Der ewige Jude

A film used to "educate" the German public on the "danger" allegedly posed by the Jews, this film does all it can to paint Jews as subhuman (or better, anti-human) monstrosities.

Randall Bytwerk points-out in his biography of Nazi leader Julius Streicher (an excellent book which is much more about anti-Jewish propaganda techniques than it is a biography) that it was impossible for the Nazis to actually make the mass of Germans actively hate their Jewish fellow citizens. Bytwerk argues that the propaganda machinery focused on the idea of making Jews seem so wretched, disgusting and hateful that they would appear to be beings simply not worth caring about. This film, it seems to me, takes that as its motivation.

There is one interesting moment that hurts the filmmakers' cause: the camera panning over the crowds in the ghetto, when a group of Jewish youngsters are shown plainly trying to look over one another's shoulders and heads, grinning at the camera. Such moments would remind the average person that these were plainly people like anyone you might know.

Overall, however, the Berlin Gestapo reported that audience reaction to this film was "highly favorable," particularly the scenes equating Jews with disease-spreading rodents.

This film flopped when it was shown in Nazi Germany, and it's not hard to see why. Audiences apparently complained that it was simply too much, too over-the-top. The film attempts to show the Jewish people as a parasite corrupting the whole of Western Society; in fact it only succeeds in showing how they underwrite much of Western culture. For example there is a sequence attacking the Old Testament and various characters in the Old

Testament; this must have been very hard for any Christian to swallow. We see a number of famous Jews, including for example Albert Einstein; they couldn't really leave the greatest physicist of the last century out, but how can you leave him in? There are numerous internal contradictions, for example the assertion that Jews even when rich prefer to live in fly-infested hovels, against the later pictures of Jewish mansions. Perhaps the only really effective scenes are the allegedly kosher slaughter, and Peter Lorre's soliliquy which was stolen from "M".

Looking away from the content, and seen strictly as a movie whose purpose is propaganda and instilling hatred and dislike of jews, this movie did it's job very well.

If you see this movie as a document of the general atmosphere at that time (60 years ago, already dislike of jews in NS-Germany, lower educational level among the public in general, etc.) you can easily imagine how effective it was.

As an illustration of the atmosphere in prewar, nazi-Germany for the historically interested, this movie is a good document.

Admittedly the most racist (and at that best produced given the limitations of its time), this move captivates from the first time it talks about the 'observations of Jews taken in their burrows in Poland'. This movie is in German and I am not aware of a subtitled version in English (and even the German version needs technical improvement to be comprehensible).

This is a historical document, no doubt. It is not a document of the Jews of the time but of the producers and the powers to be of that time. As such it is more than a tad enlightening.

The Nazis were masters at mass-manipulation without so much as an agenda, but when they latched onto something they sure wouldn't let go. It seems almost by chance that the Jews became victims of their bizarre ideology; but then anti-semitism had quite a breeding gound in Eastern Europe for half a decade before Hitler's time.

What makes this movie so chilling is that it *does* have an emotional impact on you - whether you like it or not. When the movie goes to ridicule Einstein as a Zionist (which he never was) I was (almost) taken by it.

This movie is dangerous. It is the quintessential counterpart to the 'Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion' (a book/novel produced apparently in Russia at a time beforehand to discredit the Jew). It is evil propaganda at its best.

Its not Hollywood, its bad quality, its German only (although I understand a subtitled DVD copy will enter circulation) but when you hear Hitler end his Reichstagssitzung with the words that 'if Jewry will not join civilized nations instead of bringing about WW II they will be exterminated' you sure know which way the wind blows.

Wait for the subtitled copy if you don't speak German and wait to see hatred, insanity and bizarre politpropaganda come to life. This movie is intense (some truly disturbing scenes) but much more at what it says about the (unfocused) ideology of the holocaust than any statement it might make about Jewish lifestyle, tradition and culture.

People might argue that this movie is full of lies, and thus have no value because its untruthfulness. I find the film very interesting because it is a opportunity for us to learn how things not always is how they seem to be. We must have in mind that the common people of that time didn't have the same horizon as people have now a day. Therefore it was easier to convince them.

I see the film as a reminder to not always trust what we are told.