A Wanted Nazi War Criminal Was Used as The Man Who Faked The Golden Ticket in WILLY WONKA as a Joke

Here’s a strange bit of movie trivia for you that you probably didn’t know! Remember in the classic 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, a Paraguayan newscaster announced that multi-millionaire Alberto Minoletta found the fifth and final Golden ticket, but it was later revealed to be counterfeit, giving Charlie his chance to find the real ticket and fulfill his destiny.

Well, it turns out there was a little joke included in the scene during the newscast. There’s a picture held up that shows what Alberto Minoletta looks like, and it turns out that photo was actually of real-life wanted Nazi henchman and war criminal, Martin Bormann. 

Martin Ludwig Bormann was a German Nazi Party official and head of the Nazi Party Chancellery. He gained immense power by using his position as Adolf Hitler's private secretary to control the flow of information and access to Hitler. After the war, he went into hiding and it was rumored that he was living in Paraguay at the time of the film’s release.

Bormann was tried at Nuremberg in absentia, and he was found guilty of his war crimes. On October 15, 1946, he was sentenced to death by hanging, with the provision that if he were later found alive, any new facts brought to light at that time could be taken into consideration to reduce the sentence or overturn it.

The remains of Bormann were eventually found in 1972 when construction workers uncovered human remains near Lehrter station in West Berlin. In the autopsy process, fragments of glass were found in the jaws of his skeleton, suggesting that he has committed suicide by biting cyanide capsules to avoid capture. These remains were conclusively identified as Bormann's in 1998 when German authorities ordered genetic testing on fragments of the skull. So, he was dead the whole time.

The director of the film, Mel Stuart, acknowledges his little joke, and that it didn’t really land in his making-of movie book, Pure Imagination. He shared, “The scene was never as successful as I had hoped.” As to why the joke didn’t work, he explained, “twenty-five years after World War II, very few people knew or cared who Bormann was.” 

That has got to be one of the most random bits of movie trivia I’ve come across. Anyway, we talk about this and more in the Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory episode of our podcast, Secret Level, which you can listen to here.