Nazi Film Still Pains Relatives

Veit Harlan, left, directing Werner Krauss playing a rabbi in the 1940 film “Jew Süss.”

“If you want to understand the movies that people actually paid to go and see, Veit Harlan is the one,” said Linda Schulte-Sasse, the author of “Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema” and a professor at Macalaster College in Minnesota. “He was the Steven Spielberg or James Cameron of his era, and so you have to imagine ‘Jew Süss’ as a movie with Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson and Brad Pitt.”