Nazism and cinema

Nazism created an elaborate system of propaganda, which made use of the new technologies of the 20th century, including cinema. Nazism courted the masses by the means of slogans that were aimed directly at the instincts and emotions of the people. The Nazis valued film as a propaganda instrument of enormous power. The interest that Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels took in film was not only the result of a personal fascination. The use of film for propaganda had been planned by the National Socialist German Workers Party as early as 1930, when the party first established a film department.

The Nazis were early aware of the propagandistic effect of movies and already in 1920 the issues of the Racial Observer included film criticism. In 1923 Philipp Nickel produced a documentary of the “German Day in Nuremberg”. Hitler had written about the psychological effect of images in Mein Kampf:

Further short Nazi films about party rallies were made in 1927 and 1929. The first NSDAP film office was established in 1931 and started producing "documentaries" in a larger scale, e.g. in 1932 „Hitlers Kampf um Deutschland“ (Hitler's fight for Germany), „Blutendes Deutschland“ (Germany is bleeding), "Das junge Deutschland marschiert“ (The German Youth is on the March).

The Nazi propagandist Hans Traub, who had earned his Phd in 1925 with a dissertation on the press and the German revolutions of 1848–49, wrote in the essay "The film as a political instrument" in 1932:

Goebbels, who appointed himself "Patron of the German film", assumed, accurately, that a national cinema which was entertaining and put glamour on the government would be a more effective propaganda instrument than a national cinema in which the NSDAP and their policy would have been ubiquitous. Goebbels emphasized the will to end the "shamelessness and tastelessness" that he thought could be found in the former movie industry. The main goal of the Nazi film policy was to promote escapism, which was designed to distract the population and to keep everybody in good spirits; Goebbels indeed blamed defeat in World War I on the failure to sustain the morale of the people. The open propaganda was reserved for films like Der Sieg des Glaubens and Triumph des Willens, records of the Nuremberg rallies, and newsreels. There are some examples of German feature films from the Third Reich that deal with the NSDAP or with party organizations such as the Sturmabteilung, Hitler Youth or the National Labour Service, one notable example being Hitlerjunge Quex about the Hitler Youth. Another example is the anti-semitic feature film Jew Suss. The propaganda films that refer directly to Nazi politics amounted to less than a sixth of the whole national film production, which mainly consisted of light entertainment films, although it is those propaganda films that are much more well known today, such as Triumph of the Will.

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