An ESSAY on the film:

Operation Michael  (Unternehmen Michael, 1937) and Heroic Self–Sacrifice 

In 1937, director Karl Ritter completed his trilogy on WWI with Operation Michael, which followed his very successful Patrioten (Patriots) and Urlaub auf Ehrenwort (Leave on Word of Honor). 

Whereas Patriots dealt with a soldier’s duty behind enemy lines and Leave on Word of Honor presented the disintegrating homefront, Operation Michael focused on the war as seen not from the battlefield but rather from the headquarters of the German General Staff. This was a perspective which had never before been shown in German cinemas.

The Ufa studio promotional materials sent out to cinema owners heralded the film as a ‘tremendous film document of ever–lasting German heroism, that in a thrilling story speaks as one to both the older and young generation!  A real advance in German film, which in its spirit and creative formation cannot be compared to any previous war film. With unusual, gripping events on the foremost front lines, the film develops a moving human plot of a previously unknown world: the brains behind the battle – the General Staff of an Army Corps during the March 1918 offensive.’

The promotional materials recommended to cinema owners that they turn to the ‘various Party memberships and its affiliated groups – NS Soldiers League , Kyffhäuser League, the German Labor Front, and formations of the SS, the SA, the Hitler Youth and German Girls League; which are ready to support you in the promotion and on the widest basis for this film.’

Ritter was able to cast some of the Third Reich’s best actors in the film, such as the legendary Heinrich George, Willy Birgel, Mathias Wieman, Christian Kayssler, Paul Otto, and Hannes Stelzer. Music was by Germany’s foremost film composer, Herbert Windt. Ritter’s youngest son, Gottfried, was the film’s Editor. 

The film was premiered at the Nuremburg Party Day on 7 September, 1937 to great acclaim. It opened in Berlin on 19 September that year at the prestigious Ufa Palast am Zoo cinema.

On 5 March 1938 the Reich and Prussian Minister for Science, Training and Public Education proclaimed that the film was to be taught in schools, and the Propaganda Ministry issued a 34 page school lesson plan for the film, which included two related battlefront maps.

The film also influenced Imperial Japan’s filmmakers when it and other Ritter films arrived in Japan in 1940. It was used as the basis for the famous Japanese militarist film General, Staff and Soldiers (Director Taguchi Satoshi, 1942).

Film historian Rainer Rother stated that “the idea of the ‘necessary sacrifice’ is a constant motif of Nazi propaganda films and this has rarely been more consistently celebrated than in Ritter’s films. Unternehmen Michaelis without rival in its description of war meant for a whole generation, but its re–heroification led another generation to self–destruction.” (The First World War and Popular Cinema, Rutgers, 2000).

--- William Gillespie, author of Karl Ritter, 2^ndedition ©2014,and The Making of the Crew of the Dora, ©2016.