Legal Status
Permanent Collection
Film Provenance
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum purchased this footage from the Bundesarchiv in December 2008 for use in the special exhibition, "State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda."
Note
The excerpt from R. 2 is a total of 10 meters long. The Bundesarchiv documentation must be checked to confirm that these clips all belong to R. 2.
Plot synopsis: The newly installed Duke of the Duchy of Wuerttemberg, Karl Alexander (played by Heinrich George), needs money to buy jewels for his wife and to pay for other costly items. He sends his adviser to ask for help from Joseph Suess Oppenheimer (Ferdinand Marian), a Jew who lives in Frankfurt. Suess agrees to help the Duke only if he is allowed to deliver the jewels in person, which he cannot legally do since Jews are barred from entering the city of Stuttgart. The adviser arranges false papers for Suess and Suess shaves his beard and wears courtly clothing. On the way to Stuttgart he meets Dorothea Sturm (Kristina Soederbaum), a Christian girl who is the daughter of the head of the Duke's council and who is betrothed to the council secretary. Little by little Suess gains more power until he convinces the Duke, who is now deeply in debt to Suess, to dissolve the council and allow Suess to do whatever he likes in the name of the Duke. He arrests Dorothea's father and husband and rapes the girl, who drowns herself. The Duke dies of a heart attack, removing the last protection for Suess, who is hanged by the citizens of Stuttgart for defiling an Aryan girl. The Jews, who have been allowed to enter Stuttgart while Suess was in power, are expelled once again. The film has obvious references to Nazi policy and goals.
This plot summary provides only enough information to make sense of the clips and some key points in the story may be omitted. For further information and analysis of this film see "The Demonic Effect": Veit Harlan's Use of Jewish Extras in Jud Suess (1940) in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2000 14 (2): 215-241.
Leslie Swift, Special Advisor, Time-Based Media, in response to a German institution who claimed that we do not have permission to publicly stream the following films, requested that their access permissions be changed to On Campus only. I have applied Access statement A2.
The copyright and conditions of use statements have been changed to show:
Copyright
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung
Conditions on Use
Contact Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung at footage@murnau-stiftung.de for permission to reproduce and use this film.
RG-60.1167-1172 (already on-campus only)
RG-60.1175-1179
RG-60.1201-1204
RG-60.4858-4861
Copied From
35mm
Film Source
Bundesarchiv (Germany). Filmarchiv
File Number
Legacy Database File: 5254
Source Archive Number: 10320 R2
