Transcription
Collaboration is a word that had been used from the very beginning. No one thinks that Hollywood did business with Germany in the 1930s, except for a few film historians who might have heard about it but not really exploited. But the implications of the business are dire.
The studios worked with Nazis on the movies that were screened all around the world, all the way through the 1930s. In December 1930, All Quiet on the Western Front premiered in Germany, and Goebbels organized riots against the film. This was a huge scandal at the time, and it led to the film being cancelled. Everyone agreed that what the Nazis had done was actually very good because this movie was about the German defeat in World War One, and no one in Germany wanted to hear about the German defeat.
This episode has been told a couple of times before, but the really the most important aspect of it is that about a year after the film was banned in Germany, the head of Universal Pictures, Carl Laemmle, made a trip to Germany. He made a deal with the German Foreign Office that if this picture could be shown in Germany, if this picture could, you know, reach theaters throughout the country, then he would have to make certain cuts to the movies that the Germans wanted to make all around the world.
So there are examples of other movies that are censored for local markets. There are many examples, but this is different. This is a Hollywood producer working with a foreign nation and actually censoring a movie in the version that appears all around the world. And this is really the first instance of collaboration, and it sets the tone for what happens throughout the decade.
The German market wasn't even a major market at this point. I mean, it was a significant market, and the studios had been there for a long time by this point, and they didn't want to lose their business, especially because from that perspective, Hitler might, um, remain in power for a long time. And when the war started, they thought he might win the war. They didn't want to lose their business and then have to return under his conditions. So they were determined to stay there.
This is even after Confessions of a Nazi Spy, which is the first anti-Nazi film made by Warner Brothers, which is no longer doing business in Germany. And people make a lot of this film and say that this film started the war or this film is the beginning of a new policy of the studios, but it isn't. It's a B picture, it doesn't really make much of an impact, and MGM, Paramount, and 20th Century Fox continued selling their films in Germany, and the films do very well.
After 1934, it becomes very hard for these studios to export their profits out of Germany. And for MGM, this is the problem because it doesn't know what to do with its money. Paramount and Fox actually run newsreel companies in Germany, but MGM doesn't make newsreels. I discovered a single document at the National Archives in the Commerce Department records which explains how MGM, after 1938, started exporting its profits. Because MGM had a lot of money in Germany, but it couldn't get it out.
The document states very clearly that MGM is financing the production of armaments in Austria and the Sudetenland. And this is pretty much the darkest point of the story, I think, because the biggest movie studio in America is actually financing the production of German armaments immediately before World War Two.