Jews, the 3 stooges and Hitler.

Cafe Society
1

I just found the following reference here in which it is claimed that (emphasis mine):

“The Three Stooges first parodied Hitler and his regime in their 1940 short You Nazty Spy. **This was the first Hollywood film that satirized Hitler ** and The Boys (plus Director Jules White) all being of Jewish European heritage were very proud of this film.”

Surely this 3 Stooges Trivia is incorrect?

Did Charlie Chaplin not produce the Great Dictator a number of years earlier?

However, it may well have been the first form of “Jewish” resistance to Naziism by Hollywood, since Chaplin, contrary to popular opinion, was NOT Jewish. He had a Jewish half-brother (different fathers, same mother). Chaplin was revolted by Hitler’s anti-semitism and brutal regime. But apparently, his production of this movie got him in trouble with J. Edgar Hoover and other right-wing elements in Washington.

I have always wondered: If the Jews really invented Hollywood, and if the US movie world is so Jewish-dominated why was there not more criticism of Hitler and Naziism in the 1930s?

Why did all these Jewish-American movie moguls, writers, producers etc. sit there tamely not saying a word from 1933 to the very end of 1941, (when the US entered the war) while their co-religionists were being beaten, robbed and slaughtered?

Of course, once the US went to war with Germany, Hollywood could certainly attack the enemy. But a solid eight years of Nazi racism and brutality in peacetime produced nothing from Tinseltown but a movie by the gentile Charlie Chaplin and a short in 1940 by three Jewish comics?

What accounts for this? I heard somewhere that early in the Nazi regime FDR had sent Nazi sympathizer Joe Kennedy (father of JFK) to Hollywood to warn the studios that they had to keep quiet and not stir up trouble between America and Germany. Could this be true?

2

Moderator, after reading my own post, I wonder if it belongs in Cafe Society or Great Debates? Your call.

3

That sounds like a typical Right-winger conspiracy wet dream to me.

4

I’d read this, too. But the Three Stooges short was released a couple of months before Chasplin’s film, which makes it technically correct (even though Chaplin started working on The Great Dictator in 1937). It surprised me, too, but the Stooges did get to the theater first.

5

Ignorance would be my guess. I doubt that many of them knew just how bad things really were. I have heard that even Chaplin said he would not have satirized Nazism if he had been aware of the mass murder.

:rolleyes: That’s not in keeping with Roosevelt’s favoritism toward the Allies, and there are simpler, less politically biased explanations. The first priority for everybody in Hollywood is money, and an anti-Nazi film could have been divisive and potentially unpopular because the country didn’t want to go to war.

6

Yep, money is the answer.

All the studios made large sums of money in Germany, which was probably the premier non-English-speaking foreign market of the day. They knew it would only take one anti-Nazi, anti-Hitler film to get all the studio films banned in Germany. They knew this because the Germans made this very clear to the studio representatives.

Secondarily, the amount of anti-Semitic prejudice in the country - more covert than overt, though with Father Coughlin and others the overt prejudice was more than anyone alive today would believe - was substantial. Jews were accepted as comedy figures, but even leading men like Emmanuel Goldenberg (Edward G. Robinson), Julius Garfinkle (John Garfield), and Laszio Lowenstein (Peter Lorre) had to change their names.

The studio owners knew that giving the writers - many of them Jewish - their freedom and allowing them to put anti-Nazi propaganda into pictures would be economic suicide. It was in fact worse than that - so many of the writers and anti-fascists were Communists and Socialists that the McCarthy era would have arrived two decades early if the pictures were made.

Only a very few writers - Ben Hecht foremost - gave up their lucrative careers for a vocal fight against the Germans. He tried making independent pictures but got financially wiped out in no time.

We see it all now with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, virtually nobody, not in government, not in the press, not in academia, and certainly not in Hollywood really understood what Nazism meant. They didn’t believe because a) nobody had ever imagined such a thing as deliberate genocide before and b) government propaganda lies against the Huns in WWI had been widely debunked after that war and for most people any accusations were just more of the same lies. That’s what happens when the government cries “wolf.” Moreover, the U.S. was stupendously isolationist as a nation throughout the 30s and isolationism was the official Republican position the entire decade. It took the actual start of WWII to begin to overturn the hardened attitudes about Germany. The Stooges were first and Chaplin followed soon thereafter.

The FDR story is nonsense. I would as a rule of thumb not believe anything at all you read at a site or from a book that says it is true.

7

If you want to send a message, call Western Union.

Attributed most often to Sam Goldwyn, but also Louie B. Mayer and Jack Warner.

8

Pretty much what Exapno said are the reasons why. Another thing to keep in the mind is that the Jewish moguls who ran Hollywood during the so-called “Golden Age” were assimilationists who often went to great lengths to act more gentile than the gentiles. Thus, they avoided doing anything that might publicly call attention to their being Jewish like, for example, making movies that directly addressed the virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazis.

As for the story about FDR, Joe Kennedy, and Hollywood, that’s a grossly distorted and exaggerated to say the least. What really happened was in early 1939, Joe Kennedy, who was Ambassador to the Court of St. James, publicly criticized the openly anti-German tone of movies like Confessions of a Nazi Spy as jeopardizing American efforts to remain neutral. Somehow that’s gotten conflated into the conspiracy theory mentioned in the OP.

An interesting book about the “Golden Age” moguls that discusses this subject is An Empire of Their Own by Neal Gabler.

9

I love it when Moe hits Curly in the head with a shovel!

10

Weren’t there actually a number of anti-Nazi films before this. Such as “Confessions of a Nazi Spy” with Edward G Robinson and “The Mortal Storm” with James Stewart?

11

Of course Hollywood is not an invention and therefore no one ‘invented’ it, but that the Jews are now and have always been very powerful in the movie business is not a myth at all. I am by no means saying there is anything wrong with it, I’m just stating the fact that it is true.

12

I just realized that I said ‘the Jews’. I could’ve worded that better :o :p.

13

Check the IMDb link given in NDP’s post:

The movie wasn’t much of a threat to the Germans. Even so, even though the movie was based on a real incident, even though the Nazis had already all but started the war, it was a very risky thing to do, as the facts on the “trivia” page indicate:

The Mortal Storm was released in 1940, after the war had started and it was safe to criticize Germany, which was a lost market.

Hollywood has never at any time in its history been noted for its courage. Anti-Nazi pictures in the 1930s would have been foolhardy at the least, financially ruinous at a given, and life-threateningly dangerous in all likelihood. It’s easy after the fact to accuse them, but none of us would have done anything different at the time.

14

In saying the Jews invented Hollywood, I was alluding to a book by an author (who happns to be Jewish) entitled “How the Jews Invented Hollywood”.

And no, there is nothing “wrong” with their being a strong Jewish presence in the movie industry.

I was just amazed that the Jews (or for that matter ANY decent, fair-minded Jew of Gentile in Hollywood) would not have done more to expose the horrors of the Nazi regime between 1933 and the year before America entered WWII.

But the answers I recived are all very plausible. Many of these Jewish moguls were in fact assimilationists who were married to gentile wives (and whose children were not therefore Jewish).

The argument about the isolationism in the US and the fear of losing Germany as a movie market alo makes sense.

All of this makes more sense to me now.

We have no idea how virulent and open anti-semitism was even in North America in the 1930s. The article in Wikipedia about Father Charles Coughlinq.v. is a real eye-opener.

It is hard to imagine something like this happening in the US today, but at that time:

“On December 18, 1938 two thousand of Coughlin’s followers marched in New York protesting potential asylum law changes that would allow more Jews (including refugees from Hitler’s oppression) into the US, chanting, “Send Jews back where they came from in leaky boats!” and “Wait until Hitler comes over here!” The protests continued for several months.”

In Germany, Hitler kept screaming that the Jews were trying to “provoke another war”.

It is easy to see how assimilationist Jewish moguls in Hollywood would have been terrified of the backlash that would have resulted from an anti-Nazi movie at a time when most Americans were strongly isolationist. The last thing they wanted was to supply grist for the Nazi mill.

Thanks to all who elightened me. I hope I am not being too hard on these Jewish moguls. I probably would have done the same thing in their place.

I guess it all goes back to my most basic premise of historical discussion. Judge people in the historical context in which they lived.

15

This is sort of off-topic, but I’m confused by one point in the OP:

It was always my understanding that Judaism was matrilineal; that is, passed down through the mother. If Charlie Chaplin and his half-brother had the same mother, wouldn’t that make *both * of them either Jewish *or * Gentile, depending on mom?

16

You are right that it is matrilineal, so Chaplin’s brother would not have been born Jewish by rabinnic law. The Wikipedia article says: “There is no evidence of Jewish ancestry for Chaplin himself. Chaplin’s (older) half-brother, Sydney, was three-fourths-Jewish, but he was never a practising Jew”.

Chaplin was very, very close to his brother, both of whom had to join together to survive Chaplin’s alcoholic father and their mentally ill mother.

I guess all Chaplin was really saying is that his half-brother was “ethnically” Jewish through having a Jewish father. To a lot of gentiles in the 1930s, having a Jewish father made you a Jew in their eyes. It would certainly have been enough to get Sydney Chaplin gassed in the 3rd Reich.

The point I was making is that a lot of people, even today, think Chaplin was Jewish, and VERY many people believed that in the 1930s, especially after he appeared in one of the few pre-war Hollwood attacks on Hitler, the Great Dictator.

Of course, the Nazi propaganda machine claimed Chaplin was Jewish. They also claimed FDR was!

Also, I suppose that Chaplin’s dark, curly hair and his prominent nose correspended to stereotypes about what a Jew should look like. No doubt his affection for his brother and his outrage at anti-semitism was a factor that led him to make “The Great Dictator”.

17

Don’t discount his Communist sympathies. The Nazis had made it clear that they would stamp out any Leftist political opinions in Germany and the conquered territories.

18

This statement does not make mathematical sense to me. If Chaplin’s half-brother was 3/4 Jewish, doesn’t that mean that Chaplin has to have been at least 1/4 Jewish? How can anyone be 3/4 anything and their half-brother not at all?

19

I must admit that that part of it has me confused as well. Ask the Wikipedia author what he meant.

All I know is that Syndney Chaplin had a Jewish father, and Charlie did not.

So why was Sydney named “Chaplin” I hear you ask? Well, there may be any number of reasons, but if you read the article about Chaplin, you immediately realize that this ws not a normal, functional family. Maybe Charlie’s father “gave” his name to Sydney.