A new documentary on the Nazis’ favourite film-maker and lead propagandist Leni Riefenstahl suggests she was a direct witness to murderous crimes of the Third Reich she later claimed to have known nothing about, and may even have contributed to one herself.
The film Riefenstahl, which premieres at the Venice film festival at the end of August, also claims that the propagandist admired the party and its henchmen until her death at 101 in 2003, a sentiment that ran counter to her insistence that she was not signed up to the Nazi cause.
Written and directed by Andres Veiel, the documentary is the first to have had full access to Riefenstahl’s estate. It gives fresh details about claims that the film-maker was witness to one of the first massacres of Polish Jews while briefly working as a war reporter.
Riefenstahl followed Adolf Hitler to Poland at the start of the second world war in September 1939, and saw the atrocity take place in Końskie, a town in south-central Poland.
A 1952 letter found in her estate appears to claim that Riefenstahl may even have been indirectly responsible for the deaths. The letter, written by a lower-ranking officer to her ex-husband Peter Jacob, a major in the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing, refers to an army report on the massacre.
The letter says that Riefenstahl, “probably ahead of filming a scene on the market place”, had urged that “the Jews” be “removed from there”.
When a lance corporal passed on the comments, the officer’s letter says “it ended up sounding like this: ‘Get rid of the Jews!’”. It adds: “Prompted by this remark … some of the Polish Jews attempted to flee and the shots were fired.”
Veiel said: “If this statement is true, Riefenstahl’s set direction played a role in the death of the Jews in Końskie.” At the very least, he added, “her resulting feelings of guilt might explain her vehement denial of even witnessing the crime”.
The documentary draws on about 30 hours of cassette recordings of postwar telephone conversations with members of the public, including former Nazis, who had called to offer Riefenstahl their moral support in response to what they regarded as attempts to sully her for her close association with the Nazis. One unidentified caller said the “morality, decency and virtue” of the Nazi era would return, with Riefenstahl responding: “Yes, the German people are predestined for that.”
The recordings accompany some of the hundreds of hours of home video footage shot by Riefenstahl’s partner, Horst Kettner, of cosy domestic life at their idyllic lakeside villa in Pöcking, south-west of Munich.
Veiel’s film recounts how she was heaped with praise from the public, in particular after appearing on a late-night chatshow in 1976, alongside a former member of the workers’ anti-Nazi resistance movement, Elfriede Kretschmer. Riefenstahl was applauded after talking of the shock she felt on becoming aware, only after the war, of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, and how her “wounds have still not healed”, as Kretschmer looked on in disbelief.
Hundreds of letters written in subsequent support of her, including words of thanks from a well-known Holocaust denier, with messages such as: “Don’t let the swine bring you down,” were meticulously catalogued by Riefenstahl.
One letter written by Riefenstahl to a longtime companion openly expresses her unmitigated regret about the end of the Nazi era. In it she talks of her “murdered ideals”.
Her phone conversations with Hitler’s architect and armaments minister, Albert Speer, offer a brief insight into the peaceful postwar lives of former members of the elite Nazi circle.
The pair discuss the renovations on his house in the idyllic mountain scapes of the Allgäu and compare notes on what they get paid for giving talks or interviews. “Every time I go on TV they claim I share the blame,” she moans to Speer, “[for] all the atrocities, the concentration camps.”
Pictures from her archives show the two walking in the Alps together, dressed in snow boots and fashionable winter attire.
The documentary also throws light on incidents in Riefenstahl’s life that Veiel said emphasised her disregard for people whose physical conditions did not live up to the Nazi ideals of strength and beauty she had championed in films such as Triumph of the Will.
Willy Zielke, a celebrated film-maker whom she had commissioned to shoot the prologue to her film Olympia, documenting the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was admitted to a psychiatric unit for exhaustion and psychosis at the end of the project. He was subsequently forcibly sterilised in line with Nazi law in 1937. Despite knowing about his plight, Riefenstahl failed to intervene on his behalf, Veiel said.
Veiel and the film’s producer, Sandra Maischberger, argue that the view of Riefenstahl as a great artist who exploited Hitler’s desire to use her talents to further her career should be rethought. But they “expect a backlash” when the film is premiered at Venice, owing to the high regard with which Riefenstahl is still held in the film world.
Maischberger, one of Germany’s leading TV talkshow hosts, said her preoccupation with Riefenstahl began in 2002 when she interviewed the film-maker to mark her 100th birthday. “I left the house in Pöcking with significantly more questions than answers,” she said.
She said she and Veiel had both been sceptical of finding the truth about Riefenstahl’s life in the 700 boxes of material that made up her estate, which the army of historians and researchers on the film quickly concluded she had heavily edited.
Instead, they said, they found evidence of an “activist” who had remained convinced of the Nazi ideology until the end of her days.
One telling detail they discovered was a casually scribbled note on a page of her calendar, Maischberger recalled. It said “Vote NPD”, a reference to the postwar neo-Nazi party.
