Wort und Tat (1938)

Directed by

Otto Heinz Jahn, Eugen York, Fritz Hippler, Gustav Ucicky

Genre

documentary film, propaganda film

Country

Nazi Germany, Germany

Runtime

10 min

Rating

5.1 of 10 from 7 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This 1938 Nazi propaganda film contrasts the Weimar Republic with life under Hitler. It uses rapid montage to show the earlier period as chaotic and decadent then presents the Nazi regime as bringing order and improvement.

propagandisticmontage-heavyfast-pacedblack-and-whitehistoricalrhetoricalmanipulative

What happens

Wort und Tat (Words and Deeds) is a 10-minute-long Nazi propaganda film directed by Fritz Hippler, which was released in 1938. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum described the film as a "Propaganda film about the improved life of the German people under Hitler." The film is known for the extensive use of montage to get its message across, in a style reminiscent of Sergei Eisensteins Oktober. It was ordered by Joseph Goebbels. The film begins with a montage of clips from the Weimar period, showing a series of clips of Labor and Communist rallies, interspersed with scenes of scantily clad cabaret girls, and then shots of posters of various Weimar era political parties. This illustrates the "chaos" and "decadence" of the Weimar period. This sequence ends with former chancellor Heinrich Brüning making a speech against National Socialism. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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