New documentary uncovers filmmaker’s lies about Nazi atrocities

A new documentary draws on previously unreleased archival material to challenge Leni Riefenstahl’s claims she knew nothing about the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities.

Leni Riefenstahl with Adolf Hitler.

German film director and Nazi sympathiser Leni Riefenstahl lived until she was 101, yet she once lamented: “My life would have been nicer if I had died at the peak of my career.’’

Riefenstahl, who died in 2003, was referring to the years before World War II, when “my star had been constantly rising”.

In the 1920s, she was a fearless silent movie star who performed her own stunts including being lowered into a crevasse at the end of a rope. In the 1930s, her technically innovative propaganda films, Olympia (1938) and Triumph of the Will (1935) – the latter was commissioned by Adolf Hitler – brought her international recognition and awards.

Some of the cinematic techniques Riefenstahl pioneered in those films are still being used today. Olympia, a portrait of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, has appeared on many greatest film lists, including Time Magazine’s All-Time 100 Movies, while The New Yorker’s legendary critic Pauline Kael called Riefenstahl’s propaganda documentaries “the two greatest films ever directed by a woman’’.

However, this sublimely talented artist was perhaps the 20th century’s most controversial filmmaker. In the decades after World War II, Riefenstahl – who had been a close friend of Hitler, Goebbels and Speer – was also accused of being a Nazi collaborator and a neo-Nazi. She furiously dismissed these accusations as a witch hunt and “hatchet” job and pointed out she had never been a Nazi Party member.

Adolf Hitler with filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl in 1934.

Now, however, a new documentary, simply titled Riefenstahl, draws on previously unreleased archival material to challenge the filmmaker’s claims she knew nothing about the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities.

A centrepiece of the German Film Festival, which opens nationally on Wednesday, this two-hour documentary up-ends Riefenstahl’s insistence she was a “naive”, apolitical filmmaker who was preoccupied solely with art.

Riefenstahl’s director Andres Veiel tells Review: “I didn’t want to just stage a tribunal. On a moral level, everybody knows she lied. The interesting question is not the moral issue. The interesting question is why, and when did she lie and shift her narration.’’

In a letter quoted in Veiel’s documentary, Riefenstahl corresponds with Hitler about Olympia, and boasts: “The film’s impact as German propaganda is much greater than I could have imagined.’’ She also comes across as a Fuhrer fangirl, telling the dictator: “I am so happy that you have not forgotten me. I am always thinking of you.’’

Riefenstahl is quoted in the film saying she “had many adventures with Goebbels … he tried everything to get me”.

Riefenstahl during the filming of Olympia during the Berlin Olympics in 1936.

She also claims the Nazi propaganda chief attempted to sexually assault her.

Since World War II a plethora of books, films and articles including Susan Sontag’s take-down of Riefenstahl, Fascinating Fascism, and the 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, have interrogated the legacy of this talented yet deeply compromised filmmaker.

Why make another documentary about her now? Veiel says the catalyst was producer Sandra Maischberger gaining access to Riefenstahl’s vast estate.

This followed the 2016 death of Riefenstahl’s long-time partner, camera operator Horst Kettner, who was 40 years younger than her.

Veiel says the estate was “really huge’’ – it encompassed 700 boxes of material including 150,000 photographs, taped phone conversations, diaries, private films and a draft of a memoir that differed significantly from her published memoir. He engaged a team of archivists and editors but still found “the challenges (of sifting through this material) were greater than in any previous film project … At times the work pushed me to my limits.’’

Veiel will visit Australia for the German Film Festival and will take part in Q&A sessions in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. The co-writer of the widely-produced play, The Kick, about a murder committed by neo-Nazi teenagers, he found it initially difficult to forge a narrative path through Riefenstahl’s thickets of myth-making:

“It was a challenge, because Leni Riefenstahl is famous for manipulating, for lies, for fabricating legends about her life, and we knew there were a lot of gaps in this estate.’’

Nonetheless, his film exposes glaring inconsistencies in the narrative she constructed to salvage her reputation. She claimed to know nothing about Nazi persecution of Jews, yet in 1939 she went to Konskie, Poland, with the Wehrmacht as an official German war correspondent. According to one report, she asked that Jewish labourers be removed from a shot so she could focus on heroic German soldiers.

Panic ensued and the Jewish workers tried to run away. Within minutes, 22 Jewish men had been killed by the Nazis.

Riefenstahl was the subject of four denazification trials which found she was “a fellow traveller” and a Nazi sympathiser.

Riefenstahl asked to be released from her war correspondent duties soon after.

Veiel says: “When you think about the Konskie episode … you can see she was the witness of the first (World War Two) massacre of Jews. So of course, it’s a lie when she says, I learned about it only after the war, about the atrocities, about the concentration camps like Auschwitz. She had a reason for lying, because there were the denazification trials, and it was a good excuse to say I learned about it only after the war.’’ Riefenstahl was the subject of four denazification trials which found she was “a fellow traveller” and a Nazi sympathiser.

In another troubling incident, the film documents how she procured 30 Roma people, including children, to work as extras on her 1940 film, Lowlands, which she directed, wrote and starred in. The Roma extras were then living in an internment camp and most were eventually shipped to Auschwitz and murdered there. Riefenstahl falsely claimed she had met all the extras after the war.

In the film, Riefenstahl defends herself, pointing out that “back then (before World War II) the whole world was enthralled by Hitler’’. She claims that even Winston Churchill admired the dictator at one point.

Veiel shows us a series of television interviews in which she throws tantrums when challenged over her links to Nazis and their ideology. He says she deployed “different methods” to deflect criticism. “She was a good actor,’’ he argues. “She could be very charming …. The second role is to get aggressive, to intimidate people who interview her with critical questions … And the third role is to demonstrate that I was the victim. I was pursued like a witch after the war, so the Jews will pursue it till the end of my life. … That’s absurd, of course, but that’s a way to rescue herself.’’

Interestingly, when she claims in one historical interview that she is a victim of unjustified attacks, there is significant applause from the studio audience. Asked whether that sentiment persists in Germany, Veiel says that “partly, it’s persisting. Some people still separate aesthetics and ideology or politics – they consider her one of the greatest artists ever. And it’s not only in Germany. Think of Tarantino. He said something similar, and for me, it’s very naive.’’

While his film builds a complex portrait of Riefenstahl’s psychology, he says: “I don’t want to excuse her or discharge her from any responsibility, because she was, of course, part of the Third Reich. She made propaganda for a regime which was responsible for the deaths of millions of people.’’

Riefenstahl will screen throughout the German Film Festival, which opens in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra, Perth, Byron Bay, Ballina and Ballarat on April 30.