The Eternal Jew (film)
The Eternal Jew is a 1940 antisemitic[2] Nazi propaganda film,[3] presented as a documentary. The film's initial German title was Der ewige Jude, the German term for the character of the "Wandering Jew" in medieval folklore. The film was directed by Fritz Hippler at the insistence of Nazi Germany's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.
Der ewige Jude
(The Eternal Jew)
- Albert Endrejat
- Anton Hafner
- Robert Hartmann
- Friedrich Carl Heere
- Heinz Kluth
- Erich Stoll
- Heinz Winterfeld
- Svend Noldan (uncredited)
- Hans Dieter Schiller
- Albert Baumeister
- 28 November 1940
65 minutes
German
With a screenplay credited to Eberhard Taubert and narrated by Harry Giese, the film consists of feature and documentary footage combined with materials filmed shortly after the Nazi occupation of Poland. At this time, Poland's Jewish population was about three million, roughly ten percent of the total population.
Production
Although Goebbels did not generally take an active role in the production of particular films, he elected to do so in the case of major propaganda films such as The Eternal Jew.[5] The film was in production for over a year.[11] Throughout the end of 1939 and the beginning of 1940, Goebbels devoted "constant attention" to the production of what he referred to as "the Jew film".[12]
As early as 1938, Goebbels had wanted to have a film crew travel to Poland to shoot the ghetto scenes; however, he was unable to gain permission from the Polish government. In October and November 1939, almost immediately after the German-Soviet invasion of Poland, he instructed Hippler to send camera crews to Łódź, Warsaw, Kraków and Lublin to shoot footage of Polish Jews.[13][14]
The footage that Hippler shot in the Jewish ghettos of those cities in German-occupied Poland was the only footage shot specifically for the purpose of the film. At the beginning of the film, animated text informs the audience that this "documentary footage" shows Jews in their original state "before they put on the mask of civilized Europeans."[15] In the Nazi press, Hippler expanded on this claim, asserting that his filming techniques captured Jews "in an unprejudiced manner, real to life as they live and as they react in their own surroundings."[16]
Although Hippler advertised the film as being a factual documentary consisting of pictures of real Jews with nothing faked or simulated, his claims were complete falsehoods. In reality, the film was an exercise in manipulation for the purposes of propaganda. In shooting his footage, Hippler did in fact simulate scenes and use actors who were performing under duress and without knowledge of how the footage would be employed. For example, in order to get shots of Jewish worship services, Hippler and Goebbels assembled the congregation of the Vilker synagogue and ordered them to wear the tallithim and tefillin and to hold a full-scale service. When the Germans ordered the Torah reader to read from the Torah, he started by saying on camera "Today is Tuesday" signalling that his reading of the Torah was coerced since it was not customary to read the Torah on Tuesdays.[12]
Aside from the footage shot in Poland, the rest of the film consisted of stills and archival footage from feature films (such as 1931's M and 1934's The House of Rothschild, the latter being a Hollywood production) often without permission, that the film presented as if they were documentary footage.[17]
The movie was produced in a documentary format and, like other Hippler films, relied heavily on narration.[18]
The film can be roughly divided into four thematic areas:
Release and reception
In and of itself, the movie did not have much impact on the German public. The film suffered from being released after Jud Süß, which had been wildly popular, perhaps because the antisemitic message was secondary to an engaging period drama. The actors in Jud Süß were leading German actors of the time. In contrast, Der ewige Jude's only original footage was of Jews in the Polish ghetto and animated maps. All the other footage consisted of stills and excerpts from other films.
Thus, unlike Jud Süß, which was a box-office smash success, Der ewige Jude was a commercial flop. David Culbert asserts that it is unlikely that there were more than one million paid admissions compared to over 20 million paid admissions to Jud Süß.[44] The film was more known by word-of-mouth descriptions than from people actually viewing it. Some Germans were quoted as saying "We've already seen enough Jewish filth. We don't need to see any more."[45]
The film was chiefly screened by party supporters and Nazi organizations like the Hitler Youth and the SS. Its themes and content made it a topic of discussion by a wider audience that never saw it. Heinrich Himmler invited to screen it for SS-Einsatzgruppen troops headed for the Eastern Front to carry out the "Final Solution".[46][47]
Postwar legacy
In 1946, Fritz Hippler was tried for directing Der ewige Jude but was not found guilty.[48] Hippler contended Joseph Goebbels was the true creator of The Eternal Jew with Hitler's close supervision. He claimed that Goebbels gave Hippler credit as a reward "for his excellent work in the newsreel department".[49]
Fritz Hippler was interviewed in the Emmy Award-winning program "The Propaganda Battle" in the PBS series Walk Through the Twentieth Century (1983–1984). In this interview he stated that he regretted being listed as the director of The Eternal Jew because it resulted in being interrogated by the Allies after the war. He thought this was unfair because, in his opinion, he had nothing to do with the killing of Jews. In an interview shown in the ZDF documentary series Holocaust (2000), the 90-year-old Hippler described the film as "the most disgraceful example of antisemitism." The film's narrator, Harry Giese, went on to narrate other films, but he was associated with this film and other films by the Third Reich and he found less work in the Postwar German cinema of the 1950s and 60s.
Availability
The public distribution and exhibition of the film is prohibited in Germany. The only exception is for use in college classrooms and other academic purposes; however, exhibitors must have formal education in "media science and the history of the Holocaust",[50] and it can only be screened in a censored version with annotations.
Notes
Further reading