132 | Mass Media and Historical Change
also informed about Nazi atrocities. German-language BBC programmes
already began very detailed reporting on the Holocaust in June 1942, and
even daily in the week before Christmas 1942. These programmes were in
turn taken up by other stations, like the Dutch ‘Radio Oranje’, among others
(Longerich 2006: 438).
Film and Propaganda
Research has given particular attention to movies and newsreels during the
Nazi era. While historians soon examined the organisation of film policy,
media historians concentrated on writing numerous movie analyses based on
aesthetics and content (Segeberg 2004, among others). In general one can
recognise structural similarities to Nazi press and radio policy. What char-
acterised the cinema during National Socialism were not such well-known
propaganda films as ‘Triumph of the Will’, ‘Jud Süss’ and ‘The Eternal Jew’,
although research has focused on these until the present day, and they could
sometimes indeed be very successful, as was the case with ‘Jud Süss’. But of
the more than a thousand films produced between 1933 and 1945, the ratio
of apparently non-political films dominated – and this is especially true in
regard to the numbers of cinemagoers. Close to half were comedies and a good
quarter were melodramas, whereas directly propagandistic movies accounted
for between 10 and 25 per cent of all productions, depending on the counting
(Welch 2001: 36).
Explicit propaganda movies appeared most frequently in the wake of
general NS radicalisation around 1937 and again in 1940/41, while the pro-
portion of comedies further increased especially after the defeat at Stalingrad
in 1943, which demonstrates that cinema functioned as a means of dis-
traction. The war film genre also played merely a subordinate role. Explicit
propaganda movies were likewise relatively rare in the Fascist dictatorships
of Italy and Spain. Here, too, comedies and melodramas were dominant.
Spanish comedies were reputed to contain double entendre, which fostered
subversive hilarity (Marsh 2006: 39f.; Zimmermann 2007: 210–13). It is
noticeable that many propaganda films made use of historical subject matter
as a means of conveying their ideas with more subtlety and universality. The
stories of great men like Robert Koch, Carl Peters and Andreas Schlüter,
and historical conflicts and battles such as Patriots, Jud Süß and Kolberg
were among these. This historically founded propaganda could also be found
in Italy and Great Britain (Fox 2007: 223–43). Nazi propaganda movies
were definitely not very aesthetically innovative, Leni Riefenstahl’s works
notwithstanding. A comparison with earlier Weimar film-making makes this
clear.