women. The three-hour-long story played to sold-out crowds and recruited thousands to the Ku Klux Klan. In 1940, one year before the release of Citizen Kane, the film Jew Süss portrayed Ezra’s descendants as corrupt and showed a high-status Jewish banker, Süss Oppenheimer, raping a blonde German woman, before being hanged in front of grateful crowds in an iron cage. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won plaudits, was seen by twenty million and caused viewers to pour en masse into the streets of Berlin chanting, ‘Throw the last of the Jews out of Germany.’
