Chapter 1
Hollywood and the Nazis, 1938-1945
The American movie Nazi drew its initial presence and force from the sheer enormity of
Nazi destructive impact on the real world, the Nazis’ own projection of their dark drama onto the
movie screens of that world, and the emigration of much German, European, and Jewish talent to
Hollywood in the 1930s. The Hollywood image of the Nazi was also not just a creature of the
European and then American war against Hitler, but a presence before, during, and beyond the
Second World War in a wide variety of movies and genres. Even movies explicitly about the
Nazi treated him in more dimensions than has been appreciated in terms of authorial intention,
filmic discourse, audience reception, and social and political contexts. The Nazi in American
movies is the product of more than a single vision, but is a blurred creature—or creatures—of
double vision on the part of both film makers and film viewers. This double vision is comprised
of American fears and desires as well as German realities. To be accurate and useful, Hollywood
discourses on the Nazi therefore must be seen in the broader and longer contextual latitudes and
longitudes of American film, culture, and history.
In the 1930s Hollywood largely avoided the subject of Nazism in order not to lose a
lucrative though shrinking German film market; the ensuing war in Europe added Hollywood
concern with not compromising American neutrality. There was also Hollywood fear of
widespread isolationist sentiment in the American movie audience, which is why many prewar
Hollywood antifascist movies emphasized national defense and not war.1 The Production Code
Administration, set up by the industry early in the decade to ensure the “decency” of its movies,
was a possible and actual means of controlling discourse. The German Consul in Los Angeles
2
regularly protested to the PCA about prospective violations of the Code’s own requirement that
the “history, institutions, prominent people and citizenry . . . be represented fairly.” While such
German interference did not prevent movies from being made, it did add to the taming of
Hollywood’s reflection of and elaboration on politics as well as on sex and violence. However,
for a variety of reasons that comprise much of the subject matter of this book, the Nazi still
strutted his stuff in powerful, malevolent, though also richly ambiguous manner in Hollywood
productions. One example of the limits of PCA taming is I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany
(Alfred Mannon, 1936). In July 1936 the German Consul (founder in 1933 in New York of
Friends of Hitler) formally protested against any approval by PCA of this movie “on the grounds
that it does not fairly represent the German Government or its people.” PCA chief Joseph Breen
informed Malvina Pictures that a seal of approval was unlikely. Mannon replied that the story is
based on the experiences of a female journalist in Germany, portrays the German people as
“wholesome,” does not depict brutality, presents only well-known facts about Nazi actions, and
that censors in New York and Pennsylvania have already passed the film. Mannon also argued
that the German Consul, who has not even seen the movie, is exceeding his legal authority.
Three days later the Breen Office gave I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany a formal Certificate of
Approval.2 This decision does not show Hollywood was not sensitive to German concerns, but
that other factors could and did play roles. In this instance, however, Breen could be content that
the movie was mediocre second billing fare made by a small production company. It would have
minimal public impact and in fact saw limited release and only in the United States. Movies
from the large studios for a national and international audience of course attracted more scrutiny.
It was also the case that there were of course multiple American publics, that is,
constituencies with different views on world events and varying abilities of working their
3
influence on what appeared in Hollywood movies about the increasingly fraught world in the
1930s. The civil war that raged in Spain from 1936 and 1939 was particularly fraught with
dangers for Hollywood. Once again censors as well as moviemakers confronted difficulties in
doing their jobs. In Spain a socialist Republican government, materially supported only by the
Soviet Union, faced a revolt by the Church and a conservative military armed by Fascist Italy
and Nazi Germany. Blockade (1938) is one of several movies that illustrate the difficulties
Hollywood faced when dealing with a war that in movie terms turned out to be the short
preceding the main feature of 1939. Liberal producer William Wanger, Communist screenwriter
John Howard Lawson, and German émigré director William Dieterle collaborated on Blockade
for United Artists as part of a campaign to oppose fascism and defend democracy in Spain. The
Breen Office, concerned about movie distribution both at home and abroad, insisted that
Blockade not only not take sides in the conflict but that it avoid identifying “the warring
factions” or actual incidents and locations.3 Even with these strictures in place, the movie was
protested and boycotted by The Knights of Columbus for its “glorification of the Spanish Reds”
and just as vigorously defended by the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and other leftist groups.4
Clearly, hardly anyone was unaware of the sentiments of the creators of Blockade. Breen
himself was Catholic and notoriously anti-Semitic and had launched his campaign against the
film on that basis as well. But Hollywood filmmakers had long ago learned how to suggest—
whether it be sex, violence, or politics—what they wanted to say without saying it. And like sex
and violence anytime, the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and the controversy over it was such a
large part of public consciousness in America—or at least literate public consciousness—that the
great majority of reviewers and certainly very many or even most viewers of Blockade and other
movies about the war in Spain knew what was being shown and said. Once again the Nazi, here
4
in the guise of fascism in general, did his dark dance on the screen. However, even though
Breen and traditional American moral judgments were to become increasingly limited in both
time and space, the cost in the case of Blockade was the diminution of an intelligent political film
into what the New York Times labeled “a glib spy melodrama.”5
A similar though less drastic fate befell Frank Borzage’s Three Comrades (1938). Based
on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, the movie concerns three German veterans of the First
World War who are caught up in the economic and political problems in Germany in the 1920s.
Remarque, himself a German veteran and a strident opponent of Hitler, focuses on the violent
clash between Nazis and Communists ten years after the war. The Breen Office, prompted once
again by the protest of Los Angeles German vice consul George Gyssling and knowing the
predominantly anti-Nazi sentiments of Hollywood, urged that the movie not mention either
Nazis or Communists and that it remove scenes of book burnings and anti-Semitism. As a
result, Three Comrades refers to and portrays brief scenes of political violence only as backdrop
for a love story set in 1921, which made the movie seem to many badly out of date. But again it
wasn’t that simple. The leftist press in the United States, riding a wave of support due to the
unemployment spawned by the Depression, vigorously protested censorship of Remarque’s
story.6 Moreover, while there are no identifiable Nazis in Three Comrades, the surly mobs that
clash in the streets are comprised of men all dressed in working class garb, which registers them
in the American viewing eye as Communists, another distinct but conveniently scary imago of
present and future. In contrast to these nameless comrades, the three German Comrades are
played sympathetically by handsome and wholesome American actors Robert Taylor, Robert
Young, and Franchot Tone.7 So ennobling are these portrayals that the film played uncut in
Japan during the Second World War.
5
Europe at War, 1939-1941
By the end of the decade the atmosphere of first Nazi threat and then Nazi war was
having a significant impact on Hollywood. Three pictures of 1939, Victor Fleming’s The Wizard
of Oz as well as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Conspiracy, are striking examples of this
turn away from relative inability to face at least some of the actualities and implications of the
Third Reich. The intimidating modern deco design of the Wizard’s palace in Oz reflects the
Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, Leni Riefenstahl, 1935), while
the Wicked Witch of the West lives in a dark mountaintop castle that evokes in Gothic fashion
Hitler’s aerie at Berchtesgaden. She dispatches winged monkeys that recall Nazi air attacks in
the recent Spanish Civil War (which Hollywood continued to treat skittishly because of the clash
there between Communism and Catholicism) and for audiences from late 1939 on the blitzkrieg
of German aerial terror across Europe.8 Dieterle’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame was filming in
Hollywood when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. Addressing the ideological and
moral threat of Nazism, the long first scene is a defense of freedom of thought set around the
great technological advance of the fifteenth century, German Johann Gutenberg’s movable-type
printing press. The drama centers on a Gypsy girl railed at by black-garbed High Justice Frollo
in the language (“You come from an evil race”) of Nazi anti-Semitism, while her people stream
6
into Paris in ragged caravans suggesting persecuted Jews of medieval and modern Europe. For
its part, the independently produced Conspiracy (Lew Landers, 1939) constructs an allegory for
Hitler in the person of a Central American dictator that again would have recalled for some Nazi
support for General Franco in Spain.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame did not represent much of a break with Hollywood’s
general avoidance of the subject of Nazi persecution of the Jews. The conveniently available
indirection of its reference to anti-Semitism is evidence of this. Aside from worrying about the
German cinema market, Jewish studio heads in particular worried about provoking the Nazi
regime and making the situation worse for German Jews.9 Once America was at war the priority
for Hollywood under newly imposed and self-imposed censorship was promotion of a united
American war effort. Such trepidation was prefigured in the ongoing Hollywood tradition of
avoiding Jewish characters and stories in order to appeal to a largely non-Jewish American
movie audience and to sidestep widespread American anti-Semitism. One additional reason for
this reticence was the viewpoint of the PCA’s Joseph Breen. Like his predecessor, Indiana
Republican and Presbyterian Will Hayes, who institutionalized Hollywood self-censorship in
1922, Breen regularly bent over backwards to ensure that the movies were “fair” to the Nazi
regime and its “controversial” racial policies. For Breen, this was the obverse of prejudice
manifest in his word choice in 1938 regarding “a half-Jew girl” in the preliminary script for
Foreign Correspondent (Walter Wanger, 1940). Such American anti-Semitism, increasingly
yoked to anti-Communism, would continue to be a concern for Hollywood in the late 1940s and
on into the following decade.10 It was also the case that wartime in particular called for the
powerful villains already a staple in movies rather than powerless (and “racially” alien) victims.
7
But the war in Europe, even given the fact that many hands with different grasps on the
world situation went into making movies, had begun to turn Hollywood decisively—though
belatedly—toward anti-isolationist moviemaking. Englishwoman Phyllis Bottome’s novel, the
source for MGM’s The Mortal Storm (Frank Borzage, 1940), portrayed Hitler’s Germany as
misogynistic as well as anti-Semitic. A conservative studio had sought to avoid German reprisal
by using the word “Germany” only in a short written prelude and substituting “non-Aryan” for
“Jew” in the dialogue. This circumlocution was standard Hollywood practice until 1941. In
1940 British Conservative politician Alfred Duff-Cooper observed in the French paper Le Soir
that in Doctor Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (William Dieterle, 1940) there is no mention of the fact
that the German Ehrlich was also Jewish. Breen complained to Paris Soir that “it is clearly
indicated in the picture that Dr. Ehrlich was a Jew.”11 But this identification is made only
indirectly in the film and without the use of the words “Jew” or “Jewish.” This represented both
censorship and creative evasion of censorship, just as would be the case in The Mortal Storm.
Two liberal producers—and a change of directors—retained enough of the novel’s anti-Nazism
that the Nazis banned all MGM films. The Mortal Storm also displays the sexism common in
American culture at the time since the movie shifts the focus from Nazi persecution of a young
Jewish medical student to that of her non-Aryan professor father. In the film Freya, while
educated and intelligent, is merely the love object for Hans, a farmer and pacifist played by
American icon James Stewart. As in Three Comrades, good Germans are good—i.e., what the
Nazi is not— because they are like Americans. In the book Hans is a peasant and a Communist,
the latter taboo in American movies until the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 ended in 1941, spawning
movies—at government insistence—in support of our new Russian ally like Mission to Moscow
(Michael Curtiz, 1943), The North Star (Lewis Milestone, 1943), and Song of Russia (Gregory
8
Ratoff, 1944). In all of these movies suitably awful Germans play second fiddle to cheerful and
resilient “Amero-Russians.” America was too distant from Russia in geography and ideology to
appreciate the viciousness of Nazi racial warfare on the Eastern Front. In these movies,
therefore, the complaint is more against war and its effects on all civilians everywhere and
anytime. Within these contexts, Nazis in Hollywood Russia are like the Nazis in The Mortal
Storm, a predictably arrogant and ignorant lot. Their chief representative in The Mortal Storm, in
turn like his few prewar Hollywood brethren, is played by Robert Young with a distinct lack of
real venom or menace.12
War movies generally did not do great box office; even the Nazis found established
movies genres more useful.13 So Hollywood too diluted content and continued to make movies
attractive by means of character-driven drama and romance. Reprising 1930s antifascist
Republic Studios Westerns, the Nazi would invade and inhabit traditional genres in comedies
such as Rio Rita (S. Sylvan Simon, 1942) and adventures like Tarzan Triumphs (Wilhelm Thiele,
1943); German émigré Ernst Lubitsch would mix comedy and historical commentary in To Be or
Not to Be (1943). The Production Code Administration, worried about repercussions in South
America, urged the makers of Rio Rita to change the locale from Mexico to the United States. In
Tarzan Triumphs Jane writes from London about “the horrors of war and the brutality of the
Nazis.”14 There were also movies about Nazi Germany that cast their villains in familiar movie
roles as gangsters (The Hitler Gang [John Farrow, 1944]), sexual predators (Hitler’s Children
[Edward Dmytryk, 1943]) that bothered Hollywood morals censors, or comic bumblers.
Representative of the last is Desperate Journey (Raoul Walsh, 1942)—“not a story at all [but] a
continuous chase”—in which downed American fliers in Germany hijack Hermann Göring’s
railway carriage, one of them remarking “Pull up a swastika and sit down.” Such male body
9
humor bravado—like Nazi spies in America as reassuringly ludicrous—embodied the cultural
overconfidence that the U.S. Army’s Why We Fight series was designed to fight.15 But even
these government documentaries used Hollywood genre conventions to depict Germans and their
Axis partners as beatable though dangerous enemies of strength, resolve, and ruthlessness.
Wartime American censorship, imposed and self-imposed, would be a new factor in
shaping movie characterization of the enemy. This censorship did not occur in a cultural, social,
or commercial vacuum. The portrayal and perception of the Nazi was dependent not just on the
time, place, and personnel of the movie’s setting, making, and viewing, but also the presence or
absence of Others related to specific American concerns. As Sabine Hake observes, Nazi racism
called up for Americans their own history of racial prejudice and oppression. The new Office of
War Information promoted racial sensitivity: a Sudanese soldier in Sahara (Zoltan Korda, 1943)
killing a Nazi who called him “inferior”; peaceful and exotic Arabs in Thiele’s Tarzan Triumphs
and Tarzan’s Desert Mystery (1943) replacing the usual barbarous Arabs and jabbering Negroes.
But the racially denigrated Negro persisted: simpleton in Busses Roar (Ross Lederman, 1942),
minstrel in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943), and Uncle Tom in Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock,
1944). Still, American racism was projected onto the Japanese but not onto European and
Caucasian Germans. Unlike the Japanese, between whose militaristic government and people no
distinction was made because of their “race” and their sneak(y) attack on Pearl Harbor, Germans
were often distinguished from Nazis. German soldiers could be and were portrayed as “efficient,
disciplined, and patriotic.”16 But since Germans were Caucasian, so too were Nazis, the face of
whose persecution of “racial inferiors” was therefore uncomfortably close to Americans’ own.
Such portrayals and perceptions were aggravated by America’s own evolution into a world
power, what in Europe after 1945 was called “Coca-Colonization.” The Coca-Cola Company
10
had provided GIs with free Cokes, building a dominant domestic and worldwide market. All in
all, there emerged an American double vision of the Nazi present and past that incorporated the
evil Other—Freud’s Doppelgänger or Jung’s “shadow”—that is, a double residing within an
idealized American identity. This dual and dueling “attraction and revulsion” vis-à-vis the Nazi
was symptomatic of an idealized yet ever more challenged democratic American identity.17
The Hollywood Nazi, according to Hake, took on four basic forms before and during the
Second World War: “the party member, the officer, the sympathizer, and the collaborator.”18
The sympathizer and the collaborator most nearly reflected persistent marginalization and
isolation in American society, as with Peter Lorre’s Austro-Hungarian Jew in All Through the
Night (Vincent Sherman, 1941). These stereotypes also represented an American democratic
consciousness that had inhabited First World War Hollywood caricatures of Prussian officers as
bearers of the arrogant rot at the top of Old World society. This type of Nazi, often played by
British actor George Sanders, ranged from the urbane officer (Man Hunt [Fritz Lang, 1941]) to
the thuggish party leader (Confessions of a Nazi Spy [Anatole Litvak,1939]). Yet by 1943 a new
Nazi would dwell in this old devil’s details; even Nazi rape and “white slavery” were passed—to
Hollywood’s commercial delight—by industry censors, as that year with Hitler’s Children,
among others. Erich von Stroheim’s portrayal of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in Paramount’s
11
Five Graves to Cairo (Billy Wilder, 1943) recalled his earlier portrayals of Prussians but with
added menace. Austrian-Jewish émigré Wilder smuggles in Nazi persecution of Jews when
Rommel notes that there is no Moses to part the Red Sea for the British and when he rages—in
German—at officers dallying with a hotel maid: “Is this the German army or a Jews’ school?”
The movie also even elliptically addresses the bureaucracy of the Final Solution when Rommel
ominously notes concerning forms for information about a captive’s brother in a Nazi prison
camp that “we can use paper in Germany, a great deal of paper.”19
America at War, 1942-1945
There were radicals, liberals, and conservatives in Hollywood, but the studios had always
managed to produce profitable entertainment generally free of manifest political distraction.20
PCA, as we have seen, was not uninterested in political issues but generally more concerned with
moral ones. OWI exerted more consistent supervision, censorship, and support of movies as part
of the nation’s war aims based on defense of democratic ideals and practices. This brought
cooperation from Hollywood but also opposition from the industry’s own censorship apparatus,
which had been set up originally in order to avoid the threat of government control. Conflict was
12
greatest when it came to movies about the America’s new ally against Hitler, the Soviet Union.
The Hollywood left embraced the expanded alliance against Nazism, while Breen and the PCA
regarded it as an escalation in an ongoing campaign against American and Western political,
moral, and religious values. In this conflict the Nazi would be a touchstone for a variety of
American political and social complaints and concerns. As such, the Hollywood Nazi remained
an imperfect reflection of his own historical reality. The American left as well as the American
right had their own political and cultural concerns, which themselves were supplemented by
America’s new priority in conducting a war against Germany and Japan for the defense of the
nation and democratic values worldwide. These preoccupations in turn reflected another
American wartime social reality, the imperfect understanding of the growing horror of the Nazi
war against the Jews even as some awareness of the Final Solution and extermination camps
began to percolate into American media and society by late 1942.21
The signal instance of the confrontation between Hollywood left and right in 1942 and
1943 was Watch on the Rhine (Herman Shumlin, 1943), based on a play by Lillian Hellman.
Adapted for the screen by American Communist Party member Dashiell Hammett, Watch on the
Rhine is the only American movie of the entire era that takes an explicitly anti-fascist left-wing
position inherited from the lost struggle in Spain. Protagonist Kurt Müller, a German member of
the European resistance to the Nazis, has fled to America with his family. There he is forced to
kill a Romanian diplomat who threatens to expose him. The Breen Office, whose chief would
later in 1942 also be quite exercised over OWI pressure in favor of Mission to Moscow,
demanded two changes in the script before even considering approval. First, it must be clear
“with a line of dialogue” that Müller realizes that he will be assassinated if he is betrayed to the
Germans; second, at the end of the picture “it be clearly and unmistakably established that Kurt
13
has been finally killed by the Nazis.” Breen simplistically argued that murder is never justified
and, naively, that in any case the Romanian “is not a Nazi.” In a letter to Hays at the New York
office of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors, Breen expressed a more general “worry
I mentioned to you the other day, namely the general impression that seems to prevail in the
minds of many people hereabouts that so long as the person killed is either a German or a Nazi,
the killing is justified.” Warner Bros. producer Hal Wallis responded from “hereabouts” that “it
is not necessary to justify the killing of a Nazi heavy in a picture.” Hellman too reacted strongly
against the suggested revisions, rejecting “the strange theory that one needs to be killed if one
kills a Nazi.” She also found objectionable the PCA’s condemnation of the movie’s alleged
promotion of sexual immorality by noting that the woman involved is unhappily “married to a
Nazi and a villain.”22 For Breen and Hays, the Nazi was not as great a threat to civilization as
were the more traditional foes of their own comfortable bourgeois and religious convictions:
indecency, atheism, and socialism. For liberal Hellman the Nazi was the foe of decency and for
Communist Hammett the foe of society. The conflict had a typical Hollywood ending: the
demanded changes were made but in such a way as to vitiate the rationale behind them.23
Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca channeled Warner Bros. longstanding anti-German and
anti-Nazi stance into group identity and collective resistance to the Nazis, themes promoted by
OWI. Colonel Strasser, played by tall, slim German actor Conrad Veidt with humorless venom,
is clearly Teutonic in the aristocratic Prussian style but he also exudes more a modern
malevolence à la Nazi. He, like Rommel, sports no aristocratic “von.” His name has a
utilitarian, even proletarian simplicity and directness to it. He wears the uniform of the
Luftwaffe, the most recent and Nazified of the German armed services, and he arrives in an
airplane. The other German officers are a blend of arrogance and officiousness, described and
14
dismissed by a Russian bartender as “Germans boom, boom, boom, boom”). Unlike Strasser,
they are anything but supermen, being “overweight and stupid.”24 Casablanca’s Nazi is not just
an American but a European—even a Jewish—one. Casablanca’s Nazi—and there really is only
one Nazi so fleshed out among the German officers (and an arrogant official of the Deutsche
Bank)—is more diminished than highlighted by the many other Germans (and Europeans) who
people the film as refugees, bystanders, and collaborators. In Casablanca this distinction lumps
German soldiers together with their Nazi leader(s) and renders the good Germans refugees.
While in line with a traditional Hollywood distinction between the German people and their Nazi
leaders, the plot and point of Casablanca characterizes “good” Germans as among those—like
many of the film’s actors and crew—escaping Nazism. Casablanca contextualizes and vitiates
the image of the Nazi as an outlier among decent people like “Americans” and “most
Europeans.” This was because Hollywood had been a main beneficiary of economic and
15
political catastrophe in Europe since the late 1920s, catastrophe that delivered to it emigrants like
Hungarian director Curtiz.
More than any other wartime American film, Casablanca resounds with the powerful
voice of these emigrants, many of them Jewish, from Nazi-occupied Europe now playing
refugees from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Sweden, Russia, Norway, Bulgaria, Italy, and France
in December 1941. Veidt, who fled Germany with his Jewish wife, left behind a film career that
began with his appearance as the sleepwalking killer in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert
Wiene, 1919). Peter Lorre, born László Löwenstein in Hungary and who achieved stardom in
Germany as the child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M (1931), plays Ugarte, the oily but hapless
Italian trader in refugee souls.25 Hans Heinz von Twardowski, who had played one of Veidt’s
victims in Caligari and fled Nazi Germany because of his homosexuality, appears here in an
uncredited role as a German officer who fights with a French counterpart over—ironically—a
woman. And the Russian bartender mentioned above is played by Hungarian Jewish refugee S.
Z. Sakall. Combined with the major role played in the film by a Negro piano player, this array of
peoples visually, though not rhetorically, also represents the Nazi in terms of his murderous
obsession with racial superiority and inferiority.
Still, even though many of the crew and cast, as well most of the twelve Germanspeaking actors in the film, were Jewish, there is no mention of Jews in Casablanca, or indeed of
religion at all. Unlike Once Upon a Honeymoon (Leo McCarey, 1942) and 1944 movies like
Address Unknown (William Menzies), Tomorrow the World (Leslie Fenton), and None Shall
Escape (André de Toth), the Nazi in Casablanca appears not to be presented in the context of
war against the Jews. Two characters alone appear to be Jews: a couple the script alone names
Leuchtag who in a single scene to humorous effect practice English in the goosestep of German
16
syntax. So which Nazi bestrides Casablanca? The Nazi as enemy of freedom? The Nazi as
threat to America? The Nazi as enemy of civilization? The Nazi as enemy of peace? All of
these standard-issue Nazi identities are invoked or implied in Casablanca since the movie carries
the voice of the Hollywood left. But as in all but a very few American movies before and during
the Second World War there is apparently a Nazi missing in action here as well: The Nazi as
enemy of the Jews. The Final Solution was not widely known as it happened and so was hardly
acknowledged in American public discourse. This was the case not only because of secrecy on
the part of the Nazis and military priorities on the part of the American government and people,
but also once again because of concern among American Jews, including studio heads in
Hollywood, that the war not be seen as being waged on behalf of Jews. Thus the Nazi in
Casablanca as well is not presented in the context of the axial Nazi war against the Jews.26
And yet the Holocaust in American movies from the years of the Second World War into
the 21st century has a deeper, broader, more nuanced, as well as more problematic history. This
is, first, because the Holocaust was and is bound up in the larger context of Hollywood’s
representations of Nazis, Germans, and the Second World War. The very focus on the Nazi as
murderer of the Jews, as Lawrence Baron has recently demonstrated, moves the subject from
event to actor, opening up a wider field of inquiry and discovery that places the Holocaust in the
context of American culture, society, and politics. Second, the treatment of the Holocaust in
American movies was and is also a function of the event’s own historical and cultural enormity
in that it “will out” in ways not always even fully understood or mediated by the makers of
movies. Thus early postwar films about the Holocaust like The Diary of Anne Frank (George
Stevens, 1959) did not break new American cinematic ground. This was because American
movies already in a variety of ways in a variety of genres had addressed—however indirectly or
17
inadequately—Nazi extermination of Jews. The Diary of Anne Frank, criticized for avoiding the
horror—and the specifically Jewish horror—of the Holocaust, was, as Peter Novick argues, not
the product of a decade in which the Holocaust was simply ignored. Indeed, in Novick’s
reading, the movie, like the decade, was marked by a palpable presence of an absence of the
Holocaust in debates swirling around Hollywood’s adaptation of the stage play.27
There is even in Casablanca one subtle—heretofore unnoticed and perhaps even
unintentional— reference to Jews trapped in murderous iron Nazi Europe. It comes in the
opening sequence in which enemies of the collaborationist Vichy French regime are being
rounded up in the streets of the city. A pickpocket, played by German-Jewish émigré Curt Bois,
explains to his witless British marks that two German couriers have been found murdered in the
18
desert and that “[t]his is the customary round-up of refugees [and] liberals.”28 In one shot behind
him can be seen in deep focus the Palais de Justice into which the (usual) suspects are being led
and part of which is a balcony (next to the entrance of the Prefecture of Police building) that has
a Star of David on it. The latter detail is realistic since not only had there long been a large
Jewish community in Morocco the hexagram had also long been a symbol throughout Arab
North Africa. The set designers for Casablanca did a great deal of research on North African
design, including the transformation of a French set from the film The Desert Song (Roy del
Ruth, 1929) “into a specifically Moorish street.”29 So the detail of the hexagram is historically
realistic, but given the subject matter of the film in the minds of the filmmakers then and the
audience then and now the hexagram is also—or, rather, principally—a Jewish Star. This fact
reminds us that objects as well as characters can—at various levels of intentionality and design
in film—serve as representation, particularly of those things like Nazis that represent not only
threat but considerable cultural, political, and social volatility. Strikingly in this regard the
criminal narrating the scene goes on to editorialize in language as highly charged for the times as
his name in the screenplay:
Dark European
Unfortunately, along with these unhappy refugees the scum of Europe has gravitated to
Casablanca. Some of them have been waiting years for a visa. . . .
I beg of you, M’sieur, watch yourself. Be on guard. This place is full of vultures,
vultures everywhere, everywhere.30
The dialogue is delivered as humorous, but it clearly characterizes the Nazi and his own
characterization of Jews. How intentional this was is open to question, but the visual, aural,
19
rhetorical, and historical connections existed then and exist now. Their juxtaposition is certainly
a guide to as well as an expression of concerns central to people then and to people now.
The great majority of wartime and postwar American movies concentrated on the
Germans as military foes. But still there were differences and distinctions that reflected both the
origins and conditions affecting creation and reception of film product dealing with the Nazi.
Hitler, Beast of Berlin (1939) produced by Ben Judell (of what was originally Progressive
Pictures Corporation) was the first to portray Nazism unflinchingly. The film features an
uncredited von Twardowski (who portrays, ironically and stereotypically, a “gayish” Reinhard
Heydrich in Hangmen Also Die! [Frtiz Lang, 1943]) as an SS man who dies working for the
resistance. Here the struggle is an American one for “democracy” and the Nazis are a mix of
monocled Prussians along with SS men who enjoy whipping and drinking. Shot in less than
week, the movie is shabby and careless in its set design. All but one swastika are drawn
backwards, though this does have an expressionistic effect suggesting, whether intentionally or
not, a disordered and volatile Nazi environment. In 1942 Judell produced Hitler, Dead or Alive,
20
a rip-roaringly bad “caper” film—a rich industrialist hires crooks to kill a buffoonish, crazed
Hitler—that in extremely lame and low-budget manner anticipates The Dirty Dozen (Robert
Aldrich, 1967). Once again swastikas, this time on flags at Dachau, are backward, but the ones
on armbands are the right way round. Once again there are monocles aplenty. Like most
wartime and postwar films, soldiers wear the First-World-War-style German helmets available
from prop departments. Hitler and the Nazis are arrogant and murderous fools, klutzes, and
cowards who kill “dames and kids” and one of whom, SS Colonel Hecht, mistakenly shoots
Hitler, who has shaved off his mustache to escape his American captors. An aristocratic
confidante of Hitler’s, Else von Brandt, is one of the “decent Germans” who helps the
Americans. Brandt says killing Hitler will only allow the German “warlords of blood and iron”
to prosecute the war more effectively. Now the old Prussian German can be an ally against the
new Nazi German.31 A crazy Hitler as detriment to the German war effort anticipates the plot of
The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission (Andrew McLaglen, 1985) and turns out to have been an element
of Allied military policy in 1944 and 1945. In Warner Bros. Busses Roar a Nazi is the brutish
bespectacled brain directing a gang comprised of a Japanese-American truck farmer, the crew of
a Japanese submarine, and a mobster from Central Casting to blow up a California oil field.
Well apart from such Poverty Row productions were films by notable European directors:
Jean Renoir’s This Land Is Mine (1943) and Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. Like Casablanca, these films
represent the flow of cinema talent to Hollywood from Europe and the presentation of a
European perspective on the Second World War. In Casablanca Rick’s Café Américain is a
United Nations of refugees with the United States as the world’s hope (“Everybody comes to
Rick’s”). Rick publicly avows American isolationism—“I stick my neck out for nobody”—but
he ran guns to Ethiopia in 1935, fought the fascists in Spain in 1936, and clearly hates the
21
Nazis.32 Renoir and Hitchcock lecture Americans on their responsibility to do something about a
dangerous world. This Land Is Mine warns Americans away from the easy dichotomies of good
versus evil evident in most war films. Renoir does this by showing how complicated resistance
to evil is and presenting the Germans as constrained as well as constraining. Hitchcock,
concerned that American “can-do” overconfidence, war-weariness, and democratic divisiveness
might undermine the war against Nazism, portrays Germans as intelligent, strong, and ruthless.
Upon the outbreak of war in 1939 Hitchcock had been urged by the British government to stay in
Hollywood in order “to counteract American isolationism.”33 Even though Renoir and
Hitchcock were recent arrivals to America (Renoir in 1940), both films are American films
insofar as they were produced in America in the continuity style developed by Hollywood,
employ Hollywood actors, and, in Renoir’s case, filmed in English rather than French. Most
importantly of all, they were addressed to Americans. Renoir’s theme is that the terrible
dynamics of oppression, collaboration, and resistance can occur anywhere. Renoir was
concerned that Americans dismissed all French under German occupation as collaborationists,
while American movies generally idealized resisters and demonized the Germans without
sufficient attention either to the costs of resistance or the cruel subtleties of German occupation.
This was true of such German émigré director films as Hangmen Also Die!—with a screenplay
by émigré Communist Bertolt Brecht—and Douglas Sirk’s Hitler’s Madman.
The desire to generalize is apparent from the beginning of This Land Is Mine in which a
screen title places the action in a small town “Somewhere in Europe,” rather than specifically in
Renoir’s native France. The “town is neither French nor American, but a mid-Atlantic
equivalent” emphasized in a script written by politically liberal Hollywood veteran Dudley
Nichols, “white, flat even lighting” characteristic of Hollywood dramas, and a cast dominated by
22
Anglo-Saxon and American actors Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Hara, George Sanders, Kent
Smith, and George Colouris, with Austrian émigré Walter Slezak as the German commander.34
Renoir had originally wanted Erich von Stroheim, who had played the sympathetically drawn
German First World War officer von Rauffenstein in Renoir’s antiwar classic Grand Illusion
(1937), to play the German officer in charge of the town: “This is no ordinary German officer. I
got the idea for him from . . . a discussion I had in Lisbon with an important German agent. . . .
He knew French culture extremely well, and he was a great admirer of it. His dream was a
Europe in which the Germans were the organizers and the French the artists. . . . I was
impressed by this cultivated and refined person, since he seemed to me to be a lot more as a
dangerous than some Nazi thug.”35 Slezak plays Major Erich von Keller (“cellar,” “tavern”) as a
pragmatist, like Colonel Lanser in The Moon Is Down (Irving Pichel, 1943). He wants order
23
rather than chaos (just like the killers in the extermination camps). He cultivates members of the
solid French bourgeoisie such as George Lambert (played by old Nazi-reliable Sanders) who see
the German occupation as a weapon against Communists, intellectuals, and Jews. Although
Keller wants the fruits of collaboration as well as of conquest, in response to acts of sabotage he
has hostages shot. But he contrives the acquittal of a schoolteacher wrongly accused of the
murder of Lambert. The dark core of Keller’s German is embodied in his adjutant, Schwarz
(“black”), who wears a monocle, and expressed in Keller’s own description of the United States
as “a charming cocktail of Irish and Jews.” Such indirection likely escaped most wartime
viewers.36 The only act of anti-Semitism is when French school children, who are afraid of
Allied bombing raids and not only fearful but—very unsettlingly—impressed by the glamour,
strength, and power of the German army, mark a Jewish classmate with a “J.” Renoir’s target is
not so much the German oppressor but the effects of oppression on the oppressed as an object
lesson to Americans not to be so sanguine about the conduct of “free peoples” on the American
model. The Nazi brings out the worst in those he dominates. So in the character played by
Sanders, an educated and professional Frenchman, Renoir expands the definition of “Nazi” to
include people who are not German. This was an important political and social reality in Europe
under Nazi occupation and also a reflection of the widespread appeal of Nazism and fascism
among bourgeois Europeans between 1918 and 1945. This Land Is Mine establishes that
behavior and not (just) nationality can constitute being a Nazi by intent as well as in effect.
Hitchcock’s Lifeboat concentrates on rallying American commitment to the war against
the Nazi. The movie resembles late wartime espionage melodramas about the danger of Nazi
spies and saboteurs and also displays the wartime Anglophilia evident in romantic dramas from
Daryl Zanuck at Fox. Lifeboat began life as a story by John Steinbeck focusing on class and
24
racial conflicts among Americans and Britons whose ship has been sunk by a U-boat.
Hitchcock’s film stresses the strength, ruthlessness, and craft of the sunken submarine’s captain
who too is in the lifeboat. Hitchcock’s purpose was to urge Americans not to underestimate the
power and resolve of the Nazi enemy. So his German, unlike Steinbeck’s, is a surgeon, speaks
perfect English, and has a secret cache of water, food tablets, and energy pills. Willi also has a
compass and exploits the divisions among his democratic companions to row the lifeboat toward
a German supply ship. While some critics found these contrasting Nazi and Western portraits
distressing and counterproductive, in the end the Americans beat the German to death with a
brutality as discomfiting to Hollywood censors as the machine-gunning of surrendering German
airmen in Passage to Marseille (Michael Curtiz, 1944).37 The supply ship is sunk by an Allied
warship and a young German sailor crawls aboard the lifeboat and pulls a gun. When he is
disarmed, he asks “Aren’t you going to kill me?” This question prompts one of the Americans to
ask what is to be done “with people like that?” The film ends with another American saying that
the answer may rest with the Germans’ victims. That the new German is young suggests either
that his Nazi education has made him incorrigible or that he can be reeducated into humane and
democratic sensibility. Such ambiguity about the future served Hitchcock’s stress on Nazi
wartime resolve, an ambiguity taken amiss or just missed in all the action by reviewers and
25
viewers. This ending replaced one that promised final Allied victory by having the German
ship’s flag floating in the water: “the Swastika shimmers, becomes fainter, and is finally
obliterated, as we FADE OUT.”38 Instead, the Nazi in Lifeboat remained what Hitchcock needs
a German in 1944 to be and, for wartime Hollywood, is: a prisoner of war.
In 1945 both much more and much less was to be said about the Nazi. Much more
because much more was known about the scale of Nazi horror in Europe, much less because of
growing fear among American makers of movies and American makers of policy with our now
victorious Soviet allies taking the place of our now defeated Nazi foes. Peter Godfrey’s long
overlooked Hotel Berlin, which premiered in March 1945, was both culmination and expansion
of the wartime movie Nazi. Here he is shown to be cruel, omnipresent, and highly militarized,
though now also desperate and seeking a way out of the trap of a lost war. Nazis also remain
common and foolish, as when a star-struck SS man accepts a cigarette from a female film
celebrity during a search of her suite, the entire scene underscored by a bassoon and clarinet
burlesque of martial music. (There is no music at all in Lifeboat.) The wide variety of German
uniforms on display in this movie was—and still is—de rigueur for films about Nazi Germany.
There are mobs of black-uniformed and beswastikaed thugs bullying and arresting fearful
26
Berliners; a corrupt, cowardly, and licentious Gauleiter and SA officer found out and arrested by
the SS; and a black-uniformed Central Casting Nazi, Joachim Helm (German for “helmet” and
Variety “slanguage” for directing a movie). Helm, “the Gestapo heavy,” is played with ugly
bug-eyed mug lugubriousness by well-used in wartime British heavy role specialist George
Colouris.39 And even though Gestapo officers during the war usually dressed in civilian garb,
the infamous organizational acronym after all meaning secret police, Hollywood generally stuck
with the prewar all-black General SS uniform with swastika armband since it has greater visual
impact. Likewise, Helm’s Luger pistol, then as now a favorite physical Hollywood metonym for
the Nazi, plays a persistent visual role in the action.
Most importantly, Hotel Berlin broke new ground in the depiction of the Nazi as enemy
of the Jews. This was partly because in 1945 more was beginning to be known and shown about
“the camps,” the end of the war ended Hollywood and Jewish concern about Americans’ war aim
priorities, and there was a final burst of leftwing screenwriting before the Cold War ended the
27
careers of those like Hotel Berlin’s Alvah Bessie. While the shrewd Helm, described by the
Production Code Administration as “a minor Heydrich,”40 pursues only resisters, a stereotypical
Prussian General Arnim von Dahnwitz—replete with flashing monocle—has been implicated in
the generals’ plot to kill Hitler but known to the plebian resistance as the “murderer of Kharkov.”
The movie’s introduction of Nazi atrocities in Russia—the novel’s repeated description is
“Victor of Kharkov”— reflects Bessie’s leftwing condemnation of “Junkers, Industrialists, and
their Nazi gangsters.”41 But it was also a modernized vilification of Prussian officers as Nazis
confirmed much later by discovery of German Army involvement in SS mass murders of Jews
and Communists in the East. Facing arrest, dropped by his mistress, and his aristocratic honor
torn by complicity with Nazi thugs, von Dahnwitz shoots himself. There is also the brownshirt
Plottke, not only bested by the SS but upbraided by the “Aryan” wife of a Jew whose family
department store Plottke seized for himself. And there is actress Lisa Dorn who maneuvers her
way among the fraying Nazis with whom she has upholstered her career. Her resultant
complicity in the Nazi war against the Jews is flagged in novel, screenplay, and movie by Dorn
28
(“thorn”) being in rehearsal as Portia for The Merchant of Venice (“If you prick us, do we not
bleed?”), which was a popular production in the Third Reich.42
The Holocaust is clearly on display within two trajectories of the story contained in the
movie. One of these vectors is a Jewish woman, Sarah Baruch (“blessed”), who in a long shot
from inside the hotel sheds her star (just about an anachronism in 1945) and is subsequently
bullied by Plottke about putting it back on. In both scenes the star itself is glimpsed rather than
displayed. More striking is the scene in which a German airman tears up a photograph with the
remark, “He looks like a Jew!” Most telling is the change of Professor Johannes Koenig
(“king”) from a literature professor who bemoans “the German soul . . . full of darkness and with
the face of a gargoyle” into a scientist once imprisoned in Dachau.43 As part of the movie’s
theme of Nazis escaping to plot their return to power in Germany—the last line of the film is the
Foreign Ministry’s Baron von Stetten’s (stet, stetig: “continuous,” “perpetual”) “We’ll be
29
back”— Koenig is promised a laboratory in South America, a popular locale for Nazis in movies
and real life after 1945. Consumed by guilt over his part in the modern Nazi exploitation of
science, he utters a place name from dark and distant Poland rarely heard in American movies,
and unmentioned in Baum’s novel, when he observes that “in our gas chambers at Birkenau we
can exterminate 6000 people in twenty-four hours.” This mention of Auschwitz death camp
Birkenau—evolved in the script from “concentration camp” and “Dachau” by late 1944—is
historically vitiated somewhat by the word “people.”44 But elsewhere the film does establish a
link between Jews and death camps by having Sarah Baruch speak of someone named Rosa
having been “sent to Poland.” By contrast, most wartime movies ignored or even misrepresented
Poland; only one of the three major exceptions was made by an American: In Our Time
(Vincent Sherman, 1944). To Be Or Not To Be was produced in Hollywood but was very much a
Lubitsch film while Dangerous Moonlight (Brian Desmond Hurst, 1941), released as Suicide
Squadron in the United States in 1942, was made in Britain. Even in cosmopolitan Casablanca
there are no Poles identified as such among the many nationalities of European refugees crowded
into Rick’s.45
Such movie discourse in Hotel Berlin on the—here not so named—Holocaust was
exceptional for its time and place. The tentativeness with which the vocabulary of genocide is
handled actually reinforces the proper sobriety with which the subject is treated. Hotel Berlin
avoids the problem that overtook Charlie Chaplin’s early masterful satire The Great Dictator
(1940), whose Adenoid Hynkel snorts about “Die Chuden!” but whose humor soon seemed
inadequate and even objectionable given what “Nazi” would in just a couple of years come fully
and finally to mean. There is a concentration camp scene in The Great Dictator, which Hotel
Berlin because of its setting can avoid. It is not the place for the country club parody Chaplin
30
offers. The scene includes a now doubly unfortunate reference to “a smoking room”; in another
now unfunny scene, there is very short-lived Nazi military interest in a “gas that will kill
everybody.” Even a mention of “wiping out the Jews” is trivialized by “Then the brunettes.”
The black core of the Nazi was—and is—such that treatment of him to a degree unmatched by
almost any other subject involves both great care and great consequence. Chaplin himself later
admitted that “[h]ad I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could
not have made The Great Dictator, I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the
Nazis.”46 Chaplin’s aim, defensible in 1940, was to exploit the astounding resemblance between
the two most famous men in the world at the time. Early on in his career, Hitler was the guy
with the Charlie Chaplin mustache; later it became a burden for Chaplin, whom the Nazis
(wrongly) believed was Jewish (Chaplin replied that he wasn’t, but that he wished he were). The
result in The Great Dictator is story that in the end has a Jewish barber mistaken for Hitler and
who takes his chance to speak to the world (of course, Chaplin speaking on film to the world) in
order to make a plea for common humanity and world peace. When it came to the Jews, Chaplin
extended his generosity of spirit to the Germans in general. Hynkel’s speech, spoken in a
hilarious burlesque of German, elicits repeated cheers from the crowd, which he silences
31
immediately by waving his hand. But his rant on the Jews alone is received in silence until he
jerks his hand to signal applause. Even the country in the film, Ptomania, is (thinly) disguised by
having all the signs in an ostensibly Central European Slavic language, which also emphasizes
distance and, somewhat ethnocentrically perhaps, a dark, alien environment far from the West
and civilization. By 1942 all this seemed at least insufficient and even inappropriate. Chaplin
could take some justifiable pride in the fact that the German consul in Los Angeles objected in
1938 after reading a newspaper article about Chaplin’s plan to make a film “about a defenseless
little Jew who is mistaken for a powerful dictator.”47 And that in Chicago, with its large German
population, his film was banned. Finally, it is the case that almost no one in America could
anticipate the culture-shattering mass murder magnitude of what only long after the war would
be termed the Holocaust and for which the word “genocide” was invented in 1944.
The power of names, places, and objects associated with Nazi genocide remained fraught
after the war as well. Even much later in The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1965), the first major
Hollywood movie about the Holocaust, the German place name Birkenau, consistent to be sure
32
with that film’s focus on traumatic repression, is never uttered. But it is present—from the
Polish Brzezinka, “birches and meadows”—in the form of birches at the base of a meadow
where a Jewish family is rounded up. And it lies in the name Miss Birchfield, a social worker
who tries in vain to help bitter, brutal, and benumbed survivor Sol Nazerman, who physically
resembles Nazerman’s murdered wife, and whose apartment faces east over train yards.
Similarly and significantly, the “J” that appears on the sleeve of a concentration camp prisoner in
The Mortal Storm and on a French school child in This Land is Mine in place of the spoken word
“Jew,” the German “Jude” in Fox’s The Man I Married (Irving Pichel, 1940), “Jew”
whitewashed on a shop window in The Great Dictator, the Star of David in Casablanca,
Rommel’s tirade in German in Five Graves to Cairo, and Luger pistols in movies during and
after the war all evidence the indirect use of objects and sounds to represent the Nazi and the
Holocaust. This alternative to movie characters was a means to evade and exploit social,
political, and cultural restrictions as well as, as we shall see in later films, aesthetic and artistic
limits.48
33
The late addition of Birkenau to the screenplay of Hotel Berlin was also consistent
with—perhaps even causative for—a change in the ending. The movie concludes with German
resistance fighter Martin Richter (“judge”) shooting Lisa Dorn in a cellar (with a Luger) for
betraying him (a thorn on his Christ-like brow?) to the Gestapo. In an earlier treatment of the
story Richter leaves Dorn—who originally hides him from the Nazis—alive, hoping he has
opened her eyes to the nature of fascism. This is consistent with the book since Baum has Dorn,
von Dahnwitz’s innocent and ignorant former lover, join Richter in hiding. The evolution
toward the death of Dorn in the film is hinted at in the screenwriters’ notes on the relationship
between her and Richter that speak of Dorn’s opportunistic and cynical desire to avoid reprisal
by the resistance as “factual [since] many Nazis have been helping their former victims . . . to get
back into their good graces.”49 This death of another Nazi rat trying to leave a sinking Nazi ship
is emblematic of liberal as well as leftwing concern at the end of the war about the survival and
revival of Nazism. The ending of Hotel Berlin thus links with the revised ending of Lifeboat that
too sets a postwar task of punishment—and vigilance regarding young Germans indoctrinated by
Nazism—for the Nazis’ victims rather than celebrating the literal sinking of the swastika’s
fortunes. In 1945 Hotel Berlin posits the horror of Nazi escape and return, unlike Baum’s novel,
which has von Stetten falling asleep from exhaustion instead of embarking on his escape.50
Horror at what the Nazi has done—and might do again—has just been magnified exponentially
above all by what the name Birkenau represents: millions of Jews gassed by a chemical
developed long ago by the German chemical industry for the extermination of vermin such as
rats.
Government censors were not at all concerned with such references to the Holocaust. In
1945 OWI was still concentrating on the issue of the present war against—and the immediate
34
future of—Germany. In November 1944 Warner Bros. sent the Hotel Berlin screenplay to
OWI’s Los Angeles Overseas Bureau in order to smooth the way for foreign exhibition. Initially
OWI found positive the film’s emphasis on the possible long-term danger posed by “Junkers and
Industrialists” seeking to continue their pursuit of “world domination.” This was consistent with
OWI’s overall bias toward liberal and democratic values also evident in the judgment that
foreign nations—and especially those just liberated from Nazi tyranny—should know that
America would be unstinting in pursuit of German warmongers and war criminals as well as
prevention of any Nazi resurgence anywhere in the world. OWI also liked Hotel Berlin’s
emphasis on German resistance to Hitler as indicative that Germans be given the chance to “earn
their way back into the fellowship of peace-loving and law-abiding nations.” The only
reservation about the screenplay was “the open statement that Argentina is at present harboring a
complete and functioning Nazi organization,” which might complicate American foreign policy
in “our” hemisphere in the coming years; as of November 27 the studio had changed “Argentina”
to “South America.” A few days later the chief of the Los Angeles Bureau wrote the studio that
the von Dahnwitz character was drawn too sympathetically and that this might cause audiences
to forget that his attempt to assassinate Hitler was carried out only “in the hope of maintaining
the German military regime and continuing a strong, but undemocratic Germany.”51
OWI review of the release print in March 1945 brought new concerns, however. These
stemmed essentially from the script’s socialist conviction that human beings are good absent
oppressive social conditions produced by economic and social elites. By contrast, American
reviewers and audiences in 1945 were most often disposed not to be charitable to the Germans
who had started the war and recently cost so many American soldiers their lives. Only Lorre’s
Koenig gave voice to their concerns in his cynical and derisive search for the “good Germans”
35
who might all be hiding in his hotel room closet. The government also had a more specific
worry along these lines, namely, that in the movie the “foredoomed attempt . . . of German
militarists and Nazis” to go underground abroad was now “overshadowed by an artificial,
melodramatic and optimistic treatment of the present German Underground.” According to
OWI, the visual impression left by the film that many Germans were disgusted with the Nazi
regime “could have the disturbing effect on overseas audiences of implying that Americans
might lean towards a so-called ‘soft peace’ or be too naïve when it comes to judging the
Germans.” In April 1945 OWI ruled that for these reasons Hotel Berlin was “unsuitable” for
“for early use in the liberated territories of Europe” or for distribution in Japan, Thailand, Korea,
French Indo-China, and Burma. In July Warner Bros. was informed that Hotel Berlin was also
presently not approved for showing in Switzerland.52 The presumed reaction of nations occupied
by Nazi Germany certainly conformed to the usual anger that follows a war. But it was also
clear to OWI that the scale of Nazi monstrousness went far beyond that normally associated with
war in the modern era. This is another measure of the importance and impact of the Nazi in reel
as well as real life. Especially when linked with what would become known as the Holocaust,
the Nazi would remain a powerful and problematic presence on the Hollywood screen around the
world. He would remain above all a powerful horrific attraction after 1945, conforming to but
also transcending and even transforming Hollywood’s longstanding, popular, and profitable
portrayal of the conflict and cohabitation of evil and good.
The end of the American war against the Nazi by no means meant the end of Hollywood
movies about him—or, as we shall again see, her. Indeed, Warner Bros. was planning a sequel
to Hotel Berlin on postwar Germany to be titled Ghost of Berchtesgaden.53 And OWI’s attention
was already beginning to fade by 1944.54 Freed from the demands, opportunities, and constraints
36
of the war, the movie Nazi would in the decades after 1945 in fact assume even greater boxoffice presence in a variety of guises in a variety of genres. Such trends and eras, while
overlapping, nonetheless represented somewhat distinct evolutions in the perception and
presentation of the Nazi in the contexts of American culture and history in an increasingly global
age. These evolutions will serve as the bases for the chapters that follow in which discussions of
a variety of movies complement and contextualize concentration on one exemplary film of each
era. We will also keep in mind and in view the intentions of—and influences on—the multiple
makers of movies, the demands and reactions of critics and audiences to these movies, and the
ways in which audiences—including the authors of this book—receive in old and new ways
movie portraits of the Nazi. As for the last, however, it is the case that reviews and reception of
movies do not measure completely—or even at all—the influence or reflection of images and
ideas coursing from the contexts of culture and history. In the immediate postwar period, the
Nazi would be seen noirishly by some filmmakers as an ongoing threat to civilization, not only—
as in Lifeboat and Hotel Berlin—from without but also from within American culture and
politics. Very soon, however, the movie Nazi would be rivaled and even eclipsed by the “good
German” in defense of the West—and especially Western Europe—against Soviet Communism.
By the 1960s the Civil Rights Movement, fear of nuclear war, and opposition to the war in
Vietnam spawned a counterculture within which what some radicals called “Amerika” was
regarded as the inheritor of Nazi racism and imperialism. Commercialism and even cynicism
subsequently spawned a series of movies that exploited growing popular and scholarly interest in
Hitler and the Holocaust that had begun germinating as early as 1961 with the televised trial of
Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. At the same time, serious filmmakers were exploring new ways
of representing the evil of Nazism in a variety of genres. Postmodern play began to accompany
37
and even eclipse modern narrative earnestness in ways that affected, for both good and ill,
Hollywood images of the Nazi. By the 1980s national cinemas around the world were
increasingly being challenged and even overwhelmed by the form and subject matter of the
Hollywood commercial entertainment movie. Thereby the American movie Nazi in his various
guises and genres became international in production and consumption. In all of these ways over
all of this time, the Nazi would, among many other things, continue to serve as a mirror held up
to America as well as a window onto the world.
1
Bernard F. Dick, The Star-Spangled Screen: The American World War II Film (Lexington, KY,
1996), 47, 49; Joseph I. Breen to Producers Pictures Corporation, September 9, 1939 and Carl
Milliken to Harry Rothner, November 3, 1939 [Goose Step], AMPAS Production Code
Administration Records (PCA), Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills; Thomas Doherty,
Hollywood and Hitler 1933-1939 (New York, 2013); Ben Urwand, The Collaboration:
Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (Cambridge, MA, 2013).
2
Breen to Alfred T. Mannon, July 22 and August 8, 1936, Mannon to Breen, July 29, 1936,
PCA, Reel 12, Herrick Library; Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 17.
3
Breen to Walter Wanger, February 3, 1937, January 4 and February 7, 1938, PCA, Reel 14,
Herrick Library; Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 17.
4
“‘Blockade’ Given Pink Pedigree,” The Bulletin 12,2 (1938), 9, Hollywood Now, July 7, 1938,
1, PCA, Reel 14, Internation[al] Aid Fraternity to Will Hays, [1939] [Confessions of a Nazi Spy],
PCA, Reel 15, Herrick Library.
5
New York Times, June 17, 1938, PCA, Reel 13, Herrick Library; Dick, Star-Spangled Screen,
17-20; Jill Watts, Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood (New York, 2007), 146.
38
6
“Off-Color Remarque,” New Masses¸ typescript, February 15, 1938, Georg Gyssling to Breen,
September 30, 1938, Breen to Louis B. Mayer, January 22 and 27, 1938, PCA, Reel 14, Herrick
Library.
7
Tony Barta, “Film Nazis: The Great Escape,” in Barta, Screening the Past: Film and the
Representation of History (Westport, CT, 1988), 133; Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 69, 92-93, 97.
8
Paul Nathanson, The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America (Albany, 1991), 37-38, 261-
62; Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism” [1975], in Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New
York, 1980), 91, 94; Barta, “Film Nazis,” 131; Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 10-40.
9
Barta, “Film Nazis,” 133; Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 54.
10
Breen to Will H. Hays, June 18, 1938, PCA, Reel 17, [Hays], “Re: Storm Over America
(WB),” January 22, 1939 [Confessions of a Nazi Spy] PCA, Reel 15, Herrick Library; Peter
Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York, 1999), 95.
11
Breen to Harold Smith, April 15, 1940, A. Duff Cooper, “The United States Risk Losing
Freedom of Speech Because of Fear of Propaganda, Translation from Paris Soir, 17 Mars 1940,”
“Analysis Chart,” December 19, 1939, PCA, Reel 17, Herrick Library.
12
Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 64, 69-72, 77, 78, 80; Hollywood Reporter, October 12, 1943,
Motion Picture Daily, October 13, 1943, PCA, Reel 20, Herrick Library.
13
Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA.,
1996).
14
“Synopsis,” n.d., 2 and [Rio Rita] October 20, 1941, PCA, Herrick Library; Dick, Star-
Spangled Screen, 46-50.
15
Carl Bernhardt to Hall Wallis, December 18, 1941, File 1899, Warner Bros. Archives, School
of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles; Hitler’s Children was
39
originally Hitler’s Women and then Women in Bondage; Hitler’s Women had been rejected as the
title for several films: Carl E. Milliken to Trem Carr, September 1, 1943 and Breen to Luigi
Luraschi, August 10, 1943 [The Hitler Gang], PCA, Reel 21, Herrick Library; Dick, StarSpangled Screen, 109-11, 196-200.
16
Lawrence H. Suid, Guts and Glory: Great American War Movies (Reading, MA, 1978), 47;
Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and
Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York, 1987), 282; Dick, Star-Spangled Screen,
110, 230-49; Thomas O. Kelly, “Race and Racism in the American World War II Film: The
Negro, the Nazi, and ‘the Jap’ in Bataan and Sahara,” Michigan Academician 24,4 (1992): 579;
“Synopsis,” 2.
17
Sabine Hake, Screen Nazis: Cinema, History, and Democracy (Madison, 2012), 4, 5, 7, 24.
Novick, Holocaust in American Life, 95; Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, 248-77,
281; Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (New York, 1986),
26, 60-61; Colin Shindler, Hollywood Goes to War: Films and American Society 1939-1952
(London, 1979), 66.
18
Hake, Screen Nazis, 41.
19
“Release Dialogue Script,” April 30, 1943, Reel 5A, 6, File 02878, Paramount Scripts, Herrick
Library; Bosley Crowther, New York Times, May 27, 1943; Shindler, Hollywood Goes to War, 7,
8-9, 13, 17, 19-20, 30-31, 40, 55, 57-59, 60-61, 62, 110, 120, 129; Robert McLaughlin and Sally
E. Parry, We’ll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema During World War II (Lexington,
KY, 2006), 108-9; Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, 282; Hake, Screen Nazis, 35, 39,
47, 49; Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 180, 188-93, 194-95, 227; “Jewish Hollywood’s
40
‘Confessions of a Nazi Spy’,” Deutscher Weckruf und Beobachter, May 4, 1939, 1, File 12508,
Warner Archives.
20
Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 14-17, 46.
21
Novick, Holocaust in American Life, 20-29.
22
Breen to Warner, June 5 and December 23, 1942, Breen to Hays, July 21, 1942, Hellman to
Breen, July 13, 1942, Wallis to Breen, July 20, 1942, PCA, Reel 20, Herrick Library; Hake,
Screen Nazis, 58-61; Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 23.
23
“Story Summary,” September 2, 1942, Motion Picture Daily, July 27, 1943, PCA, Reel 20,
Herrick Library.
24
McLaughlin and Parry, Always Have the Movies, 3; Howard Koch, Casablanca: Script and
Legend (Woodstock, NY, 1973), 23, 37; Variety, December 1, 1942; John U. Sturdevant,
“Another Movie the Nazis Won’t Like,” American Weekly, October 11, 1942, 17, File 683,
Warner Archives; Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 55-56.
25
Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca—Bogart,
Bergman, and World War II (New York, 1992), 211-12, 224; Hake, Screen Nazis, 52;
McLaughlin and Parry, Always Have the Movies, 2; Basinger, World War II Combat Film, 28;
Koch, Casablanca, 37-39, 107-9.
26
Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 168, 207-9; Barta, “Film Nazis,” 133; Koch, Casablanca, 27,
110-12; “Analysis Chart,” August 27, 1942, PCA, Reel 19, Herrick Library.
27
Novick, Holocaust in American Life, 117-20; Lawrence Baron, “Holocaust Iconography in
American Feature Films About Neo-Nazis,” Film & History 32,2 (2002): 38-47; Annette Insdorf,
Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, 3rd edition (Cambridge, 2003); Lawrence Baron,
Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust
41
Cinema (Lanham, MD, 2005); Lawrence Baron, “The First Wave of American ‘Holocaust’
Films, 1945-1959,” American Historical Review 115,1 (2010): 90-114; Aaron Kerner, Film and
the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films (New
York, 2011).
28
Koch, Casablanca, 21.
29
Harmetz, Usual Suspects, 104; Richard J. Anobile, Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (New York,
1974), 20; “Elevations Sheet #2 Ext. Sidewalk Café (Palais de Justice) Set No. 410-05,” June 22,
1942, File 5887A, Warner Archives.
30
Koch, Casablanca, 22, 105. The studio thought the pickpocket “could be Italian, in respect to
friendly European countries”: Carl Schaeffer to Jack Warner and Hal Wallis, May 22, 1942, File
1881A, Warner Archives.
31
Arthur T. Harman, “Story Idea,” n.d., 3, File 1899, Warner Archives; Dick, Star-Spangled
Screen, 74.
32
Koch, Casablanca, 26, 46-47, 51.
33
Roger Manvell, Films and the Second World War (New York, 1976), 35.
34
Raymond Durgnant, Jean Renoir (Berkeley, 1974), 235, 239; Janet Bergstrom, “Jean Renoir
and the Allied War Effort: Saluting France in Two Languages,” Historical Journal of Film,
Radio and Television 26,1 (2006): 45-56; Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, 290-95;
Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 27.
35
Quoted in Célia Bertin, Jean Renoir: A Life in Pictures (Baltimore, 1991), 211.
36
Bosley Crowther, New York Times, May 28, 1943; Variety, December 31, 1942.
37
Breen to Hal B. Wallis, December 17, 1943 and “‘Passage to Marseille’ Liked by B’Way
Critics’,” Hollywood Reporter, February 23, 1943, PCA, Breen to Jason Joy, August 4, 1943,
42
“Lifeboat Gets Flood of Praise on Broadway,” Hollywood Reporter, January 17, 1944, PCA,
Reel 21, Herrick Library; Robert E. Morsberger, “Adrift in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat,”
Literature/Film Quarterly 4,4 (1976): 325-38; Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, 30916; Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 85-89, 113-15. By contrast, Stroheim plays a brutal Nazi
officer in The North Star that reflects Lillian Hellman’s leftist leanings and the especially
merciless war “fascists” waged against in the Soviet Union: Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 161.
38
“‘Lifeboat’ Screenplay by Jo Swerling,” August 6, 1943, 162, File 353, Alfred Hitchcock
Papers, Herrick Library; Harry Brand, “Lifeboat,” November 18, 1943, “Story Summary,”
December 8, 1943, PCA, Reel 21, Herrick Library; Bosley Crowther, New York Times, January
13, 1944; Variety, December 31, 1943; Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 204-7.
39
Jack Warner to Steve Trilling, October 14, 1944, File 1755, Warner Archives.
40
“Cast of Characters,” 1, PCA, Herrick Library; Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 10, 62, 213-14.
Bessie had fought against the fascists in Spain and in 1950 was one of the “Hollywood Ten”
imprisoned and blacklisted.
41
Virginia Richardson, “Feature Script Review,” Office of War Information, Los Angeles
Overseas Bureau, Motion Picture Division, November 21, 1944, 1, RG 208, NARA 4741453,
National Archives and Records Administration (NA), Suitland, Maryland; Vicki Baum, Hotel
Berlin ’43 (Garden City, NY, 1944), 12, 87, 98.
42
Baum, Hotel Berlin ’43, 34-36, 87; Jo Pagano and Alvah Bessie, “Screenplay,” June 24, 1944,
30, File 1755, Warner Archives; Hake, Screen Nazis, 39, 41-43; John Gross, Shylock: A Legend
and Its Legacy (New York, 1997), 234-43, 332-34; Hamburg Institute for Social Research, The
German Army and Genocide: Crimes Against War Prisoners, Jews, and Other Civilians, 19391944 (New York, 1999), 76-171.
43
43
Baum, Hotel Berlin ’43, 76; Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 213-14.
44
Jo Pagano, “Second Revised Final Screenplay,” November 27, 1944, Scene 121, File 1755,
Warner Archives; Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi
Germany (New York, 1998), 87, 149, 232; Dick, Star-Spangled Screen, 172, 225.
45
M. B. B. Biskupsi, Hollywood’s War with Poland, 1939-1945 (Lexington, KY, 2009), 155-56,
300n198; “Analysis Chart.”
46
Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography (New York, 1964), 392;; Insdorf, Indelible Shadows, 62.
Chaplin’s stature was such that he was allowed—or simply demanded—greater freedom from
censorship. In The Great Dictator, Hitler pantomimes the anatomy of “Aryan” girls when he
refers to their “Holsteins”; in 1952 Breen objected to a similar description in Stalag 17 of
women’s breasts as “Glockenspiels”: Breen to Luigi Luraschi, February 14, 1952, PCA, Reel
29, Herrick Library.
47
Gyssling to Breen, October 31, 1938, PCA, Reel 17, Herrick Library.
48
Geoffrey Cocks, “Indirected by Stanley Kubrick,” Post Script 32,2 (2013): 22-35; Dick, Star-
Spangled Screen, 77, 78; Wendy Zierler, “‘My Holocaust Is Not Your Holocaust’: ‘Facing’
Black and Jewish Experience in The Pawnbroker, Higher Ground, and The Nature of Blood,”
Holocaust and Genocide Studies 18,1 (2004): 50-51, 56.
49
Jo Pagano and Alvah Bessie, “Supplementary Notes On The Basic Relationship Between Lisa
Dorn and Martin Richter,” July 6, 1944 and Pagano and Bessie, “‘Berlin Hotel’: List of Main
Changes in Treatment,” June 17, 1944, File 1755, Warner Archives; Baum, Hotel Berlin ’43,
249-50.
50
Baum, Hotel Berlin ’43, 249.
44
51
William S. Cunningham to James Geller, November 25, 1944, RG 208, NA; “Feature Script
Review,” 2, 3; Pagano, “Second Revised Final Screenplay,” Scene 121; “Second Revised Final
Screenplay,” October 24, 1944, 127, File 1755, Warner Archives. Argentina joined the war
against the Axis at the end of March 1945, but had long had close ties with Germany; from 1943
to 1946 the country was ruled by a military regime that later evolved into a fascist dictatorship
under Juan Perón.
52
Arnold M. Picker, Motion Picture Bureau, Overseas Branch, to John Dodd, July 24, 1945;
Joseph Handler to Picker, April 21, 1945; Picker to Joseph Hummel, April 26, 1945; Office of
War Information, “Long Range Motion Picture Review,” April 17, 1945; Virginia Richardson,
“Feature Viewing,” Office of War Information, Los Angeles Overseas Bureau, Motion Picture
Division, March 2, 1945, 2, RG 208, NA; Bosley Crowther, New York Times, March 3, 1945.
53
“Warners planen Film ‘Ghost of Berchtesgaden’,” n.d., File 683, Warner Archives.
54
Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, “What to Show the World: The Office of War
Information and Hollywood, 1942-1945,” Journal of American History 64,1 (1977): 102-3.