The interwar period saw the "Nibelungenlied" enter the world of cinema in Fritz Lang's two part film "Die Nibelungen" (1924/1925), which tells the entire story of the poem. At the same time, the "Nibelungenlied" was heavily employed in anti-democratic propaganda following the defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary: the epic supposedly showed that the German people were more well suited to a heroic, aristocratic form of life than democracy. The betrayal and murder of Siegfried was explicitly compared to the "stab in the back" that the German army had supposedly received. At the same time, Hagen and his willingness to sacrifice himself and fight to the death made him into a central figure in the reception of the poem. During the Second World War, Hermann Göring would explicitly use this aspect of the "Nibelungenlied" to celebrate the sacrifice of the German army at Stalingrad and compare the Soviets to Etzel's Asiatic Huns.