20130804

Hollywood freely collaborated with Hitler and China is next.


Six days after a protest by a group of Nazis managed to shut down a screening of “All Quiet on the Western Front” for supposedly making Germans look like cowards, the film was banned in 1930 Germany. Germany then ordered a recut version of the film that was more flattering to its side in WWI and stipulated that the cuts must be made to all prints of the movie shown worldwide, not just in Germany. Since Germany had recently been the second-biggest movie market and was expected to bounce back to the same position soon, Universal chief Carl Laemmle (a German-born Jew) meekly accepted.

Such alarming revelations, many based on newly unearthed documents, are the basis of Harvard scholar Ben Urwand’s new book, “The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler.” Urwand notes that 1930s Berlin heavily censored movies out of Hollywood, which would not deliver a major anti-Hitler production until 1939.

Hollywood effectively submitted its films for approval to Georg Gyssling, a Nazi diplomat who arrived in LA in 1931 and threatened the studios with “Article 15,” which said that if an American film released anywhere in the world offended Germany, the Germans would ban all other releases from the same studio...

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/shanghaied_CDRl1DbGRu5DjclErtYYhL

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