Propaganda Published 05 April 2021 Simon Hill HonFRPS, President of the RPS [email protected] On 6 April 1920 - exactly 101 years ago tomorrow - the photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, joined the fledgling Nazi Party. When Adolf Hitler took control of the Party in 1921, Hoffmann became his official photographer and Hitler decreed that no-one other than Hoffmann should take photographs of him; although Wieland Wagner (son of the composer, Richard Wagner) was later granted special permission to photograph Hitler at the Bayreuth Festival where Wagner’s epic Der Ring des Nibelungen (‘The Ring of the Nibelung’) was showcased. Hoffmann reputedly took over two million photographs of Hitler and eventually became his confidant and one of his most trusted propagandists. Hoffmann and the Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, ‘choreographed’ events that reinforced the conceited allusion of Nazi Germany as the