Nazism made extensive use of the cinema throughout its history. Though it was a relatively new technology, the Nazi Party established a film department soon after it rose to power in Germany. Both Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, used the many Nazi films to promote the party ideology and show their influence in the burgeoning art form, which was an object of personal fascination for Hitler.
The Nazis valued film as a propaganda instrument of enormous power, courting the masses by means of slogans that were aimed directly at the instincts and emotions of the people. The Department of Film also used the economic power of German moviegoers to influence the international film market. This resulted in almost all Hollywood producers censoring films critical of Nazism during the 1930s, as well as showing news shorts produced by the Nazis in American theaters. The exception was Warner Brothers, the lone American production company without a partnership with the Nazis. The company had pulled out of Germany in 1934, after one of its Jewish employees was assaulted in Germany.
Goals of the Nazi film policy
Goebbels, who appointed himself "Patron of the German film", believed 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.
For conceiving a Nazi film theory, Goebbels suggested as formative material the Hamburg Dramaturgy and Laokoon, or the Limitations of Poetry by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and also demanded "realistic characters" pointing to Shakespeare. Goebbels emphasized Lessing's idea that "not only imagining per se, but purposeful imagining, would prove the creative mind".
A system of "award" was used to encourage self-censorship; awarded for such things as "cultural value" or "value to the people", they remitted part of the heavy taxes on films. Up to a third of the films in Nazi Germany received such awards.
The Nazis were very aware of the propagandistic effect of movies and already in 1920 the issues of the Racial Observer included film criticism. The SS-philosopher Walter Julius Bloem published the book The Soul of the Cinema – A Commitment to the Movies in 1922. A comprehensive critique of the film industry was published by the Nazi economist Hans Buchner in 1927 with the title "Spellbound by Movies. The Global Dominance of the Cinema".
The Nationalist Socialist Film Service was created in November 1928, and local parties were required to have film projectors starting in 1929. Goebbels established an organization to distribute Nazi films in 1930, but did not receive proper financial backing. Film production and distribution were instead handled by Gauleiters. In 1932, ten Landesfilmstellen (LES) were formed to distribute films created by the Nazi Film Service.
Hugenberg, who controlled UFA, joined the Harzburg Front with the Nazis in 1931. He supported Hitler during his rise to power and was appointed Reich Minister of Economics in 1933. He used his power over UFA to make it produce films aligned with the Nazis.
On 9 February 1933, Nazi members of the German Cinema Owners' Association demanded that Adolf Engl be appointed leader. The entire board resigned on 18 March, and gave Engl and the Nazis control over the organization.
The Film Credit Bank[de], formed on 1 June 1933, gave the Nazis financial control over film production as independent producers became dependent on its backing. The Reich Chamber of Film was formed on 14 July, and was later included as one of the seven organizations in the Reich Chamber of Culture. The Film Credit Bank was financing over 73% of feature films by 1936. The Reich Cinema Law, enacted on 1 March 1934, required all film scripts to be approved by a Nazi film advisor.
Film trade magazines were restricted and placed under government control. Goebbels replaced the editor of Film-Kurier with Luitpold Nusser, a leader of the film press division in the Nazi's propaganda office, on 5 April 1933. The publisher of Der Film, the oldest weekly trade magazine for film, was replaced by people aligned with the Nazis.
On 21 December 1934, the Reichsfilmkammer required all cameramen to be members of a government film organization; this policy eliminated foreign newsreels. A law was passed in 1938 which required newsreels to be played before all commercial film showings. All of the newsreel companies were merged into Die Deutsche Wochenschau on 21 November 1940.
German film exports fell as they could not reach screen quotas due to Nazi policies to reduce foreign film imports and widespread censorship inhibiting distributors who wanted to import films. The international box office accounted for 40% of German film earnings during the silent era and was at 30% in 1932, but fell to 11% for 1934–1935. On 8 June 1935, all foreign film distribution was centralized within the Propaganda Ministry. Foreign sales fell from RM 22 million in 1930 to RM 12 million in 1932 and RM 4 million in 1936. State subsidies to the film industry resulted in improved production values: average film production costs quintupled from 250,000 ℛℳ in 1933 (equivalent to €1,158,873in 2021) to 1,380,000 ℛℳ in 1942 (equivalent to €5,785,574in 2021). Ticket sales within the Reich quadrupled from 250 million in 1933 to more than a billion in 1942. Overall film attendance rose from 100 million in 1933 to 333 million in 1936, but higher production costs and losing foreign exports caused German film companies to become unprofitable. UFA had a RM 12–15 million deficit in 1936.
Max Winkler oversaw the elimination of economic roadblocks to the nationalization of the film industry. UFA and Tobis Film, who were financially struggling in 1936, now had the majority of their stock controlled by Cautio Trust Company, created by Winkler. Kautio purchased all of UFA's stock for RM 29 million on 19 March 1937, Tobis in May, Terra Film in August, and Bavaria Film was also acquired. Austria and Czechoslovakia's film industries were nationalized into Wien-Film and Prag Film[de] following their annexations by Germany. On 10 January 1942, UFA-Film GmbH (UFI) was formed as a giant holding company for the entire German film industry. UFI was a vertically integrated monopoly, covering the entire European film market under German hegemony, with foreign imports cut off.
Propaganda
Film showings and attendance for the Hitler Youth
Year
Showings
Attendance
1934–1935
300,000
1935–1936
905
425,176
1936–1937
1,725
897,839
1937–1938
3,563
1,771,236
1938–1939
4,886
2,562,489
1939–1940
8,244
3,538,224
1940–1941
12,560
4,800,000
1941–1942
15,800
5,600,000
1942–1943
>45,290
11,215,000
An extensive system of educational film hire services existed under the Weimar Republic and which was extended under the Nazi administration. In 1943, there were 37 regional services and 12,042 city services. The Hitler Youth of Cologne started Film Hour for the Young (Jugendfilmstunde), in which members were shown propaganda films, on 20 April 1934, and this expanded nationally to a weekly basis in 1936. Reich Minister of Science, Education and Culture Bernhard Rust issued an order requiring political films showed in classrooms. The National Institute for School Films was replaced by the Office of Educational Films, an organisation with 30 state offices and 1,007 district offices; by 1936 there were 70,000 schools with 16mm projectors and 227 films commissioned for use in schools.
One-sixth of the 1,097 feature films produced between 1933 and 1945 were overt propaganda films. The majority of these films were financed by the RMVP's film section. The number of political films produced declined as World War II continued as Goebbels sought to distract the populace from the war.
The Nazis produced three feature-length propaganda films about the party's rise to power in 1933. These were S.A.-Mann Brand, Hitlerjunge Quex, and Hans Westmar. Goebbels praised The Rebel as what Nazi filmmakers should aspire to. Goebbels wanted film propaganda to be done using subtle methods, but Triumph of the Will, which was the opposite of this belief, was produced against Goebbels' wishes.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they investigated the family background of Max Skladanowsky to determine if they were Polish Jews. Because Skladanowsky was of non-Jewish origins, he was elevated by the Nazis as a great German cinema innovator. On May 4 1933, an event at Berlin's Atrium cinema honoring Skladanowsky's contributions to German cinema was attended by Joseph Goebbels and in 1935 Adolf Hitler attended a private screening of a Skladanowsky film. Skladanowsky was fully supportive of the Nazis, adding "Heil Hitler!" to many of his letters and describing the Bioskop as a non-Jewish and therefore authentically German invention. Skladanowsky's support for the Nazi embrace of his work came during a time of poverty and may have been motivated by profit. The Nazis had some ambivalence about his work due to his Polish ancestry and because he had fabricated some of his chronology to exaggerate his influence and by the time of his death in 1939 the Nazis interest in his work had declined.
The foundation of the Wehrmacht in 1935 resulted in an increase of films centred around the military.
Frisians in Peril (1935) was pulled shortly before the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact due to its anti-Soviet message. Cadets (1939), an anti-Russian film, was finished in 1939, but was not released until 1941 due to Germany's favorable position towards the Soviet Union.
Death Over Shanghai, which was released four weeks before the Nazi rise to power, was re-edited into a pro-Japanese film. Another pro-Japanese film, Port Arthur, was made in 1936.
Around 500 films were exported to the United States between 1933 and 1942. The 79th Street Theater in Yorkville, Manhattan only showed films from Germany. Casino Film Exchange was one of the largest American importers of German and Austrian films in the 1930s, operated a theatre in Yorkville, and presented the films to German-Americans across the country.
French films were the most common foreign film in Spain prior to the Spanish Civil War. A cooperative agreement was signed between Spain and Germany in 1938. The Barber of Seville (1938) was the first project after this agreement. German film distribution to Spain was later used to expand into Latin America.
World War II and fall of Nazism
MGM was ordered to close all of its offices in Germany on 14 August 1940, and Paramount, the last American company with German distribution, was removed from Germany on 7 September 1941. American films were provided to Goebbels through the embassies of neutral countries.
Newsreel and film production was hampered by petrol and potassium nitrate shortages in 1944. Goebbels dissolved the departments for theatre, music, and the visual arts in the Propaganda Ministry. Cultural and advertising film production was ended as well.
The Soviet Union dismantled Ufa within its occupation zone and created the state-owned DEFA to manage a film monopoly in East Germany. East Germany held the major studios of Berlin, such as Babelsberg Studio and Johannisthal Studios, while Geiselgasteig studio in Munich became one of the film centres of West Germany. All Ufa property was liquidated in the American and British occupation zones on 7 September 1949.
The war had destroyed a large number of Germany's cinemas. Only 10 of Munich's 80 theatres and 100 of Bavaria's 500 theatres were still operating in January 1946. The number of theatres rose to 1,848 in the British zone, 1,268 in the American zone, and 450 in the French zone.
Censorship
All Quiet on the Western Front was so upsetting to Nazi officials watching the screening in Berlin in December 1930 that it was stopped mid-screening and many edits had to be made before it could be re-released. Universal scrapped all scenes that portrayed Germans in a negative light, and the Germans agreed to screen the film again only if Universal released the censored version worldwide as well.
Using the significant economic power of German moviegoers to self-censor films globally, resulting in all but one Hollywood producers censoring films critical of Nazism and even showing news shorts of film produced by the Nazis in American theaters. No American films that were made between 1933 and 1939 were critical of Nazism, including those released domestically. Warner Brothers, the lone US production company without a partnership with the Nazis, had pulled out of Germany in 1934 after one of its Jewish employees was assaulted in Germany. Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Fox Film all kept working with the German market, in part because their revenue was often frozen in German banks and not released right away. Fox and Paramount even collaborated on news reels with the Nazis that were shipped all around the world, in the hopes of getting their frozen assets back.
Warner Brothers released the first film with a plot critical of Nazis, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, in May 1939; the film also fueled unfounded fears of Jewish refugees acting as Nazi spies and contributed to the further restriction of Jewish refugees from Europe. Hollywood's presence started to come under increasing scrutiny after Kristallnacht in 1938, and a wholesale retreat from the country took place in mid-1940, in part because of declining sales in Germany.
These new incentives put in place by the Nazis led to Universal scrapping a project about the sinking of the Lusitania and delaying its sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front to 1936. When production started on The Road Back, all the actors received a letter from Goebbels' emissary in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, that none of them would be able to work on projects shown in Germany. Despite the uproar that ensued, the production was completed after 21 preemptive cuts were made, including a sanitized ending that made the world, not Germany, seem culpable for militarism. However, Universal was still blacklisted in Germany. The Nazis insisted on edits to the Warner Brothers film Captured! that showed poor treatment of prisoners at the hands of Germans, and further punished the studio even after they acquiesced by blocking subsequent releases that were expected to perform well in Germany. MGM's cancellation of the anti-Nazi movie Are We Civilized? led to a dozen of their films being approved a week later. The Mad Dog of Europe, one of the first attempts to dramatize Hitler, was dissuaded from going further by the MPAA in 1933, who worried that all American films would be banned in Germany in retaliation.
Goebbels also kept lists of which actors and crew were Jewish or anti-Nazi and refused to import films on which they worked. Georg Gyssling kept an eye on Hollywood scripts and activities, including writing letters to Will H. Hays' office when he found something that he or his bosses did not approve of.
On 13 May 1936, Goebbels banned critics having writing negative reviews published on the same day as the exhibition. He later banned all negative and positive reviews on November 27; all future reviews would simply be descriptive. Critics were required to obtain a license from the Reich Chamber of Culture.
Jews
Jews were banned from the film industry in 1933 under the Aryan paragraph. Hans Hinkel was tasked by Goebbels with removing all Jewish influence from the film industry. Weimar-era films which had Jewish people involved in the production were renamed and had those people removed from the credits. Warner Bros. closed its German affiliate rather than follow Nazi policies on Jews and Universal Pictures' German affiliate, Deutsche Universal, was moved to Vienna and then to Budapest.
Censorship of films starring Jewish people was limited in the initial years of the Nazi government. The Rise of Catherine the Great starring Jewish actress Elisabeth Bergner was released in Germany in 1934. Goebbels declined to take action against the film as the international press was too aware of the film and demonstrations against it were suppressed by Hitler and Ernst Röhm. The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933) starring Jewish boxer Max Baer was not restricted in order to avoid an international incident with the United States; Goebbels wrote an editorial in Der Angriff asking readers to accept the film. The subtitled version was released in Germany, but the dubbed version was denied a screening license. MGM filed an appeal against the restriction, but this resulted in both versions being banned. Multiple Americans films such as The Kid (1921), The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929), My Weakness (1933), Roman Scandals (1933), Tarzan and His Mate (1934), Manhattan Melodrama (1934), Stand Up and Cheer! (1934), Baby Take a Bow (1934), Nana (1934), and Men in White (1934) were banned. All German films made before 1933 featuring Jewish actors were banned on 8 June 1935.
There always had been film stars in Germany, but a star system comparable to the star system in Hollywood did not yet exist. Nazi leaders denounced the star system as a Jewish invention. However, in order to improve the image of Nazi Germany, Goebbels made great efforts to form a star system. After Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo had gone to Hollywood and could not be persuaded to serve the National Socialist film industry as figureheads, new film stars were promoted.
The best-known example is the Swedish actress Zarah Leander who was hired in 1937 by Ufa and became the most prominent and highest-paid German film star in only a few years. The publicity campaign for Leander was run by the press office of the Ufa, which concealed her past as a film actress already well known in Sweden and put their money right away on her charisma as a singer with an exceptionally deep voice. The Ufa press office provided the newspapers with detailed instructions on how the new star would have to be presented, and even the actress herself had to follow detailed instructions whenever she appeared in public. This kind of star publicity had not existed in Germany before.
Prominent politicians such as Hitler, Goebbels, and Hermann Göring appeared in public flanked by popular German film actors. The female stars in particular were expected to lend some glamour to the dry and male-dominated NSDAP events. Hitler's preferred dinner partners were the actresses Olga Chekhova and Lil Dagover, and from 1935, Hermann Göring was married to the popular actress Emmy Sonnemann. The relationships of Goebbels to several female film stars are also notorious. Magda Goebbels left a screening of the film Die Reise nach Tilsit, because it seemed to her too close a telling of her husband's relationship with Lída Baarová, which had resulted in the actress being sent back to her native Czechoslovakia.
Personal proximity to the political leaders became a determining factor for the career success of film actors. An informal system of listings decided how frequently an actor would be cast. The five categories extended from "to cast at all costs even without a vacancy" (for instance Zarah Leander, Lil Dagover, Heinz Rühmann) to "casting under no circumstances welcome".
How crucial the film stars were for the image of the National Socialist government is also evident from the tax benefits that Hitler decreed in 1938 for prominent film actors and directors. From that time on, they could deduct 40% of their income as professional expenses.
The Nazi film theorist Fritz Hippler wrote in his 1942 book Contemplations on Film-Making: "Enough has been written as to whether 'celebritism' is beneficial or harmful—but one way or the other, it cannot be denied that throughout the world a main motive of people going to the movies is to see the faces they know and love" and Hippler suggested that the stars to be chosen for Nazi cinema should have "European standard" and at the same time appeal to the "Germans' ideal of beauty", so that Germans could identify with them. Non-German actors in the Nazi cinema included Zarah Leander, Marika Rökk, Lída Baarová, Pola Negri, Adina Mandlová, Johannes Heesters, Iván Petrovich, Laura Solari, Angelo Ferrari, Germana Paolieri (Italian), Nikolay Fyodorovich Kolin, Boris Alekin (Russian), Igo Sym (Polish), Rosita Serrano (Chilean). The Russian Victor Tourjansky and the Hungarian Géza von Bolváry were popular non-German directors.
During World War II, German film stars supported the war effort by performing for the troops or by collecting money for the German Winter Relief Organization (Winterhilfswerk). Although most of the male stars were exempted from military service, some—such as the popular Heinz Rühmann—participated in the war as soldiers, often accompanied by newsreel film crews.
The Bureau for the Promotion of Art worked with sub-divisions of the RMVP to investigate the racial origins of actors. Hans Albers's popularity was able to maintain his acting career despite his relationship with Hansi Burg, a Jewish woman.
Officially honored films considered by the Nazis to be "artistically valuable" (German: künstlerisch wertvoll) by the state (* = predicate "special political value" – introduced in 1934, + = predicate "special traditional value" (German: volkstümlich wertvoll), ** = predicate "film of the nation" introduced in 1941):
↑Klaus Kreimeier: Die Ufa-Story. Geschichte eines Filmkonzerns. S. Fischer Verlag, 2002. ISBN3596155754, pp. 309–310, Original, Goebbels: "Scham- und Geschmacklosigkeiten".
↑Cinzia Romani, Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich p. 13; ISBN0962761311
↑Michaela Rethmeier: Die Funktion und Bedeutung Fritz Hipplers für das Filmschaffen im „Dritten Reich“, p. 194 (dissertation, University of Münster, 2006)
↑Same source, p. 224. Original in German: "nicht das bloße Erdichten, sondern das zweckmäßige Erdichten einen schöpferischen Geist beweise."
12Cinzia Romani, Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich p. 9; ISBN0962761311
↑Michaela Rethmeier: Die Funktion und Bedeutung Fritz Hipplers für das Filmschaffen im „Dritten Reich“, p. 25 (dissertation, University of Münster, 2006)
↑Original title: Seele des Lichtspiels – ein Bekenntnis zum Film, by Dr Walter Julius Bloem (1898–1945), Verlag Grethlein, Leipzig, 1922.
↑Original title: "Im Banne des Films. Die Weltherrschaft des Kinos", by Dr. Hans Buchner (1896–1971), Boepple publishing house, Munich, 1927.
↑Cinzia Romani, Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich p. 2 ISBN0962761311
↑Cinzia Romani, Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich pp. 2–3 ISBN0962761311
↑Cinzia Romani, Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich p. 86 ISBN0962761311
↑Fritz Hippler: Betrachtungen zum Filmschaffen, 1942, pp. 23–24, 29. Original in German, Hippler: "über Wesen und Unwesen des Startums ist genug gesagt und geschrieben worden, aber Startum hin Startum her: es ist nicht zu leugnen, daß die Menschen der ganzen Welt ein Hauptmotiv ihres Filmbesuches in dem Wunsch sehen, ihnen bekannten und beliebten Gesichtern wiederzubegegnen"; "europäisches Format"; "deutschen Schönheitsideal".
(in German) Spiker, Jürgen (1975). Film und Kapital. Der Weg der deutschen Filmwirtschaft zum nationalsozialistischen Einheitskonzern. Berlin: Volker Spiess. ISBN3920889045
Kelson, John (1996). Catalogue of Forbidden German Feature and Short Film Productions held in Zonal Film Archives of Film Section, Information Services Division, Control Commission for Germany, (BE) (2ed.). Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN0948911190.
Merziger, Patrick (2014). "Americanised, Europeanised or nationalised? The film industry in Europe under the influence of Hollywood, 1927–1968". In Nathaus, Klaus (ed.). Made in Europe: The Production of Popular Culture in the Twentieth Century. Abingdon: Routledge. ISBN978-1138794443.
