The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler

[aceplace57]

Quite an eyeopener. I’m quite surprised because several of the 1930’s studio heads like Louis B. Mayer, Adolph Zukor, and Sam Goldwyn were Jewish. Hard to imagine them appeasing the Nazis.

They mention that All Quiet on the Western Front had changes made. I wonder how many other movies got changed to keep the Nazis happy?

I’ll have to read this book for sure. The publisher is Harvard University Press. I want check the bibliography and see what references were used.

The Chilling History of How Hollywood Helped Hitler (Exclusive)

Harvard post-doctoral fellow Ben Urwand uncovers a darker side to Hollywood’s past.

Drawing on a wealth of archival documents in the U.S. and Germany, he reveals the shocking extent to which Hollywood cooperated and collaborated with the Nazis during the decade leading up to World War II to protect its business.

Beginning with wholesale changes made to Universal’s 1930 release All Quiet on the Western Front, Hollywood regularly ran scripts and finished movies by German officials for approval. When they objected to scenes or dialogue they thought made Germany look bad, criticized the Nazis or dwelled on the mistreatment of Jews, the studios would accommodate them – and make cuts in the American versions as well as those shown elsewhere in the world.

It was not only scenes: Nazi pressure managed to kill whole projects critical of the rise of Adolf Hitler. Indeed, Hollywood would not make an important anti-Nazi film until 1940

[MrDibble]

Well, look at how they bend over backwards to accommodate the Chinese nowadays. And that happened relatively quickly - does anyone think Red Corner would get greenlit today?

[Bryan_Ekers]

Gadzooks, Hollywood is about making money! Has someone alerted the President?

[Odesio]

@Bryan_Ekers

Gadzooks, Hollywood is about making money! Has someone alerted the President?

There’s a lot of people in Hollywood who seem to think that they’re very progressive and this is reflected in their work. George Clooney’s 2006 Oscar speech where he uses Hattie McDaniel’s win for best supporting actress for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind is one of the more outrageous examples of this claim of progressiveness. You’re right, Hollywood is about making money and I think most of their films are rather conservative. I don’t mean conservative in the sense of right wing political ideology but Hollywood usually doesn’t want to rock the boat.

[aceplace57]

Just for context, The Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935. Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass, occurred in Nov. 1938. The destruction of businesses, schools, homes, and synagogues was widely reported in the world news.

The appeasement of Nazi Germany is something I’ve read and studied since college. I’m looking forward to reading more on Hollywood’s role in this prior to 1940.

Even after 1940 much of the propaganda movies were aimed at the Japanese. I’ve been trying to think of even one war movie where John Wayne fought the Germans. The imdb lists Reunion in France (with Joan Crawford) 1942, but I can’t recall seeing it. The movie listing says he plays a downed American flyer hiding in occupied Paris. IIRC nearly all his WWII war movies were set in the Pacific.

*Casablanca *came out in 1942. The really good WWII movies about the European front were made after the war ended. Command Decision (Clark Gable, Walter Pidgeon) was made in 1948. Stalag 17 (William Holden, Otto Preminger) was 1953.

Martin Gilbert writes that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from the foreign journalists working in Germany sent shock waves around the world.[3] The Times wrote at the time: “No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenseless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday.”[6]