Case Study 14.1: Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935)

The Masterpiece as Genocide Preparation

Propaganda, Power, and Persuasion: A Critical Study of Influence, Disinformation, and Resistance

"I don't know about politics, but nature I understand." — Leni Riefenstahl, in later interviews, explaining her relationship to the Nazi regime

"The film is a lie. And a masterpiece." — Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism," 1975

Overview

Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens) was commissioned by Adolf Hitler, directed by Leni Riefenstahl, and released in March 1935. It documents — or more precisely, constructs — the 1934 Nuremberg Rally of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, held September 4–10, 1934. It runs approximately 114 minutes and is technically a documentary film, though as this case study will demonstrate, that classification requires significant qualification.

The film is the most analyzed piece of propaganda in the academic literature. Its citations in studies of propaganda, film theory, totalitarianism, and genocide are essentially uncountable. It received the Venice Film Festival Gold Medal and the French Grand Prix du cinéma upon its release. It was used by the Nazi regime as a tool of domestic consolidation and international image management. It was studied by filmmakers from across the political spectrum and across the century. And it was produced to serve a regime that within ten years would have murdered six million Jews and tens of millions of others.

This case study examines the film's production context, its structural content as propaganda, its reception and use by the regime, its relationship to the Holocaust, and the ongoing debate about how — and whether — it should be studied.

Historical Context: The Political Moment of 1934

The 1934 Nuremberg Rally was not a routine party event. It was staged at a moment of particular political urgency for the Nazi regime, for reasons that the film conspicuously omits but that any historically informed analysis must include.

In June 1934 — fewer than three months before the rally — Hitler had ordered the Night of the Long Knives (Nacht der langen Messer), a series of political murders in which Ernst Röhm (leader of the SA, the Nazi paramilitary force that had been central to Hitler's rise to power) and dozens of other SA leaders were killed, along with political rivals and inconvenient figures from multiple factions. Estimates of total deaths range from 85 to several hundred. The SA, which had represented a populist, street-fighting wing of the Nazi movement, was effectively eliminated as an independent power center. The SS, under Himmler, was elevated.

The regime needed the 1934 Rally to accomplish several propaganda tasks simultaneously: to present the Nazi movement as unified and triumphant rather than recently bloodied by internal purge; to celebrate the consolidation of Hitler's personal power (Hindenburg, the President, died on August 2, 1934, and Hitler assumed the presidency); to demonstrate the loyalty and discipline of a movement that had just experienced large-scale internal violence; and to project to both domestic and international audiences an image of a Germany under confident, stable, ordered control.

Riefenstahl's film was the documentary vehicle for all of these goals. The Night of the Long Knives is not mentioned. Röhm's name does not appear. The SA exists only as disciplined formations in the background. The film begins with the title card: "20 years after the outbreak of the World War / 16 years after the beginning of Germany's suffering / 19 months after the beginning of Germany's renaissance / Adolf Hitler flew again to Nuremberg to review his faithful followers." The suffering of Germany is stated; the massacre of German citizens by their leader three months earlier is not.

This omission is itself a propaganda technique. The film does not require the audience to accept false claims about the Night of the Long Knives; it simply does not permit the Night of the Long Knives to exist within the film's world. It is not in the frame. For audiences who saw the film — particularly audiences in 1935 for whom the recent violence was already being historically managed — the film's world replaced the historical record.

Why Riefenstahl Was Chosen

Riefenstahl's selection was personal and direct. Hitler saw her 1932 film Das Blaue Licht (The Blue Light), in which she also starred, and was impressed. Her shorter 1933 film Sieg des Glaubens (Victory of Faith), documenting the previous year's Nuremberg Rally, established a working relationship and demonstrated her capacity for large-scale event documentation.

But Hitler's choice was also strategic in a way that is often underappreciated: Riefenstahl was not a party member, did not have a formal role in the propaganda apparatus, and had an international reputation as an artistic filmmaker rather than a political functionary. Her involvement gave the film a veneer of artistic independence — it could be presented not as official propaganda but as an artist's vision. This was a calculated choice. Goebbels, who resented Riefenstahl and her direct access to Hitler, was largely excluded from the production, which operated with a budget and access structure that he could not control.

The "artistic freedom" frame — which Riefenstahl herself deployed throughout her post-war career — was built into the production from the beginning. It was not her spontaneous claim; it was the cover story constructed by the regime to make the film more credible both domestically and internationally as a record rather than a production.

Production Details: No Script, Total Access

The production scale of Triumph of the Will was unprecedented for documentary filmmaking. Riefenstahl had 30 cameras and approximately 170 crew members. Camera tracks were constructed within the rally grounds. An elevator platform was built on a flagpole for vertical camera movement. A special trolley ran along the stadium's long axis. Riefenstahl directed from the field, on roller skates, so she could move quickly between positions.

The fact that the film had no script — which Riefenstahl pointed to as evidence of documentary authenticity — is analytically deceptive. There was no script because the rally itself was the script. Albert Speer, who was responsible for the physical design of the Nuremberg Rally grounds and structures, coordinated with Riefenstahl on visual requirements. The Cathedral of Light — achieved by positioning 130 searchlights pointed straight up into the night sky, creating the visual effect of a vast architectural structure of light — was designed partly as a cinematic production element. The mass formations were choreographed for the camera. Hitler's arrival sequence, with the aircraft descending through clouds, was planned in terms of its visual composition and filmed from a dedicated aircraft.

The distinction between "documentary" and "staged" breaks down completely here. The event was theatrical in its design, and the film was the intended product of the event as much as the event was the subject of the film. The two were inseparable by the time production began.

Content Analysis: The Film's Structural Propaganda

The Aerial Arrival

The film's opening sequence — approximately ten minutes — is its most analyzed and most copied propaganda segment. Hitler's aircraft descends through clouds over Nuremberg; the shadow of the plane crosses the crowd below; the city's medieval rooftops are visible from above; Hitler emerges from the aircraft to a crowd of waiting supporters.

The ideological work of this sequence is layered:

Height and descent: The sustained aerial perspective — maintained for several minutes — places the viewer at a height that cannot be human. It is the perspective of a bird or an aircraft, not a person. When Hitler descends from this height into the crowd below, the visual grammar says: he has come from above, from a place that is not human space. The imagery of divine descent — clouds, altitude, the figure who moves from the realm of clouds into the realm of people — does not require theological literacy to activate. It operates on iconographic associations that are deep in Western visual culture.

The crowd below: Seen from altitude, the crowd is not a collection of individuals. It is a pattern, a texture, a surface. The individual disappears into the collective. This is the film's visual argument about the proper relationship between the person and the national movement: the individual, seen from the right perspective, is a unit in a larger structure. The visual grammar precedes the argument; you feel it before you think it.

The procession: The sequence through Nuremberg's streets demonstrates the film's most consistent technique: the total occupation of visual space by the regime. Every building carries flags. Every street is lined with people. There is no empty space, no unaffiliated citizen, no architecture that does not carry the movement's visual signature. The Germany in this film is a Germany that is fully and completely Nazi. There is no other Germany visible.

The Mass Formations

The stadium sequences, which occupy much of the film's middle section, are the most frequently studied for their aesthetic qualities. The massed formations of SA, SS, Labor Front, and other groups, photographed from above and from multiple angles, create a visual spectacle of order and scale that has influenced military pageantry, sports spectacle, and musical performance staging across the following century.

What the formations accomplish ideologically is the visualization of the totalitarian claim: the individual and the movement are not in tension. The individual's full realization — the most meaningful form of their existence — is as part of the collective. The solo human being cannot achieve what the formation achieves. The formation's beauty — and it is genuinely beautiful by certain aesthetic standards — is the beauty of the state's claim about the individual.

The Children Sequences

Among the film's most disturbing sequences for contemporary viewers are those involving German children — Hitler Youth and BDM (League of German Girls) members who appear at various points in the film, looking up at Hitler with expressions that are clearly directed emotional performances of adoration.

These sequences accomplish a specific propaganda function: they represent the future. The rally is not just about the present National Socialist movement; it is about a generation that is being delivered, fully formed, into the movement's hands. The children's adoration is both a fact about the present (look who loves the Führer) and a claim about the future (this is who Germany will be). The propaganda stakes — the investment of the entire future in the present movement — are made visible through children's faces.

The Speeches

Paradoxically, the film's least effective propaganda element, by most analytical assessments, is Hitler's actual speeches. When transcribed, they are frequently repetitive, sometimes incoherent, and often concerned with tactical party matters that have no meaning outside the immediate context. They are not the film's propaganda content. They are surrounded by it.

The speeches are embedded in a visual and musical environment — architecture, crowd reaction, orchestral underscore, reverential camera angles — that frames them as historic utterances regardless of their actual content. The audience is told by everything around the speech that they are hearing something momentous. The frame creates the meaning that the text does not supply.

Reception and Use

Triumph of the Will won the Venice Film Festival's Gold Medal in 1935, awarded by an international jury. This was not a minor film festival; it was the most prestigious European film prize of the era. The film's international recognition gave the Nazi regime a propaganda resource of considerable value: an independent international validation of the film's artistic merit that could be cited to demonstrate that German cinema under National Socialism was not merely functional but genuinely accomplished.

Within Germany, the film was screened widely and used as a tool of political socialization. It was shown in schools, party meetings, and public screenings. It represented the visual grammar of the regime's self-presentation and trained German audiences in the aesthetic conventions through which Nazi power would be displayed for the next decade.

Internationally, the film was distributed across Europe and in some cases beyond. In France and Great Britain, where political awareness of the Nazi regime was already significant, the film's reception was more complex — critics recognized both its craft and its politics. In the United States, it was shown in limited contexts and became an object of academic and professional film study almost immediately. John Grierson, the founder of the British documentary movement, wrote about it. Frank Capra studied it carefully before making Why We Fight.

Relationship to the Holocaust

The question of whether Triumph of the Will contributed to the Holocaust — whether it is, in some sense, a preparatory document for genocide — is one that historians and genocide scholars have engaged seriously.

The direct causal chain cannot be established with the precision that the question might seem to require. Triumph of the Will does not advocate the murder of Jews; it does not depict Jews at all except by implication in the unified-ethnic-national imagery of the German crowd. The film does not explicitly call for violence.

What it does is more structural. The film's visual argument — that the healthy Germany is the unified, racially coherent Germany; that individual significance is achieved through absorption into the national collective; that the Führer is the embodiment of the nation's destiny — is the visual articulation of the same ideology that in 1941–1942 produced the Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution. The film does not make the genocide argument; it makes the ideological foundation argument from which genocide emerged.

The films that did make something closer to the genocide argument — Der ewige Jude (1940), Jud Süß (1940) — came later and were more explicit. Triumph of the Will precedes them and works at a different level: it does not construct the enemy to be destroyed, but it constructs the unified people who will do the destroying. It answers the question "who are we?" before the question "what must we do?" is posed.

The documentation of Jud Süß being shown to SS units before Eastern Front operations, and the broader context of visual propaganda in the training and ideological conditioning of Holocaust perpetrators, establishes that film propaganda was an active component of genocide preparation. Whether Triumph of the Will specifically was part of that preparation is less certain; that the regime's total propaganda apparatus, of which Triumph of the Will was the most prestigious piece, contributed to creating the psychological conditions for genocide is the consensus of genocide scholarship.

Post-War Culpability: What the Courts Found

Riefenstahl was arrested by Allied forces after the war and subjected to denazification proceedings on multiple occasions between 1945 and 1952. She was ultimately classified as a "fellow traveler" (Mitläuferin) — a Nazi sympathizer rather than a perpetrator — and released. She was never charged with war crimes or crimes against humanity.

Her defense, which she maintained consistently across her post-war decades, was essentially aesthetic: she was an artist, not a politician; she filmed what was in front of her; the film's political use was the regime's responsibility, not hers; she had no knowledge of the regime's crimes when she made the film.

Scholars and critics have subjected this defense to sustained analysis and found it largely unconvincing on its own terms. Susan Sontag's 1975 essay "Fascinating Fascism" is the most influential critique: Sontag argues that Riefenstahl's films are not merely aestheticized records of fascism but are themselves embodiments of fascist aesthetics — the worship of beauty, the celebration of power, the subordination of the individual to the collective, the aestheticization of death and sacrifice. The aesthetic content and the political content are not separable, in Sontag's analysis, and Riefenstahl's claim to aesthetic innocence is therefore analytically incoherent.

The practical legal outcome — that Riefenstahl was not prosecuted — reflects the difficulty of attributing legal responsibility for propaganda in the absence of a direct causal chain to specific atrocities. It does not resolve the analytical question, which scholarship has continued to debate: Was Riefenstahl an accomplice? Can an artist who produces propaganda in full awareness of the regime's nature bear responsibility for how that propaganda is used?

The Ongoing Debate: Studying a Masterpiece of Genocide Preparation

The debate about whether, and how, Triumph of the Will should be studied is itself a propaganda studies question of first importance. Three principal positions structure the debate:

Position 1: The film should be taught as a primary source in the history of propaganda, fascism, and genocide. Suppression or refusal to engage with the film would not diminish its historical effects, which are documented and irreversible. Understanding how the film works is essential to understanding how propaganda works; understanding how propaganda works is essential to resisting it. The scholarly consensus in media studies, film studies, and history broadly favors this position.

Position 2: The film should be studied only with extreme contextual care, given the risk that engagement without adequate framing can reproduce the film's aesthetic power and extend its influence. This position is held by some genocide scholars, educators who work in communities with direct Holocaust connections, and critical theorists who argue that the film's seduction is so powerful that it requires more protective scaffolding than most educational contexts provide.

Position 3: The film's aesthetic qualities should be engaged with honestly, including acknowledging that they are genuine aesthetic qualities, because the alternative — treating the film as purely ugly — is both dishonest and analytically self-defeating. A student who learns that Triumph of the Will is aesthetically repellent will not be equipped to encounter actual aesthetic power in the service of propaganda. The film's danger lies precisely in its beauty, and that danger must be named directly.

The three positions are not mutually exclusive. The strongest approach to teaching the film likely incorporates elements of all three: engage the film as a primary source, provide rigorous historical and analytical context, and acknowledge the aesthetic power rather than denying it — precisely because acknowledging the power is the first step to understanding how it works.

Analytical Questions for Discussion

1. Riefenstahl claimed that she was "just filming what was there" and that the political meaning of Triumph of the Will was the responsibility of the regime, not the filmmaker. What does Eisenstein's theory of montage, discussed in the chapter, imply about the validity of this defense? Can an editor film "just what is there"?

2. The film won the Venice Film Festival Gold Medal from an international jury in 1935. What does this reception tell us about the relationship between aesthetic quality and political content in the evaluation of film? What should international film prizes do with films that are technically distinguished and politically monstrous?

3. Triumph of the Will makes no explicit claims about Jewish people, yet historians connect it to the ideological apparatus that produced the Holocaust. How should we think about the relationship between a propaganda film's explicit content and its ideological function? Can a film contribute to genocide without advocating it?

4. Riefenstahl's post-war classification as a "fellow traveler" rather than a perpetrator reflects the legal and institutional difficulty of assigning criminal responsibility to propaganda producers. What framework — if any — should democracies have for holding propaganda producers legally accountable? What are the risks of such frameworks?

Case Study 14.1 | Chapter 14 | Propaganda, Power, and Persuasion