January 29th, 2007
Hitler, Goebbels and Irish propaganda films
When you hear the words “Nazi propaganda films”, most people immediately think of Leni Riefenstahl, The Triumph of the Will and other fervent homages to the Third Reich fatherland. Very few people will be aware of the fact that a sub-genre of propagandist cinema existed in 1940’s Germany: the so-called ‘Irish films’. A documentary called Hitler’s Irish Movies will be screened on RTE 1 this Tuesday (as part of the Hidden History series) examining such films and the motivation behind them.
Hitler, like his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, knew the power of celluloid and both were huge cineastes. Goebbels, who was in awe of the US industry and thought the multiple Oscar-winner Mrs. Miniver to be a perfect propaganda film, also greatly admired Eisenstein’s films, particularly Battleship Potemkin.
Up to 1940, Germany had no interest in Ireland, and even though Hitler and Goebbels disagreed on Britain - the former wanted to be more like them and tried to appease them, while Goebbels was very anti-British - Hitler soon realised that war against the British was inevitable, and propaganda was the perfect way to change the minds of German people. Apart from the geographical aspect to things, ie, that Ireland could be used as a back door to England, films were made with a certain mantra in mind - “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”.
Anti-British films appeared even before the ‘Irish films’ - films like Heart of a Queen about Mary Queen of Scots (as the goodie) and a 1942 version of Titantic in which the ship’s owner is portrayed as a greedy Capitalist who pushes the captain to increase speed despite the risk of icebergs. Worst of all in this canon, is Ohm Kruger about the Boer War, which draws parallels between the Irish and the Boers with both as oppressed peoples fighting the crown. The film even suggests that the British invented concentration camps during the Boer War. Another film whose aim was to paint a subversive portrait of the British, was Jew Suss, an anti-semetic polemic that attempted to show that the British had been ‘Jewified’ and were no longer great Aryans.
And so to the specifically ‘Irish’ movies, two of which which were directed by a little-known filmmaker called Max Kimmich. Kimmich had worked in Hollywood for five years making short entertainment films like The Tricky Trickster that weren’t terribly successful. Handily enough, from a nepotistic point of view anyway, he was married to Goebbel’s younger sister, Maria. Kimmich and his entire production staff had no idea of what Ireland was like. No attempt was made at factual accuracy, at representing Ireland - its people and places - as they really were.
The Fox of Glenarvon (April 1940) concerns the Irish armed struggle against British occupation. The heroine, Gloria, is married to a man who is a servant of British crown, but she sympathises with the Irish rebels (called Ribbonmen in the film). Even Ennis, the Irish landlord possesses a very atypical patriotism that sees him side with the rebels. In a bid to prove the film’s importance, it starred Ferdinand Marian and Olga Checkova, two of Germany’s biggest actors of the 1930s. Hitler was fascinated by Olga and later awarded her the title of ‘State Actress’ under the Third Reich. Frequently she was cast to appeal to men and to awaken women’s sense of patriotism.
In My Life for Ireland, young Irish boys mix with English students at a boarding school, where the authorities hope the boys can be ‘Anglicised’. The story is not an intrinsically Irish one and the characters aren’t identifiably Irish: in one scene at a ceile, where the Ribbonmen flee to escape the police by joining in on a reel, they stomp around in a pounding march. Think Nuremburg Rallies and not Michael Flatley. The more Irish the Irish were portrayed, the less German audiences empathised with them, so portraits of ‘real’ Irish people were passed over in favour of a Teutonic version that German audiences could identify with.
The most interesting thing about these films is that they weren’t ever meant to be seen in Ireland. Ireland, in cinematic terms and in the context of the films, was useful in facilitating a defeat of Britain. Never mind that the Irish of the time would have been considered sub-Aryan by the Nazis (and viewed with the same disregard as the Slavs in Eastern Europe). Portraying an idyllic peasant society of loyal, courageous types could easily help Germans identify with the characters’ positive traits, not necessarily their Irishness.
In later years, Goebbels realised that the message of these films could be counter-productive, particularly in German-occupied countries like Poland. A Gestapo report indicates that some films, including The Fox of Glenarvon were “totally unfit, and even dangerous, for the Polish population�. Ditto Luxembourg, because the film concerned a small country as the victim of a bigger oppressor who was right next door.
The programme is fascinating, particularly for anyone interested in film, propaganda or Third Reich history.
Hitler’s Irish Movies is on tomorrow (Tuesday, January 30th) at 22.15 on RTE 1.
January 29th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Cool. Must remember to watch that.
January 29th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Interesting stuff. Pity my aerial can’t pick up Bog 1 here in London
January 29th, 2007 at 10:15 pm
Wow, that sounds absolutely fascinating, thanks for alerting us to it! I can’t believe that I’d never heard of those films, despite my four years of university German (but then, I did write most of my big essays and my final dissertation on stuff like the novels written by lefty Jewish exiles in the ’30s and the Baader-Meinhof gang and Brecht & Weill’s Threepenny Opera, so I concentrated more on the non-Nazi side of things).
Actually, I’ve been reading an excellent forthcoming book by Clair Wills on Ireland during the war, which I recommend. It’s called That Neutral Island and the stuff about Ireland’s defence plans in the late ’30s and first year or so of the war is really interesting. Despite the fact that my granny was fond of telling how her windows were all blown by the North Strand bombings (she lived about 100 yards from the bomb site all her life) and my dad remembered there being gas masks and ration cards packed away in the house when he was very little, I knew relatively little about actual daily life during the Emergency and how convinced people were that an invasion was imminent.
January 29th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
I’ll tape it for you, Colm.
Assume you have access to a Betamax player.
January 29th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
Great stuff Sinéad. Thanks for the reminder.
January 30th, 2007 at 10:55 am
Excellent article..One minor point, to the best of my knowledge the British actually did invent the concentration camp during the Boer war, although clearly they did not use them for the same genocidal purposes as the Nazis. From the wikipedia article..
“The English term “concentration camp” was first used to describe camps operated by the British in South Africa during the 1899-1902 Second Boer War. Allegedly conceived as a form of humanitarian aid to the families whose farms had been destroyed in the fighting, the camps were used to confine and control large numbers of civilians as part of a Scorched Earth tactic. A report after the war stated that 27,927 Boers (of whom 22,074 were children under 16) and 14,154 black Africans died as a result of diseases developed due to overcrowding, inadequate diets and poor sanitation in the camps. In all, about 25% of the Boer inmates and 12% of the black African inmates died. The term “concentration camp” was coined at this time to signify the “concentration” of a large number of people in one place, and was used to describe both the camps in South Africa (1899-1902) and those established by the Spanish to support a similar anti-insurgency campaign in Cuba (circa 1895-1898 [1]), although at least some Spanish sources disagree with the comparison”
January 30th, 2007 at 11:06 am
Twenty, it’s really worth watching. And top-loading Betamax VCRs are cool.
Stellanova, I remember a couple of lectures on propaganda films in college, but with no mention of an Irish context.
Colm, RTE are planning to launch a new Digital TV station for Irish viewers in the UK. Just think: why bother soaking up the joys of London’s metropolis on a Friday night when you can stay in and watch Pat on the Late Late Show.
Gareth, thank you, it’s a great programme and I’d heartily recommend it if you’re home tonight. Sorry if I wasn’t too clear about the camps; the film suggests that the British invented the concentration camps, not merely as places to contain large numbers of people, but in the way that WE know concentration camps, ie like the Nazi ones at Belsen, Dachau, etc.
January 30th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Everybody’s jumping on this racism bandwagon. Next thing they’ll be saying is that Hitler was racist.
Twenty, thanks for the offer to tape it on Betamax. Just remember to wipe all of the other stuff you have on that tape you sick monkey.
Sinead - excellent news. Now I won’t have to go to O’Neills and cry into my pint, yearning for the old sod. What are the odds that RTE will have the channel up and running this side of the new millennium?
January 30th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Colm, looks like it might take a few months according to this:
January 30th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
Sinead,
Very interesting post- must try to watch it. Just wanted also to say thanks for the link to John Baker’s site a while back.
January 31st, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Most interesting article Sinead and very well written.
My Dad was in the Irish Army in the Curragh Camp detention centre in WWII. He had told me that they used to let the German prisoners out to go the pub some evenings unsupervised - they always safely returned! The same courtesy was not extended to British soldier prisoners - partly for the easier escape they would have to Britain - but also the “old enemy” attitude.
I’m sorry I missed the programme, I hope they re-run it.
PS - I don’t feel so old when many of you recall Betamax!
January 31st, 2007 at 12:49 pm
My grandfather lived a couple of miles from the Curragh and remembered seeing the German Luftwaffe internees marching up to a village pub some Saturdays, escorted by a couple of Irish soldiers. They sat quietly on the bar stools and had a couple of pints, then smartly took their leave and marched back to the detention centre. Some RAF pilots, after crash landing in the Irish countryside, were taken by night to the border in army lorries and quietly handed over to the RUC. Ireland was neutral against Germany, but those German internees “had a good war” as the saying goes.
February 1st, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Bollocks. I forgot about it.
February 1st, 2007 at 12:57 pm
this is available by bittorrent
info at
http://indymedia.ie/article/80768
February 4th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
Thanks, erqwnqr.
Nice Polish name that.