Joseph Goebbels and his subordinates at the propaganda ministry were
thoroughly aware of the power of the still young medium of film, and
they put it to strategic use in National Socialist propaganda, for
example in the dissemination of antisemitic racial ideology.
The Eternal Jew
[Der ewige Jude], a film by Fritz
Hippler (1909–2002), was made on commission by the propaganda ministry
in 1940. The film was subtitled “A Documentary Film about World Jewry”
[“Ein Dokumentarfilm über das Weltjudentum”]. This “documentary film,”
which was primarily filmed in the Jewish ghettos of Lodz, Warsaw,
Cracow, and Lublin, aimed to make the German public feel disgust and
revulsion toward the Jews and to convince the masses of the necessity of
a “Final Solution.” The undignified conditions under which Jews in
German-occupied Poland were forced to live were supposed to offer
evidence of the inferiority of the so-called Eastern Jews
[Ostjuden] in terms of civilization,
biology, and morality. The film employed falsified statistics and
age-old prejudices about supposedly Jewish traits (criminality, greed,
parasitism, usuriousness, etc.) to expose the alleged conspiracy of
world Jewry. Jews living in the Diaspora were likened to wandering rats,
a comparison that was supposed to show that Jewish infiltration posed
grave dangers to the German population and the Western world as a whole.
Accordingly, the film ended with a clip from Hitler’s Reichstag speech
of January 30, 1939, the address in which he predicted “the annihilation
of the Jewish race.”
The film premiered in German theaters on November 28, 1940. Although
it dates from the same year as the antisemitic feature films
Jew Süß
[Jud Süß] and
The Rothschilds
[Die Rothschilds], it was nowhere
near as successful as either of these two films.
The Eternal Jew, however, was
mandatory viewing for police and SS-units, special units of the
Wehrmacht, and guards at concentration and extermination camps, since it
was thought that the film could ward off any scruples they might feel
about the merciless persecution and annihilation of the Jews.