"Nazis Were All but Invisible in American Movies at the Time When Depicting Their Savagery Might Have Done the Most Good"

"In the end it was Jack Warner who brought the rest of Hollywood on board. By using the techniques of 'March of Time,' he was able to blend melodrama, agitprop and a remedial history lesson into the Warners production 'Confessions of a Nazi Spy.' The film made it through the censor boards and onto American screens in the spring of 1939, only a few months before the outbreak of war in Europe. By then, as Doherty pointedly notes, even the most optimistic of Hollywood’s businessmen had concluded that Nazi Germany was no longer a viable outlet for American movies, and was unlikely to be so again for the foreseeable future."

Dave Kehr in The New York Times reviews Thomas Doherty's Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939.