"We can give money so we can take and take and take!"
Before Jud Suss (1940), Veit Harlan was a modestly successful melodrama director. Afterwards he became the Third Reich's favorite auteur, forever associated with this masterpiece of anti-Semitism. Jud Suss is less propaganda than a warrant for genocide; artistically, it's also unwatchable.In 18th Century Wurtemberg, Duke Karl Alexander's (Heinrich George) profligate ways are uneasily checked by the city council. Enter Joseph Suss Oppenheimer (Ferdinand Marian), a Jewish financier who promises money to fund the Duke's lifestyle. He becomes the Duke's Finance Minister, taxing the locals, raising a private army and allowing Jews into the city. When he imprisons the council chairman (Eugen Klopfer), and rapes his daughter Dorothea (Kristina Soderbaum), Wurtemberg's citizens rebel against the crafty Suss.
Jud Suss purports to adapt Lion Feuchtwanger's 1925 novel, subject of a British adaptation with Conrad Veidt in 1934. Both novel and earlier film paint Suss as a tragic figure, half-Jewish, half-Christian and belonging in neither world. Naturally, Harlan and his benefactors had no use for nuance. They twist Feuchtwanger's story to demonstrate how Jews control and destroy society, justifying Hitler's call for a Final Solution.
For 93 relentless minutes, Jud Suss hammers us with the perfidy of Judaism. He's a Hebrew Dracula, infiltrating polite society in disguise, then destroying it from within. He manipulates the Duke with money, booze and women, allowing him to amass a personal fortune on taxes and handouts. He proclaims himself a stateless person, cackling to fellow Jews "I've just opened the door for all of you to enter." Naturally, he rapes Dorothea in exchange for her husband's (Malte Jaeger) life. Harlan employs the D.W. Griffith method: if your racial caricature isn't heinous enough, add sex.
Ferdinand Marian, surprisingly, gives a subdued performance that makes Suss compelling in his hatefulness. The same can't be said for Werner Kraus, cast in four separate roles, each an odious stereotype. Playing Suss's secretary, he's a goggle-eyed Muppet cackling shrilly at his Gentile victims. As a rabbi, he's swathed in robes and a ludicrous beard, abdicating spiritual leadership for money. Nazi favorite Heinrich George plays the dissolute Duke; Kristina Soderbaum is defiled and dies, a performance she'd repeat in The Golden City.
If Jud Suss had any artistic merit, it might deserve critical consideration. Unlike Birth of a Nation or Battleship Potemkin, nothing redeems its ideological toxicity. Harlan provides 93 minutes of anti-Semitic rants and demonstrations: there's no plot beyond Suss's perfidy, hence no drama or interest. Everything builds to a grotesque climax: the Duke dies, Suss is hanged in an iron cage, and the film triumphantly ends with the Council expelling all Jews from Wurtemberg. Bigots everywhere, rejoice.
Veit Harlan desperately disowned Jud Suss, claiming Goebbels coerced him into making it. Regardless, he was tried for "crimes against humanity" for working on Jud Suss. Understandably so: it became an SS training film and directly inspired Hitler Youth murders of Jews in Vienna. Joseph Goebbels surely beamed with pride: few films inspired such a high body count. For that reason alone, Jud Suss earned its place in cinematic history.
