propaganda film made by a major studio: Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Royce played one of the Nazis. From then on, the heavily accented immigrant was cast in many German roles. Over the course of more than 40 films, he played a Nazi colonel, a German naval commander, a concentration camp guard and a Stormtrooper.

In 1941, Agnes Straub died in Berlin after she was severely injured in a car accident. Stefanie, Royce’s first wife and the mother of his children who’d stayed behind in Europe, was murdered at Auschwitz in 1943.

Royce died of a heart attack on April 1, 1946, at age 55, while entertaining U.S. troops stationed in the Philippines. His final film appearance was as an uncredited German alongside Rita Hayworth in Gilda. There were numerous obituaries. One, in a paper in Northern California, appeared under the headline “Nazi Portrayer Dies in Manila.” Nowhere did the article mention that the actor had been Jewish.