Hollywood and the Holocaust

Shortly after the end of World War II in Europe, 13 of Hollywood’s movie moguls -- all of whom were Jewish -- toured the librated concentration camps at the invitation of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. He wanted them to help tell the world about the horrors of the Holocaust.

After that 1945 visit, the men promised to produce features that would address the extermination of more than 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany. But they didn’t carry out their promise.

It wasn’t until 1959’s “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which was based on the bestseller and the hit Broadway play, that Hollywood looked at World War II through a Jewish perspective.

A new documentary, “Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust,” premiering at 9 p.m. Tuesday on AMC, examines the reluctance of producers to explore the Holocaust as well as the studios’ laissez-faire attitude before the war to Germany’s treatment of the Jews.

Although the studio heads were almost all from Eastern Europe, or were the children of immigrants from that area, “they were paranoid” about how the Holocaust might affect their own careers, said media critic Neal Gabler, author of “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” who appears in the documentary.

“They had been pressured by the time they entered the film industry by all sorts of forces, which today would be the forces of the religious right, that they weren’t ‘real’ Americans. Because they were Jewish, they didn’t subscribe to American values. There was also a sense among these men that they were going to lose their industry, so in essentially deciding not to make movies that engaged in what was going on in Europe, this was an act of self-preservation.”

Narrated by Gene Hackman, the documentary features newsreel clips and historic footage of pre- and postwar Hollywood, as well as the concentration camps.

Jewish filmmakers also are interviewed, including the blacklisted screenwriter Norma Barzman, who talks about the industry’s unwillingness to confront Germany’s extermination of Jews.

Only a few movies produced before America entered the war dealt with the evils of Nazi Germany, including the 1939 Warner Bros. picture “Confessions of a Nazi Spy” and Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 spoof of Hitler, “The Great Dictator,” which he financed with his own money.

Gabler pointed out that before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. wasn’t chomping at the bit to enter World War II. There was a strong isolationist movement, and Germany was one of the biggest importers of Hollywood films.

Gabler attributed Hollywood’s big silence after the war not to reticence, but to fear of being labeled communists by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

“The last thing they [studio executives] wanted to do was to call attention to themselves as Jews because it was only raising their profile in the way that could only do them harm,” Gabler said.

But with time -- and with the success of “The Diary of Anne Frank” -- Hollywood began producing films about the Holocaust, including 1961’s “Judgment at Nuremberg,” 1965’s “The Pawnbroker,” 1982’s “Sophie’s Choice” and Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning 1993 epic, “Schindler’s List.”

Such stories also found their way into television, most notably with the 1978 miniseries “Holocaust.”

“What happened after the war was silence,” said Daniel Anker, director of “Imaginary Witness,” “but these films were also made.

“We wanted to look at those films and see how they reflected the times in which they were made, as well as America’s relationship to the Holocaust at the time.”

Despite the success of such movies as “Schindler’s List” and Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist,” the AMC documentary concludes that films about the Holocaust are still rarely produced and when they are, they’re often the products of individual directors who are at the peak of their careers -- and willing to overcome the challenges of bringing the subject to the screen.