Rare photo booklet from early Nazi Party events. Berlin, 1933

Rare photo booklet from early Nazi Party events. Berlin, 1933

Deutschland-Bildheft - Sonderheft: Nürnberg – Die Stadt der Reichsparteitage – Nuremberg, City of the Reich Party Rallies – a "special photo" booklet. Contains 48 photographs from early Nazi Party events printed in brown copperplate, along with two detachable postcards at the center of the booklet – one depicting Adolf Hitler and the other a mass parade. “Published by agreement with the German Transport and Bathing Association, ” Universum-Verlagsanstalt G.m.b.H., Berlin [1933]. Introduction by Nuremberg Mayor Willy Liebel.

A rare photo album published in Nazi Germany as part of a series of visual propaganda booklets intended to glorify the Nazi state and the Führer through high-quality photographs of Nazi Party events.

This booklet is dedicated to the Party events in the city of Nuremberg, which served as the central location for the annual Nazi Party rallies (Reichsparteitag), held there every year beginning in the early 1920s. 

The booklet features close-up images and uniquely angled shots taken by leading Nazi photographers, who worked around the clock during the Party Congresses of the 1920s, in the formative years of the party, and at the major rally of 1933.

The photographs include: the first-ever parade attended by Adolf Hitler on “German Day” in September 1923; images from the Reich Party Congress held in Nuremberg in 1927; masses of people giving the Nazi salute at the 1929 Reich Party Congress; SA men marching in formation; mass processions and enthusiastic public support in the streets of Nuremberg; Adolf Hitler delivering a speech at the cultural conference in the ballroom of the Cultural Association; "Brownshirt" marches; young people asking for autographs from Joseph Goebbels; Hitler Youth parades; Adolf Hitler alongside his deputy Rudolf Hess; Hitler with Nuremberg Mayor Willy Liebel at the Nazi Party Congress; and more.

The Nazi Party rallies of the late 1920s and early 1930s played a critical role in building the political power and public image of the Nazi movement. Even before its rise to power, these gatherings - especially those held in Nuremberg - were meticulously orchestrated spectacles, combining symbols, parades, flags, and Hitler’s fiery speeches, all designed to unify the ranks and project strength, discipline, and unity.

In 1926, with the re-establishment of the party and Hitler’s decision to pursue power through political means externally, a party propaganda office was created, including a film department. A year later, the party produced its first documentary film about that year’s “Party Day, ” which functioned as an annual show of force. Through media, the party was able to present this one-day event again and again to an audience far larger than those who actually attended, effectively raising a new generation shaped by the impressions of those events. 

These rallies served not only external propaganda purposes, but also functioned as tools for forging internal ideological identity, cultivating Hitler’s personality cult, and presenting a vision of a future Germany through theatrical staging of total order. Even in this early period, there was a clear tendency to turn politics into an art of spectacle and status, a process that would reach its peak after 1933, but whose roots were firmly planted in these formative years.

The booklet is considered one of the most sought-after and rarest in the series (the majority of which focused on Germany’s historical cultural heritage).

See also: Matthias Rösch, Die Münchner NSDAP 1925–1933: Eine Untersuchung zu inneren Struktur der NSDAP in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002), pp. 315–316.

48 [2] pages. Very good condition.