Nürnberg Rally, German Nürnberger Parteitage, English Nürnberg Party Meetings, any of the massive Nazi Party rallies held in 1923, 1927, and 1929 and annually from 1933 through 1938 in Nürnberg (Nuremberg) in Bavaria. The rallies were primarily propaganda events, carefully staged to reinforce party enthusiasm and to showcase the power of National Socialism to the rest of Germany and the world.

At Hitler's personal request, a 31-year-old actress and movie director named Leni Riefenstahl was filming the entire week-long Rally. Utilizing thirty film cameras and 120 technicians, she produced an extraordinary film record of the festivities, featuring many unique camera angles and dramatic lighting effects.

Nürnberg Laws, two race-based measures depriving Jews of rights, designed by Adolf Hitler and approved by the Nazi Party at a convention in Nürnberg on September 15, 1935. One, the Reichsbürgergesetz (German: “Law of the Reich Citizen”), deprived Jews of German citizenship, designating them “subjects of the state.” The other, the Gesetz zum Schutze des Deutschen Blutes und der Deutschen Ehre (“Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour”), usually called simply the Blutschutzgesetz (“Blood Protection Law”), forbade marriage or sexual relations between Jews and “citizens of German or kindred blood.” These measures were among the first of the racist Nazi laws that culminated in the Holocaust.

Her most famous film, Triumph of the Will, documented Hitler's 1934 Nuremberg rally. It "created an image of the Nazi phenomenon which remains with us today", said Val Williams in the Independent. "With its awesome combination of ritual, piety, hysteria and order, [it] marked a watershed in German history ... [and] made Riefenstahl one of the most discussed directors in the history of cinema."

Triumph of the Will was first screened on March 28, 1935, at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin. It was given massive publicity and official promotion. Reviews in Germany were, naturally, gushing and for its financer and distributor, the leading film company UFA, the film proved a commercial success.

This timeline explains the effects of World War 1 on Germany and how the Nazis gained power including the role of propaganda.

Adolf Hitler: Man and monster 1889 - 1945.

In the good times before the Great Depression the Nazi Party experienced slow growth, barely reaching 100,000 members in a country of over sixty million. But the Party, despite its tiny size, was a tightly controlled, highly disciplined organization of fanatics poised to spring into action.

Ninety minutes of Leni Riefenstahl’s film about the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, The Triumph of the Will, can give undergraduates a more vivid impression of the nature of the system than can be obtained from reading three or four books from the History Faculty Library.