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Shay Hazkani
MORESHET
partially severed, writhing in its own blood. In contrast, there are idyllic scenes of cows and sheep at pasture, looking gentle and contented. The narrator condemns kosher Jewish slaughter, which he claims is carried out without anesthesia, and refers to attempts made in several “advanced” European countries to ban this practice – including the Nuremberg laws. Giesen described it as follows: Germans don’t like rats but they like pastoral lambs, and these peaceloving animals are falling victim to the knives of Jewish butchers without anesthesia. It was announced that the slaughter sequence contained the cruelest scenes ever depicted.76
The film researcher Ilan Avisar, concludes that the purpose of the sequence was to legitimize – by way of analogy – the solution to the Jewish problem: by their physical elimination.77 J. Hitler’s speech at the Reichstag: this sequence is defined by Gitlis as “the climax of the film.” On screen we see sections of Hitler’s appearance before the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, when he threatened the destruction of international Jewry if the Jews brought about war in Europe. The film concludes with images of a military parade, with S.S. officers and blonde girls decked out with Nazi symbols, against the background of a narration calling for “the elimination of the ugliness and inhumanity of world Jewry that has so revolted and disgusted us for the last hour.”78 Film critics of the time explained that this concluding scene was “like once again seeing the light after darkness. Once again we are surrounded by Germans and German life. We return from a long journey and are cut off at last from the Jews.”79 After the war, the Allied Commission ruled that The Eternal Jew was one of the most blatant examples of outright antisemitic Nazi propaganda and the most revolting yet astute film ever made for mass consumption.80 Not withstanding good editing of some of the scenes and top-quality camera work, Gitlis concluded that the movie was an artistic failure – as both film and propaganda. The main reason, in his view, was that it went too far in both the artistic and the aesthetic sense, and did not rouse tension in the audience. Møller and Culbert found that “The Eternal Jew did not attain its declared objectives,” the reasons being lack of active audience participation in the film due to the presence of an omniscient narrator, too much horror,