#Hollywood's Secret Pact with #Hitler

Scholar Asserts That Hollywood Avidly Aided Nazis
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/books/scholar-asserts-that-hollywood-avidly-aided-nazis.html?_r=0

The list of institutions and industries that have been accused of whitewashing their links to the Third Reich is long, including various governments, the Vatican, Swiss banks and American corporations like I.B.M., General Motors and DuPont.

Now a young historian wants to add a more glamorous name to that roll call: Hollywood.

In “The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler,” Ben Urwand draws on a wealth of previously uncited documents to argue that Hollywood studios, in an effort to protect the German market for their movies, not only acquiesced to Nazi censorship but also actively and enthusiastically cooperated with that regime’s global propaganda effort.

In the 1930s “Hollywood is not just collaborating with Nazi Germany,” Mr. Urwand said by telephone from Cambridge, Mass., where he is currently at Harvard’s prestigious Society of Fellows. “It’s also collaborating with Adolf Hitler, the person and human being.”

Mr. Urwand’s book, to be published in October by Harvard University Press, has been seen by few scholars. But his research, which was summarized this month in the online magazine Tablet, is already creating a stir.

“I think what this guy has found could be a blockbuster,” said Deborah Lipstadt, a Holocaust historian at Emory University. “I’m very anxious to see this book. I found it breathtaking in the audacity of the story it seems to be trying to tell.”