Behind the Bastards - Part One: How Hollywood Helped The Nazis

Episode Date: September 11, 2018

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.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a show where I read a story about someone or someone's terrible from history to a guest who is coming in cold. And 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. Thank you. And I'm going to guess you can throw a pretty good punch because you look kind of yoked from over here. I just think the listeners should know that. That's all I'm going for is yoked. I am working towards that being my only introduction. Excellent. Alright, this next guy is yoked.

Please welcome to the stage. Yoked as hell! Just saw him on the street and brought him in for the podcast. I am going to fight that rule that you can't do stand up in a tank top. You can't. Is that a rule? You can't. Think about it.

Would you listen to anybody talk to you on a microphone in a tank top? I was Daniel O'Brien's subordinate for years and he wears a tank top 100% of the time. Maybe he's broken the rule. I'm used to it, yeah. Alright, so today we are talking about Hollywood and the Nazis and how the two helped one another. You know, you say that us guests come into this cult and 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 was a documentary on Netflix about a whole bunch of directors get sent to like make propaganda films. I mean, they made propaganda for the US. Yes. Against the Nazis. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Are we saying the idea of people who are pro within the Hollywood elite? It's a little more complicated than that. Wonderful. So when we think about Hollywood and the Nazis, we think about what you're talking about. Those like why we fight documentaries and like Bugs Bunny beating up Hitler and all that stuff. That all came after the war had started. Oh, okay. When we talk about the period from when the Nazis took power to the beginning of World War II

and what Hollywood did, it is a very different tale and a less positive one towards Hollywood. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Oh man, I'm so ready to hear this. 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 on the 28th of December, 1895 in Paris. This is when 10 Lumiere 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 it was the first like good movie going experience. The first permanent movie theater, the Nickelodeon was opened in Pittsburgh in 1905. 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. It's interesting that it started in Pittsburgh. Yeah. The first movie theater. I would never have guessed that, right? Neither. No. Yeah.

Like Pittsburgh. Okay. Yeah. All right. I guess that and a Permanente brothers sandwich. You're historic. I don't know what that means because I've never been to Pittsburgh. Me either.

But I see it on all those food channels. It's like the sandwich where they put everything on the sandwich like fries and coleslaw. Oh, it's Permanente brothers supposed to be amazing. Well, our three Pittsburgh listeners are over the moon right now. 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 1892, Edison got the patent for like the first functional movie camera that you could really sell as a commercial device. This made him even wealthier, although who's 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 in all of history in order to make his fortune.

That's the prequel to the deuce. Yes. Okay. Yes. Edison, meanwhile, just kept buying patents related to the motion picture industry and suing anyone he caught infringing upon them. In 1908, 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 monopolize the art form of filming things. Like anytime there's a new industry, especially in like the 1800s and then the early 1900s, it was like three or four people being like, well, let's just own all of it. Let's just own all of it and stop it from ever changing. Right. Because that was Edison's idea. He figured movies would always be like five or 10 minute shorts that people watched a

bunch of in a row. And he was like, well, let's just be the only ones who get to do that. Right. And actually that's what's happening today in the car industry. Over the past like 20 to 30 years and even up till today, what Tesla was trying to fight is like, you guys bought all of this electric technology back in the 80s so that you never had to release it. Yeah.

Because you controlled it all. Yeah. So it was basically illegal starting in 1908 to make a film that Thomas Edison didn't personally approve of. And he was from the beginning very concerned with the moral character of films. Quote, 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.

By good moral. By his definition. By his definition. Which is always the best part. Somebody's like, by my moral tone. I'm like, no, I understand what you're saying. But do you also understand yourself defining that? Yeah.

If you, everyone judges their own morals. Yeah. Everybody has a moral tone. Right. You're just saying yours is right. 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 Americanize the immigrant movement, which was a reaction to the fact that immigration into 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. Yeah. Terrible pizza. I think people like just don't think enough about the time in our country where, you know, the difference between racism and prejudice, right? Yeah. Prejudice is I judge you based off what I know about you and racism tends to be I 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. Well, there was this time where it was like, it wasn't based on color of skin.

It was like this thing of like, well, you're from there. No, thanks. They would say it was based off color of skin, because a lot of people in 1908 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. Yeah.

I was educated to how deep that went then. The Irish were the last of the white people to 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 hell. Right. That's Europe. Right. But that was not the case from the beginning.

I mean, this is the period where it was starting to change. That's where Edison drew his lines. Well, I don't know much about Edison in specific, but I know this was a big factor in the movie industry because the Americanized the immigrant movement campaigned for the regulation of the film industry. They were the first people to want to censor films. Wow. 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 and on one side were people like Edison. And 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 1910, and he gave a horrified description of a movie theater. 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's side of things were horrified of when they looked 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 500 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 what is hardest to swallow is that the tastes of this seething mass of human cattle that have dominated or at least set the standards of American moving pictures. This is like a film critic in 1910. And he's commenting on the type of people in the movie theater. Yeah, yeah. That if you're going to the movie, you're slumming. Yes.

But not based on people who are seeing movies or based on. Based on both. The people who are seeing movies, a lot of them are immigrants and poor 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 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 to play to this audience. And that is scary to the whitest people who have ever lived. What are they watching? 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 rent entertainment. It was very low rent entertainment, very short, cheap. Right. It wasn't the opera or the orchestra. Yeah. And you're not in this period seeing complicated movies with a three act structure that are very long and stuff. That doesn't come until a little bit later. In 1909, because of this 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 films. On whose authority? On his because he owns the patents. You can't make a movie. They're like bounty hunters for film.

And at this point, the film industry is all in basically New York, the East Coast. Right. 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. Wow. These people are breaking the law by filming movies illegally because they don't have the right to use a movie camera

to make a movie if Edison doesn't approve of it. Wow. 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 themselves. 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 start getting their own cameras from outside of the US

because there's other people making movie cameras. And that's legal. That's right. Kind of on the edge. Like they're definitely breaking the law a bunch. But you know, it's also 1908, 1909. So the law doesn't mean quite what it does today. Right.

But Edison's hiring goons to enforce it. Yeah. You know? So many of these independent early motion picture moguls were people like Carl Lamell. They were immigrants themselves. And Carl Lamell 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.

So Lamell 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. So he eventually starts his own production outfit, the independent motion picture company in order to make films on his own terms 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. Yeah. So a guy like Lamell is like, well, fuck it, I'll just make my own movies. And I'll rent them out to other theaters in addition to the theaters that I owned. In 1912, Carl Limley renamed his company, which had 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. Ars Technica does note that he later admitted he'd gotten the name from a universal pipe fitting truck. 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 your name? And you're like, Daniel Pencil. He just pulled it from what was in front of him. Although that also proves like, don't put too much thought into it. Just do the work.

Yeah, because it clearly it's worked. Right. Everybody knows what Universal Pictures is, right? Right. That's awesome. So Universal Paramount and Warner Brothers all started as essentially illegal film companies. Really? They fled from the East Coast to California, both because the fantastic sunlight made it easier to shoot on sort of a low-tech shit 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 across the country. Like you were saying, the law was not what the law is now. Because this is like in the... 1909. Are Pinkerton still running around too? Yes. Where you just hire your own cops. That's part of it.

There's also US Marshals and stuff, but they've got to travel all the way across the country. Right. It just means everything takes longer. And these guys are basically playing a waiting game. Yeah. Because they know that the trust are starting to be busted during this period of time, right? Like Teddy Roosevelt, that was a big thing he was doing. So their thinking is if we get out to California, we can make a shitload of money.

We're off the radar. Yeah. When we do have to pay fines, we'll make enough money to make it worthwhile. Sure. And the lengthening of sort of the time that everything will take, eventually we'll win out. This is why I love your show, man. I was wondering when we started, how did we end up in California from Pittsburgh? Yeah.

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 started making movies too, just like Lamlee. And the Fox Film Corporation became the foremost anti-Edison studio. Fox sued the MPPC and won, finally ending the patent wars in 1915. 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'd fought bigotry upon arriving 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 Irwans, The Collaboration. The men who created the studio system in Los Angeles were Jewish immigrants of Eastern European descent. 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 rose to power in the early 1930s,

these diverse and used to fighting bigots, movie moguls would have stood up to try and halt the spread of fascism. You would 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 II, zero major motion pictures were made that addressed the Hitler or the Nazis in a hugely negative light. There was one movie that kind of sort of did up until the outbreak of the war, but it came out in like 1940. Well, that's what I was going to 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 19.

Like I said, I think it was 1906 was the first close to full length movie with like an hour or something long. 1910 was the birth of the Star System. That's when these people, so number one, these are, I think 1927 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 that, because it's important for the medium. So 1910 is when movie stars start to become a thing, which again, 1915 is when the patent war is in. So by 1915, 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 it was obvious what his agenda was. Oh, yeah. It's so interesting to me that there's this disconnect of this industry that is literally derived out of the idea of like showing viewpoints or opinions or 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 addressing it. Yeah. And we, 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 II years, but post the Nazis 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 60 or 70 percent.

They became very, very careful about not offending the Germans. The debate is over, you know, Harvard scholar Ben Irwand, who wrote the collaboration, essentially argues that the studios worked with the Nazis and he presents compelling evidence to that point. Really? Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's a good book. The studios run by predominantly Jewish men. Yes. Yes. And we'll, we'll get into how this all started. I do want to announce up front that Irwand has some detractors, people who don't think collaboration is a fair term. And so I'll be getting 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 Irwand's arguments are more convincing than the other ones. So that is kind of largely the tact we're going to be taking here. Now Irwand traces the start of the collaboration to the film All Quiet on the Western Front, which came out in 1930. Almost three years before Hitler was in charge, 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 wonderful. 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's also, it gives you a sympathetic take on the German soldier.

Oh yeah, because it's, it's a devastating emotionally. But the Nazis hated it because again, like you remember that scene where like the boys are in class and their teacher's making, going to war, seemed like this like wonderful awesome adventure and they're all like, and then they all go die. Yeah, horribly. The Nazis did not like that. They still want their moms and yeah, yeah. Yeah, the Nazis hated that because they're Nazis. We're trying to get more.

We want, we want to get kids excited about dying for the Fatherland again. The day the film was released in Germany, the Nazis in Berlin, organized by Joseph Goebbels, bought 300 tickets to the 7 p.m. showing. Nazis inside the theater hooded and yelled at the movie and at one predetermined point started throwing stink bombs into the crowd and releasing mice. So like that was sort of their, before they were in power, how they would try to shut down a movie they did. Really? Yeah. Like Junior High Kids. Like Junior High Kids.

Yeah. Wow. I mean, probably a lot of them were teenagers. Yeah. Now the Nazis protested for six days until the film was completely removed from German screens. Carl Lamley, founder of Universal, ordered a 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 into Nazi demands. Now he died in 1936 and to be totally fair, he helped smuggle like 300 Jewish people out of Germany during the Hitler years that he was alive.

Yeah, I mean, we could say that once he realized, whole shit, not good. Yeah. But when it, beforehand, when it was just about money. Yeah. 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 it. See, this is the thing, man. Like even right now in our country where it's like, you really got to ask yourself, what side of history do you want to fall in on this?

Even if it doesn't affect you now. Yeah. Like where do you want to fall on this shit? The hard part is you got to look at history from the perspective of people who don't know what's coming next. I know, but. But you're leery. Yeah. I mean, you're, because the Nazis are still saying all this shit.

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. Maybe they can be moderated. So if I can appease a whole group of people and makes, you know, sell my whatever your product is, then I'll do it. But then I 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 Lamley too harshly because clearly he was a, what's, what? Oh. Lemley.

Lemley. Lemley. Well. Yeah. I don't want to judge Lemley too harshly because clearly he was a good person who like just fucked up. Agreed. I agree with that. But we know, we know, we have the precedent now that we should be more careful.

You're right. I mean, we're looking at it with hindsight, but I just be careful. Yeah. And this is again, one of the things that the people who don't like Erwan criticize him over is essentially thinking too much from the perspective of people living in the present day who know what the Nazis did. And that's a fair point. But can't both things be true? Yeah.

Can't you be like, even couldn't it possible for him to be like, yeah, I fucked up on that early stuff? Yeah. Once I saw the legitimacy of the horrors of what they were doing, come, ask me how hard I worked to try and save people. Yeah. Yeah. Both of those things can be true. And it's also true that while he worked hard to save people, he didn't work hard to make anti-Nazi movies. Right.

So we're going to get into the rest of this collaboration and sort of the history of Hollywood and the Nazis. But first, it is time for some ads for products. I understand you're a big fan of products. I am. I love a good product. Do you also love Doritos, Daniel Van Terk? I enjoy a Dorito. Well, that's fantastic.

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Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

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That's not a complete joke. Anyway, let's move on. Now that we're fortified. So in April of 1933, around a month after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the movie King Kong debuted around the world. It ran in Germany for quite a while and 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. The torture to which this woman is exposed, her mortal fear, and the other horrible things that one would only imagine in a drunken frenzy are harmful to German health. In a drunken frenzy?

Yeah. The things you would imagine happening to her while you're drunk? 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. Do we know if he was a Nazi? I mean, he probably, right? Yeah, I feel like.

I don't know this 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. You see, isn't this, even that tone, isn't that even in itself part of the whole, how we got to World War II and the Nazi Party? For the German people, like it's a pride thing.

Yeah, yeah. Because of how much pride was lost in this World War I. Disasterous war, yeah. That now, that's part of the whole thing, like other people can do what they want, more Germans, and we need to hold ourselves to a higher esteem. We are proud people. And once we root 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. Yeah, I know.

Everybody happened to die that was here before us. Oddly enough. Oddly enough. 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 factor. And they weren't. Russia was. Russia was the hardest sons of bitches. Russia was the hardest sons of bitches.

Solid grout, I'll tell you that. Yeah, yeah. So the professor went on to warn that quote, psychopaths or women would in particular be vulnerable to being thrown into a panic by the film. Psychopaths or women. Either one. Either one. You're either going to go do that to a woman or you're going to, you're going to feel like that's going to happen to 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, well. But no, I think you are probably right. Is that he's like, well, 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. Credit to the Nazi. Not me, the person. No, no, no, no, no.

I'm not calling you a Nazi. I almost never call our guest Nazis. Thank you. Thank you. I'd like to keep that straight going. Yeah. Yeah. So the movie was not banned, but its title was changed.

Really? Yes. It was changed from King Kong to quote, the fable of King Kong, an American trick and sensation film. Whoa. So it's like. Rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? Yeah, of course. Yeah, that should have been the title.

Yeah, yeah. Peter Jackson. You missed the boat. You fool. An sensation film. What does that mean, a trick and sensation? That the Americans have worked up this kooky little idea. I think it, yeah.

It was meant to make it seem less serious. Trivialize it. To make it, yeah. It's a fable. Yeah. German people are used to scary fables. So if we present this as a fable rather than, you know, this. Go and see it as a joke.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Exactly. They were trying to make it seem. Not as a commentary. Bingo. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

So Peter Ernst Seeger, who we'll be hearing about a bit in this podcast, was Germany's chief censor and he had other issues with the film. He was. He's already opened, right? It had already been out when this stuff started. 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 Oranutan and I just want you to look at the spelling of Oranutan. Oh, is it similar to Oranutan? It is. That's what they used to call them. What? The idea of a.

Oranutan. Oranutan. Oranutan. It's almost written phonetically. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Which I suspect. Oranutan.

Oranutan. Oranutan. So he was fine with the idea of an Oranutan falling in love with a, quote, blonde woman of the Germanic type because that was in line with popular racist wisdom of the time, which was that people who aren't white lust over white women. So he was actually okay with that. Protect your 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. He's got some old timey racism from this particular Nazi. So Dr. Seeger didn't object to that, to the film because of the monkey molesting 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 of public transportation. Oh my God. They're forced to the trees, buddy. That is a very German thing though to watch this movie and be like, what if it makes people scared of the trains? Right. Like he has an issue with mechanical malfunctions. Like they, you've got to show that we can build stuff better than that.

Yeah. What if the German people think that we endorse that something would be built not well? German engineering would never have a train derailment. For what it's worth, Hitler loved King Kong. Really? 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 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 it screened several times. Really? I can't hear that and not think.

Do you remember when the, 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, like Hitler just staring at this ape on the screen just in spellbound. Do you think he just really liked the idea of like a creature that like could not be contained and had like he, because how he saw himself as like, I'm bigger than they, I can bust free. I can like, there had to be some sort of grandiose delusion that he had in that.

I think I, and I, I'm on, I'm on the record here. I think Hitler was just a nerd. I think before that was a commenter. I think if Hitler had grown up. He just loved the idea of a monster found in the jungle. And he thought it was cool. The side, the, the, the special effects were groundbreaking at the time. Yeah, I think that's why he, he loved it for the same reason people love Jurassic Park

in 1992. That's probably safer. 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 1920, when Hollywood was allowed back in the country, accepted

between like 20 and 60 movies every year that the, the Nazis were in power. 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 really loved it. Yeah. Yeah. Germans loved American movies and were, yeah, it was a major market for Hollywood. There was a lot of money in being able to sell films to the Germans.

First of the major studios set up German branches during the Weimar years. Executives from MGM, Paramount and 20th 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 shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Stay all. That's, that's some wrong side of history shit right there. Should I write, should I write Heil Hitler on it? I could just like sincerely regard, it's like, dude, what's the harm, you know, he's gonna like it. Mm-hmm. 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 gonna come back at somebody in auction in 60 years in the dismay of your future family is gonna be selling a letter where you wrote Heil Hitler. Yeah. And what, in two years he'll be out of power. He's so crazy.

How could this keep going on? Did you imagine the feeling of like 1943 and you fucking wrote Heil Hitler? Oh yeah. You'd be like, oh my God, I hope that gets burnt. Throw that in with the books. Please throw my letter in with the books. Boy, I hope the Germans are bad at keeping records. It's actually the thing they're best at.

Oh shit. Yeah. So like every dictator I've ever read about, Adolf Hitler was a huge movie buff. He watched at least one Hollywood film every single night pretty much that he was in power in his own private movie theater usually. The only time Hitler stopped talking as a general rule is when he was watching a movie. Really? Yeah.

Oh shit, man, with the glorious bastards, get him to a movie. Get him to a movie. He loved movies and he tend to either really like films or hate them. When Erwan was researching the collaboration, he went into the Buns Archive, which is like a big German government archive and he found Hitler's thoughts on dozens and dozens and dozens of movies. No shit. Yeah.

Yeah. And he would usually write like, I liked it or it was good or it was great or I switched it off for whatever reason. He would say that if he didn't like a movie, he would say it was bad, very bad, particularly bad, extraordinary bad. All capstone-ish in points. No, no, no. I know.

I'm just kidding. 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 gotta be abandoned Berlin.

Yeah. Potent crap. Can you guess what Hitler's favorite Hollywood movie was? Let's see. You didn't see anything after 45, right? Definitely not. Yeah. Allegedly.

As far as we know. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck. Which is a shame. I really think he would have liked White Christmas. Oh, he would have loved White Christmas. Yeah.

There's a lot of like racist stuff in there. Yeah. Oh, times. Fuck, dude. I don't know. Tell me. Mickey Mouse. Really?

Yeah. Yeah. He ordered multiple Mickey Mouse cartoons. In 1937, Joseph Goebbels was trying to get him a Christmas gift and wound up settling upon a shitload of Mickey Mouse. Does Disney come up in any of this stuff in Hollywood? Yeah, 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. He loved Mickey Mouse. He loved Mickey Mouse. Yeah. That's, you don't want to be on that end of the room. Yeah. Hitler, Joseph Goebbels one Christmas gave him a bunch of Mickey Mouse films and this

is what Goebbels wrote in his diary, I presented the, I present the fewer with 32 of the best films from the last four years and 12 Mickey Mouse films, including a wonderful art album for Christmas. And he's very pleased and extremely happy for this treasure that will hopefully bring him much joy and relaxation. Hitler loved Mickey Mouse. That's sad. That makes me, it pumps me out.

And Osama bin Laden loved Tom and Jerry. What the fuck, man? Yeah. The CIA's archive, because the CIA posted up all the stuff, we did an episode on this, but all the stuff that was on Osama's hard drives, dozens of episodes of Tom and Jerry. Really? Yeah. Tons of them.

That's sad. That's sad. There's nothing to do with this information. It's not sending to any cartoon. What? Tom and Jerry, isn't the final episode they kill each other? Do they? I think so, yeah.

I had no idea. Or there is an episode where they kill themselves and then the ghosts and they float away. It's like dark, dude. That's extremely dark. That actually sounds more fitting of Hitler, because the Germans are into dark myths for kids. Dude, 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 it and he was so pissed. Yeah. I think he was so mad that he felt betrayed by Disney. It's frustrating because we don't know much about what he thought about the anti-Hitler. 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 he watched it twice. Wow. Yeah. We'll talk more about The Great Dictator at the end, but that's always one of the big mysteries to me is like, did he like it? Was Hitler watching The Great Dictator and just like- Some of them I bet he was flattered.

Yeah. Because it's, I mean, it's one of the great films of all time. Right. Yeah. And they made one about him. They made one about him. I mean, they made many, but like- Yeah.

But they made one about him that like was a groundbreaking film. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I'm sure he probably, 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 censors. There were numerous cases of films that had difficulty getting through Nazi censors that

were nonetheless loved by Hitler. 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 lie 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 he could go write a law, a one sentence law that was immediately put into German like legal codes, quote, whoever sets up a road

block with intent 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 make a new law. He's so influenced. Yeah. It's pretty wild, right? Yeah. He's just like a kid.

He is like a kid. I mean, he's a horrible fucking monster kid. I'm not minimizing. No. 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.

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, movies screened at night were more convincing. True. Still true. Yeah, still true. Hitler. You don't, comedy's the same way.

Yeah. Absolutely. Doing stand-up comedy in daylight is not, there's something about the night for us as human beings that we allow more influence or just sway into our minds. We allow ourselves to go places mentally, whether through a, like a spoken person, whether that's a speech or stand-up. Like how many, I don't know, you just think about so many big things just happen at night. I don't know.

I think, like if I think personally in my own self, like why I'm more influenceable at night, it's because when I wake up in the morning, I usually get a bunch of shit to do. Like I'm not thinking about life, I'm thinking about the stuff that I need to do in my life. Yeah. And then you get around to nighttime and you're probably done with most of that. I don't know, 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. Yeah. I don't know what that, I don't know. I'm sure that's probably even more true for like Friday night. Yeah. And Saturday night comedy shows and movies. Yeah. And the rest of your world is turned off for a few couple 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 or trying to like convinced when he talks about how speeches impact people, you should probably listen to him on that stuff. The guy knew what he was talking about when it comes to that. So pre-Hitler, Germany and many other countries had limited how many films Hollywood could export.

In January of 1932, 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 had 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 aren't the only people who are concerned about their representation in movies, obviously.

The French were particularly emphatic about this. One French man, Baron Valentin Mandelstam, had convinced- That's a great name. Yeah, really great. That's a German name, actually. Yeah, it doesn't. He 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 people trying to influence Hollywood. They're not the only people going in there with kind of like strong arm tactics. One of the criticisms of Ben Irwan's book, The Collaboration, is that he doesn't go into all of this quite enough. It is important to note that the U.S. also had a serious censorship boner at this time. This had started in the 1920s. Like I said, the idea of movie stars who really drove films had come about after 1910. And so during the 20s, you had both an economic boom, obviously, it's the Roaring 20s, 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, of being homosexual or bisexual, like that was a very common thing. There were murders. The stuff that has always been a factor in Hollywood was new at this point and it was shocking to people. And this all came due ahead in the summer of 1921 when Roscoe Faddy Arbuckle was the biggest name in comedy.

You could call him the 20s equivalent of a guy like Chris Farley, almost. Paramount pictures. Interesting because Chris Farley was supposed to play Faddy Arbuckle in a biographical film. I did not know that. Yeah, and died before he could do it. Well, that's... We'll get into what that is because we're going to talk more about Faddy 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 for product. Yeah, you didn't see it, but he pumped his arm exactly once. Yeah. All right, well, listen to this, the ads with your ears. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

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We're back, and we're talking about Fatty Arbuckle and the birth of censorship in Hollywood. So you said he's like the biggest comedic star in the world in 1921, Paramount Pictures had just given him a $3 million 18 film contract, which was the biggest contract in history at the time. They also owned him. This is still part of the system. He's not doing any other movies for anyone else but Paramount because of this contract, but he's fucking loaded because $3 million in fucking 1921 is like all of the money today.

So to celebrate his success, one of Fatty Arbuckle's friends threw a three-day Labor Day Bacchanal 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, so they're able to find liquor anyway. It's like finding drugs now. 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 burns. Oh boy, I love it, when did you start out with that? He said he did not have a good trip. He did not have a good time before the trip. Okay, so before he leaves for his Bacchanal San Francisco Bender Labor Day party, which I would still, that sounds like a great Labor Day. It does sound like a great Labor Day. So he sit, where's he at?

He's at a mechanic's getting his car worked on, and he sits in the chair, and there's an acid-soaked rag in the chair, and it burns his ass. Were batteries the same? Were you getting acid in the car? I don't know. I just assumed acid was all over the place in the place. That's why you never sit down and be like, cool if I sit here? You ask that question first.

No, that's the acid, Jess, son. That's why we keep the acid rags. If I am a mechanic, right, you know how when you go to a mechanic and they're like, don't enter the garage area, or only enter the garage area with one of our employees, I would also post underneath that sign, here's why, and have the story of Fatty Arbuckle City, his ass on an acid-soaked rag. It is the kind of thing. He had acid ass.

If it was a movie starring Fatty Arbuckle, this is exactly what would have happened to our fat, funny protagonist, burns it, and then he's going to sit on a donut the whole movie, and it's funny. What do you mean, Fatty? What do you mean you 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 sitting around? Of course I do. Yeah. Don't you wish sometimes we still had those horse and bogies? Don't get me started. Why? What happened?

I have acid ass. I have acid ass. So Fatty Arbuckle shows up to this party with his acid ass, and he goes to sleep, wakes up in the morning, and there's a shitload of people in the rooms that they'd rented. There's a big party. So he gets drunk, he starts to have a good time, and he meets a 25-year-old actress and fashion model named Virginia Rapp. Arbuckle and Rapp, one version of the story, is that Arbuckle and Rapp go back into a room

and have sex, and somehow her bladder winds up punctured. Whoa. The myth is that he crushed her to death. To death? Yeah, that's one of the myths that Fatty Arbuckle crushed a woman to death. There's no evidence of that. But did she die? She totally died.

Okay, hold on. So everybody goes into separate rooms? No. There's two different versions of the story. Okay, sorry. One woman, who's possibly a con woman, had a history of being a con woman before this, claimed to be a friend of Rapp. 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 tragedy train. And in court, she basically claimed that he sexually assaulted Rapp and her bladder wound up punctured. And that's why she died. 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 were like, oh, this isn't getting better. And this is like 1940. How does one's bladder tend to get popped from a punch? Well, sorry, I feel like I'm jumping ahead. I don't really know. Okay, yeah. What we know is that in the autopsy, there was no signs of violence on the body.

And that Arbuckle and multiple other guests claimed that they never had sex and were 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 consensual or non-consensual.

Yeah. But either way, in the course of that, his either weight or aggression. Or just, yeah. Harmed her in a way that eventually killed her. Yes. The other theory is she just drank a lot, somehow ruptured her own bladder. She had some sort of... Didn't have sex with anybody.

Yeah. There's no signs of any sort of abuse or sex. And there's no signs of violence. Of violence is what I should say. Yeah, exactly. And they put her in a hotel to be like, yeah, go sleep off the thing that's killing you. And they're sure enough she slept it off forever. Well, they took her to a hospital eventually.

Oh, yeah. But then she died in the hospital. Yeah. And it doesn't really, like, it seems like Arbuckle was probably innocent with what we know today because this case has been re-litigated for decades. But at the time, there was a huge court case about it. And it exposed the wild lifestyles of legal drinking and general 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 was like... Really? Yeah. This was like shocking to people at the time. Yeah. Because you don't have what we have today.

Literally, this is deaths, murders, suicides, and scandal, like, are the only times the general American public is hearing about what the hell these celebrities are doing. Yeah. You could literally just... You could just do whatever you wanted. Yeah. Yeah. 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 isn't her husband. Yeah, that too. Like, so this is shocking to people at the time. They get 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 1922.

This become... Basically, they create the MPAA, because this is where the MPAA comes from. And the head of the MPAA at first is a guy named William Hayes, who was a former postmaster general. One of Hayes' first acts was to ban Fatty Arbuckle from ever appearing in another movie. Whoa. Yeah. Now, that ban was reversed eight months later, but it was too...

This is the end of Fatty's career, is like a big star. And this is the end of him being a part of this podcast, because he was not a Nazi. So this sets up where Hollywood is at the time, because again, one of the criticisms of Erwan'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. Now in 1930, the MPAA adopted the Production Code, which is more commonly known as the Hayes Code.

And the Hayes 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 for 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, lower the moral standards of those who see it. No, let me ask you. This is also like, this is in response to the public outcry of a scandal of like what's

happening in Hollywood, right? It's a bunch of different scandals. So our buckle is why this. Because it just seems weird to me that they're like, oh, in their personal life they're acting like this. Yeah, but as far as what they put on film, we'll make sure that that makes you 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, too 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. This was essentially the industry being like, well, all right, we've got to stay within the lines. Otherwise we're going to get shut down by the government. We're going to pun intended project a good image.

Yeah, exactly. And so, and another factor in this is that like in 27 or I think it is the, they start making talkies. And so that there are more concerns than because film is growing from a novelty to a serious fact at the center of like American culture. Yeah, big industry. Exactly. So in 1930, they clamped down even further and make this Production Code.

So again, no pictures allowed to lower the moral standards of those who see it. It states that the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the site of crime, wrongdoing, sin or evil. So like 80% of the 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, suggestive dancing was banned as was kissing with too much lust.

Whether 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 give people an idea of how to actually commit that crime. Interracial romance, the concept of revenge, and what was the last thing? 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 the 1980s when MacGyver showed everybody how to make a pipe on TV and then a kid went out and did it.

Well, I feel like that's a public service. The only thing that's going to stop a bad guy with a pipe bomb is a good guy with a pipe bomb. A good kid with a pipe bomb. Yeah, a good kid with a pipe bomb. A good 15 year old with a pipe bomb. Oh boy, we don't talk about pipe bombs enough anymore. Thankfully.

Yeah, because all the guns. One thing at a time, brother. All right, so in the collaboration, Ben Erland argues that studios work directly with the Nazi government in a way that was unique and novel. Who did this? Ben? The guy who wrote this book. Yeah, oh yeah.

Okay. Again, I'm trying to give both sides of this. Sure. Sure. You got to set up that censorship is everywhere. Right. And other countries are also agitating to have films censored because they're offended at one thing or another.

How they want to be viewed. Ben 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 whether or not it was a collaboration where the studios were actually working with the Nazis or if it was just normal censorship. So I'm going to let you make your own mind up on that. Okay.

I'm going to let you, the listener, make your mind up on that. I'm going to try to sort of present both sides of this. What no one doubts is that during the time the Nazis were in power up until World War two started references to Nazis and references to Jewish people were severely curtailed in movies and in fact often cut out entirely. Now one thing everyone seems to agree on is that greed was a major factor behind this because in 1932, the Germans introduced Article 15 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 effect of which is detrimental 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 60 a year or something like that. And generally most studios, they're going to need about 10 to a dozen movies accepted to make a profit in Germany. So what Article 15 said is that all permits to a film producer can be stopped if they distribute anywhere in the world a movie that is detrimental to German prestige.

So 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 going to stop you if you do a movie anywhere in the world that we don't like. Exactly. So that starts to be how the Germans approach things is like, we will cut Hollywood off from Germany if you make movies anywhere that we don't like. So yeah, now this is 1932, 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 I, Hollywood had made a lot of anti-German pictures, right? So like this is not just a Nazi thing, but the Nazis really amp it up to the nth level. So that German guy who came to Hollywood, Dr. Freudenthal, to sort of like talk to them about how they represented Germans. 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 a German

POW camp. So 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 from his time in LA, 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. Freudenthal meets with several German officials, including Joseph Goebbels. I'm going to quote from the collaboration here.

Everyone listened as Freudenthal 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 Karl Lamely of Universal Pictures, and as a result of their meeting, Lamely had agreed to postpone the sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front, entitled The Road Back. Throughout the rest of the year, Freudenthal had met with Lamely's son, Karl Lamely Jr.,

and many more pictures were changed in Germany's favor. Naturally, Freudenthal 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 the German market. Other studio heads were just as obliging. An executive at RKO promised that whenever he made a film involving Germany, he would work, quote, in close collaboration with the local console general. An executive at 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 Collaboration for his book. It does seem like there was an active working relationship with these studios. Them saying, look, we get what you guys are doing over there. 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 at all. Is it too far of a reach to say that if you make a movie, the Nazis like, all the Nazis are going to go see it? Like if it's endorsed by the government to go see it, they would all go see it, right? I mean, not all of it. It's very popular. And actually, we're going to get into that in a little bit. So one of the things that's interesting here is the Nazis have sort of come down to us

from history as 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 discussing that quite a bit later on. So Freud and Paul suggested that someone should permanently have the job 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 Freud and Paul probably wanted that job for himself, but he didn't wound up getting it. A diplomat named George Gisling actually got the job. And Gisling's first big task was a movie called Captured, which featured scenes of German soldiers beating up captured British soldiers and denying them water. Gisling demanded that this all be cut, and when it wasn't, he flipped his shit. Captured was declared by the Nazis to be the worst hate film since World War I. Gisling activated Article 15 and stopped Warner Brothers from receiving permits from any more

films. Ever. In 1934, the company closed its Berlin office. A scholar named Doherty, 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 studio's kind of the heroes at this point, because they made their movie. They refused to change.

They refused. They did change it somewhat, because Gisling had some points that were like, okay, maybe that is unfair. But they still made a movie that the Nazis didn't like, and the Nazis completely cut them out of Germany. And so they said, fine, let's close our office, we're not going to keep fighting with you. Well, they closed their office. I mean, they lost a lot of money on that.

But yeah, they did close their office. And they left Germany. I mean, they were forced to leave Germany. So on March 29, 1933, UFA, the major German film company at the time, their big studio that was actually making movies in Germany, fired most of its best writers, directors, crew members, and talent. I'm going to give you one guess as to why they fired all these people at once. They were Jewish?

Yup. And it turns out that most of their film industry people in Germany were Jewish, too. The Salesman Syndicate, a Nazi organization, sent letters to American film studios with offices in Germany and ordered them to fire all of their Jewish employees as well. Wait, say that to me again? The Salesman Syndicate, which was a Nazi organization, like a Nazi almost like a labor union for Nazi salesmen, sent letters to American film studios with offices in Germany and ordered them to fire all of their Jewish employees.

So 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 say- Right. They said to Lemley and all these other people like, hey. You can't have any Jewish people employed in Germany. You know, they're not saying you have to fire your Jewish people. You do whatever you want in America. We'll get to that later.

We'll get to that later. But they start by saying you can't employ Jewish people within Germany. Now, in fairness to the companies, none of the studios obliged instantly. 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 granted them protection too,

like state protection to Jewish employees of 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 most of their Jewish employees in Germany. So these people were able to stay at their jobs until January of 1936 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 much because they understood movies were valuable for like people's morale. And so they were like, well, OK, 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.

So actually for a while, this goes great for the Hollywood studios. And in fact, in 1933, they sell 65 pictures because they're the only people making movies that German German citizens can get. Yeah. And Germany can't really make movies for a while. Yeah. So in, you know, in, yeah, it's a boom. And in 1932, before Hitler was in power, they'd sold 54 films to Germany in 1933.

They sell 65. So this is seeming great for the studios, you know, you got to deal, you got to work with the Nazis a little bit, but by God, the money comes in. Yeah. It's like a, what is that? Like a 20% increase. 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 1933, a screenwriter named Herman Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz. Yeah. Who wrote, he was the guy who wrote Citizen Kane later. Yeah. So he decided to write a movie that explicitly attacked the Nazis and brought up the attacks that Jewish people had to endure under Nazi rule.

He wrote a screenplay titled The Mad Dog of Europe. Anyway, this is what? 36? 33. This is the same year. So he's early on this. He's very early on this. This is when the studios.

He's already being like, shit's going down over here. Yeah. This is fucked up. Right. The Nazis are a problem. Somebody should make a movie about that. Put that into paper and go after them. Yeah.

Exactly. So he writes a script and a producer, Sam Jaff buys the idea and leaps into trying to film it. Jaff was so shocked that there were no other anti-Nazi movies in production in Hollywood that he got terrified someone was about 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 its subject merits, I hereby ask the motion picture industry to kindly respect my priority rights. Whoa. So he puts out an ad being like, no one else making anti-Nazi movie right now. I'm making a great anti-Nazi movie. This is what Dante's Peak should have done with Volcano. Oh yeah? Put out an ad?

Yes. Or the Prestige should have done with that other magician movie that came out. Or what's the other one? The impact in Armageddon. I feel like it happens about every two years. One of them should have asked for priority. Yeah. In Hollywood.

Guys, I'm making the definitive fuck Hitler movie. Yeah. Nobody else would make a fuck Hitler movie. 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 going to be the fuck Hitler movie to fuck all fuck Hitler movies. Now, I've never read the screenplay Erwan, who wrote the collaboration, did, and he doesn't 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 Jews and would have been

groundbreaking, because that did not happen before 1940, period. And no movie was there a depiction of Nazi violence against Jewish people before 1940. 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 Jisling couldn't bring Article 15 against him, since his company, he wasn't working with one of the big studios. He started his own independent production company. So there wasn't anything that Jisling could do to them, because like, we're not in Germany. What are you going to do?

Well, Jisling went to the Hayes office, or at least Erlan suspects that Jisling went to the Hayes office. We don't exactly know what happened. Erwan suspects that Jisling went to 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 fact. What we know is that Will Hayes, America's chief censor, had a meeting with Sam Jaff and Herman Mankiewicz very shortly after that.

And Hayes allegedly told them, quote, 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 Jisling did go to Hayes and be like, I'm going to ban America from Germany, American movies from Germany, if you don't stop this shit. Right.

Because he certainly says that. Or Hayes 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, that's shitty. Either way, it's gutless.

Right. Yeah. So Jaff wound up selling the script to a guy named Rosen, because he couldn't raise the money himself. Al Rosen was an early film industry agent. He got as far as buying film stock and casting who would have been the very first Hitler ever in motion picture history, other than the actual hit. But the project died on the vine.

He also couldn't find additional financial backing to make the movie. Louis Meyer of MGM told him, quote, because we have interest in Germany, I represent the film and picture industry here in Hollywood. We have exchanges there. We have terrific income from Germany. And as far as I am concerned, this picture will never be made. See. Yeah.

All that, like, Mankiewicz or Jaffy or Jaff could have had to say was like, yeah, but they're doing fucked up shit. They're doing fucked up shit. And it seems, seems, 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. Tough to do. Yeah. As you would hear. Yeah. Nazis are bad, but someone's got to fucking pay the rent, buddy. Good. Yep.

Now, I think we've clearly seen some evidence of what could be fairly called collaboration so far. But there 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 in anti-Semitism and in anti-Semitic violence in the United States, 20,000 Nazis marched in Madison Square Garden in the 30s.

Like, there were camps all around the United States for American. You don't hear about that very much. You do not hear about that. There were fascist rallies all over the United States. Oh, in the Pacific Palisades, the Nazis bought a chunk of land to make a retreat in the early 30s. What is it now? Oh, it's a graffiti sanctuary, essentially.

Really? Yeah. Yeah. Some of the old buildings are still there and it just gets tagged a bunch. It's a beautiful hike. Holy shit. Yeah. Look up Hitler's house and it wasn't actually Hitler's house, so I think it was supposed

to be like a spa, basically. But if you look up Hitler's house, Pacific Palisades, you'll find how to have a hike up there. It's a beautiful hike. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

There was a lot of fascist sympathy in the United States at this point. What is that about? What is that about? Would you say anti-Semitism in America? Anti-Semitism was everywhere. But I mean, here, there was just so many people that were like, yeah, we think the Jews are the problem, too. Yeah.

And it was less, I think people here were less hateful about us than they were in Europe, but it was very common. It was very common to view the idea that Jewish people controlled, I mean, they did control the film industry at this point. But the idea, to go back to your other episode behind the bastards of Hitler, the scapegoat became that the Jews were undermining the government's ability to come back to power. Right? Yeah.

That's how it initially started. Yeah. So what was the feeling here that they just were bad people? No, it's the same idea that has persisted for a while that, so Jewish families 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 charging interest. That was a religious, like it was forbidden, it's still forbidden for Muslims, I think

for whatever reason, Catholics and Protestants have gotten over that shit in recent years. For a long time, pretty much the only people who could run a bank were Jewish people. And so they got a toehold in that industry and that has been a major factor in the rise of anti-Semitism. It's not talked about a lot now, like we tend to think of the Nazis as really stirring up anti, I mean they did, but there was a lot of it present in Europe and the United States. There are still churches all throughout Europe that have stained glass reliefs of which called a Judensau, 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. 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, anti-Semitism did not start with the Nazis and it was everywhere prior to World War II. 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 on the United States prior to World War II

and we're seeing anti-Semitism surge in the United States prior to World War II. 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 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 needed to address like the issues that the Nazis raised. Rabbi Stephen Wise of the American Jewish Congress said this in 1933, the time for caution and prudence has passed, what is happening in Germany today may happen tomorrow 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 none of these are uniform groups, there are a lot of Jewish people saying, fucking Hollywood ought to do something, but there's also a lot of very scared people in Hollywood being like, maybe it's bad to do anything. So that speaker I just quoted was from the American Jewish Congress who called for a total boycott on German products in 1930. Now the American Jewish Committee and the Benai Brith protested this, they were more on the don't rock the boat side of things and those Jewish advocacy groups had 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. From 1900 to 1929, some 230 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 from 28 to 1934, 63 Hollywood movies had featured Jewish characters in the next six years from 1934 to 1939, 40, only 24 films featured Jewish actors. So yeah, about two thirds is what this drops by.

And we're going to get into why right now. See in 1934, a former Warner Brothers employee named Daryl Zanuck 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, 20th 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 veiled attack on Hitler because it would be talking about how Jewish people had been persecuted a century or so ago in Europe.

But it would clearly be, he thought people would, you know, yeah, right. So yeah, though it was set in the 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 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. Really? Yeah, it was not intentionally so. 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 Zanuck's heart is in the right place. Yeah. Yeah. 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 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 Rothschilds, who always work together. That will be your power. And remember this before all, neither business nor power nor all the gold in Europe will bring you happiness till we, our people, have a quality respect dignity, to trade with dignity, to live with dignity, to walk the world with dignity. So he's trying.

That's great. There's a good message in here. There's a good message in here. Yeah. But it's couched in like a story about bankers who, like a big part of the movie focuses on. It's like serving tropes. Exactly.

While trying to comment intelligently. Exactly. And it focuses a lot on Nathan Rothschild, 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. It also had a lot of people who loved it. And a lot of Jewish people in America thought it was a heroic movie.

And it still has a reputation as like, for whatever you will say about its flaws, at least he tried. Yeah. Right? Like you can't, you can't condims it. When other people seem 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 1930s, Jewish actors started getting less and less work. It's debatable as to how much of that 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 an indisputed Jewish people started disappearing from the silver screen long before the Germans disappeared them en masse from Europe. We do know at least that the Nazis were fans of the House of Rothschild. In 1940, they released The Eternal Jew, which is one of the vilest propaganda films in all

of history. That film included that scene from Zinach's movie where the elder Rothschild cheats a 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 Amschel

Rothschild cheats his host state by fanning 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. You gotta do a spin it, man. Yep.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Are you are you? No one's trying and the person who's trying is making some mistakes and then also fueling the fire of the people he's against. Yeah.

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. Yeah. That they're like, oh yeah, we don't even want you making movies that could infringe on Hollywood's profitability in Germany.

Don't rock the boat. Or Nazi Germany to be more specific. Yeah. So we're going to get into the rest of this possible collaboration. And we're also going to talk about the pro fascist movies that Americans made completely by accident. Really? In this period of time.

Yeah. It's a wacky story, Daniel. But this is where part one's going to end. Okay. So the listener's going to have to catch the rest of this on Thursday. Daniel, at the end of this episode, do you have any pluggables to plug? Yes. I would like to let people know I am starting Daniel Van Kerk, the together tour that will

start on the 18th of September. And I'm going to be hitting up a whole bunch of cities. The first leg of it is Houston, Austin, Dallas, Lafayette and Baton Rouge. If you go to DanielVanKerk.com or my Twitter handle at DanielVanKerk, you can find all that information there. And I will also be doing a live Dump People Town, October 25th, 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 IWriteOK. You can find this podcast on the internet at BehindTheBastards.com, which is where all of the sources for today's podcast will be listed. You can also find us on Twitter and Instagram at atBastardspod. So check us out. And I will see you all in like two days to talk more about Nazis in Hollywood. Mm.

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