Film as Propaganda

The 1940 costume melodrama was used to stoke up hatred of Jews in 21 nations. It was a favorite of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who had funded it.

"The film is an overwhelming success," he gloated in his diary in 1940. "The audience was seething. This is the first really anti-Semitic film."

The movie, a remake of a story that had previously had a pro-Jewish slant, depicts a Jewish businessman, Joseph Süss, manipulating the government of a German ducal state, raping a German girl and being condemned.

Unlike the Nazi pseudo-documentary "Der ewige Jude" (The Eternal Jew), which came out in the same year and which blatantly exploited racist stereotypes, "Jud Süss" was commissioned to get the Nazi chauvinistic message across in the more subtle guise of a familiar Hollywood-style historical drama.

It will be shown at the Baden-Württemberg history museum in Stuttgart, the city where the real Joseph Süss Oppenheimer was executed on trumped-up charges in 1738.

Nazi propaganda

Paula Lutum-Lenger, the curator, said the museum exhibition, open till August 3 next year, explains the tricks used by the Nazis to make the film audience hate Jews.

The one-hour movie was seen by 20 million people in Nazi Germany and paramilitary chief Heinrich Himmler made it compulsory for all police and SS members to see it.

Jewish concentration camp inmates say they received extra rough treatment on the day after Nazi guards had been to screenings.

The movie is banned from general screening in Germany today and can only be shown with a commentary explaining its falsehoods. At the exhibition, six scenes from the film run continuously as video.

Documenting the past

The 600-square-meter show, which opened on Friday, Dec. 15, includes film posters, the script, old cameras from Babelsberg Studios near Berlin and facsimile documents about the real Süss, who modern Stuttgart people are curious to learn more about.

The 16 full screenings will be preceded by lectures and followed by panel discussions.

The real Joseph Süss Oppenheimer (1698-1738) was chief financial adviser to the Duke of Württemberg. His opponents used the vilest anti-Semitic claims to execute him after his patron Duke Karl Alexander died.

His life was fictionalized in a German novella by Wilhelm Hauff in 1827 and a best-selling 1925 novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, but the plot was only rewritten into a hate script in the Nazi film directed by Veit Harlan (1899-1964).

Films were one of Göbbels' key instruments in manipulating public opinion: he described movies as a "weapon" of "total war."

The exhibition also details how Harlan and the cast tried to wriggle out of blame after the war.

Harlan was tried in Hamburg for crimes against humanity, but acquitted after judges said they could not establish a causal linkage in law between the film and the Holocaust.