Nazis are an American cinema cliche, often used in good cinema. But I think this has rather less to do with Nazis themselves and more to do with the film busin

Nazis are an American cinema cliche, often used in good cinema. But I think this has rather less to do with Nazis themselves and more to do with the film business. Soviets and asian communists as bad guys didn't work because there were pervasive socialist sympathies in the film industry. It just doesn't fly when your coworkers have party contacts (no, Mccarthy was not just crazy). The other thing is the film business is heavily Jewish. If for some reason the movie business was heavily Finnish or Latvian I'm sure we'd have tons of good movies about evil Soviets. I don't really see anything so special about the nazis vis-a-vis any of five other modern totalitarian regimes. The imperial Japanese make absolutely fantastic subject matter, too, but after the war propaganda nobody bothered.