Gene Hackman credited as playing...
Narrator
- [first lines]
- Narrator: For over a half a century Hollywood films have dealt with Nazism and the Holocaust in complex and often contradictory ways. Marked by outrage and indifference, compassion and ignorance, the need to understand and the desire to forget. And yet while this most horrific chapter in modern world history happened far from America's shores, it has been American movies, perhaps more than any other medium, that have shaped how we understand and remember these events.
- Narrator: Long before the Second World War, Hollywood and Germany already had a complex relationship. In the late 1920s Germany meant big business for the studios, accounting for 10% of a foreign market that sustained the film industry. So from the moment Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, Hollywood treated Nazism with kid-gloves.