Anti-Semitic Films
Anti-Semitism was an important element in Nazi ideology and films were made to propagate that theme to the German people. They were produced for a sadistic purpose of preparing the German people for the final solution to the "Jewish Problem."1 These films served as an important mean to the Nazis' attempt to destroy rational thought and human feeling; to create apathy and indifference to suffering; to prepare the nation for the Holocaust.2 Such films included examples such as Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, 1940), Jud S�ss (Jew S�ss, 1940), Leinen aus Irland (Irish Linen, 1939) and Die Rothschilds (The Rothschilds, 1940).3
The Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, 1940) was the work of Dr. Franz Hippler, one of Dr Goebbels's film experts, who was very skilful in arranging disparate clips and most antagonistic arguments into a "triumph of dialectical destructiveness."4 This film premiered in Berlin on 28 November 1940, was able to raise the mood against the Jews to a boiling point.
The main emphasis of this film could best be sum up by this text from the Berlin journal of Film-Kurier.
| " The camera wandered [through this ghetto] before the ordering hand of the German administration intervened to clean out this Augean in order to obtain a true-undiluted picture of this cesspit from which world Jewry was steadily supplied."5 |
The Jews are depicted as parasites and belonging to a subhuman race.
Shots were taken to show faces that were designed to confirm the prejudices of the Jews.
An analogy is made between disgusting rats and Jews threatening to over swamp the civilized world, hence creating dangers of pest epidemics. This is best seen from the commentary: " Where rats appear, they spread disease and carry destruction into the land. They are wily, cowardly, and cruel and appear mostly in large numbers - just like the Jews among the humans."6
The film also attempts to portray the grotesque artistic 'taste' of the Jews.
Films such as the Eternal Jews were made to justify Hitler's racist fanaticism. This can be seen from the climax of the film that features Hitler's speech.
This is the translation of the speech:
| Europa kann nicht eher zur Ruhe kommen,
bevor die j�dische Frage ausger�umt ist. Die Welt hat Siedlungsraum gen�gend, es mu�
aber endg�ltig mit der Meinung gebrochen werden, als sei das j�dische Volk vom lieben
Gott eben dazu bestimmt, in einem gewissen Prozentsatz Nutznie�er am K�rper und an der
produktiven Arbeit anderer V�lker zu sein. Das Judentum wird sich genauso einer soliden aufbauenden T�tigkeit anpassen m�ssen, wie es andere V�lker auch tun, oder es wird fr�her oder sp�ter einer Krise von unvorstellbarem Ausma� erliegen. Wenn es dem internationalen Finanzjudentum in und au�erhalb Europas gelingen sollte, die V�lker noch einmal in einen Weltkrieg zu st�rzen, dann wird das Ergebnis nicht der Sieg des Judentums sein, sondern die Vernichtung der j�dischen Rasse in Europa! |
Europe will not have peace until the
Jewish question has been disposed of. The world has sufficient capacity for settlement,
but we must finally break away from the notion that a certain percentage of the Jewish
people are intended, by our dear God, to be the parasitic beneficiary of the body, and of
the productive work, of other peoples. Jewry must adapt itself to respectable constructive work, as other peoples do, or it will sooner or later succumb to a crisis of unimaginable proportions. If the international finance-Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations into a world war yet again, then the outcome will not be the victory of Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe! |
Cinematographic instruments were used to manipulate the consciousness of the people to secure consenting silence on a massive scale.7
