Hitler's Hollywood

Between 1933, when the Nazis came to power, and 1945, when the Third Reich collapsed, more than a thousand feature films were made in Germany. Roughly five hundred of them were comedies and more than three hundred were musical revues; the rest were crime and adventure pictures. What audiences were actually handed, in other words, was usually entertainment rather than open propaganda. The film critic Rüdiger Suchsland lines up twelve years of that output and asks what it was carrying. Suchsland's argument is that the Third Reich was itself a film, produced and directed by Goebbels with the German nation in the leading role. That is his claim rather than a settled verdict; what is not in dispute is that openly antisemitic propaganda films came out of the same studios. The documentary is a sequel to his 2015 From Caligari to Hitler and picks up where that film left the Weimar years.