The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Actors such as Albers and Jannings played their part in boosting the extraordinary popularity of German cinema in the 1930s. Yet such successes were balanced out by the rapidly growing isolation of the German film industry. Foreign sales of German films plummeted. This was due partly to their increasing political content and declining quality, but above all to the hostility of foreign distributors, particularly if they were Jewish or had political objections to the controls which were now imposed on their colleagues in Germany. More serious still from the industry’s point of view was the virtual cessation of imports of foreign films into Germany. The problems that faced foreign films can be illustrated through the unlikely figure of Mickey Mouse, who achieved enormous popularity in Germany in the early 1930s, spawning a huge range of merchandizing from model figures to comic books. One Pomeranian Nazi newspaper declared stridently in 1931: ‘Micky Maus is the shabbiest, miserablest ideal ever invented.’ But this was very much the exception. So popular was Mickey with the German cinema-going public that Nazi film censors were more or less forced to pass all of Disney’s Silly Symphonies for exhibition. Disney’s cartoon of The Three Little Pigs had a particular appeal to the censors, since it contained a scene, later excised by Disney, in which the big bad wolf appeared at the door of one of the pigs’ houses disguised as a travelling brush salesman, with a cartoon-caricature false nose that the Nazis had no difficulty in interpreting as Jewish. The Mad Doctor, in which a crazed scientist tried to cross-breed the dog Pluto with a chicken, was a solitary exception, possibly banned because it could be taken as a satire on Nazi eugenic ideas, more likely because it was thought to be too frightening for children.30

  Yet Disney’s cartoons, enormously popular though they were in Germany, soon ran into difficulties all the same. The basic reason was financial. Roy Disney, who handled the financial side of his brother’s business, concluded a new contract on 20 December 1933 with UFA to distribute Walt’s films in Germany, but on 12 November 1934 the German government quadrupled import duties on films, forcing distributors to pay 20,000 Reichsmarks in tax for every foreign film they bought. The government also imposed stringent controls on currency exports, making it virtually impossible for American companies to take any income out of Germany at all. As a result, Universal and Warner Brothers closed their businesses in Germany, while Disney never made a profit from its massive German success. The situation was hardly eased by a change in the regulations on 19 February 1935. From this point, imported films had to be paid for by exchanges with the export of German films; but the Germans no longer made films that foreign distributors wanted to show. The hostility of American distributors and the American public to Nazi antisemitism would have made it difficult to show them even had this not been the case. In the autumn of 1937 the Disney contract with UFA ran out, and to make matters worse, Disney’s accumulated assets in Germany were written off, partly to cover the bankruptcy of a major distributor. A visit to Berlin by Roy Disney failed to produce a solution, and by 1939 hardly any Disney cartoons were being shown in Germany at all. Adolf Hitler, who was given eighteen Mickey Mouse films by his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels as a Christmas present in 1937, was a lucky exception to the rule.31

  By the second half of the 1930s, state control over the German film industry had become even tighter, thanks to the Film Credit Bank created in June 1933 by the regime to help film-makers raise money in the straitened circumstances of the Depression. By 1936 it was funding nearly three-quarters of all German feature films, and was not afraid to withhold support from producers of whose projects it did not approve. Meanwhile, the Propaganda Ministry’s control over the hiring and firing of people in all branches of the film industry had been cemented by the establishment of the Reich Film Chamber on 14 July 1933, headed by a financial official who was directly responsible to Goebbels himself. Anyone employed in the film industry was now obliged to become a member of the Reich Film Chamber, which organized itself into ten departments covering every aspect of the movie business in Germany.32 The creation of the Reich Film Chamber in 1933 was a major step towards total control. The next year, Goebbels’s hand was further strengthened by a crisis in the finances of the two biggest film companies, UFA and Tobis, which were effectively nationalized. By 1939, state-financed companies were producing nearly two-thirds of German films.33 A German Film Academy, created in 1938, now provided technical training for the next generation of film-makers, actors, designers, writers, cameramen and technicians, ensuring that they would work in the spirit of the Nazi regime. Financial control was backed by legal powers, above all through the Reich Cinema Law, passed on 16 February 1934. This made pre-censorship of scripts mandatory. It also merged the existing film censors’ offices, created in 1920, into a single bureau within the Propaganda Ministry. And as amended in 1935 it gave Goebbels the power to ban any films without reference to these institutions anyway. Encouragement was to be provided, and cinemagoers’ expectations guided, by the award of marks of distinction to films, certifying them as ‘artistically valuable’, ‘politically valuable’, and so on.34

  As Goebbels intended, there were plenty of entertainment films produced in Nazi Germany. Taking the categories prescribed by the Propaganda Ministry, fully 55 per cent of films shown in Germany in 1934 were comedies, 21 per cent dramas, 24 per cent political. The proportions fluctuated year by year, and there were some films that fell in practice into more than one category. In 1938, however, only 10 per cent were classed as political; 41 per cent were categorized as dramas and 49 per cent as comedies. The proportion of political films had declined, in other words, while that of dramas had sharply risen. Musicals, costume dramas, romantic comedies and other genres provided escapism and dulled people’s sensibilities; but they could carry a message too.35 All these films of whatever kind had to conform to the general principles laid down by the Reich Film Chamber, and many of the movies glorified leadership, advertised the peasant virtues of blood and soil, denigrated the Nazi hate-figures such as Bolsheviks and Jews, or depicted them as villains in otherwise apparently unpolitical dramas. Pacifist films were banned, and the Propaganda Ministry ensured that the correct line would be taken in genre movies of all kinds. Thus for example in September 1933, the Film-Courier magazine condemned the Weimar cinema’s portrayal of ‘a destructive, subversive criminal class, built up through fantasies of the metropolis into a destructive gigantism’ - a clear reference to the films of Fritz Lang, such as Metropolis and M - and assured its readers that in future, films about crime would concentrate not on the criminal ‘but on the heroes in uniform and in civilian dress’ who were serving the people in the fight against criminality.36 Even entertainment, therefore, could be political. 37

  Overt political propaganda was supplied by the newsreels, above all the Weekly Review (Wochenschau), which had to be shown at every commercial film programme from October 1938 onwards, and which devoted on average half its coverage to political issues alongside the usual fare of sport, society gossip and the like. Stylized, cliché-ridden, couched in a thoroughly Nazified language of combat and struggle, delivered by the voice-over speaker in a tone of unrelenting aggressiveness, and often portraying events especially staged for the purpose of being filmed, the newsreel’s relation to reality was at best only intermediate. By 1939 all the newsreels, originally owned by a variety of companies, one of them American (the Fox Talking Weekly Review), were speaking with one voice, co-ordinated by a special office in the Propaganda Ministry and backed by a Newsreel Law passed in 1936. Like many other visual sources for the history of Nazi Germany, therefore, newsreel footage has to be used by the historian with a considerable degree of caution.38 As far as contemporaries were concerned, the propaganda intent was obvious to all but the most obtuse of cinemagoers.

  III

  Newsreels were not the principal means by which most Germans learned about what was going on in their country and the rest of the world: of far more importance was radio, which had grown rapidly in popularity under the
Weimar Republic. Everyone involved in the industry, from broadcasters to engineers and salesmen, had to belong to the Reich Radio Chamber, established in the autumn of 1933. This gave the Propaganda Ministry complete power over the hiring and firing of staff. German broadcasting had already been brought under government control earlier in the year; and regional stations were eventually incorporated into the Reich Radio Company on 1 April 1934 and subordinated directly to the Propaganda Ministry. The Nazis extended their grasp to the production of wireless sets as well, paying large subsidies to manufacturers to make and sell cheap radios known as People’s Receivers (Volksempfänger), available for 76 Reichsmarks or in a smaller version at only 35. This was no more than the average weekly wage of a manual worker, and it was payable if required in instalments. One and a half million of these sets were already made in 1933. In 1934 over six million radio sets were in use in Germany, and by the middle of 1939 over 70 per cent of households in Germany owned a wireless, the highest percentage of any country in the world, including the USA. Many country people were brought within reach of government propaganda on a regular basis for the first time by this means. The spread of the radio enabled the regime to bring its message to parts of the nation that had hitherto been relatively remote from the political world. Altogether, over seven million People’s Receivers were manufactured; by 1943 every third radio set in Germany’s homes was a People’s Receiver. A particular feature of the People’s Receiver was that it only had a limited range, so that away from border areas, listeners were unable to tune in to foreign radio stations. On special occasions, radio wardens would arrange for a speech by Hitler to be broadcast over loudspeakers in public places, on factory shop-floors, in offices, schools and restaurants. On the sounding of a siren, people were supposed to stop whatever they were doing and gather round the radio set or within hearing distance of the loudspeaker for a session of communal listening. They were also meant to listen to ‘Hour of the Nation’, broadcast every evening on all stations from seven to eight o’clock. Plans were even laid for a nationwide network of 6,000 loudspeaker pillars to facilitate public listening; their implementation was interrupted only by the outbreak of war in 1939.39

  Map 4. Radio Ownership in July 1938

  Already on 25 March 1933, Goebbels had told broadcasters and radio managers that ‘radio will be purged’ of nonconformists and leftists, and asked them to undertake this task themselves, otherwise he would do it for them. By the summer, the airwaves had indeed been purged. Often this could mean real hardship for the dismissed. One of many affected was the novelist, poet and journalist Jochen Klepper. Born in 1903, he was not Jewish, but his wife was, a fact that aroused suspicion in itself. And though he was a deeply religious Protestant, he had a Social Democratic past. An anonymous denunciation brought about his dismissal from the state-controlled radio in June 1933. Like many such people, he now feared for his economic future. Publishing novels and poems was no substitute for his radio job, and in any case he thought it quite likely that he would be banned from publishing too. ‘I can’t really believe that the German Publishing Institution will stand by me’, he wrote despairingly. ‘How is a publishing house to keep an author afloat these days if he does not explicitly represent the “nation’s hope”?’ Finally he was rescued by an appointment to work on the staff of the Ullstein Publishing Company’s radio magazine.40 Many others had to emigrate, or go into an impecunious early retirement. But Goebbels was not content with mere personnel changes. In the same address to radio executives and producers, he went on to state, with remarkable candour:

  There is nothing at all that is without political bias. The discovery of the principle of absolute objectivity is the privilege of German university professors - and I do not believe that university professors make history. We make no bones about the fact that the radio belongs to us and to no one else. And we will place the radio in the service of our ideology, and no other ideology will find expression here . . .41

  But just as in film, so in radio, Goebbels knew that people would not tolerate a diet of unremitting propaganda. Already in May 1933 he began turning down requests from Nazi Party bosses keen to hear their voices on the radio, and limited broadcasts of political speeches to two a month.42

  Radio, said the Propaganda Minister, had to be imaginative, modern, up-to-date. ‘The first law’, he told radio managers on 25 March 1933: ‘Don’t become boring!’ They were not to fill their programmes with martial music and patriotic speeches. They had to use their imagination. Radio could bring the whole people behind the regime.43 Despite this warning, the radio network was initially used for broadcasting large quantities of political propaganda, with fifty speeches by Hitler being transmitted in 1933 alone. On 1 May 1934 broadcasts of the Mayday celebrations, with their speeches, songs, marches and the rest, took up no fewer than seventeen hours of radio time. No wonder that there were reports that listeners were growing blasé in the face of such excesses and listening, when they could, to foreign radio stations. Only gradually was Goebbels’s oft-repeated advice heeded. From 1932 to 1939 the proportion of broadcasting time devoted to music grew steadily. By 1939 the total broadcasting hours devoted to ‘literature’ and ‘talks’ had been cut to around 7 per cent; two-thirds of broadcasting time was now taken up by music, seven-eighths of it popular rather than classical. Particularly successful was the regular request concert, introduced in 1936 and purveying hit songs and entertainment music whose style remained generally unchanged from that of the Weimar years. But some still complained that even the music was boring, and they missed the radio plays that had been so popular under the Weimar Republic.44 As the Security Service of the SS complained in 1938, the ‘dissatisfaction of radio listeners’ was demonstrating itself in the fact that ‘almost all kinds of German radio listeners . . . now as before regularly listen to German-language broadcasts from foreign stations’.45

  IV

  Goebbels’s multi-faceted campaign to mobilize the spirit of the German people in the service of the Third Reich and its ideas did not run entirely smoothly. For, in a manner characteristic of so many areas of the regime, he was far from enjoying a monopoly over the territory he claimed as his own. Already in the course of the discussions leading up to the creation of the Propaganda Ministry, his original intention of including education under its aegis had been frustrated by Hitler, who had passed education over to a separate ministry headed by Bernhard Rust. More seriously, however, Goebbels had to battle for supremacy over the cultural sphere against the self-designated Party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, who saw it as his duty to propagate Nazi ideology, and in particular his own elaborate version of it, throughout German culture. At the end of the 1920s, Rosenberg had become leader of the Fighting League for German Culture (Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur), one of many special ist organizations established within the Party at the time. In 1933, the League moved swiftly to take ‘co-ordinate’ German theatrical institutions under its control.46 Rosenberg was also keen to impose ideological purity on many other aspects of German culture, including music and the visual arts, the Churches, and university and intellectual life, all areas that Goebbels had originally envisaged falling under the control of the Ministry of Propaganda.47 The Fighting League for German Culture was small but very active. Its membership increased from 2,100 in January 1932 to 6,000 a year later, 10,000 in April 1933, and 38,000 by the following October. Many of the assaults on Jewish and left-wing musicians that took place in the spring and early summer of 1933 were organized or inspired by the Fighting League for German Culture, to which a substantial number of far-right music critics and writers belonged. In addition, Rosenberg had a powerful propaganda weapon at his disposal in the shape of the Racial Observer, the Nazi daily newspaper, of which he was the editor-in-chief. To make matters worse for Goebbels, Rosenberg’s views on art and music were much more in tune with Hitler’s than were his own, and on more than one occasion, Goebbels’s penchant for cultural innovation threatened to give Rosenberg the upper hand.
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