Karl Ritter: His Life and 'Zeitfilms' Under National Socialism by William Gillespie

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Karl Ritter: His Life and 'Zeitfilms' Under National Socialism by William Gillespie

Karl Ritter s films for Goebbels were called cinematic tanks that belong to the advance guard on the propaganda front by Germany s leading film magazine. His films Patrioten, Unternehmen Michael, Urlaub auf Ehrenwort and Stukas made him one of Germany s leading film directors and his anti-Bolshevik films Hitlerjunge Quex, Über alles in der Welt, Kadetten and GPU prompted the Soviets to demand that Ritter stand trial in 1945 for war crimes.

German film director Karl Ritter (1888 1977) scripted, assisted, produced or directed 97 movies and film projects between 1927 and 1945 but his work is known today only to historians and students of National Socialist film. A pamphlet written in war time Berlin was the sole biographical sketch on Ritter ever published.

Yet Ritter was the prototype fascist film director who more than any other director in the Third Reich worked tirelessly for the Nazi ideological cause. Ritter first heard Hitler speak in Munich in 1920, knew him personally from 1923, and joined the NSDAP in 1925. His creative skills as a soldier, aviation pioneer, technician, graphic artist and film director came to the fore in 1933 when the Ufa film studio gave him his own production company to make films for the New Germany. His films for Goebbels were called cinematic tanks that belong to the advance guard on the propaganda front by Germany s leading film magazine. In 1950 film historian John Altmann labelled Ritter the most irresponsible and dangerous filmmaker of the Third Reich.

His WWI trilogy of Patrioten, Unternehmen Michael and Urlaub auf Ehrenwort made him one of Germany s leading film directors in the late 1930 s, and his anti-Bolshevik films Hitlerjunge Quex, Über alles in der Welt, Kadetten and GPU prompted the Soviets to demand that Ritter stand trial in 1945 for war crimes. His films are still taboo in Germany and Austria to this day.

Karl Ritter His Life and Zeitfilms under National Socialism provides the first study in English which draws on both German film archives and unpublished sources to present Karl Ritter to a new audience. A chronology of his life and film work from Weimar silent films through to the collapse of the Third Reich offers new insights heretofore unexamined.

Translated here for the first time are a speech on Zeitfilms and Contemporary History given by Ritter to a 1936 film institute audience in Hamburg, the 1940 biographical sketch, and relevant entries in his diaries about Ritter by Dr Joseph Goebbels. Rare full colour reproductions of original posters of Ritter s most famous films are included, as well as B&W illustrations drawn from Third Reich and never before seen private Ritter family sources.

Paperback, 168 pp