In the Faculty of Information Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid An optional subject is taught called History of informative and documentary cinema. A few years ago, the teacher who taught that class had the habit of giving his students fragments of ‘The triumph of the will‘, the documentary that Leni Riefenstahl directed about the Nazi party congress in Nuremberg, in 1934. She always added that she only showed those fragments because, if she put it in its entirety, she feared that we would want to join the party.
‘Triumph of the Will’ is one of the more than 1,200 films that the Ministry of Propaganda German, under the command of Joseph Goebbels, produced to spread Nazi ideals, anti-Semitism and to justify the Second World War. When the war ended, the Allies banned about 300 of them, and 44 are still on that list in charge of the German government.
Why are these movies banned?
Those forty-four were the subject of a documentary a few years ago, ‘Forbidden Films’which not only explained what kind of tapes they were and what they were about, but also asked whether they should no longer be banned and what legacy they might have left, 70 years after the end of the war.
Your director, Felix Moellerproduced it in the face of disinterest of German youth about the history of the Nazis and the rise of the extreme right in Europe, and the documentary shows the reactions of different people when watching some of these films. Because the German government does allow their exhibition, but for educational purposes and with an expert in the room to explain and contextualize them.
In the trailer you can already see some of these opinions, from those who are surprised because these films have good technical quality and are entertaining, to those who think that some of them should remain prohibited because they were, at the time, Nazi symbols, such as ‘The Jew Süss‘, which was probably the most successful of all the productions promoted by Goebbels.
‘The Jew Süss’ was the second film adaptation of the life of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, financial advisor to the Duke of Württemberg during the 18th century and who was accused of fraud, bribery, treason and even illicit relations with several ladies of the court, and executed for these crimes. His story had been treated in books and even in plays that generally focused on it as a great human tragedy.
But Goebbels saw that he could present Süss as a arrogant jew who infiltrated the Germans to take away what was theirs. He already had the most important piece in his cinematic anti-Semitic propaganda.
‘The Jew Süss’ was a great popular success. It was screened at the 1940 Venice Film Festival, receiving good reviews for its technical workmanship, reviews that did not seem to be aware of the ultimate objective of the film. Goebbels himself wrote in his diary about the film that it was “an anti-Semitic film of the kind we could only wish for. I’m very happy about it.”
Good but dangerous movies
In 1994, the film critic Roger Ebert wrote about one of those 44 banned Nazi films, ‘Triumph of the Will’, that “we would all have reflected on the received opinion that the film is good but evil, and that writing about it raises the question of whether quality art can be in the service of evil.” Ebert asked himself the same question with ‘The Birth of a Nation’, RW Griffith’s film that is considered one of the founding works of cinema and, at the same time, deeply racist.
Those films, at the time, were not considered that way. Luis Buñuel himself stated in his memories that, in 1935, no one in Hollywood thought that ‘Triumph of the Will’ was dangerous because there were too many regional dances and too many songs for its propaganda message to be taken seriously. The Second World War drastically changed that perception, but until then, the productions of the Ministry of Propaganda Germans used entertaining stories to convey their ideals.
They portrayed the British as cruel inventors of concentration camps or justified the invasion of Poland by showing the Poles persecuting the German minority living there. They could be full of stereotypes, historical manipulations and blatant attempts to “brainwash” their viewers, but they were well produced and shot and were very successful at the time. For all these reasons, they remain prohibited. But should they continue to be?
In ‘Forbidden films’ there are scholars who claim that these films clearly show what should not be repeated in the future and that, therefore, their access to them should not be restricted, while former members of neo-Nazi parties point out another reason for them to be removed from the “black list”: “When something is prohibited, it becomes interesting. Prohibiting things makes them fascinating and taboo because if it is prohibited, it must be true to a certain extent.”
Other Banned Non-Nazi Films
Nazi ideological propaganda is the reason why these 44 films remain banned in Germany, which also has a great controversy over the passage to public domain of ‘Mein Kampf’but throughout the history of cinema there have been films that have also been included in “blacklists” for reasons that can range from accusations of obscenity to, directly, blasphemy.
Or it could have happened to them like ‘The great dictator‘, the satire that Charles Chaplin made of Hitler and Mussolini, in 1940, and which was banned in Argentina precisely for that parody, since Germany had been an ally of Juan Domingo Perón. It was even on the verge of not being shown in the United Kingdom because, when filming was announced, the country was trying to appease Hitler in his expansionist desires for Europe. When it was released, however, the British were already at war with the Germans and there was no reason for its censorship.
You don’t have to go to China or countries with fundamentalist regimes to find the most diverse banned films. Finland, for example, prevented it from being seen ‘Battleship Potemkin’ between 1930 and 1952 for fear that it would incite a communist insurrection in the country, and at the time banned ‘Red Telephone. We flew to Moscow so as not to disturb the Soviet Union, its neighbor to the east.
The extreme violence of ‘cannibal holocaust‘ earned it total censorship in many countries, and in Iceland it still cannot be screened, for example. The same thing happens in France with a more recent film, ‘Antichrist’, by Lars Von Trier, which cannot be seen in cinemas, on television, or released on DVD until it is resolved. a legal dispute for its age rating. The case of ‘A Serbian film’ in Spain also ended in court. ‘Life of Brian’, ‘Last Tango in Paris’, ‘A Clockwork Orange’… There have been quite a few movies that have been partially or totally censored for different reasons, although almost all of them could be seen later. The case of Nazi propaganda films is special.
The 44 banned Nazi films
- ‘Stukas’. Karl Ritter. 1941
- ‘Uncle Kruger’. Hans Steinhoff. 1941
- ‘Homecoming’. Gustav Ucicky. 1941
- ‘Der stammbaum des Dr. Pistorius’ (‘The family tree of Dr. Pistorius’). Karl Georg Külb. 1939
- ‘SA-Mann Brand’ (‘The Soldier’s Mark’). Franz Seitz. 1933
- ‘Hitlerjunge Quex’ (‘The Arrow Quex’). Hans Steinhoff. 1933
- ‘Jud Süss’ (‘The Jew Süss’). Veit Harlan. 1940
- ‘Der ewige Jude’ (‘The Eternal Jew’). Fritz Hippler. 1940
- ‘Die Rothschilds’ (‘The Rothschilds’). Erich Waschneck. 1940
- ‘Über alles in der Welt’ (‘Above everyone’). Karl Ritter. 1941
- ‘GPU’. Karl Ritter. 1942
- ‘Carl Peters’. Herbert Selpin. 1941
- ‘Anschlag auf Baku’ (‘Attack on Baku’). Fritz Kirchoff. 1940
- ‘Die goldenne spinne’ (‘The golden spider’). Erich Engels. 1943
- ‘Die grosse liebe’ (‘The great love’). Rolf Hansen. 1942
- ‘Wunschkonzert’ (‘Unattainable Desire’). Eduard von Borsordy. 1940
- ‘Kolberg’. Veit Herlan. 1945
- ‘Ich klage an’ (‘I accuse’). Wolfgang Liebeneiner. 1941
- ‘Besatzung Dora’ (‘The Crew of the Dora’). Karl Ritter. 1943.
- ‘Pour le merité’. Karl Ritter. 1938
- ‘Fronttheater’. Arthur Maria Rabenalt. 1942
- ‘U-Boote westwärts!’ (Submarine to the west!’). Günther Rittau. 1941
- ‘The triumph of the will’. Leni Riefensthal. 1935
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