DVD: Victory of Faith

Considered lost for nearly seventy years, Victory of Faith is a key work in the evolution of Nazi propaganda, providing an ambitious record of the 1933 Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg. Released in early 1934, the film was enthusiastically promoted by the Nazi Party as a masterful promotional tool in presenting itself to the German people. Later that same year, however, Hitler oversaw a bloody purge of many of his “old comrades,” notably the Brownshirt leader Ernst Röhm, whose leading role at the 1933 rally – second only to Hitler – figures prominently in Riefenstahl’s film.

Victory of Faith provides a revealing look at the Nazi movement in the first blush of its 1933 triumphs. Here, the movement still bears the marks of its street-fighter origins; its rituals are often raw, lacking the orchestrated precision and theatrical grandeur we associate with later Nazi stagecraft. In these and other ways, Victory of Faith fills a gap in our understanding of the Third Reich, capturing the Hitler state at a pivotal stage in its early development.

B&W, 70 minutes, German with English subtitles