On 8 September 1940, a new German movie premiered in Europe. Jew Suss [Jud Süss/Jud Süß] was an infamous, anti-Semitic, Nazi propaganda movie. Produced by Joseph Goebbels in 1940 Germany, it hastened the Nazi genocide against European Jews. The movie was a box office success, earning 6.5 million Reichsmarks and an audience of over 20 million. Jud Süss was a star-studded, historical melodrama whose secret goal was inciting anti-Jewish fear and hatred amongst the German people. It worked all too well. During World War II, Heinrich Himmler required his SS officers to view it. [Remarkably, there was a pro-Jewish British version made a few years earlier.] The Allied Military Occupation banned the German Jud Süss movie after the war in 1945 and ordered all negatives destroyed. What was it about and why was it so reviled?
Jud Süss was a person, Josef Oppenheimer, an 18th century German Jew. Born in Heidelberg in 1698, he became the “Court Jew,” chief financial adviser, to Karl Alexander, Duke of Württemberg. Jud Süss was his nickname, German for ‘sweet Jew.’ He was a prominent figure in Stuttgart at a time when anti-Semitism was rampant across Europe. His rise to power, controlling taxes and fees, caused both resentment and hostility among the courtiers, officials, and citizens. They were also unhappy that he enabled other Jews to move to Stuttgart, despite laws forbidding them. His lavish lifestyle did not help matters either.
Duke Karl died suddenly in 1737. Oppenheimer was soon arrested and accused of various schemes, embezzlement, fraud and treason. He was put on trial and convicted. Stuttgart judges could find no evidence however that he had broken any laws. So judges convicted him on a old statute where it was illegal for Jews to have sexual relations with non-Jewish women. Jud Süss had numerous, well-known affairs and was sentenced to death.
Authorities offered Oppenheimer the chance to convert to Christianity before being hanged. He refused, responding, “I will die as a Jew, suffering violence and injustice.” His 1738 execution was staged as a public spectacle in Stuttgart. Guards placed him in a cage, hauled to the top of the gallows. There, thirty-five feet above the town square, he was hanged while praying the Shema. His body was left up there in the cage, for six years, as a warning to other Jews. Oppenheimer was seen as a dangerous traitor by Germans.
By Jews, Josef Oppenheimer was seen as a faithful martyr.
His life was the subject of several books and not just one, but two, movies. Two hundred years later, his story was manipulated to serve two different purposes – the first by the British, the second by the Germans. Six years before the German Jud Süss movie, came a British film, Jew Suss, made in 1934. Jew Suss was adapted from a 1925 novel by German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger. The historical movie tells a slightly fictionalized version of Josef Oppenheimer’s story.
In the British production, Jew Suss was played by a German actor Conrad Veidt, best known as Heinrich Strasser, the Nazi major in Casablanca (1942). In the British version, Jew Suss navigates Stuttgart politics with smooth-talking self-assurance, allowing him to climb the social ladder and grab power. The movie portrays his arrest and execution poignantly due to his refusal to disavow his Jewish heritage. He asserts his dignity, and defiantly cries a Jewish prayer as he is hanged.
This British version boasted a budget of 100,000 pounds, with a large supporting cast and elaborate sets. However, the picture was a box-office flop. It enjoyed a wide release in Britain and the U.S., but was banned in Germany and Austria for its pro-semitic tone. The British film was a veiled petition on behalf of the victimized Jewish population of Nazi Germany. At the time, the persecution of Jews in Europe was well known, thanks to the SS St. Louis incident. But what about the contemptable German version?
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party had hoped that 1938’s Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) would produce a surge of anti-Semitism throughout Germany. SA and SS henchmen destroyed Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues. Many Germans had Jewish friends or neighbors and found it difficult to embrace the Nazi-fueled hatred for the Jewish race. German citizens had already been bombarded with anti-Semitic propaganda for years both by newspapers and radio. However, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda since 1933, was not convinced this had changed the hearts of the people.
By 1940, Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews was already in its early stages.
Goebbels believed films would ultimately make Germans accept the Nazi’s solution to the “Jewish problem.” The triumph of his vision was their version of Jud Süss. In this movie, the Nazi’s anti-Semitism was not blatantly in your face. It was placed instead insidiously and subtly inside an engaging historical drama. With quality production values and a well-known cast of actors, Jud Süss engaged the audience on an emotional level. Goebbels knew it would finally change Germans’ minds about their Jewish neighbors.
The German movie was based on a different 1827 novel by Wilhelm Hauff. This Goebbels remake of the British film stressed the Nazi stereotypes of Jews as crafty, untrustworthy villains. Jud Süss was directed by well-known German director Veit Harlan. In this movie, Jud Süss is played flamboyantly by actor Ferdinand Marian as a seductive scoundrel, rather than a victim. He undermines political methods and subverts law and order. Worst of all, he unabashedly satisfies his sexual appetites by raping a Christian girl and having her fiancé tortured.
The lead actor, Ferdinand Marian, was forced into playing the role of Süss. Goebbels warned him he would destroy his career if he refused. In the Nazi version, Jud Süss opens in 1733 with Oppenheimer providing the new duke with lavish presents, that entangle Karl in an expensive, extravagant lifestyle. Oppenheimer begins granting the duke large loans to finance pet projects. As the duke does not have the treasury to repay the loans, Oppenheimer demands to serve as Finance Minister to collect his due via taxes, duties, and tolls on the people. He places his Jewish cronies in positions of power as tax collectors, causing suffering amongst the Germans.
In the German film, Oppenheimer also convinces the duke to open the city to Jews, and they arrive by the thousands. Süss lusts after the beautiful daughter, Dorothea, of the chief minister, but she rebuffs his advances. He orders her abduction and arrests her fiancé. As the fiancé is tortured in the dungeon, Süss brutally rapes the girl. Burdened with shame and grief, Dorothea commits suicide. Süss is arrested by rioters and condemned at trial to death. He is hauled to the top of the gallows and hanged in the presence of an angry mob of Germans.
At the end of the German movie, the Duke Karl’s final address to the people drives the Nazi’s propaganda message home: “May our descendants hold firmly to this law, so they can save themselves much sorrow … and save the lives and blood of their children and their children’s children.” The duke then orders all the Jews to be expelled from Wurttemberg.
The German film portrays Süss’s execution as a just and poetic ending of an evil, despised Jew. It is followed (before the credits) by a Nazi declaration, warning Germans about the perils of allowing Jews into their midst. The German movie was blatant, anti-Semitic agitation. It builds on the repeated Nazi propaganda message that Jews are ‘sub-human vermin’ with a talent for disguising themselves as Aryan Germans.
The Nazis injected anti-Semitism into the film in sinister and subtle ways.
Suss’s loans to the duke were both for his own self-glory AND the opportunity to allow more Jews into the city. Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as insidiously disguising and inserting themselves as part of a deep conspiracy to gain power and wealth for the Jewish community. After seeing the film’s final cut, Goebbels wrote in his diary: “An anti-Semitic film of the kind we could only wish for. I am quite happy about it.”
Goebbels opened the film simultaneously in 80 Berlin cinemas to great fanfare. Jud Süss became a hit. It was viewed by 20 million Germans owing to Goebbels’s propaganda blitz and director Harlan’s reputation. A Nazi Party press release issued at the time of the movie’s premier stated, “It is the duty of all to point out that every Jew has only his well-being and that of his brothers in mind, even when he pretends generous motives.”
Jud Süss was a success across Europe as well, where it sparked anti-Jewish violence in France, Italy, and elsewhere. Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler had it shown to all of his elite SS troops AND the Hitler Youth. In the movie, Suss’s crimes included “blackmail, profiteering, indecency, and high treason.” But only one mattered most, a Jew having sex with a Christian. The Nuremberg Law of 1935 banned sex between Jews and Aryans.
The Nazi film documented that laws excluding Jews had been the norm over Germany’s long history. The film prompted street demonstrations in Berlin with crowds shouting “Throw the Jews out of Germany!” As the war progressed, the film was shown to SS Einsatzgruppen units in the Holocaust Death Camps, to “boost morale” and affirm the Nazi Final Solution.
Goebbels propaganda was successful and Hitler was pleased. The Nazi anti-Semitism message offered to the German people was now affirmed. Fear and hatred of Jews in German was now acceptable. The movie offered a solution to the German Jewish problem as well—deporting and ‘relocating’ Jews. Of course, during Hitler’s Third Reich, deporting the Jews meant eventual genocide in Nazi death camps. But once the idea of deporting Jews was accepted by Germans, what eventually became of them was out of sight – out of mind.
At the end of World War II, the liberation of the Nazi Death Camps allowed a horrified world to witness what had happened to those deported Jews. A public outcry, organized by groups of Nazi victims, led prosecutors to press charges against the movie’s director Harlan for “crimes against humanity.” Victims of Nazi persecution testified to the effects of the anti-Semitic propaganda film. They stated that Jud Süss had spread fear and terror amongst Jews, and fuel hatred and violence against them. The trial ended with Harlan’s acquittal. Veit Harlan may have escaped criminal liability, but he did not escape guilt. While Jud Süss did not directly cause the Jewish Holocaust, it certainly had a role as a catalyst.
As the Russian Army stormed into Berlin, Adolf Hitler trapped in his bunker under the Reich Chancellery. He shot himself in the head on 30 April 1945. Joseph Goebbels, architect of years of vile Nazi propaganda, was at Hitler’s side, always the loyal sycophant, along with his wife and children. On May 1st, Goebbels murdered each of his six children (five daughters and one son) with cyanide capsules. Then he and his wife went outside the bunker and took capsules of their own. Soldiers doused their bodies with petrol and set them aflame.
The Nazi threat was finally dead … for now.
