Credit: Inside the MagicFew views are more breathtaking than when walking under the Magic Kingdom railroad around the corner of Main Street, U.S.A., to see Cinderella Castle for the first time. It is the moment that Disney fans come back to time after time.
As guests head toward the castle, the little details stand out—little pieces of Disney history and Easter eggs from the outside world.
When guests walk through the draw bridge and head into the castle, they are blown away by the details and precision of the Cinderella mural, which includes hundreds of thousands of miniature Italian glass pieces. However, few guests know the sordid history of the man behind the mural.
When the mural was created in 1971 for Magic Kingdom’s opening, few people knew the name Hans-Joachim Scharff. Unless you were an American POW captured by the Germans, you would have no reason to know Scharff.
In 1971, Orlando Sentinel wrote a story about Scharff, saying that he fled East Germany in 1948 to avoid the Communists. The paper failed to recognize that among American soldiers in World War II, Scharff was one of the most famous Nazis.
Scharff was famous for his interrogation techniques used during the war. He was renowned among American POWs for the respect he showed them and his ability to relate to them. After the war, Scharff’s interrogation techniques were studied by the Americans and even used by the CIA during the Obama Administration.
He was born to a wealthy German family and moved to South Africa after graduating with a degree in art history. He married a British South African woman and became fluent in English.
He used his knowledge of America and information on POWs he got from their local newspapers to relate to them on a human level. Before long, and sometimes without them even realizing it, Scharff got information from them.
Once he arrived in America, he used his art background to create mosaic furniture in New York City. His style became famous and was mentioned in articles nationwide, with no mention of his German war service.
Eventually, he moved to Los Angeles, and that’s when he started working for Disney. He created mosaics for shops in New Orleans Square in Disneyland and built the tabletops for Cafe Orleans.
After his work at Disneyland, the company commissioned him to work on Cinderella Castle. The job took 18 months to complete. He was so successful that Disney returned to Scharff for the mosaics outside the Land Pavilion at EPCOT.
Unlike many other prolific Nazis, Scharff was never put on trial after the war. He would later write a book about his experiences called The Interrogator.
Scharff died in 1992, but his work lives on at Disney World and Disneyland; complicating the beauty of the art is the fact that it was created by one of the Nazi’s lead interrogators.