Triumph of the Will

The rally, from the great Nuremburg rallies to the parade through the streets of small towns like Northeim which I refer to in my e-book on the Nazis control of Germany, was always a part of Nazi control, as they had been a part of the Nazis rise to power.

In this short piece I am going to take a more detailed look at the 1934 Nuremburg rally which was filmed by Leni Riefenstahl. It became the epic film, Triumph of the Will, studied by students of the cinema to this day for the way camera, light and editing was used to create a masterpiece of propaganda. Riefenstahl used thirty cameras, some with telephoto and wide-angle lenses. She had a crew of 120 helping her. Nothing like it had been produced before.

Riefenstahl was a fan. She described seeing Hitler speak: ‘It seemed as if the earth’s surface was spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth.’[1] I’m sure you feel the same way when you here your Headmaster speak in assembly!

She set out to portray Hitler as a superhero. The film begins with his plane flying over Nuremburg delivering the messiah to his people. And Hitler’s speech, delivered by him standing alone below the ‘blood flag’ (the flag carried in the beer hall putsch) but above the massed rank of worshippers (250,000 of them attended the week-long rally), with flags and banners waving, 130 searchlights reaching up into the night, the flames of torches too, the “Sieg Heil” rising up from the ranks  – it was like a religious service. It was the ‘national community’ at worship. William L. Shirer, author of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, was at the rally: ‘I’m beginning to comprehend, I think’, he wrote in his diary, ‘some of the reasons for Hitler’s astonishing success.’[2] It was truly powerful stuff – you should watch snippets of it on YouTube.

Triumph of the Will showed Hitler as the leader supreme, he always stood alone, apart from his people. Whereas they, the people, were shown in huge numbers, disciplined, a single like-minded body. As Richard J. Evans says, ‘’it was a propaganda film designed to convince Germany and the world of the power, strength and determination of the German people under Hitler’s leadership.’[3] It was the only documentary made of Hitler during the Third Reich, but then it achieved its aim.

[1] Quoted in Laurence Rees, The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler, p. 131

[2] Quoted in Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, p. 124

[3] Richard J. Evans, p. 126