Latest news with #Goebbels
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Goebbels and the Führer review – austere satire shows fears of Nazi high command
In an appropriate spirit of cynicism and bleakness, German director Joachim Lang has made a film about the private life of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, the Hexenmeister or chief sorcerer of lies, and his always strained relationship with Hitler. Robert Stadlober plays the preening and self-pitying Goebbels and Fritz Karl is a careworn Hitler. Franziska Weisz plays Goebbels's wife Magda, who at first resented his infidelities with showbusiness starlets but for the sake of the Fatherland submitted to the public image of a good Nazi wife and mother of six adorable children – whom Joseph and Magda finally murdered in the bunker before killing themselves. In its subversive, austerely satirical way, the film feels almost like a B-side to Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall from 2004, and Lang has perhaps even inhaled, just a little, the numberless internet parody memes that Downfall inspired, with English subtitles reinterpreting Hitler's impotent rage. Lang's film shows us the fears and misgivings that quite senior Nazis had until late in the war, and is perhaps also in the spirit of The Zone of Interest; that is, the Martin Amis novel, whose knowing, ironised dialogue and drama was mostly excised by Jonathan Glazer for his film version. Goebbels and the Führer is a project which has apparently arisen from two of Lang's previous films. The first, on which he is credited as a writer, was a documentary-drama about the hideous antisemitic propaganda film Jud Süss. The second, which he directed, was about the German screen actor Heinrich George, who acted in the preposterous and delusional propaganda film Kolberg, released in 1945, about German forces' heroic defence against Napoleonic soldiers (Goebbels, incredibly, assigned legions of soldiers as extras to the latter). Both films are mentioned here, and Lang's script sharply reminds us that Jud Süss was embarrassingly praised by the young Michelangelo Antonioni at the time. Lang's new drama is a movie showing Goebbels's work as a propagandist was never done. In addition, behind the theatrical display of ecstatic loyalty, the German public, and many of the high command, were in fact just as nervous about war before Munich as the British and French. The same people were very glad to hear of appeasement, very glad to hear of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and aghast to hear of the Soviet invasion and the unwinnable two-front war that Hitler had embraced. It was Goebbels's job to soothe their fears, to create a subhuman identity for Germany's enemies with repeated lies and provide a comforting illusion of imminent victory in which he, Hitler and everyone came to believe. The film shrewdly mixes real archive footage with dramatic dialogue scenes, in which Lang has added genuine language from historical documents. Lang also cleverly shows us what looked like a slip of the tongue in a Goebbels speech, in which he stumbled over a single crucial word, promising Germany the '… exter – exclusion … ' of Jews. The film suggests that this was a deliberate feint on Goebbels's part, preparing Germany to accept, subconsciously, the idea that extermination must follow the milder idea of exclusion. Perhaps there can be nothing totally new to say on film about Hitler and nazism, but Lang is interesting on the hidden disbelief and fear that existed among the leaders. Yet the film cannot quite bring itself to show us that grotesque inversion of Goebbels's Aryan-family sentimentality: the murder of his children. Goebbels and the Führer is in UK cinemas from 6 June.
Times
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Marie Najer obituary: Black German child actress in Nazi films
When Joseph Goebbels, the German propaganda minister, needed a black child to act in Nazi films, he personally excused 12-year-old Marie Najer from her Hamburg school for 14 days. 'Now I'll be a real movie star,' she thought. She arrived alone in Berlin to play a servant girl in Josef von Báky's Münchhausen (1943). 'We had very nice costumes with a huge duster, like a fan, and we had to fan the ladies with fresh air. So we were basically the idiots,' she told Jermain Raffington in a video interview. At that age she did not consider herself part of Nazi propaganda. 'I just thought, 'How nice, that we're being integrated into the films',' she said. 'I did not realise what this was actually about.
Irish Times
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favourite film-maker: ‘After the first page of Mein Kampf she became an enthusiastic Nazi'
When she was 100, a year before her death , Leni Riefenstahl , who was perhaps second only to Joseph Goebbels as Nazi Germany 's leading propagandist, faced legal action over her continual misrepresentation of the fate of the Roma and Sinti people who had appeared in her film Lowlands, which she began to make in 1940. Riefenstahl had used Romas as extras, many of them 'borrowed' and subsequently returned to the regime's concentration camps. 'I regret that Sinti and Roma had to suffer during the period of National Socialism,' she said. But she also remarked about the claims against her, 'I'm not saying Gypsies need to lie, but, really, who's more likely to commit perjury, me or the Gypsies?' Riefenstahl, an authoritative new documentary by the Swiss film-maker Andres Veiel , exposes decades of contradictory statements and obfuscation from the director who played a huge part in shaping Adolf Hitler 's public image. 'For example, there was an interview by the Daily Express from 1934,' Veiel says. Official documents referred to the interview, 'but the interview itself was missing. We found it in the archive of the Daily Express. In 1934 she said she bought Mein Kampf and read it. And after the first page she became an enthusiastic National Socialist. READ MORE 'It was obvious why this was missing, because she was just telling the interviewer not only how close she was to Hitler but how she was deeply involved in Nazi ideology. The interesting point for us was not just to show 'This is a lie' and 'That is a lie' but to look at how she was constantly shifting and editing her story.' Working alongside a German journalist and TV host, Sandra Maischberger, Veiel gained unprecedented access to the Riefenstahl archives, a vast collection of material related to the film-maker's life and work, including photographs, correspondence and recordings of telephone calls. For decades she kept the material at her home in Bavaria, carefully curating it to amplify her artistry while downplaying her role in the Third Reich. Veiel says he watched hundreds of interviews in which Riefenstahl used exactly the same phrases, as if she were reading from a script: 'I was never interested in politics. I was just an artist,' she would say; 'I had nothing to do with the regime.' [ Riefenstahl review: Unrepentant propagandist will make you want to yell at the screen ] Many parts of the archive remain difficult to access because of ongoing legal and ethical debates, but Veiel was able to sift through some 700 boxes of material while researching his damning documentary. The rolls of film alone fill 140 chests. His sleuthing yields several chilling revelations, including Riefenstahl's part in a massacre in Konskie in 1939. The film-maker was in the Polish town on her way to record the Nazis' defeat of the country, and wanted to shoot a street scene. According to a letter written by a Nazi officer, she demanded that 'the Jews' be 'removed'. When relayed by a lance corporal, her directive prompted some Jewish locals to run. German soldiers responded by opening fire. 'This is a good example of her storytelling,' Veiel says. 'Before 1952 she claimed, 'I was a witness of a massacre'. She didn't always say it was a Jewish massacre but that Polish people were killed. Then, in 1952, she changed the narrative and said, 'No, I was far away. I heard about the episode. But I never saw corpses. I never saw any atrocities.' 'We had TV footage from the middle of the 1950s, and you realise she is learning this new story by heart. It's still a lie, but she's working on it, like a bad actress. Then, five years later, the lie became the truth for her. She was straightforward about attacking people with another opinion or view.' Riefenstahl was initially a dancer and actor; she rose to prominence as Hitler's favourite director, most notably for Triumph of the Will, a glorification of the Nuremberg Rally of 1934. In 1993 Riefenstahl claimed she was merely a film-maker for hire and was disgusted that Triumph of the Will was used to promote Nazism. But Veiel's documentary quotes from a letter she wrote to Hitler: 'The film's impact as German propaganda is greater than I could have imagined, and your image, my Führer, is always applauded.' Hitler then chose Riefenstahl to make a documentary about the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Despite her later claims of political naivety, Riefenstahl used all her artistic talents to fill the film, Olympia, with images of athletic prowess designed to both legitimise and romanticise the Nazi regime. A prologue depicting the return of the Greek gods echoes Hitler's idea of Sparta as the 'clearest racial state' and his projection of a future 'Völkisch state'. (Behind the scenes of the film, Willy Zielke, its cinematographer, was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, where he was experimented on and forcibly sterilised, after a dispute with Riefenstahl.) 'Olympia projected this image of being strong, healthy, and victorious,' Veiel says. 'The aesthetics of her films are an interesting point for me. It's never just the question of self-optimising. There's always a contempt for weakness. The contempt for people who are 'not healthy', who don't fit into that pattern. They jeopardise the Reich because, according to her ideology, they are lunatics and criminals. They are dirty. They spoil the national blood.' Leni Riefenstahl with Adolph Hitler at a party in Nuremberg in the 1930s. Photograph: Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty In a notorious appearance on a late-night German chatshow in 1976, Riefenstahl was confronted by Elfriede Kretschmer, an anti-Nazi activist during the war. Kretschmer calmly asked the rattled film-maker how someone so close to the inner workings of the Third Reich could know so little about life under the Nazis. Riefenstahl received sacks of fan mail in the days after the broadcast, praising her composure and denouncing Kretschmer. The letters were hard for Veiel to read. 'It was horrifying,' he says. 'It was not just the issue of Leni Riefenstahl. It was a mirror image of West Germany. A lot of German authorities in postwar Germany worked for the Reich. [Kurt Georg] Kiesinger worked for Goebbels in a high-ranking position, but he became chancellor of West Germany in the 1960s. A lot of the messages sent about Leni Riefenstahl said, 'Stop stirring up the guilt of the past and leave this great artist alone.' Or, 'We are the silent majority, and we stick to the ideology.' After the war Riefenstahl was arrested and supposedly de-Nazified, but she was never convicted of any crimes. Several high-profile film-makers have attempted to bring Riefenstahl's life to the screen, including Steven Soderbergh and Jodie Foster . Quentin Tarantino has called her the best director who ever lived. For them to respect Riefenstahl's technical achievements, and want to chart them in a biopic, is very different from respecting her as a person, of course, but Veiel still finds any kind of admiration for the film-maker extremely disturbing. [ Fionola Meredith: The terrible wonder of Leni Riefenstahl's life took hold of my imagination Opens in new window ] 'I don't know if it's just naive,' he says. 'I always say you can't separate the ideology from the aesthetics. You can't just celebrate the aesthetics not seeing the contempt behind it. It's not just an attitude. People were incarcerated. People were sterilised. And many people were killed because of this ideology. How can you omit this fact?' Riefenstahl is in cinemas from Friday, May 9th
The Herald Scotland
21-04-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
‘Human dignity and honour': remembering the Warsaw Ghetto uprising
When the Nazis entered the ghetto in spring 1943 for the final-round up, ZOB resisted by force. ZOB was a mix of Zionist and Socialist organisations, with big differences in politics, their point of unity being that all Jews, regardless of their political outlook, would end in Auschwitz. ZOB was completely outnumbered and outgunned but held out against the German army for some five weeks. It tied down thousands of German troops, meaning they could neither be deployed in the war nor used to hunt Jews. Goebbels (the Nazi propaganda chief) fumes in his diary about Jews fighting back and with captured German weapons! It was an inspiration understood by some of the leaders of the Polish resistance, one of whom commented that "the blood of the ghetto fighters was not shed in vain…it gave birth to an intensified struggle against the fascist invader". By the middle of May, the Nazis decided to burn the ghetto to the ground to avoid further German casualties. Some survivors fled through the sewers; most were captured and killed. The uprising was part of a radical Jewish tradition which included large numbers of young Jews joining left parties and antifascist groups, including the International Brigades to fight against fascism in Spain in the late 1930s; the cemetery and monument in Montjuic in Barcelona tells us that some 15% of the International Brigaders were Jewish (indeed 50% of the USA Abraham Lincoln Brigade), a hugely disproportionate number. This radical tradition preceded this and continued to the Ghetto. One of the great historical ironies is how a large proportion of the shock troops of the ethnic cleansing (Naqba) of the Palestinians in 1948 was carried out by this same tradition, recruited from the left kibbutz movement. Pre-Second World War this tradition had been avowedly non-Zionist. A mixture of the Holocaust and western immigration controls convinced many Jews that a homeland was necessary. The Palestinians became the victims of the Holocaust victims. The ghetto fighters left us a universal message of humanism and hope in the face of barbarism. This is a message that we need to remember as we confront racism and fascism wherever and whenever it raises its head. Henry Maitles is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of the West of Scotland Agenda is a column for outside contributors. Contact: agenda@
Yahoo
05-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Fact Check: Rep. Keith Self quoted Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels at congressional hearing. Here's the context
Claim: During a March 2025 congressional hearing, U.S. Rep. Keith Self, a Republican from Texas, quoted Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as saying, "It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion." Rating: Context: Prior to quoting Goebbels, Self was questioning Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert who wrote the 2020 book "How to Lose the Information War" and led the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) during its brief existence in Joe Biden's administration. He asked Jankowicz about her personal beliefs regarding "the role of government in [forming] public opinion" in an attempt to compare her answers to Goebbels' statement. On April 1, 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs held a congressional hearing titled, "Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Need for First Amendment Safeguards at the State Department." During the hearing, Rep. Keith Self, a Republican from Texas, allegedly quoted Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister of Nazi Germany, as saying, "It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion." The claim was shared in a video on X by the account of Rep. Julie Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, and quickly went viral on multiple platforms because, well, it purported to show an American politician quoting a Nazi propagandist. Based on a video of the full hearing uploaded to the House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans YouTube channel, the claim is true — Self did quote Goebbels at the hearing. However, Johnson's post was misleading in that it omitted the context of Self's remark and the reason he quoted Goebbels in the first place. Self replied to Johnson's post the next day: Self's Goebbels quote came at the end of his questioning, which focused on Nina Jankowicz, the CEO of the American Sunlight Project, a nonprofit that describes its mission as "increasing the cost of lies that undermine democracy." Jankowicz is a disinformation researcher who wrote the 2020 book "How to Lose the Information War," and according to The New York Times, once served as an adviser to Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She founded the American Sunlight Project in 2024 in response to a large, ongoing campaign by conservative Republicans "to silence think tanks and universities that expose the sources of disinformation" by arguing that measures to fight disinformation unfairly target conservative speech. However, Self didn't want to discuss Jankowicz's personal record as a disinformation researcher — he wanted to discuss her 11 weeks leading the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) during former President Joe Biden's administration. In early 2022, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) established the advisory-only DGB, led by Jankowicz, with a goal of combating "disinformation coming from Russia and rebutting misleading information aimed at migrants hoping to travel to the U.S.-Mexico border," according to Politico. It did not go particularly well for the board. Republicans immediately began making comparisons to George Orwell's "1984," and the Biden administration floundered in response. Even then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on CNN that officials "probably could have done a better job of communicating what [the DGB] does and does not do." According to CNN, DHS paused the board's activities in May 2022 in response to the backlash and Jankowicz resigned after the pause was announced. The board was fully shut down that August. A video of the hearing is available on YouTube, uploaded by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Self's questioning begins at 1:01:33. Self opened his questioning by asking Jankowicz her personal opinion, having worked in the government ("for 11 weeks," Jankowicz noted), on the government's role in "enforcing free speech." Jankowicz responded that the First Amendment, which grants the right to free speech, is "sacrosanct," and that she thought the government should not be "arresting people for exercising their speech." Self then read a supposed quote from Jankowicz during her time leading DGB saying that "law enforcement and our legislatures [needed] to do more," implying that she was advocating that the government using law enforcement to restrict free speech. Jankowicz said the quote omitted necessary context, namely that she was "talking about online harms and threats against people online for exercising their speech," not free speech itself. Self's final question, which he asked in four different ways (Jankowicz gave a similar answer the first three times and did not engage with that part of the question on the fourth), was the following: "What is the mission of the state, the right of the state, to form public opinion?" Self's choice of wording clearly alluded to the Goebbels quote. Here is the transcript of the exchange from Self's final question through to the Goebbels quote [the annotations are ours, to add as much context to the exchange as possible]. The transcription begins at the 1:04:07 mark of the video: Self: What is the mission of the state, the right of the state, to form public opinion? Because we're talking about — our government has been involved in doing that for the last few years. Jankowicz: In my opinion, the government has a First Amendment right to free speech as well, and SCOTUS [Supreme Court of the United States] has just affirmed with a case last June, we just heard a case that came in federal court in New York, that, actually showed that NewsGuard was not acting as an envoy of the state. Self: So what is the role of the government? Jankowicz: The role of the government can express its free speech, right? And citizens have a right to their free speech as well. I don't really understand your question, sir, I'm not sure the point. Self: I'm asking you what is the role of government in public opinion? Because we're talking about actions here that have tried to form public opinion. On the Hunter [Biden] laptop, on the Russia disinformation, all of that. I'm asking you what is the role of government in that matter? Jankowicz: Absolutely, congressman. So the government is allowed to express its own opinions, its viewpoints, as we're seeing this administration do, as we saw the previous administration do— Self: Well, what is their role when it is absolutely wrong? The Hunter laptop is probably the best example we could roll out here. [This is a reference to social media companies trying to slow the spread of the original New York Post article about Hunter Biden's laptop published just before the 2020 presidential election. Jankowicz was not an employee of the government at the time.] Jankowicz: I actually disagree with that, because when Twitter decided to add friction [slow the spread] to the Hunter Biden laptop case, it actually got more views. You've also heard Mr. Taibbi talk about 22 million tweets, millions of things censored through the GEC [Global Engagement Center] to the Election Integrity Partnership [EIP]? [Journalist Matt Taibbi, another witness at the hearing, was the lead author of the "Twitter Files," a report comprising internal Twitter documents Elon Musk gave journalists shortly after buying and taking over the social media platform. The Global Engagement Center was an agency in the State Department founded in 2016 to combat "foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States." It folded in 2024 after the Republican-controlled Congress refused to fund it. The EIP was a partnership of misinformation researchers between Stanford University and the University of Washington that helped track false and misleading information during the 2020 and 2022 elections. According to NPR, it faced massive conservative backlash and was the focus of claims that it was a front used by the Biden administration to suppress speech. It also folded in 2024.] Jankowicz: You know how many emails went between the GEC and the EIP? 15. You can look it up in Chairman Jordan's documents that he released at the end of last year. Fifteen emails. I've sent more text messages to my husband about our toddler's potty training in the last week than emails went from the GEC to the EIP, and those were all about overt Russian propaganda — RT and Sputnik — except for one, when the GEC analyst said to the folks there, "I can't comment on this one because I'm a government employee, but I think you should check it out." That's all that happened, sir. Self: So I'm gonna leave you, and I'll yield back a little bit of my time, a direct quote from Joseph Goebbels. "It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion," and I think that may be what we're discussing here. So it's true that Self quoted Goebbels, but as the context clearly shows, he was attempting to liken Jankowicz's views to the Nazi propaganda minister's. About Us - Global Engagement Center - United States Department of State. 5 Oct. 2023, AFP. "US Agency Focused on Foreign Disinformation Shuts Down." France24, 24 Dec. 2024, Bertrand, Sean Lyngaas, Priscilla Alvarez,Natasha. "Expert Hired to Run DHS' Newly Created Disinformation Board Resigns | CNN Politics." CNN, 18 May 2022, Bond, Shannon. "A Major Disinformation Research Team's Future Is Uncertain after Political Attacks." NPR, 14 June 2024. NPR, "Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Need for First Amendment Safeguards at the State Department." House Foreign Affairs Committee, 1 Apr. 2025, "GOP Rep Quotes Infamous Nazi During Censorship Hearing." The Daily Beast, 2 Apr. 2025, Hooper, Kelly. "Mayorkas Cites Misinformation about Homeland Security's Disinformation Board." Politico, 1 May 2022, Lorenz, Taylor. "How the Biden Administration Let Right-Wing Attacks Derail Its Disinformation Efforts." The Washington Post, 18 May 2022, Myers, Steven Lee, and Sheera Frenkel. "G.O.P. Targets Researchers Who Study Disinformation Ahead of 2024 Election." The New York Times, 19 June 2023, Myers, Steven Lee, and Jim Rutenberg. "New Group Joins the Political Fight Over Disinformation Online." The New York Times, 22 Apr. 2024, "North Texas Congress Members Clash over Use of Nazi Propagandist Joseph Goebbels Quote at Hearing." 3 Apr. 2025, "Programs." The American Sunlight Project, Accessed 4 Apr. 2025. Rutenberg , Jim, and Steven Lee Myers. "How Trump's Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation." The New York Times, 17 Mar. 2024, Sands, Geneva. "DHS Shuts down Disinformation Board Months after Its Efforts Were Paused | CNN Politics." CNN, 25 Aug. 2022, Tait, Robert. "Capitol Hill Hearing on 'Censorship Industrial Complex' under Biden Based on 'Fiction', Says Expert." The Guardian, 1 Apr. 2025. The Guardian, "Team." The American Sunlight Project, Accessed 4 Apr. 2025.
