Is Die Welle Based on a True Story?

The Real Third Wave Experiment | World Cinema with Anna | Film Club Companion

Partly. Die Welle (The Wave, 2008) is inspired by a real classroom experiment called the Third Wave, run by history teacher Ron Jones at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California, in 1967. But the film is a fictionalised retelling, set in modern Germany, with invented characters and an ending that never happened in real life. This post explains what was real, what was changed and why the story still matters.

Content note: this post discusses fascism, bullying and the film’s violent and tragic ending, which it mentions but does not describe.

At a glance

• Was there a real experiment? Yes. The Third Wave took place in the first week of April 1967 at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California.
• Who ran it? Ron Jones, a 25-year-old history teacher.
• How long did it last? About five days, according to Jones’s own account.
• Is the film a faithful retelling? No. It moves the story to present-day Germany, invents the characters and changes the ending.
• What else is the film based on? The 1981 novel The Wave by Todd Strasser, who wrote under the name Morton Rhue, which was itself inspired by Jones’s experiment and a 1981 American TV film.

What was the Third Wave experiment?

Jones was teaching his students about Nazi Germany when one of them asked how ordinary Germans could claim they had not known about the Holocaust. Jones struggled to answer, so he decided to show his class how a movement like that could take hold. According to his own account, the experiment unfolded like this:

• Day one: Jones began with strict classroom discipline. Students had to sit at attention, stand to answer questions, reply in three words or fewer and begin every answer with ‘Mr Jones.’ He wrote ‘Strength through discipline’ on the board. He had meant it as a one-day exercise.
• Day two: He added ‘Strength through community,’ named the movement the Third Wave, and introduced a salute, a cupped hand raised to the shoulder. Students were given jobs, such as making a banner, recruiting friends and keeping non-members out. Members received membership cards.
• Growth: the class grew from 30 students to 43, and Jones says that by the end of the day more than 200 students were taking part.
• Day three: he added ‘Strength through action.’ He had asked three students to report rule-breakers and was surprised when around twenty did so. A student volunteered to act as his bodyguard.
• Ending the experiment: Jones felt it was slipping out of his control. He told the students that the Third Wave was a national movement and that a presidential candidate would be announced at a rally. He had three dissenting students sent to the library so they could not attend.
• The rally: the students gathered in front of a television, which showed an empty channel. Jones told them they had been part of an experiment in fascism, that they had willingly created a sense of superiority, and he apologised for how far it had gone. He then showed them a film about the Nazi regime.

Accounts differ on the exact days, and a contemporary student newspaper report puts the last day of the movement on Wednesday 5 April, so treat the day-by-day details as Jones’s recollection.

How well documented is it?

Not very well. The experiment was barely documented at the time. It was mentioned briefly in two issues of the school newspaper, The Cubberley Catamount, with a fuller report published about two weeks later. Jones wrote about it in the early 1970s, and his short story was published in 1976, nine years afterwards. Later work includes Lesson Plan (2010), a documentary made by two of Jones’s former students, and a German documentary, The Invisible Line (2019), which includes interviews with Jones and former students.

The experiment also was not a controlled scientific study. It is best understood as a classroom demonstration, and its conclusions rest on anecdotes and memories. Jones has said that he found himself trapped in his own experiment, and he has admitted that part of him enjoyed having followers. It also raised ethical questions, because the students did not know they were taking part in an experiment until it ended.

From classroom to cinema

• 1967: Ron Jones runs the Third Wave at Cubberley High School.
• 1976: Jones’s short story about the experiment is published.
• 1981: an American TV film, The Wave, is made, and Todd Strasser’s novel of the same name appears. Both move the story to the present day.
• 2008: Dennis Gansel’s Die Welle transfers the story to modern Germany.
• 2010: the documentary Lesson Plan premieres.
• 2019: the German documentary The Invisible Line and the Netflix series We Are the Wave appear.

Fact versus fiction in Die Welle

• The setting: the real experiment happened in a California high school in 1967. The film takes place in a present-day German school.
• The premise: in real life, Jones responded to a student’s question about the Holocaust. In the film, teacher Rainer Wenger is assigned the topic of autocracy for a project week, when he would rather have taught anarchy.
• The name: the real group was the Third Wave. In the film, the students choose the name Die Welle (The Wave).
• The symbols: the real movement had a salute, banners and membership cards. The film adds uniforms, a logo and graffiti.
• The characters: Tim, Karo, Marco and the other students are fictional. Some details do echo real events: Jones also had a student who volunteered as a bodyguard and he also separated dissenting students from the group.
• The ending: the real experiment ended peacefully, with the blank-screen rally and Jones’s revelation. The film’s ending is violent and tragic, and it is invented. Gansel has said he changed the ending deliberately to shock audiences.
• Ron Jones’s involvement: Gansel has said Jones supported the film as an adviser, and he reportedly found its portrayal of the experiment convincing.

Why did Gansel change the story?

Gansel has said that he took the original event as a starting point rather than trying to recreate it, and that things had changed a lot in the forty years since. In Germany the novel The Wave is widely read in schools, so many people already knew the story, and he wanted to find a way to make it feel new and urgent. Reviewers noted that the film updated its climax to reflect violence that has happened in schools in recent years.

What does the experiment show?

The Third Wave is often compared with Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. Unlike those, it was a classroom exercise rather than a research study, so it cannot prove how people behave in general. What it does show is how quickly rules, symbols and a sense of belonging can make people feel part of something, and how hard it can be for a leader to stop once a group takes on a life of its own. That is why the film continues to be used in schools and film clubs.

Discuss it further

Our discussion guide, Teaching Die Welle: 100 Discussion Questions on Conformity, Leadership and Responsibility, includes questions on the real experiment, and our printable worksheet suits classrooms. Both work well around Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January.

Sources

• The Third Wave (experiment), Wikipedia
• The Wave Home, the official site by original Third Wave students
• Electric Sheep: interview with Dennis Gansel
• 27east: Ron Jones talks about his experiment
• NZIFF 2008 programme note for The Wave
• Perpetrator Studies Network: Die Welle
• The Collector: How a Palo Alto High School Experiment Created Classroom Fascism