Kristian

There was just as much melodramatic anti-German/Jap propaganda by the Americans and the British during WW II

Since the Nazis were intent on invading and enslaving Great Britain, one could understand the birth of and the reasons for anti-German propaganda. To compare that propaganda, though, to a blatantly anti-semitic film, financed by the Nazis, is absurd.

Veit Harlan struck a Faustian deal with the Nazis and this rather good documentary shows some of the lasting effects that deal has wrought on his family and which they will have to deal with until the day they die.

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Jud Süß was not pro-war propaganda that demonised a nation with which Germany was at war. It was a deeply pernicious piece of anti-Semitism that employed various racist tropes (i.e. the idea that Jews were secretly plotting to manipulate and overthrow the government for their own benefit, and that they preyed on and sexually exploited 'Aryan' women) to further stigmatise an ethnic minority within Germany, many of whom had fought alongside gentile Germans during World War I, and would have considered themselves to be proud Germans were it not for the rise of the Nazis.

Whatever one thinks of anti-German/anti-Japanese propaganda, it was emphatically not the same thing as a film designed to target an increasingly oppressed racial minority. As heavy-handed as a lot of the Allied propaganda was, it still had the commendable purpose of instilling a sense of patriotism and duty in Americans and Brits to fight for their countries and defeat the Axis empires and the fascistic and racially supremacist governments they represented.

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