James Cameron and his team of minions may have produced the high watermark for 3D technology in the 21st century, but it seems the Nazis got there first. The Australian film-maker Philippe Mora says he has discovered two 30-minute 3D films shot by propagandists for the Third Reich in 1936, a full 16 years before the format first became briefly popular in the US.

The first of the films, titled So Real You Can Touch It, features shots of sizzling stereoscopic bratwursts on a barbecue while the second, named Six Girls Roll Into Weekend, features actors Mora believes were probably stars from Germany's top wartime studio, Universum Film.

"The quality of the films is fantastic," Mora told Variety.com. "The Nazis were obsessed with recording everything and every single image was controlled – it was all part of how they gained control of the country and its people."

Mora discovered the movies while doing research for a new documentary, entitled How the Third Reich was Recorded, which explores the way the Nazis used film to shape public opinion and manipulate the German people.

An American film from the MGM studio, Audioscopics, won a best short film Oscar in 1936 for Joseph Leventhal and John Norling. Yet stereoscopic movies did not reach Hollywood on a commercial scale until 1953 with the release of André de Toth's House of Wax, starring Vincent Price.

Mora believes the existence of the 35mm Nazi films confirms the Germans were decades ahead. "They were made by an independent studio for Goebbels's propaganda ministry and referred to as 'Raum film', or space film, which may be why no one ever realised since that they were 3D," he said.

Mora, who believes there may be more Third Reich 3D footage hidden away in Germany or elsewhere, is something of an expert on the successes of Nazi film-makers. In his 1973 film Swastika, he debuted colour footage of private home movies made by Hitler and his partner, Eva Braun, at Obersalzberg in the Bavarian alps.