It seems a matter of respect not to use an article image of Conrad Veidt as a Nazi, even though the first place most people think of him is doubtless as Major Strasse in Casablanca. Don’t get me wrong—it’s a hell of a role, and Veidt is very good in it. But the man was so passionately opposed to the regime that he had it written into his contract that any Nazi role he played would be a villain, and this before the war when Hollywood was still largely vacillating on the subject in the hopes of continuing to draw in German box office. The great shame is that Veidt died before the end of World War II and didn’t get to see Nazism defeated.

We are probably fortunate that he got desperately ill during World War I, since young Veidt was stationed on the Eastern Front. He’d done some minor acting before the war, but he enlisted in 1914, as so many others did. He was given a medical discharge due to his illness and was permitted to go back to acting in order to boost morale. He seems from an early age, starting even in childhood, to be one of those actors whose appearances were routinely the best thing in a bad work, and one of his first rave reviews begged him not to go into movies.

Which, you know, he ignored. Indeed, his first films are from 1917, immediately after being discharged from the army. Many of his early films are lost, but he is one of the few people of the silent era to have two instantly iconic roles, albeit one of which is because the look of his character inspired the look of the Joker. Veidt was involved in German Expressionist film, and he starred in both The Man Who Laughed and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. This alone made him suspect when the Nazis came to power, and then he married a Jewish woman and listed his race—falsely—as Jewish on official paperwork.

Veidt and his third wife, Ilona Prager, fled to England like so many of his countrymen who had the opportunity. And, yes, Vedit ended up in Hollywood, playing a Nazi or two. But the pair gave enormous amounts of money toward helping those devastated by the Blitz, and they personally took in one of the children evacuated from the UK to the US, and there was that contract. Veidt was even briefly imprisoned by the regime when he had to return to Germany at one point and barely escaped with his life, and he helped smuggle his in-laws into Switzerland. This is not the act of a man who deserves to be remembered as a Nazi.

His fidelity to Prager is also worth noting. Bisexuals get a lot of grief from people who assume they’re incapable of monogamy, because obviously they’d leave a man for a woman and a woman for a man. When he was single, Veidt apparently flirted with anything that was there for the flirting. And, true, he was married three times. But the evidence appears to be that, while he was married, he was faithful, and there seem to be no stories of his cheating on his wives. His first wife claimed she’d divorced him because he wore her new Paris dress—before she was able to.

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