In the September 16th issue of the magazine, I reviewed two books, by Thomas Doherty and Ben Urwand, devoted to the relationship of the Hollywood studios to Nazism in the nineteen-thirties. One of the books, Urwand’s “The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler,” is so recklessly misleading that my point-by-point critique of it, I now realize, needs some additional detail. In this post, I want to do two things: offer a partial list of Urwand’s omissions and blunders; and make public some research on one aspect of these tormented issues by Steven Carr, of Indiana University-Purdue University. Carr, as well as Thomas Doherty, has a much broader and better-informed view of the matter than Urwand. (I use Professor Carr’s material with his permission.)

Perhaps I’m naïve about academic publishing, but I’m surprised that Harvard University Press could have published anything as poorly argued as Urwand’s book; and I’m surprised still more that Harvard or Urwand (or both) hired a commercial book publicist, Goldberg McDuffie, which, in its press release for Urwand’s book, attacked Doherty’s work on the subject, “Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939.” Here’s a taste: “Whereas Doherty relied on flawed, superficial accounts in domestic trade papers, Urwand discovered a vast array of primary source materials….” In the past, disputes between scholars were hashed out in academic journals and conferences, not by hired guns. Doherty does quote trade papers, but he provides a much richer account of the political atmosphere of the studios in the nineteen-thirties than does Urwand, and he arrives at different conclusions from “The Collaboration.”

Urwand’s thesis is that the studios, by dropping anti-Nazi movies and taking Jewish characters out of their films, and by negotiating with Nazis from 1933 to 1939, actively collaborated with the Third Reich. But what the studios failed to do regarding Nazism has always been known—it was widely reported at the time. Urwand, however, does much more than charge the bosses with cowardice (an accusation with which I agree); he has them actively working for the Nazis. On June 25th, Urwand told the Times that, in the thirties, “Hollywood is not just collaborating with Nazi Germany, it’s also collaborating with Adolf Hitler, the person and human being.” It’s an extraordinary and damning claim, if true. But Urwand offers no evidence of this personal connection—not until the epilogue, when he pulls an apparent rabbit out of his hat. He describes a visit that a group of Hollywood executives took to Germany. On July 6, 1945, a little less than two months after V-E Day, the executives travelled up the Rhine in Hitler’s former yacht. When he learned of the trip, Urwand told the Times, “That was the one time I actually shouted out in an archive.”

I’m not sure what the shouting was about. By July, 1945, Hitler, of course, was dead, and the executives embarked on his boat wearing Army uniforms. Why? Because, as Urwand relates, they had been invited to Germany by General George Marshall as a way to witness the destruction of Germany and to reëstablish their business in that country after the war. Harry Warner even wanted the studios to take over the film business altogether in Germany. (That didn’t happen.) I think Urwand completely misunderstands the pleasure cruise. The studio bosses, posing for photos in front of castles in their nifty costumes, were not betraying their closeness to Hitler (which, in any case, Urwand never demonstrates). Much more likely, they were taking a victory lap: “We won this war, and now we are going to run this country and ride in your goddamn boat.” Something like that, I would guess, was the prevailing sentiment. The cruise was inappropriate and maybe foolish (the top executives helped the war effort mainly from their desks in Culver City and Burbank), but Urwand mistakes preening for some sort of sinister relation. His charge is sensational and baseless. It should be withdrawn.

Throughout the book, Urwand shows little understanding of how the movie business—or even routine capitalist activity—might work. In my piece I granted him a point about the newsreels that Paramount and Fox made in Germany under Nazi supervision during the thirties. It seems that the receipts from American films shown in Germany were frozen in German banks, something that Urwand doesn’t reveal until the middle of the book—and a key point, since he insists that studios behaved cravenly in order to hold onto the German market (more on that in a moment). In any case, the two studios, eager to put the frozen assets to use and earn some money, photographed party rallies and the like, and the films were issued as propaganda in Germany and also around the world.

Or at least that’s what Urwand says in the book, where he presents the American-made newsreels as a case of remorseless greed and yet another instance of the studios working for the Nazis. But Urwand does not say in his text what he said on NPR’s “On the Media” on September 6th—that the footage taken by the cameramen was sent back to Hollywood, where it was re-edited, stripped of its propagandistic narration, and reissued for the world market as films “neutral in tone.” Those are his words. Well, where I was brought up, that kind of newsreel is not called propaganda. It might even be called reporting. The world could see how the Nazis presented themselves, and the world may have been impressed, enamored, or terrified, but the world was not watching propaganda for Nazi Germany. So I no longer grant Urwand a point about the newsreels. The charge that they were Nazi propaganda for the world market should be withdrawn or corrected, too.

Urwand leaves the impression, despite some perfunctory nods to the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and other liberal anti-Nazi activity in the movie colony, that the American cinema of the thirties was rife with fascist filmmakers. In my piece, I mentioned the absurdity of his thinking that if the Nazis liked an American film (because they could exploit some element in it), then that film was necessarily Nazi propaganda. The Nazis liked the rule-Britannia, pro-imperialist adventure movie “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer,” with Gary Cooper, because, for them, it embraced “the leader principle.” Even so, it seems that “Lives” wasn’t rigorous enough for the Party. Urwand goes on: