Films in Nazi Germany

   
Nazi control of films increased to an even greater degree in 1934 and 1935. On April 25 1935 Goebbels anxious to win prestige for the Nazi state, was host to an International Film Congress in Berlin, some 2.000 delegates representing forty nations attended. The same year marked the appearance of the film Triumph of the Will an impressive documentary on the Nazi party rally in Nuremberg on September 4-10 1934.

By 1937 the German film industry was virtually nationalised. In 1938 another striking documentry Olympia, concerning the Olympic Games held in Germany in 1936. In 1939 came a series of anti-Semetic films including The Rothschilds Shares in Waterloo in 1940 and Jew Suss in the same year.

During the early years of WW2 Nazi films were filled with scenes of triumph, glorification of the fighting man and denunciation of the enemy. By 1943 the tone changed to a plea for sustained morale. In the latter part of the war when heavy Allied bombing crippled the film industry in Berlin, production was moved to Amsterdam, Budapest and Rome.

During the life of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945 The German film industry produced 1.363 feature films, most were designed for escapism, only a few were produced for propaganda reasons, they were carefully chosen. Before the outbreak of WW2 German audiences prefered American films, even poor ones, to the Nazi output.