The Western Allied project to denazify Third Reich feature film stock

The three Allied powers that occupied West Germany from 1945 to 1955 subjected the feature film legacy of the Third Reich to a process of denazification. The origins and implementation of this project are examined here along chronological and comparative lines.
Part One looks at British and American dealings with Third Reich feature films until 1945. It explores whether general suggestions of ill-prepared occupation plans apply here; what role the wartime “reeducation” debate played in Anglo-American planning efforts; and to what extent British and American plans, partly informed by the perspectives of émigrés such as Siegfried Kracauer and Heinrich Fraenkel, confirmed the notion of a dichotomy between a few “political” Nazi features and a large group of “unpolitical” Third Reich features.
Part Two compares Western Military Governments’ policies from 1945 to 1949: legislation and official regulations; determination of ownership rights to seized films; censorship policies; destruction or shipment abroad of banned films; and the circulation of approved films, often in somewhat cut versions. The September 1949 lists of hundreds of cut and banned German feature films are shown to form a legacy of years of Allied purging efforts.
Part Three concentrates on the Allied High Commission period (1949-1955), when the Western Allies supervised a continuing process of denazification of Third Reich feature film stock. Representatives of the former UFI/UFA and other film industry members, many of whom seemed to hold on to the notion of a largely “unpolitical” Third Reich cinema, now aimed for a removal of individual features from the list of forbidden feature films. Submissions to and approvals by the semi-official German FSK were often based on drastic cuts. The AHC was sometimes internally divided (Harlan, Titanic), but accepted most of the FSK approvals. Still, several hundred features remained banned.