Fritz Lang
Goes After
the Nazis

In this article, Austrian film director Fritz Lang (1890 – 1976) recalled the day in 1933 when he was summoned to the office of Joseph Goebbels and invited to make a pro-Nazi movie. He knew then and there that he had to get out of Dodge, toot sweet. This column was written on the occasion of the American release of his film, The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse, a 1933 movie that the Nazis banned.

“Lang’s intention in the film was, in his own words, ‘to expose the masked Nazi theory of the necessity to deliberately destroy everything which is precious to a people so that they would lose all faith in the institutions and ideals of the State. Then, when everything collapsed, they would try to find help in the new order.'”

The director fled to Paris and in 1936 arrived in Hollywood, where he was quickly put to work. During his twenty-year career in the United States, Land made twenty-three feature films.

– from Amazon: