I can’t believe that I’ve never featured German hottie Hildegard Knef before. Some salient facts about her: in the dying days of WWII she disguised herself as a man and joined the German Wehrmacht so she could fight the Russians alongside her lover; she was the first woman to appear nude in a German-made film; and after her acting career ended in the 1960s, at age 40 she went on to become a singer-songwriter and sold over 3 million records.
Just to backtrack a little: her nude scene in Die Sünderin (The Sinner) caused all sorts of rumpus in Germany, to which she responded that considering that Germany had been responsible for Auschwitz, they shouldn’t get all upset about a nude scene (okay, stop laughing now: she had a point). Then there was the fact of her romance with a Nazi, which caused her all sorts of problems with the wokisti of the time, and which she explained away with the comment that she was only eighteen, and sometimes girls do stupid things.
Oh, and did I mention that she survived imprisonment in a Russian POW camp, back in 1945?
I wish I’d met her.









Here she’s singing Ich habe’ noch einen Koffer in Berlin, and in English, In This Old Town (both of which she wrote herself). What a voice.
And what a woman.