Author Event: "The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler" by Ben Urwand (History)

"Astonishing" -Boston Globe
"Groundbreaking" -Publishers Weekly

A phenomenal book reviewed by the New York Times, CNN, Lou Dobbs, Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, the Telegraph UK, and every major media outlet.

Join us for a gripping presentation and interview with author Ben Urwan, a Harvard University fellow who offers an insight into Hitler's love of cinema, and the lengths Hollywood took to maintain financial success in Germany before and after the Nazi rise to power. Admission is free. 7pm. Signed books will be available for purchase. ($26.95)

The astonishing story of Hollywood’s dealings with Nazi Germany is told for the first time in a new book. 

Drawing upon a wealth of secret documents that he uncovered during his nine-year-long investigation at archives in Germany and the U.S., Urwand, a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, reveals the complex web of interactions between the American studios and the German government in the 1930s. He found that in order to keep the German market open for their films, the Hollywood studios (mostly headed by Jews) followed the instructions of the Nazi German consul in Los Angeles, abandoning or changing movies that would have exposed the horrors of Nazism and Germany’s persecution of the Jews. The studios that chose to do business with Hitler included MGM, Paramount, Fox, Warner Brothers, United Artists, Universal, and Columbia.

In THE COLLABORATION, Urwand proves that Hollywood’s relationship with Nazi Germany was a real arrangement—an active collaboration—and not a case of passive indifference or self-censorship. Through the course of his research, he discovered a vast array of primary source materials, including Hitler’s own notes on American movies; the reports of Hitler’s representative in LA, who was working directly with the Hollywood studios; scripts of movies that were abandoned or severely cut because of the Nazis’ interventions; and evidence that Fox and Paramount produced pro-Nazi newsreels and that MGM invested in German armaments.

The movies that Hollywood abandoned included the first picture about Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, The Mad Dog of Europe (written by Herman Mankiewicz, who also wrote Citizen Kane), a top MGM production of It Can’t Happen Here (based on Sinclair Lewis’ bestselling novel about fascism coming to America), and United Artists’ first version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (which spoke out against Nazi anti-Semitism). The studios followed the instructions of the Nazi authorities and edited a whole series of other pictures in Germany’s favor—an arrangement which both parties called “collaboration” (Zusammenarbeit).

As long as the studios pandered to the whims of the Nazi regime, Hollywood movies played to packed theaters throughout Germany. From 1933 to 1940, around 250 Hollywood movies were shown in Germany, the most popular of which were King Kong, It Happened One Night, Broadway Melody, and anything starring Greta Garbo, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Shirley Temple, Claudette Colbert, and Laurel and Hardy. 

The movie studios were putting profits above principles when they had the chance to show the world what was really happening in Germany. As Urwand says, “If this is a dark chapter in Hollywood history, then it is also a dark chapter in American history.”