20-05-2025
Marie Najer obituary: Black German child actress in Nazi films
When Joseph Goebbels, the German propaganda minister, needed a black child to act in Nazi films, he personally excused 12-year-old Marie Najer from her Hamburg school for 14 days. 'Now I'll be a real movie star,' she thought. She arrived alone in Berlin to play a servant girl in Josef von Báky's Münchhausen (1943). 'We had very nice costumes with a huge duster, like a fan, and we had to fan the ladies with fresh air. So we were basically the idiots,' she told Jermain Raffington in a video interview.
At that age she did not consider herself part of Nazi propaganda. 'I just thought, 'How nice, that we're being integrated into the films',' she said. 'I did not realise what this was actually about.
