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.

Background

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).