Film Propaganda: Triumph of the Will as a Case Study

Author(s): Alan Sennett

Source: Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Vol. 55, No. 1 (2014), pp. 45-65
Published by: Wayne State University Press
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Film Propaganda: Triumph of the Will
as a Case Study

Alan Sennett

Until a reassessment by historians and film critics in the 1990s, Leni Riefenstahl’s
cinematic “record” of the September 1934 Nazi party rally had generally been
regarded as the quintessential example of the art of political film propaganda.
Susan Sontag argued in a seminal article for the New York Review of Books that
Riefenstahl’s “superb” films of the 1930s were powerful propaganda as well as
important documentary art made by “a film-maker of genius.”1 She concluded
that Triumph des Willens/Triumph of the Will (DE, 1935) was “a film whose very
conception negates the possibility of the filmmaker’s having an aesthetic concep-
tion independent of propaganda.”2 Although still an important source, Sontag’s
assessment has been seriously challenged on a number of counts. While her 1975
essay certainly breaks with an earlier insistence upon the separation of artist from
historical context,3 it nevertheless makes huge claims for the quality and power
of Riefenstahl’s film as both art and political propaganda that are difficult to
sustain. Brian Winston, the prominent media scholar, has argued that the film
might better be seen as the antithesis of persuasive propaganda and that it is more
powerful as a warning against the very political and social ideas the film espouses
rather than a successful projection of them.4 Moreover, Winston contends that
the film does not stand up very strongly as a work of art and is certainly far from
the masterpiece Sontag and others such as Richard M. Barsam claim it to be.5
For her own part, Riefenstahl always maintained that she was not a political
filmmaker and her film was not propaganda but a documentary record of the
Nuremberg rally. She maintained, perhaps most passionately in Ray Müller’s 1993
film, that she had been engaged—reluctantly on her part—in a technical exercise

Framework 55, No. 1, Spring 2014, pp. 45–65. Copyright © 2014 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

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Alan Sennett

to document the event and had no interest in or sympathy with the political views
of the National Socialists.6
Clearly, this dispute over the film’s nature, purpose, and status raises questions
about its production history and wider issues around the characteristics of politi-
cal cinema and the specific nature of film propaganda as a form of political cinema.
In an attempt to explore the relationship between art, politics, and propaganda,
this paper addresses three main issues. Firstly, how can we conceptualize “political
propaganda” and how has this concept been understood by some of those who
study film history? Secondly, how does Riefenstahl’s film function as political
propaganda? Can it be argued that technical and aesthetic qualities help under-
score the film’s political aims? Thirdly, is it possible to judge the effectiveness of
the film as a piece of propaganda in its historical time and place? Indeed, a major
concern here will be to restore a crucial element absent in so many discussions of
the film, namely that of its specific historical context.

Defining Propaganda
In the English-speaking world, there is a tendency to apportion a negative mean-
ing to the term “propaganda.” Here propaganda connotes the dissemination of
particular messages of a dishonest and dangerous kind; ones usually associated
with authoritarian and tyrannical regimes. Propaganda is associated with the
manipulation of large numbers of people and is seen to involve deliberately
misleading them either by obscuring reality with a partial or slanted view, or
through downright lies. Yet it is evident that in some cultures the term has retained
its Catholic usage alongside the modern negative sense. In Latinate languages,
the term retains something of its original meaning of “propagation” and is used
as a colloquial expression meaning advertising or “junk mail.” Yet it is important
to reflect upon the fact that propagandizing has not always been thought of
as something to be ashamed of. It can be viewed as a positive activity, as in the
original use of the term by the Catholic Church in its 1622 Sacra Congregatio de
Propaganda Fide. Here the reference is to the active promotion of a worldview
perceived to be the absolute and unquestionable truth.7
In the Anglophone world, the tendency has been to avoid the label “propa-
gandist” even when describing agencies with a clearly propagandistic purpose.
If Nazi Germany had its Ministry of Propaganda, wartime Britain simply had
a Ministry of Information and the United States an Office of War Information.
Thus, the democracies eschewed the propaganda label and claimed to produce
“information” to counter the “propaganda” of the regimes of which democratic
Western society disapproved. The implication is that “our” information is bal-
anced and honest whereas “their” propaganda is one-sided and deceitful, designed

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 Triumph of the Will

to transmit a false view of the world. Our “ideas” are open to contention, their
“ideology” is closed and totalitarian. Thus, the process of defining what constitutes
propaganda has been a highly politicized and controversial matter that must itself
be viewed in historical context.
The film historian Richard Taylor has argued in favor of a tight definition of
propaganda that helps us avoid any confusion with claims simply to be supplying
information or “enlightening” the public. For Taylor,

propaganda is concerned with the transmission of ideas and/or values from one
person, or group of persons, to another. Where “propagation” is the action, there
“propaganda” is the activity.8

Hence, propaganda, in order to qualify as such, must be both intentional and

purposeful. It involves a conscious and deliberate action on the part of the
propagandist and must always have an aim. This ultimate purpose affords the
propaganda act its distinctiveness. Propaganda, Taylor insists, cannot be com-
municated unintentionally or accidentally. On the contrary, the propagandist
is highly conscious of the message she wishes to convey and wittingly employs
techniques of persuasion and manipulation to achieve her ends. This would seem
to preclude the possibility of propaganda being made by a producer unaware of
the political content or significance of their work. Yet it would seem reasonable
to suppose that such a work might be consciously used as propaganda by others.
Certain artistic products might also acquire political significance in a specific
context and in relation to other ideas and attitudes circulating in a particular
historical moment.
It follows that in order to be able to describe an activity as “propaganda” we
must be able to uncover a connection between the propagandist and her audience.
There must be a link between the act of propagating and an intended audience.
Whether or not the propagandist is successful is quite another matter. It is the
intention and purpose that counts. In the mid-1930s, Aldous Huxley commented
that political and religious propaganda only held sway over those who were already
partially or wholly convinced of the truth of its core message. As he noted:

Propaganda gives force and direction to the successive movements of popular

feeling and desire; but it does not do much to create these movements. The
propagandist is a man who canalizes an already existing stream. In a land where
there is no water, he digs in vain.9

Thus, the propagandist deals with ideas, perceptions, and emotions that already
have social currency. But must she strive to conceal her message from the audience?

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Alan Sennett

Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, certainly thought that the propaganda

message should ideally be disguised.10 He believed that propaganda had far less
of an impact once the audience became conscious of the message. Hence, he
tended to favor the production of entertainment films that engaged the viewer
and delivered messages through an emotional involvement with characters and
storyline.11 While it is common in the literature to note that out of the 1,094 films
made during the Nazi period only 153 were classified by the regime as “political,” it
is evident that all filmmakers in Germany operated within a broader ideological
context as well as being subject to pre-censorship, censorship, and many other
controlling institutional mechanisms.12 Does this mean, then, that all films made
during the Nazi period should be seen as “political” in the broad sense that they
contain messages and were required to conform to or not contradict the ideologi-
cal norms of the regime? Or is it possible to make a distinction between films that
are “made politically” and films that are entertainment?
Such a discussion draws us inexorably toward questions of politics and
ideology. Steve Neale points to the distinction between films produced in Nazi
Germany that were unequivocally designed as political propaganda and those that
served the function of propaganda.13 He insists that what he calls the “specificity
of propaganda” resides in the “use to which a particular text is put, to its function
within a particular situation, to its place within cinema conceived as a social
practice.”14 This means that a film lacking in propagandist textual properties might
nevertheless serve a propaganda function in a specific historical conjuncture,
within certain institutional spaces and with regard to a particular audience.
Hence, the mass of “entertainment” films produced during the Third Reich can be
analyzed in relation to whether or not their texts contain ideological features that
reinforce National Socialist ideas and preoccupations, the specific institutional
production setting and their specific viewing contexts.
Riefenstahl’s claim to have documented events touches upon another issue
relating to the nature of propaganda namely, its veracity. Often the most effective
propaganda involves the truth or, at least, a version of it. Arguments that appeal to
something an audience perceives to be true or real may permit the propagandist
to gain its trust. Modern political propaganda came of age during the First World
War and in the context of mass society and new forms of mass communication.
If earlier propaganda was often targeted at elites or specific groups, now whole
populations were routinely addressed through film, radio, newspapers, and posters
often with the involvement of state institutions.15 The use of actuality footage,
photographs, and eye witness accounts was a common device that gave depictions
of what were unquestionably real events the appearance of realism. Yet the appeal
to “truth” in propaganda is not an end in itself but rather a means to an end. It
appears to validate the claim of the propagandist to be revealing life as it actually

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 Triumph of the Will

is. Of course, the impression that what an audience sees on the screen is in some
way “true” belies the selective and manipulative nature of the medium.
If one accepts the impossibility of making nonpolitical art, or to be more
precise, making art nonpolitically, there remains a question over the exact point
at which the political content of art may be described as propaganda. Once again,
Neale’s insistence upon contemporaneity is worth noting. He suggests that “pro-
paganda places the spectator in relationships with discourses and practices existing
outside of the text.”16 An audience may be in agreement with some and in conflict
with others. But this relationship may change over time. Hence, what functions
as “propaganda” in 1935 may not do so if the external practices and discourses
alter. This would seem to argue in favor of a “moment of propaganda” that is not
simply defined by the political message of the film but through its relationship
to a specific historical conjuncture. Thus, when considering the politics of art we
need to examine the viewing context as much as the intentions of the producer
and its conditions of production. All of the above can be taken as a framework for
analyzing our case study, Triumph of the Will, the production history and nature
of which we will now address.

Filming the Führer

Triumph of the Will was commissioned by Hitler himself as a “record” of the
sixth Nazi party congress held at Nuremberg, September 4–10, 1934. The film
was intended to be an artistic work that would convey a sense of spectacle by
making use of a documentary-style approach. To this end, Riefenstahl was
given unprecedented facilities, generous state funding, and access to the party
hierarchy. Accounts give different figures, but it seems that at least 170 people
were directly involved in the filming. Apart from SA and SS bodyguards, these
included: eighteen film cameramen and sixteen assistants with thirty cameras;
sixteen newsreel cameramen;17 four sound trucks; and twenty-two chauffeur-
driven cars.18 In addition, Riefenstahl was provided with an airship and a plane.
She was able to set up special camera positions, which included a camera lift on
an iron flag mast in the stadium. There was also to be an opportunity to restage
shots at a later date. Music was to be composed by a leading film composer,
Herbert Windt.
As Neale has pointed out, documentaries cannot be deemed to portray “real-
ity” simply because the camera becomes the spectator. The viewer’s gaze is directed
at whatever the filmmaker desires him or her to see. While the subject matter is real
enough, the image is a construction and perhaps a distortion of reality. The viewer
is thus manipulated by the filmmaker despite, or rather because of, the ostensible
reality of the image on screen.19 Triumph of the Will clearly displays this stratagem.

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Figure 1. Hitler with Riefenstahl and locals during the filming of Triumph.

Indeed, it is so contrived that some of the preparations for the rally were built
around the organisation of the filming. This was effectively acknowledged in the
1935 illustrated booklet about the making of the film.20 Most of the camera crew
were dressed in grey uniforms rather than, as most accounts would have it, Nazi
uniforms.21 The aim was to give the impression they were part of the rally, which
in a real sense they were. Some scenes were rehearsed beforehand rather than, as
was meant to appear, simply captured as a record of the rally. In her editing of the
film, Riefenstahl reordered events22 and even restaged some speeches for dramatic
impact. In total, she shot sixty-one hours of film, which was cut down to just under
two hours over five months of intensive and exhaustive editing.23
Although later she would deny that the film was a manipulation and insisted
upon the term “documentary,”24 it is clear that the staging of sequences, such as
the “Labour Service Rally” with its almost balletic quality, gives the film a status
closer to that of an epic feature film. Hitler plays the leading role and has the bulk
of the dialogue. He is supported by an all-male cast with brief “walk on” parts by
key Nazi figures and thousands of extras. Indeed the central aesthetic conception
of the film is that of a grand spectacle. This level of artifice and organization would

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 Triumph of the Will

seem to run counter to the description of Triumph as a documentary and perhaps

places it in the category of “staged documentary.”
Turning to the overt political content of the film, it is evident that the aim
was to convey the message of Hitler’s unchallenged legitimacy and authority over
both the party and Germany itself. Riefenstahl’s film of the previous year’s rally,
Victory of Faith (Leni Riefenstahl, DE, 1933), had become unacceptable not for
technical reasons, but because it portrayed Ernst Röhm as a figure almost on a par
with Hitler.25 On June 30, 1934, Röhm and other possible threats to Hitler’s posi-
tion in the Nazi party had been surgically removed. Now the Führer’s supremacy
needed to be sealed in the minds of both party and nation. Hitler himself chose
the title “Triumph of the Will” to convey the particular double meaning both of
his personal triumph over party factionalism and the “triumph of the will of the
German people.” To this end, the film is prefaced by a solemn declaration that
clearly situates the sixth party rally in the historical context of Germany after
World War One and the role of the National Socialist movement:

Documentary of the Reich Party Day 1934

Produced by Order of the Führer
Created by Leni Riefenstahl
On September 5, 1934,
20 years after the outbreak of the World War . . .
16 years after the beginning of our suffering . . .
19 months after the beginning of the German renaissance . . .
Adolf Hitler flew again to Nuremberg to review the columns of his
faithful followers . . .

The film’s opening sequence is shot from inside Hitler’s plane as it descends
through the clouds, a scene which prompted Siegfried Kracauer to comment
upon its closeness in symbolism and aesthetics to the “mountain films” of Arnold
Fank in which Riefenstahl starred.26 One might also mention her own 1932
directorial debut film The Blue Light (Leni Riefenstahl, DE, 1932), whose images
of cloud-shrouded mountains and mystical overtones find parallels in Triumph.
Stunning glimpses of Nuremberg are revealed through the clouds in an attempt
to convey a sense of spatial scale. Hitler’s plane casts a shadow over the medieval
city indicating that Germany has now been released from the torment of the
post-Versailles years. Hitler’s plane literally as well as metaphorically carries the
Nazi message that Germany is “awakening” to carry out its historic mission.27 The
symbolism could hardly be more explicit. Hitler descends from the skies like a
god attending a festival in his honor. Swelling ranks of storm troopers, pageantry
and ceremony, and speeches by party bigwigs are all dedicated to one man. His

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followers exalt his leadership with pledges of loyalty, unity, and devotion to the
cause of National Socialism. For Kracauer, the film portrays the “Hitler cult”
and is the ultimate display of obedience to a leader who has supposedly rescued
Germany from the fears of social chaos that had obsessed the middle classes
during the Weimar years. In Triumph, Hitler aspires to the status of the national
historical hero Frederick the Great, something he may have felt at the time he
could only achieve on film.
Central to the ideological message of the film are five speeches by Hitler. He
seeks to legitimize the National Socialist state by reference to the war and Ver-
sailles, as well as stressing the vital role of German workers and youth. Emotions
rather than intellect are appealed to directly. Perhaps this is at its most developed
in the assembly of some 52,000 Labour Service men on the Zeppelin Field, a care-
fully choreographed sequence brimming with political significance. Possibly the
most important single aspect of Nazi politics at the time of the rally, September
1934, was the claim to be solving the problem of very high unemployment. Here
it seemed was living—even vocal—proof that Germans from all over the country
were active in the physical building of the German Reich. Moreover, the focus
upon labor seemed to endorse the ideological claims that National Socialism
had done away with class conflict and afforded manual work a status to which
Germans might aspire. In a key speech that knowingly references the cinematic
context, Hitler declares:

Men of the Labour Service! For the first time you appear before me for review
and therefore the entire German nation. You represent a great idea, and we know
for millions of our fellow followers the concept of labour will no longer be a
dividing factor but one of unification and that no longer will there be anybody in
Germany who will regard manual labour less highly than any other form of work.

A time will come when no German will be able to join the community of this
nation unless he has first been a member of your [ranks]. And you know that
not only the hundreds of thousands at Nuremberg are looking at you, but, at
this moment Germany is looking at you for the very first time. And I know just
as you are serving Germany in loyal devotion, Germany today sees, in proud joy,
its sons marching with you in your ranks!

This particular passage speaks directly to German workers whose trade unions
had been obliterated by the Nazis on May 2, 1933. The German Labour Front
was the Nazi’s replacement and the regime engaged in elaborate propaganda to
recruit workers to the aims of National Socialism. But it is clear that while the
NSDAP enjoyed currency among certain sections of the working class as well as

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the lower middle classes, Nazi party leaders remained uncertain of the strength of
their popular appeal.28 Indeed the official title of the rally, the “Reich Party Rally
of Unity and Strength,”29 unwittingly suggests the insecurity of the Nazi regime
at that moment and attests to a sense of Germany as disunited. An overriding
ideological aim was to build a “national community” that might overcome capital-
ist class conflict and would forge those seen as “racially worthwhile” into a single
community. There is nothing socialistic about this, despite the party’s title. At the
core of this national community were values of obedience, hard work, thrift, and
sacrifice of the self to the interests of the nation.30 In terms of the claims Hitler
made to be resolving Germany’s unemployment problems, joblessness actually
remained at three million in mid-1934. Compulsory labor and military service
only began from 1935, which helped unemployment fall to less than two million
by January 1937. Hitler’s idea of levelling social class divisions through a national
community thus proved more of a propaganda exercise than reality. Class divisions
remained largely unaffected by the social practices of National Socialism.31
The film situates Hitler physically above, and also apart from, the people and
the party. While the German nation is depicted as a crowd, lacking in individual
properties, Hitler is given a god-like presence through the use of close-up shots of
him speaking. The loneliness and isolation of command is evinced and his stature
enhanced by camera shots from low angles.32 The masses are both uniformed
and presented as a uniform body. For much of the film, their leader is the only
individual present. Imagery such as the geometrical shapes of the marching Nazis
and soldiers, their flags and icons show the nation as a single unit, with one agreed
purpose: the rebuilding of Germany as a great power. All this is underpinned by
dynamic use of music and a rhythmic montage style clearly influenced by Eisen-
stein’s Soviet epics of the 1920s.33 The 100,000 “extras” are there to demonstrate
the loyalty, unity, and strength of the party, united behind and through Hitler.
As Rudolf Hess says somewhat perplexingly at the end of the film: “The Party is
Hitler! Hitler, however, is Germany just as Germany is Hitler!”

Reception
Triumph of the Will was first screened on March 28, 1935, at the Ufa-Palast am
Zoo in Berlin. It was given massive publicity and official promotion. Reviews in
Germany were, naturally, gushing and for its financer and distributor, the leading
film company UFA, the film proved a commercial success. It was screened in
seventy first run cinemas to capacity audiences.34 Audience figures over 100,000
were recorded in Berlin in its first three weeks. Yet the film was never especially
popular outside the big cities, running for only a week in many provincial
theatres.35 Its lukewarm provincial reception may simply have been to do with

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its repetitive and rather tedious nature combined with a media surfeit of images
of uniformed, goose-stepping Nazis. Perhaps the film’s greatest achievement was
the international acclaim it received, winning the Gold Medal at the Venice Film
Festival in 1935 and, perhaps more remarkably, the Grand Prix at the Paris Film
Festival two years later. This apparent commendation from the European artistic
community was something Riefenstahl would later cite as evidence that her film
was “art” as opposed to propaganda.36 There is, of course, no logical reason why a
work acknowledged as art should not also be conceived and function as political
propaganda. Yet many commentators have chosen to distinguish art from pro-
paganda. Battleship Potemkin (Sergei M. Eisenstein, SU, 1925), for instance, has
often been discussed as “film art” rather than propaganda. Yet Eisenstein himself
was well aware that he used art as a weapon of class struggle and applied the term
“propaganda” to his own work in a positive sense.37 Riefenstahl was clearly very
familiar with Eisenstein’s films and utilized rhythmic montage techniques as well
as drawing from Potemkin directly. One dramatic sequence in Triumph captures
the shadows cast by marching SS troops that evokes a similar image of Cossacks
in the Odessa Steps sequence of Potemkin. Goebbels, who had no use for what
he called “purposeless art,” fully appreciated the propaganda worth of Potemkin
and desired a Nazi version. Indeed many critics have credited Riefenstahl with
producing exactly that and it may well be that she shared this conceit. Here it
would seem that in one sense at least, Eisenstein and Goebbels perceived a deep
connection between the artistic qualities of a film and its political purpose.
Within the Nazi party, Triumph was well received. Contrary to an idea much
cultivated by Riefenstahl after the war as a means of distancing herself from the
Nazis, the film was not publicly ignored by Goebbels. In fact, the opposite was
true. No one praised it in more fulsome terms and Riefenstahl received many
plaudits from the Nazi propaganda machine.38 Goebbels recommended the film
for the National Film Prize based upon its artistic merit, presenting her with the
award personally in May 1935. Yet it would be true to say that despite his public
and private admiration for the film and its director, Goebbels almost certainly felt
that no further documentary film of the Führer would be necessary. Despite his
enthusiasm for the film, Goebbels’ conception of effective propaganda involved
subtlety and disguise of the message. As he noted in 1937: “Propaganda becomes
ineffective the moment we are aware of it.”39 Thus, it was more consistent with
his perspective that feature films with historical themes such as the Frederick
the Great series should serve as vehicles for endorsing the “leadership principle.”
While Triumph would be shown by official order at particular junctures later in
the regime’s history, it would seem that the spring of 1935 was the film’s “propa-
ganda moment” and that as the broader context changed, other political messages
and formats would be required.

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Effective Propaganda?
Scholars of Nazi film propaganda have adopted very different stances on the
question of the effectiveness of Triumph as a piece of political propaganda. In the
absence of opinion polls or other indications of popular reception of the film, it
is clearly impossible to cite quantitative evidence other than the initially good
box office figures and very positive film reviews.40 The tendency among many
commentators has been to assume that because the film was evidently highly
propagandistic in nature and widely seen both inside and outside of Germany, it
must have been successful as political propaganda. David Welch, for instance, has
argued that Triumph was “the most powerful film” to show the leadership cult or
“Führer myth.” and that this was a key objective of Nazi propaganda.41 But if the
promotion of Hitler as a unifying force was indeed the prime message of the rally
in September 1934, it is questionable how successful the film was in propagating
this idea upon its screening in the spring of 1935.
One historian who demurs from the popular view that Triumph should
be rated as highly successful propaganda at the time of its release is Nicholas
Reeves. In a pivotal contribution to the study of official film propaganda, he
argues strongly that Hitler’s popularity did not revolve around his depiction
in Triumph. He thinks it was really Hitler’s domestic policies and later foreign
policy triumphs, especially from March 1936, that secured the regime ever-wider
backing.42 Reeves notes that at the time of release and widest screening in
Germany, Hitler’s popularity was declining from the high point reached with the
90 percent vote for incorporation of the Saar into Germany in January 1935 and
the reintroduction of military service in March. Both victories had struck blows
against the Versailles settlement as the Nazis had sworn to do. However, mid-1935
saw a degree of popular unease over continuing high unemployment levels, food
shortages, low wages, and a new wave of anti-Jewish violence by SA militants. It
would seem that the Nazi leadership’s popularity was not to be fully restored until
the remilitarization of the Rhineland on March 7, 1936. Reeves insists that given
this “crisis of confidence” in the regime, Triumph does not appear to have played a
very significant role in improving popular perceptions of Hitler and the other Nazi
leaders in the thirteen months between March 1935 and March 1936. Foreign policy
and economic successes of the regime would win it far greater popularity.43 This
perspective concurs with that of Ian Kershaw who mentions Gestapo and other
official reports of the time that point to a “poor” popular mood underpinned by
a gloomy economic situation and “wide-ranging disaffection” with the party.44
Hence, if we are to fully appreciate the film’s significance at the time as a piece
of propaganda it would seem that we need to consider the broader historical
context of both the making and exhibition of Triumph. But avoiding exaggeration

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Alan Sennett

of the effectiveness of Triumph in selling the “Hitler myth” to the German people
in the mid-1930s does not mean underplaying the film’s significance at the time.
It is rather that an appreciation of the immediate context of the film’s production
and its subject matter, the sixth party rally, is required to fully comprehend its
propaganda function. To gauge this we need to go back to the early summer of
1934, a time when the Nazi leadership was decidedly uncertain of its standing
with the German public.
Barely two months after the Röhm purge, carried out on the pretext of
suppressing an alleged plot against the army and Hitler’s government, there was
a pressing need to establish the legitimacy and acceptance of the new SA leader,
Viktor Lutze, and heal the wounds in the party. In an evident justification of the
June 30, 1934, purge, Hitler noted toward the end of his final rally speech to the
party faithful:

In the past, our enemies persecuted us and have removed the undesirable
elements from our Party for us. Today, we ourselves must remove undesirable
elements which have proven to be bad. What is bad, has no place among us!

The tense of the second sentence may be the present but the reference is to
the very recent past and the removal of a huge obstacle for the regime. Röhm,
who saw the Nazi party as “revolutionary” force, had sought the integration of
Germany’s still small army into the SA under his own command. In purging the
SA leadership, Hitler had delivered upon an earlier deal with German military
chiefs to eliminate this potential rival to their role. In return, the German armed
forces would swing behind the regime as Hitler further extended his executive
power. It surely cannot be of minor significance that the presence of the military
top brass at the rally is covered in the film in the military review sequence.45
It is clear that whatever its wider purpose, the September rally was designed by
Albert Speer with the aim of underscoring Hitler’s authority over his party. In this
respect, the gobbets of speeches included in the film constitute hugely significant
political utterances at the time. Yet these speeches were edited not by the speakers
but by Riefenstahl herself. Hence, she was intensely aware that the central message
of the spectacle and the speeches needed to underline absolute loyalty to Hitler as
well as the party’s total commitment to the German people. Hitler proclaimed:
“. . . the goal must be that all loyal Germans will become National Socialists. Only
the best National Socialists are members of the Party!”
Thus, the rally itself was crucial propaganda for the moment, September 1934.
It came after a series of key moves in the consolidation of the regime. The SA purge
had been followed by the establishment of the SS as a separate body on July 20.
Then President Hindenburg had died on August 2, allowing Hitler to fuse his own

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office of Chancellor with that of the Presidency. Indeed the referendum in which
Hitler’s role as Chancellor, Head of State and Supreme Army Commander was
popularly approved was held on the August 19, just two weeks before his dramatic
arrival in Nuremburg.46

Art and Propaganda

Brian Winston asks why a film that is quite monotonous and repetitive won the
Gold Medal at Venice (1935) and Grand Prix at Paris (1937). Moreover, we might
consider why film critics often still view Triumph as a technical and artistic master-
piece. Winston’s answer is that the film impresses less by its technical and artistic
virtuosity and more because of Speer’s choreography of the rally and the glamour
of the spectacle. He suggests that it would have been hard even for newsreel
photographers not to capture the flavor of the event, let alone a filmmaker with
all the special privileges and resources that were placed at Riefenstahl’s disposal.47
However attractive such a revisionist view might seem, it risks underestimating
the enormous aesthetic contribution to the film of Riefenstahl’s rhythmic editing
of some outstanding images to Windt’s rousing musical score. Of particular
significance and artistic merit is the aforementioned opening sequence that
constructs Hitler as a god-like figure descending from the heavens through the
clouds over Nuremberg to visit his adoring worshippers. The powerful religious
imagery of the first part of the film surely could not have been achieved simply
through competent montage of newsreel sequences. Riefenstahl’s careful editing
of footage taken with wide angle and telephoto lenses from prepared positions
locates the audience within the spectacle itself. Close-ups of attractive smiling
and waving townsfolk welcoming Hitler serve to normalize and humanize what
was really an artificial and contrived scenario. Newsreel coverage tends to have
the reverse effect, distancing the spectator from the spectacle. Hence, many key
sequences in the film owe as much to the imagination of the artist as they do to
Speer’s choreography and design.
Certainly Triumph has been classified by many commentators as art first and
propaganda second, and in this respect Winston makes a point worth considering.
For even when account is taken of the vicious ideology the film sustains, it may be
that in accepting it first and foremost as art one risks diminishing its political role
and exonerating its maker of any complicity in the Nazi regime, thus validating
Riefenstahl’s own postwar self-justifications. As we have seen, even the Nazis
themselves categorized her film as “politically especially valuable” rather than
“artistically and politically valuable.”48 Of course, this tends to contradict Riefen-
stahl’s lifelong contention that the making of Triumph was a wholly “technical”
matter. Until her death in 2003 at the age of 101, she would insist that she was in

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Figure 2. Riefenstahl the auteur surrounded by crew and “extras.”

no sense responsible for creating the political messages in the film, arguing that
since Hitler and the other figures wrote their own speeches, she could not be held
responsible for the content. Yet her ability to distil the essence of often lengthy
political speeches, compressing core Nazi ideology of the time down to a few
sound bites, suggests considerable political sympathy on her part. Her insistence
that she did not appreciate the significance of the Röhm purge because at the time
she was location-hunting in Spain for her feature film Tiefland/Lowlands (Leni
Riefenstahl, AT/DE, 1954) seems just another facet of the familiar excuse that
Germans were powerless to resist the Nazi dictatorship.49
Riefenstahl’s postwar reimagining of the making of and nature of Triumph
thus raises interesting issues around the nature of propaganda, the relationship
between editing techniques and politics, and the role of aesthetics in political
cinema. For if Riefenstahl is justified in saying she did not write the speeches,
devise any aspects of Nazi ideology, or design the overall spectacle of the rally,
her role cannot be accepted as neutral. It was she who shaped the filmic record
of the events in the first instance through choice of shot, position of camera, and
direction of many of those involved in close-up sequences. She then refashioned

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the raw footage through her aesthetically impressive editing into the arresting
images of the completed film.
Riefenstahl’s technical skills were thus employed to create a film that was far
more powerful than it could have appeared had it indeed been the straightfor-
ward “documentary record” she claimed. Her later assertion that there were no
reconstructed scenes but rather that it was a purely “historical” film50 would appear
to sell her own efforts short. In the 1935 pamphlet on the making of the film, the
author argues vigorously that the intention was to create a dramatic impression in
showing Germany on its triumphant march forwards. It was not simply an exercise
in documentary realism.51 Even if the author was Jäger rather than Riefenstahl,
this contemporary source must surely be more trustworthy when it comes to the
aims of the film than the director’s post war utterances. Moreover, Riefenstahl’s
later reflections upon the making of Triumph display enormous pride in her
technical achievement that unwittingly reveals hints of the relationship between
aesthetics and politics.
Interviewed at length in Müller’s 1993 filmed biography The Wonderful,
Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (Ray Müller, FR/UK/DE/BE, 1993) Riefenstahl
actually demonstrates her editing technique in dealing with political speeches
by distilling their essence, choosing camera angles, selecting what to include and
how to order the material, employing dynamic montage in the marriage of music
and image.52 Her demonstration makes clear that the idea was to reinforce and
underline the political meaning of the events and utterances of the Nazi elite,
especially Hitler. It is difficult to believe that an artist not in sympathy with the
messages being portrayed and not believing entirely in the mission to transmit
them to a wide audience could have undertaken this task with such success. Her
evident pride in the finished product sixty years on would seem to attest to the
identification between artist and subject matter. As her biographer Steven Bach
points out, Riefenstahl’s opportunism and egotism continued to be expressed
through her disingenuous claims in later life. Far from refusing to speak of
Triumph, “. . . she sought credit for art and craft while rejecting to the end of her
life all moral responsibility for content or consequence.”53

Conclusions
It would seem that there is no support for Riefenstahl’s self-justificatory efforts to
portray her film simply as a technical exercise, devoid of political commitment,
and primarily aimed at producing a “purely historical . . . film verité.”54 Even
statements made or endorsed by her in the mid-1930s clearly contradict this claim.
But while there can be few difficulties in accepting the film as a work of political

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propaganda, it still remains to summarize how the case study fits our earlier
framework definition and reflect upon its contemporary significance.
Evidently, the film seeks to transmit a clear set of ideas and values that are
those of the Nazi party in 1934 and of Adolf Hitler in particular. Its clear intention
is to propagate these ideas among the German people through the medium of
cinema. There is no attempt to disguise the message since the audience is sup-
posed to associate itself with the thoughts and feelings being projected. Huxley’s
argument that propaganda mines existing seams of ideas rather than opens up
new ones is well illustrated by the film’s use of historical and cultural symbolism.
Hitler’s appeal is to a heroic German national past that is largely an invention, but
one well understood by his intended audience and reinforced by already existing
and ongoing cultural discourses. Many German films of the 1920s and 1930s
dwell upon themes and motifs that connect with elements in National Socialist
ideology such as German national mythology and the desire for national revival,
Teutonic mysticism, the “leadership principle,” and strong authority figures.
Riefenstahl’s own directorial debut, The Blue Light (Leni Riefenstahl, DE, 1932),
and Fanck’s “mountain films” in which she starred, have been seen to foreshadow
Nazi cinema.55 We need not accept Kracauer’s thesis of ideological continuity
between Weimar and Nazi cinemas in order to identify discourses that could be
articulated to reinforce aspects of the dominant German ideology of the time.
Thus if it is true that many German films of the period were not conceived either
as propaganda or political cinema, within the particular conjuncture they can
often be seen to function as such.
In Triumph, the propaganda act is indeed conscious and deliberate on the
part both of the political figures appearing and speaking, of the designers of the
rally and of the chief filmmaker. The rally itself served a very specific propaganda
purpose both for the internal cohesion of the Nazi party following the Röhm
purge and as a gesture toward the German military whose support Hitler badly
needed. In this respect, the film is a record of a propaganda event held at a specific
conjuncture for the regime. As a completed work exhibited six months later,
Triumph addressed a national and international audience offering the opportunity
of the Nazi leadership, and especially Hitler, to “speak” with maximum impact.
The film’s political message is heightened by Riefenstahl’s brilliant editing
of speeches and parades, cutting out all the boring and repetitive parts of the
speeches to create “sound bites.” Her sympathetic treatment made the Nazis
appear interesting and, in the context of the time, attractive. Biographies of the
filmmaker have assembled mounting evidence from reminiscences and other
primary sources that validate the findings of the two 1948 denazification trials
that she was indeed a “follower” of National Socialism.56 It would seem that she

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only discovered the negative meaning of “propaganda” once it became a barrier

to her career rather than a positive boon.
Reeves may be correct to doubt how effective the film was in helping construct
the “Hitler myth” and deepen domestic support for the Nazis. Yet it did deliver
a major international artistic coup for the regime. Riefenstahl quickly became an
internationally acclaimed director who was very soon pictured on the cover of
Newsweek and would also make Time magazine in February 1936. Domestically,
though, initial box office success was not sustained and any impact the film
may have had should be judged within the broader sweep of Nazi propaganda.
Hindsight and the repeated usage of many sequences from the film may play a
significant role in exaggerating the reach of its messages. Indeed, its international
exposure permitted these images to be deployed as counterpropaganda. Expres-
sions of the will to power, militarism, and focus upon the cult of leadership
looked increasingly sinister and alien to audiences in the Western democracies in
the light of unfolding world affairs after 1935. Chaplin’s 1940 parody of Hitler in
The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, US, 1940) was supposedly influenced by a
screening of Triumph.57 In wartime Britain, propagandists even used clips from
Riefenstahl’s film to ridicule the Nazis by reversing and speeding up the footage
of goose-stepping storm troopers to the strains of “The Lambeth Walk.”
Nearly eighty years after it was made, Triumph of the Will cannot be freely
screened publicly in Germany owing to its portrayal of Nazi ideology and symbol-
ism. This suggests that the film’s political messages are still thought by the German
state to possess persuasive power for a modern audience. On one level such a
view runs counter to the argument advanced above concerning the operation
of propaganda and the specifics of our case study. While the political values and
messages of Triumph are obvious, and many would argue that the filmmakers bear
a measure of moral responsibility for what followed, they relate very definitely to
a specific time and place: Nazi Germany in the years 1934 to 1935. This might be
described as the film’s “propaganda moment.” Even the passage of a few months
meant that its production context differed somewhat from its initial viewing
context as the discourses, practices, and requirements of the regime shifted.
However, it can hardly be said that the passing of time and general awareness of the
atrocities later carried out by the regime Riefenstahl aestheticized mean that the
politics of the film no longer matter. At least, not as long as political movements
that espouse similar ideologies still clamor for attention in periods of deep social,
economic and political crisis.
But if the politics of the film still surface in neofascist movements, the real
political power of the film resides in its aesthetics and the way these are harnessed
to a wider social purpose. Riefenstahl defended her work by effectively saying:

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“Forget the Nazi politics. Admire my technique!” As if technique could exist

independently of politics. But aesthetics are not politically neutral or value free.
Were they so, her film would never have been commissioned. In proclaiming the
autonomy of art from ideology, she continued to trumpet a key Nazi deception:
that its art was nonpolitical and impartial. A study of Triumph refutes an auteur
perspective that divorces the artist from her politics and historical context or
permits her to sidestep moral responsibility.

Alan Sennett is an associate lecturer at the Open University and lecturer in modern history, politics and
film history at Liverpool University. He also works for a number of adult educational organizations in
addition to freelance lecturing, research and writing. He has an MA in political sociology from Leeds
University and PhD from Manchester Victoria University. His research areas include political organiza-
tions in the Spanish Civil War and political cinema of the 1920s–1940s. He has just completed a book
project, for Brill, on the revolutionary Left in Spain during the 1930s.

NOTES
1. “Fascinating Fascism.” New York Review of Books (February 6, 1975), reprinted in Susan
Sontag’s Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 96–97.
2. Ibid, 79.
3. See Carl Rollyson, “‘Fascinating Fascism’ Revisited: An Exercise in Biographical Criticism,”
Journal of Historical Biography 5 (Spring 2009): 1–3.
4. Brian Winston, “Triumph of the Will,” History Today 47, no. 1 (January 1997): 27.
5. Richard M. Barsam, The Non-Fiction Film: A Critical History (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992), 129–32. See also R. M. Barsam, Film-guide to Triumph of the Will.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975).
6. Ray Müller’s The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (DE, 1993).
7. Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, 4th ed. (London: Sage,
2010), 2.
8. Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda. Soviet Russian and Nazi Germany (London: Croom Helm,
1979), 19.
9. Aldous Huxley, “Notes on Propaganda.” Harpers’ Magazine 174 (December 1936): 39.
10. As Goebbels stated in a speech in March 1933: “Of course propaganda has a purpose, but the
purpose must be concealed with such cleverness and virtuosity that the person on whom this
purpose is to be carried out doesn’t notice it at all.” Quoted in Richard Evans, The Third Reich
in Power. How the Nazis Won the Hearts and Minds of a Nation (London: Penguin, 2006),
127.
11. David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933–1945 (London: I.B. Taurus, 2001),
35.

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12. Taylor, 161.

13. Steve Neale, “Propaganda,” Screen, 18, no. 3 (Fall, 1977): 25.
14. Neale, 39. Emphasis in original.
15. Toby Clark, Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century. The Political Image in the Age of
Mass Culture (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997), 7–9.
16. Neale, 33n3.
17. Taylor gives a figure of 172 personnel and twenty-nine newsreel cameramen. Taylor,
178–79. These figures appear to come from R. M. Barsam, Filmguide to Triumph of the Will
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 23. Hinton suggests that there were probably
eighteen film cameramen apart from the newsreel cameramen. David B. Hinton, “Triumph of
the Will: Document or Artifice?” Cinema Journal, 15, no. 1 (1975: Fall): 51.
18. An account of the making of the film appeared under Riefenstahl’s name as Hinter den
Kulissen des Reichspartietagfilms (Munich 1935). Excerpts from this appear in Erwin Leiser,
Nazi Cinema (London: Secker and Warburg, 1974), 135–38. The pamphlet states that “the
preparations for the Party Convention were made in connection with the preparations for the
camera work.” Quoted in David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933–1945,
rev. ed. (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2001), 125. Riefenstahl later disclaimed authorship of the
pamphlet stating that the task was handled by Ernst Jäger, chief editor of Film-kurier. See
Hinton, 52. Steven Bach notes that this may have been part of her postwar distancing from the
Nazis and that in fact the text warmly thanks Hitler, Goebbels, and Streicher. Yet she actively
claimed authorship in 1935 and even autographed copies for Hitler’s staff, including Martin
Bormann. Steven Bach, Leni. The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (London: Abacus, 2007),
155–56. Hinton emphatically attributes authorship to Jäger citing evidence of a receipt for
Reichmarks 1,000 and other testimony to that effect. David. B. Hinton, The Films of Leni
Riefenstahl, 3rd ed. (London: Scarecrow Press, 2000), 41 and 46n33. Biographer Jürgen
Trimborn is equally convinced of Riefenstahl’s authorship. Leni Riefenstahl: A Life (London:
Macmillan, 2007), 120–23.
19. Steve Neale “Triumph of the Will. Notes on Documentary and Spectacle.” Screen, 20, no. 1
(Spring, 1979): 63–86.
20. Hinter den Kulissen des Reichspartietagfilms, cited in Welch, 125. Welch attributes authorship
of the pamphlet to Riefenstahl but see note 19 above.
21. It would appear from still photographs of the shoot that some technical personnel were
dressed in Nazi uniform.
22. For a comparison between the order of events in the film and the actual chronology of the rally
see the table in Hinton (1975), 56–57.
23. Something she makes much of in Müller’s documentary.
24. Riefenstahl in 1964, quoted in David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 5th
ed. (New York: Knopf, 2010), 822.
25. It used to be thought that Riefenstahl’s film of the 1933 party rally, Victory of Faith, had been
destroyed. This seemed plausible because it included footage of the SA leaders purged on June

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30, 1934. However, a copy resurfaced in the 1980s. It would seem that this earlier film, which
premiered in December 1933, was widely screened in 1934. Goebbels certainly approved of
it although in her memoirs and later interviews Riefenstahl dismissed the film as modest and
unfinished. See Martin Loiperdinger and David Culbert, “Leni Riefenstahl, the SA and the
Nazi Party Rally Films, Nuremberg 1933–34: Sieg des Glaubens and Triumph des Willens,”
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 8, no. 1 (1988): 3–38.
26. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, A Psychological History of the German Film (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1947), 257–58.
27. See Colin Cook, “The Myth of the Aviator and the Flight to Fascism,” History Today, 53, no.
12 (December 2003): 36–42.
28. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich. (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 225.
29. Not “Triumph of the Will” as Riefenstahl and others continually referred to it. See Trimborn,
114.
30. Jill Stephenson, “Inclusion: Building the National Community in Propaganda and Practice,”
in Nazi Germany, ed. Jane Caplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 99–100.
31. Stephenson, 102.
32. As David Hinton notes, the only other Nazi leader to be given similar treatment in the film is
Viktor Lutze, the successor to Röhm as leader of the SA. Hinton (1975): 50.
33. Although Riefenstahl denied in an interview with Alan Marcus in June 2001 even having
seen Battleship Potemkin before making Triumph, she had previously told Andrew Sarris
and Richard Barsam how much she had been impressed by Eisenstien’s film. Alan Marcus,
“Reappraising Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will,” Film Studies, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 81.
34. Kay Gladstone, “Viewing Notes” to Triumph of the Will (North Harrow: DD Video, 2001),
14. Barsam notes that UFA funded and distributed the film but the production was by the
Leni Riefenstahl Film Studio. Riefenstahl claimed it was a cheap film to make at the equivalent
of $110,600. Barsam (1975), 22–23.
35. Nicholas Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda. Myth or Reality? (London: Cassell, 1999),
107.
36. It should be noted that the Venice festival was under Mussolini’s control and the Paris festival
had a right-wing jury. Bach, 165.
37. Eisenstein cited in Taylor, 69–70.
38. Reeves, 109. Goebbels’ diary entry for March 26, 1935, records his view that it was a
“grandiose spectacle. Only in the last part a bit longwinded. Otherwise superb in its direction.
Leni’s masterpiece.” Reproduced in David Culbert, “The new Goebbels diary entries (2006)
and Leni Riefenstahl,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 27, no. 4 (October
2007): 555.
39. Goebbels, “Speech to the Reich Film Chamber,” March 5, 1937. Quoted in Taylor, 230.
40. Bach notes the huge initial success of the film yet cites no sources. Bach, 164–65. Trimborn
also comments upon record attendances but does not cite sources for box office figures.
Trimborn, 119. Reeves mentions the film’s fluctuating fortunes early on and thanks David

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Welch for providing this information. Reeves, 107n67.

41. Welch, 125.
42. Welch, 109.
43. Welch, 109–11.
44. Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Penguin 1999), 561–62.
45. It must be said that the German military were less than happy with their brief coverage in
Triumph of the Will. When Riefenstahl returned to Nuremburg in September of that year, it
was to film the German army and not the seventh party rally itself. This film, Day of Freedom:
Our Armed Forces, completes her “Nuremburg trilogy” and fulfilled the requirements of
the regime to promote the image of the newly enlarged military and to mollify criticisms by
several top generals that the military had not been afforded sufficient prominence in Triumph.
46. Leiser, 25; Hinton (1975), 49.
47. Winston, 24–28.
48. Ibid.
49. See the interview in Michel Delahaye, “Leni et le loup: entrietien avec Leni Riefenstahl,”
Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 170 (September 1965): 42–51, 62–63.
50. Riefenstahl interview, June 2001. Marcus, 82.
51. Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitagfilms, partially reproduced in Leiser, 137–38.
52. Müller.
53. Bach, 166.
54. Ibid.
55. Kracauer, 257–60, and Eric Rentschler , The Ministry of Illusion. Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife.
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 27–31.
56. See for instance the assessments by Rainer Rother, Leni Riefenstahl: The Seduction of Genius
(London: Continuum, 2002), 179–80 and Bach, 165–66.
57. Trimborn, 123–24.

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