Nazi Films in America, 1933-1942

Nazi Films in America, 1933-1942 PDF Author: Harry Waldman
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786492066
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 712

Get Book Here

Book Description
From 1933 until America's entry into World War II in 1941, nearly 500 Nazi films were shown in American theaters, accounting for nearly half of all foreign language film imports during the period. These poorly disguised propaganda films were produced by Germany's top studios and featured prominent pro-German and Nazi actors, directors and technicians. The films were replete with overt and covert anti-Jewish imagery and themes, but in spite of this obvious intent to use the medium to justify Nazi ascendancy, viewers and film critics from such prominent publications as the New York Times, Variety, the Washington Post and the Chicago Times consistently overlooked the films' anti-Semitic message, dubbing them harmless entertainment. This is the complete history of German films shown in America from the founding of the Nazi government to America's involvement in the war. Summaries, descriptions and discussions of these almost 500 films serve to examine the major filmmakers and distributors who kept the German film industry alive during the rule of Hitler and the Third Reich. Special emphasis is placed on films directly commissioned by Joseph Goebbels, head of the German Ministry for the Enlightenment of the People and Propaganda and the man directly responsible for ensuring that the anti-Semitic ideology of the new regime was reflected in all films produced after January 30, 1933. Rarely seen photographs and illustrations complete an in-depth study of the Nazi use of this global medium.

Nazi Films in America, 1933-1942

Nazi Films in America, 1933-1942 PDF Author: Harry Waldman
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786492066
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 712

Get Book Here

Book Description
From 1933 until America's entry into World War II in 1941, nearly 500 Nazi films were shown in American theaters, accounting for nearly half of all foreign language film imports during the period. These poorly disguised propaganda films were produced by Germany's top studios and featured prominent pro-German and Nazi actors, directors and technicians. The films were replete with overt and covert anti-Jewish imagery and themes, but in spite of this obvious intent to use the medium to justify Nazi ascendancy, viewers and film critics from such prominent publications as the New York Times, Variety, the Washington Post and the Chicago Times consistently overlooked the films' anti-Semitic message, dubbing them harmless entertainment. This is the complete history of German films shown in America from the founding of the Nazi government to America's involvement in the war. Summaries, descriptions and discussions of these almost 500 films serve to examine the major filmmakers and distributors who kept the German film industry alive during the rule of Hitler and the Third Reich. Special emphasis is placed on films directly commissioned by Joseph Goebbels, head of the German Ministry for the Enlightenment of the People and Propaganda and the man directly responsible for ensuring that the anti-Semitic ideology of the new regime was reflected in all films produced after January 30, 1933. Rarely seen photographs and illustrations complete an in-depth study of the Nazi use of this global medium.

Nazi Propaganda Films

Nazi Propaganda Films PDF Author: Rolf Giesen
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476612692
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description
Hitler and the Nazis saturated their country with many types of propaganda to convince the German citizenry that the Nazi ideology was the only ideology. One type of propaganda that the Nazis relied on heavily was cinematic. This work focuses on Nazi propaganda feature films and feature-length documentaries made in Germany between 1933 and 1945 and released to the public. Some of them were Staatsauftragsfilme, films produced by order of and financed by the Third Reich. The films are arranged by subject and then alphabetically, and complete cast and production credits are provided for each. Short biographies of actors, directors, producers, and other who were involved in the making of Nazi propaganda films are also provided.

The Pianist

The Pianist PDF Author: Wladyslaw Szpilman
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466837624
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Get Book Here

Book Description
The memoir that inspired Roman Polanski's Oscar-winning film, which won the Cannes Film Festival's most prestigious prize—the Palme d'Or. Named one of the Best Books of 1999 by the Los Angeles Times On September 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman played Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor live on the radio as shells exploded outside—so loudly that he couldn't hear his piano. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw: That day, a German bomb hit the station, and Polish Radio went off the air. Though he lost his entire family, Szpilman survived in hiding. In the end, his life was saved by a German officer who heard him play the same Chopin Nocturne on a piano found among the rubble. Written immediately after the war and suppressed for decades, The Pianist is a stunning testament to human endurance and the redemptive power of fellow feeling.

Continental Strangers

Continental Strangers PDF Author: Gerd GemŸnden
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231166796
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book Here

Book Description
Hundreds of German-speaking film professionals took refuge in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, making a lasting contribution to American cinema. Hailing from Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine, as well as Germany, and including Ernst Lubitsch, Fred Zinnemann, Billy Wilder, and Fritz Lang, these multicultural, multilingual writers and directors betrayed distinct cultural sensibilities in their art. Gerd Gemünden focuses on Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934), William Dieterle’s The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), Bertold Brecht and Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (1943), Fred Zinneman’s Act of Violence (1948), and Peter Lorre’s Der Verlorene (1951), engaging with issues of realism, auteurism, and genre while tracing the relationship between film and history, Hollywood politics and censorship, and exile and (re)migration.

Hitler in Los Angeles

Hitler in Los Angeles PDF Author: Steven J. Ross
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620405644
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 435

Get Book Here

Book Description
A 2018 FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE “[Hitler in Los Angeles] is part thriller and all chiller, about how close the California Reich came to succeeding” (Los Angeles Times). No American city was more important to the Nazis than Los Angeles, home to Hollywood, the greatest propaganda machine in the world. The Nazis plotted to kill the city's Jews and to sabotage the nation's military installations: Plans existed for murdering twenty-four prominent Hollywood figures, such as Al Jolson, Charlie Chaplin, and Louis B. Mayer; for driving through Boyle Heights and machine-gunning as many Jews as possible; and for blowing up defense installations and seizing munitions from National Guard armories along the Pacific Coast. U.S. law enforcement agencies were not paying close attention--preferring to monitor Reds rather than Nazis--and only attorney Leon Lewis and his daring ring of spies stood in the way. From 1933 until the end of World War II, Lewis, the man Nazis would come to call “the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles,” ran a spy operation comprised of military veterans and their wives who infiltrated every Nazi and fascist group in Los Angeles. Often rising to leadership positions, they uncovered and foiled the Nazi's disturbing plans for death and destruction. Featuring a large cast of Nazis, undercover agents, and colorful supporting players, the Los Angeles Times bestselling Hitler in Los Angeles, by acclaimed historian Steven J. Ross, tells the story of Lewis's daring spy network in a time when hate groups had moved from the margins to the mainstream.

Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939

Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 PDF Author: Thomas Doherty
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231535147
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book Here

Book Description
Between 1933 and 1939, representations of the Nazis and the full meaning of Nazism came slowly to Hollywood, growing more ominous and distinct only as the decade wore on. Recapturing what ordinary Americans saw on the screen during the emerging Nazi threat, Thomas Doherty reclaims forgotten films, such as Hitler's Reign of Terror (1934), a pioneering anti-Nazi docudrama by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.; I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany (1936), a sensational true tale of "a Hollywood girl in Naziland!"; and Professor Mamlock (1938), an anti-Nazi film made by German refugees living in the Soviet Union. Doherty also recounts how the disproportionately Jewish backgrounds of the executives of the studios and the workers on the payroll shaded reactions to what was never simply a business decision. As Europe hurtled toward war, a proxy battle waged in Hollywood over how to conduct business with the Nazis, how to cover Hitler and his victims in the newsreels, and whether to address or ignore Nazism in Hollywood feature films. Should Hollywood lie low, or stand tall and sound the alarm? Doherty's history features a cast of charismatic personalities: Carl Laemmle, the German Jewish founder of Universal Pictures, whose production of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) enraged the nascent Nazi movement; Georg Gyssling, the Nazi consul in Los Angeles, who read the Hollywood trade press as avidly as any studio mogul; Vittorio Mussolini, son of the fascist dictator and aspiring motion picture impresario; Leni Riefenstahl, the Valkyrie goddess of the Third Reich who came to America to peddle distribution rights for Olympia (1938); screenwriters Donald Ogden Stewart and Dorothy Parker, founders of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League; and Harry and Jack Warner of Warner Bros., who yoked anti-Nazism to patriotic Americanism and finally broke the embargo against anti-Nazi cinema with Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939).

Hollywood’s Spies

Hollywood’s Spies PDF Author: Laura B Rosenzweig
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 147988247X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book Here

Book Description
The remarkable story of the Jewish moguls in Hollywood who established the first anti-Nazi Jewish resistance organization in the country in the 1930s. Finalist, Celebrate 350 Award in American Jewish Studies The 1939 film Confessions of a Nazi Spy may have been the first cinematic shot fired by Hollywood against Nazis in America, but it by no means marked the political awakening of the film industry’s Jewish executives to the problem. Hollywood’s Spies tells the remarkable story of the Jewish moguls in Hollywood who paid private investigators to infiltrate Nazi groups operating in Los Angeles, establishing the first anti-Nazi Jewish resistance organization in the country—the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee (LAJCC). Drawing on more than 15,000 pages of archival documents, Laura B. Rosenzweig offers a compelling narrative illuminating the role that Jewish Americans played in combating insurgent Nazism in the United States in the 1930s. Forced undercover by the anti-Semitic climate of the decade, the LAJCC partnered with organizations whose Americanism was unimpeachable, such as the American Legion, to channel information regarding seditious Nazi plots to Congress, the Justice Department, the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department. Hollywood’s Spies corrects the decades-long belief that American Jews lacked the political organization and leadership to assert their political interests during this period in our history and reveals that the LAJCC was one of many covert “fact finding” operations funded by Jewish Americans designed to root out Nazism in the United States. “A remarkable tale.” —The Wall Street Journal “Expose[s] a buried story about underground plots waged by Nazis against major Hollywood figures.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Hitler and America

Hitler and America PDF Author: Klaus P. Fischer
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204417
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
In February 1942, barely two months after he had declared war on the United States, Adolf Hitler praised America's great industrial achievements and admitted that Germany would need some time to catch up. The Americans, he said, had shown the way in developing the most efficient methods of production—especially in iron and coal, which formed the basis of modern industrial civilization. He also touted America's superiority in the field of transportation, particularly the automobile. He loved automobiles and saw in Henry Ford a great hero of the industrial age. Hitler's personal train was even code-named "Amerika." In Hitler and America, historian Klaus P. Fischer seeks to understand more deeply how Hitler viewed America, the nation that was central to Germany's defeat. He reveals Hitler's split-minded image of America: America and Amerika. Hitler would loudly call the United States a feeble country while at the same time referring to it as an industrial colossus worthy of imitation. Or he would belittle America in the vilest terms while at the same time looking at the latest photos from the United States, watching American films, and amusing himself with Mickey Mouse cartoons. America was a place that Hitler admired—for the can-do spirit of the American people, which he attributed to their Nordic blood—and envied—for its enormous territorial size, abundant resources, and political power. Amerika, however, was to Hitler a mongrel nation, grown too rich too soon and governed by a capitalist elite with strong ties to the Jews. Across the Atlantic, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his own, far more realistically grounded views of Hitler. Fischer contrasts these with the misconceptions and misunderstandings that caused Hitler, in the end, to see only Amerika, not America, and led to his defeat.

Veit Harlan

Veit Harlan PDF Author: Frank Noack
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813167019
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 496

Get Book Here

Book Description
Veit Harlan (1899--1964) was one of Germany's most controversial and loathed directors. After studying with theatre and film pioneer Max Reinhardt and beginning a promising career, he became one of Joseph Goebbels's leading filmmakers under the National Socialist regime. Harlan's Jud Süss ( Jew Suss, 1940), in particular, stands as one of the most artistically distinct and morally reprehensible films produced by the Third Reich. His involvement with this movie has led to many critical questions: Was the director truly forced to make the film under penalty of death? Is anti-Semitism a theme in his other productions? Can and should his work be studied in light of the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust? The first English-language biography of the notorious director, Veit Harlan presents an in-depth portrait of the man who is arguably the only Nazi filmmaker with a distinct authorial style and body of work. Author Frank Noack reveals that both Harlan's life and work were marked by creative vision, startling ambiguities, and deep moral flaws. His meticulously detailed study explores the director's influence on German cinema and places his work within the contexts of World War II and film history as a whole. Rivaled only by Leni Riefenstahl, Veit Harlan remains one of Germany's most infamous filmmakers, and virtually every book on Nazi cinema contains at least one chapter about Harlan or an analysis of one of his movies. This biography -- supplemented by production histories and rare interviews with actors, actresses, and cameramen -- offers the first comprehensive analysis of the director and his work and adds new perspective to the growing body of scholarship on filmmaking under the Third Reich.

Screening Transcendence

Screening Transcendence PDF Author: Robert Dassanowsky
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253033632
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 446

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the 1930s, Austrian film production companies developed a process to navigate the competing demands of audiences in Nazi Germany and those found in broader Western markets. In Screening Transcendence, film historian Robert Dassanowsky explores how Austrian filmmakers during the Austrofascist period (1933–1938) developed two overlapping industries: "Aryanized" films for distribution in Germany, its largest market, and "Emigrantenfilm," which employed émigré and Jewish talent that appealed to international audiences. Through detailed archival research in both Vienna and the United States, Dassanowsky reveals what was culturally, socially, and politically at stake in these two simultaneous and overlapping film industries. Influenced by French auteurism, admired by Italian cinephiles, and ardently remade by Hollywood, these period Austrian films demonstrate a distinctive regional style mixed with transnational influences. Combining brilliant close readings of individual films with thoroughly informed historical and cultural observations, Dassanowsky presents the story of a nation and an industry mired in politics, power, and intrigue on the brink of Nazi occupation.