Germany and the Nazi Cinema
In Germany, the shift to sound was more sinister, with the indigenous film industries rapidly pressed into service of the Nazi regime. Joseph Goebbels created the Reichsfilmkammer (Reich Film Chamber) in 1933 and thus made himself the sole authority on what could and could not be shown on the screen. The following year saw the passage of the infamous Reichlicht-spielgesetz (Reich Cinema Law), which made it illegal for Jews to work in the German cinema. Many talented film artists left the country almost immediately, most conspicuously Fritz Lang, but also directors Billy Wilder, Frank Wisbar (a k a Franz Wysbar), Douglas Sirk, and Robert Siodmak; actors Peter Lorre, Oskar Homolka, Anton Walbrook, and Albert Bassermann; composer Franz Waxman; and cinematographers Franz Planer and Eugen Schüfftan, as well as other gifted writers, directors, actors, and technicians.
Goebbels imported many Hollywood “B” films to meet immediate audience demand, but he also rapidly set about creating
Tracked down by film historians in the 1980s, Hippler, who died in 2002, dismissively referred to The Eternal Jew as “the film that bears my name,” as if the entire project had come to fruition without his help. In fact, Hippler was an aggressive Nazi supporter, and the film, one of the most vile documents ever created, helped to pave the way for the Holocaust, suggesting that the cure for “the Jewish problem” was their “elimination.”
Reinhold Schünzel’s musical comedy Amphitryon (Amphitryon-Happiness from the Clouds, 1935) was one example of Goebbels’s predilection for lighter, less demanding fare; as the war progressed, and the Nazis developed an early monopack color film process, Goebbels indulged in his taste for spectacle with Josef von Báky’s color fantasy film Münchhausen (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, 1943), which was designed as a prestige production to mark Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft’s twenty-fifth anniversary as a production entity. Other “A” level Nazi films included Eduard von Bor-sody’s Wunschkonzert (Request Concert, 1940) and Rolf Hansen’s Die Große Liebe (The Great Love, 1942), which depicted home-front sacrifice in aid of the German war effort, while Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s Ich klage an (I Accuse, 1941) presented a husband’s murder of his wife as a noble act because of her lingering illness, essentially endorsing euthanasia as a national policy. Actor and director Kurt Gerron’s Theresienstadt (The Führer Gives a City to the Jews, 1944) is particularly loathsome, because it falsely shows Jewish captives of the Nazi regime living in relative safety and comfort, when in fact the “city” cited in the film’s title was built specifically for the film and destroyed the moment filming was completed.
The town’s inhabitants were then sent to their deaths in concentration camps, along with Gerron himself, who was Jewish, and who had been forced to write and direct Theresienstadt as his last act on earth. Hitler appears in the film, smiling broadly as he tours the mock city. The film was created under Goebbels’s orders to counter reports of concentration camp atrocities that were then beginning to leak to the public.
Goebbels’s dreams of grandeur inevitably led him to the production of Veit Harlan’s epic historical war drama Kolberg (1945), designed to be the Gone with the Wind of the Nazi cinema; Goebbels himself was one of the screenwriters. Even as the perimeters of Germany were falling under the allied assault, Goebbels spent more than eight million marks on the color production and actually diverted troops from the battlefield to serve as extras in the film, which depicted German citizens in hopeless hand-to-hand combat against a ruthless enemy aggressor. After Kolberg was completed in the last days of the war, the finished film was first shown to German troops in occupied France and then screened in Hitler’s private bunker in Berlin, even as Russian and American forces were only miles away.
Goebbels’s mad dream of cinematic power thus collapsed as did the regime that supported them; in one of his last speeches to his staff, Goebbels suggested that one day “a fine color film” would be made of the last days of the Reich, and that every man and woman should conduct themselves accordingly so that posterity could correctly report their allegiance to the Führer. In the end, as the final hours came and Hitler and his bride, Eva Braun, committed suicide, Goebbels poisoned his children and then killed himself and his wife, Magda, unable to imagine living in a world without Hitler. Thus, one of the most bizarre and death-obsessed cinematic regimes in history collapsed upon itself in an avalanche of lies, fantasies, and dreams of power. These films, both aesthetically mediocre and morally reprehensible, are almost never revived today.
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