Jew Süss (1934)

A Jew seeks political power in order that he may use it to benefit the status of Jewry in an anti-Semitic order of society.
1930s British cinema's ability to make films that dealt with Europe's rising tide of fascism was hindered by censorship - politics at the pictures was strictly forbidden. However, filmmakers found oblique ways around the ban, as in the case of Jew Süss (d. Lothar Mendes, 1934), which substituted Germany in 1730 for the modern German state. Producer Michael Balcon hoped the film, based on Lion Feuchtwanger's novel about a wealthy Jew's rise to power, would draw attention to Nazi atrocities.
Expatriate German actor Conrad Veidt, who saw friends and colleagues threatened by his country's escalating anti-Semitism, agreed to play the leading role in the hope the production would act as covert propaganda. His conviction that Germany's fascists needed challenging was born out of personal experience. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's head of propaganda, had tried to keep the popular star in Germany, first by offering Veidt's half-Jewish wife, Lily Preger, an Aryan certificate, and later with house arrest.