As a Hays Office censor, Joseph Breen (center) was able to suppress anti-Nazi films. Photograph by Kurt Hutton / Getty

In 1937, Warner Bros. departed from its usual fare of jittery urban dramas and emotionally saturated women’s pictures. In a burst of ambition, it mounted a historical spectacle set in late-nineteenth-century Paris, “The Life of Emile Zola,” starring Paul Muni. “Zola” is meant to be a stirring man-of-conscience movie: after early struggles, followed by huge success, the writer, in self-satisfied middle age, gets drawn, with increasing fury, into the Dreyfus affair. “Zola,” which was directed by the German émigré William Dieterle, includes episodes that were interpreted at the time as indirect attacks on Nazi Germany: scenes of state-inspired mob agitation launched first against Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French Army who is falsely accused of treason; and then against Zola for defending him—his books are publicly burned. At the end, in an outpouring of the progressive rhetoric that was typical of the thirties, Zola makes a grandiloquent speech on behalf of justice and truth and against nationalist war frenzy. “The Life of Emile Zola” was a big hit for Warners. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards—Muni, formerly a star of the Yiddish theatre in New York (he was born Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund), was nominated for best actor—and it won three, including best picture. But there is a pervasive oddity about the film: the word “Jew” is never spoken in it, and anti-Semitism is never mentioned. There were four instances of “Jew” in the original screenplay, but three were cut, leaving a single appearance of the word, on a printed page. As the French general staff scan a list of officers, the words “Religion: Jew” appear onscreen next to Dreyfus’s name. The shot lasts about a second and a half.

Was the undeleted word an error? A solitary act of defiance? “The Life of Emile Zola” is a perfect example of the half-boldness, half-cowardice, and outright confusion that marked Hollywood’s response to Nazism and anti-Semitism in the nineteen-thirties. In that decade, the industry produced a generally good-hearted and liberal cinema that celebrated such democratic American virtues as easy manners, tolerance, heroic individualism, and loathing of mob violence—all of which can be seen as a de-facto rebuke to Nazism. At the same time, the studios cancelled several explicitly anti-Nazi films planned for production, and deleted from several other movies anything that could be construed as critical of the Nazis, along with anything that might be seen as favorable to the Jews—or even a simple acknowledgment that they existed. Except for Twentieth Century Fox, headed by Darryl Zanuck, a shrewd and tough Gentile from Nebraska, the studios were run by Jews, who controlled many hectares of Los Angeles turf and worldwide distribution networks—an enormous power base that makes their timidity regarding Nazism a matter of psychological and cultural as well as political interest.

In recent years, a variety of scholars, including Neal Gabler, J. Hoberman, Jeffrey Shandler, Lester D. Friedman, Steven Carr, and Felicia Herman, have worked on different aspects of this complicated history. But the story has been charged up by the appearance of two new books: “The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler” (Harvard), by Ben Urwand, a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard; and “Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939” (Columbia), by Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis. Doherty’s book is much the better of the two. A witty writer familiar with Hollywood history and manners, Doherty places the studios’ craven behavior within a general account of the political culture of the movies in the thirties and forties. He finds both greed and fear in studio practice, but in a recent Times report on the controversy he strongly objects to Urwand’s use of the word “collaboration.” Urwand, an Australian, and the grandson of Hungarian Jews who spent the war years in hiding, flings many accusations. He speaks of Hitler’s victory “on the other side of the globe,” by which he means Hollywood, and he claims to see “the great mark that Hitler left on American culture.” Throughout the book, he gives the impression that the studios were merely doing the Nazis’ bidding. In that same Times article, he says that Hollywood was “collaborating with Adolf Hitler, the person and human being.”

Urwand has established the existence of multiple contacts between the studios and German government officials, and, in an apparent coup, he makes central use of a figure whom Doherty summons only sparingly: the Nazi consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, a former diplomat whose suavely threatening manner resembles the polite menace of Conrad Veidt’s Major Strasser, in “Casablanca.” Urwand shows that the studios occasionally allowed Gyssling to read scripts, to see early cuts of movies, and to demand—sometimes successfully—deletions from finished films. But are Urwand’s extreme conclusions warranted by what he has discovered? And, intentionally or not, his accusations stir up an old, sore question: should the Jews have done more to fight the persecutions that eventually enveloped them?

“The Americans are so natural. Far superior to us,” Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, confided to his diary in 1935, after seeing “It Happened One Night.” American films, including musicals, were popular in Germany; they had a relaxed, colloquial way about them that German filmmakers, who tended toward agonized expressionism in the nineteen-twenties and rigid didacticism during the Nazi period, couldn’t match. Goebbels’s wistful appreciation of American ease is one of the bizarre ironies of the story, since he was intent on purging the cinema of anything that didn’t comport with Nazi ideology. Among other things, he removed Jewish artists and workers from the German film industry and pushed out Jews who worked for the distribution arms of American studios.

The Nazis saw every movie as a potential threat to their immaculacy. Urwand quotes some solemn colloquies among Nazi officials, including a mental-health expert. Would “King Kong” (giant ape with Nordic-looking blonde) offend the “healthy racial feelings” of the German people? How about “Tarzan” (shirtless jungle man with white woman)? “King Kong” was released, “Tarzan” banned. So was the violent “Scarface,” Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” and all the later films of Marlene Dietrich, an outspoken critic of the Nazis. Goebbels’s ministry also found out which American actors and crew members were Jewish or anti-Nazi, and refused to import films on which they had worked.

All this censoring and interdiction came at the German end of the distribution chain. Georg Gyssling was installed at the production end. After arriving in Los Angeles, in 1933, he began scouring the trade press. If he thought that a movie announced for production might contain elements “detrimental to German prestige,” or if he went to a screening (at the studio’s invitation) of such a movie when it was finished, he would write a letter detailing cuts that he wanted made. For instance, after seeing “The Lancer Spy,” a 1937 Fox picture set after the First World War, he objected to the way German officials were portrayed, and sent a list of changes, which, according to Urwand, were made before the film was released. The list was sent not to Fox but to the Hays Office, which administered the Production Code. “The production of a film of such a character will arouse very bad feeling in Germany against the producing company and may lead to serious difficulties which should be avoided in mutual interests,” he wrote, by which he meant that the film, at his suggestion, could be banned in Germany.