Leni Riefenstahl: The Century's Most Compromised Camera
Her American publicity tour opened on 4 November 1938. Five days later came Kristallnacht, and she publicly defended Hitler anyway. She met Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Louis B. Mayer and Avery Brundage, who praised her film. For sixty-five years afterwards she insisted she had been an artist and nothing else. The century has never quite agreed on what to do with her, because the films really are extraordinary and the alibi really is worthless.
Dance, Mountains, and a Blue Light
Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl was born in Berlin on 22 August 1902 to Alfred, who owned a heating and ventilation business, and Bertha Ida Scherlach, a former seamstress. Her father forbade dancing, so her mother enrolled her secretly at Berlin's Grimm-Reiter school. She toured Europe with Max Reinhardt until foot injuries and knee surgery ended it. Waiting at a doctor's office she saw a poster for Arnold Fanck's *Mountain of Destiny* and changed careers on the spot. Between 1925 and 1929 she starred in five *Bergfilme*, including *The Holy Mountain* (1926) and *The White Hell of Pitz Palü* (1929), enduring avalanches and freezing water. Her directing debut, *Das blaue Licht* (1932), co-written with Carl Mayer and Béla Balázs, took a silver medal at Venice. When it was reissued in 1938 both Jewish collaborators' credits had been deleted. She denied responsibility.
Hitler's Director
Hitler saw *Das blaue Licht* and decided she embodied his Aryan ideal; she had attended a rally in 1932 and described an "almost apocalyptic vision." He ordered Goebbels to commission her for the 1933 Nuremberg rally, giving her days to prepare. *Der Sieg des Glaubens* was funded entirely by the NSDAP; Hitler allegedly ordered every copy destroyed after Röhm's murder in the Night of the Long Knives. *Triumph des Willens* (1935), shot at the 1934 rally before more than a million participants, is, in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's words, "one of the most masterful propaganda films ever produced," using genuinely innovative cinematography to glorify National Socialism. She always claimed she had resisted the commission — the USHMM confirms she "initially rebuffed" it — and in 1993 denied any deliberate attempt to make propaganda. A private letter of 1935, surfaced in a 2024 documentary, reads: "the film's impact as German propaganda is greater than I could have imagined." She followed it with *Tag der Freiheit*, twenty-eight minutes for the Wehrmacht.
Olympia
For the 1936 Berlin Games she claimed an International Olympic Committee commission; the money was secretly the regime's. She shot the torch relay in Greece and invented much of the visual grammar of televised sport. She filmed Jesse Owens and other Black athletes with the same reverence as everyone else — offered ever since as proof of her innocence, and proving only that her aesthetic was indifferent to whose body it glorified. *Olympia* premiered on Hitler's forty-ninth birthday and won the Mussolini Cup at Venice on 31 August 1938.
Końskie, and the Extras
She entered Poland on 1 September 1939 as a war correspondent, in uniform. At Końskie on 12 September she witnessed the execution of some thirty civilians; she said she tried to stop it, was held at gunpoint, and had not realised the victims were Jewish. A competing account holds that her own request to clear Jews from the market square was relayed to soldiers as an order to get rid of them, triggering the killings. Photographs from that day show her distressed. By 5 October she was filming Hitler's victory parade in Warsaw. On 14 June 1940 she cabled him about the fall of Paris: "You exceed anything human imagination has the power to conceive." Then came *Tiefland*. Between 1940 and 1944 her production borrowed roughly 117 Roma and Sinti prisoners from the Salzburg-Maxglan and Marzahn camps to work as extras. Overwhelming evidence indicates they were later deported to Auschwitz; she maintained for decades that all of them survived. When she sued the filmmaker Nina Gladitz in 1993, a German court found she had known the extras came from a camp. In 2002, aged one hundred, facing a suit by a Roma organisation, she finally said: "It is known today that many of them were murdered in concentration camps."
Fifty Libel Suits
American troops arrested her in 1945. Budd Schulberg, then in intelligence, remembered the performance: "She gave me the usual song and dance. She said, 'Of course, you know, I'm really so misunderstood. I'm not political.'" She spent 1945 to 1948 in Allied camps and under house arrest, and four denazification proceedings classified her a *Mitläufer* — fellow traveller. She had never joined the party and was never charged with a war crime. Thereafter she litigated, filing and winning over fifty libel actions. *Tiefland* finally premiered in Stuttgart in February 1954, was refused at Cannes, and remained her last feature although she lived another forty-nine years. "Until the day I die," she said, "people will keep saying, 'Leni is a Nazi', and I'll keep saying, 'But what did she do?'"
The Nuba and the Sea
From 1956 she went repeatedly to Kenya and then Sudan, living intermittently among the Nuba; Sudan made her the first foreigner to hold its passport. *Die Nuba* (1973) brought the reckoning. Susan Sontag's 1975 essay "Fascinating Fascism" in the *New York Review of Books* argued that the pictures continued a fascist aesthetic — clean against impure, physical against mental, joyful against critical — and that her worship of strength and victory "seems only to have modified the ideas of her Nazi films." Eudora Welty had praised the book in the *New York Times*; the German Art Directors Club gave her a gold medal in 1975. She lied about her age to get scuba certification at seventy-one, dived for decades with her companion Horst Kettner, forty years her junior, survived a Sudanese helicopter crash in 2000, and released *Impressionen unter Wasser* on her hundredth birthday.
Why Leni Is Called a Genius
The claim is about craft, not intellect, and the craft is real. Riefenstahl understood before almost anyone that a camera's position is an argument: dig a pit beside the running track and a sprinter becomes a monument; lay rails and the eye is given motion the body never had; cut mass formations to music and a crowd becomes an ornament. Mark Cousins ranked her "next to Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, the most technically talented Western film maker of her era." Gary Morris called her "an artist of unparalleled gifts… one of the great formalists of the cinema on a par with Eisenstein or Welles." Pauline Kael judged *Triumph des Willens* and *Olympia* the two greatest films ever directed by a woman.
The counter-case is the substance, not a footnote. Sontag's argument is that the technique cannot be lifted clear of the content, because the content *is* a technique — the worship of the perfected body, the dissolving of persons into pattern. Taylor Downing traced "a direct line from her infamous Nazi party films to Auschwitz and Belsen"; Rabbi Abraham Cooper called her an unindicted co-conspirator. Her masterpieces were made with a dictatorship's unlimited money, a million-strong cast it supplied, and later prisoners on loan from camps — and she lied about those prisoners for half a century. In fifty-eight postwar years of freedom she completed one feature. Whatever the gift was, it never again found anything to do that mattered.
Legacy
She died in her sleep on 8 September 2003 at Pöcking, seventeen days after her 101st birthday, and was buried at Munich's Waldfriedhof. Her estate — seven hundred boxes of film, photographs, manuscripts and letters — passed to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, and in 2024 Andres Veiel's documentary mined it for what she spent her life denying: her ideological affinity with Nazism.
Achievements
- German Olympic Decoration
- German Olympic Decoration 2nd Class
- Notable work: Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations
- Notable work: Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty
- Worked as film producer, film editor and screenwriter
