When the Nazis did come to power, they soon passed a law prohibiting Jews from participating in German movies - an edict that immediately destroyed one of the most creative film industries in Europe and drove many of its leading figures to America. The studios had seen early on what chaos the Nazis could cause, when Goebbels, not yet a state official, led a squad of brownshirts to disrupt the Berlin premiere of the 1930 antiwar film “All Quiet on the Western Front” with stink bombs, sneezing powder and cries of “Judenfilm!” Caving in to Nazi pressure, the weak Weimar government rescinded the film’s exhibition license, and Goebbels had won one of his first major propaganda victories. ![]() The motivation was largely commercial: the studios, with one important exception, did not want to risk the loss of a major European market by offending Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, whose censors decided which foreign films would be shown in Germany. ![]() Doherty, a film historian and professor of American studies at Brandeis University, points out that a great majority of American studios went out of their way to avoid any mention of the ominous political developments in Germany from the moment of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 until well into 1939, when the outbreak of war in Europe had come to seem inevitable. ![]() With their eye-grabbing iconography, they provide easy cartoon villains for action films (“Inglourious Basterds”), add moral import to dubious melodramas (“The Reader”), fuel entire cable channels with documentary reconstructions of their crimes and on rare occasions motivate actual works of art.īut as Thomas Doherty forcefully establishes in his wide-ranging and brightly written new book, “Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939,” Nazis were all but invisible in American movies at the time when depicting their savagery might have done the most good. ![]() Sixty-eight years after the collapse of the Thousand Year Reich, Nazis remain a persistent presence on American screens.
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