Veteran journalist and author
Joseph C. Goulden reviewed Steven J. Ross' Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America for the Washington Times.
As Adolph Hitler tried to
spread his Nazi tentacles beyond Germany in the 1930s, he benefited from a
so-called “fifth column” of ideological supporters in several nations, notably
France.
But many of his henchmen —
formal or free-lance — also had their eyes on the movie capital of the world:
Hollywood. An estimated 150 million persons worldwide saw at least one movie
weekly, most of them produced by Hollywood studies with Jewish owners.
So Germany launched a
two-pronged attack on the industry. The first goal was to prevent the studios
from producing films attacking Hitler or his government, a chore eagerly
pursued by Georg Gyssling, the German consul in Los Angeles.
Hitler was well-aware of the
propaganda value of movies. As he wrote in “Mein Kampf,” movies had greater
propaganda value than the written word because people “will more readily accept
a pictorial representation than read an article of any length.”
The second target was the
movie mogul themselves, and the major stars of their films, who were targeted
for assassination by ad hoc bands of Nazi sympathizers. One plot discussed was
to have machine-gun squads drive through the Jewish neighborhood of Boyle
Heights, murdering anyone in sight.
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