Carl Froelich

From 1903 Froelich was a colleague of Oskar Messter, one of the advance guard of German cinema, for whom initially he worked on the construction of cinematographic equipment. As cameraman for Messter's weekly newsreels he filmed among many other things the aftermath of a train accident on the Berlin elevated railway on 28 September 1908, one of the worst transport disasters of the time.

Froelich became a member of the National Socialist Party in 1933 and took over the direction of the Gesamtverbandes der Filmherstellung und Filmverwertung ("Union of Film Manufacture and Film Evaluation"). In 1937 he was awarded a professorship and in 1939 was appointed president of the Reichsfilmkammer, an office which he retained until the end of the war in 1945. The Reichsfilmkammer was subordinate to the Reichskulturkammer, which as a National Socialist trade organisation regulated and controlled access to all artistic professions. He was one of the few filmmakers that received the title "Filmprofessor" from Goebbels.

After the end of the war Froelich was arrested and in 1948 de-Nazified. His studio had been badly damaged during the war and did not resume production. Only two more films were made under his direction before his death: Three Girls Spinning and Stips.

• Werner Krafft (1916) • Ikarus, the Flying Man (1918) • The Loves of Käthe Keller (1919) • Wandering Souls (1921) • The Brothers Karamazov (1921) • Island of the Dead (1921) • In Thrall to the Claw (1921) • The Weather Station (1923) • Mother and Child (1924) • Chamber Music (1925) • The Adventures of Sybil Brent (1925) • Tragedy (1925) • The Flames Lie (1926) • Roses from the South (1926) • The Long Intermission (1927) • My Aunt, Your Aunt (1927) • Lotte (1928) • Escape (1928) • Love in the Cowshed (1928) • Violantha (1928) • The Night Belongs to Us (1929) • German Wine (1929) • The Woman Everyone Loves Is You (1929) • Hans in Every Street (1930) • Fire in the Opera House (1930) • Louise, Queen of Prussia (1931) • Mädchen in Uniform (1931) • This One or None (1932) • Gitta Discovers Her Heart (1932) • Love at First Sight (1932) • Ripening Youth (1933) • The Hymn of Leuthen (1933) • Trouble with Jolanthe (1934) • I for You, You for Me (1934) • Sergeant Schwenke (1935) • The Private Life of Louis XIV (1935) • I Was Jack Mortimer (1935) • The Dreamer (1936) • When the Cock Crows (1936) • If We All Were Angels (1936) • Such Great Foolishness (1937) • Heimat (1938) • The Four Companions (1938) • The Roundabouts of Handsome Karl (1938) • The Life and Loves of Tschaikovsky (1939) • The Gasman (1941) • Wedding in Barenhof (1942) • The Buchholz Family (1944) • Marriage of Affection (1944) • Three Girls Spinning (1950) • Stips (1951)

• The Lovers of Midnight (1931) • The Hunter from Kurpfalz (1933) • The Abduction of the Sabine Women (1936) • Carmen, la de Triana (1938) • The Way to Freedom (1941) • Torreani (1951)