The film by Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. (as his name read in the credits), ”Hitler’s Reign of Terror,” premièred at the independent Mayfair theatre on Broadway on April 30, 1934, and garnered the biggest single opening day in the house’s history. It was a quirky admixture of stock newsreel footage, and genuine documentary material shot by Vanderbilt: sixty-five minutes of frenzied crowds burning books and parading by torchlight in Germany, speeches at a 1933 anti-Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden, street scenes of Vienna and Berlin amid Nazi brownshirts, interviews reënacted in English, and an actual interview with Helen Keller, whose books were burned by Hitler’s decree. (She avows that history has taught nothing to Germany’s leaders if they think it possible to kill ideas.) Vanderbilt photographed the graves of Hitler’s parents, and discovered that Hitler was considerably unpopular in Leonidad, his Austrian home town.
In a May 1, 1934, review for the New York Times, the aptly named Mordaunt Hall wrote, “Hitler’s methods are scourged by Messrs. Vanderbilt and Hill, but their words would be infinitely more effective if they were endowed with a slight degree of subtlety and a sense of humor.”
