Stuttgart, Germany - A German museum has announced plans for 16 screenings of the ultimate Nazi hate movie, Jud Suess, as part of an exhibition picking apart how Nazi propaganda worked. The 1940 costume melodrama was used to stoke up hatred of Jews in 21 nations. It was a favourite of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who had funded it.
"The film is an overwhelming success. The audience was seething," he gloated in his diary in 1940. "This is the first really anti- Semitic film."
The movie, a remake of a story that had previously had a pro- Jewish slant, depicts a Jewish businessman, Joseph Suess, manipulating the government of a German ducal state, raping a German girl and being condemned.
It will be shown at the Baden-Wuerttemberg history museum in Stuttgart, the city where the real Joseph Suess Oppenheimer was executed on trumped-up charges in 1738.
None of the fictionalizations of Suess's political career, pro or anti, is historically accurate.
Paula Lutum-Lenger, the curator, said the museum exhibition, open till August 3 next year, explains the tricks used by the Nazis to make the film audience hate Jews.
The one-hour movie was seen by 20 million people in Germany along and paramilitary chief Heinrich Himmler made it compulsory for all police and SS members to see it.
Jewish concentration camp inmates say they received extra rough treatment on the day after Nazi guards had been to screenings.
The movie is banned from general screening in Germany today and can only be shown with a commentary explaining its falsehoods. At the exhibition, six scenes from the film run continuously as video.
The 600-square-metre show, which opened Friday, includes film posters, the script, old cameras from Babelsberg Studios near Berlin and facsimile documents about the real Suess, who modern Stuttgart people are curious to learn more about.
The 16 full screenings will be preceded by lectures and followed by panel discussions.
The real Joseph Suess Oppenheimer (1698-1738) was chief financial adviser to the Duke of Wuerttemberg. His opponents used the vilest anti-Semitic claims to execute him after his patron Duke Karl Alexander died.
His life was fictionalized in a German novella by Wilhelm Hauff in 1827 and a best-selling 1925 novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, but the plot was only rewritten into a hate script in the Nazi film directed by Veit Harlan (1899-1964).
The movie depicted him with a hooked nose and as rich and evil, the stereotypes Goebbels sought to propagate about Jews.
Films were one of Goebbels' key instruments in manipulating public opinion: he described movies as a "weapon" of "total war".
The exhibition also details how Harlan and the cast tried to wriggle out of blame after the war.
Harlan was tried in Hamburg for crimes against humanity, but acquitted after judges said they could not establish a causal linkage in law between the film and the Holocaust.
