Goebbel's Mistep

From the movies Jew Suss and the Eternal Jew it seems clear that the Nazis (and Goebbels especially) overestimated the ease with which they could convince Germans that Jews were evil. While Jew Suss was an incredible hit as both a feature film and a piece of propaganda, the methods used in the film were not applied to the documentary the Eternal Jew. It seems that Goebbels believed that Jew Suss was a success because of its underlying theme, the need for Jewish expulsion, and not because of the drama portrayed on screen. As such, the Eternal Jew makes no effort to please the audience visually or emotionally; rather, the “documentary” uses disturbing clips, graphics, data, and music to appeal to the German public. Unfortunately for Goebbels, this tactic failed. The German public was apparently unprepared to drop the façade of the Nazi party. While Jew Suss allowed this façade to remain intact, keeping the anti-Semitic ideals hidden within the drama of an extensive plot, the Eternal Jew makes no apologies for its beliefs. From the numbers of people that left the theatre during the Eternal Jew, it seems the German public preferred the hidden messages. Germans may have been on the path to Jewish hatred; however, their hatred was not yet at the level of being able to watch swarms of rats and analogies of parasites on screen.