The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler

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I enjoyed this book and found it interesting. I'm taking off a star because I think that it oversold the “collaboration” theme.

Even prior to the Nazi take-over in 1933, Hollywood was modifying its product so that it could continue to sell movies in Germany. In the 1920s, there had been anti-German “hate films” which played upon stereotypes of German cruelty or malevolence arising from the emotions of World War I. The Weimar Republic was looking to protect the reputation of Germany and passed a law allowing it to ban film companies that produced films that denigrated Germany or Germans. Under this threat - prior to 1933 - Hollywood had removed scenes that were considered too offensive for German sensibilities, including in the classic anti-war movie “All Quiet on The Western Front.”

So, there had been “collaboration” prior to the Nazis in the form of give and take between Germany and Hollywood and what was over the line and what wasn't. This give and take was not limited to German interests. Censorship of films was rampant in the period. Cities and states had their own censorship boards that could require Hollywood to cut a variety of scenes that were deemed problematic to local mores.

This pushing and shoving continued under the Nazis, obviously. Hollywood knew that it was at risk of losing the German market and so much of the “collaboration” was self-censorship. None of this should be very surprising and it is not like the Nazis and Hollywood sat down together to plot out what movies would be made.

In fact, the self-censorship may be the big take-away from this book. For example, in 1933, Max Jaffe sought to make an anti-Nazi movie called the “Mad Dogs of Europe.” The movie never got made because the large studios - which were Jewish owned - did not want to lose their business in Germany and independent filmmakers were persuaded by Jewish organizations that German Jews would pay a price if the move was made. Likewise, after the antisemitic film “The House of Rothschild” was made by Howard Hughes in 1934, the consensus of Jewish organizations and Hollywood was that the Jewish community was better off if Jews stopped appearing as characters in movies. As the author Ben Urwand points out Jewish characters had been a staple of entertainment prior to 1934, but after 1934, Jewish characters and Nazis were erased from films.

The idea of “accommodation,” is surprising, but probably should not be so surprising at this particular moment when Hollywood and the NBA are bending over backwards not to antagonize the loathsome dictatorship in Communist China.

I particularly liked the book for the story it told about Hollywood in the 1930s. I recently read a book on “pre-Code” Hollywood and I enjoyed seeing the same names in this book as in that book. In the other book, the issue wasn't foreign affairs, but the depiction of criminals and nudity. Nonetheless, the same kind of wheeling and dealing is apparent.

So, the book overstates matters by referring to “collaboration.” A more accurate but less “clickbait” word might have been “appeasement” or “accommodation.”