Commentary by Frank Stern, cultural and film historian
Can film be crime?
The 1940 Nazi propaganda film JUD Süss
Over 20 million saw the 1940 propaganda film JUD SÜSS in Germany, Austria and the Wehrmacht-occupied countries of Europe. The film (directed by Veit Harlan) was not simply a cinema film, but was also used among SS Einsatzgruppen, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht and the crews of the concentration and extermination camps. When the Nazi empire collapsed, this feature film was therefore one of the first productions by Ufa and Terra to be withdrawn from circulation by the Allied victorious powers and its public screening was placed under reserve. This is how it has remained to this day. JUD SÜSS belongs to a long list of prohibited and
whose essential message is racism, anti-Semitism, warmongering and hatred of everything culturally different.
The historical and costume film is set in early 18th century Stuttgart and tells the story of the Jewish merchant Joseph Süß Oppenheimer (played by Ferdinand Marian), who rises to office and dignity at the court of the Duke of Würtemberg.
He becomes the Duke's financial advisor and confidant and ensures that the Jewish population can live in Stuttgart against the will of the estates, but he abuses his power, rapes a young woman and is punished by hanging after the Duke's death. It is a classic historical drama, lavishly filmed with a star-studded cast, set down to the smallest detail and, as the audience is assured at the beginning of the film, claiming to depict the historical truth. What it skilfully tells in cinematic terms, however, is not the historical truth about the role of the Jews in Württemberg before their equality under civil law, but a racist and anti-Semitic falsification of history to suit the taste of National Socialist ideology. The film was immediately immensely promoted, recommended to German youth and part of the racist re-education of the population.
Propaganda through film and art
To this day, people keep asking,
what makes this film so dangerous,
whether it is simply a particularly
sophisticated entertainment film or
whether it abuses the art of film?
A feature film, especially in its historical guise, is first and foremost entertainment, but this entertainment can also be linked to a political intention or a propagandistic objective. The film policy under National Socialism, in which the entire film industry in Germany was brought into line from 1933 and in Austria after the "Anschluss" in 1938, is a radical anti-democratic and, in the consequence of such films as JUD SÜSS, criminal example of this. The state influenced film production through censorship measures and controls on content and finances. Film and propaganda were inextricably linked here; cinematic art was placed in the service of Nazi ideology, Nazi politics and support for the war effort from 1939 onwards. Propagandistic content such as racism, emphasis on the superiority of the "Aryan" German over all other peoples, hatred directed at Poles and Russians, rejection of democracy, glorification of war and, time and again, anti-Jewish incitement appeared in many films.
Anti-Semitic propaganda was initially aimed at the Jewish population in Germany, but soon affected European Jews per se. At the heart of the youth portrayals were economic, social and sexist anti-Semitic prejudices, which were to be brought home to audiences on the home front and also to the fighting troops through appealing entertainment aimed at the emotions of the audience. A convincing feature film, Hitler and Goebbels knew, was better and more effective than newspaper articles or a political speech. The power of verbal propaganda was to create, through the power of images, a community of hatred towards everything that was considered foreign. The Jew was to become the enemy of every Reich German on the screen. But the masses in the occupied countries were also to be convinced of this Nazi image of the enemy, so that they would sympathise with, or at least tacitly condone, the deportation and extermination of the Jewish population of their countries.
The outward and also linguistic transformation of Jud Süß
and linguistic transformation of Jud Süß,
that the Jews had wormed their way into German society...
were a threat to Germanity.
The film plot, and a dramatic emotional acting with musical background, had the task of convincingly suggesting that there could be nothing in common with Jews, that the German nation had to separate itself from them at all costs, in order to protect, as it says in the film, the blood of the children and children's children.
The fearful look of actress Kristina Söderbaum was intended to cause compassion and identification among women and young people.
The emotional condemnation by the audience
anticipates the film's verdict of death by hanging.
In order to understand the role and significance of JUD SÜSS in Nazi film policy, it is necessary to look at the timing of the film's production. Such a lavish top production by Ufa and Terra, financed with over two million Reichsmark, did not come about by chance, but was extensively planned and embedded in the generally war-oriented policies of National Socialism.
Radicalisation of Nazi film policy
As early as 1933, the new German government brought about cuts in content, personnel and institutions, which led to professional bans for filmmakers of Jewish origin. Around 2000 filmmakers were forced to leave Germany and, after 1938, Austria. The entire film industry was subject to the control of the newly founded Reich Propaganda Ministry under Joseph Goebbels and the Reich Film Chamber under his command. A diary entry by Goebbels on 28 March 1933 reads: "Film can only become healthy if it recollects its Germanness and seeks the roots of its strength in German essence." This sentence is framed by remarks about the publication of a call for a boycott of Germany's Jewish population planned for the same day. This provided the framework for Nazi film policy.
Numerous films focused on negative, discriminatory portrayals of Jewish characters who either exploited the German people economically and politically or sexually abused German women. Anti-Semitic portrayals were the norm, considered "politically correct" in the circumstances of the time. While initially it was primarily the exclusion of Jewish film characters and their portrayal as something foreign, linguistically and culturally un-German, that repelled viewers and drove Jews living in the Reich into emigration, this changed in 1939 with the invasion of Poland by the German Reich. By the end of the 1930s, there was a racist intensification in the portrayal of Jewish characters, who were diametrically opposed to the "Aryan" heroines and heroes through camera work, lighting, body language, appearance, clothing and the invented Yiddish. This ranged from ridicule, discrimination and exclusion to storylines that implied the deportation and extermination of the Jewish population. The "politically valuable film" thus defined by the Nazi state combined the traditional Ufa aesthetics of the Weimar years with an effective cinematic mixture of entertainment and propaganda.
This also included the Ufa cult of stardom, which brought about an intense identification
of the audience with its screen heroes. After the expulsion of film-makers of Jewish origin, a group of both
group of directors as well as actors and actresses with celebrity and
actors and actresses with celebrity and star status had developed that was closely tied to the NSDAP leadership. The numerous newsreels of these years about meetings of Hitler, Goebbels and Göring with artists as well as their public and private display not only show an instrumentalisation of the arts and artists, but also indicate their proximity to the party and propaganda apparatus. Many filmmakers adapted to the
spirit or - more precisely - the un-spirit of the "new age". It was a
grovelling before the government. There was hardly any question of apolitical artists. It was all about careers, salaries, top roles on cast lists and stardom. But hardly anyone could ignore the fact that Nazi film policy defined itself in völkisch, nationalist, militarist and racist terms, although later, after 1945, many filmmakers claimed the "grace of artistic naivety" in their autobiographical statements.
From 1939 onwards, the visual education for war, and thus for the "race war", turned into a cinematic mobilisation of men, women and children for the war effort. Film entertainment became an instrument for shaping political opinion. To the same extent that a military radicalisation of the "Weltanschauungskrieg", the "race" and extermination war, took place, the work of the film studios in Berlin and Vienna became part of the "war work", as Goebbels defined it. Film could not be separated from total mobilisation for the war, at the latest in 1940, when JUD SÜSS was released in the cinemas.In JUD SÜSS - FILM WITHOUT CONSCIENCE, numerous scenes the propagandistic goals pursued with the 1940 film. Goebbels, portrayed by Moritz Bleibtreu,speaks to journalists after the successful premiere.
It is about the mass appeal of the propaganda film.
Falsifications of History
In many propaganda films such as JUD SÜSS, German and Austrian history was retroactively adapted to the needs of Nazi propaganda, the Viennese mayor Lueger in the feature film WIEN 1910 became a precursor of Hitler, the war against Napoleon in KOLBERG became a cinematic appeal to the people to bring about the defeat of the Allies before the end of 1945. The struggle of the German Jews for emancipation and equality in the 18th and 19th centuries was reinterpreted in JUD SÜSS as a national defensive struggle of the German people against "foreign infiltration". The historical film rewrote German history, conveyed a different, a National Socialist image of the history of Germany and Austria with the help of historical lies, in which there was a constant racist wafting of "German blood" and "German essence "
The life and death of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer was the material for numerous literary creations in the 18th and 19th centuries, for example by Wilhelm Hauff, for legends and anti-Jewish interpretations, which the screenwriters and above all the director Veit Harlan could draw on. In the literature it is repeatedly mentioned that the film also referred to the successful novel by the Munich Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger, but this is not true, because then it would not have been an anti-Semitic film, but a film that promotes understanding for the fate of German Jews in the era before their legal equality. In 1934, under the auspices of German-Jewish emigrants in London, there was an attempt to film JUD SÜSS in the style of Lion Feuchtwanger. The film was not a great success, but Goebbels was already upset by this attempt at an anti-anti-Semitic portrayal in 1934. In 1937, after the Olympic Games, Goebbels initiated work on a script for JUD SÜSS, which was intensified after the Reich pogrom against the Jewish population, the so-called Kristallnacht of November 1938. The time seemed to have come for a racist cursing and the radicalisation of anti-Jewish cinematic propaganda. The emigration of Jews was banned at the beginning of the war and mass murder began in occupied Poland. This also changed the tasks of film production. The film studios in Berlin and Vienna were to devote all their
concentrate all their energy on anti-Jewish films. In 1940, three such films were released: DIE ROTHSCHILDS in July, JUD SÜSS in September followed by the primitive anti-Semitic pseudo-documentary DER EWIGE JUDE. Goebbels was enthusiastic about JUD SÜSS and wrote in his diary: "Modern and National Socialist. Just as I imagine the films to be." And after the first great successes of the film, he says in a speech in February 1941 that the German
filmmakers had "gone about their war work with the greatest intensity".
At the end of September 1940, Himmler, the Reichsführer of the SS, ordered all SS and police to see the film during the winter. Propaganda through entertainment was consequently not just for the cinemas. In 1939, 750 sound film vans, trucks with film projectors and loudspeakers, were delivered to the Wehrmacht so that JUD SÜSS could be shown to members of the Wehrmacht and also to the operational troops of the SS and the concentration camp guards at all sections of the front. This is impressively shown in JUD SÜSS - FILM WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE. After the war, survivors of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin reported on the brutality of the guards after seeing the film. But Harlan wanted nothing to do with that. He rose to become a star director, received a professorial title and tax exemption. But the shadow of JUD SÜSS did not leave him any more than the other contributors. Power can seduce, but the main contributors to JUD SUSS were not victims of film-political violence, but responsible for their racist actions.
