Inside the Third Reich

2009

Germany

English, and German with white subtitles over picture.

R1 DVD

A Spiegel TV production in association with History Television Canada

Directed by Michael Kloft and Lutz Hackmeister

Distributed by First Run Features

Reviewer:

Bob Estreich

This impressive set includes large amounts of new footage, and war footage I have never seen before. It covers some of the areas previously only lightly explained in earlier documentaries and is the result of a lot of research and new material and sources being unearthed.

The Reich Underground

As the war turned against Germany, its leaders decided to move much of their production underground into huge caverns dug deep into the mountains. Some are still in use today by the German Army. Others were closed off except for regular inspection. Part One of this documentary largely follows Max Kabe of the Department of Mines Safety who checks the old tunnels and knows their dangers. In many tunnels the rock was never shored up. Others are flooded or the timber shoring has rotted away. Some old boreholes in unfinished tunnels (and most of them are unfinished) still have blasting charges in them.

There are poignant reminders of the war years in the abandoned tunnels – jet engines, a row of rocket motors. Hundreds of thousands of internees were diverted to the construction from the death camps. Max Mannheimer, a survivor, describes his experience at a 6-story aircraft production installation – three stories were underground. The huge concrete portal over the entrance to the tunnels is impressive, but it was smashed in by bunkerbuster bombs. 200,000 internees died on this installation alone. Life expectation was only 60 – 80 days. He weighed 37 kilos at liberation. He was lucky – other internees were sent to Dachau.

One of the largest of the tunnel systems was never used and even the local people don’t know how big it was. Mostly unfinished, there is a huge risk of falling rocks. It was to be for manufacture of BMW aero engines. Mittelwerk-Dora near Nordhausen in the Harz mountains was for building V2 rockets. The cold and humidity in the tunnels led to tuberculosis outbreaks among the slave workers. Although parts of the huge complex are opened for tourists, most remains closed for safety. There is good footage of the earliest V2 launches, a history of V2 tactics, and details of the launching and construction of launch bunkers. Northern France has one of the war’s largest V2 bunkers. It could store 500 missiles and was topped by a 55,000 ton 5-metre thick cupola covering a 15 metre high assembly hall. British bombers used 12,000 pound Tallboy bombs to bust the bunker. An interesting one is the Mimoyecques bunker, also in France, designed to fire the V3 “England Cannon”shells.

At Falkenhagen near Berlin a huge poison gas factory was being built for IG Farben.. Mustard Gas and Hydrocyanic Acid were to be produced, as well as a new terror – the nerve gas Sarin was developed here. Production was personally ordered by Hitler, and was intended to reach 500 tonnes/month – enough to wipe out a city. Fortunately the factory was not completed and Sarin never went into production.

Part Two deals with the non-industrial tunnels and city air raid shelter complexes. The Ebensee tunnel complex was to be an underground HQ for the Luftwaffe, but was never used for this. It was converted to engine factories, but the map shows the huge nature of the intended project. In Poland another underground town for 29,000 people was planned and begun, but never finished. It was to be an emergency headquarters for Hitler.

Huge complexes of air raid shelters were built in the main cities – the biggest surviving one is in Dortmund. Tunnel building continued up to the end of the war as the shelters proved inadequate for the population. Some still exist as they were left in 1945. Berlin was to feature an underground highway system that could also be used as shelters – some are in use today as the Unterlinden.

Goebbels’ private bunker was discovered under his villa in 1998 during building work. Bunkers under Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s home at Obersalzburg, are explored for the first time in decades. Another large but unfinished complex, 6km long. includes a very deep SS bunker. Construction was organized by Martin Bormann. It was attacked by US bombers, which may explain why it was never used. Martin Bormann’s private bunker under his home, guarded by machinegun posts, can only be entered now by special permit. This documentary contains what may be the only film footage existing of the well-finished bunker. Hitler barricaded himself and his remaining followers into the bunker under the Reichschancellery and committed suicide when he realized finally that the war was lost.. The documentary has rare footage of the bunker.

Exploration of salt mines found the accumulated loot of the Reich, hidden in hundreds of kilometers of old tunnels. It was found by U.S. soldiers on advice from some of the slave workers who survived the digging of the tunnels.

Firestorm

Over 1 million bombs were dropped on Germany during the war. Mass bombing was directed against civilians, just as the bombing of Rotterdam was directed against the Dutch and later the Blitz was against British civilians. Its intention was to demoralise civilians and overload refugee resources. The need for such warfare is still debated today, and is discussed in the documentary. Precision bombing was crude, and often a large part of a city was leveled to get a single factory complex anyway. Factories simply moved into the country or underground. This encouraged the growth of city-wide bombing as an alternative. The basis of the bombing was that “dehousing” people took them away from the factories and towns, depriving the industries of their workforce.

Development of British bombers and bombing/ marking techniques versus the development of the German fighter guidance system is covered in some detail. It is interesting that some German air raid shelters exist today, too well built to demolish economically. Arthur “Bomber” Harris organized the “moral bombing” of cities, knowing the old wooden city centers would burn well and set fire to the surrounding worker suburbs. Development of the small incendiary bomb allowed this weapon to be used for destruction out of proportion to the bomb’s size. 300,000 incendiary bombs were dropped on Hamburg – it was regarded as a highly successful raid. This, the first Firestorm, killed 35,000 people.

Germany tried to hold on until the V-weapons could come on line and wreak retaliation on London. Tales of the survivors show a fatalism, and they asked themselves if they would ever be able to enjoy a quiet life again. Over 100 shot down Allied pilots and crew were lynched by Germans. Yet in the end firestorm bombing did not wear down German morale enough to stop them resisting the invasion. After five years of bombing, supplies were still flowing to the Wehrmacht. Germans got the V2 flying at last – too little, too late. Several thousand V2s hit Britain and 35,000 people were killed. Bombing of German cities continued but there is argument over whether this now represented a strategic weapon or simply revenge. In the spring of 1945 Dresden, ignored until now, was bombed on the excuse that it was a center of resistance against the advancing Russians. Thousands were killed. The city was still burning 24 hours later. Remaining attacks had no strategic value whatever. Swinemunde, a Baltic port filled with 22,000 people and an unknown number of refugees, was bombed by 100 bombers at Russian request. 15,000 died. It was an evacuation port, but had no military value. Germany would not surrender, so it was punished.

Television under the Third Reich

Since 1935 the first public TV broadcast in the world was going out from the Paul Nipkow studios in Berlin. 285 rolls of film were recently found in the Berlin National Film Archives. They were restored and copied, and some of the results appear in this documentary. They contain propaganda, entertainment, and news (called Topical Events or Topical Picture Broadcasting). They developed outside broadcasts, and later broadcast direct, but most were shot onto 35mm film and broadcast later. TV was something of a propaganda victory for Germany, but this documentary shows that they never used its possibilities to the fullest extent.

TV looked a little primitive compared with, say, Leni Riefenstahl’s carefully set up films. Broadcast commentary was more like radio broadcasting. The film had long shots, with little cutting and editing. Quality was not great. Most entertainment was performances by leading radio personalities. Propaganda songs fitted well into the format. There were very few TV sets, mostly owned by technicians and party officials. Some public “television parlours” were available and proved popular. The TV sets needed constant careful adjustment. The 1936 Summer Olympics spurred interest. More parlours opened, better cameras were built, careful presentation and better narration were introduced. Vision at the Olympics was fed from the camera to a truck where it was transferred to film, developed instantly, then fed into a transmitter, all in less than a minute. It was something of a technical showpiece in spite of its underdeveloped status.

Programming matured, showing more of the German social infrastructure and daily life. News shared time with cooking shows, interviews with Party personalities, womens shows, sports, hunter’s conventions “for the animals know that the hunters are their best friends” and, of course, Nazi parades. There was no critical journalism, though. Propaganda was becoming stronger on the new medium, although the Party still did not see much use for it. The documentary shows an early anti-Bolshevism exhibition, Goebbels railing against the Jews, and the Nuremberg rallies. 1936 saw the rally transmitted live, but still backed up to film. The quality of the sound and vision is remarkably good on the cleaned-up film. By 1937 they were broadcasting up to four hours per day (which included a lot of reruns). The search for content led to a lot of odd footage, such as on fish breeding, and this gives a snapshot of German life at the time. It is this that makes the archive particularly valuable.

The outbreak of war meant fewer resources to expand TV set production. Programming was more propaganda oriented. The first mention of “anthropological and race experiments” slipped into one documentary. Programming now included helpful hints for the hausfrau – how to make old clothes last for longer, cooking around shortages, home gardening and preserving of vegetables. There was no direct war footage, but communiqués and reports were inserted in the news. In spite of this, interest in TV was waning at an official level. To get themselves reclassified as an essential industry, the company turned to entertaining the troops. Eleven military hospitals were wired up for TV. A strong propaganda element crept in to convince the convalescing troops that everything was well in the German world. They also broadcast in France which had a thriving TV industry of its own. It became harder to broadcast as the towers became targets for bombers. Poignantly, one of the last pieces of film in the documentary is a motivational talk to help legless soldiers make the most of their life. A young couple dancing : “So you’ve had both legs amputated?” “Yes, life is wonderful”

The Goebbels Experiment

This very personal documentary follows the life of Josef Goebbels through the entries in his diaries. They show his relationship with Hitler, and give a picture of a lonely boy who found in Hitler a hero he could worship. Goebbels was a sickly child with a damaged foot. He became a solitary boy. He read a lot, including Hitler and other revolutionaries, and started to become anti-semitic. He developed as an effective orator for the National Socialist Party, which he found satisfying. He met Hitler, came to like him, and came to believe in his political ideals. His contact with Hitler got him a job with the Party as an orator and meeting organizer.

After studying Sergei Eisenstein’s Ten Days That Shook The World, Goebbels took an interest in propaganda. This marked the beginning of a long period of internal conflict, highs and lows, as his career advanced and declined. In 1929 he was promoted to head of propaganda in Munich, a post he didn’t want as he thought he was being pushed out of the power center in Berlin. He saw this as a loss of interest in him by Hitler, but continued to do his best. As the Nazi party started to win elections, his morale improved. He moved back to Berlin and started to become the face of the Party, introducing Hitler at many public rallies. In Berlin he was undermined by the SA and Himmler, who were seeking their own power. With Hitler’s rise to political power he found himself sidelined again – he had hoped to become Minister for Broadcasting, Once again he lost faith in Hitler. By 1933 his propaganda expertise was becoming noticed internationally, a matter which gave him some pride. He reorganized the Ministries’ opinion makers to remove those he thought were less effective. He also started to give voice to his anti-semitic campaign. He was in his element organising the huge public spectacle rallies and parades. His fondness for his wife and children shows through in many diary entries.

The Minister for Propaganda position was becoming vacant, but once again it looked as if he may miss out. He still acted, though, as if he was already Minister. Infidelities discovered by his wife led to depression. He got back to work with anti-Jewish demonstrations, which seemed to lift his spirits somewhat. He also had to hold the Press in check while waiting for the invasion of England. He expressed admiration for Goering’s handling of the air battle, in spite of previously calling Goering an oaf and a cocaine addict.

In 1941 everything was ready for the invasion of Russia and he prepared many speeches to justify the action. Goebbels certainly enjoyed the power, travelling around the growing German empire, but he still found time to wish Berlin could be made Jew-free. Around this time he spent a lot of his time developing propaganda in the German cinema industry.

Goebbels respected Churchill’s ability to do what he himself was doing, but he had nothing but contempt for the Reich Press Officer, Dietrich, who was already speaking of success in the East in spite of the facts. Goebbels’ speeches were increasingly important to keep the German people wanting the “Total War” Hitler promised them, in spite of the sacrifices it would mean. This role became critical as air raids on German cities intensified, and supercritical as entire towns became firestorm targets. By the end of 1943 his diary entries showed pessimism creeping in. June 7, 1944, D-Day, saw him optimistic about repulsing the landing, although it appears he was not properly informed of the extent of the invasion or the inadequate preparations – in fact he seems to have been under the influence of his own propaganda. He was also overenthusiastic about the effects of the V weapons on the British. He noted that the Germans were now starting to want the truth, not glossy propaganda, and perhaps it was time to give it to them.

The realities of the Russian advance were getting closer to Berlin and the front was now only a few days from Berlin. Goebbels was still promoting Total War, although by now he appeared to be talking as much to convince himself as the German troops. Was he losing touch with reality? Even as the Russians were in Berlin’s suburbs, he was plotting revenge against a man in his old home town who was collaborating with the Americans. He continued making speeches until the end. This came in the main bunker under the Reichs Chancellery. He, his wife and children took poison, and his body was partly burnt.

I cannot praise this documentary set enough. It covers important details of the war that have been ignored before and makes best use of the recently rediscovered sources. The underground scenes are powerful and must have been achieved at some risk to the cameraman and crew. The use of Goebbels’ diaries gives an insight into a man who was there almost from the start. The quantity and quality of rare or unpublished footage is impressive, giving a total length of over six hours. This set deserves a place on your shelf.

This review will appear in Volume 2 No.3 (2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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