Part One: How Hollywood Helped The Nazis

Hitler was very aware of the impact movies had on him and everyone else and he believed the spoken word was the only way to push large scale societal changes. He noted that, just as people were more convinced by his speeches, movies were more convincing. In Episode 21, Robert is joined by comedian Daniel Van Kirk and they examine the influence Hitler and The Nazis had on Hollywood. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M Hey everybody, I'm Robert Evans, and this is once
again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you
everything you don't know about the very worst people in
all of history. Now, this is a show where I
read a story about someone or someone's terrible from from
history to a guest who is coming in cold. And

(00:21):
my guest today is the inimitable Daniel van Kirk. Hello, Daniel.
You are a comedian. You are a writer, host of
Dumb People, Town, Hindsight, pen Pals, three great podcasts than you,
and I'm gonna guess you can throw a pretty good
punch because you look kind of yoked. I just think
the listeners should know that. Thanks. It's all I'm going

(00:43):
for is yoked. I am working towards that being my
only introduction. Alright, this next guy is Yokes. Please welcome
to the Yokes as Hell. Just saw him on the
street and brought him into the podcast. I am going
to fight that rule that you can't do stand up
in a tank time that a rule. Can't think about it?
Would you listen to anybody talk to you on a

(01:04):
microphone in the tank top. I was Daniel O'Brien's subordinate
for years and he wears a tank top of the time,
so maybe he's broken used to it. Yeah. Um, all right,
So today we are talking about Hollywood and the Nazis,
I mean, and how the two helped one another. You know,
you say that US guests come into this cold and

(01:25):
I am ready for that. That's beautiful. Well, what do
you think when you think of like how Hollywood reacted
to the Nazis, what do you think of? Well, one,
I think there's that documentary on Netflix about a whole
bunch of directors get sent to like make propaganda films.
I mean they made propaganda for the US against the Nazis. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah. Are we saying the idea of people who

(01:47):
are we pro within the Hollywood elite. It's a little
more complicated than that. When we think about Hollywood the Nazis,
we think about what you're talking about, those like why
we fight documentaries and like bugs Bunny beating up Hitler
and and all that stuff that all came after the
war had started. When we talk about the period from
when the Nazis took power to the beginning of World

(02:08):
War two and what Hollywood, it is a very different
tale and a less positive one towards Hollywood. So that's
what we're gonna talk about. All right, Well, I'm going
to start us off with some background on the motion
picture industry because I think it's going to be useful
to sort of set the tone that this story comes
in on. The first good movie going experience probably happened

(02:29):
on December in Paris. This is when Tin Lumiser Brothers
films were screened, and it was sort of the first
time where projection technology was advanced enough that, like it
was a good picture, you'd actually want to go and
see this rather than looking at like a grainy like
you know, it wouldn't be clear what was really happening.
So that was the first like good movie going experience.

(02:50):
The first permanent movie theater, the Nickelodeon, was opened in
Pittsburgh in nineteen o five. The first full length movie
came out a year later. It was an Australian film
about the outlaw Ned Kelly. But of course Americans quickly
grew to dominate the industry, which you may have caught, yeah,
that it started in Pittsburgh. Yeah, the first movie theater.

(03:10):
I would never have guessed that right either. Yeah, Like
Pittsburgh Okay, yeah, all right, I guess that in a
Permanti Brothers sandwich your historic. I don't know what that
means because I've never been to Pittsburgh either, but I
see it on all those food jounls. It's like the
sandwich where they put everything on the sandwich, like fries
and cole slaw. It's Permanti Brothers supposed to be amazing. Well,
our three Pittsburgh listeners are over the moon right now.

(03:32):
We're here for you. We're here for you, guys. Today
is for you Pittsburgh. Obviously, one American was more dominant
than others in the early film industry. Thomas Alba Edison
now William Dixon, a Scottish inventor, actually created the kinetoscope,
which is one of the very first movie cameras, but
he worked for Thomas Edison, and so in eighteen ninety
two Edison got the patent for like the first functional

(03:54):
movie camera that you could really sell as a commercial device.
This made him even wealthier, although who's are already pretty
rich at the time. Dixon, because he didn't get rich
off of inventing the movie camera, went on to become
one of the first video pornographers and all of history
and to make kids fortune. Yeah, he's that's the prequel
to the Deuce. Yes, yes, yes. Edison meanwhile just kept
buying patents related to the motion picture industry and suing

(04:17):
anyone he caught infringing upon them. Uh. In nineteen o eight,
he was a leading mind behind the creation of the
Motion Picture Patents Company, which was a trust that basically
bonded everyone who owned a film patent together in one
organization so they could control which films could be made
and basically monopolized the art form of filming. Things Like
anytime there's a new industry, especially in the eighteen hundreds

(04:40):
and then the early nineteen yards, it was like three
or four people being like, well, let's just on all
of it. Let's just down all of it and stop
it from ever changing, because that was Edison's idea. He
figured movies would always be like five or ten minutes
shorts that people watched a brunch of in a row,
and he was like, well, let's just be the only
ones who get to do that. Right, it went, and
actually that's what's happening today in the car industry. Over
the past like twenty to thirty years and even up

(05:01):
till today. With what Tesla is trying to fight is like,
you guys bought all of this electric technology back in
the eighties so that you never had to release it
because you controlled it all. So it was basically illegal
starting in nineteen o eight to make a film that
Thomas Edison didn't personally approve of. Uh, And he was
from the beginning very concerned with the moral character of films. Quote,

(05:21):
in my opinion, nothing is of greater importance to the
success of the motion picture interests than films of good
moral tone. No thank you, which is always the best part.
Somebody's like by my moral tones, Like, no, I understand
what you're saying, But do you also understanding yourself defining that? Yeah,
if you everyone judges their own morals. Yeah, everybody has

(05:42):
a moral tone. You're just saying yours is right. And
in Edison's case, I think that meant he didn't want
films to show immigrants, so well, I guess that's his
moral tone. One of the things happening during this period
was what's known today as the Americanized the immigrant movement,
which was a reaction to the fact that immigration into

(06:02):
the United States had switched from being mostly people from
the British Isles, Germany and Northwest Europe, to people from
scary places like Russia, the Balkans and most horrifying of all, Italy.
Yeah yeah, which we all know what happens when too
many Italians get into a country. Good stuff, great espresso,
terrible pizza. I think people like just don't think enough

(06:23):
about the time in our country where you know the
difference between racism and prejudice, right, prejudices. I judge you
based off what I know about you, and racism tends
to be at judge you based off how you look. Yeah,
so prejudice like was equal to like racism, but you
had to identify like are you Irish? Are you Italian?
And then once find out, then we prejudicize. Is that
a way we prejudicize you. But there was this time

(06:46):
where it was like it wasn't based off color of skin.
It was like this thing like, well you're from there,
No thanks. They would say it was based off color
of skin because a lot of people in nineteen o
eight would have looked in an Italian, a lot of
like American white people would have looked in an Italian
and said, well that's not a white man. Really. Yeah,
the Irish were the last of the white people to

(07:07):
become officially white essentially, but it was a process of
being accepted as white for all of what we now
just say, like, oh, everybody in fucking Europe is white
as well, that's Europe. But that was not the case
from the beginning, and this is the period where it's starting. Well,
I don't know much about Edison in specific, but I
know this was a big factor in the movie industry

(07:28):
because the Americanized the Immigrant movement campaigned for the regulation
of the film industry. They were the first people to
want to censor films, and so Edison was very much
sort of reacting to that. The Americanized the Immigrants movement
was unsuccessful in actually creating laws to govern films, but
their arguments clearly had an impact on people like Edison.
A war started to brew in the nascent motion picture industry,

(07:50):
and on one side were people like Edison. And uh,
I'm going to read you a quote from a Moving
Picture World, which is like one of the first industry
trade magazines. A critic wrote it in nineteen ten, and
he gave a horrified description of a movie theater um
and This is from the textbook Taking Fame to Market.
So this will give you an idea of kind of
what some people in the film industry, sort of on
Edison side of things, were horrified of when they looked

(08:12):
into a movie theater. The audience also stood for one
or two high class films without any fuss, although we
are sure they didn't understand what they were looking at
any more than they would a Chinese opera. I would
have been more comfortable on board a cattle train than
where I sat. There were five hundred smells combined in
one One young lady fainted and had to be carried
out of the theater. I can forgive that all right,
as people with sensitive noses should not go slumming. But

(08:35):
what is hardest to swallow is that the taste of
the seething mass of human cattle are the tastes that
have dominated, or at least set the standards of American
moving pictures. This is like a film critic in nineteen
ten and he's commenting on the type of people in
the movie theater that you're going to the movie you're slumming, Yes,
but not based on people who are seeing movies, or
but based on based on both the people who are

(08:57):
seeing movies are a lot of them are immigrants and
horror people because it's a very affordable way to spend
your time, but also the people making movies and running
movie theaters were mainly lower class entrepreneurs who had come
to the country from Europe and were either Jewish or
Catholic immigrants, which at this point, if you're not a
white Anglo Saxon Protestant, you're below what they would declare

(09:18):
white people on the totem pole. So that's a big
factor in this is that these people who are Jewish
immigrants from Eastern Europe and Catholic immigrants from Eastern Europe
are moving into the United States and starting movie theaters
and other people like them are going to see these shows,
and the movies that are being made are being made
to play to this audience, and that is scary to
the whitest people who have ever lived. What are they watching?

(09:41):
I mean, they're probably not watching that much in the
way of movies. I'm guessing nothing good because we don't
really get it was low round entertainment. It was very
low rent entertainment, very short, cheap kind of like it
wasn't the opera or the orchestra, and you're not in
this period seeing complicated movies with a three act structure
that are very long, and that doesn't come until a
little bit later in nineteen o nine. Because of this

(10:03):
trust Edison puts together, independent film basically becomes illegal. The
now outlaw filmmakers call themselves Independence. They keep right on
making movies, using illegal equipment and buying foreign film stock.
To get around the trust. Edison forms a subsidiary, the
General Film Company, to confiscate illegal equipment and basically bust
into movie theaters and shut down on his because he

(10:24):
owns the patents. You can't make a movie unters for film. Yeah,
and at this point the film industry is all in
basically New York, the East Coast. But it's like the
cops showed up and there was a fight between his
people and the Independence. They would just say, well, we're
recovering what we own exactly, and they've got the law
on their side. These people are breaking the law by

(10:44):
filming movies illegally, you know, because they don't have the
right to use a movie camera to make a movie
if Edison doesn't approve of it. Yeah, Now the good
news is Edison's plan backfired. The General Film Company's iron
fist just pushed independence to get into manufacturing film them selves.
So Edison's not I'm not going to sell you film,
I'm not going to sell you cameras. So these people
who are making independent films and running small movie theaters

(11:07):
start getting their own cameras from outside of the US
because there's other people making movie cameras kind of on
the edge, like they're definitely breaking the law a bunch,
but you know, it's it's also nineteen o eight, nineteen
o nine, so the law doesn't mean quite what it
does today, which is why Edison's hiring goons to enforce it.
You know, so many of these independent early motion picture

(11:31):
moguls were people like Carl Lamel. They were immigrants themselves,
and Carl Lamel was born in southern Germany. He moved
to the United States as a young man and worked
a series of odd jobs until, in his recollection quote,
one rainy night, I dropped into one of those hole
in the wall five cent motion picture theaters. The pictures
made me laugh. Although they were very short in the
projection jumpie. I liked them, and so did everybody. Else.
I knew right away that I wanted to get into

(11:53):
the motion picture business. So Lamel got into the business
of running theaters. But then he became a distributor himself
because he basically it was too much of a hassle
to rely on the distributor to send him films, and
that also meant he was dependent on Edison Um. So
he eventually starts his own production outfit, the Independent Motion
Picture Company, in order to make films on his own terms,

(12:13):
because he's just there's so much demand and Edison and
his guys, the people who have actual approval, aren't making
enough movies and they're sort of throttling the supply to people.
So a guy like Lambol's like, well, funk it. I'll
just make my own movies and I'll rent them out
the other theaters in addition to the theaters that I owned.
In nineteen twelve, Carl Limley renamed his company, which had

(12:33):
been the Independent Motion Picture Company Universal, where we get
Universal Studios. During the meeting where this was announced, he explained, quote,
that's what we're supplying, Universal Entertainment for the Universe Ours
Technica does note that he later admitted he'd gotten the
name from a Universal pipe fitting struck he'd seen out
the window during this meeting. So I think Carl was
just kind of literally the thing where somebody's like, what's

(12:54):
your name and you're like, uh, pencil fold it from
what was from That also proves like, don't put too
much thought into it just didn't work, because it clearly
it's worked. Everybody knows what Universal Pictures is, right. Uh So, Universal,
Paramount and Warner Brothers all started as essentially illegal film companies.

(13:14):
They fled from the East Coast to California, both because
the fantastic sunlight made it easier to shoot on sort
of the low tech ship that they were using in
those days, but also because the distance helped protect them
from Thomas Edison's wrath because you know, back then travel
Act you were saying, is not what the law is now,
because it's just like in the still running around to
where you just hire your own cops. That's part of it.

(13:36):
There's also US marshals and stuff, but they've got to
travel all the way across the country, and right, it
just means everything takes longer. And these guys are basically
playing a waiting game because they know that the trust
are starting to be busted during this period of time, right,
like Teddy Roosevelt. That's anything he was doing. So they're
thinking is if we get out to California, we can
make a shipload of money. We're off the radar. Yeah,
when we do have to pay fines, will make enough

(13:58):
money to make it worthwhile. And the lengthening of sort
of the time that everything will take eventually will win that.
I was wondering when we started, how did we end
up in California Fromburg? That's how we got it. Yeah.
So the guy who wound up slaying the beast of
the Motion Picture Patent Company was a dude named William Fox.
He started out running a film rental company. Soon he

(14:19):
started making movies to just like Lambley uh, and the
Fox Film Corporation became the foremost anti Edison studio. Fox
sued the mp PC and one, finally ending the patent
wars in nineteen fifteen. By that point, Hollywood had already
become the center of American and global film production. Now
all this is important to establish his background because Hollywood
was built by immigrants who had fought bigotry upon arriving

(14:42):
in America and had often fled persecution in their home countries.
Jewish people were overwhelmingly well represented within the industry. Here's
a quote from Ben Irwan's The Collaboration quote. The men
who created the studio system in Los Angeles where Jewish
immigrants of Eastern European descent. These men included William Fox
who founded Fox, It was b Mayor who ran MGM,
Adolf Zucker who ran Paramount, Harry Cone who ran Columbia Pictures,

(15:06):
Carl Lamley who ran Universal Pictures, and Jack and Harry
Warner who ran Warner Brothers. Of eighty five names engaged
in production, one study noted in the nineteen thirties, fifty
three are Jews. So this is a very Jewish dominated business.
These are people who had to fight in order to
be able to do their business against discrimination and stuff.
So these are You would think that when Adolf Hitler

(15:28):
rose to power in the early nineteen thirties, these diverse
and used to fighting bigots movie moguls would have stood
up to try and halt the spread of fascism. You
think that was their bread and butter, But you would
be wrong. Throughout the first seven years the Nazis were
in power, past the outbreak of World War two, zero
major motion pictures were made that addressed the Hitler or
the Nazis in a in a hugely negative LFE. There

(15:49):
was one movie that kind of sort of did up
until the outbreak of the war, but it came out
in like nineteen Well, that's what I was gonna ask you.
So when they got here, when did they switch from
making these nickel like quick short movies and start making
longer ones. That really starts to happen around nineteen Like
I said, I think it was nineteen o six was
the first close to full length movie, was like an
hour or something long. Nineteen ten was the birth of

(16:10):
the star system. That's when these people, so number one
these are, I think, is when they start doing talkies.
So in the silent movies, it becomes very useful to
have someone the audience is familiar with who, They understand
this person's gestures, their facial expressions and what because it's
important for the medium. So nineteen ten is when movie
stars start to become a thing. Which again nineteen fifteen

(16:33):
is when the patent wars in. So by nineteen fifteen
we have the beginnings of Hollywood as we know it. Yeah,
and I you know, from that episode that you did,
people should check out if they haven't already about Behind
the Bastards for Hitler, Like there, it was obvious what
his agenda was. It's so interesting to me that there's
this disconnect of this industry that has literally drived out

(16:54):
of the idea of like showing viewpoints or opinions are
telling stories. That there's a disconnect of the people who
have started this here in California that are like, yeah,
we're not even yeah addressing it. Yeah, and we what
what's undeniable? So this is a controversial thing that we're
going to get into today. What's undeniable is that during
the pre World War two years, but post the Nazis

(17:14):
coming to power, Hollywood made almost no films whatsoever that
even talked about the Nazis. The number of films that
mentioned Jewish people dropped by like sixty or seventy percent. Um.
They became very very careful about not offending the Germans.
Um the debate is over. You know. Harvard scholar been Urwand,

(17:36):
who wrote the collaboration, essentially argues that the studios worked
with the Nazis, and he presents compelling evidence to that point. Yeah, yeah,
and it's it's a it's a good book studios run
by predominantly Jewish, Yes, yes, and we'll we'll get into
how this all started. I do want to announce upfront
that Urwand has some detractors, um, people who don't think
collaboration is a fair term. And so I'll be getting

(17:58):
in when where there are areas of controversy, I'll be
getting into it a little bit because this is very
far from settled history. But I think Irwan's arguments are
more convincing than the other one. So that is kind
of largely the tact we're going to be taken here. Um. Now,
Irwan traces the start of the collaboration to the film
All Quiet on the Western Front, which came out in
nineteen thirty, almost three years before Hitler was in charge,

(18:20):
but during the period where Nazis had attained a lot
of power in both the Reichstag and on the streets. Now.
All Quiet on the Western Front was based off of
a classic book about German soldiers in World War One,
It's It's Wonderful. Um. It was not an anti German film,
but it was anti war and very critical of the
pro war sentiment in the country that had driven Germany
to ruin in World War One. It gives you a
sympathetic oh yeah, like take on the German soldier. Oh yeah,

(18:44):
because it's it's a devastating emotionally um. But the Nazis
hated it because again, like you remember that scene where
like the boys are in class and their teachers making
going to war seem like this like wonderful, awesome adventure,
and they're all, yeah, horribly, Um, the Nazis did not
want them, and yeah, yeah, the Nazis hated that because

(19:05):
their Nazis they were trying to get we want we
want to get kids excited about dying for the fatherland again.
So on the day the film was released in Germany,
the Nazis in Berlin, organized by Joseph Gebel's, bought three
D tickets to the seven pm showing. Nazis inside the
theater who did and yelled at the movie and at
one predetermined point started throwing stink bombs into the crowd

(19:27):
and releasing mice. So like that was sort of there,
before they're in power, how they would try to shut
down a movie they didn't really, Yeah, like junior high
kids like junior high kids. Yeah, I mean probably a
lot of them were teenagers. Yeah, yeah, Now, the Nazis
protested for six days until the film was completely removed
from German screens. Karl Lambley, founder of Universal, ordered a

(19:49):
bunch of scenes cut from the film in order to
please the German foreign Office, including that scenes with the teacher.
He was the first big studio head to cave in
to Nazi demands. Now he died in nineteen thirty six,
and to be totally fair, he helps smuggle like three
Jewish people out of Germany during the Hitler years that
he was alive. Yeah, I mean we could say that
once he realized whole ship, yeah not good. But on

(20:10):
what when beforehand, when it was just about money, he
started the precedent of working with the Nazis in order
to continue to sell films to Germany. He was the
first of the studio heads that was like, yeah, this
is worth. This is the thing man, Like, even right
now in our country where it's like you've really got
to ask yourself, what side of history do you want
to fall in on this? Even if it doesn't affect

(20:30):
you now, yeah, like where do you want to fall
on this ship? I mean, but the hard part is
you gotta look at history from the perspective of people
who don't know what's coming next. I know. But Leery, yeah,
I mean you're because the Nazis are still saying all
this ship. Yeah, they still have all these attitudes, but
you're like, well, they're kind of self contained and they're
there and they're not really doing anything bad yet. So

(20:52):
maybe I can moderate a whole group of people and
makes you know, sell my whatever your product is, then
I'll do it. But then ask like, well, what if
it what if they start doing what they're talking about?
And I think that I don't want to like judge
Lambley too harshly because clearly he was a what what
uh Limley? Well, yeah, I don't want to judge Limley

(21:14):
too harshly because clearly he was a good person who
like just fucked up. I agree with we know, we
know we have the precedent now that we should be
looking at with hindset, but I just be careful. Yeah,
very And this is again one of the things that
the people who don't like Rwan criticize him over is
essentially thinking too much from the perspective of people living

(21:34):
in the present day who know what the Nazis did
And that's a fair patamt. Both things be true. Yeah,
can't you be like even couldn't it possible for him
to be like, Yeah, I funked up on that early stuff. Yeah. Um,
once I saw the legitimacy of the horrors of what
they were doing, Uh, asked me how hard I worked
to try and save people? Like, yeah, both of those
things can be true. And it's also true that while

(21:55):
he worked hard to save people, he didn't work hard
to make anti Nazi movies. So right, we're going to
get into the rest of this collaboration and sort of
the history of Hollywood in the Nazis. But first it
is time for some ads for products. I understand you're
you're a big fan of products. I love a good product.
Do you do you also love doritos? Daniel Van enjoy

(22:16):
a Derrito? Well that's fantastic. Why don't you and I
go have a quick derrito break and then we'll we'll
we'll let these ads roll for everybody else and we're back.
We just had a delicious fistful of of derrito's. Are
you on a little half and half? Oh yeah? And

(22:37):
cool Ranch that's a that's we call that the Nacho ranch,
dangerous place for a horse. That's not a complete joke anyway,
Let's move on now that we're fortified. So in April
of ninety three, around a month after Hitler became Chancellor
of Germany, the movie King Kong debuted around the world.
Uh It ran in Germany for quite a while and

(23:00):
was very successful until a professor with the German Health
Office called it quote nothing less than an attack on
the nerves of the German people. He said, it quote
provokes our racial instincts to show a blond woman of
the Germanic type in the hand of an ape. It
harms the healthy racial feelings of the German people. The
torture to which this woman has exposed her mortal fear,
and the other horrible things that one would only imagine

(23:22):
in a drunken frenzy are harmful to German health. In
a drunken frenzy, yeah, you're the one on the things
you would imagine happening to her while you're drunk. Yeah, yeah,
it's normal to imagine a woman getting molested by an
ape when you're drunk. As a doctor in Germany, I
can say this. You know, if he was a Nazi,
I mean, he probably right, It's I don't know this

(23:43):
specific guy. He was certainly okay enough to maintain his
job when the Nazis took over, which meant he was
willing to He was vetted on some level. Yeah, he
was vetted on some level. My judgment has nothing to
do with the technical achievements of the film, which I recognize,
nor do I care what other countries think is good
for their people. For the German people, this is unbearable

(24:03):
even that tone, Isn't that even in itself part of
the whole how we got to World War Two in
the Nazi Party for the German people, like it's a
pride yeah, because of how much pride was lost in
this world War is wondrous war. Yes, that now, that's
part of the whole thing. Like other people can do
what they want, Germans and we need to hold ourselves

(24:24):
to a higher esteem. We are a proud people and
once we route out this evil within our country, we
will be the best country in the world and eventually
take it all over. And it's this like in America,
we've always sort of had this like attitude that like, yeah,
we can be free and easy because we just like
landed on the continent with all of the resources. You know,
everybody happened to die that was here before us, oddly enough,

(24:45):
and in Germany they're like everybody around us wants to
kill us, and we have to be the hardest sons
of bitches in order to like, Yeah, I think that
is a big fact. And they weren't. Russia was Russia
was the Russia was the hardest sons of bitches will
tell you that. Yeah, yeah. Uh So. The professor went
on to warn that quote psychopaths or women would in
particular be vulnerable to being thrown into a panic by

(25:07):
the film Psychopaths or Women, either one either because you're
either gonna go do that to a woman or you're
gonna you're gonna feel like that's gonna happen. Do you.
Oh see, you actually found a more like a friendlier
interpretation of that. I thought he was just saying psychopaths
and women are the same thing. Oh, but no, I
think you are probably right. Is that he's like, well,

(25:29):
either men who want to molest women will see this
as a call to do it, or women will be
scared by I think you're probably right, um, credit to
the Nazi not me. No no, no, no no, I'm
not calling you a Natz. I almost never call our
guest Nazis. Thank you, thank you. I'd like to keep
that straight going. Yeah. Uh so the movie was not banned,

(25:49):
but its title was changed. Yes, it was changed from
King Kong to quote the Fable of King Kong, an
American tricken sensation film. So it's like rolls off the tongue,
doesn't that of course? Yeah, that should have been the title. Yeah,
it's puter Jackson, that's you miss you fool. It's a
tricken sensation film. What does that mean? A Trickensen? The

(26:12):
Americans have worked up this skookie little idea, I think it. Yeah.
It was meant to make it seem less serious, to
make it. Yeah, it's a fable like German people are
used to scary fable. So if we present this as
a fable rather than you know, this as a joke, Yeah,
exactly exactly. They were trying to get the commentary bingo. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh. Now.

(26:35):
Dr Ernst Seeger, who will be hearing about a bit
in this podcast, was Germany's chief censor, and he had
other issues with the film. He was sorry, opened right,
it had already been it's already been out, it's already
been a huge hit. It's been out in Germany for months,
I think, I think months. Yeah. So he was fine
with the idea of what he called an uran utan.
And I just want you to look at the spelling
of randutan. Is it similar to orangutang? It is, that's

(26:59):
what they used to call them. What the idea of
a ran newtan ran neutan. It's almost written phonetically, Yeah
it is, yeah, which I suspect ran new ran Neutan randuitan.
So he was fine with the idea of an Irandutan
falling in love with a quote blonde woman of the
Germanic type, because that was in line with popular racist

(27:20):
wisdom of the time, which was that people who aren't
white lust over white women. So he was actually okay
with that women. He was like, yeah, this show is
a real thing in nature that we have to be
guarded about. Yeah, yeah, he's I mean, he's a jackass.
Sure we'll be hearing a lot of old timey racism
from this particular Nazi. Uh So Dr Seeger didn't object
to that to the film because of the monkey molesting

(27:42):
the woman thing. He objected to the film because it
showed a commuter train being derailed, and he was afraid
that that would make people less trusting for public transportation.
God for us, funny, that is a very German thing, though,
to watch this movie and be like, what if it
makes people scared of the train, Like he has an
issue with mechanical malfunctions, like they you've got to show

(28:03):
that we can build stuff better than Yeah, you can't.
The German people think that we endorsed that something would
be built. Not well, I I German engineering would never
have a train derailment. For what it's worth, Hitler loved
King Kong. Yeah, Hitler had no problem. He was. He
was way into the movie. He loved it. The collaboration
quotes a German foreign press chief who said, quote, one

(28:27):
of Hitler's favorite films was King Kong, the well known
story of a gigantic ape who falls in love with
a woman no bigger than his hand. Hitler was captivated
by this atrocious story. He spoke of it often and
had its screens several times. Really, I can't hear that
and not think. Do you remember when them that Fire
and Fury book came out and somebody posted a fake
excerpt from it where they were talking about Trump having
the monkey channel made for him. It reminds me of that, Like,

(28:50):
like Hitler just staring at this ape on the screen,
just spell bound, do you get just really liked the
idea of like a creature that like could not be contained,
had like he because how he saw himself, It's like,
I'm bigger and they can bust free. I can like
there had to be some sort of grandiose delusion that

(29:12):
he had in that. I think I and I'm on
I'm on the record here. I think Hitler was just
a nerd. I think before that was a commentary. I
think if Hitler had just a monster and he thought
it was cool, the the special effects were groundbreaking at
the time. So I think that's why he loved it
for the same reason people love Jurassic Park in Ninetich

(29:33):
just probably And I think that's the kind of guy
Hitler was, because he was he was very obsessed with
fantasy sort of fiction, you know, as a young man.
So I suspect that was the thing. Now. Germany in
the thirties was an important market for Hollywood prior to
World War One. It had been like the second largest
foreign market for Hollywood films. And then you know, after
nineteen twenty, when Hollywood was allowed back in the country,

(29:55):
accepted between like twenty and sixty movies every year that
the Nazis were in power. There there were rules in
Germany stating that like they were supposed to be no
more than one Hollywood movie for every German movie made,
but they relaxed those because the German film industry had
trouble and because the people like Hitler, yeah yeah, Germans
loved American movies, um, and we're it was a major

(30:18):
market for Hollywood. There was a lot of money in
being able to sell films to the Germans. Um. Most
of the major studios set up German branches during the
Weimar years. Executives from MGM, Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox
all kept up a brisk correspondence with Hitler's adjutants during
the period of time the Nazis were in charge. Some
of them even signed letters Heil Hitler, no ship. Yeah yeah, yeah,

(30:40):
they all that's some wrong side of history right there.
Should I write Should I write Aisle Hitler on it?
I could just like sincerely regards, like dude, what's the harm.
You know he's gonna like it. You know he's gonna
like it. We're all the way over here in America.
Do you want to keep selling movies? Yeah? Right, trust me,
it's never going to come back at somebody in auction

(31:01):
in sixty years, in the dismay of your future family
is going to be selling a letter where you wrote, Yeah,
and what's in two years? He'll be out of power.
He's so crazy? How could this keep going on? Do
you imagine the feeling of like ninety three and you
fucking wrote Hitler? Oh yeah, you'd be like, oh my god,
I hope that gets burnt in with the books. He's

(31:22):
throwing my letter in with the boy. I hope the
Germans are bad at keeping records. It's actually the thing
their best at. Oh ship Yeah. So, like every dictator
I've ever read about, Adolf Hitler was a huge movie buff.
He watched uh at least one Hollywood film every single night,
pretty much that he was in power in his own

(31:42):
private movie theater. Usually the only time Hitler stopped talking,
as a general rule, is when he was watching a movie. Um, yeah,
Tarantino knew this ship man with glorious pastards, get him
to a movie, Get him to a movie. He loved movies,
and he tended to either really like films or hate them.
When Irwan was searching the collaboration, he went into the
Buns Archive, which is like a big German government archive,

(32:04):
and he found Hitler's thoughts on dozens and dozens and
dozens of movies. Yeah. Yeah, And he would usually write
like I liked it, or it was it was good,
or it was great, or you know, I switched it
off for whatever reason. Um. He would say that if
he didn't like a movie, he would say it was bad,
very bad, particularly bad. No, no, no, I know, I'm

(32:24):
just being trump. Well, he would say bad movies were
repulsive or the most potent crap, which is potent crap.
Potent crap, Yeah, potent crap. That's that's got to be abandoned, Berlin,
potent potent crap. Can you guess what Hitler's favorite Hollywood
movie was? M Let's see you didn't see anything after? Rightly? Yeah,

(32:51):
which is a shame. I really think he would have
liked white Christmas. Oh, he would have loved white Christmas.
There's a lot of like racist stuff in that TONSU dude,
I don't know tell Mickey Mouse really Yeah, yeah, he
ordered multiple Mickey Mouse cartoons In nineteen thirty seven. Joseph
Gebbels was trying to get him a Christmas gift and
wound up settling upon a shipload. Disney come up in

(33:13):
any of this stuff in Hollywood, but they actually got
out of the country pretty early because they were kind
of a small studio at this point, and so like
dealing with we'll get into that a little bit, like
they weren't a huge factor in here. But he loved
Mickey Mouse. Yeah, that's you don't want to be on
that end of the room, yeah, Hitler. Joseph Gebel's One
Christmas gave him a bunch of Mickey Mouse films, And
this is what Gebels wrote in his diary. I presented

(33:35):
the Few. I present the Fear with thirty two of
the best films from the last four years and twelve
Mickey Mouse films, including a wonderful art album for Christmas.
He's very pleased and extremely happy for this treasure that
will hopefully bring him much joy and relaxation. Hitler loved
Mickey Mouse, which and salam Bin Laden left, Tom and
Jerry what. Yeah, the CIA is archive because the CIA

(33:58):
posted up all the stuff we didn't episode on this,
but all the stuff that was on a Sama's hard drives.
Dozens of episodes of Tom and Jerry really, yeah, tons
of them. That sad. There's nothing to do with this information.
That's the sad ascending to any cartoon. What Tom and
Jerry isn't the final episode they kill each other, they
kill him? I think so. Yeah, I had no idea

(34:18):
where there is an episode where they killed themselves and
then the ghosts and they float away. It's like dark, dude,
that's extremely dark. Yeah, that's that actually sounds more fitting
of Hitler. The Germans are into dark myths for kids.
And you know what, then, I hope he saw that
whole Like remember Disney made that propaganda film about the kids. Yeah,
I hope he saw and he was so pissed. Yeah,
I hope he just hate He was so mad he

(34:40):
felt betrayed by Disney. It's frustrating because we don't know
much about what he thought about the anti We know
he saw some of the anti Hitler films. He watched
The Great Dictator twice. Really, we don't know what he
thought about it. That's not recorded, but we know we
watched it twice. Wow. Yeah. And we'll talk more about
The Great Dictator at the end. But that's always one
of the big mysteries to me is like, what did
he like it? Like, was Hitler watching The Great Dictates flattered? Yeah,

(35:05):
because it's I mean, it's one of the great movies. Yeah,
and they made one of bottom they made one about him.
They made many, but like, yeah, but they made one
about him that like was a groundbreaking film. Yeah, So yeah,
I'm sure he probably he may he may have. Anyway,
Hitler was chiller. The point of this is that Hitler
was actually a lot chiller about movies than most of
his sensors. Um there were numerous cases of films that

(35:28):
had difficulty getting through Nazis sensors that were nonetheless loved
by Hitler. Uh. He seemed to be particularly vulnerable to
being influenced by films. He actually had a film called
tip Off Girls turned off midway through during a scene,
like there was a scene in the movie where these
people are robbing trucks by having women light down in
the street and then the truck stops in front of
the woman, and then like gangsters will rob the trucks.
Hitler had the movie stopped right after this scene so

(35:50):
he could go write a law, a one sentence law
that was immediately put into German like legal codes. Quote,
whoever sets up a roadblock with an hint to commit
a crime will be punished by death. So Hitler watches
this movie about people hijacking trucks like this and like
runs out of the theater to go and make a
new law. Influenced pretty wild, right, Yeah, it's just like

(36:12):
a kid. He is like a kid. I mean, I
mean a horrible fucking monster kid. I'm not minimalizing, but
like on this level and this energy of his life,
he's like, oh no, oh my god, we have to
change the law. Yeah. So Hitler was clearly aware of
the impact movies had on him and on everybody else. Um.

(36:33):
He believed the spoken word was the only way to
push large scale societal change, and he noted that just
as people were more convinced by his speeches when they
happened after dark, movie screened at night were more convincing. Yeah,
still true, Hitler. You know, comedy same way. Yeah, absolutely,
doing stand up comedy and daylight is not There's something

(36:54):
about the night for us as human beings that we
allow more in fluence or just sway into our minds.
It's where we allow ourselves to go places mentally through
like a spoken person, whether that's a speech or stand up,
Like how many I don't know, you just think about

(37:14):
so many big things has happened at night? I don't know.
I think, like if I think personally in my own self,
like why I'm more influence able at night, It's because
when I wake up in the morning, I usually get
a bunch of ship to do, and so like I'm
not thinking about life. I'm thinking about the stuff that
I need to do in my life. And then you
get around tonighttime and you're probably done with most of that.

(37:35):
I don't maybe that's a factor, just that like when
you're going out to a movie at night or to
see a comedy show you finished, you're more willing to
think about stuff because you don't have anything pressing other
than this thing, you know what. I don't know. I'm
sure that's probably even more true for like Friday night
and Saturday night comedy shows and movies, because you're you're
the rest of your world is turned off for a

(37:56):
few couple of days hopefully. Yeah, that makes sense, And
it's one of those things like, you know, Hitler is Hitler,
but when he says something about how people react to
being propagandized, too, are trying to like convinced when he
talks about how speeches impact people should probably listened to
him on that stuff. The guy knew what he was
talking about when it comes to that. So pre Hitler,

(38:17):
Germany and many other countries had limited how many films
Hollywood could export. Uh. In ninth January ninety two, a
non Nazi German Dr. Martin Freudenthal, had traveled to Hollywood
to study the studio system. This was not uncommon. Canada, Chile, China,
and other countries at all sent representatives to Hollywood in
the early thirties to make sure that their people were
portrayed accurately and inoffensively in films. Right, So the Germans

(38:39):
aren't the only people who are concerned about their representation
in movies. Obviously, the French were particularly emphatic about this.
One Frenchman Baron Valentine Mandelstam had convinced Yeah, really great,
sounds like a German name. Actually, um actually convinced his
government to ban all Warner Brothers films in France until
Warner Brothers paid him for the advice that he was
giving them. So like, the Germans are not the only

(39:01):
people trying to influence Hollywood. They're not the only people
going in there with kind of like strong arm tactics.
When the criticisms have been Irwan's book, the collaboration is
that he doesn't go into all of this quite enough.
It is important to note that the US also had
a serious censorship bonner at this time. This had started
in the nineteen twenties. Like I said that the idea
of movie stars who really drove films had come about

(39:22):
after nineteen ten um, and so during the twenties you
had both an economic boom obviously it's the Roaring twenties,
but also the first generation ever of rich, famous Hollywood actors.
Several of these people died of drug overdoses and were
revealed of having, you know, being homosexual or bisexual, like
that was a very common thing. There were murders. The
stuff that happened has always been a factor in Hollywood

(39:44):
was new at this point and it was shocking to people.
And this all came to a head in the summer
of nineteen one when Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle was the biggest
name in comedy. Uh, he was you could call him
the twenties equivalent of a guy like Chris Farley almost
um Paramount interesting because Chris Father was supposed to play
Fatty Arbuckle Uh in a biographical film. I did not

(40:06):
know that and before he could do it. Well, that's
we'll get into what what that is because we're gonna
talk more about Fatty Arbuckle and sort of the first
moral scare in Hollywood that led to the birth of
the American censorship apparatus. That is important for us to
understand the context of all this. But first it's time

(40:26):
for products. Yeah you didn't see it, but he pumped
his arms. Yeah all right, Well listen to this the
ads and with your ears and we're back. Uh, we're back,

(40:47):
and we're talking about Fatty Arbuckle and the birth of
censorship in Hollywood. So you said he's like the biggest community,
He's he's the biggest star in the world. Right in
n Paramount Pictures had just given him a three million
dollar eighteen film contract, which was the biggest contract in
history at the time. So he's a uh, this is
still part of the system. Yeah, he's not doing any

(41:09):
other movies for any other one else but Paramount because
of this contract. But he's he's fucking loaded because three
million dollars in nineteen one is like all of the
money today. Um. So, to celebrate his success, one of
Fatty Article's friends through a three day Labor Day bacchan
all party in San Francisco, which is, of course one
of the great drinking towns in history. Now this is
during prohibition, but these guys are movies star so they

(41:31):
just they're able to find liquor anyway. It's like finding
drugs now. Uh. Now, Fatty did not enter the party
in good spirits. He visited a mechanic slightly before the
trip and accidentally sat on an acid soaked rag, so
his ass was covered in second degree burn. Yeah, I
love it. When did you start all that? He said
he did not have a good trip. He did not

(41:52):
have a good time before the trip. Okay, so before
he leaves for his back and all San Francisco vender
and Labor Day party, which I still that sounds like
a great labored It does sound like a great labor
So he where's the app He's in a mechanics getting
his car worked on, and there's an acid soaked rag,
and that someone that burns his ass for batteries the

(42:13):
same where are you getting acid? I don't know. I
assume acid was all over the place. And that's why
you never sit down and be like cool if I
sit here you asked that question. No, that's the acid,
jass on, That's where we keep the acid. Right if
I am a mechanic, right, and you know how when
you go to a mechanic and they're like, don't enter
the garage area, or like owner only enter the garage
are with one of our employees. I would also post

(42:33):
underneath that sign here's why and have the story of
Fatty Arbuckle city his ass on an acid soaked rag.
It is the if this was a movie starring Fatty Arbuckle,
this is exactly what would have happened. Are fat funny
protagonist burns and then he's got to sit on a
donut the whole movie and it's it's funny. What do
you mean, Fatty? What do you mean you're not you

(42:54):
don't know if you're coming to the party. All right, Look,
I'm at the mechanic. Sure, as one does. Sat down right,
don't you get set of standard around? Of course I do. Yeah,
don't you wish sometimes we still had those horse and boggies.
Don't get me started. Why what happened? I have acid as,
I have acid ass. So Fatty Arbuckle shows up to

(43:15):
this party with his ascid ass and he goes to sleep,
wakes up in the morning and there's a shipload of
people in the rooms that they've rented. There's a big party. Um,
so he gets drunk. He starts to have a good time,
and he meets a year old actress and fashion model
named Virginia rap Are Buckle and rap. One version of
the story is that our Buckle and rap go back
into a room and have sex and somehow her bladder

(43:36):
winds up punctured. Um. The myth is that he crushed
her to death. To death. Yeah, that's that's one of
the myths, that Fatty Arbuckle crushed a woman to death.
There's no evidence of that. Did she die? She she
totally died. Okay, hold on, so everybody goes into separate rooms. No,
there's two different versions of the story. Sorry. One woman

(43:57):
who's possibly a con woman had a history of being
a con woman before this. Claimed to be a friend
of Rap, but there's no evidence of that. There's no
evidence they'd ever known each other. She just might have
tried to jump onto this exactly. It's tragedy train. And
in court she basically claimed that he sexually assaulted Rap
and her bladder wound up punctured and that's why she died.

(44:17):
But was she found dead the next morning? No, no, no,
She lingered for several days. They first rented a hotel
room for her because she was sick, and then after
a day or two, they took her to a hospital
because they're like, oh, this isn't getting better, and this
is like nineteen ladder tend to get pop from a punch. Well, sorry,
I feel like I'm jumping out that I don't really know.
Don't we know is that in the autopsy there's no
signs of violence on the body. Um and that Arbuckle

(44:40):
and multiple other guests claimed that they never had sex
and we're never alone together. They claimed that she had
been drinking and started complaining that she couldn't breathe and
like complaining of abdominal pain, and then they got her
a hotel room to try to like chill her out
and whatnot. And you know, she died several days later.
We don't know what happened. So one theory is they
had sex, maybe concerns real or non consensual, but either way,

(45:01):
in the course of that his either weight or aggression
or just yeah, harmed her in a way that eventually
killed her. Yes. And the other theory is she just
drank a lot, somehow rumptured her own bladder, she had
some sex with anybody. There's no signs of any sort
of abuse or sex, and there's no signs of violence
violence exactly, and they put her in a hotel to

(45:22):
be like, yeah, go sleep off the thing that's killing you,
and then sure enough she slept it off forever. Well,
they took her to a hospital, but then she died
in the hospital. Yeah, it doesn't really like it seems
like Arbuckle was probably innocent with what we know today
because this case has been relitigated for decades um. But
at the time there was a huge court case about it,
and it exposed the wild lifestyles, illegal drinking, in general

(45:44):
debauchery of Hollywood A listers. So this led the Motion
picture Studios to get scared because they were scared that
the government was going to come in and regulate the
whole industry because this really yeah, this was this was
like shocking to people at the time. Yeah, because you
don't have what we have today everybody. This is death's murders, suicides,
and drug scandal like are the only times the general

(46:08):
American public is hearing about what the hell these celebrities
are doing. Yeah, used to be you can literally just
you just do whatever you wanted. A lot of times
you had enough money to make people not say anything
about it. And this is also a time where like
people are shocked at the idea of a woman having
sex with someone who wasn't husbands like, so this is
this is shocking two people at the time. They get

(46:29):
really angry, and there's a fear that the government's going
to come in and regulate the film industry. So in
order to avoid that, the big studios try to get
ahead of this by creating the Motion Picture Production Code.
In N two, this becomes this. Basically, they create the
m p a A because this is where the m
p A comes from, and the head of the m
p a A at first is a guy named William Hayes,

(46:50):
who was a former Postmaster General. UM. One of Hayes's
first acts was to ban Fatty Arbuckle from ever appearing
in another movie. Yeah. Now that band was reversed eight later,
but it was too This is the end of Fatty's
career is like a big star, um and this is
the end of him being a part of this podcast
because he was not a Nazi. Uh So, I just

(47:10):
this sets up where Hollywood is at the time, because again,
one of the criticisms of Rwan's book is that he
talks about how all these Hollywood studios collaborated with the Nazis,
but he doesn't focus enough on how everybody was censoring
movies back then. So I want to make sure we're
giving that sort of background. Um. Now. In nineteen thirty,
the m p A adopted the Production Code, which is

(47:31):
more commonly known as the Hayes Code, and the Haze
Code basically laid out all the things you couldn't do
in movies. So when the code was announced, Hayes said
this quote. The code sets up high standards of performance
from motion picture producers. It states the considerations which good
taste and community value make necessary in this universal form
of entertainment. The code decreed that no picture quote laurel

(47:52):
lower the moral standards of those who see it. Now,
this is also like, this is in response to the
public outcry of the scandal of like what's happening in Hollywood. Right,
it's a bunch of different scanals, so our buffets that
they're like, oh, in this in their personal life, they're
acting like this, yeah, but as far as what they
put on film, will make sure that that makes you

(48:13):
feel good about your quote moral code. Yeah, because this
is like that's the basic idea is that Hollywood gets
criticized for being too too lascivious two out there, and
some of the movies were a little bit more before
the production code. You know, you could get away with
more nothing that we would consider shocking today, but for
the time it was so this was essentially the industry

(48:34):
being like, well, all right, we've got to stay within
the lions anywise, we're gonna get shut down by the government.
We're gonna pun intended project a good image, yeah, exactly,
and so and part another factor in this is that
like in I think it is the they start making
talkies and so that there are more concerns then, because
film is growing from a novelty to a serious fact

(48:56):
at the center of like American culture, big industry exactly.
So that's why in nineteen thirty they clamped down even
further and make this production coke. Um. So again, no
picture is allowed to lower the moral standards of those
who see it. Uh. It states that the sympathy of
the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing,
sin or evil. Um. So, like eight percent of the

(49:16):
movies that have come out this year are already banned.
You can't even have a Sopranos. Yeah, no, of course,
not Jesus Christ, let alone breaking bad. Um. Suggestive dancing
was banned, as was kissing with too much lust. It
was forbidden to insult religion or show the use of
illegal drugs. Also forbidden was interracial romance, the concept of
revenge and depicting a crime in any way that might

(49:38):
give people an idea of how to actually commit that crime.
The concept of revenge and what was the lass? Uh,
you can't show someone committing a crime in a way
that actually would inform people how to do that, which
is still something like you can't and we lost that
boat in nineteen in the eighties when mcgeivers showed everybody
how to make a pipe point on TV and then

(49:59):
a kid went out and did it. Well, I feel
like that's a public service. The only thing that's Daniel,
the only thing that's going to stop a bad guy
with a pipe bomb is a good guy with a kid. Yeah,
a good kid year old with a pipe bomb. Boy,
we don't talk about pipe bombs enough anymore. Yeah, because
all the guns, one thing at a time. Brother, all right,

(50:24):
So um. In the Collaboration, ben Erland argues that studios
work directly with the Nazi government in a way that
was unique and novel. Um, who did this? This is
the guy who wrote this book. Operation. Again, I'm trying
to give both sides of this. So you gotta set
up that censorship is everywhere and other countries are also

(50:45):
agitating to have films censored because they're offended at one.
But Erland argues that the way the studios worked with
the Nazi government was unique and novel, even given all
of this context, and I do think his argument has
a lot of water. The main argument is there or
not it was a collaboration where the studios were actually
working with the Nazis, or if it was just normal censorship.

(51:06):
So I'm gonna let you make your own mind up
on that. I'm gonna let you the listener, make your
mind upon that. I'm gonna try to sort of present
both sides of this. Um. What no one doubts is
that during the time the Nazis were in power, up
until World War Two started UH, references to Nazis and
references to Jewish people were severely curtailed in movies and
in fact often cut out entirely. UM. Now, one thing

(51:28):
everyone seems to agree on is that greed was a
major factor behind this, because in nineteen thirty two, the
Germans introduced Article fifteen into their legal code, which stated
that quote the allocation of permits may be refused for
films the producers of which, in spite of warnings issued
by the competent German authorities, continue to distribute on the
world market films the tendency or effective which is detrimental

(51:50):
to German prestige. So the Germans now say that we
can stop. So they have to hand out permits in
order for like a studio to sell them a movie,
and they're doing like six to a year or something
like that. Generally, most studios they're going to need about
ten to a dozen movies accepted to make a profit
in Germany. So what what Article fifteen said is that
all permits to a film producer can be stopped if

(52:13):
they distribute anywhere in the world a movie that is
detrimental to German prestige. Yeah, so this is opposed to
like France who was like, we're not putting your movies
out until you take advice on how we want to
be seen Germany saying we're gonna stop you if you
do a movie anywhere in the world that we don't
we don't like exactly. So that starts to be how
the Germans approach things. It's like, we will cut Hollywood

(52:35):
off from Germany if you make movies anywhere that we
don't like. So yeah, this is now, this is ninety two,
So this is when the Nazis have a lot of
power in Germany, but they're not in control yet. So
it's important to note that this is a lot of
Germans are sore about Hollywood because during World War One,
Hollywood had made a lot of anti German pictures, right,

(52:56):
So like this is not just a Nazi thing, but
the Nazi he's really amp it up to the nth level.
So that that German guy who came to Hollywood Dr
Freuden Tall to sort of like talk to them about
how they represented Germans. Um he was. He had been
able to get the Hayes office to cancel a paramount
movie about the sinking of the Lusitania, and he'd also
been able to secure edits to a movie set inside

(53:17):
of German pow camp. So he he went over there
and he was able to actually get Hollywood to change
some movies to make them more friendly to Germans. And
when he returned to Germany eight when he returned to
Germany from his time in l A, he wound up
landing there eight days after the Enabling Act, which is
what made Hitler a dictator. So eight days after Hitler
takes power for real, Dr Freuden Tall meets with several

(53:37):
German officials, including Joseph Gebel's I'm going to quote from
the collaboration here. Everyone listened to Freud and Tall outlined
a brand new plan to combat the hate film problem
in the United States. He began by pointing out that
the most successful moments of his trip had been his
interactions with the heads of Hollywood studios. He had received
permission from the Hayes office to meet directly with Carl
Lamley of Universal Pictures, and as a result of their meeting,

(54:00):
Limley had agreed to postpone the sequel to All Quiet
on the Western Front entitled The Road Back. Throughout the
rest of the year, freuden Tall had met with Lambley's son,
Karl Lambley Jr. And many more pictures were changed in
Germany's favor. Naturally, freuden Tall said Universal's interest in collaboration
is not platonic, but is motivated by the company's concern
for the well being of its Berlin branch and for

(54:20):
the German market. Other studio heads were just as obliging.
An executive at r KO promised that whenever he made
a film involving Germany, he would work quote in close
collaboration with the local consul general. An executive Fox said
that he would consult a German representative in all future
cases as well. Even United artists offered quote the closest collaboration.
So you can see why Erland picked the title the

(54:41):
Collaboration for his book. Yeah, it does seem like there
was an active working relationship with these studios and them
saying we know, look, we get what you guys are
doing over there. Yeah, we want to work with you. Yeah,
don't ban our films. Let's work together so we can
make sure we can sell our films and Germany will
get enough movies and we don't offend you guys. And

(55:01):
is it too far of a reach to say that
if you make a movie the Nazis, like all the
Nazis are gonna go see it, Like if it's endorsed
by the government, not see it. They would all go
see it, right, I mean not all of their they're
very it's very popular. And well, actually we're going to
get into that in a little bit. So one of

(55:22):
the things that's interesting here is the Nazis have sort
of come down to us from history is like masters
of propaganda. They did not consider themselves masters of propaganda.
The Nazis considered Hollywood to be by far the best
at propaganda, and so we will be we will be
discussing that quite a bit later on um so Freud
and Tall suggested that someone should permanently have the job

(55:45):
of being the German liaison to Hollywood. This person's job
would be to educate and train film industry personnel so
that anti German movies were never made in the first place.
I think fred Fred Tall probably wanted that job for himself,
but he didn't wind up getting it. Diplomat named George
Gisling actually got the job, and jis Ling's first big
task was a movie called Captured, which featured scenes of

(56:05):
German soldiers beating up captured British soldiers and denying them water.
Justisling demanded that this all be cut, and when it wasn't,
he flipped his ship. Captured was declared by the Nazis
to be the worst hate film since World War One.
Jis Ling activated Article fifteen and stopped Warner Brothers from
receiving permits from any more films. Ever, in nineteen thirty four,
the company closed its Berlin office. A scholar named Doherty,

(56:28):
who also has written about this period of time, calls
them quote the first of the majors to withdraw on
principle rather than work with the Nazis. So Warner Brothers
are of the studios, kind of the heroes at this point,
because they they made their movie. They made their movie,
they refused they did change it. Somewhat because he had
some Justling had some points that they're like, okay, yeah,
maybe that is unfair, but they still made a movie

(56:49):
that the Nazis didn't like, and the Nazis completely cut
them out of German so they said, fine, let's closer office.
We're not going to keep fine with you. Well, they
closed their office. I mean, they lost a lot of money,
but yeah, they closed their office and they left her
I mean they were forced to leave Germany. So on
March nineteen thirty three, UFA, the major German film company
at the time, They're big studio that was actually making

(57:10):
movies in Germany, fired most of its best writers, directors,
crew members, and talent. I'm gonna give you one guess
as to why they fired all these people at once. Yep.
And it turns out that most of their film industry
people in Germany were Jewish too. Um. The Salesman's Syndicate,
a Nazi organization, sent letters to American film studios with

(57:30):
offices in Germany and ordered them to fire all of
their Jewish employees as well. The Salesman's Syndicate, which is
a was a Nazi organization like a Nazi almost like
a labor union for a Nazi salesman sent letters to
American film studios with offices in Germany and ordered them
to fire all of their Jewish employees. So the Nazis fired.

(57:51):
The Nazis ordered their big film company to fire all
of its Jewish employees. And then they go to the
American studios working in Germany and they said the Lemley
and all these other people, like, hey, every you can't
have any Jewish people employed in Germany. You know, they're
not saying you have to fire you Jewish people, and
we'll get to that later. We'll get to that later.
But they start by saying, you can't employ Jewish people

(58:13):
within Germany now, and fairness of the companies, none of
the studios obliged instantly. First they sent all of their
Jewish workers home instantly on mental preservation leave. So they
put these guys out on paid leave, and eventually Hollywood
reached an accord with the Nazis. They put up lists
each studio of their best Jewish employees in Germany, and
the German government would grant those employees exemptions and actually

(58:35):
granted them protection to like state protection to the Jewish
employees of these these movie studios, but most of the
Jewish employees of all these studios were fired, so they
did come to an arrangement. The Nazis aren't getting their
whole way yet, but also the studios fire and most
of their Jewish employees in Germany. Um so, uh, these

(58:56):
people were able to stay at their jobs until January I,
nineteen thirty six, when the Nazis categorically banned Jewish people
from working in the film industry. The collaboration basically credits
the delay to the fact that because the Germans had
fired all of the Jewish people from their own film
production company, they weren't able to make enough movies, and
so they couldn't. They didn't want to push Hollywood that

(59:16):
much because they they understood movies were valuable for people's morale,
and so they were like, well, okay, we can't make
many movies right now because we just fired everyone who
knows how to make movies, So we won't push the
studios quite yet because we need a couple of years
before we do to rebuild our own domestic film industry.
Um so, actually, for a while, this goes great for

(59:36):
the Hollywood studios, and in fact, in nineteen thirty three,
they sell sixty five pictures because they're the only people
making movies that Germany German citizens can get. Yeah, and
the Germany can't really make movies for yeah. So in
you know, in the boom Yeah, and it's a boom
in In In nineteen thirty two, before Hitler was in power,
they'd sold fifty four films to Germany and nineen thirty

(59:58):
three they sell sixty five. So this is seeven great
for the studios. You know, you gotta deal, you gotta
work with the Nazis a little bit, but by god,
the money comes in. It's like a curse. Yeah, it's
a good it's a solid amount of money. And these guys,
you know, it's it's an expensive industry. So midway through
nineteen thirty three, a screenwriter named Herman manka witza Witz yeah,

(01:00:19):
who wrote he was the guy who wrote Citizen Kane.
Later um so he decided to write a movie that
explicitly attacked the Nazis and brought up the attacks Jewish
people had to endure under Nazi rule. He wrote a
screenplay titled The Mad Dog of You. This is the
same year, so he's early on this, He's very early

(01:00:39):
on this. This is when the studios He's already being
like ships going down. This is fucked up, right, The
Nazis are a problem. Somebody should make a movie in
the paper and go after exactly. So he writes a
script uh and a producer, Sam Jeff, buys the idea
and leaps into trying to film it. Jeff was so
shocked that there were no other anti Nazi movies in
production in Hollywood that he got terrified someone was about

(01:01:01):
to beat him to the punch. So he takes out
a full page ad in the Hollywood Reporter that says this,
which try to imagine anyone doing this today. Because I
sincerely believe that in the mad Dog of Europe, I
have the most valuable motion picture property I have ever possessed,
and because I wish to take sufficient time to prepare
and film it with the infinite care that it's subject merits,
I hereby ask the motion picture industry to kindly respect

(01:01:23):
my priority rights. So he puts out an ad being like,
no one else make an anti Nazi movie right now,
I'm making a great anti Nazi. This is what Dante's
Peak should have done with Volcano. Oh yes, or the
prestige this is important other magician movie that came out
or what's the other one? Deep impact and Arma should

(01:01:44):
have asked for priority. Yeah, and I'm making the definitive
f Hitler movie nobody else, everybody. I don't know what
you guys are doing or if I get to be first,
but hold off if you're hold off, because this is
gonna be the funk Hitler movie to funk all fun
Hitler movies. Um Now, I've never read the screenway screenplay.
Irwan who wrote the collaboration, did, and he he doesn't

(01:02:07):
think it was very good, but who knows. I have
no way to judge this. But it did contain frank
depictions of Nazi violence against Jewish and would have been
groundbreaking because that did not happen before nineteen forty period,
and no movie was there a depiction of Nazi violence
against Jewish people before nineteen So the movie would have
been groundbreaking if it had ever been made. See, Jeff
was not trying to release the movie in Germany, so

(01:02:29):
j Lyn couldn't bring Article fifteen against him since his
company he wasn't working with one of the big studios.
He started his own independent production company. Um so there
wasn't anything that Jisling could do to them, because like, what,
we're not in Germany, what are you gonna do? Well,
Jisling went to the Hayes office, or at least Irlan
suspects that Jisling went to the Hayes office. We don't
exactly know what happened. Urwan suspects that Jisling went to

(01:02:50):
the Hayes office and threatened to ban all American movies
from Germany if the studios didn't make sure that this
movie didn't get made. There is no hard evidence of
this act. What we know is that Will Hayes, America's
chief censor, had a meeting with Sam jeff and Herman Mankowitz,
very shortly after that, and Hayes allegedly told them quote

(01:03:11):
because of the large number of Jews active in the
motion picture industry in this country, the charge is certain
to be made that the Jews as a class are
behind an anti Hitler picture and using the entertainment screen
for their own personal propaganda purposes. The entire industry because
of this is likely to be indicted for the action
of a mere handful. So I think it's probable that
Jissling did go to Hayese and be like, I'm gonna

(01:03:31):
ban America from Germany, American movies from Germany if you
don't stop this ship. Because he's certainly bore. Hay was
just unprovoked looking out for the interest of the industry
so that they could keep making money in Germany. Also possible.
I mean either way, yeah, either way, either way, it's
it's gutless. Yeah. Um. So Jeaff wound up selling the

(01:03:51):
script to a guy named Rosen because he couldn't He
couldn't raise the money himself. Al Rosen was an early
film industry agent. He got as far as buying film
style and casting who would have been the very first
hitler ever in motion picture history other than the actual hits,
but the project died on the vine. He also couldn't
find additional financial backing to make the movie. Lewis Meyer

(01:04:13):
of MGM told him, quote, because we have interest in Germany.
I represent the filming picture industry here in Hollywood, we
have exchanges there, we have terrific income from in Germany,
and as far as I am concerned, this picture will
never be made. See all that, Like Magawitz or Jeffy
or Jeff could have had to say it was like, yeah,
but they're doing fucked up ship and it seems seems

(01:04:36):
full full disclosure. From my opinion, it seems as though
their attitude is, yeah, we know they are. We're also
making more money there than we've ever made. Yeah, so exactly, Yeah,
as you would hear it. Yea. But someone's gotta fucking
pay the rent, buddy, dude. Ye Now. I think we've
clearly seen some evidence of what would could be fairly

(01:04:57):
called collaborations so far. But they is another wrinkle in
this and another dynamic present in Hollywood at the time
that is important. Fear See. Hitler's rise to the chancellorship
had correlated with a massive surge and anti Semitism and
an anti Semitic violence in the United States. Twenty thousand
Nazis marched in Madison Square Garden in the thirties, like

(01:05:18):
there were camps all around the United States for American
You do not hear about that. There were fascist rallies
all over the United States. In the Pacific Palisades, the
Nazis bought a chunk of land to make a retreat
in the early thirty What is it now, It's a
graffiti sanctuary essentially, really yeah. Yeah, some of the old
buildings are still there and it just gets tagged a bunch.

(01:05:39):
It's a beautiful hike. Look up Hitler's house and it
wasn't actually Hitler's house. It was supposed to be like
a spa basically. But if you look up Hitler's house
Pacific Palisades, you'll find out how to hike up there.
It's a beautiful hike. Really, yeah, yeah, there is. There
was a lot of fascist sympathy and what is that about?
Point would just anti semitism in America. Anti Semitism was everywhere.

(01:06:04):
I mean, I mean here though, there were just so
many people that like, yeah, we we think the Jews
are the problem too. Yeah, and it was less I
think people here were less hateful about us and they
were in Europe, but it was very common. It was
very common to view like the idea that Jewish people
controlled I mean, they did control the film industry. At
this point, the idea, like to go back to your

(01:06:25):
other episode about behind the Bachards of Hitler, the escapegoat
became that the Jews were undermining the government's ability to
come back to power, right, That's how it like initially started.
So what was the feeling here that they just were
bad people. Know. It's the same idea that has persisted
for a while that um so, you know, Jewish families

(01:06:47):
are overrepresented in the finance industry and banking and have
been for quite some time. And the reason for this
is that for a very long time, both Muslims and
Christians were prohibited, based on their religions, from running banks,
from charge interest that was a religious like like it
was forbid. It's still forbidden for Muslims. I think for
whatever reason, Catholics and Protestants have gotten over that ship

(01:07:09):
in recent years. And for a long time pretty much
the only people who could run a bank were Jewish people,
and so they got a toe hold in that industry
and that that has been a major factor, uh in
the rise of anti Semitism. It's it's not talked about
a lot now like we tend to think of the
Nazis is really stirring up anti I mean they did,
but there was a lot of at present in Europe

(01:07:30):
in the United States. There are still churches all throughout
Europe that have stained glass reliefs of which called a
judent sow, which is a pig that's supposed to represent
a Jewish woman nursing Jewish babies, like there's still representations
of the Blood Passover, which is like this idea that
Jewish rabbis kill Christian kids to make their Passover bread.

(01:07:51):
Like those things are in You can go find churches
today in Europe that still have stained glass reliefs of
that stuff. If you look at it, like, anti Semitism
did not start with the Nazis. It was everywhere prior
to World War Two. And so the studio heads in
Hollywood were terrified of this, and we're very aware of it.
And we're seeing fascist sympathy surging in the United States

(01:08:12):
prior to World War two, and we're seeing anti Semitism
surge in the United States prior to World War Two.
So they were scared and they wanted Hollywood not to
stir things up and make it worse. That was a
legitimate fear that if we make movies about Jewish people
in any way, if we address the Nazi issue in
any way, if we're seen as trying to change American
opinion towards the Nazis, that will encourage more violence against

(01:08:35):
Jewish people. So that is another factor here that is
something all of these Jewish studio heads and production people
are very concerned about. Jewish people were very divided about
what to do because there were a lot of Jewish
speakers at this time who thought that Hollywood need to
address like the issues that the Nazis raised. Rabbi Stephen
Wise of the American Jewish Congress said this in ninety three,

(01:08:56):
the time for caution and prudence's past. What is happening
in Germany today may happen to morrow in any other
land on Earth unless it is challenged and rebuked. It
is not the German Jews who are being attacked. It
is the Jews. We must speak out. If that is unavailing,
at least we shall have spoken. So this is not
like none of these are uniform groups. There are a
lot of Jewish people saying fucking Hollywood ought to do something,

(01:09:17):
But there's also a lot of very scared people in
Hollywood being like, maybe it's bad to do anything. Um.
So that speaker just quoted with from the American Jewish
Congress um who called for a total boycott on German
products in nineteen thirty. Now, the American Jewish Committee and
the Benigh Breath protested this. They were more on the
don't rock the boat side of things, and those Jewish

(01:09:37):
advocacy groups were closer head closer ties to the film industry,
so their feelings wound up having a larger impact on
the policy of the major studios at the time. UM.
From nineteen hundred to nineteen twenty nine, some two d
and thirty movies had been made about Jewish people. There
would be significantly fewer released during the Nazi era. I
think one of the things that's worth noting is that

(01:09:58):
from ninety four or sixty three Hollywood movies had featured
Jewish characters. Right in the next six years, from nineteen
thirty four to nineteen forty, only twenty four films featured
Jewish actors. So yeah, about two thirds is what this
This drops by um, and we're going to get into
why right now. UM. See, in nineteen thirty four, a

(01:10:23):
former Warner Brothers employee named Darryl z and Nuck got
his hands on the script for a movie called The
House of Rothschild. Since he wasn't Jewish himself and was
the co founder of his own studio, Twentieth Century Pictures,
he felt free to produce whatever the hell he wanted.
He saw this movie as a critique of anti Semitism
and a carefully availed attack on Hitler, because it would
be talking about how Jewish people have been persecuted a

(01:10:44):
century or so ago in Europe, but it would clearly
be he thought people, would you know, Yeah right? Um?
So Yeah, though it was set in the fat past,
the film addressed the present at one point. His main
character even said quote, go into the Jewish quarter of
any town in Prussia today and you'll see men lying dead,
but for one crime that they were Jews. So this
is like a pretty direct attempt to address it. But

(01:11:05):
there's a double irony in this movie. The first irony
is that only a non Jew at this point in
Hollywood could have gotten away with making a film that
directly addressed anti Semitic violence. The second irony is that
the fact that Zanuck was not Jewish meant that he
didn't notice that his film attacking anti Semitism wound up
being anti Semitic as fuck. Real. Yeah, it was not

(01:11:27):
intentionally so, um, But one of its central scenes involved
a Jewish banker, the patriarch of the Rothschild family, bribing
a tax collector and cheating the government out of his money.
During a rant about the unfairness of anti Semitism. This
banker shouted, quote, work and strive for money. Money is power.
Money is the only weapon that the Jew has to
defend himself with. So Zanuk's heart is in the right place. Yeah, Yeah,

(01:11:51):
he's not seeing it clearly. Yeah. The inciting incident of
the movie is when the patriarch of the Rothschild family,
on his deathbed, urges his five sons to create at
five bank branches in different cities across Europe. He says, quote,
your banking houses may cover Europe, but you will be
one firm, one family, the Rothchilds, who always work together.
That will be your power. And remember this before all,

(01:12:12):
neither business, nor power, nor all the golden Europe will
bring you happiness. Till we are people have equality, respect, dignity,
to trade with dignity, to live with dignity, to walk
the world with dignity. So he's trying there's a good
message in here. There's a good message in here, but
it's couched in like a story about bankers who like
a big part of the movie trying to comment and

(01:12:34):
exactly and it focuses a lot on Nathan Roth's child
wheeling and dealing with different European leaders in order to
fund the defeat of Napoleon. So some of this plot
could very easily be anti Jewish propaganda, and many American
Jews were horrified by the movie. Um, it also had
a lot of people who loved it, and a lot
of Jewish people in America thought it was a heroic movie,

(01:12:56):
and it still has a reputation as like, whatever you
will say about its las, at least he tried, right, like,
you can't, you can't condemn it, when when other people
seemed to be deliberately not trying. Yeah, but this did
scare a lot of Jewish people, particularly a lot of
Jewish people in the film industry, and so as a result,
throughout the nineteen thirties, Jewish actors started getting less and
less work. It's debatable as to how much of that

(01:13:18):
was out of a desire to please the Nazis and
how much of it was due to the fears of
Jewish political leaders. Whichever cause was more to blame, the
result is in dispute. Jewish people started disappearing from the
silver screen long before the Germans disappeared them on Moss
from Europe. We do know at least that the Nazis
were fans of the House of Rothschild. In nineteen forty
they were released The Eternal Jew, which is one of
the violence propaganda films and all of history. That film

(01:13:41):
included that scene from Zenox movie where the elder Rothschild
cheats the tax assessor. Like that whole scene was included
in this Nazi propaganda film, but a German voiceover played
during the scene, saying, here we show a scene from
a film about the Rothschild family. It was made by
American Jews, obviously, is a tribute to one of the
greatest names in Jewish history. They honor their hero in
a typically Jewish manner, delighting in the way old Meyer

(01:14:03):
Mshell Rothschild cheats his host state by feigning poverty in
order to avoid paying taxes. So, yeah, it's tough. The
guy tries to do the right thing and he accidentally
makes Nazi propaganda like, so you gotta do a spin it, man.
It's a mess, yeah right, yeah, yeah, are you are?
No one's trying, and the person who's trying is making

(01:14:26):
some mistakes and then also fueling the fire of the
people he's against. Which yeah, sucks. And not only are
the people not trying, there seems to be some evidence,
whether directed from the Nazi government or just to make
their own money, that they're like, oh, yeah, we don't
even want you make in movies that could infringe on

(01:14:48):
Hollywood's profitability in Germany don't rock the boat or Nazi
Germany to be more specific. So we're going to get
into the rest of this possible collaboration, uh, and we're
also going to talk about the pro fascist movies that
Americans made completely by accidents in this period of time. Yeah,
it's a wacky story, Daniel. But this is where part

(01:15:11):
one's gonna end, So the listeners gonna have to catch
the rest of this on Thursday. Daniel. At the end
of this episode, do you have any plug doubles to plug? Yes.
I would like to let people know I'm starting Daniel
van Kirk The Together tour that will start on the
eighteenth of September, and I'm going to be hitting up
a whole bunch of cities. The first leg of it
is Houston, Austin, Dallas, Lafia, and Baton Rouge. If you

(01:15:34):
go to Daniel van Kirk dot com or my Twitter
handle at Daniel van Kirk. You can find all that
information there and I will also be doing a live
Dumb People Town October twenty as part of the All
Things Comedy Festival in Phoenix. Well that's just grand. I'm
Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at I
right okay. You can find this podcast on the internet

(01:15:55):
at behind the Bastards dot com, which is where all
of the sources for today's podcast pea this. You can
also find us on Twitter and Instagram at at Bastard's pod.
So check us out and I will see you all
in like two days to talk more about Nazis in Hollywood.
H