“The Wolf Man” came out in the first year of the Holocaust and was written by a German Jew, Curt Siodmak, who fled after hearing an antisemitic speech by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
These few details alone make the film inevitably feel like the it must be addressing itself to the rise of Naziism in some way. It is, after all, set in a small European town that feel like it could be anywhere in the Pale of Settlement.
(Properly, the film is set in Wales, but that simply seems like an excuse for the fact that the entire cast speaks English. There is nothing especially Welsh about the set, which was filmed on Universal Studio’s generic European village backlot; there are no street signs written entirely in consonants or leek boutonnieres to be seen.)
Further, the film details an occult savagery that can seize men and turn them into monsters, and their victims are revealed by a star that marks them. This is not the only film to note the essential wolfishness of Naziism: It was one of the themes of Janusz Bardach’s memoir “Man is Wolf to Man,” and Nazis appear as wolves in “An American Werewolf in London.”
Additionally, the Nazis themselves made frequent use of wolf imagery: Hitler named his Eastern Front military headquarters The Wolf’s Lair, and would sometimes claim “wolf” as a nickname for himself; and, in a detail significant to the story, the Nazis also used the word “werewolf” to name both a Wehrmacht headquarters in Ukraine and a secret Nazi guerrilla organization that was intended to operate behind Allied lines.
Sidomak created a lot of the lore we now associate with the werewolf: the wolfsbane poem repeated throughout his film (“Even a man who is pure at heart …”); more significantly, he invented the pentagram markings shared by the werewolf and his victims, which so directly seem to echo the Jewish stars that Nazis forced Jews to wear.
It’s hard to say whether this was conscious on Siodmak’s part when he was writing the film. His script creates a complicated parable where victim become monster, where the film’s tragic hero, Larry Talbot, is both a victim of Naziism and then a Nazi. He is bitten by a murderous beast, then he becomes a beast and murders.
This makes for an uneasy parallel with Naziism. After all, when Jews were attacked by Nazis, they didn’t then become Nazis. I am tempted to see this as an expression of the fact that screenwriter Siodmak hailed from Dresden, and that German Jews were especially assimilated into German society.
That, for Siodmak, it may have felt less as though gentiles were turning murderous to Jews and more than Germans had turned murderous to Germans. After all, Larry Talbot isn’t a despised interloper in his little village, but instead the scion to the local Lord. (Although it is worth noting that the film makes him a bit of an alien in the village, as he has been aboard much of his life and returns having spent years laboring as an artisan.)
But this sort of examination may read too much into the text of the story. “The Wolf Man” does not need to have a one-to-one relationship with the Holocaust; it need merely suggest the event. Our horror is in knowing that the film doesn’t exist merely as a supernatural fantasy, but as something that gestures toward very real, and, when the film came out, contemporary monstrousness and savagery.
We cannot know how conscious Siodmak was of the Holocaust reference, but we know he was aware of it. "I am the Wolf Man," Siodmak told an interviewer for the Writers Guild magazine late in his life. "I was forced into a fate I didn't want: to be a Jew in Germany. I would not have chosen that as my fate."
