their revenue was often frozen in German banks and not released right away. Fox and Paramount even collaborated on news reels with the Nazis that were shipped all around the world, in the hopes of getting their frozen assets back. Warner Brothers released the first film with a plot critical of Nazis in May 1939, it also fueled unfounded fears of jewish refugees acting as Nazi spies and contributed to the further restriction of jewish refugees from Europe. Hollywood's presence started to come under increasing scrutiny after Kristallnacht in 1938, and a wholesale retreat from the country took place in mid-1940, in part because of declining sales in Germany. These new incentives put in place by the nazis led to Universal scrapping a project about the sinking of the Lusitania and Paramount delaying its sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front to 1936. When production started on The Road Back, all the actors received a letter from a Georg Gyssling that none of them would be able to work on projects shown in Germany. Despite the uproar that ensued, the production got made with 21 preemptive cuts made, including a sanitized ending that made the world, not Germany, seem culpable for militarism, but Universal still got kicked out of the country in retaliation. Nazis insisted on edits to Warner Brother's film Captured! that showed poor treatment of prisoners by the hands of Germans, and further punished the studio even after they made those edits by blocking subsequent releases that were expected to perform well in Germany. MGM's cancellation of the anti-Nazi movie Are We Civilized? led to a dozen of their films being approved a week later. The Mad Dog of Europe, one of the first attempts to dramatize Hitler, was dissuaded from going further by the MPAA in 1933, who worried that all American films would be banned from Germany in retaliation. Goebbels also kept lists of which actors and crew were Jewish or anti-Nazi and refused to import films on which they worked. His emissary in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, kept an eye on Hollywood scripts and activities, including writing letters to Will H. Hays' office when he found something that he or his bosses didn't like. Measures of the Nazi film policy To subdue film to the goals of propaganda (Gleichschaltung), the Nazi Party subordinated the entire film industry and administration under Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of