The Rothschilds

The Rothschilds (1940)

Die Rothschilds

Biopic about the Rothschilds, a Jewish family whose members rose to the top of the European banking community during the Napoleonic era.

Date of release
1940-07-17
TMDB
6.1 / 10 (16)
Runtime
1h 37m
Genres
Drama
Director
Erich Waschneck

Casting

Interesting facts

The Rothschilds is a 1940 Nazi German historical propaganda film directed by Erich Waschneck.

Production

The Nazis had hoped for a surge in antisemitic sentiment after Kristallnacht but, when it became clear that most Germans did not share such views, Goebbels ordered each studio to make an antisemitic film. While Hitler preferred presenting this agenda directly in films such as Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), Goebbels preferred a more subtle approach of couching such messages in an engaging story with popular appeal.

Joseph Goebbels ordered the beginning of the production on 17 November 1938. C.M. Köhn and Gerhard T. Buchholz wrote a script based on an idea by Mirko Jelusich. It cost 951,000 ℛℳ (equivalent to $4,000,000 in 2021) to produce.

Saul Friedländer suggests that Goebbels' intent was to counter three films whose messages attacked the persecution of Jews throughout history by producing violently antisemitic versions of those films with identical titles.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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