The Eternal Jew
Encyclopedia
The Eternal Jew is an antisemitic German Nazi propaganda film
, presented as a documentary
. Its title in German
is Der ewige Jude, the German term for the character of the "Wandering Jew
" in medieval folklore. At the insistence of Nazi Germany
's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels
, the film was directed by Fritz Hippler
. The screenplay is credited to Eberhard Taubert
. The film consists of feature and documentary footage combined with materials filmed shortly after the Nazi occupation of Poland. At this time Poland's Jewish population was about three million, roughly ten percent of the total population. Actor Harry Giese
(1903–1991) narrated.
first established a film department in 1930 and Goebbels had taken a personal interest in the use of film to promote the Nazi philosophy and agenda. Soon after the Nazi takeover, Goebbels was insisting in speeches that the role of the German cinema was to serve as the "vanguard of the Nazi military" as they set forth to conquer the world.
Saul Friedländer suggests that Goebbels' intent was to counter three films whose messages attacked the persecution of Jews throughout history by producing violently anti-Semitic versions of those films with identical titles.
In 1934, a British film titled "The Eternal Jew" had been produced by Gaumont-Twickenham studios. Unlike the Nazi film, the British production portrayed Jews in a favorable light as the victims of unjustified persecution throughout history, in the Spanish Inquisition
, for example. The Goebbels film appears to have been intended as a violently anti-Semitic version of this previous British film.
In 1937, a special wing of the Propaganda Ministry put on an art exhibition in Munich
titled Der ewige Jude
. It followed this up with the publication of a book consisting of 265 photographs, each with a derogatory caption asserting the degeneracy of the Jewish race.
The Nazis had hoped for a surge in anti-Semitic sentiment after Kristallnacht
but, when it became clear that the majority of Germans did not share the Nazi hatred for Jews, Goebbels launched a campaign to promote the anti-semitic views of the Nazis to the German populace. He ordered each film studio to make an anti-semitic film.
Goebbels conceived of a film that would communicate to the German people the same antisemitic message that had been the theme of the 1937 Munich exhibition.
Hitler preferred films like Der ewige Jude which presented the Nazi anti-semitic agenda openly and directly; however Goebbels disliked the crudeness of such straight-forward approaches, preferring the much more subtle approach of couching anti-semtic messages in an engaging story with popular appeal.
Although Goebbels did not generally take an active role in the production of particular films, he elected to do so in the case of major propaganda films such as The Eternal Jew.
As early as 1938, Goebbels had wanted to have a film crew travel to Poland to shoot the ghetto scenes; however, he was unable to get permission from the Polish government. In October and November 1939, almost immediately after the German/Soviet invasion of Poland, he instructed Hippler to send camera crews to Łódź, Warsaw
, Cracow and Lublin
to shoot footage of Polish Jews.
The footage that Hippler shot in the Polish ghettos of Lodz, Warsaw, Cracow and Lublin was the only footage shot specifically for the purpose of the film. At the beginning of the film, animated text informs the audience that this "documentary footage" shows Jews in their original state "before they put on the mask of civilized Europeans." In the Nazi press, Hippler expanded on this claim, asserting that his filming techniques captured Jews "in an unprejudiced manner, real to life as they live and as they react in their own surroundings."
Although Hippler advertised the film as being a factual documentary consisting of pictures of real Jews with nothing faked or simulated, his claims were complete falsehoods. In reality, the film was an exercise in manipulation for the purposes of propaganda. In shooting his footage, Hippler did in fact simulate scenes and use actors who were performing under duress and without knowledge of how the footage would be employed. For example, in order to get shots of Jewish worship services, Hippler and Goebbels assembled the congregation of the Vilker synagogue, ordered them to wear the tallithim andtefillin and hold a full-scale service. When the Germans ordered the Torah reader to read from the Torah, he started by saying on camera "Today is Tuesday" signalling that his reading of the Torah was coerced since it was not customary to read the Torah on Tuesdays.
Aside from the footage shot in Poland, the rest of the film consisted of stills and archival footage from feature films (often without permission) that the film presented as if they were documentary footage.
format and, like other Hippler films, relied heavily on narration.
The film can be roughly divided into four thematic areas:
Unser Wille und Weg, a Nazi Party monthly publication aimed at propagandists provides a rationale for why The Eternal Jew was made. The author of the essay “The Film of a 2000-Year Rat Migration,” who remains anonymous, believes the film shows “a full picture of Jewry,” and provides "the best treatment of this parasitic race." The author connects the Jews' migration from the Middle East
to Egypt
and their following of German colonists to rats traveling as a group, who "even then displayed the same criminal traits that they still displayed". The film is complimented for "its portrayal of the Jews' vulgar methods and the brutality and all-devouring hatred they exhibit when they reach their goal and control finance." The slaughtering method causes the author to question the "so-called Jewish religion", as butchers do their work with grins on their face. In closing, the author states the film will be a valuable tool in the struggle to break the Jews' "power over us. We are the initiators of the fight against world Jewry, which now directs its hate, its brutal greed and destructive will toward us. We must win this battle for ourselves, for Europe, for the world."
Following this commentary, the film provides a succession of scenes in which Jews are portrayed as an uncivilized, parasitic people with low social standing. The images were mostly shot on site in Polish ghettos, showing subjects who were deliberately chosen to be poorly dressed, dirty and partially toothless grins. The locations shown are dirty and infested by vermin.
Robert Reimer asserts that a central theme of the film is the assertion that "Jews have always lived in the ghettos and in fact they choose to live this way." According to Reimer, the film asserts that ghettos are "ordinary [and] normal" aspects of Jewish life. Reimer charges that what the film is actually showing is not the normal life of Polish Jewry but rather the "effect of the Nazi administration and the disruption of the lives of millions of Polish Jews." Erik Barnouw describes the Warsaw ghetto after the Nazi conquest as a place where "hundreds of thousands of Jews were herded by the [Nazi] conquerors into pockets of indescribable misery." He describes footage shot there as showing "half-starved, unshaven creatures caught in pathetic acts of barter - a pair of socks for a scrap of food."It is scenes such as these that the film presents as showing Jews "in their natural state."
The film utilizes a montage
that juxtaposes these images of ghetto Jews with images of rats to draw an analogy between the migration of Jews from Eastern Europe with the migration of rats. For example, one of the shots shows a pack of rat
s emerging from a sewer, followed by a shot of a crowd of Jews in a bustling street of Lodz. Close-ups of those in the crowd reveal sickly, malformed facial features. The narrator states that, as rats are the vermin of the animal kingdom, Jews are the vermin of the human race and similarly spread disease and corruption. Unlike rats, however, the narrator continues, Jews have the uncanny ability to change their appearance and blend into their "human hosts." A scene depicts four bearded men in traditional religious Jewish clothing, then shows them shaved and in modern business suits, while the narrator explains that only a "trained eye" can distinguish their Jewish features.
The movie blamed Jews for inflation and unemployment in Germany. It charged that they had crept into all professions and through usury
, racketeering and crimes on German assets.
This sequence includes footage of notable figures who had earned Adolf Hitler
's wrath, such as physicist and Nobel laureate Albert Einstein
and Rosa Luxembourg as representatives of so-called " international Jewry". Einstein's image was juxtaposed with a series of images about Jewish control of the pornography
industry. Einstein was characterized as "relativity Jew, his hatred of Germany after an obscure pseudo-science hidden "refers to.
Other film clips presented Jewish (or supposedly Jewish) actors from the Weimar era such as Curt Bois , Charles Chaplin (who was not a Jew), Fritz Kortner
, Peter Lorre
, and Ernst Lubitsch
.
The film includes a sequence from The House of Rothschild (1934) that shows a rich Rothschild hiding money and putting on old clothes to fool the tax collector. The clip was used without permission and presented with misleading German
subtitles that hid the comic intent of the original film.
The film's narrator asserts that: "(t)he Jew is instinctively interested in everything abnormal and depraved." To illustrate this point, Hippler included a scene from Fritz Lang
's film M
in which the child murderer Beckert (played by Peter Lorre) makes an impassioned plea the jury, begging for his life and disclaiming responsibility for his crimes on account of insanity. Beckert shrieks, "... it burns within me. I must go the way I am driven. Who knows what is going on inside me? How I must - not want, must!" According to Sharon Packer, Hippler used this scene to assert that "Jews transmit inheritable criminality and therefore deserve to die."
, whom the Nazis appointed head of the Judenrat
(Jewish Council), is shown seated in front of a seven-branched menorah, gesticulating wildly at the director's insistence, because "that is how Jews speak."
After showing how Jews have been responsible for the decline of Western music, science, art, and commerce, is a scene of a cow being slaughtered for meat by a shochet (Jewish ritual slaughter), which is prefaced by a warning similar to the one in Frankenstein
, warning women, children, and the squeamish about the upcoming scene. This long scene, lasting several minutes, shows the cows and sheep in all their death throes as they bleed to death. The movie's creators apparently filmed this scene on the knowledge that Hitler was opposed to cruelty to animals
and had banned kosher slaughter of animals in Germany, and that such footage would shock an audience that was sensitive to animals.
This scene was cut from the version intended for women and children.
The film omits the line "the Bolshevization of Earth and thus..." following "...will not be...", likely due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The film ends with images of SA troops on parade.
which was wildly popular, perhaps because it wrapped the antisemitic message in an engaging period drama with costumes, etc. The actors in Jud Süß were leading German actors of the time. In contrast, Der Ewige Jude's only original footage was of Jews in the Polish ghetto who were deliberately set up to look poor, filthy and disgusting. All the other footage consisted of stills and archive film clips.
In contrast to the interesting story of Jud Süß, Der Ewige Jude was unremitting propaganda without the cloak of an interesting plot line to engage the audience. It also had some disgusting scenes of Jewish ritual slaughter that turned the audience's stomach.
Thus, unlike Jud Süß
which was a box-office smash success, Der Ewige Jude was a commercial flop. David Culbert asserts that it is unlikely that there were more than 1 million paid admissions compared to over 20 million paid admissions to Jud Süß.
There were only 1 million paid admissions compared to 20 million for Jud Süß. The film was more known by word-of-mouth descriptions than from people actually viewing it. Some Germans were quoted as saying "We've already seen enough Jewish filth. We don't need to see any more."
For the most part, the film was viewed by party supporters and Nazi organizations like the Hitler youth
and the SS
. Nevertheless, because its dramatic scenes were widely discussed, the theme and contents of the film were known by reputation by large segments of the population who had not actually viewed it. It is widely noted that SS troops headed for the Eastern front to carry out the "Final Solution
" were "invited" by Himmler to watch the film.
An unrepentant Hippler was interviewed in the Emmy Award
-winning program "The Propaganda Battle" in the PBS series Walk Through the Twentieth Century. In this interview he explains that he regrets that his name was listed as the director of The Eternal Jew because the Allies interrogated him after the war. He thought this was unfair because, in his opinion, he had nothing to do with the killing of Jews. However, in an interview shown in the 2000 German documentary series Holocaust, the 90-year old Hippler described the film as "the most disgraceful example of anti-semitism."
Downloadsites
The Eternal Jew (1940
) is an antisemitic German Nazi propaganda film
, presented as a documentary
. Its title in German
is Der ewige Jude, the German term for the character of the "Wandering Jew
" in medieval folklore. At the insistence of Nazi Germany
's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels
, the film was directed by Fritz Hippler
. The screenplay is credited to Eberhard Taubert
. The film consists of feature and documentary footage combined with materials filmed shortly after the Nazi occupation of Poland. At this time Poland's Jewish population was about three million, roughly ten percent of the total population. Actor Harry Giese
(1903–1991) narrated.
first established a film department in 1930 and Goebbels had taken a personal interest in the use of film to promote the Nazi philosophy and agenda. Soon after the Nazi takeover, Goebbels was insisting in speeches that the role of the German cinema was to serve as the "vanguard of the Nazi military" as they set forth to conquer the world.
Saul Friedländer suggests that Goebbels' intent was to counter three films whose messages attacked the persecution of Jews throughout history by producing violently anti-Semitic versions of those films with identical titles.
In 1934, a British film titled "The Eternal Jew" had been produced by Gaumont-Twickenham studios. Unlike the Nazi film, the British production portrayed Jews in a favorable light as the victims of unjustified persecution throughout history, in the Spanish Inquisition
, for example. The Goebbels film appears to have been intended as a violently anti-Semitic version of this previous British film.
In 1937, a special wing of the Propaganda Ministry put on an art exhibition in Munich
titled Der ewige Jude
. It followed this up with the publication of a book consisting of 265 photographs, each with a derogatory caption asserting the degeneracy of the Jewish race.
The Nazis had hoped for a surge in anti-Semitic sentiment after Kristallnacht
but, when it became clear that the majority of Germans did not share the Nazi hatred for Jews, Goebbels launched a campaign to promote the anti-semitic views of the Nazis to the German populace. He ordered each film studio to make an anti-semitic film.
Goebbels conceived of a film that would communicate to the German people the same antisemitic message that had been the theme of the 1937 Munich exhibition.
Hitler preferred films like Der ewige Jude which presented the Nazi anti-semitic agenda openly and directly; however Goebbels disliked the crudeness of such straight-forward approaches, preferring the much more subtle approach of couching anti-semtic messages in an engaging story with popular appeal.
Although Goebbels did not generally take an active role in the production of particular films, he elected to do so in the case of major propaganda films such as The Eternal Jew.
As early as 1938, Goebbels had wanted to have a film crew travel to Poland to shoot the ghetto scenes; however, he was unable to get permission from the Polish government. In October and November 1939, almost immediately after the German/Soviet invasion of Poland, he instructed Hippler to send camera crews to Łódź, Warsaw
, Cracow and Lublin
to shoot footage of Polish Jews.
The footage that Hippler shot in the Polish ghettos of Lodz, Warsaw, Cracow and Lublin was the only footage shot specifically for the purpose of the film. At the beginning of the film, animated text informs the audience that this "documentary footage" shows Jews in their original state "before they put on the mask of civilized Europeans." In the Nazi press, Hippler expanded on this claim, asserting that his filming techniques captured Jews "in an unprejudiced manner, real to life as they live and as they react in their own surroundings."
Although Hippler advertised the film as being a factual documentary consisting of pictures of real Jews with nothing faked or simulated, his claims were complete falsehoods. In reality, the film was an exercise in manipulation for the purposes of propaganda. In shooting his footage, Hippler did in fact simulate scenes and use actors who were performing under duress and without knowledge of how the footage would be employed. For example, in order to get shots of Jewish worship services, Hippler and Goebbels assembled the congregation of the Vilker synagogue, ordered them to wear the tallithim andtefillin and hold a full-scale service. When the Germans ordered the Torah reader to read from the Torah, he started by saying on camera "Today is Tuesday" signalling that his reading of the Torah was coerced since it was not customary to read the Torah on Tuesdays.
Aside from the footage shot in Poland, the rest of the film consisted of stills and archival footage from feature films (often without permission) that the film presented as if they were documentary footage.
format and, like other Hippler films, relied heavily on narration.
The film can be roughly divided into four thematic areas:
Unser Wille und Weg, a Nazi Party monthly publication aimed at propagandists provides a rationale for why The Eternal Jew was made. The author of the essay “The Film of a 2000-Year Rat Migration,” who remains anonymous, believes the film shows “a full picture of Jewry,” and provides "the best treatment of this parasitic race." The author connects the Jews' migration from the Middle East
to Egypt
and their following of German colonists to rats traveling as a group, who "even then displayed the same criminal traits that they still displayed". The film is complimented for "its portrayal of the Jews' vulgar methods and the brutality and all-devouring hatred they exhibit when they reach their goal and control finance." The slaughtering method causes the author to question the "so-called Jewish religion", as butchers do their work with grins on their face. In closing, the author states the film will be a valuable tool in the struggle to break the Jews' "power over us. We are the initiators of the fight against world Jewry, which now directs its hate, its brutal greed and destructive will toward us. We must win this battle for ourselves, for Europe, for the world."
Following this commentary, the film provides a succession of scenes in which Jews are portrayed as an uncivilized, parasitic people with low social standing. The images were mostly shot on site in Polish ghettos, showing subjects who were deliberately chosen to be poorly dressed, dirty and partially toothless grins. The locations shown are dirty and infested by vermin.
Robert Reimer asserts that a central theme of the film is the assertion that "Jews have always lived in the ghettos and in fact they choose to live this way." According to Reimer, the film asserts that ghettos are "ordinary [and] normal" aspects of Jewish life. Reimer charges that what the film is actually showing is not the normal life of Polish Jewry but rather the "effect of the Nazi administration and the disruption of the lives of millions of Polish Jews." Erik Barnouw describes the Warsaw ghetto after the Nazi conquest as a place where "hundreds of thousands of Jews were herded by the [Nazi] conquerors into pockets of indescribable misery." He describes footage shot there as showing "half-starved, unshaven creatures caught in pathetic acts of barter - a pair of socks for a scrap of food."It is scenes such as these that the film presents as showing Jews "in their natural state."
The film utilizes a montage
that juxtaposes these images of ghetto Jews with images of rats to draw an analogy between the migration of Jews from Eastern Europe with the migration of rats. For example, one of the shots shows a pack of rat
s emerging from a sewer, followed by a shot of a crowd of Jews in a bustling street of Lodz. Close-ups of those in the crowd reveal sickly, malformed facial features. The narrator states that, as rats are the vermin of the animal kingdom, Jews are the vermin of the human race and similarly spread disease and corruption. Unlike rats, however, the narrator continues, Jews have the uncanny ability to change their appearance and blend into their "human hosts." A scene depicts four bearded men in traditional religious Jewish clothing, then shows them shaved and in modern business suits, while the narrator explains that only a "trained eye" can distinguish their Jewish features.
The movie blamed Jews for inflation and unemployment in Germany. It charged that they had crept into all professions and through usury
, racketeering and crimes on German assets.
This sequence includes footage of notable figures who had earned Adolf Hitler
's wrath, such as physicist and Nobel laureate Albert Einstein
and Rosa Luxembourg as representatives of so-called " international Jewry". Einstein's image was juxtaposed with a series of images about Jewish control of the pornography
industry. Einstein was characterized as "relativity Jew, his hatred of Germany after an obscure pseudo-science hidden "refers to.
Other film clips presented Jewish (or supposedly Jewish) actors from the Weimar era such as Curt Bois , Charles Chaplin (who was not a Jew), Fritz Kortner
, Peter Lorre
, and Ernst Lubitsch
.
The film includes a sequence from The House of Rothschild (1934) that shows a rich Rothschild hiding money and putting on old clothes to fool the tax collector. The clip was used without permission and presented with misleading German
subtitles that hid the comic intent of the original film.
The film's narrator asserts that: "(t)he Jew is instinctively interested in everything abnormal and depraved." To illustrate this point, Hippler included a scene from Fritz Lang
's film M
in which the child murderer Beckert (played by Peter Lorre) makes an impassioned plea the jury, begging for his life and disclaiming responsibility for his crimes on account of insanity. Beckert shrieks, "... it burns within me. I must go the way I am driven. Who knows what is going on inside me? How I must - not want, must!" According to Sharon Packer, Hippler used this scene to assert that "Jews transmit inheritable criminality and therefore deserve to die."
, whom the Nazis appointed head of the Judenrat
(Jewish Council), is shown seated in front of a seven-branched menorah, gesticulating wildly at the director's insistence, because "that is how Jews speak."
After showing how Jews have been responsible for the decline of Western music, science, art, and commerce, is a scene of a cow being slaughtered for meat by a shochet (Jewish ritual slaughter), which is prefaced by a warning similar to the one in Frankenstein
, warning women, children, and the squeamish about the upcoming scene. This long scene, lasting several minutes, shows the cows and sheep in all their death throes as they bleed to death. The movie's creators apparently filmed this scene on the knowledge that Hitler was opposed to cruelty to animals
and had banned kosher slaughter of animals in Germany, and that such footage would shock an audience that was sensitive to animals.
This scene was cut from the version intended for women and children.
The film omits the line "the Bolshevization of Earth and thus..." following "...will not be...", likely due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The film ends with images of SA troops on parade.
which was wildly popular, perhaps because it wrapped the antisemitic message in an engaging period drama with costumes, etc. The actors in Jud Süß were leading German actors of the time. In contrast, Der Ewige Jude's only original footage was of Jews in the Polish ghetto who were deliberately set up to look poor, filthy and disgusting. All the other footage consisted of stills and archive film clips.
In contrast to the interesting story of Jud Süß, Der Ewige Jude was unremitting propaganda without the cloak of an interesting plot line to engage the audience. It also had some disgusting scenes of Jewish ritual slaughter that turned the audience's stomach.
Thus, unlike Jud Süß
which was a box-office smash success, Der Ewige Jude was a commercial flop. David Culbert asserts that it is unlikely that there were more than 1 million paid admissions compared to over 20 million paid admissions to Jud Süß.
There were only 1 million paid admissions compared to 20 million for Jud Süß. The film was more known by word-of-mouth descriptions than from people actually viewing it. Some Germans were quoted as saying "We've already seen enough Jewish filth. We don't need to see any more."
For the most part, the film was viewed by party supporters and Nazi organizations like the Hitler youth
and the SS
. Nevertheless, because its dramatic scenes were widely discussed, the theme and contents of the film were known by reputation by large segments of the population who had not actually viewed it. It is widely noted that SS troops headed for the Eastern front to carry out the "Final Solution
" were "invited" by Himmler to watch the film.
An unrepentant Hippler was interviewed in the Emmy Award
-winning program "The Propaganda Battle" in the PBS series Walk Through the Twentieth Century. In this interview he explains that he regrets that his name was listed as the director of The Eternal Jew because the Allies interrogated him after the war. He thought this was unfair because, in his opinion, he had nothing to do with the killing of Jews. However, in an interview shown in the 2000 German documentary series Holocaust, the 90-year old Hippler described the film as "the most disgraceful example of anti-semitism."
Downloadsites
The Eternal Jew (1940
) is an antisemitic German Nazi propaganda film
, presented as a documentary
. Its title in German
is Der ewige Jude, the German term for the character of the "Wandering Jew
" in medieval folklore. At the insistence of Nazi Germany
's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels
, the film was directed by Fritz Hippler
. The screenplay is credited to Eberhard Taubert
. The film consists of feature and documentary footage combined with materials filmed shortly after the Nazi occupation of Poland. At this time Poland's Jewish population was about three million, roughly ten percent of the total population. Actor Harry Giese
(1903–1991) narrated.
first established a film department in 1930 and Goebbels had taken a personal interest in the use of film to promote the Nazi philosophy and agenda. Soon after the Nazi takeover, Goebbels was insisting in speeches that the role of the German cinema was to serve as the "vanguard of the Nazi military" as they set forth to conquer the world.
Saul Friedländer suggests that Goebbels' intent was to counter three films whose messages attacked the persecution of Jews throughout history by producing violently anti-Semitic versions of those films with identical titles.
In 1934, a British film titled "The Eternal Jew" had been produced by Gaumont-Twickenham studios. Unlike the Nazi film, the British production portrayed Jews in a favorable light as the victims of unjustified persecution throughout history, in the Spanish Inquisition
, for example. The Goebbels film appears to have been intended as a violently anti-Semitic version of this previous British film.
In 1937, a special wing of the Propaganda Ministry put on an art exhibition in Munich
titled Der ewige Jude
. It followed this up with the publication of a book consisting of 265 photographs, each with a derogatory caption asserting the degeneracy of the Jewish race.
The Nazis had hoped for a surge in anti-Semitic sentiment after Kristallnacht
but, when it became clear that the majority of Germans did not share the Nazi hatred for Jews, Goebbels launched a campaign to promote the anti-semitic views of the Nazis to the German populace. He ordered each film studio to make an anti-semitic film.
Goebbels conceived of a film that would communicate to the German people the same antisemitic message that had been the theme of the 1937 Munich exhibition.
Hitler preferred films like Der ewige Jude which presented the Nazi anti-semitic agenda openly and directly; however Goebbels disliked the crudeness of such straight-forward approaches, preferring the much more subtle approach of couching anti-semtic messages in an engaging story with popular appeal.
Although Goebbels did not generally take an active role in the production of particular films, he elected to do so in the case of major propaganda films such as The Eternal Jew.
As early as 1938, Goebbels had wanted to have a film crew travel to Poland to shoot the ghetto scenes; however, he was unable to get permission from the Polish government. In October and November 1939, almost immediately after the German/Soviet invasion of Poland, he instructed Hippler to send camera crews to Łódź, Warsaw
, Cracow and Lublin
to shoot footage of Polish Jews.
The footage that Hippler shot in the Polish ghettos of Lodz, Warsaw, Cracow and Lublin was the only footage shot specifically for the purpose of the film. At the beginning of the film, animated text informs the audience that this "documentary footage" shows Jews in their original state "before they put on the mask of civilized Europeans." In the Nazi press, Hippler expanded on this claim, asserting that his filming techniques captured Jews "in an unprejudiced manner, real to life as they live and as they react in their own surroundings."
Although Hippler advertised the film as being a factual documentary consisting of pictures of real Jews with nothing faked or simulated, his claims were complete falsehoods. In reality, the film was an exercise in manipulation for the purposes of propaganda. In shooting his footage, Hippler did in fact simulate scenes and use actors who were performing under duress and without knowledge of how the footage would be employed. For example, in order to get shots of Jewish worship services, Hippler and Goebbels assembled the congregation of the Vilker synagogue, ordered them to wear the tallithim andtefillin and hold a full-scale service. When the Germans ordered the Torah reader to read from the Torah, he started by saying on camera "Today is Tuesday" signalling that his reading of the Torah was coerced since it was not customary to read the Torah on Tuesdays.
Aside from the footage shot in Poland, the rest of the film consisted of stills and archival footage from feature films (often without permission) that the film presented as if they were documentary footage.
format and, like other Hippler films, relied heavily on narration.
The film can be roughly divided into four thematic areas:
Unser Wille und Weg, a Nazi Party monthly publication aimed at propagandists provides a rationale for why The Eternal Jew was made. The author of the essay “The Film of a 2000-Year Rat Migration,” who remains anonymous, believes the film shows “a full picture of Jewry,” and provides "the best treatment of this parasitic race." The author connects the Jews' migration from the Middle East
to Egypt
and their following of German colonists to rats traveling as a group, who "even then displayed the same criminal traits that they still displayed". The film is complimented for "its portrayal of the Jews' vulgar methods and the brutality and all-devouring hatred they exhibit when they reach their goal and control finance." The slaughtering method causes the author to question the "so-called Jewish religion", as butchers do their work with grins on their face. In closing, the author states the film will be a valuable tool in the struggle to break the Jews' "power over us. We are the initiators of the fight against world Jewry, which now directs its hate, its brutal greed and destructive will toward us. We must win this battle for ourselves, for Europe, for the world."
Following this commentary, the film provides a succession of scenes in which Jews are portrayed as an uncivilized, parasitic people with low social standing. The images were mostly shot on site in Polish ghettos, showing subjects who were deliberately chosen to be poorly dressed, dirty and partially toothless grins. The locations shown are dirty and infested by vermin.
Robert Reimer asserts that a central theme of the film is the assertion that "Jews have always lived in the ghettos and in fact they choose to live this way." According to Reimer, the film asserts that ghettos are "ordinary [and] normal" aspects of Jewish life. Reimer charges that what the film is actually showing is not the normal life of Polish Jewry but rather the "effect of the Nazi administration and the disruption of the lives of millions of Polish Jews." Erik Barnouw describes the Warsaw ghetto after the Nazi conquest as a place where "hundreds of thousands of Jews were herded by the [Nazi] conquerors into pockets of indescribable misery." He describes footage shot there as showing "half-starved, unshaven creatures caught in pathetic acts of barter - a pair of socks for a scrap of food."It is scenes such as these that the film presents as showing Jews "in their natural state."
The film utilizes a montage
that juxtaposes these images of ghetto Jews with images of rats to draw an analogy between the migration of Jews from Eastern Europe with the migration of rats. For example, one of the shots shows a pack of rat
s emerging from a sewer, followed by a shot of a crowd of Jews in a bustling street of Lodz. Close-ups of those in the crowd reveal sickly, malformed facial features. The narrator states that, as rats are the vermin of the animal kingdom, Jews are the vermin of the human race and similarly spread disease and corruption. Unlike rats, however, the narrator continues, Jews have the uncanny ability to change their appearance and blend into their "human hosts." A scene depicts four bearded men in traditional religious Jewish clothing, then shows them shaved and in modern business suits, while the narrator explains that only a "trained eye" can distinguish their Jewish features.
The movie blamed Jews for inflation and unemployment in Germany. It charged that they had crept into all professions and through usury
, racketeering and crimes on German assets.
This sequence includes footage of notable figures who had earned Adolf Hitler
's wrath, such as physicist and Nobel laureate Albert Einstein
and Rosa Luxembourg as representatives of so-called " international Jewry". Einstein's image was juxtaposed with a series of images about Jewish control of the pornography
industry. Einstein was characterized as "relativity Jew, his hatred of Germany after an obscure pseudo-science hidden "refers to.
Other film clips presented Jewish (or supposedly Jewish) actors from the Weimar era such as Curt Bois , Charles Chaplin (who was not a Jew), Fritz Kortner
, Peter Lorre
, and Ernst Lubitsch
.
The film includes a sequence from The House of Rothschild (1934) that shows a rich Rothschild hiding money and putting on old clothes to fool the tax collector. The clip was used without permission and presented with misleading German
subtitles that hid the comic intent of the original film.
The film's narrator asserts that: "(t)he Jew is instinctively interested in everything abnormal and depraved." To illustrate this point, Hippler included a scene from Fritz Lang
's film M
in which the child murderer Beckert (played by Peter Lorre) makes an impassioned plea the jury, begging for his life and disclaiming responsibility for his crimes on account of insanity. Beckert shrieks, "... it burns within me. I must go the way I am driven. Who knows what is going on inside me? How I must - not want, must!" According to Sharon Packer, Hippler used this scene to assert that "Jews transmit inheritable criminality and therefore deserve to die."
, whom the Nazis appointed head of the Judenrat
(Jewish Council), is shown seated in front of a seven-branched menorah, gesticulating wildly at the director's insistence, because "that is how Jews speak."
After showing how Jews have been responsible for the decline of Western music, science, art, and commerce, is a scene of a cow being slaughtered for meat by a shochet (Jewish ritual slaughter), which is prefaced by a warning similar to the one in Frankenstein
, warning women, children, and the squeamish about the upcoming scene. This long scene, lasting several minutes, shows the cows and sheep in all their death throes as they bleed to death. The movie's creators apparently filmed this scene on the knowledge that Hitler was opposed to cruelty to animals
and had banned kosher slaughter of animals in Germany, and that such footage would shock an audience that was sensitive to animals.
This scene was cut from the version intended for women and children.
The film omits the line "the Bolshevization of Earth and thus..." following "...will not be...", likely due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The film ends with images of SA troops on parade.
which was wildly popular, perhaps because it wrapped the antisemitic message in an engaging period drama with costumes, etc. The actors in Jud Süß were leading German actors of the time. In contrast, Der Ewige Jude's only original footage was of Jews in the Polish ghetto who were deliberately set up to look poor, filthy and disgusting. All the other footage consisted of stills and archive film clips.
In contrast to the interesting story of Jud Süß, Der Ewige Jude was unremitting propaganda without the cloak of an interesting plot line to engage the audience. It also had some disgusting scenes of Jewish ritual slaughter that turned the audience's stomach.
Thus, unlike Jud Süß
which was a box-office smash success, Der Ewige Jude was a commercial flop. David Culbert asserts that it is unlikely that there were more than 1 million paid admissions compared to over 20 million paid admissions to Jud Süß.
There were only 1 million paid admissions compared to 20 million for Jud Süß. The film was more known by word-of-mouth descriptions than from people actually viewing it. Some Germans were quoted as saying "We've already seen enough Jewish filth. We don't need to see any more."
For the most part, the film was viewed by party supporters and Nazi organizations like the Hitler youth
and the SS
. Nevertheless, because its dramatic scenes were widely discussed, the theme and contents of the film were known by reputation by large segments of the population who had not actually viewed it. It is widely noted that SS troops headed for the Eastern front to carry out the "Final Solution
" were "invited" by Himmler to watch the film.
An unrepentant Hippler was interviewed in the Emmy Award
-winning program "The Propaganda Battle" in the PBS series Walk Through the Twentieth Century. In this interview he explains that he regrets that his name was listed as the director of The Eternal Jew because the Allies interrogated him after the war. He thought this was unfair because, in his opinion, he had nothing to do with the killing of Jews. However, in an interview shown in the 2000 German documentary series Holocaust, the 90-year old Hippler described the film as "the most disgraceful example of anti-semitism."
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Propaganda film
The term propaganda can be defined as the ability to produce and spread fertile messages that, once sown, will germinate in large human cultures.” However, in the 20th century, a “new” propaganda emerged, which revolved around political organizations and their need to communicate messages that...
, presented as a documentary
Documentary
A documentary is a creative work of non-fiction, including:* Documentary film, including television* Radio documentary* Documentary photographyRelated terms include:...
. Its title in German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
is Der ewige Jude, the German term for the character of the "Wandering Jew
Wandering Jew
The Wandering Jew is a figure from medieval Christian folklore whose legend began to spread in Europe in the 13th century. The original legend concerns a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming...
" in medieval folklore. At the insistence of Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels
Joseph Goebbels
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism...
, the film was directed by Fritz Hippler
Fritz Hippler
Fritz Hippler was a German filmmaker who ran the film department in the Propaganda Ministry of the Third Reich, under Joseph Goebbels. He is most famous as director of the propaganda film Der ewige Jude ....
. The screenplay is credited to Eberhard Taubert
Eberhard Taubert
Eberhard Taubert was a lawyer and anti-Semitic Nazi propagandist. Since 1933 he was a member of the Nazi Propagandaministerium under Joseph Goebbels.His nickname in Nazi circles was Dr. Anti...
. The film consists of feature and documentary footage combined with materials filmed shortly after the Nazi occupation of Poland. At this time Poland's Jewish population was about three million, roughly ten percent of the total population. Actor Harry Giese
Harry Giese
Harry Giese was a German theatre and voice actor.-Career:He was the narrator for German newsreels between 1940 and 1945. He is perhaps best known as the narrator for the anti-semitic propaganda film The External Jew ....
(1903–1991) narrated.
Background
Hitler and Goebbels believed that film was a very potent tool for molding public opinion. The NazisNational Socialist German Workers Party
The National Socialist German Workers' Party , commonly known in English as the Nazi Party, was a political party in Germany between 1920 and 1945. Its predecessor, the German Workers' Party , existed from 1919 to 1920...
first established a film department in 1930 and Goebbels had taken a personal interest in the use of film to promote the Nazi philosophy and agenda. Soon after the Nazi takeover, Goebbels was insisting in speeches that the role of the German cinema was to serve as the "vanguard of the Nazi military" as they set forth to conquer the world.
Saul Friedländer suggests that Goebbels' intent was to counter three films whose messages attacked the persecution of Jews throughout history by producing violently anti-Semitic versions of those films with identical titles.
In 1934, a British film titled "The Eternal Jew" had been produced by Gaumont-Twickenham studios. Unlike the Nazi film, the British production portrayed Jews in a favorable light as the victims of unjustified persecution throughout history, in the Spanish Inquisition
Spanish Inquisition
The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition , commonly known as the Spanish Inquisition , was a tribunal established in 1480 by Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. It was intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms, and to replace the Medieval...
, for example. The Goebbels film appears to have been intended as a violently anti-Semitic version of this previous British film.
In 1937, a special wing of the Propaganda Ministry put on an art exhibition in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
titled Der ewige Jude
The Eternal Jew (art exhibition)
The Eternal Jew was the title of an exhibition of 'degenerate art' displayed at the Library of the German Museum in Munich from November 8, 1937 to January 31, 1938...
. It followed this up with the publication of a book consisting of 265 photographs, each with a derogatory caption asserting the degeneracy of the Jewish race.
The Nazis had hoped for a surge in anti-Semitic sentiment after Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht, also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, and also Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht, and Novemberpogrome, was a pogrom or series of attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on 9–10 November 1938.Jewish homes were ransacked, as were shops, towns and...
but, when it became clear that the majority of Germans did not share the Nazi hatred for Jews, Goebbels launched a campaign to promote the anti-semitic views of the Nazis to the German populace. He ordered each film studio to make an anti-semitic film.
Goebbels conceived of a film that would communicate to the German people the same antisemitic message that had been the theme of the 1937 Munich exhibition.
Hitler preferred films like Der ewige Jude which presented the Nazi anti-semitic agenda openly and directly; however Goebbels disliked the crudeness of such straight-forward approaches, preferring the much more subtle approach of couching anti-semtic messages in an engaging story with popular appeal.
Although Goebbels did not generally take an active role in the production of particular films, he elected to do so in the case of major propaganda films such as The Eternal Jew.
Production
The film was in production for over a year. Throughout the end of 1939 and the beginning of 1940, Goebbels devoted "constant attention" to the production of what he referred to as "the Jew film".As early as 1938, Goebbels had wanted to have a film crew travel to Poland to shoot the ghetto scenes; however, he was unable to get permission from the Polish government. In October and November 1939, almost immediately after the German/Soviet invasion of Poland, he instructed Hippler to send camera crews to Łódź, Warsaw
Warsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...
, Cracow and Lublin
Lublin
Lublin is the ninth largest city in Poland. It is the capital of Lublin Voivodeship with a population of 350,392 . Lublin is also the largest Polish city east of the Vistula river...
to shoot footage of Polish Jews.
The footage that Hippler shot in the Polish ghettos of Lodz, Warsaw, Cracow and Lublin was the only footage shot specifically for the purpose of the film. At the beginning of the film, animated text informs the audience that this "documentary footage" shows Jews in their original state "before they put on the mask of civilized Europeans." In the Nazi press, Hippler expanded on this claim, asserting that his filming techniques captured Jews "in an unprejudiced manner, real to life as they live and as they react in their own surroundings."
Although Hippler advertised the film as being a factual documentary consisting of pictures of real Jews with nothing faked or simulated, his claims were complete falsehoods. In reality, the film was an exercise in manipulation for the purposes of propaganda. In shooting his footage, Hippler did in fact simulate scenes and use actors who were performing under duress and without knowledge of how the footage would be employed. For example, in order to get shots of Jewish worship services, Hippler and Goebbels assembled the congregation of the Vilker synagogue, ordered them to wear the tallithim andtefillin and hold a full-scale service. When the Germans ordered the Torah reader to read from the Torah, he started by saying on camera "Today is Tuesday" signalling that his reading of the Torah was coerced since it was not customary to read the Torah on Tuesdays.
Aside from the footage shot in Poland, the rest of the film consisted of stills and archival footage from feature films (often without permission) that the film presented as if they were documentary footage.
Format and structure
The movie was produced in a documentaryDocumentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
format and, like other Hippler films, relied heavily on narration.
The film can be roughly divided into four thematic areas:
- Recordings from Polish ghettos
- Enumeration and evaluation of numerous political, cultural and social values in the international arena of Jewish origin
- Religious ceremonies, religious instruction, worship, ritual slaughter
- Adolf Hitler's Reichstag speech, parading SA troops
Themes
According to Stephen Fritz, Goebbels intended The Eternal Jew as "both a demonstration of the parasitical nature of the Jews and a justification for drastic measures against them." According to Maria Tatar, the Nazis were able use Hippler's film to "position the victims of their genocidal project as dangerous aggressors who had to be exterminated."Unser Wille und Weg, a Nazi Party monthly publication aimed at propagandists provides a rationale for why The Eternal Jew was made. The author of the essay “The Film of a 2000-Year Rat Migration,” who remains anonymous, believes the film shows “a full picture of Jewry,” and provides "the best treatment of this parasitic race." The author connects the Jews' migration from the Middle East
Middle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
to Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
and their following of German colonists to rats traveling as a group, who "even then displayed the same criminal traits that they still displayed". The film is complimented for "its portrayal of the Jews' vulgar methods and the brutality and all-devouring hatred they exhibit when they reach their goal and control finance." The slaughtering method causes the author to question the "so-called Jewish religion", as butchers do their work with grins on their face. In closing, the author states the film will be a valuable tool in the struggle to break the Jews' "power over us. We are the initiators of the fight against world Jewry, which now directs its hate, its brutal greed and destructive will toward us. We must win this battle for ourselves, for Europe, for the world."
Jews as a uncivilized and parasitic people
Richard Taylor describes the basic tenet of the film as arguing that "the Jew is an oriental barbarian who has insinuated himself cleverly into European society, and now exploits it parasitically." This point is emphasized throughout the film, starting from the very opening lines of the film's commentary:
The civilised Jews that we know in Germany give us only an incomplete picture of their racial character. This film shows genuine shots of the Polish ghettos. It shows the Jews as they really are, before they conceal themselves behind the mask of the civilised European.
Following this commentary, the film provides a succession of scenes in which Jews are portrayed as an uncivilized, parasitic people with low social standing. The images were mostly shot on site in Polish ghettos, showing subjects who were deliberately chosen to be poorly dressed, dirty and partially toothless grins. The locations shown are dirty and infested by vermin.
Robert Reimer asserts that a central theme of the film is the assertion that "Jews have always lived in the ghettos and in fact they choose to live this way." According to Reimer, the film asserts that ghettos are "ordinary [and] normal" aspects of Jewish life. Reimer charges that what the film is actually showing is not the normal life of Polish Jewry but rather the "effect of the Nazi administration and the disruption of the lives of millions of Polish Jews." Erik Barnouw describes the Warsaw ghetto after the Nazi conquest as a place where "hundreds of thousands of Jews were herded by the [Nazi] conquerors into pockets of indescribable misery." He describes footage shot there as showing "half-starved, unshaven creatures caught in pathetic acts of barter - a pair of socks for a scrap of food."It is scenes such as these that the film presents as showing Jews "in their natural state."
The film utilizes a montage
Montage
-Filmmaking:*Montage , a technique which uses rapid editing, special effects and music to present compressed narrative information*Soviet montage theory in the 1920s-Other:* Montage , Documentary television series from 1960s and 1970s...
that juxtaposes these images of ghetto Jews with images of rats to draw an analogy between the migration of Jews from Eastern Europe with the migration of rats. For example, one of the shots shows a pack of rat
Rat
Rats are various medium-sized, long-tailed rodents of the superfamily Muroidea. "True rats" are members of the genus Rattus, the most important of which to humans are the black rat, Rattus rattus, and the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus...
s emerging from a sewer, followed by a shot of a crowd of Jews in a bustling street of Lodz. Close-ups of those in the crowd reveal sickly, malformed facial features. The narrator states that, as rats are the vermin of the animal kingdom, Jews are the vermin of the human race and similarly spread disease and corruption. Unlike rats, however, the narrator continues, Jews have the uncanny ability to change their appearance and blend into their "human hosts." A scene depicts four bearded men in traditional religious Jewish clothing, then shows them shaved and in modern business suits, while the narrator explains that only a "trained eye" can distinguish their Jewish features.
"Where rats appear, they bring ruin by destroying mankind's goods and foodstuffs. In this way, they spread disease, plague, leprosy, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and so on. They are cunning, cowardly and cruel and are found mostly in large packs.Among the animals, they represent the rudiment of an insidious, underground destruction - just like the Jews among human beings. "
Economic impact
The film asserts:
"At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews sit at the junction of the world financial markets. They are an international power. Only one percent of the world's population, with the help of their capital, they terrorize the world stock exchanges, world opinion, and world politics."
The movie blamed Jews for inflation and unemployment in Germany. It charged that they had crept into all professions and through usury
Usury
Usury Originally, when the charging of interest was still banned by Christian churches, usury simply meant the charging of interest at any rate . In countries where the charging of interest became acceptable, the term came to be used for interest above the rate allowed by law...
, racketeering and crimes on German assets.
"Out of a thousand workers in Berlin, only two were Jews. For the start of 1933, out of one hundred prosecutors in Berlin 15 were Jews. Out of a hundred judges were 23 Jews. Out of a hundred lawyers 49 Jews. 52 Jews out of a hundred doctors. And out of every hundred of businessmen 60 Jews. The average wealth of Germans was 810 marks each. The average wealth of each Jew amounted to 10,000 marks."
Jews as abnormal and depraved
In a long sequence of images, the film provides examples of how it claims Aryan/European culture has been corrupted by Jews.This sequence includes footage of notable figures who had earned Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
's wrath, such as physicist and Nobel laureate Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...
and Rosa Luxembourg as representatives of so-called " international Jewry". Einstein's image was juxtaposed with a series of images about Jewish control of the pornography
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...
industry. Einstein was characterized as "relativity Jew, his hatred of Germany after an obscure pseudo-science hidden "refers to.
Other film clips presented Jewish (or supposedly Jewish) actors from the Weimar era such as Curt Bois , Charles Chaplin (who was not a Jew), Fritz Kortner
Fritz Kortner
Fritz Kortner was an Austrian-born stage and film actor and theatre director.Kortner was born in Vienna as Fritz Nathan Kohn. He studied at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. After graduating, he joined Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1911 and then Leopold Jessner in 1916. Also in that year...
, Peter Lorre
Peter Lorre
Peter Lorre was an Austrian-American actor frequently typecast as a sinister foreigner.He caused an international sensation in 1931 with his portrayal of a serial killer who preys on little girls in the German film M...
, and Ernst Lubitsch
Ernst Lubitsch
Ernst Lubitsch was a German-born film director. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch."In 1947 he received an Honorary Academy Award for his...
.
The film includes a sequence from The House of Rothschild (1934) that shows a rich Rothschild hiding money and putting on old clothes to fool the tax collector. The clip was used without permission and presented with misleading German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
subtitles that hid the comic intent of the original film.
The film's narrator asserts that: "(t)he Jew is instinctively interested in everything abnormal and depraved." To illustrate this point, Hippler included a scene from Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...
's film M
M (1931 film)
M is a 1931 German drama-thriller directed by Fritz Lang and written by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou. It was Lang's first sound film, although he had directed more than a dozen films previously....
in which the child murderer Beckert (played by Peter Lorre) makes an impassioned plea the jury, begging for his life and disclaiming responsibility for his crimes on account of insanity. Beckert shrieks, "... it burns within me. I must go the way I am driven. Who knows what is going on inside me? How I must - not want, must!" According to Sharon Packer, Hippler used this scene to assert that "Jews transmit inheritable criminality and therefore deserve to die."
Jewish religious practice
Scenes of Jewish life in Poland were also staged to make the Jews objects of ridicule. Adam CzerniakowAdam Czerniaków
Adam Czerniaków , born in Warsaw, Poland, was a Polish-Jewish engineer and senator to the prewar Polish Sejm for Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government...
, whom the Nazis appointed head of the Judenrat
Judenrat
Judenräte were administrative bodies during the Second World War that the Germans required Jews to form in the German occupied territory of Poland, and later in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union It is the overall term for the enforcement bodies established by the Nazi occupiers to...
(Jewish Council), is shown seated in front of a seven-branched menorah, gesticulating wildly at the director's insistence, because "that is how Jews speak."
After showing how Jews have been responsible for the decline of Western music, science, art, and commerce, is a scene of a cow being slaughtered for meat by a shochet (Jewish ritual slaughter), which is prefaced by a warning similar to the one in Frankenstein
Frankenstein (1931 film)
Frankenstein is a 1931 Pre-Code Horror Monster film from Universal Pictures directed by James Whale and adapted from the play by Peggy Webling which in turn is based on the novel of the same name by Mary Shelley. The film stars Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles and Boris Karloff, and features...
, warning women, children, and the squeamish about the upcoming scene. This long scene, lasting several minutes, shows the cows and sheep in all their death throes as they bleed to death. The movie's creators apparently filmed this scene on the knowledge that Hitler was opposed to cruelty to animals
Cruelty to animals
Cruelty to animals, also called animal abuse or animal neglect, is the infliction of suffering or harm upon non-human animals, for purposes other than self-defense. More narrowly, it can be harm for specific gain, such as killing animals for food or for their fur, although opinions differ with...
and had banned kosher slaughter of animals in Germany, and that such footage would shock an audience that was sensitive to animals.
This scene was cut from the version intended for women and children.
"These images are a clear proof of the cruelty of Schächtmethode. They also reveal the character of a race , their blunt brutality under the guise of religious worship is hidden. "
Hitler's Reichstag speech
The film concludes with footage of Hitler's speech in the Reichstag in which he proclaims:"If it should succeed in the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe, the nations once more into a world war to overthrow, then the result is not being Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry to be, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe! "
The film omits the line "the Bolshevization of Earth and thus..." following "...will not be...", likely due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The film ends with images of SA troops on parade.
Release and reception
In and of itself, the movie did not have much impact on the German public. The film suffered from being released after Jud SüßJud Süß (1940 film)
Jud Süß is an antisemitic propaganda film produced in 1940 by Terra Filmkunst at the behest of Joseph Goebbels. The movie was directed by Veit Harlan, who wrote the screenplay with Eberhard Wolfgang Möller and Ludwig Metzger, and starred Ferdinand Marian and Harlan's wife Kristina Söderbaum.The...
which was wildly popular, perhaps because it wrapped the antisemitic message in an engaging period drama with costumes, etc. The actors in Jud Süß were leading German actors of the time. In contrast, Der Ewige Jude's only original footage was of Jews in the Polish ghetto who were deliberately set up to look poor, filthy and disgusting. All the other footage consisted of stills and archive film clips.
In contrast to the interesting story of Jud Süß, Der Ewige Jude was unremitting propaganda without the cloak of an interesting plot line to engage the audience. It also had some disgusting scenes of Jewish ritual slaughter that turned the audience's stomach.
Thus, unlike Jud Süß
Jud Süß (1940 film)
Jud Süß is an antisemitic propaganda film produced in 1940 by Terra Filmkunst at the behest of Joseph Goebbels. The movie was directed by Veit Harlan, who wrote the screenplay with Eberhard Wolfgang Möller and Ludwig Metzger, and starred Ferdinand Marian and Harlan's wife Kristina Söderbaum.The...
which was a box-office smash success, Der Ewige Jude was a commercial flop. David Culbert asserts that it is unlikely that there were more than 1 million paid admissions compared to over 20 million paid admissions to Jud Süß.
There were only 1 million paid admissions compared to 20 million for Jud Süß. The film was more known by word-of-mouth descriptions than from people actually viewing it. Some Germans were quoted as saying "We've already seen enough Jewish filth. We don't need to see any more."
For the most part, the film was viewed by party supporters and Nazi organizations like the Hitler youth
Hitler Youth
The Hitler Youth was a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. It existed from 1922 to 1945. The HJ was the second oldest paramilitary Nazi group, founded one year after its adult counterpart, the Sturmabteilung...
and the SS
Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
. Nevertheless, because its dramatic scenes were widely discussed, the theme and contents of the film were known by reputation by large segments of the population who had not actually viewed it. It is widely noted that SS troops headed for the Eastern front to carry out the "Final Solution
Final Solution
The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...
" were "invited" by Himmler to watch the film.
Postwar significance
In 1946, Fritz Hippler was tried for directing Der Ewige Jude but was not found guilty. Hippler contended Joseph Goebbels was the true creator of The Eternal Jew with Hitler's close supervision. He claimed that Goebbels gave Hippler credit as a reward “for his excellent work in the newsreel department”.An unrepentant Hippler was interviewed in the Emmy Award
Emmy Award
An Emmy Award, often referred to simply as the Emmy, is a television production award, similar in nature to the Peabody Awards but more focused on entertainment, and is considered the television equivalent to the Academy Awards and the Grammy Awards .A majority of Emmys are presented in various...
-winning program "The Propaganda Battle" in the PBS series Walk Through the Twentieth Century. In this interview he explains that he regrets that his name was listed as the director of The Eternal Jew because the Allies interrogated him after the war. He thought this was unfair because, in his opinion, he had nothing to do with the killing of Jews. However, in an interview shown in the 2000 German documentary series Holocaust, the 90-year old Hippler described the film as "the most disgraceful example of anti-semitism."
Availability
The public distribution and exhibition of the film is prohibited in Germany; the only exception is for use in college classrooms and other academic purposes; however, exhibitors must have formal education in "media science and the history of the Holocaust." In addition, only a specially annotated version may be screened.Cast
- Harry GieseHarry GieseHarry Giese was a German theatre and voice actor.-Career:He was the narrator for German newsreels between 1940 and 1945. He is perhaps best known as the narrator for the anti-semitic propaganda film The External Jew ....
as Narrator - Curt Bois as Himself (archive footage)
- Charles ChaplinCharlie ChaplinSir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...
as Himself (archive footage) - he is erroneously identified as a Jew - Albert EinsteinAlbert EinsteinAlbert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...
as Himself (archive footage) - Adolf HitlerAdolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
as Himself, speaking at Reichstagssitzung (archive footage) - Fritz KortnerFritz KortnerFritz Kortner was an Austrian-born stage and film actor and theatre director.Kortner was born in Vienna as Fritz Nathan Kohn. He studied at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. After graduating, he joined Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1911 and then Leopold Jessner in 1916. Also in that year...
as Himself (archive footage) - Peter LorrePeter LorrePeter Lorre was an Austrian-American actor frequently typecast as a sinister foreigner.He caused an international sensation in 1931 with his portrayal of a serial killer who preys on little girls in the German film M...
as Himself (archive footage) - Ernst LubitschErnst LubitschErnst Lubitsch was a German-born film director. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch."In 1947 he received an Honorary Academy Award for his...
as Himself (archive footage) - Rosa LuxemburgRosa LuxemburgRosa Luxemburg was a Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and activist of Polish Jewish descent who became a naturalized German citizen...
as Herself (archive footage) - Mona MarisMona MarisMona Maris was an Argentine film actress who was born in Buenos Aires.-Ancestry and education:Her given name was Mona Maria Emita Cap de Vielle. Her mother was a Spanish Basque and her father a French Basque...
as Herself - Anna StenAnna StenAnna Sten was a Ukrainian-born Russian silent film actress and later a Hollywood film star. She began her career in stage plays and films in Russia before travelling to Germany, where she starred in several films...
as Herself (archive footage)
See also
- List of films made in the Third Reich
- List of films in the public domain
- Nazism and cinema
- The International JewThe International JewThe International Jew is a four volume set of booklets or pamphlets originally published and distributed in the early 1920s by Henry Ford, an American industrialist and automobile manufacturer....
- Henry Ford
- Protocols of the Elders of Zion
- Antisemitic canardAntisemitic canardAn antisemitic canard is a false story inciting antisemitism. Despite being thoroughly disproved, antisemitic canards are often part of broader theories of Jewish conspiracies. According to Kenneth S. Stern,Historically, Jews have not fared well around conspiracy theories. Such ideas fuel...
- History of the Jews in PolandHistory of the Jews in PolandThe history of the Jews in Poland dates back over a millennium. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Jewish community in the world. Poland was the centre of Jewish culture thanks to a long period of statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy. This ended with the...
Further reading
- Stig Hornshøj-Møller, Der ewige Jude: Quellenkritische Analyse eines antisemitischen Propagandafilms ("Source-Critical Analysis of an Antisemitic Propaganda Film"), Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film, GöttingenGöttingenGöttingen is a university town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Göttingen. The Leine river runs through the town. In 2006 the population was 129,686.-General information:...
, 1995.
External links
- Der Ewige Jude at Internet Movie DatabaseInternet Movie DatabaseInternet Movie Database is an online database of information related to movies, television shows, actors, production crew personnel, video games and fictional characters featured in visual entertainment media. It is one of the most popular online entertainment destinations, with over 100 million...
- Shay Hazkani, "Forbidden Films-An Analysis of the Nazi Propaganda Films The Eternal Jew and Jew Suess and Their Influence on the German Public" Moreshet 5
- Still Images of film via holocaust-history.org
- The Eternal Jew: The Film of a 2000-Year Rat Migration
- Papers on 'The Eternal Jew' by Stig Hornshoj-Moller
- The Eternal Jew - a Blueprint for Genocide
Downloadsites
The Eternal Jew (1940
1940 in film
The year 1940 in film involved some significant events, including the premieres of the Walt Disney classics Pinocchio and Fantasia.-Events:*February 7 - Walt Disney's animated film Pinocchio is released....
) is an antisemitic German Nazi propaganda film
Propaganda film
The term propaganda can be defined as the ability to produce and spread fertile messages that, once sown, will germinate in large human cultures.” However, in the 20th century, a “new” propaganda emerged, which revolved around political organizations and their need to communicate messages that...
, presented as a documentary
Documentary
A documentary is a creative work of non-fiction, including:* Documentary film, including television* Radio documentary* Documentary photographyRelated terms include:...
. Its title in German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
is Der ewige Jude, the German term for the character of the "Wandering Jew
Wandering Jew
The Wandering Jew is a figure from medieval Christian folklore whose legend began to spread in Europe in the 13th century. The original legend concerns a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming...
" in medieval folklore. At the insistence of Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels
Joseph Goebbels
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism...
, the film was directed by Fritz Hippler
Fritz Hippler
Fritz Hippler was a German filmmaker who ran the film department in the Propaganda Ministry of the Third Reich, under Joseph Goebbels. He is most famous as director of the propaganda film Der ewige Jude ....
. The screenplay is credited to Eberhard Taubert
Eberhard Taubert
Eberhard Taubert was a lawyer and anti-Semitic Nazi propagandist. Since 1933 he was a member of the Nazi Propagandaministerium under Joseph Goebbels.His nickname in Nazi circles was Dr. Anti...
. The film consists of feature and documentary footage combined with materials filmed shortly after the Nazi occupation of Poland. At this time Poland's Jewish population was about three million, roughly ten percent of the total population. Actor Harry Giese
Harry Giese
Harry Giese was a German theatre and voice actor.-Career:He was the narrator for German newsreels between 1940 and 1945. He is perhaps best known as the narrator for the anti-semitic propaganda film The External Jew ....
(1903–1991) narrated.
Background
Hitler and Goebbels believed that film was a very potent tool for molding public opinion. The NazisNational Socialist German Workers Party
The National Socialist German Workers' Party , commonly known in English as the Nazi Party, was a political party in Germany between 1920 and 1945. Its predecessor, the German Workers' Party , existed from 1919 to 1920...
first established a film department in 1930 and Goebbels had taken a personal interest in the use of film to promote the Nazi philosophy and agenda. Soon after the Nazi takeover, Goebbels was insisting in speeches that the role of the German cinema was to serve as the "vanguard of the Nazi military" as they set forth to conquer the world.
Saul Friedländer suggests that Goebbels' intent was to counter three films whose messages attacked the persecution of Jews throughout history by producing violently anti-Semitic versions of those films with identical titles.
In 1934, a British film titled "The Eternal Jew" had been produced by Gaumont-Twickenham studios. Unlike the Nazi film, the British production portrayed Jews in a favorable light as the victims of unjustified persecution throughout history, in the Spanish Inquisition
Spanish Inquisition
The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition , commonly known as the Spanish Inquisition , was a tribunal established in 1480 by Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. It was intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms, and to replace the Medieval...
, for example. The Goebbels film appears to have been intended as a violently anti-Semitic version of this previous British film.
In 1937, a special wing of the Propaganda Ministry put on an art exhibition in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
titled Der ewige Jude
The Eternal Jew (art exhibition)
The Eternal Jew was the title of an exhibition of 'degenerate art' displayed at the Library of the German Museum in Munich from November 8, 1937 to January 31, 1938...
. It followed this up with the publication of a book consisting of 265 photographs, each with a derogatory caption asserting the degeneracy of the Jewish race.
The Nazis had hoped for a surge in anti-Semitic sentiment after Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht, also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, and also Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht, and Novemberpogrome, was a pogrom or series of attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on 9–10 November 1938.Jewish homes were ransacked, as were shops, towns and...
but, when it became clear that the majority of Germans did not share the Nazi hatred for Jews, Goebbels launched a campaign to promote the anti-semitic views of the Nazis to the German populace. He ordered each film studio to make an anti-semitic film.
Goebbels conceived of a film that would communicate to the German people the same antisemitic message that had been the theme of the 1937 Munich exhibition.
Hitler preferred films like Der ewige Jude which presented the Nazi anti-semitic agenda openly and directly; however Goebbels disliked the crudeness of such straight-forward approaches, preferring the much more subtle approach of couching anti-semtic messages in an engaging story with popular appeal.
Although Goebbels did not generally take an active role in the production of particular films, he elected to do so in the case of major propaganda films such as The Eternal Jew.
Production
The film was in production for over a year. Throughout the end of 1939 and the beginning of 1940, Goebbels devoted "constant attention" to the production of what he referred to as "the Jew film".As early as 1938, Goebbels had wanted to have a film crew travel to Poland to shoot the ghetto scenes; however, he was unable to get permission from the Polish government. In October and November 1939, almost immediately after the German/Soviet invasion of Poland, he instructed Hippler to send camera crews to Łódź, Warsaw
Warsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...
, Cracow and Lublin
Lublin
Lublin is the ninth largest city in Poland. It is the capital of Lublin Voivodeship with a population of 350,392 . Lublin is also the largest Polish city east of the Vistula river...
to shoot footage of Polish Jews.
The footage that Hippler shot in the Polish ghettos of Lodz, Warsaw, Cracow and Lublin was the only footage shot specifically for the purpose of the film. At the beginning of the film, animated text informs the audience that this "documentary footage" shows Jews in their original state "before they put on the mask of civilized Europeans." In the Nazi press, Hippler expanded on this claim, asserting that his filming techniques captured Jews "in an unprejudiced manner, real to life as they live and as they react in their own surroundings."
Although Hippler advertised the film as being a factual documentary consisting of pictures of real Jews with nothing faked or simulated, his claims were complete falsehoods. In reality, the film was an exercise in manipulation for the purposes of propaganda. In shooting his footage, Hippler did in fact simulate scenes and use actors who were performing under duress and without knowledge of how the footage would be employed. For example, in order to get shots of Jewish worship services, Hippler and Goebbels assembled the congregation of the Vilker synagogue, ordered them to wear the tallithim andtefillin and hold a full-scale service. When the Germans ordered the Torah reader to read from the Torah, he started by saying on camera "Today is Tuesday" signalling that his reading of the Torah was coerced since it was not customary to read the Torah on Tuesdays.
Aside from the footage shot in Poland, the rest of the film consisted of stills and archival footage from feature films (often without permission) that the film presented as if they were documentary footage.
Format and structure
The movie was produced in a documentaryDocumentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
format and, like other Hippler films, relied heavily on narration.
The film can be roughly divided into four thematic areas:
- Recordings from Polish ghettos
- Enumeration and evaluation of numerous political, cultural and social values in the international arena of Jewish origin
- Religious ceremonies, religious instruction, worship, ritual slaughter
- Adolf Hitler's Reichstag speech, parading SA troops
Themes
According to Stephen Fritz, Goebbels intended The Eternal Jew as "both a demonstration of the parasitical nature of the Jews and a justification for drastic measures against them." According to Maria Tatar, the Nazis were able use Hippler's film to "position the victims of their genocidal project as dangerous aggressors who had to be exterminated."Unser Wille und Weg, a Nazi Party monthly publication aimed at propagandists provides a rationale for why The Eternal Jew was made. The author of the essay “The Film of a 2000-Year Rat Migration,” who remains anonymous, believes the film shows “a full picture of Jewry,” and provides "the best treatment of this parasitic race." The author connects the Jews' migration from the Middle East
Middle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
to Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
and their following of German colonists to rats traveling as a group, who "even then displayed the same criminal traits that they still displayed". The film is complimented for "its portrayal of the Jews' vulgar methods and the brutality and all-devouring hatred they exhibit when they reach their goal and control finance." The slaughtering method causes the author to question the "so-called Jewish religion", as butchers do their work with grins on their face. In closing, the author states the film will be a valuable tool in the struggle to break the Jews' "power over us. We are the initiators of the fight against world Jewry, which now directs its hate, its brutal greed and destructive will toward us. We must win this battle for ourselves, for Europe, for the world."
Jews as a uncivilized and parasitic people
Richard Taylor describes the basic tenet of the film as arguing that "the Jew is an oriental barbarian who has insinuated himself cleverly into European society, and now exploits it parasitically." This point is emphasized throughout the film, starting from the very opening lines of the film's commentary:
The civilised Jews that we know in Germany give us only an incomplete picture of their racial character. This film shows genuine shots of the Polish ghettos. It shows the Jews as they really are, before they conceal themselves behind the mask of the civilised European.
Following this commentary, the film provides a succession of scenes in which Jews are portrayed as an uncivilized, parasitic people with low social standing. The images were mostly shot on site in Polish ghettos, showing subjects who were deliberately chosen to be poorly dressed, dirty and partially toothless grins. The locations shown are dirty and infested by vermin.
Robert Reimer asserts that a central theme of the film is the assertion that "Jews have always lived in the ghettos and in fact they choose to live this way." According to Reimer, the film asserts that ghettos are "ordinary [and] normal" aspects of Jewish life. Reimer charges that what the film is actually showing is not the normal life of Polish Jewry but rather the "effect of the Nazi administration and the disruption of the lives of millions of Polish Jews." Erik Barnouw describes the Warsaw ghetto after the Nazi conquest as a place where "hundreds of thousands of Jews were herded by the [Nazi] conquerors into pockets of indescribable misery." He describes footage shot there as showing "half-starved, unshaven creatures caught in pathetic acts of barter - a pair of socks for a scrap of food."It is scenes such as these that the film presents as showing Jews "in their natural state."
The film utilizes a montage
Montage
-Filmmaking:*Montage , a technique which uses rapid editing, special effects and music to present compressed narrative information*Soviet montage theory in the 1920s-Other:* Montage , Documentary television series from 1960s and 1970s...
that juxtaposes these images of ghetto Jews with images of rats to draw an analogy between the migration of Jews from Eastern Europe with the migration of rats. For example, one of the shots shows a pack of rat
Rat
Rats are various medium-sized, long-tailed rodents of the superfamily Muroidea. "True rats" are members of the genus Rattus, the most important of which to humans are the black rat, Rattus rattus, and the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus...
s emerging from a sewer, followed by a shot of a crowd of Jews in a bustling street of Lodz. Close-ups of those in the crowd reveal sickly, malformed facial features. The narrator states that, as rats are the vermin of the animal kingdom, Jews are the vermin of the human race and similarly spread disease and corruption. Unlike rats, however, the narrator continues, Jews have the uncanny ability to change their appearance and blend into their "human hosts." A scene depicts four bearded men in traditional religious Jewish clothing, then shows them shaved and in modern business suits, while the narrator explains that only a "trained eye" can distinguish their Jewish features.
"Where rats appear, they bring ruin by destroying mankind's goods and foodstuffs. In this way, they spread disease, plague, leprosy, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and so on. They are cunning, cowardly and cruel and are found mostly in large packs.Among the animals, they represent the rudiment of an insidious, underground destruction - just like the Jews among human beings. "
Economic impact
The film asserts:
"At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews sit at the junction of the world financial markets. They are an international power. Only one percent of the world's population, with the help of their capital, they terrorize the world stock exchanges, world opinion, and world politics."
The movie blamed Jews for inflation and unemployment in Germany. It charged that they had crept into all professions and through usury
Usury
Usury Originally, when the charging of interest was still banned by Christian churches, usury simply meant the charging of interest at any rate . In countries where the charging of interest became acceptable, the term came to be used for interest above the rate allowed by law...
, racketeering and crimes on German assets.
"Out of a thousand workers in Berlin, only two were Jews. For the start of 1933, out of one hundred prosecutors in Berlin 15 were Jews. Out of a hundred judges were 23 Jews. Out of a hundred lawyers 49 Jews. 52 Jews out of a hundred doctors. And out of every hundred of businessmen 60 Jews. The average wealth of Germans was 810 marks each. The average wealth of each Jew amounted to 10,000 marks."
Jews as abnormal and depraved
In a long sequence of images, the film provides examples of how it claims Aryan/European culture has been corrupted by Jews.This sequence includes footage of notable figures who had earned Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
's wrath, such as physicist and Nobel laureate Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...
and Rosa Luxembourg as representatives of so-called " international Jewry". Einstein's image was juxtaposed with a series of images about Jewish control of the pornography
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...
industry. Einstein was characterized as "relativity Jew, his hatred of Germany after an obscure pseudo-science hidden "refers to.
Other film clips presented Jewish (or supposedly Jewish) actors from the Weimar era such as Curt Bois , Charles Chaplin (who was not a Jew), Fritz Kortner
Fritz Kortner
Fritz Kortner was an Austrian-born stage and film actor and theatre director.Kortner was born in Vienna as Fritz Nathan Kohn. He studied at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. After graduating, he joined Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1911 and then Leopold Jessner in 1916. Also in that year...
, Peter Lorre
Peter Lorre
Peter Lorre was an Austrian-American actor frequently typecast as a sinister foreigner.He caused an international sensation in 1931 with his portrayal of a serial killer who preys on little girls in the German film M...
, and Ernst Lubitsch
Ernst Lubitsch
Ernst Lubitsch was a German-born film director. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch."In 1947 he received an Honorary Academy Award for his...
.
The film includes a sequence from The House of Rothschild (1934) that shows a rich Rothschild hiding money and putting on old clothes to fool the tax collector. The clip was used without permission and presented with misleading German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
subtitles that hid the comic intent of the original film.
The film's narrator asserts that: "(t)he Jew is instinctively interested in everything abnormal and depraved." To illustrate this point, Hippler included a scene from Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...
's film M
M (1931 film)
M is a 1931 German drama-thriller directed by Fritz Lang and written by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou. It was Lang's first sound film, although he had directed more than a dozen films previously....
in which the child murderer Beckert (played by Peter Lorre) makes an impassioned plea the jury, begging for his life and disclaiming responsibility for his crimes on account of insanity. Beckert shrieks, "... it burns within me. I must go the way I am driven. Who knows what is going on inside me? How I must - not want, must!" According to Sharon Packer, Hippler used this scene to assert that "Jews transmit inheritable criminality and therefore deserve to die."
Jewish religious practice
Scenes of Jewish life in Poland were also staged to make the Jews objects of ridicule. Adam CzerniakowAdam Czerniaków
Adam Czerniaków , born in Warsaw, Poland, was a Polish-Jewish engineer and senator to the prewar Polish Sejm for Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government...
, whom the Nazis appointed head of the Judenrat
Judenrat
Judenräte were administrative bodies during the Second World War that the Germans required Jews to form in the German occupied territory of Poland, and later in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union It is the overall term for the enforcement bodies established by the Nazi occupiers to...
(Jewish Council), is shown seated in front of a seven-branched menorah, gesticulating wildly at the director's insistence, because "that is how Jews speak."
After showing how Jews have been responsible for the decline of Western music, science, art, and commerce, is a scene of a cow being slaughtered for meat by a shochet (Jewish ritual slaughter), which is prefaced by a warning similar to the one in Frankenstein
Frankenstein (1931 film)
Frankenstein is a 1931 Pre-Code Horror Monster film from Universal Pictures directed by James Whale and adapted from the play by Peggy Webling which in turn is based on the novel of the same name by Mary Shelley. The film stars Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles and Boris Karloff, and features...
, warning women, children, and the squeamish about the upcoming scene. This long scene, lasting several minutes, shows the cows and sheep in all their death throes as they bleed to death. The movie's creators apparently filmed this scene on the knowledge that Hitler was opposed to cruelty to animals
Cruelty to animals
Cruelty to animals, also called animal abuse or animal neglect, is the infliction of suffering or harm upon non-human animals, for purposes other than self-defense. More narrowly, it can be harm for specific gain, such as killing animals for food or for their fur, although opinions differ with...
and had banned kosher slaughter of animals in Germany, and that such footage would shock an audience that was sensitive to animals.
This scene was cut from the version intended for women and children.
"These images are a clear proof of the cruelty of Schächtmethode. They also reveal the character of a race , their blunt brutality under the guise of religious worship is hidden. "
Hitler's Reichstag speech
The film concludes with footage of Hitler's speech in the Reichstag in which he proclaims:"If it should succeed in the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe, the nations once more into a world war to overthrow, then the result is not being Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry to be, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe! "
The film omits the line "the Bolshevization of Earth and thus..." following "...will not be...", likely due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The film ends with images of SA troops on parade.
Release and reception
In and of itself, the movie did not have much impact on the German public. The film suffered from being released after Jud SüßJud Süß (1940 film)
Jud Süß is an antisemitic propaganda film produced in 1940 by Terra Filmkunst at the behest of Joseph Goebbels. The movie was directed by Veit Harlan, who wrote the screenplay with Eberhard Wolfgang Möller and Ludwig Metzger, and starred Ferdinand Marian and Harlan's wife Kristina Söderbaum.The...
which was wildly popular, perhaps because it wrapped the antisemitic message in an engaging period drama with costumes, etc. The actors in Jud Süß were leading German actors of the time. In contrast, Der Ewige Jude's only original footage was of Jews in the Polish ghetto who were deliberately set up to look poor, filthy and disgusting. All the other footage consisted of stills and archive film clips.
In contrast to the interesting story of Jud Süß, Der Ewige Jude was unremitting propaganda without the cloak of an interesting plot line to engage the audience. It also had some disgusting scenes of Jewish ritual slaughter that turned the audience's stomach.
Thus, unlike Jud Süß
Jud Süß (1940 film)
Jud Süß is an antisemitic propaganda film produced in 1940 by Terra Filmkunst at the behest of Joseph Goebbels. The movie was directed by Veit Harlan, who wrote the screenplay with Eberhard Wolfgang Möller and Ludwig Metzger, and starred Ferdinand Marian and Harlan's wife Kristina Söderbaum.The...
which was a box-office smash success, Der Ewige Jude was a commercial flop. David Culbert asserts that it is unlikely that there were more than 1 million paid admissions compared to over 20 million paid admissions to Jud Süß.
There were only 1 million paid admissions compared to 20 million for Jud Süß. The film was more known by word-of-mouth descriptions than from people actually viewing it. Some Germans were quoted as saying "We've already seen enough Jewish filth. We don't need to see any more."
For the most part, the film was viewed by party supporters and Nazi organizations like the Hitler youth
Hitler Youth
The Hitler Youth was a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. It existed from 1922 to 1945. The HJ was the second oldest paramilitary Nazi group, founded one year after its adult counterpart, the Sturmabteilung...
and the SS
Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
. Nevertheless, because its dramatic scenes were widely discussed, the theme and contents of the film were known by reputation by large segments of the population who had not actually viewed it. It is widely noted that SS troops headed for the Eastern front to carry out the "Final Solution
Final Solution
The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...
" were "invited" by Himmler to watch the film.
Postwar significance
In 1946, Fritz Hippler was tried for directing Der Ewige Jude but was not found guilty. Hippler contended Joseph Goebbels was the true creator of The Eternal Jew with Hitler's close supervision. He claimed that Goebbels gave Hippler credit as a reward “for his excellent work in the newsreel department”.An unrepentant Hippler was interviewed in the Emmy Award
Emmy Award
An Emmy Award, often referred to simply as the Emmy, is a television production award, similar in nature to the Peabody Awards but more focused on entertainment, and is considered the television equivalent to the Academy Awards and the Grammy Awards .A majority of Emmys are presented in various...
-winning program "The Propaganda Battle" in the PBS series Walk Through the Twentieth Century. In this interview he explains that he regrets that his name was listed as the director of The Eternal Jew because the Allies interrogated him after the war. He thought this was unfair because, in his opinion, he had nothing to do with the killing of Jews. However, in an interview shown in the 2000 German documentary series Holocaust, the 90-year old Hippler described the film as "the most disgraceful example of anti-semitism."
Availability
The public distribution and exhibition of the film is prohibited in Germany; the only exception is for use in college classrooms and other academic purposes; however, exhibitors must have formal education in "media science and the history of the Holocaust." In addition, only a specially annotated version may be screened.Cast
- Harry GieseHarry GieseHarry Giese was a German theatre and voice actor.-Career:He was the narrator for German newsreels between 1940 and 1945. He is perhaps best known as the narrator for the anti-semitic propaganda film The External Jew ....
as Narrator - Curt Bois as Himself (archive footage)
- Charles ChaplinCharlie ChaplinSir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...
as Himself (archive footage) - he is erroneously identified as a Jew - Albert EinsteinAlbert EinsteinAlbert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...
as Himself (archive footage) - Adolf HitlerAdolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
as Himself, speaking at Reichstagssitzung (archive footage) - Fritz KortnerFritz KortnerFritz Kortner was an Austrian-born stage and film actor and theatre director.Kortner was born in Vienna as Fritz Nathan Kohn. He studied at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. After graduating, he joined Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1911 and then Leopold Jessner in 1916. Also in that year...
as Himself (archive footage) - Peter LorrePeter LorrePeter Lorre was an Austrian-American actor frequently typecast as a sinister foreigner.He caused an international sensation in 1931 with his portrayal of a serial killer who preys on little girls in the German film M...
as Himself (archive footage) - Ernst LubitschErnst LubitschErnst Lubitsch was a German-born film director. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch."In 1947 he received an Honorary Academy Award for his...
as Himself (archive footage) - Rosa LuxemburgRosa LuxemburgRosa Luxemburg was a Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and activist of Polish Jewish descent who became a naturalized German citizen...
as Herself (archive footage) - Mona MarisMona MarisMona Maris was an Argentine film actress who was born in Buenos Aires.-Ancestry and education:Her given name was Mona Maria Emita Cap de Vielle. Her mother was a Spanish Basque and her father a French Basque...
as Herself - Anna StenAnna StenAnna Sten was a Ukrainian-born Russian silent film actress and later a Hollywood film star. She began her career in stage plays and films in Russia before travelling to Germany, where she starred in several films...
as Herself (archive footage)
See also
- List of films made in the Third Reich
- List of films in the public domain
- Nazism and cinema
- The International JewThe International JewThe International Jew is a four volume set of booklets or pamphlets originally published and distributed in the early 1920s by Henry Ford, an American industrialist and automobile manufacturer....
- Henry Ford
- Protocols of the Elders of Zion
- Antisemitic canardAntisemitic canardAn antisemitic canard is a false story inciting antisemitism. Despite being thoroughly disproved, antisemitic canards are often part of broader theories of Jewish conspiracies. According to Kenneth S. Stern,Historically, Jews have not fared well around conspiracy theories. Such ideas fuel...
- History of the Jews in PolandHistory of the Jews in PolandThe history of the Jews in Poland dates back over a millennium. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Jewish community in the world. Poland was the centre of Jewish culture thanks to a long period of statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy. This ended with the...
Further reading
- Stig Hornshøj-Møller, Der ewige Jude: Quellenkritische Analyse eines antisemitischen Propagandafilms ("Source-Critical Analysis of an Antisemitic Propaganda Film"), Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film, GöttingenGöttingenGöttingen is a university town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Göttingen. The Leine river runs through the town. In 2006 the population was 129,686.-General information:...
, 1995.
External links
- Der Ewige Jude at Internet Movie DatabaseInternet Movie DatabaseInternet Movie Database is an online database of information related to movies, television shows, actors, production crew personnel, video games and fictional characters featured in visual entertainment media. It is one of the most popular online entertainment destinations, with over 100 million...
- Shay Hazkani, "Forbidden Films-An Analysis of the Nazi Propaganda Films The Eternal Jew and Jew Suess and Their Influence on the German Public" Moreshet 5
- Still Images of film via holocaust-history.org
- The Eternal Jew: The Film of a 2000-Year Rat Migration
- Papers on 'The Eternal Jew' by Stig Hornshoj-Moller
- The Eternal Jew - a Blueprint for Genocide
Downloadsites
The Eternal Jew (1940
1940 in film
The year 1940 in film involved some significant events, including the premieres of the Walt Disney classics Pinocchio and Fantasia.-Events:*February 7 - Walt Disney's animated film Pinocchio is released....
) is an antisemitic German Nazi propaganda film
Propaganda film
The term propaganda can be defined as the ability to produce and spread fertile messages that, once sown, will germinate in large human cultures.” However, in the 20th century, a “new” propaganda emerged, which revolved around political organizations and their need to communicate messages that...
, presented as a documentary
Documentary
A documentary is a creative work of non-fiction, including:* Documentary film, including television* Radio documentary* Documentary photographyRelated terms include:...
. Its title in German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
is Der ewige Jude, the German term for the character of the "Wandering Jew
Wandering Jew
The Wandering Jew is a figure from medieval Christian folklore whose legend began to spread in Europe in the 13th century. The original legend concerns a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming...
" in medieval folklore. At the insistence of Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels
Joseph Goebbels
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism...
, the film was directed by Fritz Hippler
Fritz Hippler
Fritz Hippler was a German filmmaker who ran the film department in the Propaganda Ministry of the Third Reich, under Joseph Goebbels. He is most famous as director of the propaganda film Der ewige Jude ....
. The screenplay is credited to Eberhard Taubert
Eberhard Taubert
Eberhard Taubert was a lawyer and anti-Semitic Nazi propagandist. Since 1933 he was a member of the Nazi Propagandaministerium under Joseph Goebbels.His nickname in Nazi circles was Dr. Anti...
. The film consists of feature and documentary footage combined with materials filmed shortly after the Nazi occupation of Poland. At this time Poland's Jewish population was about three million, roughly ten percent of the total population. Actor Harry Giese
Harry Giese
Harry Giese was a German theatre and voice actor.-Career:He was the narrator for German newsreels between 1940 and 1945. He is perhaps best known as the narrator for the anti-semitic propaganda film The External Jew ....
(1903–1991) narrated.
Background
Hitler and Goebbels believed that film was a very potent tool for molding public opinion. The NazisNational Socialist German Workers Party
The National Socialist German Workers' Party , commonly known in English as the Nazi Party, was a political party in Germany between 1920 and 1945. Its predecessor, the German Workers' Party , existed from 1919 to 1920...
first established a film department in 1930 and Goebbels had taken a personal interest in the use of film to promote the Nazi philosophy and agenda. Soon after the Nazi takeover, Goebbels was insisting in speeches that the role of the German cinema was to serve as the "vanguard of the Nazi military" as they set forth to conquer the world.
Saul Friedländer suggests that Goebbels' intent was to counter three films whose messages attacked the persecution of Jews throughout history by producing violently anti-Semitic versions of those films with identical titles.
In 1934, a British film titled "The Eternal Jew" had been produced by Gaumont-Twickenham studios. Unlike the Nazi film, the British production portrayed Jews in a favorable light as the victims of unjustified persecution throughout history, in the Spanish Inquisition
Spanish Inquisition
The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition , commonly known as the Spanish Inquisition , was a tribunal established in 1480 by Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. It was intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms, and to replace the Medieval...
, for example. The Goebbels film appears to have been intended as a violently anti-Semitic version of this previous British film.
In 1937, a special wing of the Propaganda Ministry put on an art exhibition in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
titled Der ewige Jude
The Eternal Jew (art exhibition)
The Eternal Jew was the title of an exhibition of 'degenerate art' displayed at the Library of the German Museum in Munich from November 8, 1937 to January 31, 1938...
. It followed this up with the publication of a book consisting of 265 photographs, each with a derogatory caption asserting the degeneracy of the Jewish race.
The Nazis had hoped for a surge in anti-Semitic sentiment after Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht, also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, and also Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht, and Novemberpogrome, was a pogrom or series of attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on 9–10 November 1938.Jewish homes were ransacked, as were shops, towns and...
but, when it became clear that the majority of Germans did not share the Nazi hatred for Jews, Goebbels launched a campaign to promote the anti-semitic views of the Nazis to the German populace. He ordered each film studio to make an anti-semitic film.
Goebbels conceived of a film that would communicate to the German people the same antisemitic message that had been the theme of the 1937 Munich exhibition.
Hitler preferred films like Der ewige Jude which presented the Nazi anti-semitic agenda openly and directly; however Goebbels disliked the crudeness of such straight-forward approaches, preferring the much more subtle approach of couching anti-semtic messages in an engaging story with popular appeal.
Although Goebbels did not generally take an active role in the production of particular films, he elected to do so in the case of major propaganda films such as The Eternal Jew.
Production
The film was in production for over a year. Throughout the end of 1939 and the beginning of 1940, Goebbels devoted "constant attention" to the production of what he referred to as "the Jew film".As early as 1938, Goebbels had wanted to have a film crew travel to Poland to shoot the ghetto scenes; however, he was unable to get permission from the Polish government. In October and November 1939, almost immediately after the German/Soviet invasion of Poland, he instructed Hippler to send camera crews to Łódź, Warsaw
Warsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...
, Cracow and Lublin
Lublin
Lublin is the ninth largest city in Poland. It is the capital of Lublin Voivodeship with a population of 350,392 . Lublin is also the largest Polish city east of the Vistula river...
to shoot footage of Polish Jews.
The footage that Hippler shot in the Polish ghettos of Lodz, Warsaw, Cracow and Lublin was the only footage shot specifically for the purpose of the film. At the beginning of the film, animated text informs the audience that this "documentary footage" shows Jews in their original state "before they put on the mask of civilized Europeans." In the Nazi press, Hippler expanded on this claim, asserting that his filming techniques captured Jews "in an unprejudiced manner, real to life as they live and as they react in their own surroundings."
Although Hippler advertised the film as being a factual documentary consisting of pictures of real Jews with nothing faked or simulated, his claims were complete falsehoods. In reality, the film was an exercise in manipulation for the purposes of propaganda. In shooting his footage, Hippler did in fact simulate scenes and use actors who were performing under duress and without knowledge of how the footage would be employed. For example, in order to get shots of Jewish worship services, Hippler and Goebbels assembled the congregation of the Vilker synagogue, ordered them to wear the tallithim andtefillin and hold a full-scale service. When the Germans ordered the Torah reader to read from the Torah, he started by saying on camera "Today is Tuesday" signalling that his reading of the Torah was coerced since it was not customary to read the Torah on Tuesdays.
Aside from the footage shot in Poland, the rest of the film consisted of stills and archival footage from feature films (often without permission) that the film presented as if they were documentary footage.
Format and structure
The movie was produced in a documentaryDocumentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
format and, like other Hippler films, relied heavily on narration.
The film can be roughly divided into four thematic areas:
- Recordings from Polish ghettos
- Enumeration and evaluation of numerous political, cultural and social values in the international arena of Jewish origin
- Religious ceremonies, religious instruction, worship, ritual slaughter
- Adolf Hitler's Reichstag speech, parading SA troops
Themes
According to Stephen Fritz, Goebbels intended The Eternal Jew as "both a demonstration of the parasitical nature of the Jews and a justification for drastic measures against them." According to Maria Tatar, the Nazis were able use Hippler's film to "position the victims of their genocidal project as dangerous aggressors who had to be exterminated."Unser Wille und Weg, a Nazi Party monthly publication aimed at propagandists provides a rationale for why The Eternal Jew was made. The author of the essay “The Film of a 2000-Year Rat Migration,” who remains anonymous, believes the film shows “a full picture of Jewry,” and provides "the best treatment of this parasitic race." The author connects the Jews' migration from the Middle East
Middle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
to Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
and their following of German colonists to rats traveling as a group, who "even then displayed the same criminal traits that they still displayed". The film is complimented for "its portrayal of the Jews' vulgar methods and the brutality and all-devouring hatred they exhibit when they reach their goal and control finance." The slaughtering method causes the author to question the "so-called Jewish religion", as butchers do their work with grins on their face. In closing, the author states the film will be a valuable tool in the struggle to break the Jews' "power over us. We are the initiators of the fight against world Jewry, which now directs its hate, its brutal greed and destructive will toward us. We must win this battle for ourselves, for Europe, for the world."
Jews as a uncivilized and parasitic people
Richard Taylor describes the basic tenet of the film as arguing that "the Jew is an oriental barbarian who has insinuated himself cleverly into European society, and now exploits it parasitically." This point is emphasized throughout the film, starting from the very opening lines of the film's commentary:
The civilised Jews that we know in Germany give us only an incomplete picture of their racial character. This film shows genuine shots of the Polish ghettos. It shows the Jews as they really are, before they conceal themselves behind the mask of the civilised European.
Following this commentary, the film provides a succession of scenes in which Jews are portrayed as an uncivilized, parasitic people with low social standing. The images were mostly shot on site in Polish ghettos, showing subjects who were deliberately chosen to be poorly dressed, dirty and partially toothless grins. The locations shown are dirty and infested by vermin.
Robert Reimer asserts that a central theme of the film is the assertion that "Jews have always lived in the ghettos and in fact they choose to live this way." According to Reimer, the film asserts that ghettos are "ordinary [and] normal" aspects of Jewish life. Reimer charges that what the film is actually showing is not the normal life of Polish Jewry but rather the "effect of the Nazi administration and the disruption of the lives of millions of Polish Jews." Erik Barnouw describes the Warsaw ghetto after the Nazi conquest as a place where "hundreds of thousands of Jews were herded by the [Nazi] conquerors into pockets of indescribable misery." He describes footage shot there as showing "half-starved, unshaven creatures caught in pathetic acts of barter - a pair of socks for a scrap of food."It is scenes such as these that the film presents as showing Jews "in their natural state."
The film utilizes a montage
Montage
-Filmmaking:*Montage , a technique which uses rapid editing, special effects and music to present compressed narrative information*Soviet montage theory in the 1920s-Other:* Montage , Documentary television series from 1960s and 1970s...
that juxtaposes these images of ghetto Jews with images of rats to draw an analogy between the migration of Jews from Eastern Europe with the migration of rats. For example, one of the shots shows a pack of rat
Rat
Rats are various medium-sized, long-tailed rodents of the superfamily Muroidea. "True rats" are members of the genus Rattus, the most important of which to humans are the black rat, Rattus rattus, and the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus...
s emerging from a sewer, followed by a shot of a crowd of Jews in a bustling street of Lodz. Close-ups of those in the crowd reveal sickly, malformed facial features. The narrator states that, as rats are the vermin of the animal kingdom, Jews are the vermin of the human race and similarly spread disease and corruption. Unlike rats, however, the narrator continues, Jews have the uncanny ability to change their appearance and blend into their "human hosts." A scene depicts four bearded men in traditional religious Jewish clothing, then shows them shaved and in modern business suits, while the narrator explains that only a "trained eye" can distinguish their Jewish features.
"Where rats appear, they bring ruin by destroying mankind's goods and foodstuffs. In this way, they spread disease, plague, leprosy, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and so on. They are cunning, cowardly and cruel and are found mostly in large packs.Among the animals, they represent the rudiment of an insidious, underground destruction - just like the Jews among human beings. "
Economic impact
The film asserts:
"At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews sit at the junction of the world financial markets. They are an international power. Only one percent of the world's population, with the help of their capital, they terrorize the world stock exchanges, world opinion, and world politics."
The movie blamed Jews for inflation and unemployment in Germany. It charged that they had crept into all professions and through usury
Usury
Usury Originally, when the charging of interest was still banned by Christian churches, usury simply meant the charging of interest at any rate . In countries where the charging of interest became acceptable, the term came to be used for interest above the rate allowed by law...
, racketeering and crimes on German assets.
"Out of a thousand workers in Berlin, only two were Jews. For the start of 1933, out of one hundred prosecutors in Berlin 15 were Jews. Out of a hundred judges were 23 Jews. Out of a hundred lawyers 49 Jews. 52 Jews out of a hundred doctors. And out of every hundred of businessmen 60 Jews. The average wealth of Germans was 810 marks each. The average wealth of each Jew amounted to 10,000 marks."
Jews as abnormal and depraved
In a long sequence of images, the film provides examples of how it claims Aryan/European culture has been corrupted by Jews.This sequence includes footage of notable figures who had earned Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
's wrath, such as physicist and Nobel laureate Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...
and Rosa Luxembourg as representatives of so-called " international Jewry". Einstein's image was juxtaposed with a series of images about Jewish control of the pornography
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...
industry. Einstein was characterized as "relativity Jew, his hatred of Germany after an obscure pseudo-science hidden "refers to.
Other film clips presented Jewish (or supposedly Jewish) actors from the Weimar era such as Curt Bois , Charles Chaplin (who was not a Jew), Fritz Kortner
Fritz Kortner
Fritz Kortner was an Austrian-born stage and film actor and theatre director.Kortner was born in Vienna as Fritz Nathan Kohn. He studied at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. After graduating, he joined Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1911 and then Leopold Jessner in 1916. Also in that year...
, Peter Lorre
Peter Lorre
Peter Lorre was an Austrian-American actor frequently typecast as a sinister foreigner.He caused an international sensation in 1931 with his portrayal of a serial killer who preys on little girls in the German film M...
, and Ernst Lubitsch
Ernst Lubitsch
Ernst Lubitsch was a German-born film director. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch."In 1947 he received an Honorary Academy Award for his...
.
The film includes a sequence from The House of Rothschild (1934) that shows a rich Rothschild hiding money and putting on old clothes to fool the tax collector. The clip was used without permission and presented with misleading German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
subtitles that hid the comic intent of the original film.
The film's narrator asserts that: "(t)he Jew is instinctively interested in everything abnormal and depraved." To illustrate this point, Hippler included a scene from Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...
's film M
M (1931 film)
M is a 1931 German drama-thriller directed by Fritz Lang and written by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou. It was Lang's first sound film, although he had directed more than a dozen films previously....
in which the child murderer Beckert (played by Peter Lorre) makes an impassioned plea the jury, begging for his life and disclaiming responsibility for his crimes on account of insanity. Beckert shrieks, "... it burns within me. I must go the way I am driven. Who knows what is going on inside me? How I must - not want, must!" According to Sharon Packer, Hippler used this scene to assert that "Jews transmit inheritable criminality and therefore deserve to die."
Jewish religious practice
Scenes of Jewish life in Poland were also staged to make the Jews objects of ridicule. Adam CzerniakowAdam Czerniaków
Adam Czerniaków , born in Warsaw, Poland, was a Polish-Jewish engineer and senator to the prewar Polish Sejm for Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government...
, whom the Nazis appointed head of the Judenrat
Judenrat
Judenräte were administrative bodies during the Second World War that the Germans required Jews to form in the German occupied territory of Poland, and later in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union It is the overall term for the enforcement bodies established by the Nazi occupiers to...
(Jewish Council), is shown seated in front of a seven-branched menorah, gesticulating wildly at the director's insistence, because "that is how Jews speak."
After showing how Jews have been responsible for the decline of Western music, science, art, and commerce, is a scene of a cow being slaughtered for meat by a shochet (Jewish ritual slaughter), which is prefaced by a warning similar to the one in Frankenstein
Frankenstein (1931 film)
Frankenstein is a 1931 Pre-Code Horror Monster film from Universal Pictures directed by James Whale and adapted from the play by Peggy Webling which in turn is based on the novel of the same name by Mary Shelley. The film stars Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles and Boris Karloff, and features...
, warning women, children, and the squeamish about the upcoming scene. This long scene, lasting several minutes, shows the cows and sheep in all their death throes as they bleed to death. The movie's creators apparently filmed this scene on the knowledge that Hitler was opposed to cruelty to animals
Cruelty to animals
Cruelty to animals, also called animal abuse or animal neglect, is the infliction of suffering or harm upon non-human animals, for purposes other than self-defense. More narrowly, it can be harm for specific gain, such as killing animals for food or for their fur, although opinions differ with...
and had banned kosher slaughter of animals in Germany, and that such footage would shock an audience that was sensitive to animals.
This scene was cut from the version intended for women and children.
"These images are a clear proof of the cruelty of Schächtmethode. They also reveal the character of a race , their blunt brutality under the guise of religious worship is hidden. "
Hitler's Reichstag speech
The film concludes with footage of Hitler's speech in the Reichstag in which he proclaims:"If it should succeed in the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe, the nations once more into a world war to overthrow, then the result is not being Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry to be, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe! "
The film omits the line "the Bolshevization of Earth and thus..." following "...will not be...", likely due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The film ends with images of SA troops on parade.
Release and reception
In and of itself, the movie did not have much impact on the German public. The film suffered from being released after Jud SüßJud Süß (1940 film)
Jud Süß is an antisemitic propaganda film produced in 1940 by Terra Filmkunst at the behest of Joseph Goebbels. The movie was directed by Veit Harlan, who wrote the screenplay with Eberhard Wolfgang Möller and Ludwig Metzger, and starred Ferdinand Marian and Harlan's wife Kristina Söderbaum.The...
which was wildly popular, perhaps because it wrapped the antisemitic message in an engaging period drama with costumes, etc. The actors in Jud Süß were leading German actors of the time. In contrast, Der Ewige Jude's only original footage was of Jews in the Polish ghetto who were deliberately set up to look poor, filthy and disgusting. All the other footage consisted of stills and archive film clips.
In contrast to the interesting story of Jud Süß, Der Ewige Jude was unremitting propaganda without the cloak of an interesting plot line to engage the audience. It also had some disgusting scenes of Jewish ritual slaughter that turned the audience's stomach.
Thus, unlike Jud Süß
Jud Süß (1940 film)
Jud Süß is an antisemitic propaganda film produced in 1940 by Terra Filmkunst at the behest of Joseph Goebbels. The movie was directed by Veit Harlan, who wrote the screenplay with Eberhard Wolfgang Möller and Ludwig Metzger, and starred Ferdinand Marian and Harlan's wife Kristina Söderbaum.The...
which was a box-office smash success, Der Ewige Jude was a commercial flop. David Culbert asserts that it is unlikely that there were more than 1 million paid admissions compared to over 20 million paid admissions to Jud Süß.
There were only 1 million paid admissions compared to 20 million for Jud Süß. The film was more known by word-of-mouth descriptions than from people actually viewing it. Some Germans were quoted as saying "We've already seen enough Jewish filth. We don't need to see any more."
For the most part, the film was viewed by party supporters and Nazi organizations like the Hitler youth
Hitler Youth
The Hitler Youth was a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. It existed from 1922 to 1945. The HJ was the second oldest paramilitary Nazi group, founded one year after its adult counterpart, the Sturmabteilung...
and the SS
Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
. Nevertheless, because its dramatic scenes were widely discussed, the theme and contents of the film were known by reputation by large segments of the population who had not actually viewed it. It is widely noted that SS troops headed for the Eastern front to carry out the "Final Solution
Final Solution
The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...
" were "invited" by Himmler to watch the film.
Postwar significance
In 1946, Fritz Hippler was tried for directing Der Ewige Jude but was not found guilty. Hippler contended Joseph Goebbels was the true creator of The Eternal Jew with Hitler's close supervision. He claimed that Goebbels gave Hippler credit as a reward “for his excellent work in the newsreel department”.An unrepentant Hippler was interviewed in the Emmy Award
Emmy Award
An Emmy Award, often referred to simply as the Emmy, is a television production award, similar in nature to the Peabody Awards but more focused on entertainment, and is considered the television equivalent to the Academy Awards and the Grammy Awards .A majority of Emmys are presented in various...
-winning program "The Propaganda Battle" in the PBS series Walk Through the Twentieth Century. In this interview he explains that he regrets that his name was listed as the director of The Eternal Jew because the Allies interrogated him after the war. He thought this was unfair because, in his opinion, he had nothing to do with the killing of Jews. However, in an interview shown in the 2000 German documentary series Holocaust, the 90-year old Hippler described the film as "the most disgraceful example of anti-semitism."
Availability
The public distribution and exhibition of the film is prohibited in Germany; the only exception is for use in college classrooms and other academic purposes; however, exhibitors must have formal education in "media science and the history of the Holocaust." In addition, only a specially annotated version may be screened.Cast
- Harry GieseHarry GieseHarry Giese was a German theatre and voice actor.-Career:He was the narrator for German newsreels between 1940 and 1945. He is perhaps best known as the narrator for the anti-semitic propaganda film The External Jew ....
as Narrator - Curt Bois as Himself (archive footage)
- Charles ChaplinCharlie ChaplinSir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...
as Himself (archive footage) - he is erroneously identified as a Jew - Albert EinsteinAlbert EinsteinAlbert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...
as Himself (archive footage) - Adolf HitlerAdolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
as Himself, speaking at Reichstagssitzung (archive footage) - Fritz KortnerFritz KortnerFritz Kortner was an Austrian-born stage and film actor and theatre director.Kortner was born in Vienna as Fritz Nathan Kohn. He studied at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. After graduating, he joined Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1911 and then Leopold Jessner in 1916. Also in that year...
as Himself (archive footage) - Peter LorrePeter LorrePeter Lorre was an Austrian-American actor frequently typecast as a sinister foreigner.He caused an international sensation in 1931 with his portrayal of a serial killer who preys on little girls in the German film M...
as Himself (archive footage) - Ernst LubitschErnst LubitschErnst Lubitsch was a German-born film director. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch."In 1947 he received an Honorary Academy Award for his...
as Himself (archive footage) - Rosa LuxemburgRosa LuxemburgRosa Luxemburg was a Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and activist of Polish Jewish descent who became a naturalized German citizen...
as Herself (archive footage) - Mona MarisMona MarisMona Maris was an Argentine film actress who was born in Buenos Aires.-Ancestry and education:Her given name was Mona Maria Emita Cap de Vielle. Her mother was a Spanish Basque and her father a French Basque...
as Herself - Anna StenAnna StenAnna Sten was a Ukrainian-born Russian silent film actress and later a Hollywood film star. She began her career in stage plays and films in Russia before travelling to Germany, where she starred in several films...
as Herself (archive footage)
See also
- List of films made in the Third Reich
- List of films in the public domain
- Nazism and cinema
- The International JewThe International JewThe International Jew is a four volume set of booklets or pamphlets originally published and distributed in the early 1920s by Henry Ford, an American industrialist and automobile manufacturer....
- Henry Ford
- Protocols of the Elders of Zion
- Antisemitic canardAntisemitic canardAn antisemitic canard is a false story inciting antisemitism. Despite being thoroughly disproved, antisemitic canards are often part of broader theories of Jewish conspiracies. According to Kenneth S. Stern,Historically, Jews have not fared well around conspiracy theories. Such ideas fuel...
- History of the Jews in PolandHistory of the Jews in PolandThe history of the Jews in Poland dates back over a millennium. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Jewish community in the world. Poland was the centre of Jewish culture thanks to a long period of statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy. This ended with the...
Further reading
- Stig Hornshøj-Møller, Der ewige Jude: Quellenkritische Analyse eines antisemitischen Propagandafilms ("Source-Critical Analysis of an Antisemitic Propaganda Film"), Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film, GöttingenGöttingenGöttingen is a university town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Göttingen. The Leine river runs through the town. In 2006 the population was 129,686.-General information:...
, 1995.
External links
- Der Ewige Jude at Internet Movie DatabaseInternet Movie DatabaseInternet Movie Database is an online database of information related to movies, television shows, actors, production crew personnel, video games and fictional characters featured in visual entertainment media. It is one of the most popular online entertainment destinations, with over 100 million...
- Shay Hazkani, "Forbidden Films-An Analysis of the Nazi Propaganda Films The Eternal Jew and Jew Suess and Their Influence on the German Public" Moreshet 5
- Still Images of film via holocaust-history.org
- The Eternal Jew: The Film of a 2000-Year Rat Migration
- Papers on 'The Eternal Jew' by Stig Hornshoj-Moller
- The Eternal Jew - a Blueprint for Genocide
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