The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Goebbels was quite open about the fact that this popular legitimation of the Third Reich was manipulated by the regime. It was the Propaganda Ministry’s job to co-ordinate and run the entire public presentation of the regime and its policies. ‘All that goes on behind the backcloth’, he said, ‘belongs to stage management.’5 This included ceremonies and rituals such as the torchlit parades held to mark the appointment of Hitler as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933, the formal state opening of the Reichstag at Potsdam on 21 March 1933, the annual Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg every autumn, the ‘Day of National Labour’ on 1 May, and much more besides. New holidays and festivals were added to the traditional calendar, including Hitler’s birthday on 20 April and the commemoration of the 1923 putsch on 9 November. All over Germany, street names were altered to remove suddenly unwanted, or inconvenient, reminders of the democratic past and to celebrate Hitler, or other leading Nazis, or sacrificial heroes of the movement such as Horst Wessel, after whom the working-class district of Friedrichshain in Berlin was now called. A street was also renamed in Hamburg after the seventeen-year-old Otto Blöcker, a member of the Hitler Youth shot in an armed Communist raid on a local branch headquarters of the Nazi Party on 26 February 1933.6 There were many similar examples.

  But it was Hitler who was celebrated above all else. The cult of Hitler had already reached major proportions within the Party by the early 1930s, but now it was propagated in the nation with the full resources of the state and projected not just in words and images, but also in countless small, symbolic ways.7 From March 1933 onwards, towns rushed to appoint Hitler an honorary citizen. In almost every town across Germany the main square was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz by the end of 1933. Already on 20 April 1933 the Leader’s forty-fourth birthday saw flags and banners in every German town, garlands hung outside houses in villages all over the land, shop windows carrying special displays to mark the occasion and even public transport decorated with celebratory bunting. Parades and torchlit processions brought the celebrations into the streets, while the churches held special services to wish the Leader well. Goebbels’s propaganda machine pumped out rhetoric comparing Hitler to Bismarck, while the Bavarian Minister of Education, Hans Schemm, went still further, describing him as ‘the artist and master-builder whom the Lord God has given to us’, creating ‘a new face of Germany’ that gave the people its ‘final shape’ after ‘the events of two thousand years’: ‘In the personality of Hitler, a millionfold longing of the German people has become reality.’8 Posters and magazine illustrations, newsreels and films proclaimed Hitler as the man from the trenches, with the common touch, not only a many-sided genius with a sense of destiny, but also a humble, even simple human being who had few needs, spurned wealth and display, was kind to children and animals and dealt compassionately with old comrades fallen on hard times. Soldier, artist, worker, ruler, statesman, he was portrayed as a man with whom all sectors of German society could identify. Many ordinary Germans were overwhelmed by the scale and intensity of this propaganda. The emotion that overcame Luise Solmitz when she stood on the street awaiting Hitler’s arrival in her home town of Hamburg was typical: ‘I shall never forget the moment when he drove past us in his brown uniform, performing the Hitler salute in his own personal way . . . the enthusiasm [of the crowd] blazed up to the heavens . . .’ She went home, trying to digest the ‘great moments I had just lived through’.9

  The embedding of the Hitler cult in everyday life was nowhere more obvious than in the introduction of the German greeting - ‘Hail, Hitler! (Heil Hitler)’ - to be used on all official correspondence by state employees from 13 July 1933. It was reinforced by the Hitler salute, the upstretched right arm, sometimes accompanied by the barking-out of the same German greeting, which was also compulsory, this time for all citizens, when the national anthem or the Horst Wessel Song were being sung. ‘Anyone not wishing to come under suspicion of behaving in a consciously negative fashion will therefore render the Hitler greeting’, the decree proclaimed.10 Such rituals not only cemented the formal solidarity of the regime’s supporters but also isolated those who stood apart from the regime. And they gave a further boost to Hitler’s standing.11 After the death of Hindenburg and the subsequent plebiscite on the headship of state on 19 August 1934, accompanied by the slogan ‘Hitler for Germany - the whole of Germany for Hitler’, the Leader-cult knew no more limits. Goebbels’s rapid propaganda spin on the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ only won the Leader more backing, as the man who had supposedly saved Germany from disorder yet again, crushed excessive ambition amongst the Party ‘big-shots’ and restored decency and morality to the Nazi movement.12 From now on, whatever popular criticism there was of the regime was likely to be directed against Hitler’s satraps; the Leader himself was largely immune.13

  The Hitler cult achieved its grandest stage-management yet at the Party Rally held in Nuremberg in 1934, the second to be held under the new regime. Five hundred trains carried a quarter of a million people to a specially built railway station. A vast city of tents was constructed to house the participants, and gargantuan quantities of supplies were brought in to feed and water them. At the Rally itself, an elaborate series of rituals commenced. Extending over a whole week, it celebrated the unity of the movement after the alarums and excursions of the preceding summer. Outside the city, on the huge Zeppelin Field, the serried ranks of hundreds of thousands of uniformed brownshirts, SS men and Nazi Party activists took part in ritual exchanges with their Leader. ‘Hail, my men,’ he would shout, and a hundred thousand voices would answer back in unison: ‘Hail, my Leader.’ Speeches, choruses and march-pasts gave way after dusk to torchlit parades and dramatically choreographed ceremonies, with over a hundred searchlights beaming up into the sky, enclosing participants and spectators in what the British ambassador described as a ‘cathedral of ice’. Spotlights in the arena picked out thirty thousand red, black and white swastika standards as their bearers moved through the brownshirted ranks. At the most hushed moment of the ritual, the ‘blood-banner’, the flag carried in the beer-hall putsch of 1923, was ceremonially rededicated and touched on the new flags to pass on to them its nimbus of violent struggle and bloody sacrifice for the cause.14

  The American correspondent William L. Shirer, attending his first Nazi Party Rally, was suitably impressed. ‘I’m beginning to comprehend, I think, some of the reasons for Hitler’s astonishing success,’ he confided to his diary on 5 September 1934:

  Borrowing a chapter from the Roman church, he is restoring pageantry and colour and mysticism to the drab lives of twentieth-century Germans. This morning’s opening meeting in the Luitpold Hall on the outskirts of Nuremberg was more than a gorgeous show; it also had something of the mysticism and religious fervour of an Easter or Christmas Mass in a great Gothic cathedral.

  As Hitler entered, followed by his entourage, walking slowly down the centre aisle, ‘thirty thousand hands were raised in salute’. Standing on the podium beneath the ‘blood-flag’, Hess read out the names of those killed in the 1923 putsch, and silent tribute was paid. ‘In such an atmosphere’, wrote Shirer, ‘no wonder, then, that every word dropped by Hitler seemed like an inspired Word from on high.’ Shirer saw for himself the emotion that Hitler’s presence could inspire amongst his supporters, as the Leader rode into Nuremberg from the nearby airfield on the eve of the Rally in an open-topped car, greeting with raised hand the shouting crowds lining the old city’s streets. Shirer went on:

  I got caught in a mob of ten thousand hysterics who jammed the moat in front of Hitler’s hotel, shouting: ‘We want our Leader.’ I was a little shocked at the faces, especially those of the women, when Hitler finally appeared on the balcony for a moment. They reminded me of the crazed expressions I saw once in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some Holy Rollers who were about to hit the trail. They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman. If he had remained in sight for more than a few moments,
I think many of the women would have swooned from excitement.15

  One ‘great pageant’ followed another, wrote Shirer, culminating in a mock battle fought by army units on the Zeppelin Field. The whole event closed with a seemingly endless march-past of military and paramilitary units through the streets, giving Shirer a strong impression of the ‘sheer disciplined strength’ of the Germans under the Nazi regime. To convey a choreographed image of new-found spiritual unity through a series of gargantuan displays of huge masses of men moving and marching in unison, arranged four-square in rank and file, or standing patiently in huge geometrical blocks on the field, was the primary purpose of the Rally; and it was Hitler and Goebbels’s intention to convey it not just to Germany, but to the world.16

  It was in pursuit of this aim that Hitler had indeed arranged for the entire 1934 Rally to be filmed, commissioning a young actress and film director, Leni Riefenstahl, to do the job, and issuing orders that she should be provided with all the resources she needed to carry it out. With thirty cameras at her disposal, operated by sixteen cameramen, each with an assistant, and four sound-equipment trucks, Riefenstahl made a documentary like none before it. A crew of 120 deployed new techniques such as telephoto lenses and wide-angle photography to achieve an effect that many found mesmerizing when the film was released in 1935 under the title - chosen by Hitler himself - of Triumph of the Will. The ‘will’ in question was, as Riefenstahl later explained, not only that of the German people but also and above all that of Hitler, whom her cameras almost invariably portrayed alone, descending through the clouds into Nuremberg in his aeroplane; standing in his open car as it drove through the city to the cheers of the crowds lining the streets; stopping to accept a bouquet from a small girl; speaking to his followers against a backdrop of empty sky; ritually touching the new Party banners with the ‘blood-flag’; and finally, in the Luitpold Hall, working himself up into a frenzy in a speech that had the crowd shouting repeated unison cries of ‘Hail, Victory’ like the worshippers in a revivalist chapel, and Rudolf Hess, his face glowing with fanatical devotion, shouting: ‘The Party is Hitler! But Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler! Hitler! Hail, Victory! (Sieg, heil!)’17

  Triumph of the Will was striking for its monumentalism and its presentation of vast, disciplined masses moving in perfect co-ordination as if they were one body, not thousands. The light relief it presented through interludes of young brownshirts indulging in rough masculine horseplay elided into the glorification of the male body, as much a product of Riefenstahl’s own predilections as it was an expression of Nazi ideology, as they stripped off their clothes to jump into a nearby lake. All of this concealed a less glorious reality of drunkenness, brawling, mayhem and murder that went on behind the scenes.18 But Riefenstahl’s film altered reality in more subtle ways than this, not only depicting the events of the Rally in a different order from the one in which they took place, but also, backed by Hitler’s licence to interfere in proceedings as she wished, rehearsing and staging some of them deliberately for cinematic effect. Some scenes, indeed, only made sense when seen from the camera’s eye. One of the film’s most breathtaking moments, as Hitler paced slowly up the broad, blank aisle between the still, silent ranks of more than 100,000 uniformed paramilitaries, with Himmler and the new brownshirt leader Lutze following, to lay a wreath in memory of the movement’s dead, cannot have made a visible impact on more than a handful of those taking part. In the final stages of the film, the screen was filled with columns of marching stormtroopers and black-shirted, steel-helmeted SS men, leaving audiences no room for doubt not just about the disciplined co-ordination of the German masses, but also, more ominously, about the primacy of military models in their organization. Presented as a documentary, it was a propaganda film designed to convince Germany and the world of the power, strength and determination of the German people under Hitler’s leadership.19 This was the only film made in the Third Reich about Hitler; it said all that needed to be said, and did not need to be followed by another. It was released in March 1935 to widespread acclaim, not only at home but also abroad. It won the National Film Prize, presented to Riefenstahl by Joseph Goebbels, who described it as ‘a magnificent cinematic vision of the Führer’, and was also awarded the Gold Medal at the Venice Film festival in 1935 and the Grand Prize at the Paris Film Festival in 1937. It continued to be shown in cinemas, and, though banned in Germany after the war, remains one of the great classics of documentary propaganda of the twentieth century. 20

  Ironically, Triumph of the Will had originally been commissioned and shot in the teeth of fierce opposition from the Reich Propaganda Minister following the failure of a first attempt by Riefenstahl the year before, filmed under the title Triumph of Faith. Riefenstahl was not a Nazi Party member, indeed she never became one, and Goebbels resented the fact that she had been directly commissioned by Hitler, bypassing what he regarded as the proper channels for works of propaganda.21 Moreover, Triumph of the Will went against every precept that Goebbels had ordered the film industry to observe. Addressing representatives of the film industry on 28 March 1933, Goebbels condemned crude propaganda films that were ‘out of touch with the spirit of the times’: ‘The new movement does not exhaust itself with parade-ground marching and blowing trumpets,’ he said. Praising the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, he declared that ‘it is not only a film’s convictions that make it good, but also the abilities of the people making it’. Films had to conform to the new spirit of the age, he said, but they also had to cater to popular taste.22 Propaganda, Goebbels said, was most effective when it was indirect:

  That is the secret of propaganda: to permeate the person it aims to grasp, without his even noticing that he is being permeated. Of course propaganda has a purpose, but the purpose must be concealed with such cleverness and virtuosity that the person on whom this purpose is to be carried out doesn’t notice it at all .23

  In pursuit of this policy, Goebbels sanctioned, perhaps even wrote, a scathing review of an early Nazi film set in the early 1930s, SA-Man Brand, with its crude, fictional and obviously propagandistic depiction of a sixteen-year-old working-class schoolboy who defied his Social Democrat father to join the brownshirts, is victimized at work with the collusion of the Jewish-dominated trade union and is eventually shot dead by Communists, a martyr for the Nazi cause. Goebbels considered the film unlikely to win over any new adherents to the Nazi cause: it was addressed to the already converted. In October he sharply criticized another film glorifying the life and death of the brownshirt Horst Wessel, shot dead by a Communist in 1930. The film told a similar story to SA-Man Brand, but with a far stronger antisemitic content. It portrayed the Communists who eventually killed the hero as dupes of Jewish criminals and intellectuals. Goebbels declared that the film was not equal to Wessel’s memory. ‘We National Socialists’, he said, ‘see no value in our SA marching on the stage or screen; their place is on the streets. Such an ostensible show of National Socialist ideology is no substitute for real art.’24

  On the morning of the Horst Wessel film’s première, which was to have been attended by a wide variety of prominent figures in Berlin society, including the Hohenzollern Crown Prince, eldest son of the last Kaiser and a noted supporter of the Nazis, Goebbels issued a formal prohibition on its screening. His high-handed action aroused a furious reaction from the film’s backers. These included Putzi Hanfstaengl, one of Hitler’s old friends, who had composed the music for the film and had personally raised a good deal of the money needed to finance it. Complaining in person to Hitler and Goebbels, Hanfstaengl eventually managed to get enough support in the Party hierarchy to have the ban reversed, though only under the condition that the film’s title was changed to Hans Westmar: One of Many. In this guise, the film won widespread approbation in the press and public, who rose to their feet in many cinemas as the Horst Wessel Song rang out in the final scene.25 But Goebbels had made his point. The row convinced Hitler that the Propaganda Min
ister should have more effective control over the film industry in future. And he used it to ensure that straightforward propaganda films of this kind, which might have been popular amongst committed ‘Old Fighters’, but were no longer appropriate to the period when the Nazi Party had consolidated its rule, were not made again.26

  II

  The 1930s were a golden age of cinema worldwide, with the advent of sound and in some films colour too. Audiences in Germany increased, with the average number of visits per person per year almost doubling from four to nearly eight between 1932-3 and 1937-8, and tickets sold increasing over the same period from 240 million to almost 400 million a year.27 Many leading film stars and directors had emigrated from Germany in the early-to-mid-1930s, some, like Marlene Dietrich, following the lure of Hollywood, others, like Fritz Lang, leaving for political reasons. But the majority remained. One of the most famous was Emil Jannings, who in his Hollywood days in the late 1920s had won the first ever Oscar for his performance in The Last Command. Back in Germany, Jannings soon found himself starring in overtly political films such as The Ruler (Der Herrscher), a celebration of strong leadership based loosely on a well-known play by Gerhart Hauptmann and set in a monied middle-class family of industrialists modelled on the Krupps. The script-writer, Thea von Harbou, who had worked on silent films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Dr Mabuse, now made a new career for herself in the talkies during the 1930s. New stars such as the Swedish-born Zarah Leander achieved huge popularity among the cinema-going public, while others, like the German actor Theodor Loos, seemed to be an almost permanent presence on screen. A fresh generation of directors, among whom Veit Harlan was perhaps the most prominent, emerged to put across the Nazi message on film.28 Not all those who played a part in the film industry of the Third Reich escaped hostile scrutiny, however. In 1935 and 1936 the Party encouraged cinemagoers to send in inquiries about the racial and political affiliations of leading screen actors. There were repeated inquiries about one of Germany’s best-loved stars, Hans Albers, who was rumoured to have a Jewish wife. The rumour was true: his wife Hansi Burg was indeed Jewish; but Albers made sure she stayed in Switzerland for the duration of the Third Reich, out of harm’s way. Goebbels, who knew this, felt unable to take any action, given Albers’s extraordinary popularity, and the Propaganda Ministry’s officials steadfastly denied Hansi Burg’s existence.29