https://peertube.dngr.us/videos/watch/2087933d-5034-4658-b3d9-93b19c9330ea Made during the time of Hitler's Third Reich, this silent educational film (made to have a script read over it while it played) shows the various rivers of importance to Germany and Central Europe, while superimposing maps of Germany as it morphed over a several hundred year period. Part of the idea and motivation behind this film may have been to demonstrate to the German people the "natural" geographic boundaries of the German nation, and possibly that Germany deserved to be a bigger state than it was permitted to be following the Treaty of Versailles. Various Germanic tribes have occupied northern Germany since classical antiquity. A region named Germania was documented before 100 CE. During the Migration Period the Germanic tribes expanded southward. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation. The rise of Pan-Germanism inside the German Confederation resulted in the unification of most of the German states in 1871 into the Prussian-dominated German Empire. After World War I and the German Revolution of 1918–1919, the Empire was replaced by the parliamentary Weimar Republic. The establishment of the Third Reich in 1933 eventually led to World War II and the Holocaust. After 1945, Germany lost roughly one-quarter of its pre-war territory and evolved into two states, East Germany and West Germany. In 1990, the country was reunified. The process of German expansion after WWI started in 1935, when residents of the Saar region, which had been ruled under a mandate by the League of Nations since the Versailles Treaty, decided to join Germany after holding a popular referendum. This was followed in March 1936 by the German army’s occupation of the Rhineland, which had been demilitarized after the end of the First World War. Hitler then legitimized the occupation by staging a popular referendum after the fact. In March 1938, after making a series of intimidating moves and threats against the Austrian government, Hitler’s Germany annexed his native Austria and incorporated it into the Reich as the Eastern March [Ostmark]. Again, Hitler staged a popular referendum to retroactively legitimize the so-called Anschluss [annexation]. None of these moves met with any appreciable resistance from the local population or the Western Allies, despite the fact that the remilitarization of the Rhineland represented a violation of the Versailles and Locarno treaties. Thus, in September 1938, Hitler moved on to the next phase of his plan: the liquidation of Czechoslovakia. First, he demanded the incorporation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland – a region inhabited by ethnic Germans – into the German Reich. After prolonged negotiations with the Western Allies (above all Great Britain), who feared another European war, the Sudetenland was ceded to Germany in the Munich Agreement. This agreement, however, was made without Czech participation. In March 1939, German troops went on to occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia, where they established the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.” Slovakia was declared a German satellite state, and a “protective zone” for the stationing of German troops was established on its western border. In the same month, German troops occupied the Lithuanian Memel region, which Germany had lost under the Versailles treaty. Lithuania, which governed the region, was forced to sign a treaty that returned the Memel region to Germany. At this point, the aggressive and confrontational nature of Hitler’s foreign policy could not be ignored any longer. As a result, Great Britain guaranteed Poland’s sovereignty and promised its support in case of an attack. Motion picture films don't last forever; many have already been lost or destroyed. We collect, scan and preserve 35mm, 16mm and 8mm movies -- including home movies, industrial films, and other non-fiction. If you have films you'd like to have scanned or donate to Periscope Film, we'd love to hear from you. Contact us via the link below. This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD and 2k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iw1RT6vHLs Mirrored from Periscope Film (https://www.youtube.com/@PeriscopeFilm) Fri, 12 Jun 2026 03:28:11 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://peertube.dngr.us https://peertube.dngr.us/lazy-static/avatars/41a6fee9-7f57-42d0-a5fc-5db4f1af2e31.png https://peertube.dngr.us/videos/watch/2087933d-5034-4658-b3d9-93b19c9330ea All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://peertube.dngr.us/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.