Propaganda und Film im "Dritten Reich", and: Jüdische Figuren im Film und Karikatur: Die Rothschilds und Joseph Süss Oppenheimer (review)

168 SHOFAR Summer 2000 Vol. 18, No.4 A separate chapter is devoted to Chiune Sugihara, the consul in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania who, on the basis of bogus final destination visas to the Dutch island of Curayao, issued transit visas to Polish Jews caught between the German and Russian lines in 1940. While Sugihara's actions certainly are laudable, he was not the only Japanese consul following existing instructions by issuing transit visas to Jewish refugees. The account of the activities of the Dutch honorary consul Jan Zwartendijk who provided the bogus end visas was not fully discussed and is inaccurate. The number of visas issued by Zwartendijk was not 1,200 to 1,400 as stated, but 2,345. Without these, Sugihara could not have issued more than a few transit visas. The book also describes the actions ofColonel Senko Yasue and CaptainKoreshige Inuzuka, who in 1911 were involved with the translation ofthe "Protocols ofthe Elders ofZion," and how Captain Inuzuka, considered by some as an "arch anti-Semite," was put in charge of the Bureau for Jewish Affairs in Shanghai. In 1942, when relief funds no longer reached Shanghai, Inuzuka cooperated with the representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in feeding the starving Jewish refugees. Sakamoto goes into great detail discussing Tokyo's prevailing politics and the working relationships between embassies and consulates scattered around the world with their superiors in Japan, citing numerous references. Perhaps a reader thoroughly familiar with the workings of the Japanese government might be better able to follow the elaborate trail through the functions of its divergent organizations. Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees lists voluminous references attesting to the author's extensive research. Unfortunately, she sometimes seems to have relied on personal testimonies and recollections as well as other sources without having fully verified their accuracy, thus making this otherwise excellent work umeliable for research by future historians. Ernest G. Heppner Independent Scholar Propaganda und Film im "Dritten Reich," by WolfDonner. Berlin: tip Verlag, 1995. 159 pp. n.p.!. Out ofprint. Judische Figuren im Film und Karikatur: Die Rothschilds und Joseph Suss Oppenheimer, edited by Cilly Kugelmann and Fritz Backhaus. Sigmaringen and Frankfurt/Main: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1996. 167 pp. DM 24.80. The late Wolf Donner was one of Germany's more important film journalists in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the director ofthe Berlin Film Festival from 1976 to 1979. As a film critic, Donner championed left-wing causes and directors who privileged social issues in the first and third worlds. Like many leftist-minded Germans of his generation (Donner was born in 1939), he spent a good deal ofhis adult life corning to Book Reviews 169 grips with the legacy of National Socialism and the nation's culpability in the Holocaust . This posthumously published monograph grew out of a set of lectures that Donner gave to students at the University ofCologne and at various Goethe Institutes. Donner died before he could write a book for publication or even complete a final chapter dealing with West German Neo-Nazis. And unfortunately, Donner was a better critic than he was a film historian, so these lectures have the rough edges ofhalf-baked ideas and reveal almost nothing new about film or propaganda in Nazi Germany. In his opening chapter, Donner discusses the Nazis' extremely efficient use ofmass media, inparticularJoseph Goebbels' ability to coin and endlessly repeat catchy phrases which reduced complex political issues to emotional appeals, e.g., "the Fuhrer commands and we obey," "Victory or Bolshevism," and "One People, One Fuhrer, One Reich." The last parole is used as a title to Donner's next chapter, which analyzes certain themes of National-Socialist propaganda: the attack against the Weimar Republic, the Fuhrer principle, militarism, "blood and soil," and antisemitism. There follows a very brief chapter about Goebbels' co-option of the German film industry, before Donner moves on to describe such signature films of the Third Reich as Hitlerjunge Quex, Triumph ofthe Will, Jew Suss, and Kolberg. While Donner's intentions were certainly pure and his plan to bring the book's concerns into the present by discussing the repression ofthe Nazi past in the 1950s and...