Film maker Leni Riefenstahl outlived the Third Reich by 56 years, but she never escaped complicity with it. She notoriously produced Triumph of the Will, a celebration of a Hitler 1934 Nuremburg rally, and Olympia, her ode to the 1936 Berlin Olympics. She was personal friends to Hitler, and some alleged something more. Likewise for Joseph Goebbels. Riefenstahl lived actively until 2003, to the age of 101, never expressing regret.
A magnetic personality across her entire century-long life, Riefenstahl became a star in 1932 with The Blue Light, which she produced and in which she starred as a mountain nymph. Hitler admired her as the ideal Teutonic woman and invited her into his circle, which led to Triumph of the Will. Marching Nazi columns festooned with banners parade with choreographed magic, with Hitler, flying into Nuremburg through the clouds like the messiah, as the object of adoration. One million rally participants made the film a propaganda extravaganza. Hitler and Goebbels were permanently grateful.
Riefenstahl, after that triumph, was the natural pick for filming the 1936 Olympics, another Nazi propaganda opportunity with a global audience. Riefenstahl masterfully focused on the physical beauty of the triumphant athletes, including black American runner Jesse Owens. Her camera techniques for filming athletes on the move were groundbreaking at the time. Olympia gained international including American acclaim. Now a global star, she gushingly credited Hitler for energizing Germany.
In 1939 Riefenstahl was obligingly on hand to film Germany’s invasion of Poland. She evidently was distressed by some of what she witnessed. A photo of her with German soldiers shows her horrified face. She may have been witnessing the execution of Jewish laborers, whose removal at her behest from a camera shot inadvertently led to their immediate murders. Riefenstahl stopped making Nazi propaganda movies but did not end her friendship with Hitler.
During the war Riefenstahl filmed, with Nazi funding, another movie Tiefland, in which she used gypsies loaned from a local concentration camp, many if not most of whom were later murdered at Auschwitz. The movie did not release until 1954, to critical acclaim. She always denied any knowledge of the origins or fate of her involuntary gypsy extras, just as she would always deny any memory of the executed Jewish laborers on her Polish film shoot.
After the war, Riefenstahl was arrested but cleared by Allied authorities of any egregious Nazi links, deemed merely a “fellow traveler.” Thereafter for decades she excelled at photography, including the 1972 Olympics in Munich, celebrities like Mick Jagger, and most famously the Nuba people in Sudan, whose athleticism and physical beauty bewitched her. She lived among the Nuba people for months at a time, and Sudan appreciatively made her a citizen. She took up scuba diving and underwater photography. At age 98 she survived a helicopter crash in Sudan. In 1966 she began her romance with a man 40 years her junior, who stayed with her until her death in 2003. She was routinely interviewed by media, like Sixty Minutes, and never failed to be captivating. She talked endlessly but never uninterestingly.
Some journalists were more aggressive than others about her Nazi ties. She was never a party member, won all her 50 defamation suits, and candidly admitted she was captivated by Hitler starting with her first exposure to him in 1932, like much of Germany, she stressed. But she never had knowledge of Nazi crimes, she always claimed.
Riefenstahl the new German-made documentary makes her claims look absurd. She almost certainly eye witnessed the execution of Jewish laborers cleared at her request and knew the origins and fate of the gypsy film extras. Beyond those incidents, her access to high level Nazis, including Hitler and Goebbels, not to mention just living for 12 years in Nazi Germany, made ignorance impossible.
Most interestingly, the documentary shows her fifty-year friendship with Albert Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect who became Hitler’s armaments minister, churning out weapons like a wizard even as Allied bombs fell. Speer at his Nuremburg trial accepted some responsibility for Nazi crimes while denying he knew details. He left Spandau Prison after twenty years, resuming his ties to fellow artist Riefenstahl. who recorded some of their calls. She asks him how much he charges for interviews, which turns out to be much less than she does. And he shares his home address with her, which he does only with his most “intimate” friends. They strolled through the countryside together, no doubt sharing many memories. Later historians found that Speer almost certainly had firsthand knowledge of the Holocaust.
Riefenstahl likely knew fewer specifics than Speer, but she knew more than she ever admitted. When asked by one interviewer if she had not noticed the disappearance of Jewish neighbors, Riefenstahl adamantly insisted the Jews she knew, like her doctor, escaped to America and never “disappeared.” And she asked, with no sense of self-awareness, who could believe gypsies, who claimed she knew of their dire fate, over a film star like herself? She pronounced that she was nonpolitical and would have obligingly made films for Stalin and Roosevelt, no less than for Hitler. She was devoted to her craft above all politics, without acknowledging the amorality.
Many post-war Germans who lived through the Third Reich applauded Riefenstahl’s insistence of ignorance and lack of apology. They too wanted to pretend not to have known. If anything, they were victims too. To the extent that had supported Hitler, they had been seduced, like everybody else, which at least partly absolved them of responsibility.
Riefenstahl’s anguished face in the photo from Poland indicates she saw horrors and she had some conscience, at least more so than the soldiers with her who look stoic or indifferent. Perhaps her denials are directly inverse to the level of her guilt. Her example is instructive now. This week is the 80th anniversary of the start of Nuremburg trials, where her friend Speer and other Third Reich chieftains faced judgement.
We also are living amid a new era of minimization of Nazi crimes. Commentator Nick Fuentes, with millions of followers, identifies with “Team Hitler,” with Tucker Carlson interviewing him uncritically. Podcaster Darryl Cooper, whom Carlson has already interviewed uncritically, also minimizes Nazi crimes and villainizes Churchill. Patrick Buchanan, who villainizes Churchill and is a WWII revisionist, is also now in vogue among many. Some trumpet Buchanan as the ideological victor over William Buckley, who faulted Buchanan for animus against Jews.
Airbrushing history can be appealing but also sinister. Riefenstahl the documentary is a needed warning against airbrushing, minimizing, or forgetting terrible atrocities and the ideologies that enable them. To airbrush is to open windows to justification and potential repetition.
