YOUTUBE RESTRICTS SECOND WORLD WAR PROPAGANDA FILM THAT MOCKED THE NAZIS. THEN IT DISCOVERS SATIRE.
YouTube on Wednesday walked back its removal of a Second World War-era video the British government created to ridicule Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, explaining it had mistakenly blocked access to the clip because an employee didn’t grasp that it was satire.
Lambeth Walk — Nazi Style (1942) disappeared from the YouTube account of The Public Domain Review, an online treasury of films, images and other works in the public domain, on Tuesday.
The employee had reviewed complaints about the video and determined it contained “violent or graphic” content that was posted either to shock or disrespect people or to “incite violence or encourage dangerous activities.”
The two-minute video features footage of German soldiers saluting Hitler and marching with the Nazi swastika, but for a humorous purpose: accompanying music makes it seem as though the Germans are performing a dance that Nazi leaders hated.
Adam Green, editor-inchief of The Public Domain Review, said he thought YouTube’s initial decision to remove Lambeth Walk — Nazi Style was “slightly farcical” and that he wasn’t sure how anyone could think it promotes Nazism.
It’s “kind of bizarre that they wouldn’t see it is satire and that it’s doing the opposite of lauding Nazis — all pretty clearly stated in the video’s description,” Green said in an email.
“The only disrespect on show is to Nazis, which I think is fair enough!”
In all, Lambeth Walk — Nazi Style was gone from The Public Domain Review’s account for almost five hours on Tuesday and blocked for 24 hours in EU countries that have specifically asked YouTube to ban pro-Nazi content.
YouTube, which employs reviewers all over the world, later conducted another probe of the video and reinstated it everywhere on Wednesday afternoon, according to a company official who requested anonymity because of not being authorized to comment publicly.
“It was simply a bad call made by somebody not understanding the satirical background,” the official said. “It was someone who just thought it was pro-Nazi footage.”
The British Ministry of Information produced Lambeth Walk — Nazi Style in wartime by fusing scenes from the Nazi propaganda movie Triumph of the Will with instrumental audio of The Lambeth Walk. The song from a 1937 British musical inspired a jaunty dance that captivated people around the U.S. and Europe, including, on the brink of the Second World War, Germany.
“In October 1938 the Times of London ran a headline that read, ‘While dictators rage and statesmen talk, all Europe dances — to The Lambeth Walk,’” Geoff Nicholson wrote in the book The Lost Art of Walking.
He described the walk as “a jaunty strut that involves linked arms and raised knees, and occasionally shouting, ‘Oi!’”
The gag in Lambeth Walk — Nazi Style is that the role of ebullient Londoners is unwittingly reprised by Hitler and the troops he commanded, devastating given that a Nazi newspaper once decried the walk as “Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping.”
As Nicholson notes, chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels is believed to have stormed out of a room “literally kicking and screaming” after he watched the mash-up.
Given the context, the YouTube official said they understood why editors at The Public Domain Review might be frustrated by the video’s removal.
“Because this is a video that uses real footage of speeches Hitler gave and Nazi rallies, it would have been very easily matched to our database of footage that has been considered problematic in the past,” the official said.
“Our teams can sometimes err on the side of a lot of caution when we’re talking specifically about Nazi Party footage.”