Mick Hartley

If the good die young – and leave a beautiful memory – then the reverse can also be true: bastards die old, and leave an unpleasant smell. I'd never heard of Johannes Heesters before reading this article by Raphael Mostel. He died on Christmas Eve, aged 108. His claim to fame was that he was Hitler's favourite singer, first captivating the Fuhrer in the role of Danilo in Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow. That, perhaps, is forgiveable, but then in his subsequent lengthy career he never really repudiated his former no. 1 fan, calling him, as late as 2008, "a great guy". His method was denial in the face of evidence:

For example, Heesters performed at Dachau in May 1941 to boost the morale of the SS officers there. When this was exposed after the war, Heesters first claimed that it never happened and that he did not even know anything about Dachau (despite several of his Gärtnerplatztheater colleagues having been sent there in the roundups of Jews and political “undesirables”). Later, after a photo surfaced of him swanning at Dachau in the admiring company of SS officers, he switched his story, recalling how marvelously the prisoner-musicians played when they accompanied his colleagues. But he adamantly insisted that he himself had not sung for the SS there. Eyewitnesses then stepped forward to contradict him. 

Of Dutch birth, he was roundly despised by his countrymen:

Heesters kept working as a major star after the war, at least in Germany and Austria. His career lasted 92 of his 108 years, and he played Danilo 1,600 times. Yet it always rankled him that his native Holland regarded him as a traitor and would have nothing to do with him. In 1964, he made the astonishingly blockheaded choice of vehicle to attempt a return there: the anti-Nazi Captain Georg von Trapp in a production of “The Sound of Music.” He was hooted off the stage. Only in 2008 did he succeed in giving a single recital, in a small hall on the Dutch border, amid many protests. In spring 2011, when Chancellor Angela Merkel hosted a state dinner for Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Heesters was invited as one of the most prominent Dutchmen in Germany. When the Dutch saw his name on the list, however, they immediately insisted he be disinvited.

There's a breathless tribute to the man here, in German.