So, just how vile a man was Veit Harlan, who has gone down in infamy for directing “Jew Suss” (1940), considered to be the Nazis’ most vicious anti-Semitic film?
Was Harlan — twice tried for and acquitted of crimes against humanity — a willing collaborator with Hitler’s gang? Or was he forced to make the film?
Writer-director Felix Moeller examines this question in the documentary “Harlan — In the Shadow of Jew Suss.”
Moeller mixes recent interviews with Harlan’s large extended family (he was married three times and had five children) with newsreels and intimate home movies.
Interestingly, one of the talking heads is niece Christiane Kubrick, widow of Stanley Kubrick.
The interviewees mostly condemn the film, but some question Harlan’s motives. Daughter Susanne Korber, who didn’t see the movie until she was in her 70s, says, “I just wept and was in despair. And I couldn’t even imagine that my father had really done this . . . I found it horrific. I felt like going outside and puking.”
While son Caspar Harlan has little use for “Jew Suss,” he insists that his father “was certainly not anti-Semitic, and certainly not a Nazi. Not at all.”
Moeller is lucky that so many of Harlan’s relatives are still with us, thus allowing him to present firsthand experiences. Moeller avoids sensationalism or pointing fingers, letting each side have its say and allowing viewers to decide Harlan’s agenda for themselves.
“Jew Suss” is set in 18th-century Germany and claims to tell the true story of a Jew who disguised himself as a Christian and wormed his way into the government to level punitive taxes on the public.
Another Harlan work, “Kolberg” (1945), inspired the film within the film in “Inglourious Basterds.”
Harlan made some 30 films from 1935 to 1962; he was 64 when he died in Capri, Italy, in 1964.