Vom Winde Verweht

Germans with a few marks to spend trudged to their cinemas last week to get their first official Nazi-eye view of what Americans are like. They saw a bloodcurdling, Grade-B thriller, showing Americans glorying in sin, sadism and corruption. The picture's title: Vom Winde Verweht (Gone With the Wind).

Herr Goebbels' thriller fulfills Adolf Hitler's recipe for Grade-A propaganda: it must be so exaggeratedly simple that the masses will get the point at once. Gone With the Wind is an exaggeratedly simple account of the brutality of American imperialism. A pack of Yankee cutthroats on a nameless West Indian island frame, cuckold and dishonor a simple, honest, hard-working South American doctor.

The tropic islands' American governor has "fingers that lust for gold." A U.S. newspaper reporter is "dissipated and dollar-greedy." The Nazi film captions him "a true-to-life American characterization." The rest of the cast are just miscellaneous rascals without character but "all more or less the type of the conscienceless plutocratic mammon."

This ghastly leer in the direction of South America is only the first of a series about the U.S. which Dr. Goebbels projects. In one way Hollywood has unintentionally prepared the ground for him. Thanks to Hollywood, most of the world already has such a completely unrealistic idea of the U.S. that many a European moviegoer may not find the antics of Gone With the Wind so ridiculous as they would appear to U.S. eyes.

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