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When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, America had no choice but to abandon its isolationism and enter the rapidly escalating war. The very next day the United States government declared war on Japan, and within a few days America's list of enemy states had expanded to include the other Axis powers, Italy and Germany. Directors were in the forefront of those in Hollywood who contributed to the war effort. Yet Fritz Lang, curiously,never volunteered anymilitary-related duty in the fight against the nation he had once embraced and which he now reviled. True, Lang had served before, on the side of Germany in World War I; true, he'd turned fifty-one by the time hostilities commenced. But Lewis Milestone and John Ford, both only five years younger than Lang, were among the veteran film directors who hastened to enlist in the armed services. Lang claimed once in an interview that he tried to join the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), when it was formulated in 1941, but was rejected because of his age. But there is no record of his claim, never repeated, and made as part of the publicity campaign for Cloak and Dagger, the director's first post-war film, which was about the OSS network. Indeed, Lang would exploit the war for publicity and career advantage. It was during these years that his Goebbels story first surfaced in the press, in interviews and articles promoting his quartet of war-inspiredproductions: Man Hunt, Hangmen Also Die, Ministry of Fear, and Cloak and Dagger. That is one of the reasons why some people, especially emigres, associated the director's story with self-serving opportunism. Articles and interviews timed to coincide with the release of Hangmen Also Die revealed to the public for the first time the Lang-Goebbels saga. It made good copy: the story of how the director had been ordered by the Third Reich's Propaganda Minister to prepare propaganda films presenting the National Socialist Party in a favorable light, because the Fiihrer "had decided that Lang was the man for the job of making the epic film of National Socialism. The hero was to be the Nazi brownshirt. The villain was Communism. The theme: the Nazi new order." The director told the U.S. Communist newspaper The Daily Worker that C H A P T E R 1 4 1941 1945 288 FRITZ LANG his frightening encounter with Goebbels marked "the first moment in which he became fully aware of the stark reality of Nazism." Like most other German progressives, Lang explained, he had recognized the Nazi movement as a mobilization of corrupt forces, organized by big industrialists and popularized with free beer and demagoguery. "He [Lang] was a keen student of social affairs with a liberal, international outlook on life and of course anti-Prussian and anti-Hitler long before Hitler smashed the Weimar Republic," noted The Daily Worker, "which explains the sociological character of some of his early German films." The U.S. premiere of Lang's last German film—the banned-in-NaziGermany The Testament of Dr. Mabuse—was conveniently timed for March 1943, to coincide with release of Hangmen Also Die. In interviews the director could bracket both films: his latent anti-Nazism of 1933 blended with his vociferous anti-Nazism a decade later. Lang in fact helped with a new prologue to Testament, declaring publicly for the first time that the film "was made as an allegory to show Hitler's processes of terrorism." The director assured the press that he had "made the picture as an antiHitler picture, putting all the Nazi slogans into the mouth of criminals. That is what angered them so much." According to the publicity line he adopted, Lang's goal was "to expose the masked Nazi theory of the necessity to destroy everything which is precious to a people so that they would lose all faith in the institutions and ideals of the State. Then, when everything collapsed, they would try to find help in the 'new order.' " In none of these accounts, tellingly, did Lang make any mention of his own Jewish heritage. In fact, publicity went out of its way to describe him as an "Austrian director" who was in fact the opposite of Jewish. "While many famous Jewish directors had to flee Germany because of the 'Aryan' work decrees, Lang, a Christian, fled only because he...

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