He was known for serious character roles,[1] especially in the 1979 film The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), as Hans in Germany, Pale Mother (1980), as Adolf Hitler in Hamsun (1996), and as the narrator in The White Ribbon (2009).

[7] In 1959 he appeared in Gerd Oswald's The Day the Rains Came (Am Tag als der Regen kam), a crime film featuring Mario Adorf, Gert Fröbe and Christian Wolff in the main roles.

[8] In 1966 he had a minor role in Ulrich Schamoni 's Es, a film about a real estate agent and an architectural draughtswoman and a concealed pregnancy and abortion.

[12] In 1979, Jacobi played the role of Gauleiter Löbsack alongside David Bennent, Mario Adorf and Berta Drews in Volker Schlöndorff's black comedy war drama The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) (1979).

In 2014 it was restored by the British Film Institute, who hailed it as a "feminist classic", writing that the "nuanced counterbalancing of Hans' and Lene's war experiences recalls the feminist commitment to exploring the distortion wrought by fascism as much on male as female psyches and bodies" and a "restored sequence charting Lene's sympathetic encounter with Soviet soldiers underlines Sanders-Brahms' political rooting in a West German feminism that was in turn indebted to the post-1968 student left.

"[15] In 1995, Jacobi appeared in Leidulv Risan's Pakten, a Norwegian crime comedy which starred Robert Mitchum and Cliff Robertson in the lead roles.

The author Charles P. Mitchell wrote in his book about portrayals of the leader in film that Jacobi "makes an excellent first impression in the role, dressed in a simple military uniform".