Development Goebbels' propaganda campaign 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, both produced in 1940, 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 film's impetus came from
Joseph Goebbels' desire to make an antisemitic response to Mendes' philo-semitic film adaptation of
Lion Feuchtwanger's 1925 novel
of the same name. Susan Tegel ascribes the genesis of the project more to opportunism than to ideological antisemitism.
Metzger and Möller script Ludwig Metzger had been trying to promote his proposal for a film on the life of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer since as early as 1921 but without any success. The publication of Feuchtwanger's book and Mendes' film adaptation of it irritated Metzger because of his inability to move forward such a project. In January or February 1939, Metzger, now a screenwriter for
Terra Filmkunst, mentioned his idea to Wolfgang Ebbecke with whom he was working on the script for
Central Rio. Ebbecke shot down the idea, raising a number of objections including the existence of Mendes' British film on the same topic and the concern that German audiences might confuse the proposed film with Feuchtwanger's novel which was not antisemitic. At Goebbels' direction, Metzger was given a contract by Terra to write a script for the proposed film. He decided to base his script on the
1827 Hauff novella rather than the more recent and better known
1925 Feuchtwanger novel.
Veit Harlan When Nazi Germany occupied Poland in September 1939, it now had the country's Jewish population of three million under its direct authority. In view of the German populace's tepid response to the orchestrated violence of Kristallnacht, the Nazis perceived an urgent need for films that would move German popular sentiment in favor of the Nazi
Final Solution to the '
Jewish question'. Frustrated with the delays on the
Jud Süß project, Goebbels ordered
Fritz Hippler, the head of his film department, to sack Brauer and bring in Veit Harlan to take over as director. Goebbels' responded to this by informing Harlan that, if he enlisted, he would do his military service at the front. According to Harlan, Goebbels screamed at him, "I can crush you like a bug on the wall!" When Harlan asked Riefenstahl to intercede for him with Goebbels, she demurred citing her own conflicts with the propaganda minister. Instead of intervening on his behalf, Riefenstahl wrote that she advised Harlan to move to Switzerland; however, Harlan expressed fear for his life and the impact it would have on his wife.
Script rewrite According to Harlan's postwar testimony, he told Goebbels that the Metzger/Möller script was nothing more than "dramatized
Stürmer", referring to the Nazi weekly propaganda publication. He argued that such a piece of poor writing would lead not to the portrayal of a "despicable Jew" but rather to just a "despicable film." Goebbels wanted Harlan to include sequences depicting Jewish ritual slaughter but Harlan demurred, arguing that portraying such cruelty would "make audiences sick to their stomachs." Harlan complained to Goebbels that all the characters were negative; to this, Goebbels retorted that Harlan would not turn down the role of
Richard III just because he was a negative character. However, Goebbels acceded to Harlan's insistence on rewriting the script and Harlan spent from November 1939 to March 1940 revising the script although he kept much of what Metzger and Möller had written. However, in rebuttal, Haggith and Newman point out that Harlan added an important sequence in which Süß is responsible for the execution of a blacksmith, a sequence which served to increase the audience's hatred for Süß. David Welch identifies Werner Krauss as having asked Goebbels to make a public pronouncement stating that Krauss was not Jewish but merely "playing a part as an actor in the service of the State." In order to address their concerns, Goebbels issued a disclaimer stating that those actors playing the parts of Jews were in fact of pure 'Aryan' blood. Similarly,
Josef Škvorecký also notes that all the major cast members as well as Harlan himself tried in various ways to avoid participation in the project; however Škvorecký ascribes a rather different motivation to the cast than the one that Azuelos propounds. Škvorecký attributes the reluctance of actors to participate in what he characterizes as a "politically-most-correct film" as an indication of "how aware most German artists were of the fact that antisemitism under Hitler changed from prejudice to murder." While cast members could have declined the roles that were offered to them, Škvorecký asserts that such action would have required "extraordinary courage: the dire consequences of such an act of defiance were only too easy to imagine." According to Škvorecký, "Goebbels either outwitted [the actors he desired for the cast], or knew about compromising circumstances in their lives and used this knowledge for bludgeoning them into acceptance." Elaborating on the "compromising circumstances", Škvorecký writes, "One of the paradoxes of this sinister film is how many participants in the violently racist project had either Jewish spouses or relatives, were disciples of Jewish artists and known friends of Jews, or had been—before the Nazi takeover—left-leaning intellectuals, even communists." For example, Škvorecký points out that Veit Harlan's first wife was
Dora Gerson, a German-Jewish actress and cabaret singer (who was later murdered in
Auschwitz). Harlan himself had flirted with socialism. Although Werner Krauss was openly antisemitic and an ardent Nazi, his daughter-in-law was Jewish. Ferdinand Marian had a half-Jewish daughter from his first marriage and the former husband of his second wife was a Jew. Heinrich George was active in the
Communist party before the Nazi takeover. Cooke and Silberman describe him as "the actor most closely tied to fascist fantasies of the autocratic and the populist leader". George's affiliation with the Nazis would have fatal consequences for him after the war when the Soviets arrested him as a Nazi collaborator. He died in 1946 while interned in
NKVD special camp Nr. 7 located in
Sachsenhausen. According to Harlan, it was Goebbels who insisted that Harlan's wife, Kristina Söderbaum, play the leading female role. As a beautiful Swedish blonde, Söderbaum had the baby-doll looks that epitomized the model Aryan woman. In fact, she had already played the role of the innocent Aryan in a number of feature films and was well-known to German audiences. Her youth and beauty made her a symbol of health and purity, and thus an exemplary specimen of the Nazi ideal of womanhood. Because two of her films ended with her committing suicide by drowning, she was given the mock honorary title
Reichswasserleiche ('Drowned Corpse of the Reich'). Harlan argued to Goebbels that Söderbaum, having just given birth, was too weak to take on the role. Goebbels countered that a special room could be set up as a nursery and that a wet-nurse could be hired to care for the infant. He further offered to halt shooting if Söderbaum became ill. Harlan later reported that Söderbaum was so upset by the entire affair that she considered fleeing back to her native Sweden to avoid having to play the part of Dorothea. In the end, however, she decided to stay and performed the role. Marian finally agreed to play the part of Süß for fear of reprisal against members of his family. Marian had a daughter from his first marriage to the Jewish pianist, Irene Saager. The former husband of his second wife was also Jewish, making her son (and Marian's stepson) half-Jewish. Goebbels, however, used not only intimidation but also cajoling and generosity to achieve his goals. Ferdinand Marian requested compensation of 50,000 marks for taking on the role of Süß, an amount double anything he had received for previous roles. When asked to approve this amount, Goebbels did so citing the importance of the film and the need for a high-caliber cast to ensure its success. According to his biographer, Friedrich Knilli, Marian never forgave himself for having accepted the role of Süß. Knilli ascribes Marian's alcoholism and alleged suicide after the war to his feelings of guilt. Of all the cast members, Werner Krauss was the one most clearly identified as an antisemite. His consummate skills in characterization had earned him the title of "the man with a thousand faces". There is some difference of opinion regarding the number of roles that Krauss played in the film. While it is generally recognized that, with the exception of Marian's title role, the other five speaking parts that depicted Jews were all played by Krauss, The roles that Krauss played in the film are often characterized as portraying antisemitic stereotypes. In an interview, Harlan explained that the decision to have Krauss play all the roles was "meant to show how all these different temperaments and characters—the pious patriarch, the wily swindler, the penny-pinching merchant, and so on—were all ultimately derived from the same (Jewish) root". describes Krauss' face as eerily appearing in different guises whenever the camera pans across a crowd of Jews, creating what Sieg calls a "paranoid effect of déjà vu".
Filming Shooting began in March 1940 and, with the exception of some scenes which were shot on location in
Prague, most of the filming took place at the
UFA studios in Berlin Babelsberg. David Culbert attributes the film's box-office success in large part to "its lavish sets, its effective crowd scenes, its skillful script, and the splendid acting by most of the principals." Goebbels' dissatisfaction was centered on the relationship between Dorothea, the leading female character and Süß. He complained that Harlan had "transformed Süß, a monster, into a Romeo." Harlan testified that Goebbels removed him from the editing process and insisted on many changes, mostly with the intent of making Süß more unambiguously evil. The film was extensively re-edited to remove ambiguities that portrayed Süß in too sympathetic a light to suit Goebbels' antisemitic agenda. While Harlan's account of Goebbels' involvement in the film has been treated by a number of sources as factual, Haggith and Newman assert that "it is difficult to find any evidence of significant interference (by Goebbels) aside from casting and the appointment of Harlan." They point out that it was in Harlan's interest to shift the blame to Goebbels after the war. ==Release and reception==