The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler by Ben Urwand (review)

Before 1934, Jews featured prominently in American movies as sweat-shop workers and pawnshop owners, as jazz singers and statesmen. After 1934, Jews virtually disappeared from celluloid and did not reappear for over a decade. In his controversial book, Ben Urwand tries to explain this absence. Why, when Nazi Germany put Jews onto the world stage as never before, did Hollywood shove them behind the curtain? Why did Hollywood studio heads, many of whom were European-born Jews, not tell the tragic tale of their persecuted brethren?

Urwand’s answer is found in his book’s unfortunate title: Hollywood collaborated with the Nazi regime by refusing to make pictures that centered on Jews or even mentioned them. The film industry also avoided Nazis until the outbreak of World War II and removed Jewish artists from some movies to assure their distribution in German territory. Although both the proof and the presentation are murky, Urwand makes a plausible case that the American film industry allowed German priorities to dictate the content of many movies. Yet succumbing to intimidation is not collaboration, either in the ordinary meaning of the term–to work together in an intellectual endeavor–or in the history-laden connotation that certainly applies here–willingly assisting an enemy of one’s country. Such imprecision in language and analysis undermines The Collaboration’s valuable contribution in helping to explain the American public’s relative ignorance of European Jewry’s plight.

Although he is not the first to tell the story, Urwand demonstrates the astonishing degree to which American and German censors controlled what Hollywood produced. A 1932 law allowed Germany to refuse an entrance permit to any movie “the tendency or effect of which is detrimental to Germany” (48). Given Germany’s substantial market for American movies, this threat had teeth, and the Hitler government, which assumed power a year after its adoption, wielded it often. Urwand describes the upshot of Article 15: “[I[f a company distributed an anti-German picture anywhere in the world, then that company would no longer be granted import permits for the German market” (48). The Hays Office, which already policed American films’ sexual and political content, simply added “detrimental to Germany” to its objectionable material. At the urging of the German consul in Los Angeles, the office in 1934 threatened the producers of The Mad Dog of Europe, a film that depicted the Nazis’ cruel treatment of a Jewish family. The movie was not made. Around the same time, American Jewish leaders raised a ruckus about a film that was released. They feared that The House of Rothschild, with its allusions to a worldwide Jewish financial conspiracy, would inspire antisemitism–fears that were borne out when it was featured prominently in the notorious Nazi propaganda film, The Eternal Jew. The tumult over The Mad Dog of Europe and The House of Rothschild convinced Hollywood it was better not to depict Jews at all, rather then risk alienating the German market or stirring up antisemitism in the American one.

In subsequent years, Hollywood refused to release some movies (the film version of Sinclair Lewis’ anti-fascist novel, It Can’t Happen Here); watered down the Jewish and Nazi content of others (the film version of Phyllis Bottome’s bestseller The Mortal Storm); or removed Jewish references altogether (the word “Jew” was never uttered in a movie about the Dreyfus affair). Toward the end of the 1930s, Germany also pushed American companies to adopt its policy barring non-Aryans from film production. At first, the studios still doing business in Germany (most had pulled out, although the three largest remained) bargained with German officials. To enable Give Us This Night to be distributed, Paramount, for example, agreed to substitute a new score by a German composer for the existing score by a Jewish composer. The German Propaganda Ministry eventually drew up a “black list” of those whose participation in a film would bar German distribution. The studios abided by this blacklist...