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Hollywood producers and studio executives censored films, cut Jewish staff from the credits and pulled the plug on movies critical of the Nazis in an attempt to appease Hitler, a new book has claimed.

Germany was an important outlet for American films and the heads of Hollywood in the 1930s were keen to maximise their revenues in Europe.

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“Throughout the 1930s, the term ‘collaboration’ was used repeatedly to describe dealings that took place in Hollywood,” according to Ben Urwand, the author of The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, which is published next month.

“Soon every studio started making deep concessions to the German government, and when Hitler came to power in January 1933, they dealt with his representatives directly.”

Urwand discovered that when a film scored by a Jewish composer was banned, Paramount offered to dub Give Us This Night with music by a German composer. A member of the Nazi Party, Paul Thiefes, was chosen by Paramount in 1937 as its new manager in Germany.

At MGM, a rival studio, Frits Strengholt, the head of the German office, divorced his Jewish wife at the request of the propaganda ministry. She ended up in a concentration camp. Much of Hollywood’s bowing down to the Nazis stemmed from the Berlin screening in 1930 of All Quiet on the Western Front, the Oscar-winning film about German soldiers’ suffering during the First World War.