Helmut Schreiber alias Kalanag-Hitler’s Magician

The photo above was taken during an early performance by the Great Kalanag, a German Magician. It just so happened that one Austrian in particular was particularly impressed by the magic of the Swabian native: Adolf Hitler.

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The black and white photo was taken on July 27, 1939. Four weeks later, the Wehrmacht was to invade Poland , and another terrible war was imminent. And Hitler? Opened the German Art Exhibition in Munich, where Schreiber did magic for him. The self-made magician had arrived where he always wanted to be: in the Olympus of the Nazi elite.

Helmut Schreiber alias Kalanag shone in front of all party grandees, in front of Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring , Albert Speer and Heinrich Himmler , Martin Bormann and Wilhelm Keitel. He also appeared regularly at Hitler’s residence on Obersalzberg , where he conjured 150 Reichsmarks into Hitler’s jacket and made Eva Braun’s diamond-studded platinum wristwatch disappear – and then brought it out again.

However, Schreiber achieved his greatest feat after 1945: the magician made his own Nazi past become invisible. Simsalabim – and the Nazi careerist was gone! After the Second World War , Schreiber cleverly, cold-bloodedly and boldly managed to avoid his own involvement in the terrorist system.

Schreiber was the first German entertainer to receive permission to perform abroad in 1949 – and became one of the world’s most popular magicians in the 1950s. The historian and journalist Malte Herwig has reconstructed how he managed this in the now published, highly exciting biography “The Great Kalanag”.

An elephant called “black snake”

Herwig came across Kalanag a few years ago while visiting the Hamburg magic theater called Magiculum. At the bar there was a portrait of a portly gentleman with horn-rimmed glasses. “I guessed Heinz Erhardt and was proven wrong,” says Herwig in the SPIEGEL interview: This was the great Kalanag, they said in awe.

A man who in many ways embodied the average German: “As long as the sun of the ‘Third Reich’ shone, Schreiber tanned himself in the splendor of the Nazi cultural bureaucracy. From 1945 onwards he was as white as innocence,” says Herwig. »A typical German biography, just more sophisticated than average.

Born in 1903 in Backnang, Swabia, the merchant’s son Helmut was actually supposed to become a dentist according to his parents’ wishes. But the boy had been passionate about magic ever since an uncle gave the eight-year-old the “Golden Book of Magic.” The father took the book from Helmut and burned the magic box that the child had bought with his pocket money.

But Helmut got hold of a new copy of the “Golden Magic”, continued practicing, and in 1916, as a teenager, entertained the wounded of the First World War in the Stuttgart reserve hospital. A staff doctor gave him the stage name Kala Nag (“black snake”) – that’s the name of the elephant in Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle Book”.

Speeding ticket for improperly parked horse

The talented autodidact went to Munich, enrolled pro forma at the university and started working in film as a translator, script writer and producer. Schreiber presented his magic skills after work in Schwabing – a police officer gave him a ticket because the extroverted bon vivant had parked his dapple gray Isabella incorrectly.

From 1925 in Berlin, Schreiber made a career at Tobis Filmgesellschaft from 1935 onwards, later making it to the position of production manager at Bavaria in Munich. According to his own statement, the all-rounder produced around 180 films by 1945 – including “Robert and Bertram” (1939), a staunchly anti-Semitic musical in which contempt for humanity is combined in the most perfidious way with supposedly harmless entertainment tropes .

Parallel to his rise in the film business, Schreiber did everything he could to gain access to the inner circle of the Nazi elite as a magician. Author Herwig shows how planned he went about it. Schreiber first won over Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and charmed the birthday party of his wife Magda in 1935 . In a second step, he became friends with Hitler’s adjutant Julius Schaub.

Abracadabra in Hitler’s Berghof

He asked Schaub in a letter in 1938 whether it would be possible for Schreiber to “contribute something to the evening entertainment in Obersalzberg.” “Perhaps you can encourage it.” Schaub could: Schreiber was a welcome guest at the Berghof; Schreiber spent a weekend with Hitler in the summer of 1939.

The magician was invited to the wedding of the “Fuhrer’s” brother-in-law; In April 1944, according to a secret dossier from the Soviet security service NKVD, the Schreiber couple spent almost two weeks at Obersalzberg. According to the report, Eva Braun summoned the magician. Almost every evening, after Hitler’s briefing with his generals, Schreiber appeared before the Führer in the large hall of the Berghof.

While the Battle of Crimea raged in the east and German planes bombed London in the west, Hitler marveled at Schreiber’s magic – according to the NKVD report, the Führer even joked how nice it would be if Schreiber could also magic away the Russian armies.

But even the strength of the great Kalanag wasn’t enough. To do this, at Christmas 1938 in Carinhall, Göring’s gigantic estate in the Schorfheide, he conjured up a bird and a cage on the stage and made Emmy Göring’s scarf disappear. As president of the Magic Circle, Schreiber also ensured that Jews were thrown out of the committee.

“Goering among the magicians”: That’s what the Jewish doctor and amateur magician Hans Katzenstein called him – he had to flee to the USA from the Nazis. However, Schreiber sent magicians he liked to the front in his role as leader of the Aryanized German magicians’ guild to entertain the soldiers.

Raising troop morale was so important to Kalanag that he even personally picked up a magic wand for the Wehrmacht: In December 1943, the magician traveled with a spear to the Murmansk Front in the Arctic tundra. And shortly before the end of the war he performed magic at Kohnstein near Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains, where the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp was set up. A photo from 1944 shows Kalanag, as always well-dressed and well-fed, on an improvised stage with two men. The V1 “flying bomb” and the V2 rocket – Hitler’s alleged “miracle weapon” – were produced in the underground factories under the most appalling conditions.

Despite all the mumbo-jumbo, things turned out differently: the “final victory” came to nothing and the “leader” took his own life. However, his favorite magician, Helmut Schreiber, survived the Nazi dictatorship unscathed. And shortly after the war, the great Kalanag really took off.

“As a magician, it was part of Schreiber’s profession to make things disappear professionally,” says Herwig: The magician concealed his Nazi past with the same mechanisms of deception, distraction and manipulation as he conjured up pigeons out of nowhere on stage or cars Disappear, cause flames to blaze from your hand, or turn water into wine, ink, liquor, or soda.

“Houdini of coming to terms with the past”

The documented NSDAP party membership since 1939? Just a preliminary application. The party badge on his lapel that is clearly visible in photos? The Magic Circle Badge. Incriminating witness statements? The lies of devious envious people. The performances in front of Hitler? Compulsory and annoying compulsory exercises for artists.

But the “Houdini of coming to terms with the past” (Herwig) was not content with rejecting all accusations and styling himself as a harmless follower. He even styled himself as a resister who allegedly hid those being persecuted and employed half-Jews and authors who were banned from working.

When the Americans remained suspicious and followed on his heels, Schreiber quickly fled to the British zone in Hamburg in 1946: there his fairy tales were accepted more uncritically.

Schreiber was denazified, received an official work permit – and created a show out of nowhere with his Simsalabim revue of 1000 Wonders that was second to none: fast-paced, frivolous, luxurious. Magic combined with striptease, dance performances, quick sayings and music. Just what the war-torn, life-hungry audience needed right now.

Nazi gold as starting capital after 1945?

Kalanag first performed magic for English troops, then for German audiences and, from 1949, for spectators around the world. After Kalanag, Herwig emphasizes, no magician traveled around the world with such an entourage.

The magician wrapped adversaries around his finger, brushing off sporadic rumors about his involvement with the Nazis as well as the question of where the start-up capital for his elaborate show came from. Did Kalanag mediate between SS men and Allies during the search for the missing Nazi gold, as was whispered to each other? Had he siphoned off a good chunk of money?

Schreiber remained silent and worked magic, tirelessly presenting his tricks. Even when he lost the battle against his greatest enemy, the television, in the early 1960s. The discarded old magician bravely roamed the provinces – his last appearance in Germany was at a fashion show for pantyhose.

Five weeks later, on December 24, 1963, Schreiber’s heart stopped beating. His ex-wife Gloria de Vos desperately searched the house for the Great Kalanag’s fortune. All she found were seven keys – to seven different safes.

“Adolf Hitler’s chamber magician” (according to the actor Fritz Benscher) took all his secrets with him to the grave. Who was hiding behind the dazzling figure? “A charming and unscrupulous egomaniac who ruthlessly imposed his will,” says Herwig. Donald T. Shea, director of the intelligence department of the American military government in Germany, put it similarly. In a memorandum dated May 18, 1949, Shea wrote of Schreiber:

“The subject must be considered an opportunist of the worst kind, without any convictions, and he does not hesitate to use any method available to ingratiate himself with those in power at the time.”

Appendix

Life

Early years

Already in his youth, the son of a factor worker devoted himself intensively to the art of magic and entered the Magic Circle of Germany at the age of 16. He attended secondary school in Stuttgart and later studied at the University of Munich and at the Technical University of Munich.

During his studies of philosophy in Munich, he organized one of the first German magic congresses. At the same time he gained experience as an actor and dramaturg at the Münchner Kammerspiele. From 1925 he worked in the film industry in Berlin. As a production manager, starting in 1926 he was in the silent films Hunt on People (1926), The Man Without a Head (1927), One Against All (1927), The Duty to be Silent (1927), Evidence (1928), The Winner (1928), Marriage in Need (1929), Motherly Love (1929), The Mistress and her Servant (1929) and Innocence (1929).

In 1927 he became editor-in-chief of MAGIE magazine of the Magic Circle. He chose his stage name after the elephant Kala Nag (“Black Snake”) from Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book.

Time of National Socialism

Due to his good contacts to Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels he made his career at the Tobis Film Company. With the onset of the sound film era Schreiber rose to production manager, from 1930 to 1934 he was also active as a motorcycle racer. From summer 1936 he worked as a production group leader, in 1939 he became an executive of the film industry, in June 1942 he finally became production manager in Bavaria and remained there until the end of the war. As author, cameraman, recording and production manager, Schreiber was responsible for a total of 150 films. Schreiber, who belonged to the NSDAP since 1933, prevented the dissolution of the Magic Circle, which, however, from June 1936 as part of the so-called Gleichschaltung forced to the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichstheater chamber, section Artistics) affiliated. Schreiber got involved with the National Socialists as president of the Magic Circle (1936–1945), membership was reduced from the originally 1373 members to 400 and prevented the use of Jewish compositions as background music. Without belonging to the circle controlled by Schreiber, magicians in Germany were banned from performing which inevitably affected Jewish magicians. In contrast, after the war, Jewish artists defended Kalanag and pointed out that he still kept Jewish personnel in the service of Bavaria for a long time. In 1936 Schreiber was awarded the Hofzinser Ring, which he passed on to Ludwig Hanemann (stage name Punx) in 1948.

After the Anschluss of Austria, Schreiber extended his influence to there. Schreiber became director of the Bavaria Film in Munich, produced public speeches by Adolf Hitler and in 1939 was a guest at the Berghof am Obersalzberg. Schreiber fostered friendship with Hitler’s personal adjutant, SS Gruppenführer Julius Schaub, who sponsored magical events. For magicians, uncommonly disliked the public education about fraudulent tricks of spiritualists and threatened traitors even openly with the Gestapo. This attitude may be related to Schreiber’s friendship with the Berlin police chief and occultist Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorff, who had once considered the tricky imposter Erik Jan Hanussen to be a real magician. Schreiber propagated the illusion “Simsalabim” as his creation, which historians ascribe to the Danish-American magician Dante.

End of the war

Towards the end of the war, Schreiber mediated between the Allies and wanted SS men, who offered free access to the legendary stolen Nazi gold, which is officially largely lost. Later, when the military police wanted to arrest Schreiber on the Bavaria site, he appeared in the presence of high-ranking American military officers who protected him. He was deposed as president of the Magic Circle and received a professional ban from the Allies. After a denazification process, Schreiber fled to the British occupation zone to Hamburg, where he lived with a magic friend who was known as the “king of the black market” and was later convicted of diamond smuggling with a Swiss magician.

Postwar career

Since Schreiber had a professional ban on his previous profession, he turned his hobby into a profession in 1947 – at a time when the postwar period was turning into a postwar boom or economic miracle. With the support of former Tobis people, he entertained British occupation soldiers with his Kalanag revue, consisting of elaborate illusions and lightly dressed showgirls.

The most famous numbers included, among others, the Magic Bar dating back to Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin and made famous by David Devant, where the whole idea of a single pitcher was served on demand, as well as for special tricks the saying “And we’ll do it all with water from India” poured a spurt of water out of a never-ending carafe on the stage. As the highlight of each performance, he had a car disappear from the brightly lit stage following an idea by Howard Thurston. An important element of his shows was always his wife and partner Gloria de Vos (Anneliese Voss). As his assistant, with the degree of sex appeal and dancer allowed for the time, she gave each performance a special shine. Exoticism was also provided by a cheetah appearing in a box.

Officially it was never known how Schreiber had financed the elaborate show in post-war Germany from scratch. Alone the costs for the disappearing car amounted to the then astronomical sum of 10.000, – DM. Magicians like Janos Bartl or Fredo Marvelli, whom Schreiber had badly harmed during the time of the national socialism, called for the boycott of his shows.

World tours

In the 1950s, Kalanag toured with his 50-member ensemble tours of Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, South Africa, Brazil, the United States, Turkey and Switzerland. In the summer of 1960 he appeared in the Zwickau Groß-Variete Lindenhof. At that time, Kalanag was the only major illusionist in the world who still toured with such an elaborate show. The magic historian Richard Hatch points out that the traveled countries strikingly match the banknotes that had disappeared in 1945 with the Nazi gold. Supposedly, the CIA has therefore observed Kalanags activities throughout his life. Before and after Kalanag, no other German magician has ever taken the economic risk of such costly world tours. At the end of the 1950s interest in variety shows diminished, which also brought Schreiber into financial difficulties.

Germany television GmbH

Schreiber became entertainment director in the commercial Free Television Society. The company served the construction of the Germany-Fernsehen GmbH planned by Adenauer, which should have offered a conservative alternative to the broadcasters of the ARD. However, the project failed due to the 1st Broadcasting Judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court.

The later years

Although Kalanag had achieved a high profile and status, he could not build on his success with a slimmed down version of his revue. In the mid-1950s, Schreiber moved from Hamburg to the Württemberg village of Fornsbach, where his cousin Margarete Sedlmayer owned land and ran a café. Here he built a bungalow with a show stage (“Kalanag Studio”). On January 23, 1963, he celebrated his 60th birthday, but on Christmas Eve 1963 he died of probable heart failure in the Gaildorfer Hospital. According to his daughter Brigitte Löser, “he lived very unhealthily and was very overweight”. He left his divorced wife Gloria, a fortune of 500,000 DM. He sought throughout his life a larger treasury from the Nazi gold, of which she also assumed that Schreiber hid somewhere.

An additional biography from a German source

K. , the most famous and influential German illusionist between 1930 and 1960, borrowed his stage name from the “Black Snake” of the same name from R. Kipling’s “Jungle Book”. His development, which reached its peak in the first half of the last decade of his life, took place in two major phases separated by the end of the war. Even as a child, K. revealed his extraordinary affection for sorcery and magic, which was evident when he performed initially simple, but then also more difficult magic tricks. K. found increasing support for his “hobby” from his parents, albeit with the reservation that he would complete his schooling with the Abitur (1921, Friedrich-Eugen-Oberrealschule Stuttgart). Thanks to his talent, K. was able to introduce himself to the public quickly and effectively from his first appearance (at the age of 15 in the Red Cross Hospital in Passau, winter 1918; cabaret theater Papa Benz, Munich, 1923). Although his work in the film industry (Bavaria, Tobis. Emelka) still provided the basis for his existence at this stage of his life, his fame as a magician and illusionist, which was based on irregular appearances, far outweighed the difficulties and brought him numerous positions at a young age, which were frowned upon by some colleagues and honors (editor of the magazine “Magie”; president, later honorary president, of the Magic Circle of Germany, bearer of the ring of this circle). Nevertheless, K. ‘s steep international career only began after 1945, when he went on numerous tours at home and abroad (North and South America, South Africa, North America) together with his wife and former partner “Gloria” and a large show troupe. , Western and Southern Europe) and earned the reputation of a “master of all magicians” with his magical entertainment revue “ K. and Gloria”. His confident, measured demeanor, his skillful contact with the audience and effective advertising contributed to his success, as did his ability to transform trick principles known in professional circles into seemingly novel, highly effective illusion sequences. His performances were so fascinating that many people wrongly regard him as the inventor of these magic tricks and large-scale deceptions. The most famous of these were “The Magic Bar”, “Water from India” (inexhaustible jug), “The Girl Without a Middle”, “The Disappearing Automobile”, “Confusion Around a Box” (people exchange illusion). K. also conducted his own research into the history and development of magic using his large specialist library.

Resources

spiegel.de, “Hocus pocus and ‘Heil Hitler!’.” By Katja Iken; en.wikipedia.org, “Kalanag (magician).” By Wikipedia Editors;

Common Sense and Ramblings In America

Helmut Schreiber alias Kalanag-Hitler’s Magician

An elephant called “black snake”

Speeding ticket for improperly parked horse

Abracadabra in Hitler’s Berghof

“Houdini of coming to terms with the past”

Nazi gold as starting capital after 1945?

Life

Early years

Time of National Socialism

End of the war

Postwar career

World tours

Germany television GmbH

The later years

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An elephant called “black snake”

Speeding ticket for improperly parked horse

Abracadabra in Hitler’s Berghof

“Houdini of coming to terms with the past”

Nazi gold as starting capital after 1945?

Life

Early years

Time of National Socialism

End of the war

Postwar career

World tours

Germany television GmbH

The later years

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