MOVIES : Reflections of the Third Reich : The UCLA series ‘Ministry of Illusion: Films From the Third Reich, 1933-1945’ provides a rare look at the filmmakers who chose to work under Hitler and Goebbels. It wasn’t all Nazi propaganda.

Of all the film footage taken of Adolf Hitler, a brief, nominally benign sequence turns out to be the most surprising and disturbing.

As presented in Philippe Mora’s little-seen 1973 documentary “Swastika,” this was a fragment of silent color home movies shot by Eva Braun at the leader’s Berchtesgaden retreat. Hitler is shown chatting on a terrace with some young women on his staff, his words cleverly decoded into subtitles with the help of a lip reader.

And what was this most frightening man chatting about? Was it his war aims, racial purity, the perfidy of his former Soviet allies? No, what Hitler wanted to know was his secretaries’ reactions to the film that had been screened the night before.

“So how was ‘Gone With the Wind?’ ” he asks his giggling associates. “How did you like it? And what did you think about Clark Gable? Wasn’t he handsome?”

Seeing that sequence is a shock because it reveals the degree to which, largely unconsciously, we have merged the deed with the doer, demonizing and dehumanizing the Nazi elite. We’ve in effect turned the Third Reich leadership into monstrous versions of the supermen they fancied themselves to be, brutal robots who never had a human thought or a relaxed moment. That’s because the contrary notion--that unspeakable, unforgivable atrocities were committed by people pretty much like us--is too horrible to contemplate.

All these sensations and more are brought to mind by “Ministry of Illusion: Films From the Third Reich, 1933-1945,” running from Thursday through Feb. 9. Screening at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater and co-sponsored by the Goethe-Institut/German Cultural Center, this group of 22 almost-never-seen Nazi-era motion pictures is sure to be the most provocative and eye-opening series to open in Los Angeles this year.

It is not an accident, it turns out, that Hitler was so curious about the reaction to “Gone With the Wind.” Both he and Joseph Goebbels, Reich minister for national enlightenment and propaganda, believed completely in the power of the cinema, often personally approving final versions of films and ensuring that cinemas were quickly reopened after air raids.

Some 1,100 theatrical features were produced in Germany from 1933 to 1945, and although anyone thinking about all that celluloid would doubtless assume that most if not all of those films would be crammed with blatant and hideous propaganda, that was not the case.

In fact, according to Eric Rentschler, a professor of film at UC Irvine and the curator of the UCLA series, the opposite was true. In line with Goebbels’ belief that “even entertainment can be politically of special value, because the moment a person is conscious of propaganda, propaganda becomes ineffective,” something like 85% or 90% of Third Reich films are classifiable as entertainment. According to Rentschler, Goebbels “encouraged the production of feature films that reflected the ambience of National Socialism, rather than loudly proclaimed its ideology.”

Consequently, many of the films in the “Ministry of Illusion” series had no more than indirect messages attached to their escapism: the fun-loving Baron who is “Munchausen’s” protagonist, for instance, takes a moment to proclaim that “one has only one homeland as he has only one mother,” and the amorous Catherine the Great offers the foreign-policy advice that “should there be blows, it is better to give than receive.”

More often, though, the messages were subtler still. What these films excelled at was portraying the masses in the way their government--and often they themselves--wanted to be seen. The Germans in these films are invariably good-hearted and kindly folks who selflessly place their duty above all else, citizens of a country so cultured that its soldiers were as familiar with classical music as with the sound of machine guns.

Most unnerving and disturbing are the movies that serve as almost exact mirror images of American films, offering visions of “aw, shucks” soldiers and the loved ones they left behind so perfectly echoing Hollywood norms that only the difference in uniform and language mark them as coming from the Reich. Never was Walt Kelly’s dictum that “we have met the enemy and he is us” so unexpectedly accurate.

“The Ministry of Illusion” opens with “The Prodigal Son,” a briskly paced 1934 film by one of the Reich’s most energetic and visually inventive directors, the surprising Luis Trenker. Often referred to as a German John Wayne, Trenker got into film as an Alpine guide for Dr. Arnold Fanck, popularizer of a robust, pre-Reich genre known as mountain films. He progressed to co-starring for Fanck along with another future director, Leni Riefenstahl, and finally went off to infuse his own films with his cheerful athleticism and man-eating grin.

“The Prodigal Son” begins in a picturesque Alpine village where everyone is so bursting with Aryan health it makes your teeth hurt. Trenker plays Tonio, a happy-go-lucky woodsman who divides his time between sweet-talking his shy shepherdess sweetheart Barbl (Maria Anderngast) and cutting down trees with similarly hearty lads who invariably sing when they work. Any spare moments are spent with the local teacher, mooning over a huge globe and talking dreamily about seeing the world.

Then, after doing a good deed for some visiting wealthy Americans, Tonio gets a chance to visit New York City, much to Barbl’s demure disgust. The teacher, however, tries to calm her down with a pointed dose of mountain wisdom: “He who never leaves can never return.”

Shot on location in lower Manattan, “The Prodigal Son’s” New York scenes strike a different tone. Photographed in stark, verite style, they provide a more graphic look at the realities of Depression America than most Hollywood films dared, concentrating on shots of grim tenements and homeless people sleeping in the streets. The film, which won the Grand Prize at 1935’s Venice festival, ends with a striking visual display of another sort, a heady harvest event back in Tonio’s hometown that is a combination Winterfest and pagan bacchanal.

More energetic still is the other Trenker film in the series, the beautifully photographed “The Emperor of California,” which is nothing less than a full-dress Third Reich Western starring Trenker as Johann Augustus Suter (John Sutter) of California gold rush fame.

Forced to leave his native Germany because of political oppression (a rather boggling scenario to be approved in 1936), Suter is told in a vision to go out and do his country’s work in the world. Practically the next shot has him wearing fringed buckskin and hanging out in a rowdy cowboy bar full of disreputable characters, all of whom speak impeccable German.

As Suter makes his way to California, this cultural topsy-turvyness continues: Our hero smokes a peace pipe with some fierce Sioux, a tribe whose native language was apparently English. And since Trenker did second unit work in Arizona, the area around Sacramento where Suter used honest German hard work to build a paradise with his bare hands turns out to be rife with large Saguaro cacti.

Despite this brio, and perhaps because of his fascination with America, Trenker, whose ability to resume work after the war always rankled Riefenstahl, never became one of Goebbels’ favorites. “Trenker makes national films,” the minister commented in a rather tart diary entry, “but he is and always was a real dirt bag.”

While the Trenker films promoted a chauvinist pride in the German people and a distrust of foreigners, other films pushed other messages, one of the most persistent being the necessity for sacrifice among women. Many of the Reich films turned into veritable orgies of denial, full-blown celebrations of self-abnegation that propagate the feeling, as one character puts it, that “one doesn’t have to be happy when one is in love.”

Perhaps the most unreal of those films is “The Great Sacrifice,” an elevated soap opera filmed in delicate Agfacolor where everyone is irreproachably wealthy, exquisitely polite, and lives in a world that barely intersects with reality.

The hero, Albrecht Froben (Carl Raddatz), is an athletic wind-and-sun kind of guy who’d rather be sailing his boat than reading gloomy poetry with the family of his refined wife, Oktavia. Out on the water, he runs into a naked vixen named Als, a Valkyrie from Finland who is known to lead “a free and irregular life,” which in addition to nude swimming includes seaside bow-and-arrow target shooting while riding bareback in a bathing suit.

Albrecht and Als appear to fall in love, but it is hard to be sure because both Als and Oktavia spend most of their time catering to self-absorbed Albrecht’s whims and telling him that their desires don’t matter as long as he is happy. Als is played by the popular Kristina Soderbaum, who, according to Cinzia Romani’s intriguing “Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich,” became “the embodiment of the fresh, ingenuous German fraulein-- modest and selfless--as well as the strong and healthy Aryan.”

Even more adept at self-sacrifice was Zorah Leander, the best-paid actress of the Reich years. A plump Swedish contralto who had to resort to intense weight-loss regimens before each new film, her deep-voiced songs (there were a few in almost every picture) were as much of an attraction as her ability to suffer for love on screen.

“The Great Love” was Leander’s most popular film, and one of the most successful of the entire Reich period. In it she plays Berlin torch singer Hanna Holberg, introduced belting out “my life for love, that’s how I am.” Hanna intoxicates an arrogant visiting airman who pesters her into bed (both of their hands on a doorknob and a fade to the clouds is as frank as it gets) and then spends the rest of the film suffering, suffering, suffering while he is off bombing civilians and thinking about the demands of duty.

Perhaps the closest Third Reich filmmaking got to pure entertainment was 1943’s “Munchausen,” made in Agfacolor to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Ufa studio. One of the most elaborate of all wartime productions, its size, according to David Stewart Hall’s “Film in the Third Reich,” forced the Agfacolor labs to work overtime to manufacture the film stock, its clever special effects took 10 months to stage and edit, and it used every candle in Berlin for a banquet scene in Catherine the Great’s Russian palace.

Playing Catherine was the seductive Brigitte Horney, the daughter of psychoanalyst Karen Horney; Leo Slezak, Walter’s father, played the Sultan of Turkey, and Hans Albers the Baron. A charming confection that is more sexually daring than American films of the period, “Munchausen” has been difficult to see publicly because of rights conflicts, though its influence on Terry Gilliam’s recent “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” is clear.

Another epic film, but one that never got shown in the Reich, is “Titanic,” which posits that the great ship went down because of the greed of British capitalists who threw prudence to the winds in an attempt to make a killing on the stock market. Not even the stalwart work of the ship’s German first officer, the only man with sense enough to worry about those pesky icebergs, could head off the disaster referred to here as “an eternal accusation against England’s greed.”

Amusing in a floating “Grand Hotel” kind of way, “Titanic” got into trouble with the authorities for two reasons. Its director, Herbert Selpin, was accused of sedition, in an incident unrelated to the film, and murdered in prison by the SS, and the film’s scenes of panic and pandemonium were considered bad for morale during a time of increased Allied bombing. One of “Titanic’s” stars, Sybille Schmitz, was both the female lead in Carl Theodor Dryer’s “Vampyre” and apparently the inspiration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Veronika Voss” as well.

The most fascinating and disorienting film in the series, “Request Concert,” was also the best-attended of the wartime period, accounting for a record 23 million admissions. Its title comes from an extremely popular radio program, broadcast from 4 to 6 p.m. every Sunday, where soldiers at the front requested snatches of primarily classical music.

What makes “Request Concert” so boggling is the way everything is so inescapably Hollywood but with the politics turned inside out and upside down. Herbert (Carl Raddatz again) and Inge (Ilse Werner) meet cute outside Berlin’s Olympic stadium in 1936 after her crotchety aunt has forgotten their tickets to the games. He gallantly offers to take her in and--aren’t they the lucky ones?--they get to their seats just in time for Hitler’s triumphal entry.

Naturally they fall madly in love, but suddenly, as it does again and again, duty calls for Herbert. The mission is so secret, so important, that he is forbidden to be in any kind of contact with stoic Inge. And what noble action is our romantic hero taking part in: the bombing of Loyalist Spain, including, for all we know, the awful destruction of Guernica.

Running parallel with the Inge-Herbert romance is a subplot concerning a group of clean-cut soldiers from the same neighborhood. Devoted to their mothers, families and sweethearts, loyal to each other, always available for comic relief, these infantrymen are close to indistinguishable from their American counterparts, as are the sailors who break into song in exactly the way sailors do in John Ford movies.

True, no American movie would have a scene where a soldier signals his mates by playing organ music by Beethoven during the invasion of Poland, and it is unnerving to hear the neighborhood butcher say, “Today we chop steaks, tomorrow Englishmen,” but those differences simply make the similarities all the eerier.

In the end, the films in “Ministry of Illusion” bring to mind a story by Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem concerning a simple Jewish boy who is drafted into the army. Sent to the front, he is told by his officer to shoot as soon as he sees the enemy.

The attack comes, but the boy does not shoot. Upbraided by his superiors, who scream “Look! It’s the enemy!,” he simply replies: “The enemy’s not there. People are there.” Of all the lessons World War II and the Holocaust have to teach us, that one continues to be the hardest to learn.

Vital Stats

“Ministry of Illusion: Films From the Third Reich, 1933-1945”

The schedule:

Saturday, 7:30 p.m.: The Prodigal Son, Titanic.

Thursday, 7:30 p.m.: Ferryman Maria, The Great Sacrifice.

Jan. 15, 2 p.m.: Lucky Kids, Kautschuk.

Jan. 15, 7 p.m.: Request Concert, Romance in a Minor Key.

Jan. 22, 2 p.m.: Closing Chord, Effi Briest.

Jan. 28, 7:30 p.m.: Munchausen, Amphitryon.

Jan. 31, 7:30 p.m.: Fugitives, The Old and the Young King.

Feb. 2, 7:30 p.m.: Under the Bridges, The Great Freedom No. 7.

Feb. 5, 2 p.m.: The Broken Jug, Akrobat Scho-o-on.

Feb. 5, 7 p.m.: Paracelsus, The Emperor of California.

Feb. 9, 7:30 p.m.: The Great Love, La Habanera.

UCLA’s Melnitz Theater is on the northeast corner of the Westwood campus, near the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Hilgard Avenue. Tickets are $5 and $3, with matinee tickets at $3 and $l.50. Parking is available for $5. For more information, call (310) 206-FILM.

In conjunction with this series, the Goethe-Institut’s German Cultural Center, at 5700 Wilshire Blvd., will host a pair of related documentary screenings. “The Eye of the Third Reich: Walter Frentz” will show on Feb. 14 at 7 p.m., and “Changing Roles: Henry V: Jaworsky” on Feb. 21 at 7 p.m. Admission is free.

Information: (213) 525-3388.