AHR Forum The First Wave of American “Holocaust” Films, 1945–1959 LAWRENCE BARON COMMENTING ON MAX WEINREICH’S BOOK Hitler’s Professors for the American Historical Review in 1946, Roland Usher declared, “It is hardly necessary today to prove terrorism and the intentional extermination of the Jews. Murder camps, mass murder, and mass executions have already been extensively described.”1 In retrospect, Usher’s confidence in the state of knowledge about Nazi genocidal policies can be attributed to his expertise in German history and the flow of films, news, and photographs showing the liberation of German concentration camps by Allied troops and the first Nuremberg Trial. Most Holocaust scholars would dismiss Usher’s claim as a momentary aberration and trace American public awareness of the Jewish ordeal to the late 1950s, when the term “Holocaust” became synonymous with Hitler’s eradication of the Jews.2 They concur that American consciousness of the subject dissipated quickly after 1946, for a variety of reasons: a failure to comprehend the Nazi assault on European Jewry, the outbreak of the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s replacement of Germany as the archenemy of the United States, the pursuit of peacetime normalcy, the rehabilitation of West Germany as a strategic ally, and the tendency to subsume the Nazi onslaught against the Jews under the rubric of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In this standard interpretation, the subsequent popularization of the Holocaust as a distinctly Jewish tragedy emerged as a response to the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the fear that Israel had been on the brink of obliteration before the Six Day War in 1967, the ensuing admiration of its rapid victory in that conflict, perceived parallels to the Vietnam War, the growth of multiculturalism, and the rise of identity politics among disadvantaged minorities who documented their past and present victimization.3 I want to thank the following for their useful feedback on earlier drafts of this article: Steven Carr, David Cesarani, Henry Greenspan, Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Joel Rosenberg, and Robert Rosenstone. 1 Roland G. Usher, review of Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People, American Historical Review 52, no. 1 (October 1946): 120. 2 Zev Garber and Bruce Zuckerman, “Why Do We Call the Holocaust ‘The Holocaust?’: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Labels,” Modern Judaism 9, no. 2 (1989): 197–211; Gerd Korman, “The Holocaust in American Historical Writing,” Societas 2, no. 3 (1972): 250–262; Jon Petrie, “The Secular Word Holocaust: Scholarly Myths, History, and 20th Century Meanings,” Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 1 (2000): 31–63. 3 Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler—How History Is Bought, Packaged, and Sold (New York, 1999), 23– 40; Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 4 –19; Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of 1 2 Lawrence Baron The pioneering surveys of Holocaust cinema by Ilan Avisar, Judith Doneson, and Annette Insdorf employ the same periodization for the entry of the Holocaust into American films, citing The Young Lions (1958) and The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) as the first Hollywood dramatizations of the topic.4 Avisar distrusted American attempts to depict Nazi genocide on geographical grounds: “Unlike the personal drives of west and east European filmmakers, who deal with the Holocaust in order to explore and express their own national traumas, the American interest in the subject is motivated by other considerations which are not necessarily rooted in a genuine concern with the disturbing truth of the historical tragedy.”5 Insdorf opined that Hollywood exploited the Holocaust “to evoke instant terror or tears” and suspected that the movie industry’s commercialism tended “to pre-empt the possibilities of truthful representation.”6 Doneson, the only historian among the three, contended that the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigation into communist infiltration of Hollywood deterred the Jewish owners of major studios from producing films that dwelled on Jewish suffering. Such special pleading might draw attention to their immigrant origins and alleged unpatriotic priorities. Accordingly, Hollywood’s initial response to the Holocaust was limited to exposés of domestic antisemitism, around which the plots of Crossfire (1947) and Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) revolved. Both portrayed their primary Jewish character as a veteran of World War II and discredited antisemitism as one of a myriad of ethnic and religious prejudices that undermined the American ideal of equality. Thus, fighting antisemitism in the United States was synonymous with defending democracy.7 The enormous human toll taken by the war did obscure the genocide inflicted on the Jews. The Jewish catastrophe appeared alongside stories about other civilian atrocities and war crimes committed by Hitler’s regime. In not singling out the ordeal of the Jews, the films continued to adhere to the wartime government and industry guidelines for how American movies should depict Nazi Germany and its wrongdoing. From its inception in 1930, the film industry’s internal censorship board, the Production Code Administration (PCA), stipulated that filmmakers should portray different nations and religions fairly. Joseph Breen, who headed the PCA after 1934, Jewish Suffering (New York, 2000), 11–30; Deborah Lipstadt, “America and the Memory of the Holocaust, 1950–1965,” Modern Judaism 16, no. 3 (1996): 198–208; Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle, 2001), 3–15; Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, 1999). 4 Ilan Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s Images of the Unimaginable (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), 90–133; Judith E. Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film (Philadelphia, 1987), 59–107; Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (New York, 1983), 1–21. 5 Avisar, Screening the Holocaust, 132–133. 6 Insdorf, Indelible Shadows, 21–28, 42– 44. Insdorf qualified her stance by classifying any formulaic movie as a Hollywood film and considering less conventional American productions such as The Pawnbroker to be valid representations of the Holocaust. 7 Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film, 50–65. For a similar interpretation of these two postwar films and the forces that influenced their approach to antisemitism, see Omer Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema: From “The Golem” to “Don’t Touch My Holocaust” (Bloomington, Ind., 2005), 37– 45. The unitary theory of racism typified the social scientific approach to prejudice in the late 1940s. See Michelle Brattain, “Race, Racism, and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public,” American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (December 2007): 1386–1413; Stuart Svonkin, Jews against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York, 1997), 23– 40. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 The First Wave of American “Holocaust” Films 3 worried that presenting antisemitic actions and attitudes onscreen would incite rather than inhibit hatred of Jews.8 He opposed excessively graphic depictions of violence even in war movies documenting the barbarism of the Third Reich. The federal Office of Censorship and Office of War Information warned against emphasizing that Jews were a target of Hitler’s wrath, anticipating that German propagandists would cite such movies as symptomatic of the pro-Jewish bias that Hollywood had purportedly cultivated to drag the United States into the war.9 The Office of War Information directed the media to publicize smaller and verifiable atrocities such as the Lidice massacre of 1942 rather than “rumors” about the unimaginable transgressions that Germany purportedly was perpetrating against the Jews.10 The widespread dissemination of footage and photographs of the liberation of concentration camps and death camps in newspapers, newsreels, and magazines in 1944 and 1945 exposed the American public to far more gruesome images.11 Allied prosecutors compiled a film titled Nazi Concentration Camps for the Nuremberg Trials as proof of the crimes they accused the defendants of committing. It consisted of scenes of corpses stacked like firewood and piled in mass graves, crematoria full of ashes and charred bones, emaciated survivors wearing striped uniforms, electrified barbed wire fences, empty canisters of cyanide pellets, gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, red boxcars used to transport Jews, Star of David badges, tattooed numbers on arms, and warehouses overflowing with the personal effects and hair of those who perished.12 The revelations about the carnage in Europe seeped into the consciousness of most Americans, even though its Jewish component was lumped together with other German outrages. This ecumenical perspective was evident in public opinion polls conducted in 1945. Following the height of press coverage about the grim discoveries that Allied troops had made when liberating the camps, those queried were asked if they believed that the “Germans have killed many people in concentration camps or let them starve to death.” Eighty-four percent of the respondents answered yes; another 9 percent agreed but felt the extent of mass murder had been exaggerated. The question typically skirted the issue of the identity of the victims.13 The Western Allies liberated concentration and labor camps whose inmates were not primarily Jews. Consequently, the footage and photographs of the death camps that the Soviets 8 Thomas Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (New York, 2007), 152–171, 199–224. 9 Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York, 1993), 36–59, 122–133; Steven Alan Carr, “Hollywood, the Holocaust, and World War II,” Studies in Jewish Civilization 17 (2006): 44 – 48; K. R. M. Short, “Hollywood Fights Anti-Semitism, 1940–1945,” in Short, ed., Film and Radio Propaganda in World War II (Knoxville, Tenn., 1983), 146–169. 10 Steven Casey, Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and the War against Nazi Germany (New York, 2001), 56–72. 11 Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago, 1998), 49–140. 12 Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven, Conn., 2001), 11–37; Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York, 1999), 5–22. 13 “Enemy Treatment of Prisoners,” Public Opinion Quarterly 9, no. 1 (1945): 246. During the Nuremberg Trials, another poll characteristically probed whether German and Japanese civilians had known about “atrocities in prison camps while the war was still going on.” Once again there was no mention of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews. “In the United States: Opinion on Germany and Japan,” Public Opinion Quarterly 9, no. 4 (1945/1946): 533. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 4 Lawrence Baron TABLE 1 Themes of American “Holocaust” Feature Films, 1945–1959 Theme Number of Films (26) Refugee Survivors in DP camps or as Immigrants to Israel and the United States Hunting and Trying Nazi War Criminals Thwarting Neo-Nazi Conspiracies Jews Escaping or Hiding from the Nazis Allied Liberation of Concentration Camps 7 7 6 4 2 recorded received less attention in the United States.14 The verdict issued by the International Military Tribunal established that 6 million Jews had been slaughtered by the Germans, but this offense belonged to a broader litany of charges for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.15 The category of “Holocaust” film in this period includes any movie whose plot or subplots feature or refer to the Nazi internment and racially motivated mass murder of Jews and other subjugated nationalities, evasion of these policies by members of the targeted groups, and the postwar repercussions of Nazi racism for Allied liberators, captured perpetrators, fugitive war criminals, neo-Nazis conspiring to overturn the Allied victory, and survivors of Nazi persecution. Hollywood filmmakers assumed that audiences recognized the images and themes derived from recent headlines, newsreels, and photographs of the carnage and civilian misery the Third Reich left in its wake. American films produced between 1945 and 1959 usually dealt with the postwar consequences of what had happened to European Jewry rather than with the losses and travails its members incurred during the war.16 (See Table 1.) From an American perspective, responding to Germany’s crimes against humanity meant caring for surviving displaced persons (DPs), ferreting out Nazi war criminals and putting them on trial, supporting Jewish attempts to immigrate to Palestine, and thwarting a resurgence of Nazism. At first, Jews appeared only as minor characters or offscreen victims who were the beneficiaries of American sympathy. By the 1950s, Jewish protagonists started to take center stage in these movies as the precariousness of their wartime existence and the urgency of their postwar situation received fuller treatment. The early popularization of the Holocaust in American feature films must be correlated to other contemporaneous sources of information available to the reading and viewing public. Reports concerning the German effort to destroy the Jews of Europe had a cumulative impact on many Americans by the end of the war. The extensive coverage of German camps being liberated, the snapshots and personal accounts brought back by returning U.S. troops who had participated in the liber14 Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (New York, 2001), 80–87; Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (London, 2005), 124 –149. 15 Michael R. Marrus, “The Holocaust at Nuremberg,” Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998): 5– 41. 16 Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Lanham, Md., 2005), 25. The figures in this table are not the same as the ones in my book because the latter includes television dramas and fundraising films not intended for theatrical distribution. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 The First Wave of American “Holocaust” Films 5 ation, and the articles and books spawned by the Nuremberg Trials enhanced public awareness of the “Final Solution” as well.17 The editors of Time presumed that the magazine’s readers knew enough to understand the caption inserted below a photograph of German soldiers aiming rifles at a man standing in front of a ditch: “Jew (with Star of David) and Nazi Executioner, Six million died—one by one, alone.”18 Throughout the 1950s, the publication of Holocaust memoirs, most notably those of Anne Frank (1952 ) and Viktor Frankl (1959), popular novels such as John Hersey’s The Wall (1950) and Leon Uris’s Exodus (1958), and historical studies about Nazi Germany such as Willi Frischauer’s biography of Heinrich Himmler (1953) and Gerald Reitlinger’s study of the SS (1957) elaborated on what Jews had endured in camps and ghettos or while in hiding, and on Hitler’s rise to power and his attempt to rid Europe of Jews.19 Jeffrey Shandler has surveyed the important role that television played in introducing the Holocaust into American popular culture during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. Various documentaries about World War II kept the atrocity footage in the public’s eye. Dramatic programming based on Germany’s genocide of European Jews and their responses to it appeared frequently in Sunday morning religious fare and primetime theatrical productions. Indeed, Stanley Kramer’s heralded Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) was originally broadcast on CBS’s Playhouse 90 in 1959.20 To be sure, Hollywood movies “Americanized” the Holocaust by plucking positive stories out of a morass of suffering to communicate edifying messages that would be personally touching and politically relevant to their audiences. Most Holocaust scholars decry this process as a trivialization and universalization of the event that dilutes its horror, Jewish specificity, and uniqueness.21 On the other hand, Doneson insisted that despite these shortcomings, American films served an important function in conveying a semblance of the Jewish calamity to a broad spectrum of the public.22 While the timeline for the popularization of the Holocaust in the United States proposed here is different from hers, it shares her recognition that repre17 Lawrence Baron, “The Holocaust and American Public Memory, 1945–1960,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17, no. 1 (2003): 64 –66. Although the press downplayed stories about the decimation of European Jewry, it disclosed key facts during the course of the war in a piecemeal way. See Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (New York, 1986); Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and American’s Most Important Newspaper (New York, 2005). 18 “War Crimes,” Time, December 24, 1945, 29. 19 Baron, “ The Holocaust and American Public Memory,” 66–71, 75–79. See David Cesarani, “Challenging the Myth of Silence: Postwar Responses to the Destruction of European Jewry,” The J. B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Lecture (Spring), April 2, 2009, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, http://www.ushmm.org/research/center/presentations/lectures/in dex_all.php?content⫽2-shapiro (accessed December 27, 2009). Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York, 2009); Kirsten Fermaglich, American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957–1965 (Waltham, Mass., 2006); Michael E. Staub, Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America (New York, 2002). 20 Shandler, While America Watches, 23–79. 21 Lawrence L. Langer, “The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen,” in Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York, 1995), 157–177; Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “The Americanization of the Holocaust,” in Rosenfeld, ed., Thinking about the Holocaust after Half a Century (Bloomington, Ind., 1997), 119–150. 22 Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film, 199–209. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 6 Lawrence Baron sentations of a crime so heinous boggled the imagination of Americans and therefore had to be framed in idioms and terms familiar to them. This recognition is predicated on the constructivist model articulated by Alan Mintz, which assumes that “historical events, even the Holocaust, possess no inscribed meanings; meaning is constructed by communities of interpretation—differently by different communities—out of their own motives and needs.”23 The pioneering “Holocaust” films naturally bear the imprint of the cinematic styles and narrative practices of Hollywood productions from this era. Their treatment of violence is less graphic than in American movies made since the 1960s.24 They possess a linear structure, deliver a moral message, treat individuals as the primary agents of historical change, and simplify the causal complexity of history. They elicit admiration for heroes, antipathy toward villains, and sympathy for victims. Robert Burgoyne, Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Robert Rosenstone, and Robert Brent Toplin have shown how the vicarious historical experience imparted to viewers by well-wrought movies renders filmed history more emotionally engaging, but less intellectually complicated, than its academic counterpart.25 In the interim between the end of World War II and the Eichmann trial, Hollywood generated a cinematic repository of what Alison Landsberg terms “prosthetic memories.” Using the analogy of an artificial limb, she maintains that “prosthetic memories originate outside a person’s lived experience and yet are taken on and worn by that person through mass cultural technologies of memory.” Like prosthetic devices, these vicarious memories “often mark a trauma” so excruciating that it needs to be buffered for those who have not sustained it. Cognizant of the tendency of feature films to manipulate emotions, she nonetheless asserts that their accessibility “makes images and narratives widely available to people who live in different places and come from different backgrounds, races, and classes.” Hence, movies personalize the abstract forces of history and engender empathy for past and present victims of oppression.26 IT DID NOT TAKE LONG for the atrocity footage of liberated camps to appear in an American feature film. Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946) holds the distinction of being the first to employ such clips. Welles modeled its sinister SS villain Franz Kindler after Martin Bormann, the highest-ranking Nazi to elude capture by the Allies. Kindler, as played by Welles, uses his fluent English and forged credentials to attain a position as a German history professor at a New England college under the alias Charles Rankin. Edward G. Robinson plays Detective Wilson of the Allied Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America, 37– 40. J. David Slocum, “Film Violence and the Institutionalization of the Cinema,” Social Research 67, no. 3 (2000): 654 –660. 25 Robert Burgoyne, The Hollywood Historical Film (Malden, Mass., 2008); Marnie Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film (New York, 2007); Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (New York, 2006); Robert Brent Toplin, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (Lawrence, Kans., 2002) 26 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York, 2004), 18–22. See also Anna Reading, The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Culture and Memory (New York, 2002). 23 24 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 The First Wave of American “Holocaust” Films 7 War Crimes Commission, who tracks Kindler down. At a dinner party thrown by Kindler, Wilson listens intently as his host lectures about the innate authoritarianism of the Germans and their lack of a philosopher who championed freedom. When Kindler’s son-in-law suggests that Karl Marx disproves this generalization, Kindler scoffs at the suggestion that a Jew such as Marx could be considered a German. To enlist the cooperation of Rankin’s unwitting wife, Wilson shows her films of corpses, a gas chamber, a burial pit, and a skeletal survivor and charges that Kindler, a.k.a. Rankin, “conceived of the theory of genocide, the mass depopulation of conquered countries.”27 With hindsight, it is easy to fault The Stranger ’s overly broad definition of genocide and its failure to specify that Jews were targeted for extermination. The latter flaw typifies the narration in early documentaries such as Nazi Concentration Camps and Night and Fog (1955), which barely mention the victimization of the Jews in order to stress the multinational scope of German war crimes.28 Despite The Stranger ’s vagueness, its clue about Rankin’s antisemitism, the inclusion of concentration camp footage, and the reference to genocide indicate an awareness of what the Third Reich’s racial policies entailed.29 Joseph Breen of the PCA did not object to the graphic atrocity footage, but he advised the studio to replace the word “cyanide” with “poison” when Wilson describes the gas to Mary.30 Most reviewers noted that Kindler planned Nazi atrocities and mass murder.31 The film’s tagline labels him “the most deceitful man a woman ever loved,” reinforcing the belief that a few wicked men “were to blame for Nazi excesses.”32 Not all screen Nazis died while trying to escape like Kindler. Those who were apprehended became the subject of courtroom dramas. Although during the war the percentage of Americans in favor of summarily executing Nazi leaders far exceeded the percentage who favored putting the worst offenders on trial, 75 percent approved of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg after its establishment. While they were certain the defendants were guilty, they believed that the IMT afforded the defendants the same legal safeguards as an American trial.33 Even before the end of the war, André de Toth’s None Shall Escape (1944) previewed what a war crimes trial would look like. Some ads and posters for it quoted the Moscow Declaration of 1943, pledging international trials of Nazi leaders after 27 The Stranger, dir. Orson Welles (U.S., 1946); Palmer R. Barton, “The Politics of Genre in Welles’ The Stranger,” Film Criticism 9, no. 2 (1984 –1985): 2–14. 28 Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 150–158; Ewout van der Knaap, “The Construction of Memory in Nuit et Brouillard,” in van der Knapp, ed., Uncovering the Holocaust: The International Reception of Night and Fog (London, 2006), 17–19. 29 Baron, Projecting the Holocaust, 27–28; Caroline Joan (Kay) S. Picart and David A. Frank, Frames of Evil: The Holocaust as Horror in American Film (Carbondale, Ill., 2006), 25. 30 Letter from Joseph I. Breen to William Goetz, September 18, 1945, The Stranger, Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences [hereafter MHLAMPAS], Beverly Hills, Calif. 31 Bosley Crowther, “The Stranger,” New York Times, July 11, 1946; Jack D. Grant, “Welles, Young, and Robinson Score Hits,” Hollywood Reporter, May 21, 1946; “The New Pictures,” Time, June 17, 1946, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,793120,00.html (accessed December 27, 2009); “”Movie of the Week: The Stranger,“ Life, June 3, 1946, 78. 32 William J. Bosch, Judgment on Nuremberg: American Attitudes toward the Major German WarCrime Trials (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1970), 111. 33 Ibid., 90–112. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 8 Lawrence Baron the cessation of hostilities.34 The courtroom testimony of witnesses against the Nazi governor of a district in Poland occasions flashbacks to the origins of his bitterness as an ethnic German residing in a town that fell within the borders of the new state of Poland created by the Treaty of Versailles; his joining of the Nazi Party in the 1920s; his suppression of dissidents, including his own brother, once the Nazis were in power; and his reign of terror over his former hometown, where he burns the synagogue and orders the shooting of Jews who resist deportation. The reviewer for the communist Daily Worker lauded the film for presenting “the most militant indictment of anti-Semitism in the history of Hollywood.”35 The picture proved to be a box-office hit and received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Story.36 The attempt to be unbiased toward an ostensibly guilty Nazi is the theme of the second American film about war crimes trials, Lewis Allen’s Sealed Verdict (1948).37 It opens with newsreel footage of Justice Robert Jackson’s opening statement at the Nuremberg Trials: “They (the accused) are the living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism, and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.”38 Major Robert Lawson, played by Ray Milland, watches this clip to prepare for his prosecution of General Otto Steigmann, who is being tried for the reprisal executions of sixty Czech hostages in the town of Leemach when he was the military governor of Bohemia. This incident is obviously modeled on the Nazi massacre of Czechs at Lidice as retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. Lidice had attracted much coverage in the American press and inspired two other feature films, Hangmen Also Die! (1943) and Hitler’s Madman (1943).39 Lawson easily wins a conviction and death sentence against Steigmann. Themis, the daughter of a French resistance leader whose life was spared by Steigmann, accuses Lawson of sending an innocent man to his death. Although initially suspicious of Themis because the French government has demanded her extradition for collaborating with Steigmann, Lawson has pangs of conscience over having failed to produce two key pieces of evidence: a Night and Fog Decree signed by Steigmann and a commendation letter from Hitler for the Leemach killings. Moreover, Lawson’s commander pressures him to execute Steigmann quickly, because rumors of his possible acquittal are becoming a rallying point among restive Germans. Lawson discovers that Steigmann’s mother may possess the missing documents. She lives at the home of a family friend, a rabbi whose wife and daughters were gassed at Buchenwald and whose son’s skull was crushed by an SS guard there. Mrs. Steigmann burns 34 None Shall Escape, dir. André de Toth (U.S., 1944); “Clippings,” None Shall Escape, Special Collections, MHL-AMPAS; “Scrapbook 1,” Joseph Than Collection, MHL-AMPAS. 35 J. Hoberman, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds (Philadelphia, 1995), 324. Hoberman’s claim that this film originally was a Yiddish production that was dubbed into English in 1944 is contradicted by various drafts of the script and the studio correspondence with the PCA. For example, see Burt Kelly to Jeff Sherlock, April 14, 1943, None Shall Escape, Special Collections, MHL-AMPAS. 36 “Scrapbook 1”; Lester Cole, Hollywood Red: The Autobiography of Lester Cole (Palo Alto, Calif., 1981), 205–206. 37 Sealed Verdict, dir. Lewis Allen (U.S., 1948) 38 Jonathan Latimer, “Sealed Verdict: Release Dialogue Script,” March 10, 1948, Special Collections, MHL-AMPAS. 39 Hangmen Also Die!, dir. Fritz Lang (U.S., 1943); Hitler’s Madman, dir. Douglas Sirk (U.S., 1943). AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 The First Wave of American “Holocaust” Films 9 the incriminating papers shortly before Themis and the rabbi arrive to confiscate them. She castigates Jews as “filthy pigs” who will be liquidated when the Nazis regain power. Pretending that he has found the two documents, Lawson confronts Steigmann in his cell. The latter confidently retorts, “We will rise again and exterminate all sub-humans throughout the world. All countries must be liberated from the degenerate races.”40 Although Bernard Dick credits Sealed Verdict with being “the first American film to speak of the camps specifically as death camps,” most reviewers and scholars have criticized its convoluted plot, its portrayal of the rabbi as too forgiving, and the unfaithful adaptation of the novel on which it was based.41 Whatever its deficiencies as a film, it inextricably linked Nazi reprisals against enemy civilians with racist rationalizations for the eradication of “inferior” races, including Jews. Heeding Robert Jackson’s advice, Lawson hesitates to hang a possibly innocent man until Steigmann confesses to the charges against him. The movie premiered several months after the Soviet Union had blockaded West Berlin, and during the American, British, and French airlift to supply the city with necessities.42 Despite speculation that Hollywood avoided the subject of the Holocaust to appease West German public opinion, the PCA’s review of the script never censures it for broaching the topic of German war crimes.43 Paramount vouched for the authenticity of the trial scenes by hiring Jackson’s press secretary, Gordon Dean, as a consultant. The studio’s publicity campaign hyped the issue of fraternization, since Lawson falls in love with Themis, but also mentioned the “dramatic war-crimes trials,” “the mass murderer of Leemach,” and the decree legitimating “the murder without trial of countless Europeans.”44 Ex-Nazis who evaded capture or trial onscreen remained menacing foes hatching plots to foment revolution, inventing weapons of mass destruction, or trying to clone Aryan supermen.45 Not all thrillers about the ongoing threat that Nazis posed to the free world limited themselves to their current machinations. Some thrillers about clandestine Nazi activities discredited their villains by reminding audiences of the shameful record of the Third Reich. Andrew Marton’s The Devil Makes Three (1952) drew on a true story about a smuggling operation conducted by former Nazis. When Lieutenant Jeff Eliot, played by Gene Kelly, returns to Munich in 1947 to search for 40 Latimer, “Sealed Verdict: Release Dialogue Script,” Reels 4A–5A. The Night and Fog Decree, issued by Hitler on December 7, 1941, authorized the Wehrmacht to arrest those suspected of endangering German occupation troops and submerge them in the “night and fog” of secret extralegal trials and incarceration in Germany. See “Night and Fog Decree,” in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang⫽en&ModuleId⫽ 10007465&print⫽y (accessed December 27, 2009). 41 Bernard F. Dick, The Star-Spangled Screen: The American World War II Film (Lexington, Ky., 1985), 209; Bosley Crowther, “Sealed Verdict,” New York Times, November 3, 1948; Herbert G. Luft, “The Screen and the Holocaust,” in David Platt, ed., Celluloid Power: Social Film Criticism from “The Birth of a Nation” to “Judgment at Nuremberg” (Metuchen, N.J., 1992), 378. 42 “Release Dates,” Sealed Verdict, Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040764/ (accessed September 7, 2008). The movie premiered in November 1948. The blockade and airlift began in June of that year. 43 Letter from Joseph I. Breen to Luigi Luraschi, August 21, 1947, Production Code Administration File, Special Collections, MHL-AMPAS. Breen objected to the script primarily on the grounds that it implied an illicit sexual relationship between Lawson and Themis and that Themis might be a prostitute. 44 Sealed Verdict, Paramount Press Sheets–Releases Season 1948–1949, Group A-8, Special Collections, MHL-AMPAS. 45 Lawrence Baron, “Holocaust Iconography in American Feature Films about Neo-Nazis,” Film and History 32, no. 2 (2002): 38– 40. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 10 Lawrence Baron the family who hid him after his plane was shot down over Germany during the war, he learns that all but their daughter Willie perished in bombing raids. He manages to track her down, and finds her soliciting drinks in a bar. Accepting his invitation to go to Salzburg, she rents a car from the owner of the bar. Willie regularly carries contraband over the Austrian border in vehicles supplied by her boss, but does not realize that these cars are plated with looted Nazi gold masked with a fresh coat of paint. The Criminal Investigation Division of the U.S. Army recruits Eliot to infiltrate the smuggling ring. The CID chief tells him that the gold must “have been collected over the years from the hundreds of thousands of men and women who were exterminated in concentration camps, from their teeth, jewelry, wedding rings, et cetera.”46 The Devil Makes Three continued the wartime practice of vilifying Nazis rather than Germans.47 Reviving the postwar scare that German women were using their liaisons with American soldiers to subvert the Allied occupation, Samuel Fuller’s Verboten! (1959) centers on the relationship between a wounded American GI named David and the German woman, Helga, who hid him and nursed him back to health near the end of the war.48 He marries her and takes a job with an occupation relief agency. Unbeknownst to either of them, Helga’s brother Franz belongs to the Nazi Werewolves, who assassinate American officials and disrupt the distribution of food and medicine. Ashamed of her brother’s bigotry and subversive activities, Helga forces him to attend the Nuremberg Trials and watch footage from Nazi Concentration Camps. In a ten-minute excerpt, the narrator describes how the Third Reich persecuted Christian Germans, euthanized the infirm, and killed citizens of every European country. Then he declares, “Perhaps the greatest crime the Nazis committed was against the Jews whom they used as a scapegoat to make Hitler God and Mein Kampf the bible.” Mortified by what he has seen, Franz professes to have known nothing about these policies. He steals a list of safe houses used by the Werewolves to smuggle war criminals out of the country and gives it to David. A combat veteran of World War II, Fuller despised Nazism, but cautioned viewers not to stereotype Germans as proHitler or anti-American as David unjustly does twice in quarrels with Helga.49 HOLLYWOOD FILMS INITIALLY DEPICTED Jewish victims of the Nazis as traumatized displaced persons dependent on American or Israeli aid to heal from their mental and physical wounds. The prominence of the DP issue in American films mirrored the refugee crisis in postwar Europe, where millions of people flocked to the American, British, and French zones in Germany after its surrender in 1945. Jews con46 The Devil Makes Three, dir. Andrew Marton (U.S., 1952). See script by Jerry Davis, The Devil Makes Three, Special Collections, MHL-AMPAS. 47 Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York, 1987), 278–316; Robert L. McLaughlin and Sally E. Parry, We’ll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema during World War II (Lexington, Ky., 2006), 100–119. 48 Verboten!, dir. Samuel Fuller (U.S., 1959); Christina von Hodenberg, “Of German Fräuleins, Nazi Werewolves, and Iraqi Insurgents: The American Fascination with Hitler’s Last Foray,” Central European History 41, no. 1 (2008): 71–92. 49 Samuel Fuller, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking (New York, 2002), 354 –374. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 The First Wave of American “Holocaust” Films 11 stituted a minority of this influx.50 Most Jewish DPs refused repatriation to countries where few Gentiles had protected them or resisted Nazi antisemitic measures, and where others had collaborated with the Germans.51 Compared to Gentile DPs, Jews usually had spent longer periods in captivity or hiding, lost more family members, and suffered greater harm, as documented in the Harrison Commission Report in September of 1945.52 Since many Jewish DPs were demanding to go to Palestine, President Truman endorsed the commission’s recommendation that the British government permit 100,000 of them to immigrate there immediately. Worried about exacerbating the volatile tensions between Arabs and Jews in the region, England rejected the proposal, but eventually deferred to the UN’s decision to partition Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state.53 American public support for Jewish immigration to Palestine and the creation of Israel increased as the revelations of Germany’s decimation of European Jewry sank in. Whereas only 36 percent of those surveyed backed the establishment of a Jewish state in 1944, that figure climbed to 42 percent in late 1945, and then to 65 percent in 1947, shortly before the UN’s vote on the matter.54 For American filmmakers, the dramatic reversal of Jewish impotence in Europe to Jewish empowerment in Israel made Zionism “a progressive cause that was also a safe one in a time of fear in Hollywood.”55 Fred Zinnemann’s The Search (1948) documented the plight of DP children in Europe and the preparations for some of them to settle in Palestine. Zinnemann had experienced antisemitic discrimination in his native Vienna and immigrated to the United States in 1929. During World War II, he directed The Seventh Cross (1944), starring Spencer Tracy as a political dissident who escapes from a prewar concentration camp and encounters ordinary Germans who variously help, ignore, or threaten to betray him. After the war, Zinnemann learned that his parents had perished at the hands of the Nazis.56 Swiss producer Lazar Wechsler approached Zinnemann to direct a movie about children languishing in DP camps. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) allowed Zinnemann and his team to tour DP shelters in Germany. They based The Search on UNRRA case files and interviews conducted with young DPs. Zinnemann cast children from the camps in all but the leading juvenile role and shot the outdoor scenes in the rubble of German cities.57 Mark Wyman, DP: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Philadelphia, 1989). Angelika Königseder and Juliane Wetzel, Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post– World War II Germany (Evanston, Ill., 2001), 9–53. 52 Harry Reicher, “The Post-Holocaust World and President Harry S. Truman: The Harrison Report and Immigration Law and Policy,” http://www.schnader.com/files/Uploads/Documents/post-holocaust.pdf (accessed August 2, 2009). 53 Arieh J. Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics: Britain, the United States, and Jewish Refugees, 1945– 1948 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001); Abram Leon Sachar, The Redemption of the Unwanted: From the Liberation of the Death Camps to the Founding of Israel (New York, 1983). 54 Eytan Gilboa, American Public Opinion toward Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Lexington, Mass., 1987), 15–21. 55 Deborah Dash Moore, “Exodus: Real to Reel to Real,” in J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, eds., Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton, N.J., 2003), 209; Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York, 1989), 350. 56 Fred Zinnemann, A Life in the Movies: An Autobiography (New York, 1992), 7–55. 57 Ibid., 56–73; Gabriel Miller, ed., Fred Zinnemann: Interviews (Jackson, Miss., 2005), 42– 43, 87–88. Vincent Brook has recently asserted that Ivan Jandl, the boy who played Karel, was also a concentration 50 51 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 12 Lawrence Baron As a train pulls into a station at night, a narrator describes its cargo as a “tiny handful of millions of orphaned, homeless, bewildered children, children who had a right to better things—a right taken from them by the war.” Not distinguishing between the DP shelter and concentration camps, the new arrivals steal bread and slavishly obey orders. A faded swastika and German eagle painted on a wall loom as relics of Nazi persecution. When interviewed by UNRRA social workers, the children recall internment in concentration camps and the deaths of family members there. A blond boy named Karel bears an Auschwitz ID number on his forearm. He replies “I don’t know” to questions about his identity. Flashbacks clarify that his Czech parents were arrested as political enemies by the Gestapo and that he last glimpsed his mother as she was being escorted away from Auschwitz by the SS. His amnesia signifies his repression of traumatic memories. Karel’s caseworker decides to transfer him to another facility for therapy. An ambulance picks up Karel and other troubled youngsters. To them, it resembles a German gas van. Suspecting the worst, the children panic and escape. Karel and a companion leap into a river, where the former hides and the latter drowns. In the meantime, Karel’s mother, Hannah, has been trekking along a deserted autobahn searching for her son. She reaches the shelter where he was staying until he ran away. When his cap washes up on the riverbank, Hannah believes that her son is dead, but she stays at the shelter to care for his peers. Montgomery Clift radiates decency as a GI named Stevenson who spots Karel scrambling over debris and tosses him a sandwich. At first the youngster spurns Stevenson, but eventually he overcomes his distrust of anyone wearing a uniform. Stevenson decides that he wants Karel to come live with him in America, but Hannah and her son are reunited shortly before the adoption can be finalized.58 Zinnemann and screenwriter Peter Viertel originally intended to make a film that would indict the United States for “locking the Jews together with their murderers” and abandoning the goal of de-Nazification to ingratiate itself with the Germans living in its occupation zone. The assurances of the UNRRA officials who guided Zinnemann’s visits to the DP shelters shifted his focus to the plight of the children residing there. Since his impressions of the DP camps were more positive than Viertel’s, Zinnemann chose a less controversial script by David Wechsler and Richard Schweizer.59 The Search alludes to the past ordeals of the young DPs and mentions that the majority of them are Jewish. A Hungarian Jewish girl named Miriam recalls that her parents were gassed at Dachau. A boy named Joel Markowsky feigns that he is Catholic because his mother warned him never to tell anyone he is Jewish. A Zionist youth group celebrates its departure to Palestine by singing a Hebrew song in a classroom where a placard on an easel gives the death toll as 6 million. The impact of the camp survivor. Brook, Driven to Darkness: Jewish Émigré Directors and the Rise of Film Noir (New Brunswick, N.J., 2009), 207. 58 Jorg Thunecke, “Flotsam and Jetsam: Fred Zinnemann’s The Search, 1947, and the Problem of ‘Unaccompanied Children’ at the End of World War II,” Modern Austrian Literature 32, no. 4 (1999): 271–286. 59 Brian C. Etheridge, “In Search of Germans: Contested Germany in the Production of The Search,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 34, no. 1 (2006): 34 – 45. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 The First Wave of American “Holocaust” Films 13 FIGURE 1: Karel’s mother, played by Jarmila Novotna, celebrates the departure of the Zionist youth. From The Search (1948), directed by Fred Zinnemann. MGM/Photofest. © MGM. testimony of the children and their tremulous behavior is disconcerting. Zinnemann admitted that he chose “to soften the truth to a certain extent, because to show things as they really were would have meant that the American audience would have lost any desire to face it.”60 The Search garnered many accolades and awards. It won two Golden Globes for Best Screenplay and Best Film Promoting International Understanding, a special Oscar for young Ivan Jandl’s poignant performance as Karel, and the United Nations Award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.61 The National Board of Review named it one of the ten best films of 1948.62 Reviewing the movie for the New York Times, Bosley Crowther praised it for its “vivid and convincing representation of how one of the ‘lost children’ of Europe is found” and its “graphic, overwhelming comprehension of the frightful cruelty to innocent children that has been done abroad.”63 Life magazine devoted a pictorial spread to The Search, juxtaposing stills from it with photographs of DP children.64 Fred Zinnemann, “A Different Perspective,” Sight and Sound 17, no. 67 (Autumn 1948): 113. “Awards and Nominations,” The Search, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040765/awards (accessed June 30, 2007). 62 Miller, Fred Zinnemann, 87. 63 Bosley Crowther, “The Search, Arresting Drama of Europe’s ‘Lost Children’ Film at the Victoria,” New York Times, March 24, 1948. 64 “Movie of the Week: The Search,” Life, April 5, 1948, 75–79. 60 61 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 14 Lawrence Baron George Sherman’s Sword in the Desert (1949) was the first mainstream Hollywood film to portray Holocaust survivors as the rightful heirs to Israel’s struggle for sovereignty.65 Adrift in longboats, refugees of all ages, some wearing striped uniforms with a Jewish star on the back, look up at David, the Zionist organizer of their surreptitious landing. David pleads with the mercenary American captain of the freighter from which they have disembarked to accompany them to the beach. His soliloquy enumerates the names of the infamous German camps they survived and where their loved ones died. Astounded that his father is waiting for him on the beach, a son asks, “How long did it take you to get here?” David answers in the other man’s stead: “Two thousand years.” The bravery of David and his comrades ultimately wins the admiration of the cynical American captain. Lester Friedman’s characterization of Sword in the Desert as “little more than an American war movie” in which “the Jews are the good guys and the British the enemy” elides the film’s significance as a forerunner of American motion pictures such as Exodus (1960) and Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), which popularized the Zionist interpretation of the Holocaust as the culmination of antisemitism in the Diaspora and Israel as the sanctuary for persecuted Jews.66 Edward Dmytryk’s The Juggler (1953) delves more deeply into the inner turmoil of a Holocaust survivor who arrives in Haifa in 1949. At the registration center for new immigrants, the former juggler and clown Hans Mueller hallucinates that his deceased wife and children are peering at him from a window. When asked what vocational skills he possesses, he replies, “I can smile while being beaten by fists, foot straps, and long lengths of hoses. I can be used as a guinea pig for new drugs and old poisons.” Chafing against being confined even in a transit camp, he escapes from the facility and beats up a police officer whose attempt to check his identification papers stirs up memories of Nazi interrogations. Roaming the countryside, Hans befriends a boy named Yehoshua and a woman named Ya’El, who belong to a kibbutz and invite him to stay there. Upon glimpsing the numbers on his forearm, Ya’El wonders why he has not talked about his imprisonment in a concentration camp. He points to a small room and tells her, “Pretend you’re seeing a place one-quarter the size—nothing but walls, a floor, and a ceiling, quite a lot of air for one man. That’s where I lay with ten others when they told me my wife and children had been burnt in their ovens.” Hans blames himself for their deaths because he was counting on his fame and German citizenship to shield them from persecution. When the police come searching for him, he barricades himself in a room. Assured by Ya’El that they won’t harm him, Hans surrenders and finally acknowledges that he is sick and needs help.67 The Juggler prefigures the trope of the survivor as a psychologically wounded soul, which found its most powerful expression in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1965). Hans differs from Lumet’s Sol Nazerman in that his flashbacks are verbal and not Sword in the Desert, dir. George Sherman (U.S., 1949). Lester D. Friedman, Hollywood’s Image of the Jew (New York, 1982), 100–103; Michelle Mart, Eye on Israel: How America Came to View Israel as an Ally (Albany, N.Y., 2006), 25–28; Moore, “Exodus,” 207–209. 67 Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), 215–217; Friedman, Hollywood’s Image of the Jew, 160–162. Avisar, Doneson, and Insdorf do not discuss The Juggler in their books. 65 66 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 The First Wave of American “Holocaust” Films 15 FIGURE 2: Hans, played by Kirk Douglas, barricades himself in his room to keep the police from arresting him. From The Juggler (1953), directed by Edward Dmytryk. Columbia Pictures/Photofest. © Columbia Pictures. visual, and that he remains an affable character capable of friendship and love.68 Hans repeatedly remarks that “home is a place you lose,” but slowly discerns that Israel is a homeland for Jews fleeing oppression. A physician at the immigration center tries to assuage Hans’s fear of authority by explaining Israel’s raison d’être: “Listen, every person is precious to us. That’s why we go on half rations and crowd our homes to bring in the people from the ghettos of Europe and Africa. That’s why we have an Israel, for no other reason.”69 Like their real-life counterparts, Jewish DPs in American films also immigrated to the United States. Maxwell Shane’s The Glass Wall (1953) is a plea for liberalizing immigration policy. In the movie, American officials deny a Hungarian refugee named Peter Kaban permission to enter the United States because he stowed away on the ship that has brought him to New York. During his interrogation, he discloses that he was interned at Auschwitz, where the rest of his family was gassed in 1944, the year several hundred thousand Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz and 68 For recent analyses of The Pawnbroker, see Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema, 94 –100; Joshua Hirsch, Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust (Philadelphia, 2004), 85–110; Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America, 107–125; Alan Rosen, “ ‘Teach Me Gold’: Pedagogy and Memory in The Pawnbroker,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 22, no. 1–2 (2002): 77–117. 69 Mart, Eye on Israel, 25–27. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 16 Lawrence Baron killed.70 Citing a law guaranteeing residency to anyone who helped Allied soldiers during the war, Peter says that he qualifies because he rescued a wounded American—a pilot named Tom who was a jazz clarinetist from New York. Given the vagueness of Tom’s identity and whereabouts, the officials decide to send Peter back to Europe, but he jumps ship and combs the city’s nightclubs in search of Tom. Along the way, he is sheltered by a Hungarian-American woman, who chides her son for urging her to turn him away because he is a “lousy foreigner”—the same epithet with which the boy’s dead father was once stigmatized. Finally, Peter goes to the United Nations Headquarters, the site of the glass wall in the title, and states his case to an empty conference room: “As long as there is one man who can’t walk free where he wants, as long as there is one displaced person, there won’t be peace, because to each man, he’s the world.” Having read about the police hunt for Peter in the newspaper, Tom finds him and saves him from committing suicide, assuring him that he can stay in the United States. The film adaptation of Irwin Shaw’s novel The Young Lions (1958) has provoked the ire of Holocaust scholars, who inveigh against its apologetic portrayal of the main German character, Christian Diestl.71 In the book, Diestl degenerates from an apolitical German attracted to Hitler’s promises of restoring Germany’s standing in the world and creating opportunities for social mobility into a ruthless killer who obeys orders.72 Director Edward Dmytryk and screenwriter Edward Anhalt felt that the “dyed-in-the wool Nazi heavy” had become a “cliché” and changed Christian into a fundamentally decent man who is gradually disillusioned by his nation’s wartime truculence. When Brando proposed that his character follow his rejection of Nazism by denouncing injustices endured by African Americans and Native Americans, Dmytryk wisely quashed this idea.73 Dmytryk did indulge Brando’s absolution of Christian toward the end of the film. In the book and the first draft of the screenplay, Diestl happens upon an inmate rebellion that has broken out in a concentration camp after most of the SS guards have retreated. He knocks out a prisoner and steals his uniform. To allay suspicions of his real identity, he cuts the throat of the camp commandant before fleeing into a forest, where he ambushes two American soldiers. In the final version, Christian abhors what he discovers about the camp’s grisly purpose from its commandant, and he walks off into the forest. Although he aims his rifle at the GIs, he decides to smash it instead and approaches them unarmed. They shoot him, and he tumbles into a thicket and dies face down in a brook.74 Brando’s vanity and Dmytryk’s aversion to the hackneyed Nazi villain rather than Cold War diplomacy influenced this redemptive finale. Shaw’s outrage over Nazi barbarism is displaced onto Captain Hardenberg, played by Maximilian Schell. He is as arrogant and brutal as Diestl is humble and 70 Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary (Detroit, 2000), 133– 154. 71 Avisar, Screening the Holocaust, 111–116; Lipstadt, “America and the Memory of the Holocaust,” 200–201. 72 Irwin Shaw, The Young Lions (New York, 1948). 73 Edward Dmytryk, It’s a Hell of a Life, but Not a Bad Living (New York, 1978), 220–230. 74 Edward Anhalt, “The Young Lions: First Draft,” April 25, 1957, Core Collection, MHL-AMPAS, 170–174. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 The First Wave of American “Holocaust” Films 17 humane. Hardenberg declines Diestl’s request to be relieved of his duty arresting fugitives for the Gestapo in Paris by lecturing, “When you became a soldier, you contracted for killing in all its forms.” Both serve on the North African front, where Hardenberg presides over the massacre of British soldiers who have signaled their surrender. Disgusted by Diestl’s refusal to execute a wounded Englishman, Hardenberg fires the fatal bullet. Later, as they escape on a motorcycle from the advancing Allied forces, Hardenberg rebukes Diestl for still being “infected with a little human feeling.” During the 1950s, American movies such as The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951) and The Desert Rats (1953) differentiated between honorable German officers such as Rommel and sinister Nazis.75 Brando’s portrayal of Diestl fits the first category, Schell’s performance as Hardenberg the second. Hardenberg’s condoning of war crimes in North Africa contradicts the apologetic thrust of the Rommel movies. The concentration camp scene arraigns Germany for crimes against humanity. Dmytryk rented an abandoned concentration camp for the set and watched unedited U.S. Signal Corps footage to re-create what American troops saw when they liberated camps.76 The SS commandant explains to Diestl the difficulty of running the camp, “with all the gas chambers, target ranges, and doctors with their experiments.” He proudly takes credit for meeting his quota of exterminating 1,500 inmates daily from among the “Jews, Poles, Russians, French, and political prisoners” and predicts that government policymakers will deny that there “was a national policy to kill 12,000,000 people.” Citing a death toll higher than 6 million to encompass Gentile casualties typifies not only contemporary American movies such as Verboten! but also the statistical tactic that Shaw employed in refusing to endorse Brando’s exculpatory portrayal of Christian and his ilk.77 The commandant’s admission reveals far more about Nazi intent than what is disclosed in the same scene in Shaw’s novel and the original script.78 It appears that Dmytryk compensated for Brando’s exoneration of Diestl by stressing the scope and severity of Germany’s extermination of European Jews and its ruthless repression of vanquished Gentile populations. The second half of the liberation scene is devoted to the Jewish survivors. When American soldiers fling open the doors of a barracks and see pallid faces staring back at them, a lone survivor with a bare, sunken chest shuffles toward them and raises his empty bowl. A rabbi in prison garb subsequently interrupts a meeting between Captain Green, who heads the American platoon, and the mayor of a nearby German village who has offered to help clean the camp for upcoming visits by dignitaries. The rabbi requests permission to conduct a memorial service for the Jews who perished at the camp. The mayor advises the captain against agreeing, since it would offend non-Jewish prisoners. Green grants the permission and sternly warns the mayor never to return to the camp. Dmytryk’s final version implicates the Germans more 75 Beverly Crawford and James Martel, “Representations of Germans and What Germans Represent: American Film Images and Public Perceptions in the Postwar Era,” in David E. Barclay and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt, eds., Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America since 1776 (Cambridge, 1997), 295–297. 76 Dmytryk, It’s a Hell of a Life, 237–238. 77 Avisar, Screening the Holocaust, 114 –115. 78 Shaw, The Young Lions, 660–671; Anhalt, “The Young Lions: First Draft,” 170–174. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 18 Lawrence Baron FIGURE 3: Concentration camp inmates upon their liberation by American soldiers. From The Young Lions (1958), directed by Edward Dmytryk. 20th Century Fox/Photofest. © 20th Century Fox. than Shaw’s novel, in which it is an interned Albanian diplomat who objects to the memorial service.79 The lead American characters, Noah and Michael, witness this exchange and then leave. Noah, played by Montgomery Clift, has persistently been fending off antisemitic harassment by his fellow soldiers to gain their respect, and he has overcome the reluctance of his Gentile girlfriend’s father to allow his daughter to marry a Jew. The concentration camp exposes him to a more virulent strain of antisemitism. Noah and Michael walk away from the camp as a truck filled with corpses drives by them. Noah wonders whether Michael ever imagined that such places existed, adding, “My father’s brother died in one of those.” Noah returns home to his wife and baby, comforted by the thought that decent men such as Green will now be in charge of the world. Dmytryk deleted a line about Noah’s thirst for revenge that was articulated in the original script: “The people who built these camps—you have to shoot them, of course, the way you’d shoot a wild animal or a poisonous snake.”80 The liberal faith in humanity espoused by Noah at the end of the film echoes Shaw’s dialogue and was not an interjection of “Hollywood’s incurable optimism,” as Avisar 79 80 Shaw, The Young Lions, 674 –677. Anhalt, “The Young Lions: First Draft,” 177; Shaw, The Young Lions, 679–680. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 The First Wave of American “Holocaust” Films 19 has charged.81 Dmytryk considered Noah’s personal growth and not Christian’s “the heart of the story.”82 FOLLOWING THE EXAMPLE of television programming in the 1950s, Hollywood belatedly broached the plotline of Jewish characters caught in the throes of the Nazi maelstrom by the end of the decade.83 Me and the Colonel (1958), Peter Glenville’s adaptation of Franz Werfel’s play Jacobowksy and the Colonel, starred Danny Kaye as the enterprising S. L. Jacobowsky.84 His odyssey across Europe epitomizes the fate of European Jewry under Hitler: My earliest recollections are of Poland—shots, screams in the night. My poor mother took her candlesticks and pillows, her most cherished possessions and fled to Berlin . . . I was a citizen, a patriot; I belonged, but a certain housepainter had different ideas. So I packed my belongings in five trunks and fled to Vienna, the city of waltzes, but the waltz soon changed into a goosestep. I packed my belongings in two trunks and fled to Prague, but the German army seemed to take absolute delight in following me. Once again, this time with no trunks, I came to Paris, the city of light. Now the lights are going out, so I embark on migration number five. When Jacobowsky offers to combine his own resourcefulness with the military prowess of a Polish colonel in hopes that together they can evade the Germans, the haughty Colonel Prokoszny, played by Curt Jurgens, will not deign to entertain the idea. He envisions only one possibility: an honorable death fighting for his nation. Jacobowsky believes that there are two possibilities in every situation: “If there is only one possibility, I’d have died I don’t know how many times. What about an honorable life?” The Colonel intimates that he cannot associate with a Jew, prompting Jacobowsky to expound on the intractability of antisemitism: “I understand perfectly; the Colonel does not like Jews. He cannot help it, that’s the way he was brought up. I’m Jewish; I cannot help it, that’s the way I was brought up.” As Jacobowsky repeatedly manages to outfox their German pursuers, the Colonel comes to appreciate his ingenuity. Werfel disliked the Broadway version of his play upon which the film was based because it did not sufficiently accentuate the tragedy enveloping European Jewry during World War II.85 Despite its comic tone, however, Me and the Colonel leaves little doubt that Nazi antisemitism was implacably lethal even if the Colonel’s aristocratic contempt for Jews was not. The film earned Kaye a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy and a spot on Time’s Top Ten Movie List for 1958.86 Although Werfel had firsthand experience as an émigré from Nazism, his play Shaw, The Young Lions, 680; Avisar, Screening the Holocaust, 114 –116. Dmytryk, It’s a Hell of a Life, 220. 83 Shandler, While America Watches, 41–69. 84 Me and the Colonel, dir. Peter Glenville (U.S., 1958); Franz Werfel, Jacobowsky and the Colonel, American adaptation by S. N. Behrman (New York, 1944). 85 Lionel B. Steiman, Franz Werfel: The Faith of an Exile—From Prague to Beverly Hills (Waterloo, Ont., 1985), 174 –177. 86 “Awards,” Me and the Colonel, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051915/awards (accessed August 7, 2009); “Top 10 Movie Lists,” http:/www.geocities.com/aaronbcaldwell/dimtime.html (accessed August 9, 2009). 81 82 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 20 Lawrence Baron could not match the popularity of The Diary of a Young Girl, which became an instant bestseller when it was released in the United States in 1952. It inspired a television program and a radio drama the same year.87 Anne’s father, Otto, originally granted Meyer Levin permission to write a play based on the diary, but he changed his mind and went instead with the husband-wife team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett because they had a successful box-office record. The Diary of Anne Frank premiered on Broadway in 1955. Its optimistic and universal themes pleased Otto Frank and resonated with American audiences and critics alike. Articles about Anne’s life and death appeared in popular magazines such as Reader’s Digest and Life.88 Look’s cover story for its first issue of 1959 featured a photographic essay about the Third Reich and concluded with a quotation from Anne’s diary: “I can feel the sufferings of millions, and, yet, if I look into the heavens, I think that it will all come out right, that this cruelty too will end.”89 George Stevens secured the movie rights for the diary in 1956. As the head of the U.S. Army’s Special Motion Picture Unit in Europe, he had directed the filming of the liberation of Nordhausen and Dachau. The experience had profoundly affected him: “I know there is brutality in war, and the SS were lousy bastards, but the destruction of people like this was beyond comprehension.”90 He consulted with Otto, who guided him through the Amsterdam building where the Frank family and their friends had hidden. Stevens meticulously replicated a vertical cutaway of the rooms on each floor to simulate the claustrophobic atmosphere of living in such close quarters. He visited Bergen-Belsen to get an idea of what Anne had endured there, then returned to Dachau to rekindle his indignation over what he had beheld at the site twelve years earlier. Stevens grappled with how to convey Anne’s ebullient personality without neglecting her tragic destiny. He considered closing the film with a shot of her standing in the midst of listless camp inmates with a “tiny expression on her face indicating a note of optimism among all the dreary faces around her.” In keeping with the diary and the Goodrich and Hackett play, Stevens focused on Anne’s relationships with the other residents who shared the family’s hiding place in the attic, which Anne dubbed the “Secret Annexe.”91 In an interview he gave in 1963, he articulated his intention: “I wanted to make a film about a human being who knew how to conduct herself in a time of overwhelming misfortune, even though the audience knows from the outset what Anne doesn’t know: her ultimate fate.”92 As knowledge of the Holocaust has increased, scholars have excoriated the play and movie versions of The Diary of Anne Frank. They resent that Anne’s recognition that Jews had suffered perennially is eviscerated when she tells Peter in both ad87 Shandler, While America Watches, 62–63; Lawrence Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the “Diary” (Berkeley, Calif., 1995); Meyer Levin, The Obsession (New York, 1973); Ralph Melnick, The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank: Meyer Levin, Lillian Hellman, and the Staging of the “Diary” (New Haven, Conn., 1997). 88 Louis de Jong, “The Girl Who Was Anne Frank,” Reader’s Digest, October 1957, 115–120; Ernst Schnabel, “A Tragedy Revealed: Heroine’s Last Days,” Life, August 18, 1958, 78–90. 89 John Hunt, “The Insane World of Adolf Hitler,” Look, January 6, 1959, 43. 90 Paul Cronin, ed., George Stevens: Interviews (Jackson, Miss., 2004), 65–67; Marilyn Ann Moss, Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film (Madison, Wis., 2004), 115–118. 91 Moss, Giant, 230–247. 92 Cronin, George Stevens, 22–23. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 The First Wave of American “Holocaust” Films 21 aptations, “We’re not the only people that have had to suffer. There always have been people that have had to—sometimes one race, sometimes another.”93 This is cited as the most egregious example of minimizing Anne’s Jewishness so that Gentile Americans could identify with her. Critics of the play and movie contend that confining the action to the attic insulates the audience from the sufferings of Jews who failed to find such a haven. The hard realities of the Holocaust are allegedly glossed over by the film’s concluding voiceover of Anne affirming her belief that “people are really good at heart.”94 Although Stevens portrays Anne as an ecumenical martyr of prejudice, he makes it clear that the Franks and their friends were victims of antisemitism. Reading the first entry in the diary, Otto’s voice segues into Anne’s as she recalls that her family fled Germany when Hitler came to power because they were Jewish. She enumerates the restrictions imposed on Jews by the German occupation government in Holland. Jewish stars appear conspicuously on the fronts of their coats. When Peter cuts his star off, Anne refuses to emulate him because, “after all, it is the Star of David.” The peril facing Dutch Jews is underscored when Dussel joins the group. He agitatedly tells them that “right here in Amsterdam every day hundreds of Jews disappear.” After Anne ponders how fortunate she and her cohort are, Jews wearing stars are marched away by armed German guards on the street below. The charge that Stevens minimized Anne’s Jewish identity is predicated on an exaggeration of how religious she was and how ethnically assertive American Jews were in the 1950s. Anne hated antisemitism and believed that Jewish suffering and survival possessed redemptive meaning.95 She described herself as “not orthodox” and found value in any creed that obligated its adherents to act ethically.96 The Chanukah celebration in the movie is more elaborate than Anne’s diary entry about it: “We didn’t make much fuss about Chanukah. We just gave each other a few little presents and then we had the candles.”97 Although the characters in the film recite the blessings in English, implying that they were speaking Dutch and not Hebrew, Otto refers to the Jewish uprising that inspired the holiday: “We kindle the Chanukah light to celebrate the great and wonderful deeds wrought through the zeal with which God filled the hearts of the heroic Maccabees two thousand years ago.” John Stone, who headed the Jewish Film Advisory Committee, a group that lobbied the movie industry to promote positive images of Jews, gushed over Stevens’s approach to Anne’s Jewish identity: “You have given the story a more ‘universal’ meaning and 93 Compare Anne’s comments about Jewish suffering in Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (New York, 1952), 221, with her dialogue in the play The Diary of Anne Frank (New York, 1956), 168. 94 Christopher Bigsby, Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory (New York, 2006), 219–257; Pascale Bos, “Reconsidering Anne Frank: Teaching the Diary in Its Historical and Cultural Context,” in Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes, eds., Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (New York, 2004), 23– 46; Cole, Selling the Holocaust, 23– 46; Judith E. Doneson, “The American History of Anne Frank’s Diary,” in Hyman A. Enzer and Sandra Solotaroff-Enzer, eds., Anne Frank: Reflections on Her Life and Legacy (Urbana, Ill., 2000), 123–138; Cynthia Ozick, “Who Owns Anne Frank?” in Ozick, Quarrel and Quandary: Essays (New York, 2000), 76–87; Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “Popularization and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank,” in Peter Hayes, ed., Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (Evanston, Ill., 1991), 243–278. 95 Frank, The Diary, 57, 139, 220–222, 252–253. 96 Ibid., 270–271; Robert Alter, “The View from the Attic,” New Republic, December 4, 1995, 41– 42; Lawrence L. Langer, “The Uses—and Misuses—of a Young Girl’s Diary: ‘If Anne Frank Could Return from among the Murdered, She Would Be Appalled,’ ” in Enzer and Solotaroff-Enzer, Anne Frank, 204. 97 Frank, The Diary, 68–69. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 22 Lawrence Baron FIGURE 4: SS guards march Jews away. From The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), directed by George Stevens. 20th Century-Fox/Photofest. © 20th Century Fox. appeal. It could very easily have been an outdated Jewish tragedy by less creative or more emotional handling—even a Jewish ‘Wailing Wall,’ and hence regarded as mere propaganda.”98 Much of the criticism of the universalizing treatment of Anne in the play and film retrospectively stems from the overt ethnic and religious pride that has evolved among sectors of American Jewry since the 1960s.99 The violence that the Germans meted out to the Jews looms menacingly in the background. The film opens with Otto sitting on the back of a truck with other survivors, one of whom still wears a striped uniform. He tells his Dutch rescuers Kraler and Miep that he has returned alone. The moments of serenity in the Secret Annexe alternate with jarring radio broadcasts of Hitler’s speeches and external noises such as jackboots clattering on the pavement and the whining of sirens. The night Anne learns that her best friend has been deported, she envisions the other girl in a nightmare sequence lethargically swaying in the midst of women inmates. She wakes up, crying “No! No! Don’t . . . don’t take me!” Before declaring her faith in human goodness, Anne admits how difficult it is to maintain hope when people are doing such horrible things. The strident sound of sirens and screeching tires heralds the arrival of the police, who furiously break down the door to the attic to get at their prey. The diary’s pages symbolically flip from written to blank. 98 Letter from John Stone to George Stevens, December 23, 1957, Goodrich-Hackett File, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre Research, Madison, Wis. 99 David Barnouw, “Anne Frank and Film,” in Enzer and Solotaroff-Enzer, Anne Frank, 165–172; Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love, 365–390; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 The First Wave of American “Holocaust” Films 23 Otto’s closing recollections reconfirm that he is the sole survivor. He recounts how the men went to Auschwitz and the women to Belsen. When Auschwitz was liberated, he was among its few surviving prisoners. From there, he embarked on a journey back to Holland. Along the way, he queried former camp inmates whether they knew anything about the fate of his loved ones. He gradually was apprised of their deaths. The day before he returned to Amsterdam, he met a woman who informed him that Anne had died in Belsen. As he immerses himself in her diary, a dissolve segues to gulls soaring in the clouds while Anne’s voice reiterates her conviction that “people are really good at heart.” Otto’s soliloquy and Anne’s faith in humanity manifest the dichotomy between doom and hope that hangs over the movie. Most contemporary responses to the play and movie applauded the vibrancy of Anne’s outlook, but did not disregard the dire circumstance in which she and her compatriots were trapped. In a review tellingly titled “Two Hearts at the Edge of Doom,” Newsweek advised moviegoers to focus on the positive aspects of the film so as to avoid being stunned and depressed by it.100 Look’s coverage featured stills with captions that left no doubt about the religious identities of the characters holed up in the Secret Annexe and what ultimately happened to them: “Anne regards her Star of David as an honor”; “Peter and Anne looking out from the bombed garret at people delivered into the hands of the cruelest brutes that walk the earth”; and “Anne, Peter, and her parents hear Nazi soldiers below as they come to take them to concentration camps.”101 Writing after the premier of the play, a high school English teacher from Georgia described what her students culled from reading the diary: My classes, faced with problems of desegregation in the South, have caught my enthusiasm for the diary. As seen through Anne’s eyes, the evils of discrimination have made a terrific impact on these young people’s minds . . . Though not living under the grim shadow of gas chambers, the Gestapo, and death in a concentration camp, high school boys and girls in America are very close to Anne’s experience.102 This sounds more like a prosthetic memory than a Panglossian diversion from a disturbing past. Similarly, Alan Mintz credits the diary with building “a bridge of empathic connection, even identification” between Hitler’s Jewish victims and Americans.103 HISTORIANS NEED TO PLACE THESE FILMS in the chronological perspective of American cinema in general and the evolving consciousness of what the Holocaust entailed in particular. Directors such as Zinnemann, Dmytryk, and Stevens operated under the PCA, which regulated how violence could be depicted onscreen.104 After those restrictions were no longer heeded, movie violence intensified “in the effort to restore “Two Hearts at the Edge of Doom,” Newsweek, March 30, 1959, 98. “Movie Review,” Look, May 26, 1959, 105–106. 102 Mary Lane, “On Anne Frank,” The English Journal 45, no. 5 (1956): 269–271. 103 Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America, 17. 104 Stephen Prince, Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968 (New Brunswick, N.J., 2003). 100 101 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 24 Lawrence Baron the possibility of having an effect, creating a shock, provoking a response.”105 In the immediate postwar period, Hollywood introduced characters belonging to different ethnic, racial, and religious minorities, but expected them to blend into the melting pot.106 The first wave of American “Holocaust” cinema contributed to an incremental process of raising public awareness of the human toll that Hitler’s policies had taken. To achieve a semblance of authenticity, some movies excerpted or re-created the images and symbols of Nazi crimes gleaned from the atrocity footage of the liberated camps. They simulated a documentary look by establishing the convention of using black and white stock to film stories set in the Holocaust or its immediate aftermath. This latter practice was standard in the late 1940s, during the heyday of film noir, but marked a departure from the Technicolor epics produced at the end of the 1950s. It provided a model for subsequent films, including The Pawnbroker, The Odessa File (1974), and Schindler’s List (1993). The pioneering “Holocaust” films focused on uplifting narratives, but alluded to an ominous offscreen evil that reduced Jewish characters to traumatized refugees, survivors, and fugitives. What has changed since 1960 is not the disappearance of edifying endings, as is evident in the miniseries Holocaust (1978) and the feature films Schindler’s List and The Pianist (2002), but rather the foregrounding of the deadly forces arrayed against predominantly Jewish protagonists.107 The number of American films with Holocaust themes pales in comparison to Hollywood’s total movie production between 1945 and 1959.108 Yet critically acclaimed and commercially successful motion pictures such as The Search, Me and the Colonel, The Young Lions, and The Diary of Anne Frank enabled American audiences to shift their perspective from citizens of a country that prided itself on defeating the Third Reich, bringing its perpetrators to justice, and rehabilitating its survivors to that of innocent Jews such as Jacobowsky, the Franks, and their friends, whose only crime was their religious affiliation. These movies accustomed Americans to the idea of the “Final Solution” by keeping its savagery offscreen or within existing conventions for movie violence. They portrayed acculturated Jewish characters whose appearance and actions did not seem foreign to Americans. By domesticating the Holocaust, these early films laid the visual and thematic foundations of a prosthetic memory for audiences who fortunately never experienced its horrors. Subsequent cinematic representations of the Shoah featuring gorier images and stressing its Jewish specificity should not be construed as the surfacing of a repressed trauma, but rather as a reworking of familiar subject material by a motion picture industry freed 105 Leo Charney, “The Violence of a Perfect Moment,” in J. David Slocum, ed., Violence and American Cinema (New York, 2000), 49. 106 See Judith E. Smith, Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940–1960 (New York, 2004). 107 Stephen J. Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hanover, N.H., 1999), 188–189. 108 See figures 6 and 7 in Lary May, The Big Picture: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago, 2000), 276–277. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 25 The First Wave of American “Holocaust” Films of the limitations imposed by the PCA and more attuned to the ethnic, racial, and religious identity politics that have competed with the melting pot paradigm in the United States since the 1960s. Lawrence Baron is Abraham Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1974 and taught at Lawrence University from 1975 until 1988, when he accepted his current position. He is the author of Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005) and served as the historian for Sam and Pearl Oliner’s The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (Free Press, 1988). He is currently editing an anthology on depictions of modern Jewish history in world cinema. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010