Hitler and Ernst Röhm, still frame from the 1933 Victory of Faith Rally
In 1933, Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) made a documentary about the NSDAP's Fifth Party Rally, which took place from August 31 - September 3 in Nuremberg.
The film was called The Victory of Faith (Der Sieg des Glaubens). The title refers to the fact that the Fifth Party Rally was the first party rally to take place after Hitler took power (i.e., after the victory).
Party rallies, which were festive occasions as well as political gatherings, were held between 1923 and 1938, mostly in Nuremberg.
The sixty-minute film was long thought to be lost until a surviving copy was discovered in Great Britain in the 1990s.
Among the foreign guests in attendance at the rally was a delegation from the British Union of Fascists. Unity Mitford and Raven Thomson were included in the B.U.F. delegation.
Unity is on the left wearing a blackshirt under a tweed suit, her arm raised in a salute. Four places away from her, bareheaded with a moustache, is Alexander Raven Thomson, the B.U.F.'s Director of Policy.
The 1933 rally began on 31 August; four hundred thousand party members had been collected by special trains; the SA, the SS and the Hitler Youth were all represented.
The film of the rally premiered in the Berlin Ufa-Palast am Zoo on December 1, 1933, and was a great propaganda success. After the Röhm purge, however, the screenings were halted. Hitler ordered the film banned, every copy withdrawn and destroyed, because Ernst Röhm figured so prominently in it.
Röhm was the chief of staff of Hitler’s street-fighting, paramilitary brownshirt SA (Sturmabteilung), which by 1933 numbered two million men. He was the second most powerful man in the Party behind Hitler.
According to Wikipedia,
The film Triumph of the Will was produced to replace Victory of Faith and follows a similar script which is evident when one sees both films side by side. For example, the city of Nuremberg scenes—down to the shot of a cat that is included in the city driving sequence in both films. The innovative camera angles and editing that made Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens such a ground-breaking film are already demonstrated in Der Sieg des Glaubens. Furthermore, Herbert Windt reused much of the musical score for this film in Triumph des Willens.
Adolf Hitler had personally commissioned Leni Riefenstahl to make the Victory of Faithfilm. The two were bound by a close friendship that provided the foundation for Riefenstahl's brilliant career during the Nazi dictatorship. Hitler believed that the talented director was the right person to portray the party rally as a thrilling and emotional mass event and to present himself as a charismatic leader.
Leni Riefenstahl
She later produced other propaganda films that also won international acclaim. In addition to the much acclaimed Triumph of the Will, she produced The Day of Freedom, and her best-known work, a two-part film on the 1936 Olympic Games (The Festival of the Peoples and The Festival of Beauty), whose artistic and technical quality established her reputation even beyond the Nazi dictatorship. Riefenstahl herself always denied any complicity with or support for the Nazi regime.
Victory of Faith film poster
The movie gathers momentum as the viewer peers over Hitler’s shoulder as his car moves through Nuremberg’s crowded streets.
The camera shows swastika banners, marching brigades, music, parades, speeches, and enormous masses of people, interspersed with dozens of individual faces of party members, soldiers, SA and SS men, Hitler Youth, and townspeople.
There is no narration.
Several selections from Hitler’s speeches are included. In one he speaks of victory after struggle, and aspirations for ethnic unity:
Many of you look back on a fight that has lasted for years. Today we see the result of that fight. The National Socialist Party has become the state. Its leaders today are the leaders of the German Reich who must answer to history. You are answerable before God and history to accomplish through the political education of all Germans that they become one people, one idea, and one expression of a single will.
A laser-like focus on youth was apparent in his remarks to 65,000 Hitler Youth from every corner of the Reich:
You will be one people bound together as tightly as you are now. As German youth, our only hope—the courage and faith of our people. You, my youth, are the living guarantee, the living future of Germany, not an empty idea, nor empty formalism, an insipid plan. No! You are the blood of our blood, flesh of our flesh, spirit of our spirit. You are the continuation of our people.Joseph Goebbels—like Hitler, a skilled orator—gave a speech on “The Racial Question and World Propaganda” that does not appear in the film, perhaps because he explicitly criticized Jews.
Indeed, none of the excerpts from any of the speeches mention the Jewish question.
Adolf Hitler and SA leader Ernst Röhm stride together toward the cenotaph during the national party day of the NSDAP, Nuremberg, Germany, September 3, 1933
Röhm and his colleagues envisioned the SA, now over two million strong, as the German army of the future, replacing the Reichswehr and its long-standing professional officer corps with traditions dating back to Frederick the Great. In February 1934, Röhm demanded that the Reichswehr be absorbed into the SA to create a “people’s army” under his leadership.
Adamantly opposed by the Army, Hermann Göring, SS leader Heinrich Himmler, and others, Röhm evidently planned a coup if his demands were not met.
During the purge known as the Night of the Long Knives on June 30, 1934, Röhm was personally arrested by Hitler, and subsequently shot on the orders of Himmler and Göring in his prison cell in Munich. Many other SA leaders were liquidated as well. Röhm was replaced by Victor Lutze as the much less powerful new head of the SA.
Mainstream sources state that in April 1934 (i.e., before the Röhm purge in June) Riefenstahl was visiting Great Britain to speak at major universities to discuss her documentary film techniques. During the visit at least one copy of Victory of Faith was made.
This copy was rediscovered in the 1990s, after being in storage for more than 60 years, and is the only known surviving print.
However, in a lecture, David Irving, who knew Riefenstahl and discussed Victory of Faith with her, said that she possessed a copy—the implication being she had retained it for herself.
In 1948, a denazification court categorized Riefenstahl as a "follower." However, she was not able to refute the accusation that while making the film Tiefland (1940-41), she had forced a group of Gypsies to participate and that – contrary to her claims – had not saved them from being deported to Auschwitz.
Thus she remains controversial, and her career is considered exemplary of those artists who not only benefited from Nazi cultural policies but also willingly accepted the ideological appropriation of their work.
The Victory of Faith is available on DVD in excellent quality.
Read more:
Counter Currents
German History Documents
Counter Currents
German History Documents
