Max W. Kimmich

Max Wilhelm Kimmich (also known as M. W. Kimmich; 4 November 1893 in Ulm – 16 January 1980 in Icking, Upper Bavaria) was a German film director and screenwriter during the first half of the 20th century. He was brother-in-law to Joseph Goebbels.

He was born in Ulm in West Germany to the painter, art teacher and author Karl Kimmich and his wife Christine, née Autenrieth. He had an older brother, also named Karl Kimmich, thirteen years his senior. While his brother went into banking, Max Kimmich visited military academies in Karlsruhe and Berlin after passing his school leaving exams and later fought as a regular officer in World War I. After the war, he studied medicine for a few terms, but at the beginning of the 1920s he became attracted to theatre and film, especially American films. So he worked at the German Cinema Company, beginning as an assistant and dramatic adviser. After that he became associate producer and later, producer, with the Rochus Gliese film company. In 1924, he went to Hollywood, where he worked at Universal Studios as a screenwriter and, according to himself, as director. But as he could not really gain ground in the USA, in 1929, he went back to Germany. The following year, he composed the music to his first sound film Waves of Passion (Wellen der Leidenschaft). In the next few years, he edited screenplays for cloak-and-dagger films like Under False Flag (1931/1932), The Invisible Front (1932) or On Secret Service (1933) with various partners.

Kimmich's career began to boom after the Nazis came to power in 1933. He wrote the screenplays for several adventure films - sometimes with a nationalistic touch like Hangmen, Women and Soldiers (Henker, Frauen und Soldaten) from 1935 - and worked for directors such as Harry Piel and Paul Wegener. In 1938, he made his first film as director, a crime movie that was also produced as radio drama in Breslau the following year. In February 1938, he married Maria Goebbels, the youngest sister of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The latter seems to have been skeptical at first because he suspected that Kimmich was not really interested in his sister, but only in the excellent connections this marriage would give him. (Since film was an important propaganda medium for the Nazis, this was quite possible). Kimmich was able to allay Goebbels´ doubts in a private conversation in summer 1937, and the marriage took place the following year. He specialized in anti-British propaganda films, e.g. My Life for Ireland in 1940/1941, and Germanin from 1942, which portrays scientists developing a medicine against sleeping sickness. While Nazi film magazines praised the latter - shortly after release it was awarded not only "artificially valuable", but also "national-political valuable" by film checkers of the propaganda ministry - today it is considered to be rather weak. Several of Kimmich's other films gained official recommendations in these years. His works The Fugitive of Chicago in 1933/1934, I Sing Myself into Your Heart in 1934, Hangmen, Women and Soldiers in 1935, The Fox of Glenarvon in 1940 and Fourth Man Missing (Der Vierte kommt nicht) in 1938/1939 were recommended as "artistically valuable". He earned most recommendations, however, for My Life for Ireland. This 1940/1941 movie was recommended not only "artistically and national-political valuable", but additionally as "particularly suitable for adolescents" (jugendwert). His last film, Peanuts (Kleinigkeiten), which he started in 1944 with Tobis, was not finished at the end of the war. It has been said that while working on this movie, Kimmich was in Vienna and witnessed the invasion of the Allies, but Goebbels biographer Curt Riess states Kimmich was in Berlin and escaped from the nearly encircled town with his wife and mother-in-law on April 19, 1945.

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