Berlin police today clubbed students and youths demonstrating against the showing here of postwar films of Veit Harlan, Nazi producer of the anti-Semitic film “Jew Seuss.”
Small groups of youths, composed of students and members of Socialist youth movements, congregated outside several motion picture houses to protest the showing of Harlan’s films. They were soon opposed by Harlan supporters who shouted anti-Semitic slogans at them. The subsequent clash brought police to the scene, and they used rubber truncheons to scatter the demonstrators.
After the clashes, Berlin trade union and Social Democratic Party leaders called on the Acting Mayor of West Berlin to order the film banned at least during the time the Big Four Ministers are meeting in this city. Earlier, a number of public figures issued a joint declaration protesting the showing of the films.
So far the protests and the clashes have succeeded in convincing only one theatre management here to remove the film. All others are playing to capacity houses.
The films, previously banned in many cities of West Germany, following protests and riots against Harlan, have been appearing in one city after another, after civil suits by Harlan and his backers against municipal bans. Until this week Berlin and Frankfurt held out, but this week cinemas in both cities began to show the film.
There were no protests against it in Frankfurt. A representative of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, which spearheaded the campaign against Harlan’s return to the German film scene, admitted today that “we’re licked.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
