Heimkehr (1941) *

As far as Nazi propaganda films go, this is a particularly inept example, especially compared with other contemporary German movies such as “Jew Suss” (1940) or “The Eternal Jew” (1940). This one, made to justify Hitler's invasion of Poland, tries to denounce the alleged persecution of ethnic Germans in Volhynia in 1939, but it mostly consists of hysterical Germans screaming about being persecuted, rather than dramatizing those persecutions in a narratively satisfying way (like “Jew Suss” did quite brilliantly). The best scene shows patriotic Poles singing their national anthem in a movie theatre while Germans sit silently – it's the only moment in the entire film when the Germans are silent. Curiously, in a film set in Volhynia, there are no Ukrainians at all – all non-Germans in the film are Poles, while in reality more than 70% of Volhynians were Ukrainians, and both Germans and Poles were small minorities in that province.