At the end of the civil war, Antonio dell’Amo He was practically in front of the firing squad due to his communist militancy and his shooting work for the Lister Brigade. Thanks to the intercession of Rafael Gil, his sentence was commuted to a few years in prison. While, Manuel Mur Ortiwhich started with the publication of articles in the socialist, the war ended with exile in France and internment in a concentration camp. Back in Spain, he spends a few months in the shadows in Franco’s prisons.
So far nothing that doesn’t fit the mold of those sludges of 36. The curious thing about the case is not that both were reintegrated into the social and working life of Franco’s Spain, like so many other artists or intellectuals of the so-called ‘internal exile’, but who started their long career in film sheltered a production company within a corporate structure led by a top-notch Nazi, Johannes Bernhardt. Two communists under the umbrella of an honorary general of the SS who took refuge between Madrid and Denia and with great influence on Francisco Franco. A pure cinematic approach.
the manufacturer, Sagittarius movie, which also included aristocrats disliked by the Falange such as Edgar Neville, passed briefly between the 40s and 50s with a bunch of films that over time took their revenge. Nobody asked and nobody wanted to know. They just wanted to make films under the only possible conditions.
«Several historians had already noted the uniqueness of this production company, both for the personality of its creator, Johannes Bernhardt, and for the anomalous nature of the filmmakers who worked for him. My interest in continuing to delve into the filmography of Edgar Neville, Luis Escobar or Antonio del Amo, e the possibility for Bernhardt’s companies to appear in reports published by the CIA on war crimes of the Nazis, were the spark that lit the fuse», he explains to L’OBIETTIVO Santiago Aguilarauthor of Sagittarius movie. Nazi gold for Spanish cinema (Shangrila Editions). His work was recently awarded the Film Academy’s Muñoz Suay for research work on Spanish filmography.
For years, light has been shed on the presence of the Nazis in post-war Spain. José Manuel Portero did research for the book Nazis on the Costa del Sol (Almuzara) to a large group of refugees around Malaga: ‘Doctor Death’ Aribert Heim, Otto Remer, the SS general who saved Hitler, Alfred Giese Hausmann, Leon Degrelle, etc… On the Costa Blanca, an eminent Bernhardt, which , in addition to Denia, came to have properties in the best areas of Madrid and a large estate in Salamanca. The enormous influence of this financier, honorary general of the SS, has been discovered over time, but his adventure is more unknown in Spanish cinema, conceived with the clear intention of laundering money from a corporate network exposed to dismantling by the victorious allies in the world war.
The pandemic has caught Aguilar on the trail of this important Nazi: “Fortunately, there are more and more archives and newspaper libraries online, which have allowed me to access a multitude of documents without which it would have been impossible to tackle the job”. In addition, he has studied the bibliography on the complex economic and political relations between Spain and Germany between 1936 and “1945 and the subsequent tug of war with the allies to recover the funds and assets that the Nazis had in Spain”. Documents from the CIA, censorship files and files from the Cineteca were used by the author to reconstruct the adventure of Sagitario Films.
Bernhardt’s relationship with Spain dates back to the 1930s, when he began export business to Spanish Morocco. With the onset of war, his intermediation between Franco and Hitler was essential to the logistics of Nazi support for military rebels.. Those favors, along with tungsten deals and all sorts of industrial ventures, plant the seeds of their immunity in Spain once the Nazis lose WWII. The Americans decide to use Bernhardt, while respecting the asylum that Franco has granted him, to the point of nationalizing him as a Spaniard. This tough character survived the German catastrophe and disguised his power and money through numerous companies and figureheads.
One of them would be Sagitario Films, technically led by Santiago Peláez. Mur Orti admitted that he knew Bernhardt was behind it. Anywaythe production company launched a handful of extravagant and some deserving films into Spain’s 1940s filmography. As Asier Aranzubia, of the Carlos III University of Madrid explains in the prologue to Aguilar’s book, although “Sagitario Films is the vehicle through which it seeks to ‘launder’ and ‘unlock’ the fortune of what was once the most influential citizen in Spain during the Second World War.The curious thing about the case is that, under this nefarious entrepreneurial umbrella, some films of indisputable interest are shot, in which it is even possible to identify a sort of trademark, a sort of ‘stamp of the Sagittarius’ which becomes visible through the predilection for certain themes and atmospheres, and which relates the production of Sagittarius to one of the most interesting underground currents of post-war Spanish cinema: that vein that José Luis Castro de Paz has defined as ‘obsessive-delusional ‘» .
Aguilar points out to this newspaper that what stands out in the cinema of Sagitario Films, whose emblem is a centaur, is “the ideological heterogeneity of directors, musicians, screenwriters and performers who have passed through the production house and comprising the most restless creators of a stage which, after scratching the surface, is far more diverse and challenging than is usually claimed.The other surprise was to find a vein of German romanticism and fantastic in the manner of ETA Hoffmann, common to many of his productions and some of the projects that did not make it to the screen; among them, one written by Josef Hans Lazar himself, the fearsome press attaché of the German embassy in Madrid during the Second World War.
Sagittarius covers, among others, movies four women (1947) and The guest of darkness (1948) from D’amore, Mister Steve (1948) by Neville and the brilliant debut by Manuel Mur Orti, A man goes down the street (1949).
In the year 51, Bernhardt, like so many other Nazis, decided to break up his business in Spain and head for Argentina.. He retired to the La Elena farm, in Tandil, with, among other things, a Greco that Franco allegedly gave him. Sagitario Films considers his journey over, even if the careers of the creators who have centered around the production company will continue to bear fruit from that moment on. Finally, the Nazi who wrote an extravagant page in post-war Spanish cinema died in 1980 in Munich. In Spain, an obituary ABC ago the times of end.
