Bob Herzberg

Bob Herzberg was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. in 1956. He graduated from Erasmus Hall High School and went on to take a variety of jobs, from truck driver to warehouse manager to salesman. He always wanted to act in plays and do comedy and soon started performing in community theaters and colleges around New York.

By the 1990s, Bob had performed standup comedy, improv and murder mystery/dinner theater at clubs in both N.Y. and Hollywood. Around the same time, he wrote and co-starred in The Melnicks series on local TV, which had been aired on both coasts.

In 2006, he started writing western novels and mysteries. He is a member of Western Writers of America, International Thriller Writers and the Dramatists’ Guild.

In the past six years he has had four books published: Shooting Scripts, From Pulp Western to Film, which is about western authors and the films made from their works; The FBI & the Movies, which focuses on films with FBI characters and the Bureau’s influence on these productions; Savages & Saints: the Changing Image of the American Indian in Westerns, which details the Indian Wars and the films made about them; and The Left Side of the Screen which focuses on Communists and Liberals in Hollywood during the years 1929-2009. In 2008, he appeared on TV-Land’s Myths & Scandals in a sequence about the FBI.

Currently, Bob is writing another book on western films for McFarland Publishing. He’s been happily married to the lovely actress/poet Colleen Hayden. One day they hope to live out west.

The Third Reich on Screen, 1929–2015

By Bob Herzberg

For more than 80 years, images of the Third Reich have appeared in newsreels, documentaries, and fictional stories—from comedies and musicals to war, horror and science fiction films. Many of these representations say as much about the filmmakers as they do about Nazism itself. Hollywood often used the brutal Nazi as an all-purpose villain in escapist adventures set during and after the war, but just as often used him to attack the evil he symbolized.

Drawing on studio files, correspondence of the Production Code office and the writings of noted historians and critics, this book describes the making of many such films produced in Hollywood, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc nations. Biographies of several military and political figures who served as the basis for Nazi characters compare the cinematic and real-life versions.