Nuremberg

Nuremberg serves as more than a backdrop in the book’s account of Nazi Germany: it is a carefully constructed stage on which political authority was made to appear overwhelming, sacred, and permanent. The city hosted the 1934 and 1935 Nazi Party rallies, linking mass spectacle and its cinematic reproduction to the regime’s expanding power. The consequences of what happened there extended well beyond the crowds gathered in the city, reaching into the lives of German Jews and shaping the arguments over whether the United States should participate in the Berlin Olympics.

A city remade as a political stage

The 1934 rally transformed Nuremberg into a setting designed to magnify the Nazi Party. Its staging was coordinated by Albert Speer, Joseph Goebbels, and Leni Riefenstahl, whose different responsibilities joined architecture, political messaging, and film. Speer designed the monumental setting; Goebbels controlled the event’s propaganda purpose; and Riefenstahl was charged with recording not only what happened but the spirit the rally was meant to project. The film was intended to carry that message to an audience much larger than the roughly three-quarters of a million party members gathered in the city that week.

The spectacle began before the speeches. On September 4, Adolf Hitler’s airplane descended into Nuremberg, and the arrival formed part of an event in which movements, images, and words were carefully arranged to reinforce the idea that the Nazi Party was invincible. The staging presented the party not merely as a political organization but as the focus of an almost religious devotion, embodied in its leader. Nuremberg’s role in the narrative therefore lies in how the rally made power visible and gave political authority the appearance of inevitability.

The 1934 rally and its film

Riefenstahl’s association with Nuremberg had begun before the better-known film. At Hitler’s personal request, she had directed Victory of Faith, a short-notice documentary of the 1933 party rally in the city. Technical problems left her dissatisfied with the result, but Hitler remained impressed and hoped she would make a more ambitious film about the next year’s gathering.

To produce that film, Riefenstahl worked from four hundred thousand feet of footage shot at the 1934 rally. At Berlin’s Geyer-Werke studios, she spent long days reviewing, cutting, and joining the material, sometimes working until three or four in the morning. The resulting Triumph of the Will used a crew of 172, including 18 cameramen dressed as SA men so they could blend into the crowd. Cameras moved along tracks, rose on elevator platforms for aerial views, and were placed in ground-level pits to film the Nazi figures from below. These choices turned the rally into a composed visual argument, not simply a record of speeches and marching.

The film assembled uniformed party members into immense formations and gave prominence to speeches by Rudolf Hess, Goebbels, and Hitler. Speer’s architecture supplied a monumental setting, while a torchlight procession, banners, and ranks of uniformed organizations extended the spectacle across the city and into the night. On the rally’s third day, the film also showed Hitler addressing boys from the Hitler Youth and its junior branch, the German Young People. Their presence placed organized youth within the image of the movement’s future. Triumph of the Will became a defining representation of Nazi power and is still considered by many to be among the most successful propaganda films ever made.

The 1935 rally and laws of exclusion

The following year’s rally was called the Rally for Freedom, an ironic name for a gathering that dramatized Germany’s defiance of restrictions on rearmament. Again, hundreds of thousands of storm troopers and Blackshirts came to Nuremberg. Riefenstahl filmed the war games staged there, but the surviving footage from her participation was a short film about those exercises. The rally’s lasting political significance came instead from the events of September 15.

That evening, Hitler addressed the Reichstag, which had been assembled in Nuremberg for the first time since 1543. The meeting made a public spectacle of adopting the swastika as Germany’s official flag, and Hitler introduced two further laws that became central to the rally’s historical significance. The Reich Citizenship Law reserved citizenship for people of German or related blood who met the regime’s terms of loyalty and service. By excluding those it did not classify that way, it reduced German Jews to subjects without citizenship; their citizenship and associated rights were stripped beginning in January 1936.

The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor prohibited marriage and extramarital sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews, nullified marriages that violated the ban even if they had taken place abroad, and restricted Jewish households and the display of the national flag. These measures added legal force to exclusions already imposed through professional restrictions, intimidation, violence, and boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses. The laws passed at the Nuremberg rally were followed by further restrictions on Jewish life. Their significance was national: the city’s public ceremony provided a setting for measures whose reach extended throughout Germany.

Wider echoes and the meaning of the rallies

Nuremberg’s rallies also mattered beyond Germany because their presentation could shape how foreign observers understood the regime. Charles H. Sherrill, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, attended the 1935 rally as Hitler’s guest and met with him privately. On returning to the United States, Sherrill denied mounting evidence of persecution and opposed the Olympic boycott campaign. His response exemplified how the rallies and their carefully managed image could reassure visitors even as exclusion was becoming law.

The debate over American participation continued into December 1935, when the Amateur Athletic Union rejected a proposal to send investigators to Germany. That decision effectively ended the last serious American effort to boycott the Berlin Olympics. The book thus connects Nuremberg to a wider contest over what the rallies meant: for the Nazi regime, they concentrated political power and broadcast an image of unity; for those arguing against participation in the Olympics, the laws and persecution associated with that image made the spectacle impossible to separate from its consequences. In this account, Nuremberg’s importance rests on that conjunction of staged magnificence, propaganda, and state-enforced exclusion.