Hans Josef Schumm

Hans Josef Schumm, born Johann Josef Eugen Schumm on April 2, 1896, in Stuttgart, Germany, was a German-born American actor whose career spanned stage, film, and television across several decades. He died on February 2, 1990, in Los Angeles. Over the course of his career, Schumm accumulated credits in approximately 95 films and 15 television productions, in addition to stage work in both Germany and the United States. On screen he worked under his own name, Hans Josef Schumm or Hans Schumm, and in seven films appeared under the pseudonym André Pola. In private life he was known as Joseph Schumm and Johann J.E. Schumm.

Schumm served in the German Army during World War I. His first visit to New York came on January 1, 1924, when he arrived as a merchant at age 27. His acting debut is attributed to around 1925, either in Meissen, Germany, or in Stuttgart, where he performed in The Merchant of Venice with Staatstheater Stuttgart. He returned to New York on November 30, 1926, and performed with a German stock company in Milwaukee and Chicago before making a permanent move to the United States, arriving in New York on August 26, 1929, to work in German-language theater. Shortly after that arrival, he lived at 160 Wadsworth Avenue in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan until approximately 1931.

By 1931 Schumm had relocated to Los Angeles, where he appeared in two productions at the Pasadena Community Playhouse in 1932. His film debut came in 1933 with an uncredited bit part in The Song of Songs, starring Marlene Dietrich. During the World War II era, Schumm's German background led to frequent casting in Nazi-themed roles in American anti-Nazi films. His most prominent wartime credit was a co-starring villainous role as "The Mask" in Spy Smasher, a popular 12-episode serial released in 1942. In a 2015 retrospective, film critic Boyd P. Magers described Schumm as "the ultimate screen Nazi," and an IMDb biographer characterized him as "Nazi swine 'par excellence.'" Magers noted that Schumm's career received a considerable boost in the early 1940s when German-born actors were in demand for roles portraying members of the Wehrmacht and SS. Schumm also appeared in the 1943 film Hangmen, one of the few productions made by German immigrants in the United States explicitly opposing the Hitler regime.

Although many of Schumm's wartime film appearances went uncredited, a contributing factor beyond the size of his roles was the risk that screen credits posed for German-expatriate actors whose relatives remained in Nazi-occupied Germany. Schumm's own paternal and maternal relatives were German citizens residing there. He became a naturalized United States citizen on February 14, 1941, and when called under the U.S. Selective Service System, he registered as a conscientious objector.

Schumm was also active in supporting German Jewish exiled actors within the Hollywood community. In 1939 in Los Angeles, he became one of more than 60 founding members of The Continental Players, a theater company organized by film executives to assist Jewish thespians exiled from Germany and Austria.

His Broadway career included a role in A Red Rainbow, a production that ran during the 1952–1953 season, representing his single credited Broadway appearance. Following that engagement, Schumm traveled to West Germany, where American film producers had begun shooting in the mid-1950s due to lower production costs. Among his West German credits was a role as a pediatric psychologist in The Third Sex, a film directed by Veit Harlan. Filmed between May 8 and June 3, 1957, the picture premiered in Vienna on August 29, 1957, and opened in Stuttgart at the Gloria-Palast on October 31, 1957. The film addressed homosexuality and was intended to liberalize public attitudes and influence reform of West German laws under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code. Schumm subsequently returned to Hollywood and continued acting until 1970. He was represented throughout his career by agent Paul Kohner.

Schumm was born to Friedrich Schumm (1855–1904) and Petronella Jehle (1855–1936) and had two brothers and a sister. His older brother, Gustav Schumm (1888–1966), served as president of VfB Stuttgart in 1912 and is credited with developing youth soccer in Germany before and after World War I. On July 29, 1931, in Los Angeles, Schumm married Agnes Mellen Kent (1888–1975), who brought two daughters from a previous marriage into the union. Agnes was the daughter of New York architect William Winthrop Kent (1860–1955), who was among the architects of the original plan for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and the granddaughter of Henry Mellen Kent (1823–1894), a founder of the Flint & Kent department store in Buffalo. Hans and Agnes later divorced.