Hollywood, Hitler and “The Banality of Evil”
By Melissa Fall (Urwand).
Faced with the prospect of losing access to
the lucrative German market, says Urwand, studios prioritized profit
over principle as they scrambled to accommodate Nazi demands. The Collaboration depicts
a studio system in which films were submitted for approval to
aggressive German propaganda officials, who demanded cuts and changes to
material deemed “detrimental to German prestige”—not only to film
versions created for the German market, but for the U.S. and countries
around the world. “We have brought them to their knees,” crowed a Nazi
newspaper after the anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front
was banned in Germany in 1930; Universal quickly issued a new version
more in line with German sensibilities, setting the stage for a decade
of Zusammenarbeit involving several major studios bidding to rake in German reichsmarks. (This portion of the book was excerpted in The Hollywood Reporter last month.)
The Collaboration also contends that
studios abandoned or prevented film projects that would have exposed the
horrors of Nazism and Germany’s persecution of the Jews. “We have a
terrific income in Germany, and as far as I’m concerned, this picture
will never be made,” declared MGM head Louis B. Mayer upon declining to
invest in the anti-Nazi film The Mad Dog of Europe. Jewish names
were slashed from credits. One German official even harassed individual
crew members working on productions deemed unflattering to Germany;
threats even once extended to a wardrobe man. MGM also reportedly
financed the production of German armaments, and in a particularly
atrocious instance of accommodation, the head of MGM Germany divorced
his Jewish wife at the request of Germany’s Propaganda Ministry. Urwand
uncovered evidence that she ended up in a concentration camp.
The revelations have rocked current-day Hollywood. Urwand’s supporters have called The Collaboration “tremendous,”
“a blockbuster,” and “a devastating R.I.P. to what we’ve been told.”
Even filmmaker and film-history buff Quentin Tarantino has deemed some of Urwand’s findings “really fuckin’ interesting.” Yet one prominent rival scholar has branded the book “slanderous and ahistorical,” and the book will likely create a further maelstrom upon its release.
This week VF Daily spoke with Urwand, who was in Paris gearing up for The Collaboration’s
upcoming official release. Below, the author discusses the Nazis’
sinister consul in Los Angeles, Hitler’s unlikely passion for Mickey
Mouse, and what was really at stake for the Germans as they sought to
control Hollywood’s portrayals of their country.
Lesley M. M. Blume: Discuss the popular notion that Hollywood was a vehicle of anti-Nazi rhetoric and sentiment. Where did that come from?
Ben Urwand: Everyone
thinks of Nazis as the first great villains on the screen, but in the
1930s this simply wasn’t true. The reason most people think of Hollywood
as fiercely anti-Nazi is because of the films that came out in 1941
through 1945—classic movies like Casablanca (1942) and Foreign Correspondent (1940).
I think around 60 percent of all of Hollywood’s products during that
period make some reference to the war. There’s also this myth that
Warner Brothers crusaded against Nazism throughout the 1930s, but that’s
not true. Based on my findings, Warner Brothers was trying to do
business in Germany, like everyone else, but wasn’t successful. They
didn’t make anti-Nazi film Confessions of a Nazi Spy until 1939, six full years after they were kicked out of the German market.
[Oscar-winning Hollywood screenwriter] Ben
Hecht made this very powerful point about the Jewish studio heads; they
will talk in private about what’s going on in Germany, he said, but they
would not “stand up as the great of Hollywood and proclaim in their
films against the German murder of their own kind.”
How did you first become aware of the
discrepancy between the popular perception and the reality of
Hollywood’s role vis-à-vis the Germans?
[From a comment made by screenwriter] Budd Schulberg in the documentary The Tramp and the Dictator, which was made to accompany Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Schulberg
says that in the 1930s [MGM chief] Louis Mayer would meet with the
German consul and allow him to screen films, and then make cuts based on
his recommendations. This ran so counter to everything that’s been said
about this period. I wasn’t convinced, but that’s where I started. But
the actual revelations came after a decade of research in archives.
Where did you uncover the first evidence backing up Schulberg’s assertion?
I went to Germany on a research trip . . .
and went through the files of Hitler’s personal adjutants at the
Bundesarchiv in Berlin. The files contained birthday letters to Hitler
and documents with his opinions on American movies, but I also found
letters from MGM, Fox, and Paramount—including one letter from Fox
asking if Hitler would give his opinion of the value of U.S. films in
Germany. It was dated January 1938, on official studio stationery, and
was signed off “Heil Hitler!” At that point, I thought, O.K., here is evidence that’s going against the accepted story.
Did the studios cooperate with your research? What has their reaction been to your findings?
I haven’t really dealt with studios at all;
I’ve been doing archival research. The reason I never reached out to
them is that I couldn’t learn anything from them: they aren’t run by the
same people. And I have no idea what their reaction has been at any
stage. . . . As a researcher I was not interested in writing a book
about what present-day Hollywood thinks about its past. I was interested
in just revealing what I found, in telling the truth. No one from a
studio has directly e-mailed me, not even after the book was excerpted
in The Hollywood Reporter.
[Note: Urwand’s publicity team states
that, at the time of writing, no studio has contacted Urwand’s agent,
publisher, or publicity representatives with rebuttals either, although
at least one studio publicity representative has requested a galley of The Collaboration.]
According to your research, Universal head Carl
Laemmle prophesied with eerie precision what the rise of Nazism would
mean for Jews in Germany. You cite a 1932 letter from Laemmle to William
Randolph Hearst in which Laemmle states: “Hitler’s rise to power . . .
would be the signal for a general physical onslaught on many thousands
of defenseless Jewish men, women and children.” Yet he personally set
the stage for a decade of collaboration between Hollywood studios and
the German government by making revision concessions to the Germans with
the 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front.
That quote is chilling because it’s so early;
he’s predicting the genocide of Jews—and not just in Germany. It’s a
myth that people didn’t know what was going on; that’s blatantly untrue.
People knew what was going on Germany throughout the 1930s—especially
Jewish studio executives.
Laemmle was the first to do a deal with the
German government, and he did set up the arrangement that followed, but
in his defense, he did it before Hitler came to power, in 1931 and 1932.
Universal did almost no business with the Nazis after Hitler came to
power, but in 1936 Laemmle loses control of Universal, and his
successor, John Cheever Cowdin—who’s not Jewish—comes up with this plan
by which his Aryan studio might re-establish his studio in Germany. But
he fails because, in 1937, Universal makes The Road Back (a sequel to the much-hated All Quiet on the Western Front).
Cowdin assured the Germans that nothing in it would be offensive to the
Nazis, and the film was cut severely, but the German consulate in L.A.
doesn’t seem to care about that. He still makes a huge fuss about the
film, sending letters to about 60 people involved in the making of the
film—even to the wardrobe man—saying, “We will put you on our
blacklist,” and warning that any films in which they participated in the
future might be banned in Germany.
You tell us that, before World War I, Germany
was the second-biggest market for American films. Do you have any sense
of exactly how lucrative a market it really was during the 1930s? You’d
think that it would have to be pretty substantial to merit such fevered
acquiescence from the studios.
It varied throughout the 1930s. In 1933, Hollywood is doing better business in Germany after
Hitler comes to power than in 1932. The reason is that the German film
industry is weakened severely when Hitler kicks out the industry Jews.
Hollywood benefits because they then all go to Hollywood. And Hollywood
then sells 60 films to Germany in 1933. As the decade progresses, [the
studios] go to all sorts of lengths to protect their investment. But
then they start operating at a loss; for example, Paramount cites a net
loss of $580 in 1936. So, why would the studios bother, go to such great
lengths, when at some point they’re making nothing?
I realized after a long time that the reason
for this is that the studios had been there for decades; they employed
hundreds of people. But if they left [the German market], where their
movies were popular, they might have to return under worse conditions—or
not get back in at all. When rumblings of the war began, they thought
Hitler might win—and the studios then worried that they’d lose their
footholds in any country Hitler controlled.
The Germans’ main weapon in their negotiations
with the studios was their dreaded “Article 15” regulation, which stated
that any film perceived by German officials to be damaging to “German
prestige” would earn German-market exile for the film’s producers. Why
did the Germans care so much how they were portrayed in American films?
World War I is critical to answering that
question. [The Germans] lost the war, and politically there were efforts
on the world stage for reconciliation, but not in film. . . . In the
1920s, films showed evil German spies blowing up submarines and Allied
ships. Systematically throughout the decade, the German defeat is being
replayed in films screened around the world. The German middle class
became very upset about what they called hate films, not just the
political right . . . and it all came to a climax with All Quiet on the Western Front.
The stakes get much higher when Hitler comes to power. Part of the
reason Hitler and the right feel that they lost the first world war is
because of the Allies’ superior propaganda. Hitler is obsessed with the
power of film; I document that extensively in the book.
In your opinion, what was the most egregious or offensive act of collaboration or appeasement during this period?
The way MGM is exporting its profits out of
Germany in the late 1930s. In 1933, all foreign businesses were banned
from converting reichsmarks into dollars and exporting their profits
earned in the country. After 1936, MGM, Paramount, and 20th Century Fox
are all still operating in Germany. To get around this law, Paramount
and Fox start making newsreels in Germany, which can then be sold all
around the world to recoup their investment. MGM [was] not in the
newsreel business and [was] accumulating capital. It invested in certain
German firms and received bonds in exchange for its investment—but
these firms were connected to the armaments industry. And this was one
month after Kristallnacht. So, in other words, the studio helped finance
the German war machine.
Your book is filled with small, grim absurdities
too, such as Hitler’s love of Laurel and Hardy films, and his passion
for Mickey Mouse. Tell us more.
When I found [this information], I just thought, This is the banality of evil.
Here’s the single most destructive individual of the 20th century, and
you find that he’s just having a good time watching these movies. But
film is extremely important to Hitler: He sees [movies] as part of a
war. He sees propaganda as just as important as a weapon on the
battlefield. He sees Hollywood’s power to expose Nazis, to destroy their
prestige, as part of a war.
You’ve been getting blowback about your findings from historian Thomas Doherty [author of a competing narrative, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–39],
who calls your work “slanderous and ahistorical.” For example, he takes
issue with your use of the word “collaboration” and maintains that the
word should be reserved for more extreme examples of cooperation with
the German government during this period, such as the Vichy government. Do you have a response to his criticisms?
The only thing I would say is that his
rebuttal is based on the book’s title. He hasn’t read my book, and as an
academic I find it surprising: you’d think he’d read it before he
rebutted it. A rebuttal would have to be based on archival evidence that
shows the opposite of what I found. I’m totally open to people finding
contrary evidence, but I’ve spent so long in archives that I don’t think
it’s here. I deal in facts that come from documents and materials from
multiple archives, and I use the words of the people at the time. I
worked hard to suppress judgment and opinion on my part; it’s strictly a
work of scholarship.
Doherty has stated that Hollywood actually did
more to advance the anti-Nazi cause than any other for-profit
institution at the time. Do you agree?
Again, that’s totally untrue during the
1930s; it’s the exact opposite. The studios are going to extreme lengths
to appease the Nazis in the 1930s. In the 1940s they make an incredible
number of anti-Nazi films—although studios are careful not to mention
the persecution of the Jews or the Holocaust. I see that as a remnant of
the collaboration of the 1930s.
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