Hollywood's pact of pandering to Hitler's whims prior to WW2 revealed

Nazi diplomats threatened to ban American-made movies from the German market if they were depicted negatively in the flicks, it has been revealed.

Harvard post-doctoral fellow Ben Urwand reveals how movies were threatened to be banned from the German market if they didn't follow orders in his controversial book, 'The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler,' the New York Daily News reported.

Spineless Hollywood executives wilted to Nazi demands in the leadup to World War II, scrubbing Jewish traces from films as they axed scenes and entire projects the regime found remotely objectionable, according to the Harvard film scholar's new book.

One MGM executive in Germany even bowed to a propaganda ministry request to divorce his Jewish wife, dooming her to life in a concentration camp.

Major studios - including MGM, Paramount and 20th Century Fox - routinely folded to demands rather than lose money.

The strategy worked so well, industry heavyweights began to self-police, leaning on independent filmmakers who planned movies revealing the ominous signs of the horror to come.

An excerpt of the forthcoming book, which appeared in the Hollywood Reporter, claims "collaboration" was common throughout the 1930s as Adolf Hitler rose to power.

When German officials thought a movie was too sympathetic to Jews or critical of Nazis, American studios edited the films for audiences at home and abroad.