Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 ends where most studies of Hollywood and Nazism begin, with the outbreak of World War II. Its animating impulse was to sharpen the focus on a blurry chapter in motion picture history—when Hollywood, in the grip of the Great Depression, first mediated Nazism as a business, an ideology, and, finally, a threat. Believing that today’s high cinematic profile of Nazism is a perceptual trick, a kind of false film memory, I wanted to recapture what was seen on screen at the time and to gauge how Americans, filmmakers and moviegoers alike, responded. Much of the task was purely archaeological—excavating forgotten films and eavesdropping on audiences.
To conjure the Hollywood past, the films have been at the center of the inquiry, but I have also relied on a rich repository of archival sources: on accounts in the motion picture trade press, especially the witty reportage from Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and the other Hollywood-dependent periodicals; on the files of the Production Code Administration, Hollywood’s in-house moral police force, and its parent outfit, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America; on memos from U.S. government bureaucrats; and on the commentary and reporting from the major newspapers and magazines of the day. Thinking it best not to overlay what we know now onto what they knew then, I have tried, with a few unavoidable exceptions, to keep away from after-the-fact memoirs and the mammoth bulk of secondary scholarship written on the 1930s and Nazism. Nor have I flash-forwarded to the postwar backfires. Many of the members of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and others who fought against Hitler in the 1930s—the “premature anti-fascists” as they ruefully dubbed themselves—would later run afoul of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and kindred Cold War watchdogs, private and public, who detected only communist subversion in the work of the Popular Front. That is an important story but not the one told here. Finally, in looking at the movie-minded men and women who first faced up to or flinched before Nazism, I have strived to keep perspective and cultivate humility. To generations with a clear picture of the Nazis, it is hard to imagine anyone would ever have had any dealings with them. Although I like to think that, had I been there as a mogul or moviegoer, I would have been both preternaturally farsighted and scrupulously moral, I am not so sure.
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One of the nice things about finishing a book, besides actually finishing the book, is getting to thank the people who helped, guided, encouraged, kibitzed, and listened along the way. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my dear friend Greg Burk, who read the manuscript with care and understanding, correcting gaffes and telling me, gently, when his eyes glazed over: thanks, Greg, I owe you big. Steven J. Ross also gave the manuscript a scrupulous and extraordinarily helpful reading, for which I am extremely grateful. Being, like so many Americans, linguistically challenged, I was fortunate to have friends who shared their fluency. Miranda Neubauer and Fritz Neubauer tracked down the postwar German genealogy of Nazi consul Georg Gyssling. Olga Gershenson and Irina Murtazashvili offered expertise in Russian, and Olga provided an eloquent on-the-spot subtitling during a living room screening of Professor Mamlock. Scholars are always dependent on the kindness of archivists and I have been the fortunate recipient of the generous guidance of Sharon Rivo and Lisa Rivo of the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University; Sandra J. Lee at the Warner Bros. Archives at the University of Southern California; Barbara Hall, Kristine Krueger, and Faye Thompson at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Robert Clark at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library; Rosemary Hanes, Zoran Sinodad, and Josie Walters-Johnston at the Motion Picture Division of the Library of Congress; Lindsay Zarwell, Ronald Coleman, Megan Lewis, Bruce Levy, and Raye Farr at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Benjamin Singleton at the Moving Image Research Collections at the University of South Carolina; Kathy McLeister at the Theatre Historical Society of America; Drew Adan at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University; Kevin Flanagan, Howard Trace, and Debra Bookhart at the American Legion National Headquarters; Charles Silver of the Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art; Jane Klain at the Paley Center for Media; and Rainer Rother at the Deutsche Kinemethek. Nicola Mazzanti and Bruno Mestdagh at the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique and Roel Vande Winkel helped tremendously with their late-breaking discovery of a print of Hitler’s Reign of Terror. At Columbia University Press, Associate Director and Editorial Director Jennifer Crewe, editorial assistant Kathryn Schell, and ace copy editor Roy Thomas were, as usual, total professionals and supportive collaborators. The serenely competent Eve Neiger was a lifesaver, lending her sharp eye and digital skills to the acquisition and spiffing-up of illustrations. A particularly precious resource—time—was provided by the Shaw Foundation Professorship at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, for which I am deeply thankful to Benjamin Detenber, Stephen Teo, Bradley Freeman, and especially Adam Knee for his crucial role as middleman and cross-cultural facilitator. For tea, sympathy, factoids, and not nodding off as I rambled on, I am grateful to Joyce Antler, Jerry Cohen, Richard Gaskins, Haden Guest, Andrew Hudgins, Catherine Jurca, Paul Lesch, Robin Lichtenstein, Charles Maland, Steve Mayer, Erin McGraw, Ross Melnick, Ed Monsour, Dane Morrison, Nancy Palmer, Kerk Phillips, John Raeburn, Steve Rothman, Jonathan Sarna, Colin Shindler, Abraham Shragge, David Sterritt, David Weinstein, Steve Whitfield, and Anne Woodrum. As always, to my wife Sandra, kind editor and life companion, I owe more than I can say.
