Recovered in Paris flea market, 1924 Austrian silent film is a Holocaust preview
A Jewish man is beaten up on the street. Jewish husbands are separated from their non-Jewish wives and children, and deported on trains. A Jewish community, led by rabbis carrying a Torah scrolls, marches down a dark road as it is banished from town.
These snapshots appear to be Holocaust history — but they are not. These are scenes from a silent Austrian film made a decade prior to the enactment of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws, and some 15 years before the outbreak of World War II.
The 1924 film “City Without Jews” is based on a popular 1922 novel by Austrian writer and journalist Hugo Bettauer. It astutely predicted what was to come. But only partially.
The film was conceived as a satirical response to the anti-Semitism gaining popular and political strength in Austria during the early inter-war period. Its plot depicted the scapegoating of the Jews for the country’s problems and their subsequent expulsion.
But unlike in the real Holocaust, these Jews are eventually reinstated when the Austrians realized their country was suffering from the absence of the creative and successful Jewish community. In real life, Austria’s Jews were deported beginning in October 1939, and most did not come back. Approximately one-third of Austria’s 190,000 Jews were killed, and only 5,000 were in the country by the end of the war.
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It's possible that he saw this movie as a young man, although he was in prison during 1924. He was also a confirmed anti-semite, and by 1924 he was already writing his book Mein Kampf which was published a year later. It's hard to say whether this movie would have made any difference to Hitler, but it demonstrates that anti-semitism was a common belief at that time in Austria.
in Germany, Holland and France, also the film's producer and writer of the 1922 book on which the film was based.
The rediscovered "City Without Jews" Austrian film is an ominous and striking visual portrait of horrible times to come, although the actual film's ending is positive. A great number of popular movies were produced in the Silent Movie Era (1894-1927) and seen in the US, Europe and elsewhere--"Metropolis," "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," "Ben Hur," classic dramas and Biblical stories, westerns and comedies by artists like Charlie Chaplin.
In Europe prior to the 1924 Austrian film, there was rising anti semitism, harassment, and violence against Jews occurring in areas in the late 19th c., into the early 20th c. and inter-war period. Attacks and pogroms were extreme in Czarist Russia and eastern Europe.
For centuries, Jews and Jewish communities experienced sporadic persecution and expulsion at least since returning Crusaders attacked Jews in Germany; the death of Aaron and the Jews of York in 12th-13th c. Norman England; the 15th c. Spanish Inquisition; and turmoil in the 1600s during the Protestant Reformation.
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/yorks/city-of-york/pp47-49: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_of_Lincoln
The subject matter of harsh anti Semitism in the Austrian film echoes another early use of motion picture mass media technology to promote racism and white supremacy, "The Birth of a Nation," (1915) the D.W. Griffith production based on Thomas Dixon's novel "The Clansman." Griffith's groundbreaking epic movie was widely viewed and used as a recruiting tool by the KKK whose membership increased in the 1920s during a time of labor issues, strikes, anarchism and the Red Scare in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_film
"Sallie Gardner at a Gallop," c. 1878 considered to be the first "proto-movie."
