"The wandering jew" is a 1940 German Nazi anti-semitic propaganda film, presented as a documentary. The film's initial German title is Der ewige Jude, the German term for the character of the "Wandering Jew" in medieval folklore. At the insistence of Nazi Germany's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, the film was directed by Fritz Hippler.
With a screenplay credited to Eberhard Taubert, the film consists of feature and documentary footage combined with materials filmed shortly after the Nazi occupation of Poland. At this time, Poland's Jewish population was about three million, roughly ten percent of the total population. Actor Harry Giese narrated.
Hitler and Goebbels believed that film was a vital tool for molding public opinion. The Nazis 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 insisted in speeches that the role of the German cinema was to serve as the "vanguard of the Nazi military".
The Goebbels film appears to have been intended as a violently antisemitic version of the British film The Wandering Jew, which argued that Jews were victims of relentless persecution throughout history. Saul Friedländer suggests that Goebbels' intent was to counter three films: Jew Süss, The House of Rothschild, and The Wandering Jew. These three films, all released in 1933-34, showed that Jews were persecuted throughout history; the Goebbels films presented the opposite message.
In 1937, a special wing of the Propaganda Ministry put on an art exhibition in Munich titled Der ewige Jude. It followed this up with the publication of a book of the same title, consisting of 265 photographs, each with a derogatory caption asserting the degeneracy of the Jewish race.
In November 1938, Goebbels made a series of attacks against the Jews in the German media that were a factor which resulted in the pogrom known as Kristallnacht. Despite the emotional satisfaction afforded the Nazis by carrying out their antisemitism with direct violence, Kristallnacht was considered by Hitler to have been a political disaster both within Germany and internationally. Not only did the brutality indirectly caused by Goebbels evoke harsh criticism internationally, the mixed reaction in the German media showed a lack of broad-based support among Germans for antisemitism and 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 harsh 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. In the case of The Eternal Jew, Goebbels conceived of a film that would communicate to the German people the same antisemitic message that had been the theme of the 1937 Munich exhibition. Hitler preferred films such as The Eternal Jew which presented the Nazi antisemitic agenda openly and directly; however Goebbels disliked the crudeness of such straightforward approaches, preferring the much more subtle approach of couching antisemitic messages in an engaging story with popular appeal. The film Jud Süß is an example of Goebbels' preferred approach.
Production
Although Goebbels did not generally take an active role in the production of particular films, he elected to do so in the case of major propaganda films such as The Eternal Jew.[4] The film was in production for over a year.[10] Throughout the end of 1939 and the beginning of 1940, Goebbels devoted "constant attention" to the production of what he referred to as "the Jew film".[11] As early as 1938, Goebbels had wanted to have a film crew travel to Poland to shoot the ghetto scenes; however, he was unable to gain permission from the Polish government. In October and November 1939, almost immediately after the German/Soviet invasion of Poland, he instructed Hippler to send camera crews to Łódź, Warsaw, Cracow and Lublin to shoot footage of Polish Jews.[12][13]
The footage that Hippler shot in the Jewish ghettos of those cities in German occupied Poland was the only footage shot specifically for the purpose of the film. At the beginning of the film, animated text informs the audience that this "documentary footage" shows Jews in their original state "before they put on the mask of civilized Europeans."[14] In the Nazi press, Hippler expanded on this claim, asserting that his filming techniques captured Jews "in an unprejudiced manner, real to life as they live and as they react in their own surroundings."[15]
Although Hippler advertised the film as being a factual documentary consisting of pictu
