Jud Süß  

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Jud Süß ("Süss the Jew") is a 1940 Nazi propaganda film produced by Terra Filmkunst at the behest of Joseph Goebbels, and considered one of the most antisemitic films of all time. The movie was directed by Veit Harlan, who wrote the screenplay with Eberhard Wolfgang Möller and Ludwig Metzger. The leading roles were played by Ferdinand Marian and Harlan's wife Kristina Söderbaum; Werner Krauss and Heinrich George played key supporting roles.

The film has been characterized as "one of the most notorious and successful pieces of antisemitic film propaganda produced in Nazi Germany." It was a great success in Germany, with some 20 million viewers. Although the film's budget of 2 million Reichsmarks was considered high for films of that era, the box office receipts of 6.5 million Reichsmarks made it a financial success. Heinrich Himmler urged members of the SS and police to watch the movie.

After the war, some of the leading cast members were brought to trial as part of the denazification process. They generally defended their participation in the film on the grounds that they had only done so under duress. Despite significant evidence to support their arguments, Susan Tegel, author of Nazis and the Cinema, characterizes their postwar attempts to distance themselves from the film as "crass and self-serving". However, she concedes that their motives for accepting the roles seem to have been more driven by opportunistic ambition than by antisemitism.

Together with Die Rothschilds and Der ewige Jude, both released in 1940, the film remains one of the most frequently discussed examples of the use of film to further the Nazi antisemitic agenda. In 2010, two documentary films were released that explore the history and impact of this movie.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Jud Süß" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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