Paper presented at the 27th Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA, March 2-4, 1997
Stig Hornshøj-Møller, Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract
The paper discusses the possibilities and dangers of using authentic Nazi anti-Semitic
film propaganda as a means of teaching the reasons behind the Holocaust. It argues that
especially one socalled "documentary" - "Der ewige Jude" from 1939/40
- had a major impact on Hitler's final decision to launch the genocide because of its
"reality-like" character. The paper outlines the production story of the film
which was produced in close cooperation between Joseph Goebbels and the Fuehrer himself.
It shows how this film - together with the feature film "Jud Süss" - was used
to legitimize the annihilation of European Jewry to the German public. The main section of
the paper consists of a report on almost 25 years of Danish and German experiences of the
effects of showing the film to the young people of today for educational purposes, also
pointing out the fact that "Der ewige Jude" is regarded as a "cult
film" among neo-Nazi groups in- and outside Germany. The paper then relates the
opinions of the different audiences to the question whether the film can be considered to
be dangerous today - or not. It is concluded that to show the film for educational
purposes could be a fruitful way to make the young people understand why the
unthinkable became a reality - at least in Denmark and Germany - and ask the question from
an ethical point of view, if such an approach could be used elsewhere in teaching the
Holocaust.
We must look into the abyss
in order to see beyond it.
Robert Jay Lifton, 1986
Introduction
"I would also like to say that it did not at all occur to me that these orders could be unjust. It is true that I know that it is also the duty of the police to protect the innocent, but I was then of the conviction that the Jews were not innocent but guilty. I believed the propaganda that all Jews were criminals and subhumans and that they were the cause of Germany's decline after the First World War. The thought that one should disobey or evade the order to participate in the extermination of the Jews did not therefore enter my mind at all."
This testimony by Kurt Möbius, a former police battalion member who served in Chelmno, was quoted by Daniel J. Goldhagen at a key place in his book "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust". According to Möbius' court statement in 1961, Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda was an important factor - perhaps even the key psychological factor - in convincing the perpetrators that they were doing something "good" for German society by killing Jews. This personal evidence from an "ordinary German", as well as many other such testimonies, confirm the importance of what Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen have defined as "Genocidal Mentality" and which they have seen as a neccessary precondition for actual genocidal behaviour.
In his book Goldhagen has traced the background of genocidal thinking in Germany and he has proven how a lot of ordinary Germans had no problems with their role as perpetrators, because their world-view during the war had developed into a profound genocidal mentality. Goldhagen lacks, however, a convincing analysis of the process of how genocidal thinking was turned into genocidal mentality in the individual perpetrator, i.e. the process of how the last psychological obstacles of human empathy was broken down and was replaced by a willingness to kill. From my point-of-view he seems to have underestimated perhaps the most crucial of all those different factors that though a long and complex process finally instigated the Holocaust: the role of self-enforcing propaganda in mass-media, using the techniques of modern technology to produce "reality" as "authentic proof" of anti-Semitic ideology.
Film as a means of teaching Holocaust
All teaching of the Holocaust must based on high ethical standards and has to deal with the the two key questions: "How could it happen?" and "What are the historical lessons we can learn in order to prevent it from happening again?"
Our knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust is to-day profoundly influenced and formed by the ability of film and television to reconstruct and dramatize the history. One notable example was the American Holocaust TV series which had a strong impact not only on Germany when it was shown in 1978:
"Put names and faces on the victims, bring the abstract horror of million-fold annihilation down to the flesh-and-blood experience of the Weiss family, and you unleash an emotional reaction, even a momentary catharsis, that libraries full of learned treatises could never produce."
A more recent example of the same kind is Steven Spielberg's most remarkable film "Schindler's List" which now has been transferred to video and is widely used as a means of teaching the Holocaust to future generations both in the US and abroad. Despite the undisputable qualities of the film - and of the teaching material that has been published for this purpose - it can be seriously questioned whether this kind of teaching the Holocaust really is accomplishing the high goals listed above. The film creates strong emotions through its realistic descriptions of the atrocities commited by the German SS and it makes the viewer understand, that it was possible for human beings to act so inhumane to fellow human beings. "Schindler's List" is for a teacher perhaps the most suitable tool to convince his students that the Holocaust did happen - and it can used as an effectful warning to young people that it must not happen again.
However, the film describes only the Holocaust from the point of view of the victims, not from the perspective of the perpetrators. It gives no explanation of why and how the perpetrators behaved the way they did and there is no indications of an answer to the crucial question of what made the Holocaust possible - the message of the film "only" being an appeal to the audience to act like Schindler and help people who are persecuted. From a ethical point of view this is undoubtedly an important aspect, because it counteracts the deniers of the Holocaust, but it is definitely not enough. Teaching of the Holocaust must create an awareness of all those features and attitudes in to-day's society which might be the beginning of a development that could end up as persecution or even genocidal killing. Or to put it in another way: "Schindler's List" must be supplemented by material which demonstrates the way the genocidal mentality was induced into the perpetrators.
One of the ways this could be done would be to show authentic Nazi film propaganda. Both Hitler and Goebbels considered the film medium to be the most important tool to influence the minds of the German people. Leni Riefenstahl's famous documentary "Triumph des Willens" on the Nueremberg Rallies in 1934 was certainly instrumental in creating the "Fuehrer-Myth", and another "documentary", "Der ewige Jude (1940), was produced in order to "reveal" the "truth" of the Jews. It contained the whole "legitimation" for their annihilation.
A source-critical shot-to-shot analysis of the film demonstrates that "Der ewige Jude" is probably the most manipulated film ever made. Apart from being a schocking example of Nazi paranoia towards the Jews it is also one of the best illustrations of how distorted "reality" can be used as a means of creating hate and genocidal mentality, because we are able to document the way it was done down to the tiniest detail. As outlined below, there are even strong reasons to believe that it was this ability of the audio-visual media to "(re)produce reality" that brought the decision-makers (Goebbels and Hitler) themselves across what Lifton once called "the Threshold of Genocide" - and that the release of the film can be seen as the promulgation of Hitler's decision to launch the Holocaust.
"Der ewige Jude" contains 70 minutes of vicious anti-Semitic propaganda of the worst kind and it is still an emotional and intellectual challenge to those who see it: How would you have reacted, if you had seen the film in 1940?
Although "Der ewige Jude" was produced almost sixty years ago, the German government still considers it to be so dangerous that it is forbidden to show it in public - with one exemption: University teachers are allowed to use it as part of their teaching - and by special permission it can also be shown in seminars dealing with "politische Bildung" (education in politics), if the responsible teacher can prove that he has got specific expertise in media-critics and the history of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, a lot of video-copies of "Der ewige Jude" is in circulation among neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic groups all over the world to whom it is a "cult film". A copy with an American voice-over can be obtained by everybody from the firm, International Historic Films in Chicago, and all efforts by the German government to stop this distribution have failed, because legally it is considered to be in accordance with the First Ammendment.
From these facts arise at least two important questions:
Should we still be so afraid of this more than fifty-five years old hate picture that we
pretend that it does not exist, thus leaving its use to those whose racism it confirms
Or should we dare to use the film ourselves as a means for teaching the Holocaust, thus
presenting the authentic venom in order to vaccinate future generations against Nazism?
Before a discussion of these two questions in detail it is, however, neccessary to present
the history of the film, as it is rather unknown even to most scholars of the Holocaust.
The production history of "Der ewige Jude"
On November 10th, 1938, the Fuehrer made an important speech to the German press. Although he made no direct reference either to the Reichskristallnacht itself or to Jews in general, the whole speech can be regarded as his comments upon the lack of support for the pogrom he was getting from the German public. Hitler rebuked the propaganda makers for not having understood his strategy - aiming at war - and he made it unmistakingly clear to his audience what exactly he expected them to do in the future:
"Coercion was the reason why for years I only talked about peace. But gradually it became neccessary to condition the German people psychologically and slowly make it grasp that there do exist things that one has to solve with violent means when they cannot be solved by peaceful means. To do so, however, it was neccessary not to make propaganda for violence as such, but to elucidate certain events of foreign policy to the German people in such a way that the inner voice of the people by itself slowly began to call for violence. Accordingly, it meant to elucidate certain events in such a way that totally automatically the conviction would gradually evolve in the brains of the broad masses: What one cannot solve with fair means, one has to solve with violence, because it cannot go on like this."
The rebuke was certainly understood by Joseph Goebbels, who for the first time decided to use the film medium as a tool for inducing anti-Semitism into the German people. Being responsible for Nazi film production he had, however, earlier preferred other topics (including easy entertainment and more "positive" presentations of Nazi world view), but immediately after Hitler's speech he called upon the production companies to present scripts for anti-Semitic feature films. His wish for a "documentary" could only be fulfilled after the Campaign in Poland in September 1939, because he lacked footage of Jews actually looking like the Nazi stereotype of the Jew, of services in the synagogue and of ritual slaughtering.
From his diary as well as other sources we can follow the production of this particular propaganda film - "Der ewige Jude" - which right from the beginning was intended to become the ultimate public legitimation of anti-Semitism, in accordance with Hitler's afore-mentioned demand.
There are strong reasons to believe that the film and its production history should be characterized as a mirror of the decision-making process to launch the Holocaust itself, because the final version of the film can only be interpreted as a deliberate call for annihilation, through its juxta-positioning of ritual slaughtering - staged as cruelty to animals - and Hitler's notorius prophecy of January 30, 1939.
In order to create the strongest effect on the public as possible Joseph Goebbels had ordered ritual Jewish slaughtering to be filmed in the Lodz ghetto, and when he saw the rushes of these scenes on October 16, 1939, he wrote in his diary:
"Scenes so horrific and brutal in their explicitness that one's blood runs cold. One shudders at such barbarism. This Jewry must be annihilated."
He showed the scenes at Hitler's dinner table on October 28, 1939, and those present "were all deeply shocked". Two days later, Goebbels himself went to the ghetto of Lodz - and commented on his impressions in his diary:
"It is indescribable. They are no longer human beings, they are animals. It is therefore no humanitarian task, but a task for the surgeon. One must make cuts here, and that in a most radical way. Or Europe will one day collapse from the Jewish disease."
Goebbels pursued this idea of a genocidal solution during the whole production of a film which can only be seen as his personal advocacy for prevailing on Hitler himself to draw the "natural" consequence of his own - exterminist, yet still theoretical - ideology. The film was recut, rephrased and tested several times in accordance with Hitler's wishes before the Fuehrer finally approved the film for public screening, probably on May 20, 1940.
However, "Der ewige Jude" was not released immediately because it awaited the final cut of the feature film "Jud Süss" which was another part of Goebbels' propaganda package. It should arouse those anti-Semitic feelings that were to be "proven" by the "authentic film-document", "Der ewige Jude". While "Jud Süss" had its opening night with great publicity during the Venice film festival on September 6, 1940, "Der ewige Jude" was shown to the top people in the Third Reich on September 8 as the demonstration of the new kind of war propaganda that should prepare the German audience for the continuation of the war. Now, nobody could be ignorant about the fact that the war was not just a "normal" war. It was a war on "Weltanschauungen", based on racism. Members of the attendant audience, however, protested heavily against showing the slaughtering scenes outside party meetings, and Goebbels had to produce a milder version - without these scenes - for women and children.
"Der ewige Jude" finally had its opening night on November 28, 1940, where its director - Fritz Hippler - stressed that the film was the proof of the correctness of Hitler's prophecy from 1939. In an interview, broadcasted all over Germany, Hippler concluded by quoting this prophecy after having pointed out that the premise - the war - had become reality. And just after the film had been shown all over Germany, Hitler himself on January 30, 1941, began to recall the prophecy in his broadcasted speeches - thus virtually giving oral confirmation of the call for genocide expressed and legitimized in the film.
It can thus be argued that "Der ewige Jude" could be Hitler's public statement of what was to be the next step in his war against the Jews - using the emotional power of modern reality-like mass media to transfer his decision into the minds of the perpetrators and bystanders. Just as the Fuehrer in his rebuke to the propaganda makers on November 10, 1938 had outlined, the German people were themselves to take the decision to kill European Jewry systematically - out of the conviction: "What one cannot solve with fair means, one has to solve with violence, because it cannot go on like this."
Testimonies like the one by Kurt Möbius quoted above are indeed horrifying proofs of how successfull this strategy was.
"Der ewige Jude" as a means of teaching the Holocaust?
From a narrow, purely historical point-of-view there can be little doubt that on an university level "Der ewige Jude" must be considered to be an important tool in teaching both Nazism and the Holocaust. No other single historical source is so elucidating about Nazi ideology and world view as "Der ewige Jude". From my more than twenty years of teaching experience I can certify that all major features of the mentality of the Third Reich can easily be demonstrated through an analysis of this film by students at high school or university level. It is also my experience from many such seminars in both Denmark and Germany that the viewing of the film suddenly turns the distant historical ideology of Nazism into a both attentive and relevant question for young people of to-day. For a period of seventy minutes they are set more than fifty years back in history and feel as if personally involved what it was like to live in the Third Reich - or to be its unfortunate neighbours or scapegoats.
A project was launched in 1970 at the Institute of History at the University of Copenhagen, originally as a purely methodological attempt to establish principles for source-critical editions of important film documents. One of the films selected was "Der ewige Jude". As it, however, soon became clear that the film contained excellent educational examples of all kinds of propaganda techniques within the audio-visual media, the project got a supplementary perspective apart from the methodological one: We wanted to find out whether the film - or part of it - could be used to teach mass-media criticism outside the university, particularly in high-schools. First of all we had to find out what effects it had on young people of the present day. In our own opinion the film was both plump and grotesque and had just the opposite effect of the one originally intended, because of our knowledge of the Holocaust, but we had to support our notion through empirical research as we, of course, in no way wanted to arouse any kind of anti-Semitism.
Between 1973 and 1975 we tested "Der ewige Jude" on a sample of 1200 Danish high-school students in the age between 16 and 19, by means of a questionaire consisting of 25 questions, and prepared according to the best sociological standards at the time. We had hidden some "traps" in order to control the honesty of the answers which were filled out anonymously. The result of the survey was both clear and encouraging to us. Only one single person expressed that he had changed his opinion of Jews in a negative direction - and from an analysis of his other answers we could conclude that he already was a latent anti-Semite before viewing the film.
From this survey we could conclude beyound any doubt that the fear that we and other experts had had of unintentionally creating anti-Semitism among Danish high-school students was unfounded. That was most of all a question of the different experiences of different generations. A close analysis of each individual questionaire demonstrated that if/when the film made somebody change his or her attitude towards Jews, it was clearly in the directly opposite direction of the one originally intended by Goebbels. The film, however, had another effect: The experience of seventy minutes of hate propaganda, as issued by the Nazi authorities, suddenly made the students reflect upon the mental process of ordinary Germans in the Third Reich. The students expressed the view that they now understood what it must have been like to live in a totalitarian society and how difficult it must have been to oppose the media bombardment of the authorities actively. Some of them even said, that they felt sorry for the Germans - and started to comment on the problems of coping with guilt after the Holocaust. They had suddenly become aware of the range and efficiency of Nazi propaganda which had brain-washed the German public.
Most of all, however, we were surprised by the ability of the youth to be critical in relation to what they saw. Because they had grown up with television contrary to most members of the project group they handled the informations from the film in much more balanced way than we had ever expected. They were also able to express their impressions and points of view on a very differentiated level. From a democratic point of view it was most comforting to us that we had underestimated their ability to associate to more general thinking and to draw their individual conclusions.
One of the questions asked was whether the topic of the film was still of current interest and in case the answer was "yes", the student should argue why. We thought that the students would refer either to persecutions of Jews in the Soviet Union and Poland or to the (then) recent Yom Kippur-War. About 60 percent answered the question in the affirmative, but only half of these pointed to matters related to Jews. The rest referred to racism in general - including the Danish attitude to Turkish and Yugoslav workers in Denmark - or to the neccessity of being critical to mass media.
Although our experiences thus were encouragingly positive, the project of making the film - or part of it - available to Danish high-school teachers stopped for a number of reasons. One of them was that the group members got their degrees and left university, another that German authorities in the late 1970's had tightened the rules for lending copies of the film from the Federal Archives in Koblenz.
The difficulties with the accessability was (and still is) - together with the lack of tradition among historians of using films as historical sources - the reason why the film was (and still is) almost unknown to both scholars and students of the Holocaust. In 1972 the project group therefore contacted the Institute for the Scientific Film in Göttingen - an institution owned by the German federal states which reprints film sources for research and educational purposes at the German universities.
A survey carried out in the following year showed that 60 out of 63 professors of modern history supported such a reprint and the institute obtained the rights for university use from Transit-Film in Munich which controls the rights of Nazi film production on behalf of the German Government. In return the institute had to publish a written commentary to the film in order to refute the manipulations in the film. For many years there only did exist a preliminary text, until the final source-critical edition was published by me for the institute in 1995.
In 1979 the German Association of History Teachers held a large conference in Berlin in order to discuss how they could deal with the effects of the American TV-series "Holocaust" which had aroused an enourmous debate in the West German public. We presented our experiences from Denmark and argued that the use of such authentic material could be one of the ways to work up the traumas of the past. Most of the participants agreed, but for many reasons nothing came out of the ideas of a cooperation that could prepare the neccessary didactic material.
The next initiative concerning the educational use came from the University of Cologne where two German psychologists, Dr. Yizhak Ahren and Dr. Christoph B. Melchers, in the mid-1980's studied the effects of anti-Semitic propaganda films on ordinary Germans to-day with the help of in-depth psychological interviews. First they analysed the impact of the feature film "Jew Süss" and then of "Der ewige Jude". In their concluding reflections they underlined the fact that any film experience can be seen as a dialogue between the film and the viewer, where the viewer is bombarded with statements which he principally can accept as trustworthy or reject as untrustworthy. They summarized their empirical findings as follows:
"Since 1945 the situation in Germany has changed so fundamentally that the film no longer can have the same effects as was originally intended. With to-day's knowledge of the crimes of the Nazis the audience has quite different possibilities of playing the balls back. But the film is still able to produce insecurity about Jews and to make existing prejudice current and to confirm it. Those who have seen the film 'Der ewige Jude' would want to have 'trustworthy information' about the different topic which the 'documentary' has presented (need to speak, questions). However, by careful analysis of different scenes and by illuminating the historical context historians who have dealt with the film in a historical-critical way are able to confort this need from the audience."
To Ahren and Melchers there is a striking similarity between modern information through mass media and commercials on one hand and open propaganda on the other, and they explicitly argued that the only way to fight such propaganda is to make it a specific topic in education. Therefore they strongly advocated the use of "Der ewige Jude" in history teaching as well as in special courses on politics:
"Education in propaganda is able to neutralize impact; this education could on the other hand itself also change into propaganda. Enlightment on propaganda goes direct to the roots, when it reconstructs the way of the impact and makes it discussable. Together with such an analysis the viewing of such a propaganda film can be a lesson on the complexity and development of mind and also lead to a deeper understanding of historical realities."
Concluding remarks
The book by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has once more lit a fierce public discussion on the reasons behind the Jewish genocide - and once more made the question of the guilt of "ordinary Germans" a matter of current interest. Josef Joffe has recently commented upon the strange gap between the rejection of the book by many scholars and the positive - almost masochistic - reception of the book by the German public. After having observed the importance of Goldhagen's approach, describing the perpetrators as "people, perhaps, like you and me?", Joffe argues that the main reason for the favorable reception of the book in Germany is the "distance that separates today's Germans from the darkest of all pasts" together with the way that West German scholarship had been able to "sterilize the past". Because of his case studies and his powerful language Goldhagen was able to break down years of collective psychological projection of culpability into "Hitler and his henchmen". The emotional character of the book even made Marion Countess Dönhoff ask in the paper "Die Zeit" whether the book would "revive the anti-Semitism that has remained more or less dormant", but as Joffe reassuringly concludes:
"The response of the German audience has proven the Countess wrong. Goldhagen has come and gone, and the dogs have hardly batted an eye."
This eagerness of the German public - especially young people - to know and to accept the obligations of history is the main reasoning behind a forthcoming conference organized by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung and the Association of History Teachers in Germany to discuss the possibilities of using "Der ewige Jude" as a didactic tool. A lot of test-screenings, accompanied by half-an-hour of introduction, and always followed by at least one hour of discussion, have been carried out in the past years in both the former West and East Germany. At the beginning of such a screening the audience was told that it was about to see a forbidden film and the participants were asked to vote after the discussion whether the ban of the film should be lifted or not.
The result was the same both in the former West Germany and in the former East Germany, although there seems to be a clear difference between the need to discuss in the two parts of the reunited Federal Republic - the need being much bigger in the
former GDR. A clear majority had voted in favour after the viewing and the following discussion, but then the same thing happened again and again: Members of the audience began during the voting to protest against the way I had deliberately phrased my question for the referendum. After a new discussion it was rephrased and obtained the votes of almost the whole audience. They were not willing to accept a general release of the film, but they did support the use of the film for educational use, i.e. in the way they had just experienced it themselves. Some of them even claimed that they had learned more about the Holocaust from the film experience and the subsequent discussion than ever before. Others explained that they now understood why it could happen in Germany.
Why did it happen in Germany? is one of the key questions in Goldhagen's book. He has shown that there did exist an exterministic attitude among those ordinary Germans that participated as perpetrators and he has demonstrated the cultural roots of this anti-Semitism. Yet - as many critics have pointed out - he has not dealt sufficiently with crucial questions like
"how much responsability for their actions should be attributed to the Nazi system in which these 'willing executioners' did their killing? What of the Nazi system of indoctrination and training? What of the express Nazi belief in, and advocacy of, physical terror, bereft of all civilizing restraints and values?"
Or to put it in other words: Goldhagen never really showed why and how the annihilation of the Jews was made into firm belief to perpetrators like Kurt Möbius.
It is exactly these psychological and socio-psychological factors that are made topical by "Der ewige Jude". The viewing of this film demonstrates in a horrifying way, how cultural stereotypes suddenly can evolve into paranoid reasons for killing other people. As revealed by the test-screening and the research by Ahren and Melchers, one of the reasons for its strong impact to-day is that it is "the real thing" - it is an authentic historical document, made by the Nazi themselves and intended for public use. Another reason is that it still is an emotional and intellectual challenge to the individual seeing it - to make up his mind regarding Nazism and anti-Semitism.
Should we still be afraid of Hitler's public call for annihilation of the Jews?
I strongly believe the answer is no. Viewing the film produces a ominous warning about what can happen when "produced" reality in a reality-like medium is conceived as the reality itself. In this respect, "Der ewige Jude" has become the ancestor of audio-visual
propaganda on TV which - like it happened in former Yugoslavia - has instigated and legitimized genocidal killing in our time. Through a comparison with such examples an analysis of the film - with the hindsight of what were the dreadful consequences of this piece of "produced reality" - we can help to disclose those psychological patterns of genocidal mentality which should be the ultimate aim of teaching about the Holocaust.