I just read a reference to physicist Werner Heisenberg as having had “classic Teutonic looks, blond hair and blue eyes.”
That started me thinking of the Aryan ideal, people whose looks we associate more today with Scandinavians than Germans. And that train of thought brought to the depiction of Nazis in movies.
Almost all Nazis were played by dark-haired types. Admittedly, Hitler and some of his top cohorts were dark-haired in reality, but the Nazi stereotype wasn’t supposed to be this way.
I can’t think of another stereotype on screen portrayed differently from the stereotype out in the world. Why weren’t there more blond Nazis in films? Is it just because of Hilter’s swarthiness? Is it because Americans have traditionally equated villains with darkness? Were all the blonds too busy playing the good guys?
And don’t get me started on white horses, which were never ridden by Nazis.
IIRC, even the Scandinavians, at least the original ones, like the Vikings, were not blondes but redheads. Blond hair and blue eyes comes from the Slavs-the people Hitler hated most after the Jews.
Except that that’s not the original image - it’s a painting based on a fairly well-known B&W photo.
Otherwise, his hair colour was always uniformly described as blond. For example, his biographer David Cassidy quotes a passage from Max Born’s autobiography that when they first met he’d looked “like a simple farm boy, with short fair hair, clear bright eyes, and a charming expression.” After childhood, when they show an obvious blond mop, his hair does however tend to show up as dark in photos.
As for the general question, it may have something to do with the point that even the Nazis didn’t necessarily think that the prevailing appearance in Germany accorded with the stereotype. Blond and blue-eyed was supposed to be the appearance of the original Aryans. The existing German population was perceived as having been diluted - to a greater or lesser extent - by other races and so, while still better than other nationalities, capable of “improvement”. Their racial policies were then meant to produce a return to this Aryan ideal.
Clearly their own propaganda very deliberately focussed on this stereotype as a way of encouraging that. But I don’t think it’s a surprise that foreigners didn’t play along with it.
Blond people are a minority in Germany (the typical German hair colour is between light brown and dark brown; children often look blond when young but grow up to be brown-haired). Obviously the Nazis were well aware of that. The stereotypical blond-blue-eyed phenotype was often referred to as “Nordic”, a subset of “Aryan”.
“Aryan” in the typical use seems to have been more of a popular antonym to “Jewish” than what Nazi racial theoreticians used the term for.
The Anglo-Saxons were blond and blue-eyed. When Pope Gregory the Great first saw a group of Angle children for sale in the roman slave market, he was so struck by their looks that he said, “Not Angles, but angels!” and sent St. Augustine (of Canterbury) to convert them to christianity in 597.
I actually think you’ve put your finger on it. I’d love to see somebody create a pigmentation index, and see how good guys versus bad guys stack up on it.
It’s certainly true for females. All female villains are dark-haired. Many dark-haired (or redheads who showed up dark in b&w like Myrna Loy) later stars got their starts playing bad girls or even “Oriental” vamps.
The problem is that it’s hard to think of many true blond male stars of the era. Alan Ladd was blondish but not extremely fair.
But this would open the doors for character roles for blonds, and allow them to play villains and get work.
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