The Eternal Jew is a 1940 German antisemiticAntisemitic: Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, Susanne Zantop. The imperialist imagination: German colonialism and its legacy, University of Michigan Press, 1998, p. 173. Jack Fischel, The Holocaust, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998, pp. 15–16. David Stewart Hull. Film in the Third Reich: a study of the German cinema, 1933–1945, University of California Press, 1969, pp. 157–158. Marvin Perry, Frederick M. Schweitzer. Antisemitism: myth and hate from antiquity to the present, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, p. 78. Hershel Edelheit, Abraham J. Edelheit. A world in turmoil: an integrated chronology of the Holocaust and World War II, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1991, 388. Nazi propaganda film,1940 propaganda film: "The Eternal Jew ranks as one of the most virulent propaganda films ever made." Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, I.B.Tauris, 2006, p. 174. "Fritz Hippler used an idea suggested by the Propaganda Ministry's anti-Jewish expert, Dr. Taubert, and produced the film The Eternal Jew." Robert Edwin Herzstein, The War that Hitler Won: The Most Infamous Propaganda Campaign in History, Putnam, 1977, p. 309. "Of the Nazi propaganda films with an antisemitic message, Jud Suss (Jew Suss, 1940) was without doubt the most popular and widely seen... The popularity of Jew Suss contrasts sharply with reactions to Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, 1940)..." Toby Haggith, Joanna Newman, Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television Since 1933, Wallflower Press, 2005, p. 74. "Of course, the Nazis also made more conventional propaganda films, the most famous being, perhaps, The Eternal Jew." Andrea Dworkin, Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation, Simon & Schuster, 2001, p. 164. "The Eternal Jew. Nazi propaganda film of 1940 that summarized the whole Nazi rationale for the disposition against Jews." Robert Michael, Karin Doerr, Nazi-Deutsch/Nazi-German: An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third Reich, Greenwood Press, 2002, p. 154. presented as a documentary. The initial German title was , the German term for the character of the "Wandering Jew" in medieval folklore. Directed by Fritz Hippler at the insistence of the Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, the screenplay is credited to Eberhard Taubert and narrated by Harry Giese; it consists of feature and documentary footage combined with materials filmed shortly after the Nazi occupation of Poland. At this time, Poland's Jewish population was about three million, roughly ten percent of the total population.
Background
Hitler and Goebbels believed that film was a vital tool for molding public opinion. The Nazis first established a film department in 1930 and Goebbels had taken a personal interest in the use of film to promote the Nazi philosophy and agenda. Soon after the Nazi takeover, Goebbels insisted in speeches that the role of the German cinema was to serve as the "vanguard of the Nazi military".
The Goebbels film appears to have been intended as a virulently antisemitic remake of the 1933 British film The Wandering Jew, which argued that Jews were victims of relentless persecution throughout history. Saul Friedländer suggests that Goebbels' intent was to counter three films: Jew Süss, The House of Rothschild, and The Wandering Jew. These three films, all released in 1933–34, showed that Jews were persecuted throughout history; the Goebbels films presented the opposite message.
In 1937, a special wing of the Propaganda Ministry put on an art exhibition in Munich titled Der ewige Jude. It followed this up with the publication of a book of the same title, consisting of 265 photographs, each with a derogatory caption asserting the degeneracy of the Jews.
In November 1938, Goebbels made a series of attacks against the Jews in the German media that were a factor leading to the pogrom known as Kristallnacht. Despite the emotional satisfaction afforded the Nazis by carrying out their antisemitism with direct violence, Kristallnacht was considered by Hitler to have been a political disaster both within Germany and internationally. Not only did the brutality indirectly caused by Goebbels evoke harsh criticism internationally, the mixed reaction in the German media showed a lack of broad-based support among Germans for antisemitic violence.
Hitler expressed his frustration and anger at the mixed response from the German media and insisted that, instead of openly calling for violence against the Jews as Goebbels had in instigating the pogrom, Nazi propaganda should "elucidate events of foreign policy" in such a way that the German people themselves would call for violence against the Jews.
In response to Hitler's harsh reprimand, Goebbels launched a campaign to promote the antisemitic views of the Nazis to the German populace. He ordered each film studio to make an antisemitic film. In the case of The Eternal Jew, Goebbels conceived of a film that would communicate to the German people the same antisemitic message that had been the theme of the 1937 Munich exhibition. Hitler preferred films such as The Eternal Jew which presented the Nazi antisemitic agenda openly and directly; however Goebbels disliked the crudeness of such straightforward approaches, preferring the much more subtle approach of couching antisemitic messages in an engaging story with popular appeal. The film Jud Süß is an example of Goebbels' preferred approach.
Production Although Goebbels did not generally take an active role in particular films' production, he elected to do so in the case of major propaganda such as The Eternal Jew. The film was in production for over a year. Throughout the end of 1939 and the beginning of 1940, Goebbels devoted "constant attention" to the production of what he referred to as "the Jew film". Hippler had directed a documentary entitled Feldzug in Polen that was released in February 1940 to great success, and it was for this reason that he was chosen by Goebbels to direct The Ethernal Jew.
As early as 1938, Goebbels had wanted to have a film crew travel to Poland to shoot the ghetto scenes; however, he was unable to gain permission from the Polish government. In October and November 1939, almost immediately after the German-Soviet invasion of Poland, he instructed Hippler to send camera crews to Łódź, Warsaw, Kraków and Lublin to shoot footage of Polish Jews. Goebbels was disappointed with the footage Hippler shot as he wanted more footage of "Jewish types of all kinds". He sent Eberhard Fangauf and Josef Henke to advise Hippler and Eberhard Taubert's camera crews.
A rough cut was completed by 18 November 1939. Otto von Kursell suggested ending the film with Hitler's speech from 30 January. Goebbels made additional edits shortly before the German invasion of western Europe.
The footage that Hippler shot in the Jewish ghettos of those cities in German-occupied Poland was the only footage shot specifically for the purpose of the film. At the beginning, animated text informs the audience that this "documentary footage" shows Jews in their original state "before they put on the mask of civilized Europeans." In the Nazi press, Hippler expanded on this claim, asserting that his filming techniques captured Jews "in an unprejudiced manner, real to life as they live and as they react in their own surroundings."
Although Hippler advertised the film as being a factual documentary consisting of pictures of real Jews with nothing faked or simulated, his claims were complete falsehoods. In reality, the film was an exercise in manipulation for the purposes of propaganda. In shooting his footage, Hippler did in fact simulate scenes and use actors who were performing under duress and without knowledge of how the footage would be employed. For example, in order to get shots of Jewish worship services, Hippler and Goebbels assembled the congregation of the Vilker synagogue and ordered them to wear the tallithim and tefillin and to hold a full-scale service. When the Germans ordered the Torah reader to read from the Torah, he started by saying on camera "Today is Tuesday" signalling that his reading of the Torah was coerced since it was not customary to read the Torah on Tuesdays.
Aside from the footage shot in Poland, the rest of the film consisted of stills and archival footage from feature films (such as 1931's M and 1934's The House of Rothschild, the latter being a Hollywood production) often without permission, that the film presented as if they were documentary footage. The film used an excerpt from the 1934 American film The House of Rothschild that was presented out of context. A scene that was presented as comical where the members of the Rothschild family hide their expensive clothing and put on shabby clothes when a local tax-collector pays them a visit was presented as an example of dishonest business practices.
Format and structure The film was produced in a documentary format and, like other Hippler films, relied heavily on narration.
The film can be roughly divided into four thematic areas: Recordings from Polish ghettos Enumeration and evaluation of numerous political, cultural and social values in the international arena of Jewish origin Jewish religious ceremonies, religious instruction, worship, ritual slaughter Adolf Hitler's Reichstag speech, parading SA troops
Themes Richard Barsam writes the film's "essential contrast is between myths and stereotypes of Jews and the Nazi ideal of a 'master race,' between the alleged inferiority of the Jews and the superiority of the Germans." According to Stephen Fritz, Goebbels' intent was to create a film that would serve as "both a demonstration of the parasitical nature of the Jews and a justification for drastic measures against them." Maria Tatar writes that the Nazis were able to use Hippler's film to "position the victims of their genocidal project as dangerous aggressors who had to be exterminated." Similarly, Barsam describes the film as arguing that "Jews are criminals;... they have no soul;... they are different in every way;... killing them is not a crime, but a necessity—just as killing rats is a necessity to preserve health and cleanliness."
Unser Wille und Weg (Our Will and Way), a Nazi Party monthly publication aimed at propagandists, provides a rationale for why The Eternal Jew was made. The author of the essay "The Film of a 2000-Year Rat Migration," who remains anonymous, believes the film shows "a full picture of Jewry" and provides "the best treatment of this parasitic race." The author connects the Jews' migration from the Middle East to Egypt and their following of German colonists to rats traveling as a group, who "even then displayed the same criminal traits that they still displayed". The film is complimented for "its portrayal of the Jews' vulgar methods and the brutality and all-devouring hatred they exhibit when they reach their goal and control finance." The slaughtering method causes the author to question the "so-called Jewish religion", as grinning butchers do their work. In closing, the author states the film will be a valuable tool in the struggle to break the Jews' "power over us. We are the initiators of the fight against world Jewry, which now directs its hate, its brutal greed and destructive will toward us. We must win this battle for ourselves, for Europe, for the world."