Jud Suss vs. the Eternal Jew

While Jud Suss and the Eternal Jew both help us to gain insight into the Nazi worldview, particularly concerning the Jewish race, they go about ingraining these ideas in the minds of the German public in very different ways. It seems rather obvious that the Eternal Jew would have been less appealing to audiences and less successful than Jud Suss because it is too harsh in its convictions about the Jews. Anti-Semitism was palatable enough to contemporary Germans, but the effectiveness of the film Jud Suss lies in its ability to subtly justify Germans in their anti-Semitic beliefs through emotional and moral appeals.

However, both help us to see into the Nazi worldview by exposing the idea of “us” versus “them” inherent in almost all Nazi propaganda. In Jud Suss, the “good” Aryan Germans are the ones who believe in law and order and who unite as a people to protect these values against the “corruption” of Jewish influence. Conversely, the Eternal Jew fully exposes Nazi racial ideology, in a fashion similar to that of Victims of the Past, by making the “inferior” peoples seem synonymous with a bacteria or pest. The camera angles and eerie music in both of these films combine to create the effect that the land is being overrun with these “defective” people and races. Overall, both Jud Suss and the Eternal Jew give both contemporary German audiences and modern audiences a sense of the Nazi ideals concerning the justification of their policy of extermination. By using propaganda, whether subtle in Jud Suss or blatant in the Eternal Jew, the Nazis sought to so convince the German populace of the inferiority of non-Aryans that all would agree that their removal from society was necessary.