Although Germany emerged from World War I with a relatively liberal government, the political climate moved rightward during the 1920s. In 1933, the fascis-tic Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (“National Socialist German Workers’ party,” known as the Nazis) gained parliamentary control, and Adolf Hitler became chancellor. The Nazis became the only legal political party, and Hitler ruled as a dictator.
Nazi ideology was based on extreme nationalism: a belief that Germany was naturally superior to the rest of the world. This notion stemmed from a view that Germans belonged to a pure Aryan race, and that other ethnic groups, especially Jews, were inferior and dangerous. Nazis also held that women were innately subordinate to men and that citizens owed unquestioning obedience to government leaders. Thus, the new German regime opposed not only the communist ideology of the USSR but also the democratic principles of many other nations.
Hitler led his party to power in part by appealing to feelings of humiliation stemming from Germany’s defeat in World War I. The country had been forced to disarm its military; soldiers could not carry even rifles. By playing on old prejudices, the Nazis managed to convince many people that the defeat had been caused by Jews. Similarly, the economic problems caused by the Depression were blamed on Jews and communists. Hitler promised to restore both the economy and national pride.
The Nazi Regime and the Film Industry
Like Stalin, Hitler was a movie fan; he cultivated friendships with actors and filmmakers and often screened films as after-dinner entertainment. Even more fascinated with the cinema was his powerful minister of propaganda, Dr. Josef Goebbels, who controlled the arts during the Nazi era. Goebbels watched films every day and socialized with filmmakers. In 1934, he gained control of censorship, and until the end of the war he personally examined every feature film, short, and newsreel that was released. Despite his hatred of communism, Goebbels admired Eisenstein’s Potemkin for its powerful propaganda, and he hoped to create an equally vivid cinema expressing Nazi ideas.
Goebbels moved to control other aspects of the film industry. The virulently anti-Semitic attitudes of the Nazi party led to an effort in April 1933 to remove all Jews from the film industry. Jews were forbidden to work for any film establishment—even in foreign companies’ distribution offices. This precipitated an exodus of filmmaking talent. Many Jews fled, including Max Ophiils, Billy Wilder, and Robert Siodmak. Anyone holding leftist or liberal views was also in danger, and many non-Jews who could not stomach Nazi policies departed. Goebbels wanted Fritz Lang for a high position in the film industry, but Lang went into exile, first in France and then in the United States. Actor Conrad Veidt, though of Aryan origin, reportedly wrote “Jew” on the racial form required of each film worker and left the country. Ironically, in Hollywood he went on to play Nazi villains (most famously, Major Strasser in Casablanca).
In April 1935, the Nazis’ anti-Semitic campaign expanded with a ban on screenings of all pre-1933 films produced with the involvement of Jews. This move coincided with increasingly harsh measures being enacted by the government; the “Nuremberg laws” in September, among other things, stripped Jews of their citizenship and forbade marriages between Jews and non-Jews. Goebbels later ordered the production of antiSemitic films.
Goebbels’s main effort to control the German cinema came through gradual nationalization of the film industry. When the Nazis came to power, there was no pressing need for the government to take control. Most shares in the largest company, Ufa, belonged to the powerful right-wing media mogul Alfred Hugenberg (who was briefly minister of economics in the new regime). Although many Ufa officials opposed the Nazis, the company made some of the earliest fascist films. Moreover, in June 1933, the government set up the Filmkred-itbank. The “Film Credit Bank” supported production in the wake of the Depression, but it also allowed the Nazis to oversee filmmaking, since projects had to meet ideological requirements in order to receive loans.
Nationalization was not tried immediately for another reason: Goebbels did not want to alienate other countries. Germany’s film industry depended on exports. It also needed imports, primarily from the United States and France, to satisfy German theaters’ needs. Some nations, however, resisted dealing with Nazi Germany. Both imports and exports fell sharply during the mid-1930s. At the same time, production costs in Germany were ballooning. The government had two options: to subsidize production (as Fascist Italy did) or to nationalize the industry.
The Nazis chose nationalization because it offered them greater control over the films. The process of nationalization, however, proceeded differently from
12.23, left The hero’s zeal for the Nazi cause in Hans Westmar sometimes verges on fanaticism. Later propaganda films toned down such extreme behavior.
12.24, right The young hero of Hitlerjunge Quex expresses delight as he receives his Hitler Youth uniform.
That in the USSR. Instead of openly seizing private firms, as the Soviet government had done, during 1937 and 1938 the Nazi regime secretly bought controlling interests in the three main film-producing companies (Ufa, Tobis, and Bavaria) and two important smaller firms (Terra and Froelich). By 1939, eighteen independent production firms still existed, but they made fewer than one-third of that year’s features.
The nationalization of the film industry was completed in 1942. All German film companies were assembled under a giant holding firm, called Ufa-Film (but abbreviated as Ufi, to distinguish it from the old Ufa). Ufi was vertically integrated, controlling 138 firms in all sectors of the industry. By now, Hitler had seized Austria and Czechoslovakia, and Ufi absorbed their national film industries.
Despite this consolidation, the number of films produced in Germany did not meet the demand, and production declined after the war began in 1939. The Nazis were more successful, however, in controlling the types of films made.
Because of the repellent nature of Nazi ideology, modern audiences outside Germany have seen few films from this era. The exceptions tend to be the more heavily propagandistic films like Triumph of the Will and Jud Suss (see p. 274), which are studied primarily as historical documents. Nevertheless, most films made during the period were intended as entertainment and have little or no overt political content. Of the 1,097 features made from 1933 to 1945, only about one-sixth were banned by postwar Allied censors for containing Nazi propaganda. Since all films had to receive Goebbels’s approval, they certainly could not attack Nazi ideology. Many are, however, ordinary studio films not very different from those made in Hollywood or England during the same period. (Indeed, many are shown on German television today, as old Hollywood films are in the United States.)
Pro-Nazi Propaganda Some of the earliest strongly propagandistic films appeared in 1933: SA-Mann Brand (“SA-Man Brand,” Franz Seitz), Hans Westmar (Franz Wenzler), and Hitlerjunge Quex (“The Quicksilver Hitler Youth,” Hans Steinhoff). These were intended to win adherents to the party by glorifying Nazi heroes. The films take place shortly before the Nazis seized power, and they depict the era as a struggle between vicious Communists and stalwart young Hitler supporters.
Hans Westmar is based loosely on the life of Horst Wessel, one of the first to die for the Nazi cause and author of the party’s fighting song. The film portrays late-1920s Berlin as sinking under Jewish, Communist, and decadent foreign influences. Young Westmar disgustedly visits a cafe that serves only English beer and features a black jazz band. A Jewish play is on at the Piscator-Biihne (a real leftist theater of the day), and a cinema is showing Boris Barnet’s 1927 Soviet comedy The Girl with the Hat Box. Villainous Communists plot to take over Germany by exploiting working-class poverty. Westmar proves so adept at winning converts to the Nazi cause that the Communists assassinate him (12.23).
Hitlerjunge Quex was, like many Nazi films, designed to appeal to adolescents. The protagonist, Heini, is attracted to a Hitler Youth group, despite his drunken Communist father’s opposition (12.24). The most effective scene shows him visiting a Communist youth camp where the leaders press wine and beer on the young visitors; he then wanders off and encounters a Hitler Youth camp where the children participate in healthy sport. Again, after Heini joins the Hitler Youth, his valiant service leads the Communists to murder him. Although the Communist organizations in both Hans Westmar and Hitlerjunge Quex contain stereotyped Jewish members, anti-Semitism is a minor part of these propaganda films, which mainly attack the German Communist party.
12.25, 12.26 Facilities for filming Triumph of the Will included a camera elevator, visible in 12.25 on the supports of the banners in the giant open-air auditorium. It permitted moving shots of the vast crowds, carefully arranged for the camera, as seen in 12.26.
12.27 Since 1919, German soldiers had been forbidden to bear arms. In Triumph of the Will they parade carrying shovels in place of rifles—but the threat posed by Hitler’s troops is still clear.
The Reich's Documentarist: Leni Riefenstahl For modern audiences, the most famous filmmaker of the Nazi era is Leni Riefenstahl. She had started as an actress in the silent era and had directed herself in one sound feature, The Blue Light (1932), starring as a mountain sprite. Her two propaganda features, Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), were made at Hitler’s request.
Triumph of the Will is a documentary feature made on the occasion of the Nazi party congress in Nuremberg in 1934. Hitler intended the event to demonstrate his control of a powerful and unified group of followers. Hitler put enormous resources at Riefenstahl’s disposal. She oversaw sixteen camera crews, and the huge buildings erected for the event were designed to look impressive in the film (12.25, 12.26). Using skillful cinematography, editing, and music, Riefenstahl created an impressive two-hour pageant of Nazi ideology and fervor. She also displayed to a nervous world Germany’s military strength (12.27).
Made as a record of the 1936 Olympic Games, held in Berlin, Olympia contains far less overt Nazi propaganda than Triumph of the Will. Nevertheless, it was financed by the government, again on a vast scale. The intention was that the film would show Germany as a cooperative member of the world community and thus quell fears about Nazi aggression. It was also hoped that the games would result in a series of prizes for Aryan participants, demonstrating the racial inferiority of their competitors.
Riefenstahl deployed camera crews to film the events and to catch crowd reactions. The resulting footage required two years to edit, and the final film was released in two feature-length parts. There were glimpses of Hitler and other Nazi officials viewing the games, but Riefenstahl concentrated on creating a sense of friendly
12.28
Riefenstahl juxtaposes a series of shots of bodies soaring against the sky in the diving sequence in the second part of Olympia.
Competition among the athletes and on the beauty and suspense of the events. At times that sense of beauty became almost abstract, as in the famous diving sequence (12.28). The medals won by several non-Aryan athletes, most prominently the black American track star Jesse Owens, also helped undercut the original propaganda purposes of the film.
Attacking the "Enemies" of the Reich During the Nazi era, films attacking the enemies of the Third Reich continued to appear. Some were anti-British, since Great Britain epitomized the kind of parliamentary democracy that the Nazis opposed. In Carl Peters (1941, Herbert Selpin), for example, British secret agents use underhanded means to battle the hero in colonizing parts of Africa. The USSR continued to be a favorite target, since the Nazis aimed to enslave and exterminate Slavic populations. CPU (1942, Karl Ritter) associates Soviet communism with women’s equality, peace, and disarmament; the GPU (Soviet secret police) acts as a band of assassins furthering the USSR’s plans for world domination. (In fact the GPU had been used primarily to persecute Soviet citizens.) After the German defeat at
12.29 Fears of Jewish corruption are exploited in Jud Suss when Suss rapes the heroine. She is played by Kristina Soder-baum, who portrayed idealized blonde Aryan heroines in several of Veit Harlan’s films.
Stalingrad in 1943, one of the turning points of the war, the Nazis were not anxious to call attention to the USSR, and anti-Soviet features disappeared.
The most notorious of the enemies films were five anti-Semitic features. These were ordered by Goebbels in 1939, shortly after Hitler first publicly discussed total annihilation as the “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.” Among the most insidious of them was Jud Suss (“Jew Siiss,” 1940, Veit Harlan). A historical epic set in the eighteenth century, Jud SUss was based on the stereotype of the grasping Jewish moneylender. Siiss loans money to an impoverished duke and tries to turn the duchy into a Jewish state. He commits hideous crimes, including raping the heroine and torturing her lover (12.29). Jud SUss was widely seen and incited violence against Jews.
Der ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew,” 1940, Fritz Hippler) was a documentary exploiting similar myths, depicting Jews as a homeless race, spreading corruption by wandering through Christian lands. Footage of poverty-stricken inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto is accompanied by a narrator’s voice saying that Jews spread disease. A scene from United Artists’ 1934 film, House of Rothschild, a positive depiction of the Jewish banking family, is taken out of context to “prove” a supposed Jewish conspiracy to control international finance. Der ewige Jude was so viciously anti-Semitic that it proved unpopular. After 1940, hatred ofJews appeared only in isolated scenes, not as the basis for entire films—partly because the Nazis wanted to divert attention from the exterminations then occurring in concentration camps.
Glorifying War Propaganda also drummed up enthusiasm for the war effort. Some militarist films showed life in uniform to be full ofcomradely cheer. In Drei Un-teroffiziere (“Three Petty Officers,” 1939, Werner Hochbaum), the heroes spend their time finding romance while on leave, singing as they march along, and occasionally participating in sanitized battles. The Nazis also, however, promoted a fanatical belief in “blood and soil,” glorifying death in combat for the fatherland. Goebbels’s pet project of the war period, Kol-berg (1945, Veit Harlan), fostered this notion. In 1943, Kolberg was envisioned as a vast historical epic, the German Gone with the Wind. Because of the growing shortages caused by the war, the film was not actually finished until 1945. So obsessed was Goebbels with his project that he drew nearly 200,000 troops away from the fighting to act as extras. The result was an extravagant film, shot on the new Agfacolor film stock introduced early in the war.
Kolberg dramatizes an actual incident in the Napoleonic Wars, as the citizens of a small Prussian town take up arms to defend themselves when the local military authorities want to surrender. The people are eventually defeated, but the film highlights their courageous resistance to the French. Apparently Goebbels hoped that ordinary citizens would rise up and save Germany from its impending defeat. That did not happen. By the time Kolberg premiered on January 30, 1945, Allied bombing had closed most Berlin cinemas. The film remained virtually unseen as the city fell to Soviet troops.
Popular Entertainment Although most features were intended primarily as entertainment, political content often underlay the drama. For example, Der Herrscher (“The Ruler,” 1937, Veit Harlan) portrays a powerful, aging industrialist who decides to marry his young secretary. His family attempts to have him declared insane, but he triumphs and disinherits them, leaving his factory to the German people. His children and their spouses are selfish: one checks a watch during the mother’s funeral; others speculate on who will inherit her jewelry. The protagonist wins out, and his last line is “A born leader needs no teacher to guide his genius.” The parallel with Hitler, who expected German citizens to follow him unquestioningly, was clear.
Goebbels believed that the cinema was valuable as pure entertainment, and he did not demand even implicit Nazi ideology in every film. The tradition of German musicals that had begun in the early sound era continued during the Third Reich. The biggest hit of 1935, for example, was Amphitryon (Reinhold Schiintzel), a comedy set in large, abstract white sets representing ancient Rome, with anachronistic touches like Mercury delivering his messages on roller skates. Danish director Detlef Sierck (known after World War II in the United States as Douglas Sirk) made several films in Germany in the late 1930s, including the popular musical melodrama
12.30, left The heroine of Zu neuen Ufern at the height of her success, before her unjust conviction sends her to prison in Australia.
12.31, right Rugged Luis Trenker, star and director of Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, embodied the ideal hero in many popular adventure films of the Nazi era.
Zu neuen Ufern (“Toward New Shores,” 1937). It is the story of a famous English music-hall singer who, taking the blame for a check her lover has forged, is sent to prison in Australia (12.30). After a series of misfortunes there, she eventually finds a happy marriage.
One of the most unusual films of the Nazi era was Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (“The Kaiser of California,” 1936, Luis Trenker). It starred Trenker in the story of Johann August Sutter, who accidentally discovered gold in California and set off the gold rush of 1849 (12.31). Much of the film was shot on location in the United States, and it suggested none of the hostilities that were to lead to war between America and Germany several years later.
The prolific Veit Harlan directed a number of nonpropaganda films, such asJugend (“Youth,” 1938), made by Tobis shortly after it was taken over by the government. Jugend involves an illegitimate young woman who has been taken in by her conservative uncle, a pastor. She is in turn seduced and abandoned by her cynical cousin and drowns herself. The film’s style and even its strict morality are not much different from what one would expect in a contemporary Hollywood film (12.32).
One little-known director working during this period was Helmut Kautner, who would become more famous in the postwar era. In Auf Wiedersehen, Franziska (“Till We Meet Again, Franziska,” 1941), he employs Ophiilsian camera movement to portray romance, though with greater realism and a more subdued tone than Ophiils displayed. A traveling reporter has an affair with and later marries Franziska, a sensitive young woman. Despite their genuine love, Franziska grows withdrawn and morose as a result of his lengthy absences, which each begin with his saying, “Auf wiedersehen, Franziska,” as he departs on a train. This bittersweet psychological study is marred only by the ending, aimed at satisfying the Nazi authorities. The husband returns after Germany’s invasion of Poland and goes into the military, with Franziska, implausibly recovered from her malaise, seeing him off at the train with an op-
12.32 The large, brightly lit sets in Jugend resemble those used in big Hollywood studio productions of the same era.
Timistic “Wiedersehen, Michael.” Still, such films indicate that there is more variety to Nazi-period cinema than is sometimes believed.
The Aftermath of the Nazi Cinema
After the Allies captured Germany, they faced the problem of what to do with the people who had participated in the making of Nazi films. Goebbels was beyond punishment, having committed suicide during the fall of Berlin. Some filmmakers fled the country. Karl Ritter, director of CPU and one of the Nazi era’s most popular directors, went into exile in Argentina. Others tried to maintain a low profile. Riefenstahl returned to her home in Austria, but her notoriety ensured that she would be investigated. Her interrogators concluded that she could not be charged with any crime, but she was not permitted to work on films again until 1952, when she completed her long-planned Tiefland. Many other filmmakers were also blacklisted while their Nazi-period activities were probed.
Veit Harlan was the only filmmaker charged and tried. There was considerable evidence that Jud Suss had been used to incite SS troops to arrest Jews and had been shown to audiences to weaken opposition to sending Jews to concentration camps. Harlan, however, claimed that he and the other filmmakers involved had been forced to make the film and had not intended it as propaganda. Two trials failed to produce enough evidence to convict him.
It is virtually impossible to assess how willingly such filmmakers cooperated with the Nazi regime. Some of them undoubtedly distorted the truth to protect themselves. Riefenstahl, for example, claimed that Triumph of the Will simply documented an unstaged event and that she financed Olympia herself, though ample evidence exists to prove these claims false (see “Notes and Queries” at the end of this chapter).
World History
