MGM with the Nazis: how Hollywood kowtowed to Hitler

I'm reading Norman Ohler's The Infiltrators: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis, which is focused, laser-sharp, and utterly engaging. From it, there's an enlightening passage that shows how Hollywood bowed down to Hitler because of greed. By the way, the book seems to be named The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis in the USA.

Harro Schulze-Boysen and Libertas Schulze-Boysen, both engaged in the Nazi-resistance movement and murdered. The image is from the German Resistance Memorial Center.

Libertas Schulze-Boysen is mentioned below; she is one of the heroes in this book and should be lauded, as opposed to MGM and their cowardly and greedy ilk.

What follows in this post is from the aforementioned book, all written by Norman Ohler:

Libertas moves to Berlin at this time. Her life is now set in the city so influenced by the scandal surrounding her grandfather Philipp. Here it will be decided whether, with all her independence and restlessness, she will transform herself into a goddess of freedom, or instead, like the Fürst, she will come to ruin by acting out her desires. It begins well: She’s just nineteen, and, with no professional experience or technical training, she’s landed a promising position that brings her close to her second-biggest passion, after poetry: film. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the largest Hollywood studio, lures her to their Berlin branch on Friedrichstrasse. But perhaps her auspicious start in the world of work isn’t as astonishing as it initially appears. MGM fired the bulk of its Jewish employees during the spring of 1933: more than half of their total staff, including practically all the managers. The German head of the studio, Frits Strengholt, even divorces his Jewish wife at the behest of the propaganda ministry; she later ends up in a concentration camp.

MGM, which also has Greta Garbo under contract, prospers in the Nazi empire, which is the second-largest film market in the world.

[...]

But the American studios must pay a steep price. Goebbels has even dispatched a censor to Los Angeles: German consul Georg Gyssling. He’s not shy about suggesting edits, and Hollywood listens to him because Gyssling has genuine leverage. It stems from Article 15 of the German film regulations: any company that produces films critical of the Nazis, regardless of where in the world, will have all future films banned from German cinemas — a nightmare scenario for American producers. As a result, they acquiesce without much grumbling when their films are shortened or a plotline is eliminated in order to suit the Nazi leadership in distant Berlin. Profit over principle, that’s the way the studio bosses do business, and they collaborate to the point of self-denial with the anti-Semites in Berlin — a scandal that’s swept silently under the rug.

The obsequiousness toward Hitler is far-reaching. At the behest of Nazi leadership, a well-funded film project intended to bring international attention to the inhuman treatment of Jews in Germany is dropped. Herman Mankiewicz, who together with Orson Welles would go on to write one of the greatest movies of all time, Citizen Kane, is working in May 1933 on a screenplay called The Mad Dog of Europe. Three kilometers of newsreel footage from the Deutsche Wochenschau, the German Weekly Review, have already been assembled in order to be woven into the film and authentically show what is happening to Jews in Germany. An actor has been chosen who is the spitt ing image of Hitler: the Führer is to be portrayed in film long before Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator. The rest of the cast will be the crème de la crème of Hollywood. “This picture is produced in the interests of DEMOCRACY,” Mankiewicz’s screenplay begins confidently, “an ideal which has inspired the noblest deeds of man.”

The story follows a Jewish family, the Mendelsohns, and their relationship with their neighbors and best friends, the Schmidts — until Hitler’s racist policies turn them against each other. When Consul Gyssling gets wind of the project, he pulls out all stops, indicating that not only will all American productions be banned in Germany in the future, but that the property of all U.S. film studios will be confiscated if the film is made. Again Louis B. Mayer backs down: “We have interests in Germany . . . we have terrific income in Germany and, as far as I am concerned, this picture will never be made.”

At this critical moment, when Hollywood could have warned the world, the final cut falls not to the filmmakers but to Goebbels.