Karl Ritter (director)

[5] 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.

[15] When officers in the military queried the wisdom of the strategy depicted in Unternehmen Michael in which an entire infantry column chooses a heroic death to take the enemy with them in a hail of artillery fire, he responded, "I want to show the German youth that senseless, sacrificial death has its moral value".

[16] The Propaganda Ministry dismissed the radio play with which the military attempted to rebut Ritter's film.

[18] However, when events overtook them, one of his films, Kadetten (completed 1939, released 1941) had to be shelved for two years[8][19] and three either had to be abandoned or could not be released: Legion Condor when the war began, Besatzung Dora when the promise of land in the East for German settlers became hollow (and when the German forces had to withdraw from North Africa, a major setting of the film[6]) and Narvik when the project was opposed by the military and then transferred to Veit Harlan.

[2][7] After the end of World War II, Ritter was declared a "follower" (Mitläufer) at his de-Nazification trial.

David Stewart Hull, in his 1969 overview of Nazi films, characterised Ritter's work as "heavy-handed and extremely talky" and described Pour le Mérite as "a crushing bore" and Stukas as "ha[ving] all his worst vices: blatant propaganda, slapdash production values, crude editing, and a terrible script" but paid GPU a compliment: "The technical work is less slap-dash than usual and the acting considerably above Ritter's usual low level".

[30] (In contrast, David Welch, in his 1983 study of German film propaganda, states that in GPU, "Ritter portrayed the enemy in such a transparent and unreal way that even German cinema audiences failed to be convinced.... [T]he actors' wildly exaggerated gestures are totally unconvincing".

[31]) Karsten Witte summed him up in his overview, which was first published in 1993, as someone who "directed bad action films on a conveyor belt".

[8] The Polish film historian Jerzy Toeplitz wrote: "If Karl Ritter had had better screenplays... and if he had been more aware of the dangers of declamatory dialogue, his works would have gained immensely.

[34] His Zeitfilme such as Stukas have been provocatively seen as forerunners of modern military thrillers such as Roland Emmerich's 1996 Independence Day.