The German newsreel

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Newsreel spokesman Harry Giese 1941

The German newsreel was during the era of National Socialism from 1940 to 1945 centralized and conformist newsreels in the cinemas of the Nazi Reich . As a rule, it was shown between the cultural film and the actual main film and at the same time served to provide information about current war events in World War II and also to spread National Socialist propaganda . Every week around 2000 copies were sent nationwide, and there were hundreds of foreign-language copies for allies, neutral states and prisoner-of-war camps. A considerable part of the film material from this period that is preserved today consists of newsreel recordings.

history

Regular newsreels existed in the German Reich long before the "German newsreels". Very early on, the documentary possibilities of film - still without sound - were used for a wide variety of newsreel productions, even by smaller film companies. An early example is the “ measurement week ” shown since 1914 . From the beginning of the 1930s, primarily as a result of the introduction of sound film technology, there was an increasing concentration of newsreel production on some dominant film groups and their newsreels:

Even before the National Socialists came to power in 1933, the newsreels often had a nationalist orientation; Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels found a well-functioning propaganda tool here .

In 1935, the production of the various privately produced newsreels was placed under the supervision of a "German Film News Office" founded by Goebbels (known at the time as the "Büro Weidemann "), which in turn was directly subordinate to the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda . In 1939 there was a further streamlining of the increasingly centralized newsreel coordination when the "German Film News Office" was replaced by the newly established "German Newsreel Center at the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda". This meant that the four big newsreel labels of the three newsreel producers UFA , Tobis-Tonbild-Syndikat and Fox remained officially independent, but in fact the Reich Propaganda Ministry intervened directly in the weekly newsreel organization via the "Wochenschauzentrale".

The individual newsreel companies were subordinate to the "Wochenschauzentrale" under direct responsibility; There was no scope for independent and responsible action, neither economically, organizationally, nor in terms of personnel. In the newsreels, which were largely standardized in terms of content after the beginning of the Second World War, the different title prefixes of the individual companies were preassembled for a few months for reasons of copyright, but from mid-June 1940 (from No. 511) they were replaced by the uniform title "Die Deutsche Wochenschau". This also removed the appearance of plurality to the outside world . In November 1940, the final organizational merging of the four newsreels under the centralized production of the UFA followed , in order to facilitate the direct influence of the Propaganda Ministry and to bring the newsreel medium into line - also linguistically .

By November 1943, the “Deutsche Wochenschau” in the main Ufa building in the center of Berlin on Krausenstrasse was completed and synchronized . When the building was badly damaged by Allied bombing in November 1943 , newsreel work was moved to the basement and the adjoining building. At the beginning of June 1944, the entire production of newsreels was relocated outside of Berlin to Buchhorst in Barracks. After the last issues of the Deutsche Wochenschau came to the few surviving cinemas from the end of December 1944 (from No. 746) onwards, their production ended on March 22, 1945 with the theatrical version of No. 755 . a. the last public appearance of Adolf Hitler in the garden of the New Reich Chancellery , almost a month before his 56th birthday, at which he a. a. The Iron Cross was awarded to twenty Hitler youths who had competed . For a long time it was assumed that these recordings would have been made on Hitler's birthday, April 20, 1945. It later turned out that these had been created the month before. Because of the essentially broken down transport and mail connections, it was hardly possible to deliver the copies of the weekly newsreel made in Berlin to all the as yet unoccupied areas of the German Reich. So had z. B. on January 23, 1945 the Reichsbahn completely stopped the civil express and express train services.

Production and characteristics

Mixing room of the German newsreel
Horst Grund out and about in Agrigento

The material of the "Deutsche Wochenschau" was largely filmed by the "film reporters" of the " Propaganda Companies " (PK) of the Wehrmacht - a camera team was assigned to each army platoon.

Harry Giese , who had previously worked for the Tobis Tonbild Syndicate newsreels, was hired as the speaker . When Giese fell ill with jaundice , he was temporarily represented by his colleague Walter Tappe in 1943/44. Editor-in-chief was initially Heinrich Roellenbleg and later, after Goebbels had fallen out of favor, the journalist and war correspondent Fritz Dettmann. The composer Franz R. Friedl acted as clerk for music. Numerous cameramen were out and about in the theaters of war for this newsreel: Gerhard Garms, Hans Bastanier, Horst Grund , Hans Ertl , Erich Stoll, Fritz Joachim Otto and many more. To take pictures of Adolf Hitler , his personal cameraman Walter Frentz was assigned to the Führer Headquarters by the Luftwaffe .

The compilation of short news reports on political, military, cultural and sporting events in recent weeks was shown in almost all cinemas during the war years before the start of the feature film. As theme music (existed from two versions: a short and longer multiple-repetition and several drum rolls) since the final merger of a sequence from which it was Horst Wessel Song , the newsreel fanfare played. After the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union , the actual weekly fanfare was followed by the Russia fanfare , a sequence from “ Les Preludes ” by Franz Liszt . The reporting concentrated above all on the current war events, which were increasingly embellished and falsified in the course of the progress that was increasingly unfavorable for Germany.

During the war and especially after the first signs of failure on the Eastern Front in the winter of 1941/42 and the defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, reporting on the newsreel became increasingly important for Goebbels; he believed he could initiate a decisive change in mood in the German population through the medium of film . As early as 1939, he was therefore frequently personally monitoring the various production phases of the individual weekly newsreels, had rough cut versions presented to him, changed the text of the commentary and determined the focus of the reporting. Adolf Hitler, on the other hand, regularly accepted the newsreel, which was classified as important to the war effort, in person until the end of 1944 (in the research literature, however, there is also the view that from the end of 1942 Hitler hardly cared about the acceptance of the newsreel at all) and often took direct action into the production process.

In fact, however, the credibility of the newsreel and thus its effectiveness as a propaganda tool has been severely limited since the defeat in Stalingrad at the latest. The Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda had issued the “Ordinance on Extraordinary Radio Measures” on the first day of the war. It banned the deliberate eavesdropping on enemy broadcasters and, above all, threatened the transmission of “enemy propaganda” with severe penalties (“in particularly severe cases with death”). But there were offenders who obtained information at risk of death and passed it on to hopefully trustworthy people at risk of death. The German field post in the Second World War and personal reports from vacationers at the front also brought knowledge of the real military situation to the population, always threatened by the possible accusation of "enemy propaganda" and " destruction of military strength ". The increasing destruction of German cities by air strikes by Allied bomber units also made it increasingly clear that the vision of the final victory that the newsreels conjured up to the last would not come true.

Offshoot

The following productions with news reports that were made using the film material shown in the "Deutsche Wochenschau" are also known:

  • for the field replacement army of the Wehrmacht: The "Frontschau" (as training and demonstration films)
  • for use outside the Reich: "UfA Europe week", "Ufa foreign sound week"
  • for the Wehrmacht and NSDAP : "Monthly photo reports"
  • As summaries: "Descheg Monthly Show", the "Panorama" monthly show in color

See also

literature

  • Ulrike Bartels: The newsreel in the Third Reich. Development and function of a mass medium with special consideration of ethnic-national content (= European university publications. Series 3: History and its auxiliary sciences. Vol. 995). Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2004, ISBN 3-631-52570-2 (at the same time: Göttingen, University, dissertation, 1996).
  • Paul Virilio : War and Cinema, Logistics of Perception. Translated from the French by Frieda Grafe and Enno Patalas . Hanser, Munich et al. 1986, ISBN 3-446-14510-9 (partial edition of: Guerre et Cinema. ).
  • Roel Vande Winkel: Nazi newsreels in Europe, 1939–1945: the many faces of Ufa's foreign weekly newsreel versus German's weekly newsreel (German weekly newsreel). In: Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Vol. 24, No. 1, 2004, pp. 5-34, doi: 10.1080 / 0143968032000184470 .

Web links

Commons : Deutsche Wochenschau  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Article: The newsreel as a means of Nazi propaganda on shoa.de

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Spiegel.de: Wenn Bilder Lügen - The true date of the last weekly newsreel issue .
  2. ↑ Mysterious places: Hitler's Reich Chancellery ( Memento of the original from August 27, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.daserste.de
  3. ↑ chroniknet.de: daily entries for January 1945 - day: 23.01.1945 .
  4. ^ Martin Loiperdinger : Film censorship and self-control. In: Wolfgang Jacobsen , Anton Kaes, Hans Helmut Prinzler (Hrsg.): History of German film. 2nd, updated and expanded edition. JB Metzler, Stuttgart et al. 2004, ISBN 3-476-01952-7 , pp. 534-537, here p. 537.