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A wartime film intended to bolster civilian morale and encourage them to do their bit for the German war effort. Zarah Leander plays a singer who falls in love with a fighter pilot. The necessities of war make their romance difficult and the finale takes place when she has to go on stage to perform, shortly after receiving a telegram to say that her boyfriend has been killed.
It has been suggested -- see below -- that the chorus, when she is on stage, is actually composed of (male) soldiers. For a musical-theatre-based film, there is very little running time showing the actual stage performance -- no doubt caused by shortages due to the war itself -- yet the impression intended to be conveyed to the audience was of a big-budget all-singing all-dancing Germany's-answer-to-Hollywood film. There is a large tableau chorus in a sequence near the beginning of the film, where all the chorus performers are dressed as men -- although I think there are a few females immediately to the left of the central flame emblem.
However right at the end of the film, there is a different tableau; at first it is indistinct, and then we see that it must be a chorus, and then they raise their heads and we can see that they represent flowers opening their petals on a warm day. It is actually quite well done, although the physical film portrayal loses so much detail that it is difficult to appreciate it.
Given the shortages of war, I suppose it is just about possible that soldiers were drafted in for a day or two to form the first male chorus, and therefore (while they were at the studios) to form the second chorus representing flowers -- they are just wearing white robes. The reported article is reproduced below -- I have not been able to trace the original newspaper report. I leave it to you to judge whether this story stacks up, and if it does whether it is really "Nazis in drag".
This is part of an article about the matter:
A German television documentary has uncovered one of the weirdest secrets of the Third Reich: the Nazi leader's SS bodyguards dressed up as showgirls to take part in a song-and-dance extravaganza featuring one of the Führer's favourite film stars. The pyramid of angels wrapped in feather boas in the 1942 film Die grosse Liebe (The Great Love) was made up of members of the elite Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.
Wilhelm Schneider, a Leibstandarte veteran, told the ZDF television channel that before the war sections of the unit were sent to the Babelsberg film studios near Potsdam and the UFA film production company to appear as extras. Their appeal to German film-makers was that they were hand-picked to be about the same height. It was this that eventually landed them in drag. The star of Die grosse Liebe, a propaganda film about women waiting for their heroic loved ones to return from battle, was the Swedish dancer turned singer Zarah Leander.
Leander, who came to Germany in 1937, became one of the leading show business personalities of the Nazi era. With her smoky voice and exaggeratedly rolled "Rs", Leander -- who died in 1981, aged 74 -- had a blatantly erotic image that was reflected in the suggestive titles of her songs, such as "Can Love Be A Sin?" Some historians have argued that Hitler and his cultural arbiters saw in her a replacement for the self-exiled Marlene Dietrich. But the woman who has been called the Diva of the Third Reich was very much a beauty in the Wagnerian mould. Her co-star, Wolfgang Preiss, who lives in retirement in Baden-Baden, said: "The problem for this scene was to find women who were just as pretty, just as tall, and if possible, just as statuesque as Zarah Leander. But they were not to be found." So, notwithstanding their questionable prettiness, the director called in Hitler's bodyguards. Preiss, who played the part of an officer, recalled an encounter with the "showgirls of the SS". "The Leibstandarte were changing, and I came along dressed as an Oberleutnant, and the sergeant-major saw me. 'Here comes...Achtung!' he shrieked. They all snapped to attention, some in women's clothes, some with their wigs askew or half made-up, others in their underpants. It was a grotesque sight.
HF February 2008
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