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The Eternal Jew
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The Eternal Jew is a 1940 antisemitic Nazi propaganda film. Its title in German is Der ewige Jude, the German term for the character of the "Wandering Jew" in medieval folklore. At the insistence of Nazi Germany's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, the film was directed by Fritz Hippler. The screenplay is credited to Eberhard Taubert. The film consists of feature and documentary footage combined with materials filmed shortly after the Nazi occupation of Poland.
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The Eternal Jew is a 1940 antisemitic Nazi propaganda film. Its title in German is Der ewige Jude, the German term for the character of the "Wandering Jew" in medieval folklore. At the insistence of Nazi Germany's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, the film was directed by Fritz Hippler. The screenplay is credited to Eberhard Taubert. The film 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. Actor Harry Giese (1903–1991) narrated.
A British film of the same name had been produced by Gaumont-Twickenham studies in 1934. Unlike the later Nazi film, this production portrayed the Jews in a favorable light as the victims of unjustified persecution throughout history, by the likes of the Inquisition. The Goebbels film appears to be have been intended as a violently anti-Semitic version of this previous British film.
Format
The movie is done in the style of a documentary, the central thesis being the immutable racial personality traits that, according to Nazi doctrine, characterize the Jew as a wandering cultural parasite. Throughout the film, these supposed traits are contrasted to the Nazi state ideal: while Aryan men are shown to find satisfaction in physical labor and the creation of value, Jews are depicted as finding pleasure in money and a hedonist lifestyle. While members of the Aryan race live healthily, rich Jews are shown as living in bug-infested and dirty homes, even though they could afford better. The footage to convey this was actually captured in ghettos, where living conditions were very poor and unsanitary surroundings were virtually inevitable. While Germanic/Nordic man has an appreciation for Northern culture and imagery, Jews are alleged only to find satisfaction in the grotesque and decadent. Many things that run contrary to Nazi doctrine are associated with Jewish influence, such as modern art, cultural relativism, anarchic and socialist movements, as well as sexual liberation. The film criticizes Jewish religious practices and criticises kosher slaughtering (shechita) in which animals bleed to death, as inhumane, contrasting it with Nazi laws requiring that animals be anaesthetized prior to slaughter.
Cast
Makers
Plot and content
One of the shots early in the film shows a pack of rats emerging from a sewer, juxtaposed with a crowd of Jews in a bustling Polish street. Close-ups of individuals show sickly, malformed facial features. The narration explains how as rats are the vermin of the animal kingdom, Jews are the vermin of the human race and similarly spread disease and corruption. Unlike rats, however, the narrator continues, Jews have the uncanny ability to change their appearance and blend into their "human hosts." A scene depicts four bearded men in traditional Jewish costume, then shows them shaved and in modern business suits, while the narrator explains that only a "trained eye" can distinguish their Jewish features.
Other scenes include footage of notable figures such as Albert Einstein (placed adjacent to a series of images about Jewish control of the pornography industry), socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg, and Charlie Chaplin who had managed to earn Adolf Hitler's wrath. The Jewish actor Peter Lorre is shown in a scene from Fritz Lang's film M, in which he played a child murderer. A sequence from the American film The House of Rothschild is shown, with misleading German subtitles.
Scenes of Jewish life in Poland were also staged to make the Jews objects of ridicule. Adam Czerniakow, whom the Nazis appointed head of the Judenrat (Jewish Council), is shown seated in front of a seven-branched menorah, gesticulating wildly at the director's insistence, because "that is how Jews speak."
Toward the end of the film, after showing how Jews have been responsible for the decline of Western music, science, art, and commerce, is a scene of a cow being slaughtered for meat by a shochet (Jewish ritual slaughter), which is prefaced by a warning similar to the one in Frankenstein, warning women, children, and the squeamish about the upcoming scene. This long scene, lasting several minutes, shows the cows and sheep in all their death throes as they bleed to death. The movie's creators apparently filmed this scene on the knowledge that Adolf Hitler was allegedly opposed to cruelty to animals and had banned kosher slaughter of animals in Germany, and that such footage would shock an audience that was sensitive to animals(the German equivalent of the Academy Award being the Bambi a golden deer).
The film ends with Hitler explaining the problems of the Jewry in Europe and says: “If the international finance-Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations into a world war yet again, then the outcome will not be the victory of Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”
Public response
Unser Wille und Weg, a Nazi Party monthly 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 relates the Jews move from 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 butchers do their work with grins on their face.
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.”
Postwar significance
Post-war Fritz Hippler contended Joseph Goebbels was truly the creator of The Eternal Jew with close supervision of Hitler. It was Goebbels who gave Hippler credit as a reward “for his excellent work in the newsreel department”
An unrepentant Fritz Hippler was interviewed in the Emmy Award winning program "The Propaganda Battle" in the PBS series Walk Through the Twentieth Century. In this interview he explains that he regrets that his name was listed as the director of The Eternal Jew because the Allies interrogated him after the war. He thought this was very unfair because, in his opinion, he had nothing to do with the killing of Jews. However, in an interview shown in the 2000 German documentary series Holocaust, the 90-year old Hippler described the film as "the most disgraceful example of anti-semitism."
The film has been banned for public use in Germany, the only exception is use in college classrooms and other academic gatherings, however exhibitors must have formal education in "media science and the history of the Holocaust."
1933 film
The same title had been used for a Yiddish-language picture made in the US by the Jewish Talking Picture Company in 1933.
See also
External links
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