In addition to staging the May Day celebrations in Berlin and the Nuremberg rallies, he was in charge of the planning and designing of the annual Reich Harvest Thanksgiving Festivals that were held from 1933 to 1937 at the Bückeberg Hill.

State Secretary Karl Hanke, the highest ranking civil servant in the Ministry, had fallen out of favor with Goebbels because of his romantic involvement with the Reichminister's wife Magda, and he had been on leave since August 1939.

On 15 August 1941, he chaired a meeting with some forty officials from other ministries and agencies to discuss the issue of forcing German Jews to wear a special visible identification marking, known as the yellow badge.

[11] Gutterer was invited by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich to represent the Propaganda Ministry at the Wannsee Conference, the meeting called to coordinate the implementation of the Final Solution.

[13] On 8 May 1942, Gutterer delivered a speech opening The Soviet Paradise, an anti-Soviet propaganda exhibition in Berlin's Lustgarten that was visited by over 1.3 million people over the following month.

Gutterer was compensated by being appointed a managing director of UFA, the mammoth Nazi film production company, at "a huge salary".

Though holding the rank of SS-Brigadeführer since 9 November 1940,[2] he was deployed at the front lines as a non-commissioned officer in an anti-tank gun unit during the final phase of the Second World War until he was taken prisoner by the American forces.

[3] After being released, Gutterer initially lived incognito as a farmhand in the village of Motten in the Rhön Mountains of Bavaria until October 1947, before he was identified, interned at a camp in Hammelburg and tried in the German denazification process.

However, in a hearing before the Nuremberg Appeals Chamber on 14 December 1948, this verdict was reduced to one year in a labor camp, lifelong deprivation of pension, surrender of 80 percent of personal assets and an eight-year professional ban.

[14] In 1985, Gutterer was one of the few contemporary Nazi officials that were interviewed by the American historian Nathan Stoltzfus, during his research into the Rosenstrasse protest against the deportation of Berlin's Jews.