German Film Archives and Third Reich posters

The Reichfilmarchiv was established in 1933 and was the world’s first national film archive. Today, Germany does not actually have one central all-encompassing film archive or collection. Third Reich film materials are even more fragmented thanks to the plundering of the Reichsfilmarchiv after the war by the Soviets and the Allies.

The post-war state-based archives in München, Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Frankfurt/Main hold immensely important film posters and ephemera from the earliest days of silent films through to the present day.

The federal Bundesarchiv has seven main archives but all film materials are now held in  in Berlin-Lichterfelde. The Bundesarchiv poster holdings are extensive and include not only its own West German inventory but many Third Reich items which were taken to the Soviet Union by the Red Army and later returned to East Germany and held by the then DDR Stäatliches Filmarchiv. The BA-FA does not have any exhibition facilities but does loan film posters and other materials out to museums and institutions on a temporary basis. Recently we have been told that the  poster copies loaned out are no longer the originals, but facsimile full–colour posters printed from the originals.

The F.W. Murnau Stiftung in Wiesbaden also has a number of original posters but is primarily a film preservation and restoration entity which licenses television, documentary film footage and DVDs of some films via Transit Films in München. The Stiftung was established as the legal rights-holder of most German film stock by the BRD in the 1950s, when film inventory, confiscated in 1945, was returned by the Western Allies and their responsibility entrusted to the new West German government.

The Deutsches Institut für Filmkunde (DIF) in Frankfurt/Wiesbaden is a scholarly enterprise, publishing seminal works such as the three volume Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland (1895 – 1945). Its library book holdings are now mostly held in the rooms of the Deutschen Nationalbibliothek, at Adicksallee 1, 60322 Frankfurt/Main. Their Wiesbaden offices have limited access and an appointment seems to be necessary.  Best to research on-line first whether what you seek is in Wiesbaden or in the Nationalbibliothek, Frankfurt.

The former Staatliches Filmarchiv der DDR in East Berlin had its Third Reich inventory transferred in 1990 to the Bundesarchiv - Filmarchiv.  

The Potsdam Filmmuseum, housed in Friedrich the Great’s Marstall building, accumulated its film posters and archives post-1945, and consequently has a focus on the East German DEFA, although some important items from the pre-1945 era are still on display, including the original Ufa scripts for MÜNCHHAUSEN and DIE GOLDENE STADT. The Archiv also has Nachlass material of important actors and cameramen and technical people going back to the 1920s.

Filmarchiv Austria, in Vienna, has 18,000 film posters, a very large collection of film stills and the Nachlass of the 1939-1945 "Wien Film G.m.b.H." as well as important books and film material in its library. It also is a publisher of the standard works on  such Austrian film directors as  Hans Steinhoff and Gustav Ucicky. 

The only guide, other than Internet information, to these collections is the CineGraph book Recherche: Film published in 1997, but there are only six pages devoted to Third Reich materials. No updated second edition has been printed.

The Gillespie Collection visited the above archives over the past decade.  We can report that other than some materials on the Bavaria Filmkunst studio from the 1930’s/40’s, the München archive, at the Stadtmuseum, has almost nothing on the Third Reich. Frankfurt has important Entwürfe from Otto Hunte and Bruno Rehak, and some posters, which can only be accessed in a nearby suburb warehouse by appointment. Frankfurt's film museum has an emphasis on the silent and sound film cameras, Bioscope type „flicker“ machines and projectors rather than film posters,  and Düsseldorf has mostly post-1945 film posters. 

The Berlin Kinemathek/Berlin Film Museum has extensive holdings, which include over 550,000 film stills, thousands of Werbematerialen, and about 1,500 pre-1945 film posters (and 15,000 post-WWII posters). A world-class permanent exhibition on German film has a room dedicated to Leni Riefenstahl and other NS film directors and films, with some original posters on display, including the very rare posters (at the time of writing) for OLYMPIA, SIEG IM WESTEN, and WUNSCHKONZERT. In our opinion, Berlin has the finest single collection of all those covered in this summary. It also has sufficient exhibition space and a commitment to display holdings on an annual exhibition program. That is said with no ability to have accessed the holdings of the Bundesarchiv–Filmarchiv poster collection.

The Deutsches Historisches Museum on Unter den Linen in Berlin has a number of very rare film posters in their collection. DER EWIGE JUDE, JUD SÜß and S A MANN BRAND are on permanent display in their Twentieth Century exhibition area on the ground floor. The DHM`s film poster collection is made up only of posters which the Museum considers to hold ' major historic importance to German history.'  Most film posters fail in this regard, so their collection is quite specific. The Museum’s Zeughauskino occasionally screens Third Reich films, which are preceded by a compulsory lecture as per the custom for any ‘Vorbehaltsfilm.’

The visits were not comprehensive in every city but in some cases access to the archives, the library, and holdings outside of the public areas were arranged. There is no doubt that there remain big gaps in the holdings of these archives and museums as far as Third Reich posters and materials are concerned. None of the archivists indicated that acquisition monies were budgeted or available, and most rely on the donation of film personality estates (Nächlasse) and the generosity of private collectors, limited exchanges with other institutions, and de-accessorisation of duplicated items. Considerable research and promotion of film directors and stars exiled from Nazi Germany on racial or political grounds has been the overwhelming focus of these archives for more than seventy years. The Third Reich has been all but ignored, is still considered taboo, and there seems no impetus to exploit such holdings.

The EYE Film Institute in The Netherlands, which houses the Dutch film archives, is reputed to have the best single collection of Third Reich film posters extant. For example on a visit in Summer 2015 we found two Karl Ritter original posters not in our Collection –– one for Verräter and one for  Kadetten. There is rarely a major exhibition from this era that does not borrow posters from Holland.

The Austrian National Library has extensive Third Reich poster holdings, but naturally concentrated on Austrian 'Muster' graphic designs of German films that were in most cases completely different than the German poster designs prior to 1939. Many poster exhibitions in Germany draw on Vienna archival holdings regularly, too.

The Gillespie Collection is seen to be one of the best privately held collections of rare posters from this era that is known. The opportunity today for an archive, museum or private collectors to obtain original copies of many of the posters we hold is almost nil, even if acquisition budgets allowed. They simply are not on the market. There are without doubt some major private collectors whose holdings may well rival ours in terms of Third Reich original posters, but we are not aware of them nor have we any information from our many colleagues and sources. The private collection of film collector Christof Winterberg †  had about 200 Third Reich posters at the time of his death in early 2018. We managed to purchase 21 such posters from him between 2013 and 2017 on visits to Munich. A substantial portion of his huge overall film poster and massive film ephemera collection was purchased by a film dealer in Hannover.  His was the only private collection we ran across in thirty years which complemented our Third Reich era posters, and we only saw photographic albums with snapshots of his Third Reich posters, never the actual collection in Neuburg/Donau.