Who gets the royalties from propaganda films nowadays?

The thread on female directors brought up the subject of Triumph of the Will (obviously enough).

This lead me to wonder, if I were to buy the new special edition DVD release, who gets the money? Did/does Reifenstahl own the rights to her work? The same question goes for other works that are “dodgey”, for example Mein Kampf, Birth of a Nation etc.

There are various films and books that I would like to watch or read for their artistic merit, or historical value etc, but I do not wish to put cash in coffers that I do not approve of. If that makes sense…

Anyone know the answer to this?

I cannot speak about Triumph of the Will, but it is well-known where royalties for Mein Kampf goes.

Hitler’s property was forfitted to the State. In this case (IIRC) the Staat in question is Bavaria. It holds the copyright to MK in all nations outside of the USA. Permission to reprint the complete work it is rarely given. Citations are allowed only in academic works.

The US rights were sold by ol’ AH himself to an American firm that still holds them. They have been ver responsible about it, although they do allow complete reprints. They have never tried to make any serious money off the book.

In any case, the copyright will be up in another ten years or so. Then all the nutter will be able to print their own versions.

Any propaganda films made by the U.S. Army or other government agency are in public domain. This is because no work made by the government can be copyrighted.

As for Triumph of the Will (I hope we’re talkign about the same film - that Nazi thing about the 1936 Olympics?), the director, Leni Riefenstahl, is still alive; she turned 100 last August. I don’t know, however, if she’s actually still receiving royalties for it.
The website riefenstahl.com mentions on this German-speaking subpage that copyright to her footage are owned by Riefenstahl alone and that the makers of the site had to obtain permission from her.

I googled up another German-speaking page delaing with the legal consequences of a Swedish documentary on the Nazi era released in 1959. This film used Triumph of the Will material a lot which they had purchased from the (socialist) East German national archives. Riefenstahl, living in West Germany, sued them for royalties.
The producers argued that, since TotW had been produced for the NSDAP (it’s about the Party Congress, not the Olympics as I said in my earlier post), it had become property of the two divided German nations as legal successors of the Reich and the Party. In 1969, finally, the supreme civil court of West Germany rejected Riefenstahl’s claims.
The site adds, however, that according to agreements with the distribution company, Riefenstahl still has the right to decide who may show TotW in public and who not, but the details of that deal have not been published.

As for “Birth of a Nation” strictly speaking it’s not propoganda, it’s just a commercial film. The proceeds went to D.W. Griffith and his successors.

I’m not usually one to trust any version of Riefenstahl’s autobiography, but she claims that, as of 1963, the US Department of Justice recognised her US rights in regard to Triumph of the Will, Olympia, The Blue Light (her pre-war fiction film) and Tiefland (the one made during and after the war). Apparently, this was only partially successful and piracy continued. She implies that the successful (I actually, unconciously, initially typed “final” there) solution was “to make small changes in my films; for instance, to supply English subtitles, and then apply for a new copyright.” In keeping with the general “everybody’s unfair to poor Leni” tone of the book, she goes on:

I presume she’s counting the two parts of Olympia as distinct films here.

See Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir (St. Martins, 1993, p567-9, 620-1).