Hollywood and Hitler 1933-1939

“One of these days there is quite liable to be a mild riot in this house over Hitler. Two factions are definitely shaping up in the Embassy audience. There was a contest to a draw Saturday between applauders and booers. The din reached a deafening climax. It was just the opposite at the Luxer which, through Pathé, was daring enouh to semi-close Hitler. Only manifestation there was subdued hissing.”¹

The ear- and-eyewitness report on the vox populi reaction to Hitler’s screen image was filed by Tom Waller, Variety’s man on the newsreel beat. Throughout the 1930s, week in and week out, Waller or his colleagues Roy Chartier, Mike Wear, or Robert Landry, promethean screen watchers all, attended the shows at the two newsreel theaters located in midtown Manhattan, the Embassy Theater and the Trans-Lux. As exquisitely attuned to the vibrations in the air as the news on screen, they commented not only on the contents of the clips but the reactions of the audience. Their observations comprise a kind of ethnographer’s field notes on the folkways of an exotic tribe of moviegoers, a community of news-hungry spectators whose tastes were uncommercial and whose opinions went unmuffled.

The Embassy Newsreel Theater, located at Broadway and 46th in Times Square, and the Trans-Lux (nicknamed “the Luxer”), located at Broadway and 49th, granted top billing to what elsewhere was the appetizer on the motion picture menu.a In metropolitan palaces and neighborhood theaters, the newsreel was typically screened at the top of what exhibitors called “the balanced program”—the full-course motion picture diet that also included a cartoon, a short subject, and a feature-length attraction. In the newsreel theater, the side dish was the entrée.

The newsreel had been a standard item in the motion picture lineup since 1906, when the French company Pathé pioneered a weekly news issue. By the early sound era, and for most of the classical Hollywood era, five commercial newsreels, each with a name-brand studio distributor, divided up the market in approximately 16,500 theaters: Fox Movietone News, Paramount News, Universal Newsreel, RKO-Pathé News, and MGM’s Hearst-Metrotone News (renamed the News of the Day in 1936). Like the big-city dailies, they jostled for pride of place and scrambled to scoop the competition. Trademark segments and announcers (“spielers” in trade jargon) also imprinted the identity of the individual brands. In 1930, Universal inaugurated the use of an offscreen narrator with the hiring of staccato-voiced radio sportscaster Graham McNamee.^b Edwin C. Hill spoke for Hearst-Metrotone News until 1936 when NBC radio announcer Jean Paul King assumed duties behind the microphone. Fox Movietone employed the most prestigious of all the vocal hosts, the famed journalist and radio commentator Lowell Thomas.

The friendly newsreel commentator, boasted Universal Newsreel, “adds that human touch that gives life and fire to the events as they flash on screen.” Perhaps, but the “commentator” title was largely honorific: wary of offending any moviegoer’s ear, the spielers kept their opinions to themselves. “Illuminating comments, especially when voiced by erudite students of affairs, are bound to prove interesting to millions of persons, but the foundation of a newsreel will always be its pictures,” lectured the Film Daily. “There is just one danger in the situation, and that is the possibility of overdoing the editorializing and moralizing aspects.”2 There was little danger of that. When it came to editorializing, the newsreels were cautious to a fault.

The newsreel companies used the high-profile New York houses to showcase their best footage and headline scoops prior to shipping the reels out of town. The Trans-Lux tended to have a shorter program, more generously sweetened with novelty shorts, color travelogues, and cartoons; the Embassy was the preferred forum for spectators who wanted their news served straight. In March 1933, already heeding the war clouds overseas, it adopted “a policy of more internationally significant news.”3

The Embassy opened on November 2, 1929, not an auspicious debut date, the week of the worst news of the decade, the stock market crash. Still, the 600-seat house was an instant hit, drawing in 7,000 patrons a day with eleven shows beginning at 10:00 a.m. and running until midnight. Signs plastered in the front lobby and barkers shouting the headlines roped in passersby. “Hear with your own ears the actual sound of the assassin’s shot exactly as it happened!” yelled the shills for the Embassy’s premiere program, highlighting Fox Movietone’s exclusive sound pictures of an attempted assassination of Italy’s Crown Prince Umberto. Admission was a reasonable 25 cents. “Everyone ought to be able to pay two bits to pass an hour away,” figured the good-natured Phil M. Daily, the eponymous columnist for the Film Daily.⁴

The newsreel theater attracted a select, or rather self-selected, audience. Even by the standards of the classical Hollywood moviegoer—by all accounts a loquacious spectator given to audible expressions of approval or disgust—newsreel audiences were notoriously mouthy and unruly. Many came not just to watch the news but to vent at the newsmakers: the motion picture theater as town hall meeting. “Taking newsreel theaters as an example, where world-renowned personalities and events are shown, hisses, catcalls, stamping of feet, booing and applause are intermingled by conglomerate audiences who have fixed opinions on the subject matter thrown on screen,” Variety noted in 1938.5 Irving Hoffman, the Hollywood Reporter’s envoy in New York, agreed that “newsreel audiences take the palm as being the most demonstrative of all theater patrons.” In 1937, watching the first reports of Japanese depredations in China, Hoffman harkened to a fiercely partisan outburst at the Embassy. “The shots of raped Nanking, for instance, inspire hisses from all parts of the house, and when a Japanese aviator is shot to earth, the house rocks with applause.”⁶

The demographic makeup of the newsreel audience—who were these avid jeerers and cheerers?—is a matter of guesswork, but the core clientele was what today would be called opinion makers or news junkies—a breed apart who, compared to the average rung of motion picture fandom, tended to be more politically minded, better educated, and (this being midtown Manhattan in the 1930s) disproportionately Jewish. Newsreel audiences, wrote a bemused Jane Cobb, the gal-about-town columnist for the New York Times, “are recognized as being more intelligent than the average, and even if there were no other reason for attending, one would go to a newsreel theater for the pleasure of feeling smug.”⁷ The Embassy catered to a more obstreperous, foreign-born, and left-wing crowd, a claque known to applaud if a close-up of Joseph Stalin flashed on screen. When the Trans-Lux screened a 35-minute propaganda film from Moscow entitled Soviets on Parade (1933), Tom Waller interpreted the addition as a naked bid to tempt some of the rowdy “Communist attendees” away from their usual haven at the Embassy.⁸

The crowd of regulars rubbed shoulders with a more casual cohort lured by a screeching headline or simply the need to kill time between appointments or train departures. In 1930, Variety’s publisher-editor Sime Silverman lauded the newsreel aficionados, upmarket intelligentsia and downtown ramblers alike, with an affectionate homage. “The Embassy draws the strollers along Broadway, the impatient date makers, the train waiters, the time-killers, and after those the untold thousands who think the newsreel is the best single feature, now that it is in sound, ever devised in the film industry.” The experiment in screen journalism, said Silverman, was “drawing the best, the class, and the intellectuals of New York into its seats each and every week.”⁹ Less romantically, a reporter for Exhibitors Herald-World sized up the Embassy crowd as “what can only be called a constantly changing hard-boiled audience.”¹⁰

From a bookkeeping perspective, the profit margin of the newsreels was always slim, more shades of red than black. “The amount of actual labor and talent put in to making our newsreels is incredible and yet for all of that, the newsreel is the least productive of actual profits of any short subject series on the market,” reported Film Daily in 1934. Yet as prestige makers and flag wavers for their corporate parents in Hollywood, the twice-weekly issues recouped in respect what they lost in cash. “It is a fair assertion that not less than half of the whole status and repute of the motion picture is based on what an intelligent public thinks of newsreels and topical shorts,” declared Motion Picture Herald editor Terry Ramsaye, himself a former newsreel editor, who maintained a proprietary interest in the medium throughout the 1930s.11 Fiscally sound or not, the newsreel was “second in importance on every screen,” asserted the Film Daily, surpassed only by the featured attraction in popularity and status. “The ordinary theatergoer doesn’t care a whoop what newsreel is included on the program, just so long as one is on the bill.”¹²

Trafficking in the real world news of the day, the newsreel stood apart from the animated shenanigans of the cartoon, the exotic realms of the travelogue shorts, and the escapist lure of the feature film. Though surely entertaining—the issues were packed with sports coverage, human interest stories, and antic silliness—the newsreel also informed and confronted audiences with the raw stuff of political upheaval, war, crime, natural disasters, and man-made horror. Even if the news was rehashed and well known by the time it unspooled on screen, the format was a rough cinematic approximation of the headlines typeset on the pages of the daily paper. Its unique purview gave the newsreel special prerogatives, especially when up against the bane of motion picture existence—censorship.

Throughout the 1930s, and well beyond, motion pictures were exhibited at the pleasure of a nationwide honeycomb of state and municipal censor boards. In 1915 the United States Supreme Court had ruled that the medium was “a business pure and simple” and as such was not protected by the guarantees given the print press under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Nothing prohibited city, state, or (by logical extension) the federal government from setting up a censorship board to clip and ban films according to the standards of the community or the whims of the membership.

Nonetheless, even in the pre–First Amendment era for the motion picture medium, the newsreels enjoyed a greater degree of freedom from censorship than the rest of the Hollywood lineup. A kind of penumbra effect emanating from the freedom accorded the print press shielded the news-on-film medium from the narrow-eyed scrutiny bedeviling the rest of the program. Unlike the feature films and short subjects on the motion picture bill—indeed, unlike the cartoons—the newsreels were exempt from oversight by the Production Code Administration, the in-house agency that from July 1934 onward precensored all Hollywood product. Occasionally, when the newsreels issued a short subject on a news event of special interest, the company would request a courtesy review from the PCA. In 1937, when Universal Newsreel, purely for form’s sake, asked for a Code seal for its short subject on the sinking of the Panay, the U.S. naval vessel attacked by Japanese warplanes on the Yangtze River in China, Variety noted that Will Hays and his outfit gave newsreels a wide berth. “[The] understood Haysian attitude is that all matter in [the Panay] short is newsreel material, and as such would be approved with little or no change since [the] MPPDA never has attempted to change newsreel material.”13

Like the MPPDA, state and city censorship boards usually exempted newsreels from the frame-by-frame scrutiny applied to the Hollywood feature films—but not always. Clips of civic unrest, political activism, or criminal lawlessness tended to rouse censors to scissor material that might give insurrectionist ideas to audiences beaten down by the Great Depression. However, on those occasions when the newsreels did run afoul of state oversight, the deletions and bannings sparked more controversy than the censorship routinely applied to the rest of the program. Newsreel cameramen could still be pushed around and roughed up, their film confiscated and their cameras busted, with an impunity that the print press would neither abide nor be subjected to, but when rogue cops or hired goons attacked newsreel cameramen, their allies in the print press hit back. After a barrage of editorial denunciations, local censorship boards tended to withdraw their original demands and approve on second thought what they had banned on first look.

Yet despite the greater leeway accorded the newsreels as journalistic entities, they were more lapdogs than watchdogs, seldom straying outside the comfort zone of consensus opinion. The pressures of commerce, the threat of legal action, and the risk of official clampdown kept newsreel editors from challenging shibboleths, bucking authority, or defying convention. The controversies the newsreels generated were seldom political, in a partisan sense, a result of defiant editors taking a fearless stand on the divisive issues of the day. Almost always, the dustups were over matters of taste and decorum—showing the bullet-riddled body of Pretty Boy Floyd in a ditch or the corpse of John Dillinger laid out on a slab.

Under a concept called “voluntary restraint,” the newsreel editors heeded an internal barometer as to what was most conducive to the mood of good cheer necessary for a moviegoer to digest the forthcoming contents of the balanced program. Both the MPPDA and the state censorship boards were “convinced that the principal guardianship of what should be cut or left in, from the great mass of material that is photographed, should rest with newsreel editors,” Variety reported in 1937, noting approvingly that the “newsreelers know when to lay off.”14 The newsreels did not need to be censored because they censored themselves.

In 1932 the veteran newsreel cameraman Charles Peden observed that “the Kaiser, the Pope, and Stalin are the only public personages in the world who have not been personally interviewed by the sound newsreel.”¹⁵ When Peden penned his wish list, the obvious omission had not yet walked onto the world stage, a public personage who, had he agreed to sit for a face-to-face interview before a sound newsreel, might have qualified for the scoop of the century.

The aloof disdain of Adolf Hitler was in distinct contrast to the accommodating availability of his fascist precursor. Ever since seizing power in 1922, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had been only too happy to preen for the American cameras and, with the advent of synchronous dialogue, to rush before the microphones so his voice might be heard. By 1931 the Italian dictator was so ubiquitous a camera hog that the “popular impression [was] that there isn’t a program released that doesn’t contain Il Duce or some reference to him,” joked Tom Waller. At the end of that year, a trade press survey ranked Mussolini with President Herbert Hoover, British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, and New York Mayor Jimmy Walker in an elite quartet of “the world’s greatest newsreel stars.” Hitler rated not a single mention.¹⁶

The first glimpse of Hitler in the American newsreels is hard to pinpoint with any precision, but by 1931 he was appearing in a handful of clips, flashing by quickly, usually paired with Mussolini, the predecessor dictator who was then seen as the senior partner in European fascism.c “What a lot of fans have been thinking for a long time is being cracked by Graham McNamee this week,” Waller reported in his review of a Universal Newsreel issue in November 1931. “He likens Hitler’s personal pose to Mussolini.”¹⁷ Later that year, Paramount scored a vivid clip of Hitler in an automobile, “wearing a hackenkreuz [swastika], receiving an ovation from his followers.”¹⁸

To most Americans, foreign news with a political edge was a distant buzz on the mental periphery, a distraction from the more urgent news of the Great Depression (another blight given scant coverage by the chronically upbeat newsreels). Even for the curious moviegoer, news from afar was badly dated by the time it unspooled on screen, generally taking two weeks or more from European filming to New York screening. The newsreels preferred to showcase the splendor of European royalty on parade rather than obscure political leaders with esoteric gripes having little relevance for an American audience. In 1932 most news-minded Americans were more interested in their own presidential election and the end of Prohibition than the internecine squabbles of the Weimar Republic.

Still, 1932 was Hitler’s breakout year in the American newsreels, the year the violent and historic presidential election in Germany received extensive international news coverage and, in America, modest notice in the newsreels. In the run-up to the election, the newsreels featured images of Hindenburg and Hitler campaigning, including the now famous shots of Hitler deplaning on landing fields, images that document his pioneering use of the airplane for campaign stops while valorizing a forward-looking leader in step with advanced technology. “Welcome clips,” remarked Waller, hinting at the general paucity of footage, “in view of the wide publicity given the event in the [newspaper] dailies.” In a report on the results of the election, which Hindenburg won but in which Hitler gained ground and momentum, Waller spotted a fresh face on the Embassy screen and recorded the response from the crowd:

German-speaking Jews, up from the Lower East Side, and German-speaking nationalists, down from the heavily German district of Yorkville, met in midtown to check out the momentous news from the home country—and to vent their opinions at the screen.

By the end of the year, Hitler was a recognizable face, though not yet a star presence, in the American newsreels. “Paramount titles a clip showing Hitler in a crowd, as he has been seen numbers of times, as signifying he is headed for an audience with Hindenburg,” Waller commented in December 1932. “When the flash is repeated, it is after the Hindenburg conference. All of which means nothing to an American audience. For all the fans over here know, the subject might have had Hitler going to and returning from a saloon.”²⁰ The remark indicates first that Hitler was becoming an increasingly common sight, and second that the images were unspooled with little context or coherence.

Yet even without a flowchart explaining Weimar politics, American audiences seem to have been able to spot one of the great villains of history. Unlike Mussolini, a blowhard whose strutting often inspired derisive cackles, Hitler radiated a pictorially ominous presence. In the frothy newsreel lineup, he was a serious splash of cold water. Most Americans watched warily, and some hissed. A few applauded or shouted “Heil!” No one seems to have snickered.

In mid-February 1933, the first newsreel clips reporting Hitler’s ascension to Reich Chancellor on January 30 reached New York. “There was scattered applause for Hitler in the Luxer,” reported Waller, manning his usual post at the Saturday matinee screenings. “Embassy reaction was mixed with marked hisses added.”²¹

In any newsreel report, the image that sparked the most vociferous reaction from viewers was a close-up shot of the newsmaker. A huge square portrait looming over audiences in crisp, 35mm celluloid, it was the signal to hiss, cheer, jeer, burst into applause, or let loose with a plosive “Bronx cheer.” After his solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, a close-up of Charles Lindbergh spurred spontaneous cheers and applause for years afterwards. FDR’s smiling visage also inspired partisan hoorays or, more rarely, hissing. In Hitler’s case, a close-up—typically a worshipful low-angle shot filmed by Nazi crews—infuriated the anti-Nazis and delighted his stateside claque. “Hitler audience reactions are back stronger than ever at the Embassy,” Waller reported in May 1933. “Hitler at Berlin’s May Day was the signal for a storm of boos and applause.”22

So Pavlovian was the revulsion or rapture incited by a close-up of Hitler that newsreel editors—responding to complaints from nervous exhibitors—often deleted his picture rather than agitate audiences. “The key city deluxers either eliminated or played down Hitler’s newsreel clips as a means to obviate disturbances which had asserted themselves with the flashing of the Nazi leader’s pictures,” Variety reported in March 1933. “Newsreel editors are all dodging Hitler close-ups.”23 Other tradewise observers also noticed the conspicuous absence in the newsreels of the headline maker in the newspapers. “In many instances scenes depicting Hitler operations have been cut out of the newsreels,” Motion Picture Herald pointed out in 1933. “Thus far Universal is the only company which has eliminated Nazi scenes. It was understood that Paramount, Pathé, Fox Movietone, and Hearst-Metrotone were considering similar moves.”²⁴

In stitching together segments on Nazi Germany, the newsreel editors had to balance their service to two masters. In order to maintain the flow of German motion picture footage, they were compelled to show some clips provided by or filmed under the approval of the Reichsfilmkammer. Yet they were also leery of angering the anti-Nazi contingent in their consumer base. “Hitler is proving an admittedly ticklish subject for the newsreels,” Waller noted in March 1933, commenting on clips of a tribute to German dead in the Great War. “The editors are obviously exerting all caution not to offend an important trade in Germany and at the same time not to arouse the ire of portions of American audiences.” Variety’s eagle-eyed correspondent noticed an interesting trend. “But Herr Hitler is not getting the close-ups that were his just a few months ago,” continued Waller. “It seemed that efforts had been made to ‘bury’ him in the current subject.”²⁵

Caught between vitriol from one side and a defiant “Heil!” from the other, newsreel editors thought long and hard about projecting the face of Adolf Hitler. Not that so prominent a profile could always be edited out of the story. The funeral of President Hindenburg, held in Germany on August 7, 1934, with Hitler delivering the funeral oration, reached American screens about ten days later. “Some of the reel editors frowned upon including the Hitler eulogy, evidently figuring the swastika man would spoil the solemnity of the occasion with some American audiences,” observed Waller. “In the Embassy, however, the usual hissing was not in evidence during the generous running time Pathé allowed Hitler.”²⁶ Presumably the anti-Hitler contingent was constrained by respect for the ritual.

Calibrating the frequency of Hitler’s appearance in the newsreels and gauging the audience reaction is made more difficult by the fact that newsreel editors did not have the final say over what was actually projected in individual theaters. In the days when projection booths came equipped with flatbed editing tables, house managers were able to reedit newsreel programs at the site of exhibition, trimming the contents to fit personal prejudice or community standards. Thus, even when newsreel editors in New York opted to include shots of Hitler, local theater managers might slice out his picture. “Following repeated complaints to the newsreel companies about the continual insertion of Nazi propaganda, without results, exhibs are taking matters into their own hands in eliminating all Nazi clips prior to theater showings,” Daily Variety reported in September 1933. “Both major and independent circuits have officially instructed managers to delete any and all shots of Hitler and the Nazis from the newsreels.”27 In New York, the Rialto Theater was also said to be “scissoring everything about Hitler.”²⁸

In an atmosphere fraught with tension and invective, vocal outbursts sometimes boiled over into scuffles and fisticuffs in the theater. The first recorded instance of an actual brawl incited by Hitler’s image on screen occurred at New York’s Acme Theater on May 9, 1933. A showcase for Soviet imports and pro-communist foreign films, the Acme had booked Slatan Dudow’s Whither Germany? (1932), a German-made paean to the proletariat in which the workers of the world united around parades, anthems, and agitprop theater, followed by a coda—recently added—denouncing Hitler and the Nazis. When a lone member of the audience, who should have known better, heckled the screen, he was jumped on and pummeled by the regulars.²⁹

In the early days of the Third Reich, getting word of a Hitler-centric newsreel clip, claques of pro-Nazis infiltrated the left-leaning crowd at the Embassy to demonstrate solidarity. “For once Hitler got a rousing reception, one which drowned all hisses, in the Embassy,” reported a surprised Waller in July 1933. “It was a Saturday matinee and the house was well filled when Fox-Hearst dared the first close-up of the Chancellor in action which it has projected for months.”³⁰ To discourage trouble, the Embassy stationed private security guards and burly ushers in the back of the house.

Even with an influx of pro-Nazi agents provocateurs, the mood of the newsreel crowds in New York was predominately, and soon monolithically, anti-Nazi. “In the old days every time Hitler was mentioned there was a rough combination of hisses and applause,” noted Waller. “Last Saturday afternoon [March 10, 1934], the reaction was negative, although the house crew was mustered in the back expecting trouble.” That afternoon spectators watched two sides of the Nazi story—first, coverage of a Nazi festivity in Germany, and then a lengthy clip from Pathé reporting on a huge anti-Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden held three days earlier, featuring former New York governor Al Smith, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise.31

Soon the anti-Nazi crowds not only outdrew but physically intimidated the smattering of pro-Nazis. By the end of 1935, not a single voice dared shout a defiant “Heil!” “When Hitler comes into focus on the occasion of celebrating Germany’s 100th anniversary of railroads, it’s a cue for plenty of hisses and no applause,” observed Roy Chartier, not displeased.³² The next year, a Fox Movietone report on the Berlin Olympics showed a brief excerpt from Hitler’s opening speech. “Embassy audiences got the opportunity for vocal partisanship,” noted Variety, “first, of course, when Hitler is pictured.” That “of course” is the parenthetical giveaway of a permanent shift in the temperature of the room.³³

Even so, outside of news-hungry New York, the newsreel rule on Hitler was the less seen of him the better. “Hitler is taboo, or nearly so, on most American screens,” Life observed as late as 1938. “Because of a notion that audiences do not wish to be aroused, newsreels seldom include his picture.”³⁴

But if the core anti-Hitler clientele out-shouted and ultimately silenced the pockets of pro-Hitler sentiment, both sides were drowned out by expressions of the consensus attitude toward the convulsions wrought by the Third Reich. In 1935, during a Pathé report on Nazi Germany, the spieler commented that “the American people look to Roosevelt to keep them out of the mess.” The isolationist sentiment “drew heaps of applause,” noted Roy Chartier, the like-minded reporter in attendance.³⁵ The silent majority of newsreel audiences neither hissed nor heiled—just hoped that the face of the swastika man would be kept at a safe distance.

Nazi Party events were, of course, strictly monitored and the footage censored before export. To secure permission to film, the newsreels were also required to screen “at least some shots which are of propaganda value for Germany.”36 The written intertitles and sound synchronization of pictures shot in Germany were not to be altered for stateside consumption. To ensure compliance, German agents in America monitored newsreel screenings.

For the American newsreel editors in New York, covering Nazi Germany was a journalistic dilemma that devolved into a devil’s bargain: either ignore the charismatic personalities, dazzling pageantry, and military mobilization of Nazi Germany altogether, which meant ignoring the most momentous and photogenic story in the world, or screen Nazi-approved or -provided footage, which then invited accusations of complicity with the regime. The trade press coined a special term for the Nazi-aggrandizing footage channeled to the newsreels via the Reichsfilmkammer: “naziganda.”

Fox Movietone and Paramount News seemed to be especially compliant conduits for naziganda. Both studios had well-established newsreel branches in Germany that served not only as a base for foreign news stories but as a kind of money-laundering operation. As arms of their studio parents, the newsreel offices in Germany offered a roundabout way for the companies to spend “blocked currency”—box office profits earned from their films playing in Germany but prevented from leaving the country. Studios could spend the restricted funds on the production of the newsreels in Germany, export the footage, and then profit off the sales accrued outside of Germany—a circuitous accounting path and not exactly a windfall profit, but better than letting the money sit in a Nazi bank.

In particular, Fox Movietone, which maintained the biggest operation in Germany, was thought to be an uncritical conveyer belt for Joseph Goebbels. “Rumors are flying about town [New York] that certain newsreels are giving the Hitler regime favorable treatment in the newsreels blanketing the United States,” the Hollywood Reporter revealed, without naming the culprits.37 Not as circumspect, Variety fingered the accused. “Consistent use of Hitler propaganda scenes in Fox Movietone Newsreel is beginning to revive previously scouted report of a deal between one of the American reels and the Hitler crowd for propagandizing Hitlerism,” it confided in September 1933. “Fox Movietone, some time ago, officially denied such a deal.”³⁸ Even so, whether a quid pro quo or a nod and a wink, Fox enjoyed closer proximity to Nazi bigwigs than the competition. “Fox treks to Germany for Goering and Hitler stuff,” read a survey of the only Nazi news item on an Embassy program from 1936.³⁹

Undeniably, the official footage from Nazi Germany made for chilling viewing. What critic Susan Sontag later dubbed “fascinating fascism”—the hypnotic allure of the pageantry and iconography of Nazism on screen—was first experienced by a generation of moviegoers for whom it was the spellbinding news of the day, not grainy archival footage. “Nazi kid army taking the pledge is a massive subject, showing blocks of youngsters as far as the camera eye could see, taking the arm up gyration,” observed Tom Waller in 1933, impressed and a bit rattled. One can almost hear his low whistle of amazement at the robotic synchronization of the precision drill.⁴⁰

Two exceptions to the Nazi monopoly on newsreel coverage bequeathed an infinitely serviceable cache of raw footage to the newsreel library—motion picture images of the nationwide German boycott of Jewish goods held on April 1, 1933, and the cinemagenic book burnings presided over by Goebbels in Berlin on May 10, 1933. Emblematic even at the time, screened forever after as visual synecdoche for the conflagrations ignited by the Third Reich, the antisemitic signage and street scuffles from the boycotts and the flames from the book bonfire distilled into a few feet of film the race hatred and thought control of the Nazi regime.

Touted by the Nazi propaganda machine with the expectation of international support, the boycott of Jewish goods was billed as a righteous response to the calls made by Jews around the world, and especially in the United States, for boycotts of Nazi goods after Hitler’s ascension to power. “If the incitement in foreign countries stops, then the boycott will stop,” Goebbels wrote in his diary, blaming “the international atrocities propaganda” for slurring the Nazis.41 Paramount News captured moving-camera shots of brownshirts marauding in trucks, street scuffles, and full-frame close-ups of a skull and crossbones on a shop window and signs reading “Deutsche! Kauft nicht bei Juden!” (“Germans! Don’t buy from Jews!”). “First definite screen news of the German boycott was credited to Paramount,” reported Waller two weeks later. “A talking reporter interpreted posted signs and editorialized about the situation while the crowd was shown milling about Berlin.”⁴² In Germany the boycott was something of a bust, but the American newsreels captured images that would forever after conjure the first stirrings of the Nazis in power.

Also ballyhooed in advance by the Nazis, the book burning was a major media event, in fact a pioneering “pseudo event” because so photogenic a spectacle would not have been staged had the cameras not been present to record it. “High toward the sky will reach tongues of vicious flame on May 10 as 62 German institutions of so-called higher education consign to the flames, under Nazi direction, any books which might in the slightest degree be construed as of Jewish origin,” announced a preview of the coming attraction in Motion Picture Herald.⁴³ The night-for-night photography of brownshirts silhouetted against the flames, tossing volume after volume into the pyre, rendered a nightmarish Walpurgisnacht with the temperature set at Fahrenheit 451.

The scene in Berlin was the center stage, with Goebbels himself presiding over the incineration. Three weeks later, when the images of the bonfire in Berlin hit newsreel theaters in New York, the scene was “greeted in silence at the Luxer while the Embassy mobs hiss it mildly.”⁴⁴ Rewound as library stock in year-end roundups of the news from Nazi Germany, the tableau was a picture-perfect snapshot of the mob frenzy of Nazism and a taste of the firestorm to come. The scene was also stitched into or reenacted in feature-length films such as Die Vandernder Yid (1933), Are We Civilized? (1934), I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany (1936), and The Mortal Storm (1940).

With the exception of the boycott and the bonfire, the early years of the Third Reich, as recorded by the newsreels, were a distant glimmer on the horizon. In April 1937, the popular monthly magazine Scribner’s asked the five newsreel companies to choose their six best newsreel moments, the scoops each outfit was proudest of. Of the thirty stories selected, only one tracked the rise of fascism in Europe: Paramount’s selection of the Nazi book burning in Germany. The choices underscored both the paucity of footage and the profile of the story.45

The ubiquity of World War II–era documentaries and the huge cache of archival footage that has emerged since 1945 can deceive the modern viewer into thinking that film of the Nazis was as vivid and plentiful in the 1930s as it is today. With only the newsreels before their eyes, American moviegoers had far less in their sights.

^a The flagship theaters for both operations were located in midtown Manhattan, but the Embassy and the Trans-Lux each maintained franchises in other locations. The Trans-Lux had branches at Madison and 60th St. in Manhattan and in Brooklyn, and the Embassy had three additional branches in Manhattan and one in downtown Newark. In 1938 the showcase Trans-Lux (“the deluxer of the species”) moved 400 feet south down Broadway to the former site of Churchill’s Restaurant. In New York and elsewhere, newsreel theaters tended to be located in or around train stations so passengers with time to kill could pop in for a quick viewing. In 1938, Variety estimated there were only ten extant newsreel houses in the country, eight in and around New York, one in Boston, and one in Philadelphia.

^b Universal Newsreel footage dominates present-day archival documentaries because its library is in the public domain, readily accessible from the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, and more importantly, free. Motion picture memory is thus filtered by what the Universal cameraman caught in his lens.

^c The first newsreel image of Hitler, animated in the motion picture medium, is a shot from 1919, caught by chance. It shows an obscure civilian among a crowd at Garmisch station, greeting a Frei Korps unit returning from crushing a communist uprising in Munich. Like an apparition, a well-dressed man leans out from the crowd and the camera catches a full body, head-to-toe portrait of an instantly recognizable figure. The shot is freeze-framed in “The Unchained Camera” episode of Cinema Europe (1995), the six-part BBC documentary series. The first headlined clip of Hitler noted in the synopsis sheets of Universal Newsreel occurs in the issue of May 5, 1932, reporting the results of the German elections: “Hitler Gets Big Vote but Fails to Nab Prussian Power.”