Leonie, actress and spy (2020)

Directed by: Annette Apon | 85 minutes | documentary | With: Rifka Lodeizen, Truus te Selle, Joost Tholens, Martijn van der Veen, Wart Kamps, Cas Enklaar

The miraculous life of Leonie Brandt is central to the documentary ‘Leonie – actress and spy’. Directed by Annette Apon, a reconstruction of her life is given based on old film fragments and a re-enacted interview with her former lawyer Besier by an employee of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentary (NIOD). The documentary is a fascinating, but not entirely satisfactory, portrait.

Leonie Brandt was born in Germany in 1901 as Leonie Pütz into a mining family. Her dream, to become an actress, came true in the “Roaring Twenties” with a debut in the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg. By coincidence she ‘rolls’ into the intelligence world during the increasing international tensions in the run-up to the Second World War. She spies for the Netherlands and for Nazi Germany. She is arrested twice and survives the Ravensbrück women’s camp where she is sent by the Nazis. After the war she was involved in the interrogations of imprisoned Nazis for the Dutch government. A fantastic life story and ideal for a movie you would say. Perhaps ‘fantastic’ in the most literal sense is appropriate here, because what is true and what is made up in Leonie Brandt’s life will probably never be clarified.

In 2003 NIOD researcher Gerard Aalders wrote a book about Leonie Brandt, which is a source of inspiration for Apon for this documentary. There is no film material from Brandt – and only a limited number of photos. The task of the narrator, actress Rifka Lodeizen, is to connect historical film material and the staged conversations between the NIOD employee (played by Martijn van der Veen – based on Aalders) and Besier (played by Cas Enklaar). The voice of Apon himself can also be heard as a voice-over. The adventures and experiences that Leonie claims are often difficult to verify and there is often only circumstantial evidence for her claims. Did she meet Hitler in Bad Godesberg in 1929 and was he really charmed by her? Did she really try to steal the list of Dutch Gestapo informants from a safe in Aachen in March 1940? Has she passed on secret messages from a German general to London through her radio plays from the occupied Netherlands? And is she really aware of the so-called ‘Stadhoudersbrief?’

It has been rumored for decades that Prince Bernhard, the son-in-law of the exiled Queen Wilhelmina, would have written a letter to Adolf Hitler in the middle of the war in which Bernhard offers to be appointed “stadholder” of the Netherlands – if the German troops withdraw. , but under some sort of German authority. Shocking, of course, if it were true, because Bernhard is revered as a resistance hero after the war, has been Prince consort of Queen Juliana since 1948 and the father of the later Queen Beatrix. Evidence for this has never been found, but Brandt says he not only saw the letter, but also had it in her possession.

One story seems even more improbable than the other, but we don’t know exactly how it works. Is there a kernel of truth in all stories, or is it more than that?

Her work for the (later) Internal Security Service ends abruptly when she is accused of collaboration with the German camp leadership during her captivity in Ravensbrück? Nothing seems quite what it is. Has Leonie Mythologised Her Past? Hides and veils unwelcome events by building a wall of fictions and half-truths on a foundation of facts? Lawyer Besier regularly refers to Leonie’s daughter in his interview. An interesting detail is that this daughter, Loek Kessels, for many years provided the ‘Dear Mona’ section in the gossip magazine Story. In one of her books she writes unflatteringly about her alcoholic mother, who leads a nomadic life in her last years. Leonie Brandt-Pütz dies in 1978.

The documentary chooses an interesting narrative style. Director Annette Apon has based herself on a lot of documented material and has chosen to illustrate images of other actresses from the same time. Apon also puts a lot of sense of freedom and independence in her consideration of Leonie’s actions. It colors her life and yet she slips away and the image remains diffuse. Wouldn’t there have been a very exciting movie or even a miniseries here? The chosen form feels just too contemplative and indicative and that is why the documentary just doesn’t quite come into its own. Perhaps this is partly due to Leonie’s elusive life herself, but a bolder approach could have made this documentary even better.