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Creating the enemy: anti-British Nazi film propaganda.

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The invasion of Poland having been successfully completed in the early autumn of 1939 and the campaigns in Norway, Denmark, and Western Europe in the following spring, the Nazi war machine set its sights on Great Britain. In order to galvanize the German public for a military offensive that would undoubtedly meet with much greater resistance than had been encountered heretofore, Joseph Goebbels and the Ministry for Propaganda commissioned the production of several feature films designed to stir up anti-British sentiment among the German people.

As both Erwin Leiser (95-105) and David Welch (257-62) have pointed out, German films made during the Third Reich prior to the outbreak of World War II paint a more sympathetic, though not completely positive picture of the British than do those made alter 1939. Films like A Man Must Return to Germany and The Riders of German East-Africa, both made in 1934 and set during the First World War, portray the British as a foe to be respected. With Traitor, which premiered at the Nuremberg Nazi Party rally in 1936, the image began to change. And with two 1940 productions, The Rothschilds, which describes the emergence of a so-called "Jewish-British Plutocracy," and The Fox of Glenarvon, cataloguing the brutal British oppression of the Irish, full-blown anti-British propaganda had emerged.

The culmination of the anti-British program was reached with the production of three films set in Africa. Ohm Kruger and Carl Peters were both released in 1941. The former portrays President Paul Kruger's tenacious fight against British domination in South Africa and British atrocities during the Boer War. Carl Peters warns prophetically of the grave dangers of a growing British imperialism. Two years later the third film, Germanin, showed the British to be a heartless and opportunistic colonial power.

While each of these eight films were Staatsauftragsfilme, or films specifically commissioned by Joseph Goebbels's propaganda ministry (Welch 273-81), there is little doubt that Ohm Kruger was the most successful of them all, not only from the standpoint of anti-British propaganda but also as a compelling historical feature film. And more money was spent on the production of Ohm Kruger than on any other film of the period except Kolberg and Munchhausen (Albrecht 417-29), indicating that it assumed a special position in the ministry's anti-British program.

Despite strong scholarly interest in films of the Third Reich in recent years, no one has yet undertaken a thematic analysis of the anti-British propaganda in Nazi-era feature films and a comparison of these themes with those of the...

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