As the editor of this journal and I agreed when talking about this review, every savvy academic knows that one good way of enlarging the enrollment of any class you teach is by adding the name “Hitler” to the course title. The word “Hollywood” may not work quite as well, but over the years I have found

that it can stir more than a little excitement among students

Rosenstone, Robert A.

Caltech Authors - Main

????????????????????
????????????????????
Reviews in American History, Volume 43, Number 1, March 2015, pp.
143-148 (Review)
???????????????????????????????????????????
DOI: 10.1353/rah.2015.0017
For additional information about this article
                                             Access provided by California Inst of Technology (16 Apr 2015 16:32 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rah/summary/v043/43.1.rosenstone.html
HITLER AND HOLLYWOOD
Robert A. Rosenstone
Thomas Doherty. Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 2013. 429 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00.
Ben Urwand. The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. Cambridge, Mass.: 
Harvard University Press, 2013. 327 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $26.95.
As the editor of this journal and I agreed when talking about this review, every 
savvy academic knows that one good way of enlarging the enrollment of any 
class you teach is by adding the name “Hitler” to the course title. The word 
“Hollywood” may not work quite as well, but over the years I have found 
that it can stir more than a little excitement among students. Now we have 
two works showing that apparently the same strategy applies to scholarly 
publications. Not that either of these two books that link Hitler and Hollywood 
in their titles devotes a great deal of time to the German dictator. Both are 
largely concerned with the actions of bureaucrats in the Nazi regime toward 
the American film industry and the various kinds of responses these actions 
brought forth in Hollywood. Both also deal extensively with the film capital’s 
products and power brokers, though they do so in dissimilar ways and with 
different results in regard to the meaning of the relationship between the U.S. 
film industry and Germany in the years between 1933, when the Nazi leader 
came to power, and the onset of the Second World War.
The backstory is not unfamiliar to anyone with a nodding acquaintance 
with the history of the motion picture industry. From the early twenties on, 
Germany was the major world competitor to the United States in terms of 
film production; it was also Hollywood’s second largest foreign market, with 
a population that had an apparently voracious appetite for American films. 
Even before the onset of the Third Reich, German diplomats occasionally 
objected to the depiction of their countrymen on screen, particularly in films 
about the (first) World War, in which the brutal German soldier was a ste-
reotypical figure. As might be expected, within a few weeks of the onset of 
the Third Reich, and under its Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, new 
policies with regard to film were instituted. In the first of them, the German 
film industry purged itself of virtually all its Jewish personnel, which meant 
Reviews in American History 43 (2015) 143–148 © 2015 by Johns Hopkins University Press
REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY  /  MARCH 2015144
a large number of talented people—directors, producers, actors, cinematog-
raphers, and others who worked behind the scenes in a variety of technical 
positions. Berlin’s loss was, to a large extent, Hollywood’s gain: many of those 
who fled the country were among the most famous names in the German film 
world. A number—including directors Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang, producer 
Ernest Pommer, and composer Erich Korngold—ended up not only working 
in Hollywood but in creating some of its finest films from the mid-Thirties on. 
The Nazi regime was not content with erasing all traces of Jews from its 
own industry. Soon enough it enacted a series of measures and practices that 
would affect Hollywood and help to limit the contents of American produc-
tions with regard to depictions of Germany, past and present. These included 
the demand that all Jewish studio representatives working in Berlin be fired; 
that films with positive Jewish characters be barred from German screens; 
that those with Jewish personnel (directors, producers, composers, actors) 
be prevented from screening in Germany unless their names were removed 
from the credits; and that any sequences that showed Germany in less than 
positive light also be cut. This naturally included any images that showed 
Nazi attitudes towards or treatment of Jews. 
To obtain licenses to exhibit in Germany, as in other countries, Hollywood 
films had to pass through a censorship office capable of cutting works or ban-
ning them entirely. In the Thirties, Germany went beyond this normal practice, 
indulged in by other countries such as France, Mexico, and England, in at least 
two ways. First, by instituting a regulation establishing that, if officials did not 
like a film from a particular studio, they could ban all of that studio’s produc-
tions from German screens. Second, rather than passively waiting to license 
films, the government installed a diplomat in Los Angeles—Consul George 
Gyssling—who was charged with trying to control and shape the contents 
of films even before they went into production. He did this by working with 
the Hays Office, which administered the Production Code put into place in 
the early Thirties in part to avoid government censorship of the film industry. 
All scripts by the major studios had to pass through this office, so developing 
and using contacts in the industry to keep up with proposed productions, 
the consul pestered the Hays office with criticism of scripts, backed by veiled 
threats about access to the German market. In an extreme case, Gyssling wrote 
threatening letters to some sixty people involved in a film of which he didn’t 
approve; and while this action led to a protest from the American State De-
partment and an apology from the German government, the consul in many 
other cases seems to have worked closely with the Hays Office, individual 
producers, and studio chiefs, playing a significant role in helping to alter or 
quash productions that would have shown anything negative about the cur-
rent regime or its Nazis leadership. 
145Rosenstone  /  Hitler and Hollywood
Equally well known as part of the backstory is the fact that Jews were 
not only extremely prevalent in the motion picture industry at all levels of 
creativity, production, and distribution, but that five of the six major studios 
were headed by Jews. (The only one who was not Jewish, Darryl Zanuck at 
Fox, was often taken to be a Jew anyway). This has led to a question that has 
been raised many times over the years: how could these Hollywood moguls, 
most of them but one generation away from roots in Eastern Europe, allow 
representatives of a regime dedicated to ridding itself and the rest of Europe 
of Jews, turn their backs on the struggles of their co-religionists and accept 
the actions of Germany with regard to the film industry? How could they cut 
deals with a Hitler? Why didn’t they simply withdraw from Germany? Are 
they not somehow implicated in the triumphs of the regime and, by exten-
sion, in the Holocaust? Such questions also lie at the heart of these two books. 
Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939, answers them in the 
equivalent of a sprawling widescreen saga, one that introduces a vast array of 
people and films in both the United States and Germany, with brief excursions 
to fascist Italy and civil war–torn Spain. As a way of explicating and under-
standing the broad social and political contexts in which the moguls made, 
or failed to make, decisions, the book contains richly detailed chapters that 
cover the following topics: the un- or semi-successful attempts of independent 
producers to make films on Nazi extremism (The Mad Dog of Europe, Hitler’s 
Reign of Terror, I Was a Captive in Nazi Germany); the portrayal of Nazis in the 
then-popular newsreels (almost absent in regular newsreels, but particularly 
strong in March of Time productions); efforts to put films about the Span-
ish Civil War, in which a German legion was fighting on behalf of the rebel 
generals, on the screen (primarily Walter Wanger’s Blockade); the images of 
Nazism in foreign, often Soviet, films, which were poorly distributed and 
seen by relatively few Americans; the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, a leftist 
organization in which some of Hollywood’s biggest creative names—writers, 
directors, and stars—agitated against fascist and Nazi policies and propaganda; 
the investigations of the House Committee on un-American Activities, headed 
by Texas congressman Martin Dies, into propaganda and immorality in Hol-
lywood, which became a laughingstock when its chair suggested the child 
star, Shirley Temple, was a subversive; the unsuccessful visits to Hollywood 
of Vittorio Mussolini, son of the Italian dictator, and Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s 
brilliant director of Triumph of the Will and The Olympics, where, due in part 
to the agitation of the Anti-Nazi League, they were treated like pariahs and 
forced to quickly depart the town; and finally a nod to Warner Brothers, “the 
only studio with guts,” which broke entirely with Germany early on, produced 
a series of patriotic American short subjects that called the tenets of Nazism 
into question and produced the first openly anti-Nazi feature, Confessions of a 
Nazi Spy. (Although this was not until 1939). 
REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY  /  MARCH 2015146
The broad picture Doherty creates allows readers to better understand 
the situation of Hollywood and its studio chiefs as they tried to negotiate 
the turbulent political and social waters of the Thirties. In the wake of Nazi 
and fascist triumphs in Europe, a new form of anti-Semitism was spreading 
widely in the United States. It was voiced not just by the German American 
Bund, the quasi-fascist Silver Shirts, or the ravings of popular Detroit priest 
Father Coughlin, but was widely dispersed from pulpits and some of the 
nation’s press, with Hollywood in particular singled out by commentators 
as a kind of Sodom and Gomorrah, a place where traditional codes of Chris-
tian conduct were regularly flouted on screen by what was often seen as a 
“foreign” Jewish industry. Even leading Jewish organizations such as the 
Anti-Defamation League, along with various influential rabbis, thought it a 
period for Jews to maintain a low profile and not publicize their own condi-
tions or accomplishments—hence their negative reaction towards a prestige 
film such as The Rothschilds, which provided a sympathetic view of the famed 
banking family. Such feelings were widespread enough at the time to perhaps 
have given pause to industry leaders, for anything overtly anti-Nazi might 
be seen as part of a pro-Jewish propaganda campaign. Ultimately, however, 
the decision to keep dealing with Germany was an economic one, the desire 
of three major studios (MGM, Fox, and Universal) to maintain a foothold in 
a once lucrative market just in case the current regime did not last. It was a 
decision by relatively rational men up against something they did not under-
stand; Doherty describes it as “the natural befuddlement of cool business men 
against hot headed fanatics” (p. 39).
In contrast to Doherty’s wide-ranging argument, Urwand approaches the 
topic with a narrow focus and a point of view that is clear even before one 
has read a word of the text. For two words of his title—“collaboration” and 
“pact”—are surely meant to evoke the dark and troubled days of the 1930s 
and to cast a negative light on Hollywood’s leaders. The former term refers 
to “collaborators,”1 those pro-Nazis waiting in the wings of various European 
countries (such as Vidkun Quisling in Norway) who worked to help the Ger-
mans take over their native lands or, like Marshal Petain in France, aided the 
occupiers in such tasks as sending Jews off to Auschwitz. The latter word, 
“pact,” carries a distinctly fascist connotation, referencing agreements such 
as the Anti-Comintern Pact (between Germany and Japan in 1936), the Pact 
of Steel (between fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in 1939), and the Molotov-
Ribbentrop Pact (between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939). And while 
the use of such terms may make for a dramatic title (we all want our books 
to be noticed, don’t we?), they are surely misleading for the false historical 
parallels they suggest. However unwise or even repugnant the decisions of 
those moguls who decided to play along with German demands despite the 
147Rosenstone  /  Hitler and Hollywood
regime’s anti-Jewish activities, the United States was not under Nazi occu-
pation nor were the studio heads ever asked to commit crimes on behalf of 
foreign rulers.
Having undertaken a great deal of research in the archives, and particu-
larly the little-explored German archives, Urwand is able to explore in great 
detail the micro-level of the struggle between Germany and Hollywood over 
canceling or editing individual film projects. This wealth of evidence, his main 
contribution to the topic, is important for those interested in details of the day-
to-day interaction between bureaucrats, attorneys, and producers. But such 
details can be, at the same time, misleading. The letters and memoranda of the 
German Consul represent one of Urwand’s chief sources of evidence, but the 
author seems to read them (and Hollywood memos) at face value and never 
considers that Gyssling’s words (or those of any negotiator) may be tactical or 
self-inflating as well as informative and thus may well skew the portrait in a 
way that appears to exaggerate his influence on the decision-making process. 
Even at those moments when the author fails to find any evidence to show 
that Gyssling interfered with a particular project (It Can’t Happen Here, for 
instance), he is nonetheless willing to suggest that even so, the Consul must 
surely have been a factor in having the production cancelled. 
His desire to make a case against Hollywood’s studio heads leads to a cer-
tain number of odd interpretations and even self-contradictions. In the chapter 
where he tries to show that Hollywood was itself making pro-Nazi films (at 
least works based upon a leadership principal similar to that of the Fuhrer’s), 
he uses examples such as King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread, a work that genera-
tions of viewers, including the author of this essay, have taken to be instead a 
pro-Soviet and collectivist film. And in dealing with the struggle over getting 
Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades onto the screen in 1938, he awards to 
Hollywood an enormous power that even the most egocentric of the studio 
chiefs would never claim: that a truly anti-Nazi film could have changed his-
tory: “At this critical moment, when a major Hollywood production could 
have alerted the world to what was going on in Germany, the director did not 
have the final cut; the Nazis did” (p. 192). Apart from somehow equating the 
U.S. with “the world” (for certainly the people in most European countries 
well understood what the Nazis were about), he contradicts his own assertion 
in a prior chapter “that the outside world” knew early on the extent of the 
Nazis’ brutality. Never does he bother to make the obvious connection that 
the people of the world relied on other forms of communication than film for 
their knowledge of the social and political movements of the day. 
Given the way their works approach the topic of Hollywood’s relations with 
the Third Reich, it is not surprising that the two authors make very different 
assessments of the behavior of the studio chiefs. Doherty makes his point of 
REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY  /  MARCH 2015148
view explicit in his acknowledgements section, saying that, as a historian, 
he has tried to approach the topic with humility, with a sense that one must 
see events in the context of what was known at the time and not through the 
lens of today: “To generations with a clear picture of the Nazis, it is hard to 
imagine anyone would ever have had dealings with them. Although I like to 
think that, had I been there as a mogul or moviegoer, I would have been both 
preternaturally farsighted and scrupulously moral, I am not so sure” (p. 376). 
Urwand, by contrast, exhibits no such sense of humility, but casts his work 
more like that of a prosecuting attorney out for a conviction. The quotation 
in the previous paragraph says it all: he accuses Hollywood’s moguls of giv-
ing the final cut to the Nazis, with the implication that, had they not done 
so, Hitler would have . . . what?—been defeated without the need for a war? 
Only by ignoring the larger historical context can Urwand make his judg-
ments. And truly, today it may strike us as impossible—given what we know 
about the horrors of the war that the Nazis began by invading Poland and 
what we know about the following Holocaust—to think that our countrymen 
could have pursued normal business relationships with the Germany of the 
Thirties; but so, in fact, did big corporations such as Ford, General Motors, and 
IBM, as well as various American universities and the athletes, some Jewish, 
who participated in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which were presided over by 
Hitler. But it makes more sense if we realize that, despite knowledge of the 
depredations against the Jews after 1933—and certainly up until the time of the 
widely reported book burnings in Berlin and the overt attacks of Kristallnacht 
in 1938—most Americans did not view the Third Reich as the most evil of the 
world’s regimes; that dubious honor went to the Soviet Union or Japan.2 This 
suggests that the criticism Urwand makes of Hollywood is really a criticism 
of a larger social order that was at once isolationist, blind to the larger threat 
of Nazism, and (to some extent) shared its beliefs in racial purity and the 
threat of others—Jews in this case—to the functioning of American democracy.
Robert A. Rosenstone is Professor Emeritus of History at the California Institute 
of Technology. His most recent publications are as author of a new (2nd) edition 
of History on Film / Film on History and as coeditor of A Blackwell Companion 
to Historical Film (2013).
 1. It should be noted that it has been claimed that Urwand mistranslates the word, Zusam-
menarbeit as “collaboration” when it really means “cooperation,” and that the accurate word 
in German would be “Kollaboration.” See Gavriel D Rosenfeld, “Hitler’s Willing Hollywood 
Collaborators,” The Jewish Daily Forward, November 8, 2013.
 2. Michaela Hoenicke Moore, Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933–1945 
(2009), quoted in ibid.


Hitler and Hollywood

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Caltech Authors - Main

Crossref