Hitler’s Hollywood

How was the Holocaust possible? It’s the question often asked when considering genocidal crimes against humanity.  Was it something about German people? This was widely believed in the years following WWII, but not so much today. Alternately, do all people have destructive tendencies that may surface anywhere, at any time? If so, what are the conditions that breed genocide?

The usual historical examples note that in Germany in the 1930s,  newspapers like Dur Sturmer openly advocated extermination of Jewish people with some of the most virulent hate speech in world history.  For this,  Dur Sturmer editor Julius Streicher was executed  in 1946 under the Nuremberg principle that complicity in a crime against humanity is also a crime.  The same principle was applied to film makers like Leni Riefenstahl  and Fritz Hippler, who were were  imprisoned after the war.

Like most examples, they tend to be small and isolated, a kind of historical shorthand that doesn’t  fit the larger question.  Surely, an event so enormous as the Holocaust had cultural causes far deeper than a few newspapers and films.

This is the gap that “Hitler’s Hollywood” addresses.  It shows that the Nazis orchestrated a broad culture of lies and hatred on the one hand while creating a myth of a heroic, steadfast and pure civilization on the other.   Over 1,000 films created during the 1930s and 1940s, across a broad range of styles, were created to serve these ends.

It’s worth remembering that when Hannah Arendt contemplated the “banality of evil” during the trial of Holocaust mastermind Adolph Eichmann in 1961,  the concern was not that evil had become ordinary, but rather that the lack of “intentions” and ethical thinking had become so routine that even the worst human behavior had become possible.   

Film, which addresses emotions more than reason, turns out to be a spectacularly useful tool for evil as well as for good.