The 16-minute documentary Inside Nazi Germany was broadcast as part of the US newsreel The March of Time on 20 January, 1938. Most of the images were created by the documentary filmmaker Julien Bryan, who went to Germany for seven weeks in 1937 to film and take photographs of everyday and cultural life. He was allowed many freedoms – albeit with some controls. Thus he was allowed to film in the exhibition “Degenerate Art” in Munich. These recordings are the only known film footage of the exhibition that we have today. The excerpt shown here is the raw material without commentary. Bryan’s images, which appear to show an idyllic state of affairs, were subsequently provided with critical comments on the core of Hitler's policy.

The structure of the newsreel is historically incoherent – for example images of the entrance to the “Great Anti-Bolshevik Exhibition” are shown alongside images of the exhibition “Degenerate Art”. Matching the film footage, the documentary commentary merely pointed out that Goebbels had the exhibits displayed in a museum in order to draw attention to the horrors of communism and to fuel Germany’s hatred of Russia. The commentary did not discuss the comprehensive defamation of works of art and the persecution of their artists.