ABSTRACT
What is remarkable about the cinema in Nazi Germany is not how many overtly propagandistic films were produced but how few . Of the 1,097 films produced in Germany between 1933 and 1945 only some 96 were specifically commissioned by the Film Section of the Propaganda Ministry.l They are the so-called 'Staatsauftragsfilme'. The failure of the three earliest Nazi propaganda features , S.A.-Mann Brand, Hans Westmar and Hitlerjunge Quex, to make money amply demonstrated that people would not go and see blatant propaganda features. Consequently Goebbels changed his policy and concentrated the bulk of his propaganda in the newsreels, which were eventually extended in length to forty-five minutes. Thus people who were lured into the cinema by the prospect of a 'straight' comedy or thriller or musical could also be brainwashed as they sat through the newsreel. It is this policy which lay behind Goebbels's bitter hostility to the making of Triumph of the Will ,2 a feature-length documentary which could not be construed as anything other than direct propaganda. But since it was a personal project of Hitler, filming went ahead, though not without Goebbels doing everything he could to hamper it.
