The film’s producers wheeled out Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel to combat a growing campaign in Hollywood designed to deny Ms Winslet her first golden statuette as best actress.
As The Sunday Telegraph revealed in mid February, a covert campaign to rubbish the film began after prominent experts on Nazi Germany denounced the film for portraying Ms Winslet’s character, an illiterate and unrepentant concentration camp guard, as too sympathetic.
Ron Rosenbaum, author of the book Explaining Hitler, branded The Reader the worst Holocaust movie in history and complained that it falsely implies that Germans were ignorant of Hitler’s genocide.
Mark Weitzman, the New York head of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said The Reader was guilty of “Holocaust revisionism”.
The team spread word of Mr Wiesel’s support for The Reader before Oscar voting closed on Tuesday night.
Then on Friday, The Reader’s British director and screenwriter, Stephen Daldry and David Hare, joined forces with producers Harvey Weinstein and Donna Gigliotti, issuing a statement condemning the “mudslinging” against their movie.