Twenty million people—soldiers assigned to Nazi death squads, residents of bourgeois Berlin neighbourhoods, and every second adult living in the Third Reich—had lined up to watch the movie. The onscreen drama went like this: Lacking the money to buy his wife coronation jewels, the Duke of Württemberg turns to the unscrupulous financier, Joseph Süß Oppenheimer. The evil Jew corrupts the Duke. Later, he rapes the innocent Dorothea Sturm as the price of her husband’s freedom from prison. Following her suicide, Süß is executed by the townspeople. The Jews are expelled from Württemberg. “Finally, an anti-Semitic film,” Nazi propaganda minister Joseph...