The author of a controversial new book detailing Hollywood’s relationship with Nazi Germany discusses his findings at Fairfield University

By Cindy Mindell

Just as the Nazi party was taking power in Germany in 1933, longtime government censor Dr. Ernst Seeger gathered a screening committee to determine whether the new American film, King Kong, was harmful to the health of the German people.

Two opposing opinions emerged. Heinrich Zeiss, director of the Institute of Hygiene in Berlin, was averse, complaining, “It provokes our racial instincts to show a blond woman of the Germanic type in the hand of an ape. It harms the healthy racial feelings of the German people. The torture to which this woman is exposed, her mortal fear…and the other horrible things that one would only imagine in a drunken frenzy are harmful to German health.”

Mental health practitioner Dr. Schulte had a different take, declaring the film not dangerous, but “merely ridiculous.”

After receiving approval from the Propaganda Ministry, the committee reconvened, this time to consider a revised film title by King Kong’s German film distribution company. In December 1933, 30 first-run theaters throughout the country raised the curtain on The Fable of King Kong, an American Trick-and-Sensation Film, stripped of close-ups showing King Kong holding the screaming Ann Darrow, which were deemed by Zeiss as particularly damaging to German health. The film would make Hitler’s personal list of favorite films.

So opens The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, August 2013) by Ben Urwand, a junior fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows. The author chronicles a surprisingly cooperative relationship between studio executives and German officials throughout the 1930s, explaining how major studios, seeking to keep the German market open to American films, not only changed their films, but even shelved entire productions at the request of Nazi diplomats. The book has provoked controversy and debate among scholars (see story, p. 15), especially over the idea that Hollywood studio heads consciously and deliberately placed profit above the fate of fellow Jews caught in the growing web of Nazi brutality.

Urwand grew up in Sydney, Australia. His father and paternal grandparents fled Egypt in 1956; his mother and her parents spent World War Two in hiding in their native Hungary.

After earning a BA at the University of Sydney and a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, Urwand recently completed his PhD in history at the University of California, Berkeley. He wrote and published The Collaboration during the first two years of his three-year Harvard fellowship.

Urwand will discuss his findings at Fairfield University on Monday, Oct. 28. He spoke with the Ledger about how the thesis for his book took shape.

JEWISH LEDGER (JL): In explaining his philosophy, Russian-Jewish intellectual Simon Dubnow (1860-1941) said: “The historian’s essential creative act is the resurrection of the dead.” As a historian, why was it important to you to tell the Collaboration story?

BEN URWAND: I like that quote, and I think it does capture my motivation: I was really trying to uncover a hidden episode in American history that has been misunderstood up to now. I spent nine years in the archives in an attempt to understand the actual relationship between the Hollywood studios and the Nazi regime in the 1930s. I did not have specific readers in mind as I wrote the book; rather, I was motivated by an urge to explain what really happened in this period, and to correct the historical record.

I came to write the book through a series of coincidences based on a few discoveries in archives that I chose to pursue: Hollywood was doing business with Nazi Germany and appeased the Nazi regime in a variety of ways. As a scholar, I kept moving between history and film but did my degree in film studies at the University of Chicago. I felt that I needed a broader background because all the people writing about film were doing it from outside film and a lot of people who work in film studies didn’t start in that field.

I wanted to start somewhere else, so I studied history – no film – for three years at Berkeley and earned a more traditional degree in American history. I was brought back into film from the perspective of an American historian, not a film scholar. I wasn’t interested in how film developed as a medium or in film appreciation, but rather in how film has functioned politically in the 20th century, the broader impact of movies in the real world.

JL: I understand that your curiosity was piqued by a 2004 interview you read with novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who mentioned that MGM head Louis B. Mayer made changes to films at the request of the German consul in Los Angeles in the 1930s. Did your personal background have anything to do with your interest in pursuing this bit of information?

BU: Lots of people could have come across the interview and done nothing, but it led me to nearly a decade of research. My background didn’t have an impact on my choice of topic, other than in the same way that someone who is African-American chooses to study African-American history. It’s a common thing that one’s cultural background may influence later study, but not beyond that. I was interested in my own background and that led me to be more interested in topics that have something to do with it. Once I made the discovery in the archives, I felt that the material was so compelling that I wanted to keep doing it, but rather as a historian uncovering something people didn’t know about. I knew that I would be the first person to talk about it and so I felt a sense of responsibility to get it right and to report it accurately.

JL: According to your findings, why did studio heads “collaborate” with Germany?

BU: Profit. In 1933, all foreign businesses were banned from converting reichsmarks into dollars and exporting their profits earned in the country. After 1936, MGM, Paramount, and 20th Century Fox are all still operating in Germany. To get around this law, Paramount and Fox start making newsreels in Germany, which can then be sold all around the world to recoup their investment. MGM was not in the newsreel business and was accumulating capital. It invested in certain German firms and received bonds in exchange for its investment – but these firms were connected to the armaments industry. And this was one month after Kristallnacht. So, in other words, the studio helped finance the German war machine.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) urged the studios not to make The Mad Dog of Europe [a film depicting Jewish life in Nazi Germany] in 1933 because the ADL’s policy in this period was that gentiles should be the ones speaking out against Hitler. But I found no evidence that this policy had any impact on the studios’ decision not to make anti-Nazi pictures. In Louis B. Mayer’s own words, The Mad Dog of Europe would not be made “because we have interests in Germany; I represent the picture industry here in Hollywood; we have exchanges there; we have terrific income in Germany and, as far as I am concerned, this picture will never be made.”

JL: Did you expect to rouse such controversy and debate? How have these repercussions affected your work?

BU: In the beginning of my research, I didn’t know about Hollywood’s relationship with Nazi Germany. I thought my findings went against the grain of our understanding of this relationship. We think of Hollywood as being anti-Nazi, but the studios produced anti-Nazi films only in the 1940s, and that clouded my judgment. I strongly believe that we should not let Hollywood off the hook for what they did in the ‘30s because of the films they produced in the ‘40s.

I expected some controversy but didn’t expect this kind of controversy. I didn’t think the attacks would be coming from the perspective of film studies, film critics, and film families of the Hollywood studios. People are invested in a different kind of narrative about Hollywood, and even with the facts before their eyes will continue to deny that what I say is true.

Everything is documented. The attacks are disappointing because I made sure that every quote and fact is accurate, as I thought that the material might be controversial. But those who are critical are not looking at the facts; theirs is purely a reaction to the word “collaboration” in the title of the book [Zusammenarbeit in German]. They are saying that Hollywood is somehow exempt from the scrutiny and facts that we assign to everything else.

It took me two years to finish the book. I learned German in high school, badly, but it was enough to begin preliminary research. Once I realized I would pursue the subject as my PhD thesis at Berkeley, I relearned German and went through archives in nine U.S. and German cities, visiting most of them several times. I watched 400 Hollywood movies, everything ever screened in Germany between 1933 and 1940, all the banned films, and the anti-Nazi films. I felt that, in order to get this right, I had to look at everything available; some films were destroyed during the war or by the studios, or locked up at the studios and not easily available to researchers.

I have a year left in the fellowship, with no time to think about what I’m doing next because there’s much more reaction and activity than I anticipated around this book. I would love to be doing something else right now.

Open Visions Forum-Espresso presents “Hitler and Hollywood” with author Ben Urwand will be presented on Monday, Oct. 28, 7:30 p.m., at Fairfield University Quick Center for the Arts, 200 Barlow Road, Fairfield. For tickets and/or information, call (203) 254-4010 or visit www.fairfield.edu.

Comments? email cindym@jewishledger.com

Collaboration? Two books on Hollywood and the Nazis spark vigorous debate

By Cindy Mindell

Publication of Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler came just four months after Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press, April 2013) by Brandeis film studies professor Thomas Doherty. The two books kicked up a robust conversation among scholars and book critics, with many declaring support for one work over the other. Even descendants of the Hollywood studio heads discussed in the books weighed in, defending the actions of their forebears.

Among several issues at the heart of the debate is the use of the word “collaboration,” a particularly charged claim when used in the context of the Nazi regime. Also at issue is how each author interprets his findings to explain the various studio heads’ actions. Reviews abound, and from various corners of the media – traditional, Jewish, trade –with the New York Times, Tablet, and the Hollywood Reporter all weighing in, among many others.

Doherty invites a Victorian English novelist into the conversation as a basis for his research. “One of my favorite history quotes is from Anthony Trollope: ‘The past is another country; they do things differently there,’” he says. “I think it is important to remember that, for all the studio heads, how best to respond to Nazi Germany was not as clear in the 1930s as it is today.” Each man shaped his policies toward the Nazi government in different ways, Doherty says. “Some, like MGM, Fox, and Paramount, were most concerned with maintaining congenial relations because of the importance of the German market, although as the 1930s went on, they were getting less and less in the way of profits. Others, like Warner Bros. and Universal, bailed out early because they couldn’t tolerate the Nazi policies.”

In his Sept. 16 New Yorker review of both books, David Denby points out that both authors discuss the approach of American Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC). He quotes AJC head Cyrus Adler, who reflected the prevailing wariness of the Jewish community in lobbying for American support of Europe’s Jews: “They will get tired of us. What I want them to do is to get tired of Hitler.” Denby explains that these organizations petitioned against the production of The House of Rothschild, Fox’s 1934 account of the European Jewish banking family, fearful that the depiction of financially successful Jews would corroborate Nazi propaganda. Though the film was released (to positive critical and popular acclaim), the ADL successfully negotiated with major studio heads to omit Jewish characters altogether from future films.

Doherty presents Nazi Germany through the sensibilities and grasp of 1930s-era American film industry. “In Hollywood and Hitler, I wanted to explore the relationship between Nazism and American cinema, both as a business – what do you do when the sane, business-like Germans suddenly become pathological? – and an ideology – how is Nazism addressed in American cinema?” he says. “I especially wanted to capture what the sense of Nazism was in the 1930s – before World War II, before the Holocaust, before the Nazis became what they are today, a universal symbol of absolute evil. To see how filmmakers coped with and slowly realized what Nazism was.”

In addition to viewing the films produced during the ‘30s, Doherty conducted his research at several archives, including the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science in Beverly Hills, the Warner Bros. archives at University of Southern California, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives. Among the materials that illuminated the motion-picture industry during the 1930s were the trade periodicals Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and Motion Picture Herald.

“I wrote with the general reader in mind, a person interested in the past as it unfolded to those experiencing it,” he says. “The reason it is important to know the story, besides the intrinsic fascination, is that a knowledge of the past can be a useful guidepost to the present.”