The German Genius

had spent so much time), Baumann said, “The great thing about having a long life is that one can correct his mistakes.”
     
     
    In an age before television, Goebbels well understood the power of radio. He inherited a system of centralized control but even so his propaganda ministry acquired all the shares in the National Broadcasting Company, which exercised an influence on other—more peripheral—broadcasting outfits. Pressure was put on electrical companies to produce cheap radio sets—so all citizens could own one—and to construct them so that they could not receive foreign broadcasts.
    Hitler moved in on the filmmakers as soon as he moved on the artists. One of Goebbels’s first initiatives when he was appointed propaganda minister was to call together Germany’s most prominent filmmakers and show them Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, his 1925 masterpiece that commemorated the revolution and was both a work of art and a piece of propaganda. “Gentlemen,” Goebbels announced when the lights came on, “that’s an idea of what I want from you.” The minister wasn’t looking for obvious propaganda; he was clever and knew better. But films must glorify the Reich: there was to be no argument about that. At the same time, he insisted that every cinema must include in its program a government-sponsored newsreel and, on occasion, a short documentary. 20
    By the outbreak of war, Goebbels’s newsreels could be as long as forty minutes, but it was the documentaries that had the most effect. Technically brilliant, they were masterminded by Leni Riefenstahl, an undistinguished actress in the Weimar years who had reinvented herself as a director and editor. The best was Triumph des Willens ( Triumph of the Will ; 1935), commissioned by Hitler himself as a record of the first party convention at Nuremberg in 1934. Sixteen camera crews were involved and when it was shown, after two years of editing, the film had a mesmerizing effect. The endless torch-lit parades, one speaker after another shouting into the microphone, the massive regularity of Brownshirts and Blackshirts absorbed in the rhetoric and then bellowing “Sieg Heil” in unison, were hypnotic.
    Almost as clever was Olympia , which Goebbels ordered to be made about the 1936 Olympic Games, staged in Berlin. It was there that the modern Olympic Games emerged, thanks to the Nazis. They implemented the idea of the “torch run,” whereby a flaming torch was carried by runners from Greece to Berlin, arriving in time to open the games in style.
    For Riefenstahl’s film of the games she had the use of eighty cameramen and crew, and shot 1.3 million feet of film, eventually producing, in 1938, a two-part, six-hour movie with soundtracks in German, English, French, and Italian. She ennobled good losers, supreme winners, and dwelled on fine musculature, particularly that of Jesse Owens, the Negro athlete from the United States who, to Hitler’s extreme displeasure, won four gold medals. Some of Olympia ’s sections, particularly those dealing with platform diving, are unsurpassingly beautiful. But Riefensthal was not the only “heroine” of Nazi cinema: Kristina Söderbaum, Lilian Harvey, and Zarah Leander were all fêted. 21
    After the war started, Goebbels used all the powers at his command to make the most of propaganda. Cameramen accompanied the Stuka bombers and Panzer divisions as they knifed through Poland—but these documentaries were not only used for audiences back home. Specially edited versions were shown to government officials in Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Romania to underline “the futility of resistance.”
    T HE S ONG OF THE S TUKAS
     
    Goebbels used to say that victory makes its own propaganda, while defeat “calls for creative genius,” a sentiment that sums up the career of the film director Karl Ritter. 22 A pilot in World War I, Ritter became one of the top two or three film directors in the Third Reich.
    After World War I Ritter tried his luck as an artist in Munich, and it was there that he first heard Hitler speak. Devastated by the outcome of the war, Ritter found Hitler’s message more than congenial and joined the NSDAP in 1925. He found his way into films via poster design and public relations and in 1933, UFA, one of Germany’s leading film companies (which would soon become the leading film company) offered him work as production director of Hitlerjunge Quex ( Hitler Youth Quex ), arguably the