Hitler and Hollywood
A review of The Collaboration, a book by Ben Urwand
Hitler loved the movies. He watched a film every night after dinner with his entourage. Across the pond, Hollywood saw Germany as one of its biggest export markets. There was money to be made from distributing films there. These two facts are the starting point of Ben Urwand’s study of Hollywood’s relationship with Nazi Germany.
Control of the film industry was a central part of Hitler’s and Joseph Goebbels’ plan for propaganda in the Third Reich. Part of this involved censorship of foreign films that did not sing the Nazis’ tune. Article 15 of a law regulating film imports made it clear that Berlin could ban a company from working in Germany, if it produced a film that was offensive to German sensibilities. This gave the Nazi consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, considerable influence. He could not only demand cuts or changes to films to be shown in Germany, but in all versions of the films to be shown internationally.
Instead of showing Gyssling the door, Hollywood went out of its way to work with him. Urwand chronicles several occasions on which he was listened to intently. Some projects did not happen because of fear of his disapproval. A Paramount film about the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine in World War I was dropped. A more aggressively anti-Hitler film called The Mad Dog of Europe was scrapped because of fears that it would harm US business interests in Germany.
When American films were banned in Germany, such as The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933) because it starred Max Baer, a Jew who was known to be hostile to Hitler, the studios continued to do business with Germany. After the Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and Austria in 1938, Goebbels produced a blacklist of 60 Hollywood figures whose work could not be allowed in Germany. The studios simply removed their credits from German versions and continued to distribute there in 1940 and 1941 up to the point at which America entered the war.
The Hollywood studios not only agreed not to attack the Nazis but they also decided not to defend the Jews. Changes were made in a series of films such as The Life of Emile Zola, where references to Alfred Dreyfus being a Jew were removed. Although The Mortal Storm (1940) finally dealt with the Nazi persecution of a minority group, all references to the fact that they were Jews were cut from the final version. The whole story of how Hollywood made an accommodation with Nazi antisemitism seems even more bizarre because many of the studio bosses were themselves Jewish immigrants.
This is a story about German censorship and the more frequent and sinister self-censorship by Hollywood. The notorious Hays Office put pressure on studio chiefs like Louis B. Mayer of MGM not to make certain films, such as the anti-fascist It Can’t Happen Here, to avoid offending the German government. The German word used at the time to describe this was Zusammenarbeit, i.e. ‘collaboration’. By calling his book The Collaboration and implying that Hollywood collaborated with Hitler, Urwand has certainly created a storm in America. The New Yorker film critic was so outraged that he has demanded to know how Harvard University Press could have published the book.
Urwand’s book is thoroughly researched but is rather rambling, occasionally repetitious and makes some strange statements. For instance, it is bizarre to claim that Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935) is about a Hitler speech. It is a visual evocation of a creed that celebrates the submission of the individual into a disciplined mass, whose function is to show total obedience to the leader. It is also daft to say that Hitler controlled the German newsreel industry because he made a few corrections of newsreel scripts. And there is no mention of the American newsreel series The March of Time, launched in 1935, which consistently warned cinema audiences of the evils of the Nazi state. Despite this, Urwand’s book is a fascinating take on the shady politics of Hollywood and should be read by anyone interested in going behind the glamour of 1930s cinema.
TAYLOR DOWNING, HISTORY TODAY