Exhibit Recalls Nazi Propaganda of ‘30s

“Hitler killed my family,” said 86-year-old Curt Siodmak, a horror screenwriter and novelist, while viewing a Nazi propaganda exhibit at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ opening of “From Babelsberg to Hollywood.”

“The Nazi paper says, ‘The Jews Are Our Misfortune,’ ” Siodmak read from a faded, brittle copy of Der Sturmer, an anti-Semitic German weekly of the 1930s, on display. “It says nothing but lies.”

Siodmak, whose works include “Donovan’s Brain,” “The Return of the Invisible Man” and the classic “The Wolf Man,” was one of more than 1,500 German film makers--the vast majority Jewish--who fled the suburban-Berlin film-making center Babelsberg from 1933-39. That was when Hitler and the Nazi Party consolidated their totalitarian control over German society and culture.

Siodmak and a handful of other emigrants attended the opening of the exhibit Monday evening.

“The exhibit tells the story of German emigrants from all artistic backgrounds, actors, writers, producers, directors . . . famous people who fled to Hollywood,” said Ronny Loewy, who conceived and curated the exhibit for the West German Film Museum in Frankfurt last year. “In no other area of cultural activity, with the possible exception of literature, was there such a bloodletting.”

The free exhibition at the academy’s Wilshire Boulevard headquarters in Beverly Hills is open to the public through Sept. 30. It is co-hosted by the Goethe Institute of Los Angeles.

The exhibits take up two floors of the building, opening with a display of 1,532 names of exiled film emigrants who went on to become Hollywood film makers, and includes photographs, film posters, Nazi propaganda, letters and other documents presenting an overview of individuals and an industry overwhelmed by the disruptive forces that would soon cause World War II.

“Since Hollywood boasted the largest film industry in the world, naturally it became the chief focus of German-speaking film emigrants, and numerically most exiles ended up in Hollywood,” Loewy said. “So Hollywood occupies a proportionally large place in this exhibition, which documents, side by side, both the comparatively successful participation of emigrants in anti-Nazi films between 1933 and 1945, as well as the devastating failure and ruin of many emigrants in Hollywood.”

Photographs, letters and other documents reveal how the emigrants departed and arrived, escaped and received refugee aid, how they looked for work only to have their work permits denied, and how they were forced to take demeaning jobs in desperation.

“Of the actors who emigrated, only a few became real stars,” reads the display on German actors and actresses. Those featured include Marlene Dietrich, the glamorous and seductive vamp in Josef von Sternberg’s “The Blue Angel”; Luise Rainer, who won two Oscars in a row for “The Great Ziegfeld” and “The Good Earth”; Peter Lorre; Hedy Lamarr; and Paul Henreid, who starred in “The Conspirators.”

“As an actress, I didn’t make it here,” said Fini Littlejohn, whose photograph was on display for her work at Walt Disney Studios as an animator in the 1940s. Known then as Fini Rudiger, whose beauty hinted of Katharine Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman, her drawings of the original Dumbo the Flying Elephant are part of the exhibit.

“I spent 40 years at Warner Bros.,” said 77-year-old Rudi Fehr, another emigrant whose name appeared among the 1,532. “I was a film editor for many years, that was my original occupation, and then I became a producer at Warner Bros. and then I became an executive.” Peter Zinner, the Oscar-winning film editor of the 1978 film “The Deer Hunter,” said, “The exhibit is incredibly detailed and it reveals a great deal about the times.”

Zinner, who is editing ABC’s coming miniseries “War and Remembrance,” pointed to a photograph of an idyllic, pleasant Jewish village that the Nazis built to hide the horrors that went on at the concentration and death camps.

“We have a scene in our show that is based on this photograph,” Zinner said. “Hitler gave the Jews a concentration camp in order to show the world that he’s really not so bad. He dressed it up, he gave them a football field and he made a Jewish director (Kirk Gerron) direct a film in that concentration camp . . . it’s all factual and documentary.”

Gerron, according to the exhibit, was eventually murdered by the Nazis.

To further document “From Babelsberg to Hollywood,” the Goethe Institute will screen six films by German film makers, including: “Five Graves to Cairo” by Billy Wilder on Wednesday, “Mortal Storm” by Frank Borzage on Sept. 14, “Man Hunt” by Fritz Lang on Sept. 21, “Mission to Moscow” by Michael Curtiz on Sept. 28, “The Seventh Cross” by Fred Zinnemann on Oct. 5 and “Address Unknown” by William Cameron Menzies on Oct. 12.

Screenings are every Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Goethe Institute at 8501 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 205, in Beverly Hills.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences is located at 8949 Wilshire Blvd. Exhibit hours are Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Information: (213) 278-8990, Ext. 287.