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From 1933 until America's entry into World War II in 1941, nearly 500 Nazi films were shown in American theaters, accounting for nearly half of all foreign language film imports during the period. These poorly disguised propaganda films were produced by Germany's top studios and featured prominent pro-German and Nazi actors, directors and technicians. The films were replete with overt and covert anti-Jewish imagery and themes, but in spite of this obvious intent to use the medium to justify Nazi ascendancy, viewers and film critics from such prominent publications as the New York Times, Variety, the Washington Post and the Chicago Times consistently overlooked the films' anti-Semitic message, dubbing them harmless entertainment. This is the complete history of German films shown in America from the founding of the Nazi government to America's involvement in the war. Summaries, descriptions and discussions of these almost 500 films serve to examine the major filmmakers and distributors who kept the German film industry alive during the rule of Hitler and the Third Reich. Special emphasis is placed on films directly commissioned by Joseph Goebbels, head of the German Ministry for the Enlightenment of the People and Propaganda and the man directly responsible for ensuring that the anti-Semitic ideology of the new regime was reflected in all films produced after January 30, 1933. Rarely seen photographs and illustrations complete an in-depth study of the Nazi use of this global medium.
Hitler and the Nazis saturated their country with many types of propaganda to convince the German citizenry that the Nazi ideology was the only ideology. One type of propaganda that the Nazis relied on heavily was cinematic. This work focuses on Nazi propaganda feature films and feature-length documentaries made in Germany between 1933 and 1945 and released to the public. Some of them were Staatsauftragsfilme, films produced by order of and financed by the Third Reich. The films are arranged by subject and then alphabetically, and complete cast and production credits are provided for each. Short biographies of actors, directors, producers, and other who were involved in the making of Nazi propaganda films are also provided.
A 2018 FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE “[Hitler in Los Angeles] is part thriller and all chiller, about how close the California Reich came to succeeding” (Los Angeles Times). No American city was more important to the Nazis than Los Angeles, home to Hollywood, the greatest propaganda machine in the world. The Nazis plotted to kill the city's Jews and to sabotage the nation's military installations: Plans existed for murdering twenty-four prominent Hollywood figures, such as Al Jolson, Charlie Chaplin, and Louis B. Mayer; for driving through Boyle Heights and machine-gunning as many Jews as possible; and for blowing up defense installations and seizing munitions from National Guard armories along the Pacific Coast. U.S. law enforcement agencies were not paying close attention--preferring to monitor Reds rather than Nazis--and only attorney Leon Lewis and his daring ring of spies stood in the way. From 1933 until the end of World War II, Lewis, the man Nazis would come to call “the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles,” ran a spy operation comprised of military veterans and their wives who infiltrated every Nazi and fascist group in Los Angeles. Often rising to leadership positions, they uncovered and foiled the Nazi's disturbing plans for death and destruction. Featuring a large cast of Nazis, undercover agents, and colorful supporting players, the Los Angeles Times bestselling Hitler in Los Angeles, by acclaimed historian Steven J. Ross, tells the story of Lewis's daring spy network in a time when hate groups had moved from the margins to the mainstream.
Hundreds of German-speaking film professionals took refuge in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, making a lasting contribution to American cinema. Hailing from Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine, as well as Germany, and including Ernst Lubitsch, Fred Zinnemann, Billy Wilder, and Fritz Lang, these multicultural, multilingual writers and directors betrayed distinct cultural sensibilities in their art. Gerd Gemünden focuses on Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934), William Dieterle’s The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), Bertold Brecht and Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (1943), Fred Zinneman’s Act of Violence (1948), and Peter Lorre’s Der Verlorene (1951), engaging with issues of realism, auteurism, and genre while tracing the relationship between film and history, Hollywood politics and censorship, and exile and (re)migration.
"The author's search for the annihilated Polish community captured in his grandfather's 1938 home movie. Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community--an entire culture--that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four-year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; to archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty-six-year-old man who appears in the film as a thirteen-year-old boy. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world"--
Between 1933 and 1939, representations of the Nazis and the full meaning of Nazism came slowly to Hollywood, growing more ominous and distinct only as the decade wore on. Recapturing what ordinary Americans saw on the screen during the emerging Nazi threat, Thomas Doherty reclaims forgotten films, such as Hitler's Reign of Terror (1934), a pioneering anti-Nazi docudrama by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.; I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany (1936), a sensational true tale of "a Hollywood girl in Naziland!"; and Professor Mamlock (1938), an anti-Nazi film made by German refugees living in the Soviet Union. Doherty also recounts how the disproportionately Jewish backgrounds of the executives of the studios and the workers on the payroll shaded reactions to what was never simply a business decision. As Europe hurtled toward war, a proxy battle waged in Hollywood over how to conduct business with the Nazis, how to cover Hitler and his victims in the newsreels, and whether to address or ignore Nazism in Hollywood feature films. Should Hollywood lie low, or stand tall and sound the alarm? Doherty's history features a cast of charismatic personalities: Carl Laemmle, the German Jewish founder of Universal Pictures, whose production of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) enraged the nascent Nazi movement; Georg Gyssling, the Nazi consul in Los Angeles, who read the Hollywood trade press as avidly as any studio mogul; Vittorio Mussolini, son of the fascist dictator and aspiring motion picture impresario; Leni Riefenstahl, the Valkyrie goddess of the Third Reich who came to America to peddle distribution rights for Olympia (1938); screenwriters Donald Ogden Stewart and Dorothy Parker, founders of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League; and Harry and Jack Warner of Warner Bros., who yoked anti-Nazism to patriotic Americanism and finally broke the embargo against anti-Nazi cinema with Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939).
In February 1942, barely two months after he had declared war on the United States, Adolf Hitler praised America's great industrial achievements and admitted that Germany would need some time to catch up. The Americans, he said, had shown the way in developing the most efficient methods of production—especially in iron and coal, which formed the basis of modern industrial civilization. He also touted America's superiority in the field of transportation, particularly the automobile. He loved automobiles and saw in Henry Ford a great hero of the industrial age. Hitler's personal train was even code-named "Amerika." In Hitler and America, historian Klaus P. Fischer seeks to understand more deeply how Hitler viewed America, the nation that was central to Germany's defeat. He reveals Hitler's split-minded image of America: America and Amerika. Hitler would loudly call the United States a feeble country while at the same time referring to it as an industrial colossus worthy of imitation. Or he would belittle America in the vilest terms while at the same time looking at the latest photos from the United States, watching American films, and amusing himself with Mickey Mouse cartoons. America was a place that Hitler admired—for the can-do spirit of the American people, which he attributed to their Nordic blood—and envied—for its enormous territorial size, abundant resources, and political power. Amerika, however, was to Hitler a mongrel nation, grown too rich too soon and governed by a capitalist elite with strong ties to the Jews. Across the Atlantic, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his own, far more realistically grounded views of Hitler. Fischer contrasts these with the misconceptions and misunderstandings that caused Hitler, in the end, to see only Amerika, not America, and led to his defeat.
The remarkable story of the Jewish moguls in Hollywood who established the first anti-Nazi Jewish resistance organization in the country in the 1930s. Finalist, Celebrate 350 Award in American Jewish Studies The 1939 film Confessions of a Nazi Spy may have been the first cinematic shot fired by Hollywood against Nazis in America, but it by no means marked the political awakening of the film industry’s Jewish executives to the problem. Hollywood’s Spies tells the remarkable story of the Jewish moguls in Hollywood who paid private investigators to infiltrate Nazi groups operating in Los Angeles, establishing the first anti-Nazi Jewish resistance organization in the country—the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee (LAJCC). Drawing on more than 15,000 pages of archival documents, Laura B. Rosenzweig offers a compelling narrative illuminating the role that Jewish Americans played in combating insurgent Nazism in the United States in the 1930s. Forced undercover by the anti-Semitic climate of the decade, the LAJCC partnered with organizations whose Americanism was unimpeachable, such as the American Legion, to channel information regarding seditious Nazi plots to Congress, the Justice Department, the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department. Hollywood’s Spies corrects the decades-long belief that American Jews lacked the political organization and leadership to assert their political interests during this period in our history and reveals that the LAJCC was one of many covert “fact finding” operations funded by Jewish Americans designed to root out Nazism in the United States. “A remarkable tale.” —The Wall Street Journal “Expose[s] a buried story about underground plots waged by Nazis against major Hollywood figures.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
Considers over sixty Hollywood films set in Austria, examining the film industry, the influence of domestic factors on images of a foreign country, and the persistence of clichés. Maria von Trapp, watching the final scene of The Sound of Music for the first time as "her" family escaped into Switzerland, exclaimed, "Don't they know geography in Hollywood? Salzburg does not border on Switzerland!" Hadshe thought about the beginning of the film, which transports viewers to "Salzburg, Austria in the last Golden Days of the Thirties," when the country was in fact suffering from extreme political and social unrest, she might haveasked, "Don't they know history either?" In The Sound of Music as well as in Hollywood's many other "Austria" films, the projections on the screen resemble reflections in a funhouse mirror. Elements of a "real" place with a"real" history inhabited by "real" people can be found in the fractured distortions, which have both drawn from and contributed to the general public's perceptions of the country and its citizens. Austria Made in Hollywood focuses on films set in an identifiable Austria, examining them through the lenses of the historical contexts on both sides of the Atlantic and the prism of the ever-changing domestic film industry. The study chronicles theprotean screen images of Austria and Austrians that set them apart both from European projections of Austria and from Hollywood incarnations of other European nations and nationals. It explores explicit and implicit cultural commentaries on domestic and foreign issues inserted in the Austrian stories while considering the many, sometimes conflicting forces that shaped the films.
German director Frank Wisbar (1899-1967) had the misfortune of achieving success as a filmmaker just as Hitler came to power. While critics praised his work, Nazi cultural watchdogs were scornful of his attempts to chart "the landscape of the soul" in films like Ferryman Maria (1936) and Anna and Elisabeth (1933). Wisbar fled to America, where Hollywood saw him as no more than a technician, good for churning out low-budget horror like Strangler of the Swamp (1945) and Devil Bat's Daughter (1946). A successful stint in early television allowed him to return home to a very different Germany, where he abandoned his earlier mystical themes to tackle questions of war and peace, tabloid journalism and racial conflict. The author examines the films and career of an under-appreciated auteur who ultimately lost faith in his own vision.