Wochenschau

Die Deutsche Wochenschau (English: The German Weekly Review) was the title of the unified newsreel series released in the cinemas of Nazi Germany from 1940 until the end of World War II. The coordinated newsreel production was set up as a vital instrument for the mass distribution of Nazi propaganda at war. Today the preserved Wochenschau short films make up a significant part of the audiovisual records of the Nazi era.

Newsreels had been regularly released since the early days of German cinema, especially during World War I, when companies like Messter Film started producing short silent film documentaries. With the final changeover to sound films in the early 1930s, the newsreel market concentrated on four dominating production companies: Universum Film AG (Ufa-Tonwoche and Deulig-Tonwoche), 20th Century Fox (Fox Tönende Wochenschau), Bavaria Film (Emelka-Tonwoche), and Tobis (Tobis-Wochenschau). After the Nazi Machtergreifung in 1933, the production was supervised and censored by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, who had realized the enormous significance of newsreels for his propaganda purposes.

Upon the German Invasion of Poland in September 1939, marking the outbreak of the Second World War, the Nazi authorities consolidated the four separate newsreel production efforts into one, led by the Universum Film AG in Berlin. These newsreels were merged into a single wartime newsreel, but kept their respective opening titles until June 1940. After that, the merger was made public by use of a single new opening title: Die Deutsche Wochenschau. This was the sole series of German newsreels until production discontinued in March 1945, when most cinemas in Germany were closed and transport links had collapsed.

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