Karl Ritter (director)

Karl Ritter (7 November 1888 – 7 April 1977) was a German film producer and director responsible for many Nazi propaganda films. He had previously been one of the first German military pilots. He spent most of his later life in Argentina.

Ritter was born in Würzburg. His father was a professor at the conservatoire; his mother was an opera singer. He was a career officer in the German military, built his own aeroplane and earned a pilot's licence in 1911 {#121}, and in World War I became one of the country's first military pilots. A Lt in the 1st Bavarian Pioneer Battalion After the war he studied architecture, worked as a graphic artist and then entered the film industry in 1926 as a public relations manager at Südfilm, where he edited a book of Disney cartoons. In 1932, he directed a short film featuring Karl Valentin, a comedian.

Ritter was a committed National Socialist. His wife's father was distantly related to Richard Wagner; he came into contact with Hitler through this connection and joined the party in the mid-1920s. After the Nazis came to power, he moved from head of production at Reichsliga-Film in Munich to become a company director and chief of production at Universum Film AG (UFA). He was the producer of Hitlerjunge Quex, among other important Nazi propaganda films. His directorial work for the régime includes entertainment films imitating Hollywood productions, such as Hochszeitsreise (1939) and Bal paré (1940), but he is best known for his propaganda films: anti-Communist films such as GPU (1942) and above all his military films: peacetime films with a World War I context—the 1937–38 trilogy of Patrioten, Unternehmen Michael and Urlaub auf Ehrenwort and Pour le Mérite (1938)—and Zeitfilme (contemporary films) made after the start of World War II such as Stukas (1942). The latter type he largely invented, as a Nazi counter to the Russian revolutionary film, and can be seen as beginning with Verräter (1936), which for the first time brought the German spy film home to Germany.

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