This video showed up as a “suggestion” when I was watching YouTube (no, I’m not a Nazi), and I was curious to see what the last German propaganda newsreel of WWII showed. Among other things, which are explained in the 12½-minute clip, is the last video taken of Hitler, showing his left hand shaking violently (5:34), a symptom medical historians have attributed to Parkinson’s disease. (This bit wasn’t shown in the final video.) Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945—just five weeks after this newsreel appeared in German cinemas.
The footnotes show the direct translation, but there’s English narration of what’s going on in the video beginning 48 seconds in.
There’s a Wikipedia article on the newsreel series called, Die Deutsche Wochenschau, and here are two paragraphs from it:
Die Deutsche Wochenschau (German for ‘The German Weekly Review’, lit. ‘The German Weekly Look‘ or ‘The German Weekly Show‘) is the title of the unified newsreel series released in the cinemas of Nazi Germany from June 1940 until the end of World War II, with the final edition issued on 22 March 1945. The co-ordinated newsreel production was set up as a vital instrument for the mass distribution of Nazi propaganda at war. Today the preserved Wochenschau short films make up a significant part of the audiovisual records of the Nazi era.
. . . Among the many notable scenes preserved by the newsreel are the Nazi point of view during the Battle of Normandy, the footage of Hitler and Mussolini right after the 20 July plot, and the last footage (No. 755) of Hitler awarding the Iron Cross to Hitler Youth volunteers in the garden of the Reich Chancellery shortly before the Battle of Berlin. Its last documentary, Traitors before the People’s Court, depicted the trial of the accused in the 20 July plot, and was never shown.
It’s fascinating to see how, with the Russians closing in on Berlin, the German people were not told of it but instead were misled to think that they might successfully resist the enemy.
It is interesting. The experience of concerted media pressure on certain topics in the last ten or so years really makes one wonder just what the average German believed at that point in the war. It’s not as if the government pretended it wasn’t (and hadn’t been) losing ground. The coverage of the fortress cities is evidence of that. The bombing campaigns also showed that German was at the mercy of Allied air forces. Did the Germans think there was hope for a turnaround? Hitler himself was conscious of the fact that Frederick the Great had been losing a war when Tsar Peter III died, bringing Catherine the Great to the throne, who ended the war. Hitler, like Napoleon, was a gambler. But what did the people believe? Note that in the First World War, Hindenburg and Ludendorff did the math and decided the war was lost and ended it then, before Germany was invaded. It is interesting to consider all this in light of the war with Iran, where we are apparently dealing with leaders who, like Hitler, are not concerned about their own people when it is a question of preserving their power.
I think most recent scholarship concludes that, for the most part, Nazi propaganda was ineffective as a tool of persuasion. It succeeded only in the sense that it reinforced existing prejudices and gave license to bigots to act (I think we’re seeing that a bit today with Trump’s rhetoric giving license to America’s bigots). Germans who weren’t antisemites / white supremacists before the Nazis didn’t become such after exposure to Nazi propaganda. Dissenters simply remained quiet for fear of punishment/social exclusion, which were real threats.
Hitler hoped that Stalin, Churchill, and FDR would die and their successors would sue for peace. He was dead (literally) wrong. Stalin and Churchill did not die and Truman was just as committed to the war effort as FDR (who did die).
So depressing, one little man responsible for so much death and destruction. Incredible.