For the multichannel exhibition “P.O.V. (Point of View),” I worked with 16 mm amateur films shot by Harald von Vietinghoff-Riesch during his service as a Wehrmacht officer between 1938 and 1942. The footage was recorded behind the frontlines in France, Belgium, Poland, and the Soviet Union, including the area around Bakhmut (then Artemovsk) in eastern Ukraine. I had access to the original material because the amateur filmmaker was my grandfather.
Although filmed for private purposes, these images document the everyday routines, movements, and occupations of the German army during its campaigns. They reflect the ideological worldview of a Wehrmacht officer: Soldiers, conquered landscapes, and prisoners of war appear arranged for the camera in sanitized form, while the violence and atrocities taking place nearby remain outside the frame.
In seven films shown together at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) exhibition in 2016, I approached the material from different angles—through recurring motifs such as horses (The Horses of a Cavalry Captain), by slowing the material down (Artemovsk 1942), by reconstructing it in a virtual space (Against the Point of View), or by speeding up the entire body of material (Untitled [Everything]). The altogether more than 180 minutes of footage have been in the German Federal Archives since 1981. The Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film in Göttingen examined and in 1999 published a study of the material, which served as a source for a conversation between cultural theorist Klaus Theweleit, Marius Babias (director of n.b.k. and curator of “P.O.V.”), and myself on aspects of the films such as the ethnographic gaze, soldiers as tourists, and the crimes of the Wehrmacht.
Engaging with Klaus Theweleit was important because his work, especially Male Fantasies (1977), provides a framework for understanding how the images arose from a militarized male subjectivity and how previous history shapes the war camera. His analysis helps to reveal the subconscious elements in the film material, linking it to broader questions of fascism, violence, and the historical construction of the perpetrator’s gaze. For the conversation, artist Eiko Grimberg and I selected scenes from the films to discuss in a viewing session in my studio on February 26, 2016. I recorded the session, edited it, and presented it as a video titled Was man nicht sieht in the exhibition at n.b.k.. The original recording, transcribed and reedited for the exhibition’s publication, appears below.
—Clemens von Wedemeyer, December 2025
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Clemens von Wedemeyer (CvW): To get us started, I want to screen the first clip, showing various châteaux with their gardens and men in uniform posing in front of them, and read you an excerpt from a letter an officer in the general staff of the 4th Army—one of the major divisions of the Wehrmacht—wrote on May 16, 1940: “This evening I set foot on French soil for the first time. Now we are here in a handsome château of the Count of Paris, pretender to the French throne. I sleep in the library, which, Alvensleben says, is very valuable.”
Klaus Theweleit (KT): A little later, in July 1940, military action strictly speaking ceases, France has surrendered, and the Germans make themselves at home in the country. And what do we see in the pictures from the period? Harald von Vietinghoff-Riesch shows us not just one château; we watch an endless parade of châteaux, one after the other. After a while it dawns on the viewer that these are the various places where the general staff, the officers, were billeted; every time they were posted to another location, they lived in whichever château was nearby. The country had been defeated, so these buildings were available. And the photographs remind me of Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), a film about war and, more specifically, about two soldiers, two scruffy country bumpkins called Michel-Ange and Ulysse—which is to say, Michelangelo and Odysseus. Their wives go by Cleopatra and Venus. The two are picked up by someone who comes by on a motorcycle and says: “The king demands that you go to war.” They bid farewell to their wives, who say: “You’re coming back with nice stuff, right? Booty and all?” And the two go: “Oh yeah, war, so what are we allowed to do?” And the guy on the motorcycle says: “Anything!” So they go down their mental list: “Can we torture old people? Throw children out the window? Rape women?” “Anything you want!” Splendid.
Off they go, and it’s a real war, the works. They come back home and the women ask: “So what did you bring? Where are the riches you promised?” The men reply, “Here!” and set a battered suitcase down on the table. They open it, and what comes out are postcards: the Arc de Triomphe (which also appears in our cavalry captain’s pictures), the Eiffel Tower, buildings of all sorts all over Europe, arranged, by the way, in structuralist fashion so that what Godard has created here is also a parody of structuralism. The soldiers call out, “Here, palaces!” and then one palace after another comes into view as they slap the pictures on the table, and the two women are wide-eyed with awe. This, then, is what the soldier brings home from war: photos of buildings that, needless to say, he doesn’t own. In the end, Godard’s soldiers are shot—the war is lost—by their own people. Les Carabiniers is a wonderful film that highlights the idiocy and the peculiar gaze of the conqueror: You take pictures of the buildings and show them off at home.
German soldiers, too, brought or mailed photos home. Now, we know that there were also pictures of scenes that von Vietinghoff-Riesch doesn’t show, often of executions: of Jewish, Russian, or Polish women, with children in their arms, with the others standing about nearby and laughing. We saw all that between 1995 and 1999 in the Wehrmacht exhibition put together by the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (Hamburg Institute for Social Research), in the first version of the show, until the institute’s director, Jan Philipp Reemtsma, made corrections and produced an exhibition almost entirely devoid of photographs, or with only very small ones. He retracted all the enlarged prints because a few pictures were mislabeled—but that’s a different story. In any case, the cavalry captain doesn’t give us any pictures of executions to look at. But his gaze, you might say, makes a collection of palaces. And the cities and towns he and his staff are posted in, he trains his camera’s lens on those as well. Like trophies that he will get to keep even after the war is lost. To the Germans, that summer really was a season of celebration, a festival—before the war started to turn against them.
Harald von Vietinghoff-Riesch’s footage also features French soldiers; after all, a part of France is collaborating with the Germans, the so-called Vichy government. De Gaulle’s government-in-exile is in London, and there’s no hint whatsoever of the French Resistance. But von Vietinghoff-Riesch doesn’t try to depict political developments in the country. He simply documents the places he sees, with that rear-echelon gaze—until, gradually, the corpses come into view. But initially his pictures signal: This is where we are now. We’ve won, France is vanquished. We’re the new lords of these manors.
CvW: Another point the pictures drive home is that it’s not just the lords of the manors that have been sent packing. So have the French soldiers. The Germans are—more or less— alone in this deserted baroque garden. It’s basically a situation in which the real world around them has fallen away. But the only times they take off their uniforms are when they get naked and go for a swim in the lake together. There’s no intermediate space in which they’re private people. They’re alone in this postcard.
KT: He doesn’t shoot inside their lodgings but always only outdoors, recording the country they’ve come to claim. There’s plenty of footage showing men going for a swim, sometimes stark naked. That seems to have been one of their main entertainments—when they weren’t busy killing, murdering, prevailing by force of arms, and destroying cities and towns. The moment there’s a body of water they take off their clothes and jump in. And then they frolic like a gang of boys, regardless of the fact that they’re all officers. They undress, and when they’re among themselves they can show themselves naked, in lieu of the sex they’re not having. Cases of rape or relationships with local women never appear in the film. Scenes like the one with the rowboat, with six or seven naked men sitting in the boat together and then jumping into the water and cavorting, are also widespread in the written record of the war, in the recollections of veterans. They describe scenes similar to the ones filmed by the cavalry captain. The fun of jumping into a lake is almost like a love act: the men exhibit their own bodies and then plunge into the water. They don’t do that to wash. It’s a moment of genuine bliss.
CvW: The study produced by the Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film conjectures that the soldiers who were apprehended near Château d’Orrouy may have been hiding inside it. Looking at the footage, my impression is that this is a first-contact kind of situation. On the one hand, there’s the intensity and duration of the scene, which runs for a total of seventy-four seconds. On the other hand, von Vietinghoff-Riesch makes the most of the scene, approaching it from all different angles and then letting his camera linger on a dark-skinned man on the left who’s been stripped of his uniform jacket.
KT: In another scene we see Moroccans who’ve covered their heads with fezzes. Moroccan soldiers were a familiar sight from World War I. The Ruhr and part of what’s now Rhineland-Palatinate were occupied after the war. To supervise and enforce the extraction of reparations payments, the French stationed troops, some of them Moroccans, on German territory. The nationalist right in Germany perceived this as an enormous insult, that the French didn’t even use white French troops but “negroes”; the newspapers were full of it. When the reparations payments ended in 1932 and the last “colored” troops withdrew, there were big public celebrations along the Rhine. Von Vietinghoff-Riesch, by contrast, doesn’t represent the “colored” French soldiers as though he regards them as subhuman. But that was how the German propaganda painted them. This was a crucial factor in the rise of the nationalists in the 1920s: they promised retribution for the war the enemy powers—especially the French—had waged against the German side with Black troops.
The Senegalese soldiers in the pictures were probably treated as prisoners of war, or that’s what it looks like. If this scene were set on the Eastern Front, you’d think: They’ll be dead, shot by the German military, within a quarter of an hour. That’s not the impression you get here, just as the film more generally doesn’t show German soldiers doing anything nasty. The message von Vietinghoff-Riesch is trying to send back home is: We’re waging an honorable war and winning it honorably. One of the Senegalese men is even allowed to smoke. With a captured Russian soldier, they would’ve smacked the cigarette right out of his mouth, if they hadn’t already confiscated it beforehand. This here is a demonstration of civil, even humane, treatment.
Marius Babias (MB): At the same time, the way the camera focuses on that smoker is heavily ethnographic. It’s a construction of this group of people—perhaps not as inferior strictly speaking, but certainly as fundamentally different. And you can see deep fear in the prisoner’s eyes.
KT: Well, he’s been told that the Germans are Huns. Of course he’s not sure what’s going to happen to him. Yes, you can tell he’s afraid.
MB: If we assume that the point is to show that prisoners of war are being treated in accordance with the rules, to pretend that groups of Black people, too, receive civilized treatment, doesn’t that mean, given the National Socialist racial doctrine, that we have to scrutinize the camera’s role? Does the camera actually depict reality, or is that reality in fact being constructed?
KT: The moment you edit footage you never just depict. And even when you don’t edit anything you don’t just depict. It’s very important that in this take the German soldier is smoking a cigarette as well. It demonstrates that there’s a level on which soldiers meet as equals. The Blacks are recognized as soldiers. The way they look at each other is quite friendly, on both sides.
MB: Would the scene have played out in the same way if the camera hadn’t been there to record it? Would he have been offered a cigarette? Would his treatment still have been so humane?
KT: No. I do think this scene is very much staged for the camera. I think it’s a demonstration of fairness among soldiers. Of the victors toward prisoners of war. The Geneva Convention is what’s being demonstrated. They have human rights.
CvW: Another take dates from 1941, probably from the day of the attack on the Soviet Union. The booklet from the Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film claims that the footage was recorded earlier, making the commentators wonder whether the Soviet soldiers visible in the film are a visiting delegation of the Red Army, in part because the German officers facing them smile at them, in part because they are in good shape and smiling as well. But the war diary kept by Harald von Vietinghoff-Riesch’s brother, who served in the same general staff, describes the footage as taken on the day of the attack on the Soviet Union: “June 22. This morning our divisions crossed the border.” And he goes on: “Passed the morning interrogating the first prisoners, a Ukrainian junior lieutenant who was very scared he’d be shot, and several infantrymen, all Uzbeks from near Tashkent who spoke barely a word of Russian … Then a customs guard was brought back, a pretty hardened Communist, most recently a military official in the rank of a lieutenant colonel, who’d unsuspectingly steered his car right toward our troops.”
KT: So that’s the idea? That this encounter was a visit from the Russian side? That’s absurd. These “visitors” have clearly been disarmed, and if we now know from the diary that the scene took place on the first day of the attack on the Soviet Union, then these are captured Soviet soldiers. True, the German troops in the pictures look like they’re standing at ease. Then again, on the first day of the attack on the Soviet Union, you can be sure they still thought this would go the way it had in France: “We’ll have this in the bag in no time, and then we’ll just keep going at that level.” The same confidence is on display in a scene in which an officer has a black bird sitting on his forefinger and presents it to the camera. There’s a bit of Germanic mythology in it: The raven recalls the bird of wisdom or Wotan’s messenger. And that’s on day one of Operation Barbarossa. With Wotan’s support, the Nordic nation now vanquishes the East.
MB: Do these shots represent a story being told? Is it a small feature film within the film, as it were? The way the camera captures the Soviet soldiers in a variety of perspectives and in close-ups suggests that the scene makes a show of aiming for a documentary register.
KT: There is a story he’s trying to tell—especially where he shoots in color, as in the scene with the Moroccans. It’s the first day of the war, and he loads color stock. It’s a day of celebration.
CvW: One might imagine that he received a major shipment of color stock in the run-up to the attack on the Soviet Union.
KT: So we shouldn’t read too much into it.
CvW: One scene has two prisoners standing on a forest track. Von Vietinghoff-Riesch films them from multiple angles. What’s happening there? What are the Germans doing with the two prisoners?
KT: This is documentary, as it were. Freshly captured soldiers need to be part of the picture. Then we see three prisoners who von Vietinghoff-Riesch films one by one. He’s doing portrait shots, a treatment that’s otherwise reserved for German officers. That’s unusual. There’s also a kind of respect in it, with an overtone, you might almost say, of hope. Neither side has any idea yet of the horrors that await them. Then, after the next cut, we see the German officers again as they deal with the prisoners. The one German soldier there is standing about quite nonchalantly, another is smiling, as is the Soviet soldier. The way they move doesn’t suggest fear, or certainly not at this moment.
CvW: Why does it seem like they’re not afraid? Why is everybody smiling the whole time?
KT: What’s conspicuous in the pictures from the Soviet Union, including the ones that come after those we’ve discussed, is that there’s very often a German soldier or officer coming toward the camera with a smile. Part of it may be—as you’ve already hypothesized—that the camera is pointed at these individuals and so their impulse is to put on a face. At the same time there’s usually a view of the landscape in the background. So my impression is that what von Vietinghoff-Riesch wanted to show or record is the confidence with which these people are proceeding: “We’re taking possession of this land here. This Soviet Union, it’ll soon be ours.” That’s how they step before the camera in these frontal shots. They come across as jovial, they smile, present themselves as victors. Theirs is a triumphant smile. They’ve taken Poland in a few weeks, then France, then there was a lull. Now the Soviet Union; according to all their projections, given their military superiority and the intelligence they have about the Red Army, they know the enemy stands no chance against them at the moment of the attack. Some on the German right have argued that the Nazis justifiably attacked Russia because Stalin was planning to do the same, just a few weeks later. The Germans effectively preempted a Soviet strike. If you look at the Soviet Union’s military equipment figures, that’s nonsense. The Red Army wouldn’t have been capable of conquering Germany if it had wanted to. But when the German army had to halt its advance due to the unusually early onset of winter. That gave the Russian armaments industry the time to start churning out equipment. And when the winter was over, they hit the ground running. They’d manufactured a million machine guns, they’d built tanks, they’d conscripted soldiers. From that point on things went downhill for the German military. But when the film was recorded, the Germans were perfectly convinced: “We’ll conquer the Soviet Union just as rapidly as those other countries.”
CvW: So it can’t have been a friendly visit, just before the attack, which is what leads us to believe that the Soviet soldiers in the pictures are prisoners. Still, they too are standing at ease in the background and smiling the whole time. Were the Germans maybe trying to win them over to their side?
KT: Yes, that’s entirely possible. At this point in time the extermination of the Jews had not yet commenced on a grand scale. That came a little over half a year later; the SS used large numbers of Ukrainians and Poles to staff the concentration camps—as guards, as operating personnel, to do the labor of killing. This brings a complaint to my mind that I heard in school, from teachers who’d been officers during the war. These teachers told us: “Yes, we received a friendly welcome in Ukraine, because they were all anti-Communists, or at least most of them were. And Hitler’s biggest mistake was that they weren’t integrated into our side. They would’ve been happy to come over to our side and keep right on fighting, against the Soviet Union, but they were treated so badly, we burned down their villages, etc. Eventually they turned into partisans and our enemies.” I heard this any number of times. So the scenes of cordial greeting that von Vietinghoff-Riesch presents may well have been expressions of this initial sympathy. That’s entirely conceivable. Many peoples along the margins of the Soviet Union felt oppressed. They’d been forcibly resettled and the farmers expropriated. There was obviously a large anti-Communist potential there. One of the men really looks like he’s glad about the German officers who’re in the country now. Well, and they in turn feel flattered and smile.
CvW: But is that also the case with a smile that one need not necessarily reciprocate?
KT: To my mind the Germans we see don’t look like they know in the backs of their minds that they’ll kill the prisoners in a few hours. Orders of the kind that no prisoners would be taken and all captured Russians were to be shot hadn’t been issued yet. That became practice later on, in part for the basic reason that prisoners would have had to be fed. The Germans pillaged the country as they did, burning down the villages and shooting civilians, simply to eliminate hungry mouths, because they needed everything they found for the German army.
There are official calculations that were drawn up before the invasion of the Soviet Union: The Germans knew exactly that once the war started, if the army advanced as quickly as it had in France, they would be unable to supply the troops. They would have no way to feed the German soldiers. Where would they obtain the necessary supplies? They would have to take them from the Russian population, and take everything they could get. The plans for this campaign envisaged fifty million dead Russians, dead from starvation. The soldiers in von Vietinghoff-Riesch’s film don’t necessarily know that. Neither do the prisoners.
CvW: There’s a scene that comes right after the ones we just discussed and that’s also set in Ukraine: A bouquet of flowers is presented to the Germans in a Ukrainian farming village. Harald von Vietinghoff-Riesch’s brother notes in his diary that one villager approached the Germans shouting, “Long live the German troops, long live the German command!”
MB: Records of this sort show that such reception scenes are historically documented and weren’t staged. These pictures would seem to be evidence that the Germans were initially welcomed in Ukraine.
KT: Yes, many Germans were received with enthusiasm, and that’s clearly what’s happening in the cavalry captain’s film. It’s unlikely that the soldiers herded the Ukrainians together and told them: “Now let’s see a big smile. And be thrilled that we’re here.” That would be conceivable, as propaganda footage, but it’s not what this looks like. The scene with the bouquet helps us understand that some Ukrainians later supported the Germans as concentration camp henchmen.
There were similar professions of sympathy for the Germans in Poland. As Claude Lanzmann demonstrated in Shoah, people he interviewed in the Polish village of Chełmno nad Nerem, the location of an extermination camp, in 1980 basically reenacted the murder of the Jews in what they said. There have been three, four, five attempts to show Shoah on Polish television, and each ended with the broadcast being canceled at short notice or interrupted. It took forever to finally show the film. I recently read in a newspaper that the Polish government is planning on, or preparing to pass, a law that makes it a punishable offense to discuss the cooperation of Poles in the murder of the Jews.
CvW: Interestingly, the very next scene shows two generals during a briefing. What’s so insane about this footage is the well-rehearsed ceremoniousness of the occasion, the men’s routine gravitas—just as the pogroms in Galicia are starting.
KT: The general staff is always trailing a little behind the action, so it’s hard to determine whether von Vietinghoff-Riesch knew what the invading Wehrmacht was doing a few kilometers ahead of him. Looking at these pictures, you wouldn’t suspect a thing. There’s no indication whatsoever in that direction. It’s still a relatively unknown fact today—even most Germans who’ve read up on the history of the war aren’t aware of this—that half of the six million Jews the Germans murdered during World War II, three million, were dispatched during the invasion of the Soviet Union. Whenever the troops entered a village or town, the Germans claimed that the young men there were Bolshevik soldiers or Jews. They were shot down into the pits and buried. The same thing had happened before, during the occupation of the General Government. By the time the so-called Final Solution gets going, the Germans have already shot three million Jews. When former German soldiers who served during World War II now claim that they had nothing to do with that and didn’t know anything about it, that’s virtually impossible to believe. Every unit of the German army that participated in the advance randomly mowed down young people and Jews. We have reason to believe that few members of the German army who served in Russia did not participate in war crimes.
MB: I think that’s an important point to note: that the Germans killed Jews in the Soviet Union not only in the targeted operations of SS Sonderkommandos, but also as part of the Wehrmacht’s military advance into the country.
KT: Yes. Not in France though; the situation there was different. But then in France they defeated a Kulturnation, as they called it. In the East, the mission was to vanquish “subhumans,” who were to be eliminated because the Germans wanted to settle the land. That was an explicit objective of the war.
KT: One of the impulses that is palpable in the cavalry captain’s pictures is the effort not to show the entire reality of the war. That’s evident throughout, as an idea on the filmmaker’s mind. Still, the camera records elements of what the war is actually like. It reveals more than von Vietinghoff-Riesch wanted it to. Seeing a certain kind of faces, we can tell: “Ah, these are people who know that at this very moment, there and there, a few yards away, people are being shot, Jews are being shot, Poles are being shot, Russian prisoners of war, thousands of them.” We can see that too. But we can see it only because we know. By virtue of the fact that we know and keep in mind what was happening beyond the camera’s field of view, the pictures reveal more than they present to the cursory viewer. That’s what makes the films such an excellent document: They show someone wielding the camera—an enthusiast for horses and uniforms—and recording people as though they basically couldn’t or certainly wouldn’t hurt a fly. Except there are those grins flashing up now and then. Some scenes do show the Germans in the role of occupiers. They wear these hideous occupiers’ mugs. If you know about the crimes they’ve committed, you can spot it in their faces. If you know your history. If you don’t, they’re just well-dressed German heroes sporting jovial smiles.
MB: Given the way the officers are staged and present themselves before the camera, we might also regard these films as illustrations of how people dissociate war crimes from their own psychological lives. The horrors of war and killings are nowhere to be seen.
KT: Exactly, they’re nowhere to be seen, and instead we watch scenes of officers standing together, wearing their expertise on their faces, talking, perusing ordnance maps. They’re all such great guys, the pictures suggest.
CvW: They demonstrate that they’re in charge. They’re seasoned. The unit has been deployed for almost two years, the officers are very much aware that they’re being filmed, they know exactly how to present themselves.
KT: And stuck to their uniforms are the war decorations: a cross here, a cross there. Those were awarded only for heroic deeds, which is to say, for acts of murder.
MB: As a result of the Historikerstreit, the prevailing political tendency in post-reunification German society, especially in the political center, was to abstract responsibility from the individual, to place the crimes in a context that diminished their severity, and to relieve the generation of perpetrators of their guilt. In 2002, Harald Welzer and others published a book with the blunt title Opa war kein Nazi (Grandpa was no Nazi) that examines the intergenerational continuity linking the perpetrators to their grandchildren. Where the parents, the generation of ’68, rebelled against the generation of the perpetrators and critically examined their actions during the Nazi era, the grandchildren’s generation tries to write off their guilt. Tellingly, this happens around the time Germany is reunified, reemerging as a European major power and looking to form a core Europe.
KT: But that tendency didn’t really prevail, and most of the research we now have about the war generation was produced not so much or only in part by my generation, the ’68 generation. The grandchildren, the generation that followed mine, did much of the work.
MB: Clemens, what made you take an interest in this material? Wherein lies its appeal to you, and how would you say it speaks to us?
CvW: I’ve wondered more than once about this man who died twenty years before I was born, whom I never met in person: How did his mind work? To what extent is much of the perspective the pictures convey just naive, or how much of what he shows us was staged, and where is the editing such that it effectively acts as a form of commentary?
KT: I’d say that there are some passages where you can tell that the pictures are staged, but then many takes are not. There’s a scene where you know from the way the people in the picture speak, get into the car, and put on friendly faces that they’re aware they’re on camera. By recording scenes like the one with the joyful villagers, von Vietinghoff-Riesch is helping to construct the legend that the German military is popular and welcomed with open arms wherever it shows up. That’s a historical claim, and an especially interesting one if you think about how the Federal Republic dealt with the legacy of the Wehrmacht after World War II: Politicians like Alfred Dregger, head of the Christian Democratic Union in Hesse from 1967 to 1982 and a member of the German Bundestag from 1972 on, took people to court who said that the German army had participated in the extermination of the Jews. Its involvement wasn’t actually proven until the Hamburg Institute for Social Research’s Wehrmacht exhibition marshaled a wealth of documents. And the insights of that show have by now pretty much sunk in with anyone who wants to know about it. If you stand up and contend the opposite today, you’ll be seen as lying or trying to whitewash history. But it’s a strategy that worked well as recently as the 1990s. Harald von Vietinghoff-Riesch’s films, you might say, are excellent evidence for that process. The only Wehrmacht you see here is the one that’s squeaky clean.
CvW: I’d originally decided that I would work only with this material. But of course by working with it you repeat it; you screen it again and so you also show the perspective of the perpetrators. Harald von Vietinghoff-Riesch selectively looks on and looks away when something doesn’t fit the picture. Does that maybe offer us an indication as to what the material can tell us?
KT: Yes. One thing that definitely offers such an indication is the very fact that the material exists at all. Because most of the pictures we see, like the one of a German soldier handling a machine gun on its stand, would’ve been impossible to take in different circumstances. If any photographer who’d happened to be on the scene, an amateur, had taken that picture, they would’ve confiscated the camera. Photographing that sort of thing was prohibited! Most of the things von Vietinghoff-Riesch’s camera records, the general staff—none of this would’ve been feasible without the explicit permission he’d been given by General Schwedler. He has carte blanche. He can even send the footage home. With more than half of the material, people who would’ve taken these pictures would’ve been shot, or at the very least had the footage taken from them. The material documents that von Vietinghoff-Riesch had written permission to film these things in this way, and that the commanders took it for granted that—even if the filmmaker’s editing isn’t always overtly propagandistic—his work would paint a favorable picture of the German military. That’s the cavalry captain’s background mission, as it were, as is evident from the very fact that he obtained this permission. He wouldn’t have been allowed to film otherwise. Schwedler has absolute confidence in him, trusting he won’t get up to anything that might cast an unfavorable light on the military or be used against it. So his—expressed or tacitly assumed—loyalty to the regime informs his background mission. And in that sense it’s of course most interesting to see what he did. Here are people dressed in the good German uniform who, yes, are waging this war, but the premise is that they have to wage it because they were subjected to such horrendous treatment by the Allies after World War I. That’s the basic proposition of this footage: We’re watching a campaign for recompense after the unjustly lost Great War and the Treaty of Versailles, after the territorial losses it inflicted and reparations it exacted, after the occupation of the Ruhr. “Now we’re out to get it all back.” That, as it were, is the duty of the good Germans in those dapper uniforms the cavalry captain presents to us. And when you see the pictures in this light, they attest to his elation over how well that campaign is working out.