"TRIUMPH" SWILL

          Of all the movies about Hitler and the Nazis, the one most revealing, the one most damning, is the one Hitler himself demanded be made. 

          The trumpery of the only Nazi propaganda film anyone even remembers, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, begins with a blank black screen and soaring trumpet music building anticipation until...ta da! we see the image of a majestic eagle perched atop a broken cross, an ancient symbol of the sun which the National Socialist German Workers Party called the swastika. 

          The name of the party itself was trumped up because the Nazis weren't socialist but in fact fascist. Adolf Hitler patterned his dictatorship on that of Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. Mussolini was another not-so-bright little guy who used to strut around in front of crowds at rallies making stupid faces in lieu of presenting sound suggestions. Eventually, Il Duce's once-rabid base strung up his corpse by the heels and whaled away on it with sticks. Not long thereafter, Hitler hid in an underground bunker and was forced to commit suicide in order to avoid facing up to his crimes. 

          Prior to being tapped as Hitler's go-to propaganda director, Leni Riefenstahl had made a couple of "mountain pictures"--films featuring German mountain climbers climbing German mountains. Would that she had stuck with this. The 32 year-old director didn't have to help Hitler. When Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels tried to enlist film heavyweight Fritz Lang on the payroll, Fritz Lang left.

          Triumph of the Will is a movie without a story. "Commissioned by order of the Fuhrer," it documents in a highly stylized fashion Hitler's trip to Nuremberg "to review his faithful followers." 

          From inside an airplane high above the clouds the camera descends over the beautiful old city littered with banners of swastikas, the shadow of the plane falling ominously over the geometric lines of dutiful followers waiting below. When the plane lands, the crowds scream adoringly, hands upraised in obedient salute. In time, the reactions of the people to the sight of the Leader would not be so adoring. But in 1934, the long lines of admirers reveling in regional pride ecstatically greeted what they took to be the Teutonic tonic to narcissism wounded on a national scale after the unjust reparations of WWI. 

          Except he wasn't Teutonic at all. Hitler wasn't even born in Germany. He wasn't blonde, he wasn't tall, he wasn't muscular, and he wasn't Aryan. 

          Waa-waaaa.

          In fact, the one sort of person he resembled most was...Charlie Chaplin, the Little Tramp. Not just because of copying Chaplin's tiny mustache, either. The two were born only four days apart. In April, 1889. Chaplin first. 

          The film isn't shot chronologically. It jumps around from torch-lit nighttime rallies to sunny German Youth camp fun where the lads have a jolly time roasting their weenies and scrubbing each other. Here Riefenstahl stages close-ups of boys told to look at the camera and joyously, dutifully laugh, laugh, so we can see how happy they are forming the necessary bonds required to ensure military group efficiency. 

          In his major speech Hitler claims that the state does not order the people, but rather the people order the state. Prrffft. As balanced and fair as this lie sounds, in fact Hitler required that both his S.A. and S.S. troops take an Oath of Fealty not to Germany, but to him. And the suckers did it.

          Even the name of the film is an egregious error. Hitler wanted to identify himself with true German greatness. The greatness of Beethoven, Goethe, Alexander Von Humboldt. And perhaps the greatest of all philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, upon whose posthumous fame Hitler so very cheaply leeched...having clearly never read a word. 

          This was in keeping with Nietzsche's sister, herself an ignorant virulent old racist who gladly handed Adolf a problematic manuscript which the philosopher himself had specifically abandoned as a failed project. It was called The Will To Power, and the mere title alone was enough for parasitic appeal. 

          In reality, Nietzsche would have lambasted the Nazis. He wasn't anti-Semitic. Far from it. In the last letter Nietzsche ever wrote he said he was having all anti-Semites shot. And he signed it Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, also called Liber, which is the root word of Liberty.

          If more Germans had read Nietzsche's work, they might have known what to expect from allowing a hateful little mind like Hitler's into power. But Hitler's Germany was afraid of books. And so they did not see.

Stewart Kirby writes for

THE INDEPENDENT

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TWO RIVERS TRIBUNE