The United States played a very influential role in the film cultures of both East and West Germany from 1945 onward, both negatively and positively, both as an active force and one reacted against. Whatever the stated aims of the U.S. government with regard to a defeated, prostrate Nazi Germany at the end of World War II, these did not coincide with the much crasser intentions of the American film industry. Although it paid public lip service to official policies (the industry claimed to be “selling American democracy and the basis for a future peaceful and if possible better Germany”), Hollywood had more self-serving goals. It intended to dominate a formidable international competitor and to capture German screens for its own product, using distribution channels under its commercial control.

With the collapse of the Nazi regime in May 1945, the German film industry simply evaporated. Its production facilities were destroyed and its personnel scattered, it had no means of distribution, and movie houses around the country had been bombed out. The debate over the issue of a Stunde Null, or zero hour, also applies to German film culture, which in most aspects proved to be not as transformed as had been thought.