Karl Ritter

Karl Ritter (7 November 1888 – 7 April 1977) was a German film producer and director responsible for many Nazi propaganda films. He had previously been one of the first German military pilots. He spent most of his later life in Argentina. Early life Ritter was born in Würzburg. His father was a professor at the conservatoire; his mother was an opera singer. He was a career officer in the German military, built his own aeroplane and earned a pilot's licence in 1911 {#121}, and in World War I became one of the country's first military pilots. He was a lieutenant in the 1st Bavarian Pioneer Battalion. After the war, he studied architecture, worked as a graphic artist and entered the film industry in 1926 as a public relations manager at Südfilm, where he edited a book of Walt Disney cartoons. In 1932, he directed a short film featuring Karl Valentin, a comedian. Third Reich Ritter was a committed Nazi. His wife's father was distantly related to Richard Wagner. Ritter came into contact with Hitler through that connection and joined the party in the mid-1920s. After the Nazis had come to power, he moved from head of production at Reichsliga-Film in Munich to become a company director and chief of production at Universum Film AG (UFA). He was the producer of Hitlerjunge Quex among other important Nazi propaganda films. His directorial work for the regime includes entertainment films imitating Hollywood productions like Hochszeitsreise (1939) and Bal paré (1940), but he is best known for his propaganda films: anticommunist films such as The Red Terror (1942) and above all his military films, which were peacetime films with a World War I context with the 1937-1938 trilogy of Patrioten, Unternehmen Michael and Urlaub auf Ehrenwort and Pour le Mérite (1938)—and Zeitfilme (contemporary films) made after the start of World War II such as Stukas (1942). The latter type he largely invented, as a Nazi counter to the Russian revolutionary film, and can be seen as beginning with Verräter (1936), which for the first time brought the German spy film home to Germany.