Concept

Nazism and cinema

Summary
Nazism created an elaborate system of propaganda, which used the new technologies of the 20th century, including cinema. Nazism courted the masses by means of slogans that were aimed directly at the instincts and emotions of the people. The Nazis valued film as a propaganda instrument of enormous power. The interest that Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels took in the film was not only the result of a personal fascination. The use of film for propaganda had been planned by the Nazi Party as early as 1930, when the party first established a film department. The goals department's goals included using the economic power of German moviegoers to self-censor films globally, resulting in all but one Hollywood producers censoring films critical of Nazism and even showing news shorts of film produced by the Nazis in American theaters. No American films between 1933-1939 were critical of Nazism. The Nazis were very aware of the propagandistic effect of movies and already in 1920 the issues of the Racial Observer included film criticism. The SS-philosopher Walter Julius Bloem published the book The Soul of the Cinema – A Commitment to the Movies in 1922. In September 1923, Philipp Nickel produced a documentary of the "German Day in Nuremberg" where the "Battle-League" was founded, shortly before the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler wrote about the psychological effect of images in Mein Kampf: One must also remember that of itself the multitude is mentally inert, that it remains attached to its old habits and that it is not naturally prone to read something which does not conform with its own pre-established beliefs when such writing does not contain what the multitude hopes to find there. The picture, in all its forms, including the film, has better prospects. In a much shorter time, at one stroke I might say, people will understand a pictorial presentation of something which it would take them a long and laborious effort of reading to understand.
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