Hitler and Film: The Führer's Hidden Passion by Bill Niven (review)

Given the large number of books published on the Nazi film industry in general and on Adolf Hitler in particular, I was skeptical initially that Bill Niven's book, Hitler and Film, would offer anything more than a rehash of information available elsewhere, even if scattered. However, Niven's book does present new research, making it worthwhile reading for specialists, even if some chapters are only of interest to general readers with no prior knowledge of the subject.

Niven begins by discussing Hitler's film-viewing habits at his mountain retreat at the Berghof and also in Berlin's Reich Chancellery. It is well known in academic circles that Hitler, like Stalin, was an incurable movie buff, but just what he saw has been less clear, as was the fact that Hitler apparently watched movies obsessively every night from the mid-1930s to the start of the war. He had a preference for films with rich visuals and a bias against dialogue-heavy films, privileging the newest German productions, but also was a big fan of Laurel and Hardy. Indeed, Hitler viewed many foreign films that were banned in the German Reich, including American films, such as Shirley Temple's Captain January (1936) and Greta Garbo's Camille (1936), the latter despite its Jewish director, George Cukor.

Hitler was apparently also sometimes involved in the banning of a film or in lifting a ban. Thus, Hitler initially banned a couple of anti-Communist propaganda films, White Slaves (1937) and Strong Hearts (1937), until the filmmakers had made changes, making the works even more stringently anti-Communist. When Paramount asked Hitler to lift a ban on The Jungle Princess (1936), the Film Censorship Office released the film in March 1938, despite its director, Wilhelm Thiele, being a German-Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany (37).

At other times, Hitler advocated for the production of specific propaganda films, even though he personally preferred mindless entertainment. Thus, Hitler got involved in the production of a documentary short about euthanasia, Victims of the Past (1937), arguing that its repellent images would convince Germans of the need for such a policy. He was also directly involved in the production of a Karl Ritter film about the Spanish Civil War, In Battle Versus the World Enemy: German Volunteers in Spain (1939), but it was of course his sponsoring of Leni Riefenstahl and her Nazi Party Rally films that demonstrate most clearly Hitler's propagandistic agenda to produce films of high artistic quality and still convey ideology, as Niven notes: "Politics, then, must find expression in culture, and culture must be imbued with politics; the two were intertwined, for Hitler, in a reciprocal relationship" (59).

As Niven's fifth chapter indicates, Adolf Hitler was ubiquitous in the German newsreels, at times attending premieres of German films he wished to support, including Dawn (1933), a film about World War I U-boats, and Hitler Youth Quex (1933), about a Hitler Youth who becomes a martyr for the cause. But Hitler's appearance in the newsreels was specifically designed to create the cult of personality that was Hitler. An Ufa short, Our Führer (1934), was released specifically for the German "elections" in August 1934, which formally ratified the unification of chancellor and president in Adolf Hitler. The weekly newsreels thereafter took pains to portray Hitler as a man of the people, always in attendance at major holidays and events, and a man of peace who was reluctantly forced to wage war against enemy aggressors, even as he planned invasions behind the scenes. The high point of Hitler's visibility was the period of Nazi victories from September 1940 to the defeat of France in 1940. Thereafter Hitler's image became ever scarcer, as the war took its toll on his physical appearance. As Niven notes, "Because many Germans had abandoned themselves to Hitler, when he abandoned them by not showing himself, some of them, at least...