How Hollywood Helped Hitler | Between 2 Wars | 1926 Part 2 of 3 - YouTube (2)
power of moving images. In the coming years they will engage leading German filmmakers
sympathetic to the Nazi cause to make propaganda for the party and its leader. Their most effective
film relationship will arguably be with Leni Riefenstahl, a dancer and actress who is already
developing into a filmmaking genius. She is in the process of inventing new ways of shooting
and editing that will soon work for the Nazi cause. She will combine documentary filmmaking
with emotion and pathos in unprecedented ways, and will be so good at her job that one of
her main opponents, John Grierson- the head of the Canadian Film Board during World War
II and the maker of many anti-Nazi propaganda films- is said to have publicly kissed her
feet in admiration when he eventually met her after the war. Riefenstahl will create
three Nazi propaganda films. Two of them, Der Sieg des Glaubens and Triumph des Willens,
will make movie history.
And despite her films' content, Riefenstahl continues to influence filmmakers to this
day. Her body of work has influenced films like Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, and even Schindler's
List, a film with the exact opposite message of her own. Her support for the Nazi regime,
will however destroy her reputation forever. Postwar, it will take until she is over 90
years old before she will be allowed to complete another film, a three-hour underwater nature
epic. To do so, she will learn how to scuba dive at 88 - becoming the oldest person to
ever take a diving license. Completed in the late 1990s, it will again be a masterpiece
of filmmaking.
But back to the interwar era!
It won't only be willing admirers and sympathetic travellers who help Goebbels. He will effectively
appropriate the star system from the 1920s and put it to work for the Nazis. In 1933,
together with Alfred Hugenberg, a German media mogul and the first Nazi Minister of Economics,
he will take control of the leading German film studio UFA. Parallel to creating propaganda,
UFA will continue to produce entertainment films, with the slight difference that they
are now pro-Nazi and work as subtle, invasive tools to spread the ideology of the party.
In the 1930s UFA will produce and distribute in Germany, France, Belgium, and the United
States, so that stars from the whole world, either wittingly or unwittingly, will now
work for the Nazis to promote their cause, and we're talking serious paycheck stars
like Hans Albers, Zarah Leander, and Valentinos last lover, Pola Negri.
In fact Negri had begun her career with UFA in the teens and early twenties. In 1935 she
will be brought back to Germany to star in the murder drama “Mazurka” for Tobis films,
another Nazi label. The film will be an instant hit and become one of Hitler's favourite
films. UFA will see their chance to reclaim their star and make her an exceptional offer.
She will settle in France and work for UFA, producing five films by 1938, but her public
association with the Nazi media machine and Hitler's fan-girl like adoration of her
will lead to the French gossip magazine “Pour Vous” publicizing an alleged love affair
between Pola and the Führer. Negri sues the magazine for libel and wins. That lawsuit
and the fact that she flees back to the US when the Germans invades France will save
her reputation in contrast to Riefenstahl, Albers, and Leander who will forever remain
branded by the Swastika.
OK, in 1926 that is still in the future, but Mussolini as you can see has already started
to spread his image across the world as a powerful protector of Italian culture.
In march of this year Hitler and Goebbels meet for the first time officially, during
the now resurrected Nazi party's annual conference in Weimar. The two are instant
brothers in arms and Hitler starts promoting Goebbels through the partly hierarchy. Goebbels,
party member since 1924 has already been working on his plans to use propaganda effectively
for the Nazi cause. One year form now in 1927 he will arrange for the party conference to
be filmed for the first time and then proceed to painstakingly document the Nazis' rise
to power in pictures and film. He will work incessantly to take control of media outlets
that are friendly to the Nazi cause. He will craft Hitler's notoriety using the tools
that are presently being created for the movie star system. The image of a Führer that will
save Germany which Hitler has already started to build for himself will be broadcast so
loudly and effectively by Goebbels, that by 1932 as the electorate go to the booths in
yet another confused Weimar parliamentary election, there will not be a single person
in all of Germany, no matter how they will vote, that doesn't either fear or admire
the Austrian with
the Chaplin moustache.
