Taking an unorthodox look at Nazi cinema, this book examines Nazi films as movies that contain propaganda rather than as propaganda vehicles that happen to be movies. It also observes that Nazi films, with their valorization of bourgeois culture and use of familiar narrative models, display an affinity with the world of Enlightenment culture.

Schulte-Sasse observes, for example, that Nazi films, with their valorization of bourgeois culture and use of familiar narrative models, display a curious affinity with the world of Enlightenment culture that the politics of National Socialism would seem to contradict. Schulte-Sasse argues that film served National Socialism less because of its ideological homogeneity than because of the appeal and familiarity of its underlying literary paradigms and because the medium itself guarantees a pleasurable illusion of wholeness. "Entertaining the Third Reich" will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, including those engaged in the study of cinema, popular culture, Nazism and Nazi art, the workings of fascist culture, and the history of modern ideology.