Hitler and Goebbels in honor box, as everyone salutes, at Charlottenburg Theatre. (Getty Images)
A poster advertising the film “All Quiet on the Western Front.” (Getty Images)
During the 1930’s golden age of Hollywood, executives throughout the movie industry slowly went from being influenced by Nazis in Germany to being totally under their control, according to a controversial new book.
In an excerpt obtained by the Hollywood Reporter from the upcoming book “The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler” written by Ben Urwand (Harvard University Press, on sale Sept. 9), the author reveals shocking details about the close “collaboration” between Hollywood and Nazi officials.
At the time Germany was the second largest film market in the world and high ranking Nazis, including head of propaganda Joseph Goebbels, realized that they could pressure Hollywood by threatening to ban American films from Germany.
The first film to feel the squeeze of Nazi pressure was the 1930 film “All Quiet on the Western Front,” which personally offended Goebbels and prompted Nazis to throw stink bombs and release mice into a screening of the film.
After the German public enthusiastically lined up behind the riotous Nazis, the film was banned because: “French soldiers went to their deaths quietly and bravely, [while] the German soldiers howled and shrieked with fear,” according to the book excerpt.
Universal Pictures, who produced the film, quickly moved to edit the film so that it could get past Nazi censors but even after changes were made, the Germans came back with yet another condition: the edited version of the film needed to be the only version of the film shown all over the world.
The studio eventually agreed to the world-wide edit but the incident proved to the Nazis that they could bend Hollywood to their will.
On the front lines of the Nazi campaign to change Hollywood was the German consul in Los Angeles Georg Gyssling, who had been a Nazi since 1931.
Gyssling built off the successful attack on “All Quiet on the Western Front” by threatening Hollywood with a German film regulation known as “Article 15.” The edict said that if a company released an anti-German film anywhere in the world, then the company would be banned from releasing any films in Germany.
Weilding the threat of Article 15, Gyssling went on a full offensive against the film industry and even managed delay the production of “The Road Back,” the sequel to “All Quiet on the Western Front” and to outright cancel a film called “The Mad Dog of Europe” which was an attack on the Nazi’s written by “Citizen Kane” screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz.
While studios could figure out the logic behind the Nazi’s hatred of a film like “The Mad Dog of Europe,” the party’s censor eventually became so brazen that studios turned to ever increasing acts of desperation to remain on Germany’s good side.
In one ghastly case, the head of MGM in Germany, Frits Strengholt, actually divorced his Jewish wife and she was sent to a concentration camp.
To read about how the Nazis went on to have editorial control over all the films produced in Hollywood head to the Hollywood Reporter.