Tomorrow The World (1944)

I recently watched this movie. It about an 11 year old German boy who leaves Nazi Germany and moves to the United States to live with a friend of his father (both his parents are died.) The boy likes to wear his Hitler Youth uniform and preach his racially-motivated talk to everyone. In the end the boy comes to see how evil Nazism is and he changes for the better.

The movie is based on a Broadway play and the fact that it was made in 1944 when World War 2 was still going on is interesting in itself. It is one of the first movies that I know of that openly talk about concentration camps, how the Germans are treating the Jews and shows that the Germans can be reformed from their brain-washing. Some things that I found hypocritical are that while the characters bash the German boy for his racist views about Jews, Poles and others they do not mention that at the same time in the US Blacks were being treated in much the same way in the South (except without the death camps.) Japanese-Americans were also treated badly and interned. I guess since these didn't "help" the war effort it was ok to forget about them. I also didn't like that they called Sign Language the "Deaf and Dumb Language." I find it hard to consider a group of people that can't hear and yet creates an intricate language of their own to be dumb.

On the whole, the movie gives a basic insight into how the US wanted to portray itself both to it's citizens and to the world during World War 2.