page_title: Jud Süß
section_title: Goebbels' propaganda campaign
hierarchical_section_title: Jud Süß / Development / Goebbels' propaganda campaign
context_page_description: Jud Süß is a 1940 Nazi German historical drama propaganda film produced by Terra Film at the behest of Joseph Goebbels. It is considered one of the most antisemitic films of all time. The film was directed by Veit Harlan, who wrote the screenplay with Eberhard Wolfgang Möller and Ludwig Metzger. The leading roles were played by Ferdinand Marian and Harlan's wife Kristina Söderbaum; Werner Krauss and Heinrich George played key supporting roles.
  The film has been characterized as "one of the most notorious and successful pieces of antisemitic film propaganda produced in Nazi Germany." It was a great success in Germany, and was seen by 20 million people. Although its budget of 2 million Reichsmarks was considered high for films of that era, the box office receipts of 6.5 million Reichsmarks made it a financial success. Heinrich Himmler urged members of the SS and police to see it.
  After the war, some of the leading cast members were brought to trial as part of the denazification process. They generally defended their participation in the film on the grounds that they had only done so under duress.
context_section_description: Adolf Hitler and the Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels believed that film was a very potent tool for molding public opinion. The Nazi Party first established a film department in 1930 and Goebbels had taken a personal interest in the use of film to promote the Nazi philosophy and agenda. Soon after the Nazi takeover, Goebbels was insisting in speeches that the role of the German cinema was to serve as the "vanguard of the Nazi military" as they set forth to conquer the world. He asked them to "produce films with ... sharp racial contours" that portrayed men and society "as they are in reality."
  According to Richard Levy, "Of the 1,100 feature films produced under the Nazis, only a handful demonstrated explicit antisemitic content and even there, the antisemitism was often secondary to the film's plot. ... Two films, however, were designed to translate National Socialism's antisemitic ideology to a popular audience: Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, 1940) and Jud Süß (Jew Süß, 1940)."
  In November 1938, Goebbels made a series of attacks against the Jews in the German media that after the murder of a German diplomat in Paris by a Jew resulted in the anti-Jewish riots known as Kristallnacht. Kristallnacht was considered by Hitler to have been a political disaster both within Germany and internationally, and he became furious with Goebbels. Not only did the brutality instigated by Goebbels evoke harsh criticism internationally, the mixed reaction in the German media evidenced a lack of broad-based support among Germans for antisemitic violence. Hitler expressed his frustration and anger at the mixed response from the German media and insisted that, instead of openly calling for violence against the Jews as Goebbels had in instigating the pogrom, Nazi propaganda should "elucidate events of foreign policy" in such a way that the German people themselves would call for violence against the Jews.
  In response to Hitler's reprimand, Goebbels launched a campaign to promote the antisemitic views of the Nazis to the German populace. He ordered each film studio to make an antisemitic film. Hitler preferred films such as Der ewige Jude which presented the Nazi antisemitic agenda openly and directly; however Goebbels disliked the crudeness of such straight-forward approaches, preferring the much more subtle approach of couching antisemitic messages in an engaging story with popular appeal.
  Although Goebbels did not usually have an active role in the production of particular films, he elected to do so in the case of major propaganda films such as Jud Süß. Saul Friedländer suggests that Goebbels' intent was to counter three films whose messages attacked the persecution of Jews throughout history by producing antisemitic versions of those films with identical titles. After viewing Lothar Mendes' sensitive 1934 British film Jew Süss starring an exile from Nazism, Conrad Veidt, Goebbels was adamant that "a new film version had to be made."
  The impetus for the movie came from Joseph Goebbels' desire to make an antisemitic response to Mendes' philo-semitic film adaptation of Lion Feuchtwanger's 1925 novel Jud Süß. Because Mendes' movie was sympathetic to the subject, the scriptwriters shifted their model to Wilhelm Hauff's 1827 novella. However, even after Harlan rewrote the original script, the result was not antisemitic enough to suit Goebbels' propaganda needs, so he personally intervened in the editing process to the point of dropping some scenes and rewriting others, including making a substantial change to the film's ending to show Süß as humbled rather than defiant. Thus, the message of the film was diametrically opposed to the intent of Feuchtwanger's novel. At the same time, however, the film evokes Feuchtwanger’s texts, twisting and reversing the core of the Jewish writer’s work. Although inspired by the historical details of Süß's life, the novel, novella, and film only loosely correspond to the historical sources available at the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg.
  Christiane Schönfeld, who examines the connections between Feuchtwanger
caption: Joseph Goebbels
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