The ministry was created as the central institution of Nazi propaganda shortly after the party's national seizure of power in January 1933.

In the Hitler cabinet, it was headed by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who exercised control over all German mass media and creative artists through his ministry and the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer), which was established in the fall of 1933.

Shortly after the March 1933 Reichstag elections, Adolf Hitler presented his cabinet with a draft resolution to establish the ministry.

The role of the new ministry was to centralise Nazi control of all aspects of German cultural, mass media and intellectual life for the country.

Fritz Hippler, director of the 1940 antisemitic Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew, followed him in 1939 and then Hans Hinkel in April 1944.

The head of the film department also assumed responsibility for the production of certain feature-length documentaries and was in charge of the newsreel Deutsche Wochenschau (German Weekly Review).

Bans and explicit language regulations were at first rarely issued in order to avoid complete uniformity in the daily press's content.

After the revision of the Reich Film Law in 1934, the "violation of National Socialist, moral or artistic sensibilities" was included as a reason for prohibition.

[citation needed] The RMVP's Film Department was also responsible for the Deutsche Wochenschau (German Weekly Review), which by 1940 had begun to surpass the press in its influence on public awareness.

More than 300 film reporters, some of them part of so-called propaganda companies, were deployed on behalf of the High Command of the Wehrmacht in the army, navy and air force as well as the Waffen-SS.

[10] Numerous tasks of the Propaganda Ministry overlapped with the jurisdictions of other organizations which were interconnected by a complex network of personnel and that were also partly under Goebbels' direction.

As a professional organization, the Reich Chamber of Culture controlled and supervised creative artists in theater, radio, film and the press.

However, since Goebbels had met with the president of the organizing committee Theodor Lewald three days after taking office and had reached far-reaching agreements with him, he was able to involve himself at all levels.

[12] The influence on internal Italian reporting, for example, remained entirely in the hands of the Foreign Office since diplomatic tact was called for in dealing with Germany's Axis partner.