The best way to view The Rothschilds from Nazi Germany is to view this side by side with 20th Century Fox's House Of Rothschild that starred George Arliss as Nathan Rothschild. In many ways this is the same story and seeing both films can tell you a great deal about the medium of film and its value for propaganda when you tell the same story, but slant it differently.
In the American version the Rothschild family is shown as canny business people, but patriots who staked their personal fortunes on the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars and that final Battle Of Waterloo. They faced the anti-Semitic prejudice and triumphed. The same prejudice that Joe Goebbels and the German film industry was trying to spread.
The Rothschild sons go to different parts of Europe in both films and Carl Kuhlman playing Nathan Rothschild here is working for a consortium of Jews looking to make those profits no matter how things turn out. The plot could have been taken from The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, it's that vicious.
The British themselves are shown as a bunch of greedy speculators anyway and the French don't really deserve a guy like Napoleon Bonaparte running things. The saviors of Europe were of course the Prussians. They certainly arrive in the nick of time to insure victory for the Duke Of Wellington in real life. But overall their performance in the Napoleonic Wars wasn't all that great.
Note that the film's release came on July 17, 1940. The end of the film had a coda saying that the Rothschilds and their Jewish agents are all refugees from Europe now, but we still have to deal with those left in Great Britain. That's about the time Mr. Hitler did start dealing with the British home land in his usual fashion.
The Rothschilds, a great example of Hitler's use of film to fan anti- Semitism. Getting rid of these Jews and their evil practices, it's what our crusade is all about.
You can't watch this film without a shudder.
