10 Movie Conspiracy Theories You Won't Believe Exist
5. Dive Bomber Was A Front For Errol Flynn’s Nazi Activities
Errol Flynn was one of golden age Hollywood’s biggest and most
bankable stars. Despite a few blips on his character – a couple of statutory
rape charges, a notoriously bad temper and a more than passing fondness for the
hard stuff – Flynn has managed to posthumously maintain an image as one of
Tinseltown’s most dashing and legendary male leads. That is, until 1980 when
writer Charles Higham released a biography of Flynn alleging the star was a
Nazi sympathiser who used his career to act as an informant to the Gestapo.
According to Higham when Flynn was playing war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War alongside his friend Hermann Erben, an Austrian-born doctor and suspected Nazi Party member, this was actually a cover for spying on German supporters of Spanish loyalists on behalf of the Nazis. Delving even deeper, Higham claims that Flynn’s patriotic 1941 war movie Dive Bomber was another front for providing intel to the Axis Powers. Apparently Flynn insisted that the movie be shot on location at a California naval base so that the enemy could have a good gander at the USA’s military defences.
Other biographers, historians and Flynn’s family alike have all debunked Higham’s claims, though some credibility is lent to the rumours via former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1942 Flynn wrote to the Office for Strategic Services, a pre-cursor to the CIA, requesting they hire him as a spy but Roosevelt declined his offer because the president himself was aware of, and possibly believed, the rumours surrounding Flynn’s Nazi affiliation.