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nazi film propaganda
nazi film propaganda
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A Study of Nazism in Feature Films
In this coursework, I will be looking at how films made in the past
one hundred years or so have portrayed the Nazis in different ways.
There are three films we have been looking at with a common subject.
These are Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), directed by Leni
Riefenstahl (1934); Cabaret (1972), dir. Bob Fosse and Schindler's
List (1993), dir. Steven Spielberg. The essay also looks at one
episode from The Lion King (1994), dir. Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff.
All these films in some way look at the subject of Nazism, except for
The Lion King which refers explicitly to Triumph of the Will. We will
be looking at the different filmic techniques used in these films, and
the effects they have on the audience.
Triumph of the Will is a documentary film, written and directed by
Leni Riefenstahl, a former actress. The film is a record of the 1934
Nazi Party Rally at Nuremberg. Triumph of the Will is rarely seen
today, because it celebrates Nazism and glorifies Hitler. Leni
Riefenstahl claimed after the war not to have known about the
treatment of Jews in Germany. She may not have known about the
Holocaust, but must have seen how Jewish people were persecuted, as
this was public policy (and mostly popular with the German people).
However, Triumph of the Will was made in 1934, five years before war
broke out, at a time when Germany was on good terms with the UK.
In the opening frames of the film, we see a view of clouds from an
aeroplane. We see shots of the mediaeval city of Nuremberg, and then
the shadow of an aeroplane passing over it. In the plane is Hitler,
and we see crowds marching in...
... middle of paper ...
...ne is also quite shocking. It is an
up-beat, happy-tempo tune. This fits pretty well with the dancers, but
when we see the image change to the club owner being beaten up, the
music does not change. So we have this jolly music backing a crime
scene.
After analysis of all three films we can make a conclusion of the
three director’s attitudes towards Hitler’s Germany and Nazism. We can
say that Leni Riefenstahl (Triumph des Willens) - a keen supporter of
Hitler.
Bob Fosse (Cabaret) - critical, but also interested in how the Nazis
came to power. We see the results of violence.
Steven Spielberg (Schindler's List) - a powerful sense of what it
means to be a Jew today, and to recall the horrors of the Second World
War and the Holocaust. Schindler's List is a more graphic account with
repeated images of violence.
Nazism and Fascism are prominent in daily life as shown in both movies Swing Kids and Berlin 36 by the uses of distinct characteristics such as the use of force, propaganda and sabotage. Fascism is defined as having a governmental system led by a dictator with complete power. Nazism on the other hand is defined as an ideology featuring racism and expansionism and obedience to a strong leader. These two ideologies are alike with Nazism falling under a sub-category of Fascism. However, it is prominent that Swing Kids was showing the effects of Nazism in daily life with scenes showing excessive use of force and propaganda.
“Modern anti-Semitism, in contrast to earlier forms, was based not on religious practices of the Jews but on the theory that Jews comprised an inferior race. Anti-Semites exploited the fact that Jews had been forced into exile by extolling as ‘fact’ that their ‘rootlessness’ had a genetic basis. A Jew was a Jew not because he or she practiced any particular religion, but because it was a character of his or her blood.”
“All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach,” Adolf Hitler (The National World War Museum). The German Nazi dictator utilized his power over the people using propaganda, eventually creating a sense of hatred towards Jews. After World War 1, the punishments of the League of Nations caused Germany to suffer. The Nazi party came to blame the Jews in order to have a nation-wide “scapegoat”. This hatred and prejudice towards Jews is known as anti-semitism. According to the Breman Museum, “the Nazi Party was one of the first political movements to take full advantage of mass communications technologies: radio, recorded sound, film, and the printed word” (The Breman Museum). By publishing books, releasing movies and holding campaigns against Jews, antisemitism came to grow quickly, spreading all across Germany. The Nazi Party often referred to the notion of a “People’s Community” where all of Germany was “racially pure” (Issuu). They would show images of ‘pure’, blond workers, labouring to build a new society. This appealed greatly to people who were demoralized during Germany’s defeat in World War 1 and the economic depression of the 1920’s and 1930’s. Hitler, along with Joseph Goebbels, used developed propaganda methods in order to suppress the Jews and spread anti semitism.
Censorship in the 1950's: How did this affect the making of “Night and Fog” one of the first ever cinematic documentaries on the Holocaust? A film by Alain Resnais.
My topic is Neo-Nazism in America. Nazism, which is the body of political and economic doctrines held and put into effect by the National Socialist German Workers' party in the Third German Reich is at its highest peak since the destruction of Hitler's dictatorship in 1945. In the streets, Nazis are spreading fear by using murderous violence and terror. This group blames the cultural and ethnic minorities for the problems in our society. These individuals, and their political leaders, are a threat to our democracy, and to everything that is decent.
...was the last time I saw my father. I was hidden for two years. I never went outside. I was not allowed to go outside because I didn’t belong to a family, and the woman who hid me sacrificed a lot to take me, because had the Nazi’s discovered she was hiding a Jew, whether it was a little girl or an adult it didn’t matter, they would have killed her on the spot, of course as well as me. I was allowed sometimes to go out in the backyard, but for the most part that was my home for two years. I was never mistreated- ever! But I also was never loved, and I really lost a great part of my childhood—simply because we were Jews.”
Introductory Paragraph: Propaganda is a tool of influence that Adolph Hitler used to abuse the German population by brainwashing them and completely deteriorating an entire race. How does one person get the beliefs of an entire country? Hitler put Joseph Goebbels in charge of the propaganda movement. Goebbels controlled every element of propaganda, there were many varieties of Nazi Propaganda. Propaganda was also being used as a tool to gain the support of the German population for the war, and supporting their government. The Jew’s were the targeted race and were completely pulverized by the Nazi’s. Hitler not only tried to destroy an entire race, he gained complete control of an entire country.
During the 1930’s the Jewish population had a lot of influence in Europe, consisting of over nine million people. Most Jewish people lived in Nazi Germany and the countries that Nazi Germany had controlled. By 1945, the Nazis had...
Propaganda is the dissemination of information to influence or control large groups of people. In totalitarian regime like Nazi Germany, propaganda plays a significant role in consolidate power in the hands of the controlling party (Nazi propaganda).The propaganda used by the Nazi Party in the years leading up to and during Adolf Hitler's leadership of Germany (1933–1945) was a crucial instrument for acquiring and maintaining power, and for the implementation of Nazi policies. The pervasive use of propaganda by the Nazis is largely responsible for the word "propaganda" itself acquiring its present negative connotations (definition).
The Nazis are infamous for their heavy use of propaganda during their reign in the Third Reich, they used many means of propaganda such as posters, cartoons, radio, film, etc. The German citizens’ constant exposure to all of this propaganda from all directions had a deep psychological and psychoanalytical impact on them, it redefined their identity and who they were as well as what they thought of the world around them. Nazi propaganda often had deep symbolic meaning usually associated with anti-semitism and German nationalism, these elements were already present in the minds of the majority of Germans so it wasn’t hard for Adolf Hitler and the rest of the Nazi party to further provoke and enrage the emotions of people concerning these things, they merely had to tap into these pre disposed emotions in a way that would have the most favourable psychological impact for the Nazis. Some of the opinions and mindsets that German citizens had may have been there even before the Nazis came into power and made it seemed like they were brainwashing people with their propaganda, but with what justification can it be said that Nazi propaganda had a psychological and psychoanalytic impact on the German population to a great extent, rather than it being the work of pre set psychological states of mind of people due to the Treaty of Versailles, the Great Depression, Hyperinflation, and other sources which may have led the German population to support and hold anti-semitistic and nationalistic ideologies.
To this day it remains incomprehensible to justify a sensible account for the uprising of the Nazi Movement. It goes without saying that the unexpectedness of a mass genocide carried out for that long must have advanced through brilliant tactics implemented by a strategic leader, with a promising policy. Adolf Hitler, a soldier in the First World War himself represents the intolerant dictator of the Nazi movement, and gains his triumph by arousing Germany from its devastated state following the negative ramifications of the war. Germany, “foolishly gambled away” by communists and Jews according to Hitler in his chronicle Mein Kampf, praises the Nazi Party due to its pact to provide order, racial purity, education, economic stability, and further benefits for the state (Hitler, 2.6). Albert Speer, who worked closely under Hitler reveals in his memoir Inside the Third Reich that the Führer “was tempestuously hailed by his numerous followers,” highlighting the appreciation from the German population in response to his project of rejuvenating their state (Speer, 15). The effectiveness of Hitler’s propaganda clearly served its purpose in distracting the public from suspecting the genuine intentions behind his plan, supported by Albert Camus’ insight in The Plague that the “townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences”(Camus, 37). In this sense “humanists” represent those who perceive all people with virtue and pureness, but the anti-humanist expression in the metaphor shows the blind-sidedness of such German citizens in identifying cruel things in the world, or Hitler. When the corruption within Nazism does receive notice, Hitler at that point given h...
The holocaust was the mass murder of about six million Jews during World War II. The hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group is known as antisemitism. Antisemitism was a centuries old phenomenon. Jews in Europe had always been a minority. In some countries , Jews could not own land, attend school, or practice certain professions. The Holocaust, which was between 1933 and 1945, is history’s most extreme example of antisemitism. A German journalist that was named Wilhelm Marr originated the term antisemitism in 1879. Which symbolized the hatred of Jews, and also hatred of a variety of advanced, catholic, and international political trends of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that were often joined with Jews. The tendency under attack included equal civil rights, required equality, free trade, ownership, account free enterprise, and self control from violence. Between the most casual definition of antisemitism all through history were pogroms. Pogroms were violent riots that were begun against Jews and many times supported by government authorities. Pogroms were often encouraged by blood libels, which were false rumors that Jews used the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes. In the modern era, antisemites added a political quality to their ideas of hatred. In the last third of the nineteenth century, antisemitic political groups were formed in France, Germany and Austria. Advertisements such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion developed or provided support for fake theories of a global Jewish plot. A convincing part of political antisemitism was nationalism, whose supporters often falsely accused Jews as disloyal citizens. The Nazi party, which was established in 19...
The Holocaust was a time when many Jews and other "undesirables" lost their lives because of Hitler and the Nazis. The genocide lasted for twelve years, from 1933 to 1945, and about eleven million lives were lost durring this time. Even though the Holocaust is over, learning about it helps us understand how power can be abused.
Arcangel’s 2002 film demonstrates the iconic scrolling pixelated clouds with a beryl bright blue background. The white clouds were
The Rise of the Nazi Party Hitler’s rise to power was the result of many factors, but Hitler’s ability to take advantage of Germany’s poor leadership and economic and political conditions was the most significant factor. His ability to manipulate the media and the German public whilst taking advantage of Germany’s poor leadership resulted in both the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party. During the early 1920s, Germany was struggling with economic instability and political uncertainty. Germany, after being defeated in the Great War, was forced to sign the unforgiving treaty of Versailles, which the Weimar Republic was held responsible for. This brought forward feelings of fear, anger and insecurity towards the Weimar Republic.