Inside Nazi Germany is one of the most important anti-Nazi documentaries in history. First released on 20 January 1938, the 15-minute movie became one of the first explicitly anti-Nazi newsreels to play in US cinemas and provided an early glimpse into the Nazi atrocities that would only become fully known to Americans years later.
The film, part of the legendary “March of Time” newsreel series, was even chosen for preservation by the US Library of Congress in 1993 because it played such an important part in US history. But YouTube recently deleted my upload of the video because the company says it’s in violation of their hate speech policy. Seriously.
On 27 July 2019, I posted the newsreel to YouTube because it seemed like an important historical document.
I’m currently writing a book about the movies the US presidents watched while in office, and I discovered that President Franklin D. Roosevelt watched Inside Nazi Germany at the White House. I went searching for the film, and when I finally tracked it down, I decided to upload it to YouTube, figuring that more people should be allowed to see it.
But YouTube apparently had other plans, deleting the video with a stern warning: “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech. Learn more about combating hate speech in your country.”
Hate speech against whom? The Nazis? This isn’t some old pro-Nazi movie that we might debate about keeping online for educational value. You can still find clips from vicious, anti-semitic Nazi films such as The Eternal Jew (1940) on YouTube, and while they’re flagged as sensitive, they aren’t pulled down under the theory that they can be an educational artefact demonstrating how fascism and bigotry go hand in hand.
Read the article by Matt Novak on Gizmodo.