The blond bombshell was a megastar by 1937. Made famous by the movie The Blue Angel in 1930, Marlene Dietrich was Germany’s most revered actress, singer, and performer. She was independent and expressive, both in her openness in her bisexuality and in her bravery to set fashion standards not previously accepted or explored for the decade. When Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi Germany’s top diplomat, approached Dietrich to star in the Führer’s Nazi propaganda films, he didn’t expect the answer to be “no.”

Dietrich had a problem, and his name was Adolf Hitler. “Hitler is an idiot,” Dietrich said in a wartime interview broadcast from Britain to Germany. “Boys, don’t sacrifice yourselves. The war is crap.”

[...] recruited Dietrich to use her voice to record a series of anti-Nazi propaganda songs for the OSS Morale Branch. She recorded the songs “Time on My Hands,” “Mean to Me,” and “Taking a Chance on Love” in German to demoralize German and Italian troops. The US Strategic Bombing Survey said “the programs were just as devastating to German morale as an air raid.”