Tabletmag.com: After the Nazi films unreel, many moviegoers are struck by how technically proficient and aesthetically compelling the films are. “It makes me ill because it was so good,” says one queasy spectator after taking in The Jew Süss. No wonder; even after the Jewish talent was purged from the German film industry in 1933-1934, enough Weimar-era expertise remained in harness to show why German cinema was the only competition on the planet the Hollywood moguls really worried about. The regime also backed up its vision with the kind of resources and budget that today’s German filmmakers “can only dream about,” marvels director Margarethe von Trotta, who happens to be Moeller’s mother, after a screening of Uncle Kruger (Ohm Krüger, 1941), a lavish biopic of the Boer leader Paul Kruger, starring the great Emil Jannings, who abandoned Hollywood to become Goebbels’ prize poodle.
For not a few spectators, the seductive quality of the cinema breeds a fear that, if let loose, the Nazi films can be a gateway drug into the harder stuff. Filmed in shadows, a pair of former neo-Nazis confirms that the vintage Nazi fare is useful as bonding bait for new recruits, though even they scoff at The Eternal Jew as over the top. After watching The Jew Süss, a theater-full of French high school kids is nearly unanimous in voting to ban it from television broadcasts: The susceptible masses need to be protected from material that should be reserved “for the educated bourgeoisie.” A man at a cinematheque in Jerusalem demurs, arguing that The Jew Süss should be shown to every schoolchild in Israel, so they can be familiar with it, understand it, and “dispute and reject it.”
…Spearheaded by the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights, which closely monitored and vigorously protested the exhibition of Nazi films in the 1930s, American Jewish groups rallied to close down any screening emanating from the Third Reich. Only a handful of specialty houses survived to serve German audiences—some pro-Nazi, some just wanting to hear the language of the home country. S.A.-Mann Brand (1933) and Hitlerjunge Quex (1933), two of the German youth exploitation films featured by Moeller, got brief releases in the Yorkville Theatre in New York, but the remaining German-language houses stuck to melodramatic and musical fare with little overt Nazi proselytizing. Many of the imported Nazi films didn’t even bother with English language subtitling, and none of them (in contrast to the glories of Weimar-era cinema) broke through to the American mainstream.
