Fritz Hippler (17 August 1909 – 22 May 2002) was a German filmmaker who ran the film department in the Propaganda Ministry of Nazi Germany, under Joseph Goebbels.
Hippler resented the Treaty of Versailles and its associated regulations, such as the assignment of the Danzig Corridor, the occupation of the Rhineland and the disarmament of Germany as unjustified humiliation, and rejected the Weimar democracy.
In 1933 he was appointed the district and high school group leader for Berlin-Brandenburg in the National Socialist German Students' League.
On 19 April 1933, the new National Socialist Education Minister Bernhard Rust repealed any disciplinary actions against students associated with the NSDAP, thus reinstating Hippler.
On 22 May 1933, he gave a speech initiating a march from the student house in the Oranienburger Straße to Opera Square with books which were then burned.
However, in July 1933 at a rally of the National Socialist Student League in the lecture hall of the Berlin University, he criticised the harsh action of some Nazi circles against the German modern artists like Emile Nolde and Barlach, the artists group Die Brücke, which was propagated by elements of the Nazi leadership as part of efforts against the Degenerate Art.
Although Goebbels was a lover of Nolde, this direction after a word of argument was in favour of the more radical of Hitler's National Socialists, whose spokesman was Alfred Rosenberg and his Combat League for German Culture.
Fritz Hippler earned his PhD in 1934 at the Heidelberg University with Arnold Bergstraesser and a dissertation titled "State and Society in the Thinking of John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Paul de Lagarde.
He appointed the 29-year-old Hippler to head the film department at the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda RMVP.
An article written by Hippler in the magazine "The film" about its creation marked Jews as "parasites of national degeneracy."
In addition to The Eternal Jew Hippler also directed the 1940 propaganda documentary Feldzug in Polen about the Third Reich's invasion and occupation of Poland in 1939, and Die Frontschau (The Frontshow), a series of shorts shown to soldiers before being shipped to the Eastern Front.
In 1942, Hippler published a book about film theory titled Betrachtungen zum Filmschaffen (i.e., Contemplations on Filmmaking), which included a preface by Emil Jannings.