In 1923, Walt Disney quit his failing animation company called Laugh-O-gram Films and used his last $40 to buy a train ticket to meet his brother, Roy, in Los Angeles, where they began they make cartoons out of their uncle's garage. The company they founded would become one of the most influential media and entertainment brands in history.
Walt Disney Co ( DIS.N ) turns 100 this month.
The company, about which Walt Disney famously remarked "that it all started with a mouse," is now a $156 billion behemoth, spanning theme parks, television networks, movies and a streaming service that reaches millions of people on every continent .
Of the famous and complex bits of Disney history, the one that piques my interest is its relationship with the Nazis in World War II.
But despite the paternal character of "Uncle Walt" he portrayed to the public, he is not a universally beloved figure. Today's pop culture associates his name with outlandish conspiracy theories, such as being a Nazi sympathizer and a bigot who was hard to work for (according to various sources it was true). But beneath the stories of cool heads and anti-Semitism lies the truth: Walt was a complicated man who did some great things and some not-so-great things and changed the course of history in the process.
When it was released in late 1942, Disney's Cartoon Der Fuehrer's Face became a big hit in the United States, winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 1943. But the home front was not the only theater of action. The face of Der Fuehrer went abroad and served the war effort in more ways than one. “It was the most popular propaganda film we had,” Walt Disney told journalist Pete Martin in the 1950s. “They had it in all the languages… They had it in the underground. They were running and laughing while under Hitler's heel...".
A small souvenir from Great Britain
Great Britain asks Germany to play "Der Fuehrer's Face" on the radio. In early June 1943, a US Air Force bomber crew in a B-17 Flying Fortress decided to drop "a little souvenir" over Germany in the form of a 100-pound training bomb. Attached is a letter addressed to 'Miss Midge' of German Radio - who was probably a Nazi employee of the propaganda broadcasting company Mildred Gillards, also known as 'Axis Sally' – who was teasing her into playing the song 'Der Fuehrer's Face' on your programme.' That same month in England—where the B-17 crew was stationed—it was reported that the Disney film had broken the box office records previously set by Three Little Pigs (1933).
Disney staff and studios were conscripted for military use during World War II, leading to a series of now-controversial cartoons, live-action films, and propaganda films, some of which contained racist caricatures.
Well, there's the famous Three Pigs scene, in which the wolf was portrayed as a Jewish peddler. (The scene was later redone). And there's the fact that in 1938, a month after Kristallnacht, Disney personally welcomed Nazi director Leni Riefenstahl to its studios. In the Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (the mogul's most in-depth biography), Neal Gabler explores the rumors but argues that Disney practiced tolerance in his life and at home. "There is some dispute whether the same spirit of tolerance extended to the studio, but of the Jews who worked there, it was hard to find anyone who believed that Walt was anti-Semitic."
Gabler argues that the accusations stemmed less from personal conduct and more from Disney's association with the deeply anti-Semitic Motion Picture Alliance, which the CEO founded after a particularly bitter labor dispute in 1941. Even if he wasn't personally anti-Semitic, Gabler allows Disney "willingly, even enthusiastically, embraced [anti-Semites] and bound his fate with them."
"Wally" saves Disney movies from Nazi destruction
Raoul Wallace Feignoux was a native Parisian who in 1936 became Disney's European distribution agent. Disney knew him as 'Wally'. When German forces occupied France in the summer of 1940, Feignoux undertook to protect Disney's film assets in the country, taking great personal risk and coming into direct contact with Nazi agents.
As historian Sébastien Roffat reports, Feignoux was effectively cut off from his American employers – a profession that made communication "practically impossible". When news broke of Disney's contribution to the American war effort and the creation of "anti-Nazi films", Feignoux struggled to convince the Germans not to destroy the Disney prints. At one point, he was taken to a "grim, dark room" full of armed Nazis. “The atmosphere was more inhospitable,” Feignoux later explained to the Associated Press, “The [SS] are really terrible men. They kill each other, their own people, as easily as the enemy." Der Fuehrer's face then appeared on a screen. "I didn't hear anyone laughing," Feignoux told Walt after the war, "And Mr. Disney, I didn't laugh either."
The Disney representative quickly hid the remaining prints of the Disney films, saving them from Nazi destruction. According to a later recollection by Feignoux's sister, Jacqueline Vieuille, “Wally had been brought up by our parents with the maxim that you must do your duty no matter what the circumstances. He was proud to represent Disney and passionate about his work." Disney's Paris offices on the Champs-Elysée were ironically, according to Vieuille, in the same building as the propaganda office of the occupying Germans.
Walt Disney confirmed parts of Feignoux's story in his interviews with Pete Martin. Journalist and Diane Disney Miller later adapted it for Miller's series of articles and subsequent book The Story of Walt Disney . Walt had explained that the Nazis were "always harassing" Feignoux. When first asked about Disney's war-related work, the Parisian was left to explain that "it's just some little insignia and stuff" and noted that even a nearby German patrol car had been unofficially painted with Mickey's likeness. Mouse—such was Disney's presence in popular culture. But when the Nazis presented him with the face of Der Fuehrer, Feignoux couldn't do it. "I am here. Mr. Disney is there,” he told them, according to Walt. “As soon as [Wally] got back [to his office] he knew [the Nazis] would be walking back to headquarters,” Walt explained. "He took all our films out of the vaults into the cans, he put old films, old reportage, old stuff, he just put them in the cans."
Wally Feignoux's nephew, Guy Feignoux, later told Sébastien Roffat that his uncle "was a character with such ability and such facility in inventing stories about him, that you could never tell the true from the false." However, the implied wartime drama of this episode and its place in Walt's own memory is matched by the energy and power of Der Fuehrer's face.
Starting business with the Soviet Union
Disney's WWII propaganda is making its way to Russia. Less than a week before Thanksgiving 1943, Hollywood columnist Thornton Delehanty reported that Disney was working to complete a Russian dub of Der Fuehrer's Face for distribution in the allied Soviet Union. It was reportedly suggested to Walt by the interests of Roy O. Disney who he later described as "Russian characters who were here during the war". The elder Disney told historian Richard Humbler: “[We] gave this image to Russia with many imprints. They used her and I understand she played there widely. This was just a small gesture of war on our part."
Until that time, Disney films had not been officially played in Russia—according to Roy O. Disney, German bootlegs usually entered the country—but still, "We were very popular," he explained. Later, in 1953, Walt received a "beautiful trophy ... a large cut crystal cup with silver strings on it" as the Soviet Film Festival Achievement Award—it remains in the collection of the Walt Disney Family Museum, in the Awards Lobby.
Walt Disney abhorred communism and even began accusing his staff of being communists after they tried to unionize and went on strike, according to Disney historian Jim Korkis.
The Time reported that Disney also testified as a "friendly witness" during a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing during the height of the Red Scare. He even identified an animator by name, according to FBI documents, as reported by Daily Mail.
Stories about Disney's personality vary and conflict. One thing is certain, Disney's success is due to him, and in 2019, in one of the biggest corporate business acquisitions of modern times, Disney bought 21st Century Fox from media mogul Rupert Murdoch, for more than $70 billion . Even Homer Simpson was now a Disney character.
When Disney+ launched later that year, it had movies and TV shows from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, and National Geographic available. Within a day he had 10 million subscribers.
One hundred years after it was founded in a small office in Hollywood, Disney has a physical presence in 30 countries and its channels reach 100 more.
It may have all started in one house, with a mouse, but now the whole world is the kingdom of Disney.
*Cover photo: AP/REX/Shutterstock