Abstract

The Eternal Jew [Der ewige Jude], an antisemitic documentary directed by Fritz Hippler, head of the propaganda ministry's film department, was released in 1940. The film was not particularly popular in German theaters. However, it was screened regularly at meetings of party organizations, like the Hitler Youth. The point of this full-length antisemitic propaganda film was to show Jews as the Nazis wanted them to be perceived: as a foreign contagion that sought to infiltrate Germany and weaken it from the inside. In the short excerpt shown here, Jews are dehumanized and equated with the rats who notoriously spread the plague and other illnesses as they migrated across Europe in the medieval period. In recent centuries, the narrator claims, Jews have also roamed across the continent. While they are “racially” inferior; they are cunning, explains the film: by taking on the trappings of western civilization in dress and manner, they are able to hide their true selves and live as harmful parasites in their host countries.

The Eternal Jew (1940)

Source

From Mesopotamia they migrate along the sea to Egypt, where they engage for some time in a brisk trade in grain. When the land-cultivating Egyptians defend themselves against the foreign usurers and speculators, the latter emigrate again and now begin their foray into the Promised Land, where they settle and ruthlessly plunder its rightful and culturally superior owners.
Here, in the course of centuries, the final mixed race of the Jews develops out of the oriental-Middle-Eastern mixture of races with a negroid touch. Foreign to us Europeans, born of completely different race elements and different from us in body and above all in nature. We would probably not concern ourselves with them to the same extent if they had remained in their Oriental homeland.

But the cosmopolitan empire of Alexander the Great, which extended from the Near East over half the Mediterranean, and above all the boundless global empire of the Romans, brought the merchant and wandering instinct of the Jews to its full development, and they soon flooded the now open Mediterranean area. While parts of them settled in the large cities, transportation and trade centers of the Mediterranean area, the migration of other parts continued restlessly over Spain, France, South Germany and England. Everywhere they make themselves unpopular. In Spain and France, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the people openly turn against them, and they migrate on, mainly to Germany. From there they follow the culture-bringing and creative German colonization of the East, until at last they find a new, vast gathering place in Polish and Russian parts of Eastern Europe.

The nineteenth century, with its vague ideas of human equality and freedom, gives the Jews a powerful boost. From Eastern Europe, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they now inexorably flood the countries and cities of Europe, indeed of the whole world.

Parallels to this Jewish migration through the whole world can be seen in the mass migrations of another, equally restless animal: the rat. As parasites, rats have accompanied mankind from its beginnings. Their home is Asia. From there, they migrate in huge swarms across Russia and the Balkans to Europe.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, they are already widespread throughout Europe. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, with increasing shipping traffic, they also take possession of America and likewise of Africa and the Far East.

Wherever rats appear, they bring destruction to the land, destroying human goods and food. In this way they spread diseases: Plague, leprosy, typhoid, cholera, dysentery and so on.

They are deceitful, cowardly and cruel, and usually appear in large swarms. They represent the element of insidious, subterranean destruction among animals, not unlike the Jews among humans.

The parasitic people of the Jews constitute a large part of the international criminal community. Thus, in 1932, the Jews, who make up only 1% of the world's population, accounted for 34% of the world's total narcotics trade, 47% of cash register thefts, 47% of counterfeiting and gambling offenses, 82% of international gangs of thieves, and 98% of trafficking in girls.

It is no coincidence that the slang words of international criminal jargon come from Hebrew and Yiddish. These physiognomies are a convincing refutation of the liberal theory of the equality of everything that bears a human face. Admittedly, they change their appearance when they leave theiPaje Polish nesting place for the rich world.

 

Payot and beard, kippah and caftan mark the Eastern Jew for everyone. If he takes them off, only sharper-eyed people recognize his racial origin. It is an essential characteristic of the Jew that he always strives to conceal his ancestry when he moves among non-Jews.

A whole group of Polish Jews: wearing caftans one moment and now in European dress ready to sneak into Western civilization.

Of course, these ghetto Jews do not yet know how to move properly in clean European suits. These Berlin Jews can do a little better. Their fathers and grandfathers also lived in the ghetto, but you can’t tell from their appearance. Here, in the second and third generation, assimilation has reached its peak.

In all outward appearances they try to be like the host people, and peoples devoid of instinct are deceived by this mimicry and actually regard them as their equals. Therein lies the tremendous danger, for even these assimilated Jews always remain foreign bodies in the organism of their host people, however much they may outwardly resemble them.

Source: Der ewige Jude, 1940. Propaganda film, b/w, dir. Fritz Hippler.
RG-60.3293; Accessed via United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv