Modernity, World Wars and Dictatorships | 135‘Actualitades Ufa’ also appeared in Franco’s Spain until the domestic news-
reel ‘NO-DO’ prevailed in 1941.
Second World War newsreels are considered virtuoso propaganda and have
frequently been analysed. Their dramatic images of combat were the achieve-
ment of propaganda units, Propaganda-Kompanien (PK), formed as early as
1938, each including over 250 newspaper journalists, photojournalists, film
journalists, and radio reporters, as well as a total of around 300 film journal-
ists. These propaganda units, whose numbers reached fifteen thousand men in
1942, were part of the combat troops and thus not independent journalists.
They were allowed a fair amount of freedom to film at the front, and their job
was to try to capture battle scenes which looked as authentic as possible. They
sent their film material to Berlin, where selection, recompilation and often
dubbing were undertaken under the surveillance of the Ministry of Propa-
ganda – sometimes on approval by Goebbels himself.
As quantitative analyses have shown, reports on the German troops now
made up half of the newsreels (Bartels 2004: 427). With their rapid, some-
times abrupt transitions (hard cuts) and contrasts as well as alternating long
shots and close-ups, the images resembled Riefenstahl’s aesthetics. Without
reference to place, they portrayed advancing soldiers, modern technology, and
the romance of a soldier’s life within short anecdotal narratives. Especially
in the first few years of the war, they not only constituted a link between
home and the front, but more often than not were the real cinema attrac-
tion. Instances of defeat were mentioned indirectly at best, which undermined
the reports’ credibility, particularly in the case of Stalingrad. Whereas initially
German casualties were for the most part omitted, towards the end of the war
newsreels graphically showed violence directed against German women, who
even related their experiences of being raped by Soviet soldiers. Such reporting
was intended to stir up fears and rally the populace for the ‘Volkssturm’.
As was the case in the West in the 1930s, the era of National Socialism also
experienced a general cinema boom. In 1936/37, the number of theatregoers
once more reached the previous high of 1928. The viewers’ social spectrum
also became broader: the lower classes were now spending twice as much on
films than they had ten years previously. Moreover, the NSDAP introduced
film into small villages where the medium had hardly been heard of before.
Since socialistic films were prohibited, film theatres often brought together
different social classes by force of circumstance. The Hollywood-like promo-
tion of film stars probably also furthered this surmounting of social borders
between the viewers of successful films. Nonetheless, socio-cultural distinc-
tions were still evident in the cinema of the 1930s (Ross 2006: 185–93).
Even in dictatorships, viewer behaviour co-determined how films were
interpreted. Reports on Germany by both SD informers and the exiled SPD
frequently documented audience reactions: patriotic scenes or advancing