When she was 100, a year before her death, Leni Riefenstahl, who was perhaps second only to Joseph Goebbels as Nazi Germany‘s leading propagandist, faced legal action over her continual misrepresentation of the fate of the Roma and Sinti people who had appeared in her film Lowlands, which she began to make in 1940.
Riefenstahl had used Romas as extras, many of them “borrowed” and subsequently returned to the regime’s concentration camps. “I regret that Sinti and Roma had to suffer during the period of National Socialism,” she said. But she also remarked about the claims against her, “I’m not saying Gypsies need to lie, but, really, who’s more likely to commit perjury, me or the Gypsies?”
Riefenstahl, an authoritative new documentary by the Swiss film-maker Andres Veiel, exposes decades of contradictory statements and obfuscation from the director who played a huge part in shaping Adolf Hitler‘s public image.
“For example, there was an interview by the Daily Express from 1934,” Veiel says. Official documents referred to the interview, “but the interview itself was missing. We found it in the archive of the Daily Express. In 1934 she said she bought Mein Kampf and read it. And after the first page she became an enthusiastic National Socialist.
“It was obvious why this was missing, because she was just telling the interviewer not only how close she was to Hitler but how she was deeply involved in Nazi ideology. The interesting point for us was not just to show ‘This is a lie’ and ‘That is a lie’ but to look at how she was constantly shifting and editing her story.”
Working alongside a German journalist and TV host, Sandra Maischberger, Veiel gained unprecedented access to the Riefenstahl archives, a vast collection of material related to the film-maker’s life and work, including photographs, correspondence and recordings of telephone calls. For decades she kept the material at her home in Bavaria, carefully curating it to amplify her artistry while downplaying her role in the Third Reich.
Veiel says he watched hundreds of interviews in which Riefenstahl used exactly the same phrases, as if she were reading from a script: “I was never interested in politics. I was just an artist,” she would say; “I had nothing to do with the regime.”
[ Riefenstahl review: Unrepentant propagandist will make you want to yell at the screen ]
Many parts of the archive remain difficult to access because of ongoing legal and ethical debates, but Veiel was able to sift through some 700 boxes of material while researching his damning documentary. The rolls of film alone fill 140 chests.
His sleuthing yields several chilling revelations, including Riefenstahl’s part in a massacre in Konskie in 1939. The film-maker was in the Polish town on her way to record the Nazis’ defeat of the country, and wanted to shoot a street scene. According to a letter written by a Nazi officer, she demanded that “the Jews” be “removed”. When relayed by a lance corporal, her directive prompted some Jewish locals to run. German soldiers responded by opening fire.
“This is a good example of her storytelling,” Veiel says. “Before 1952 she claimed, ‘I was a witness of a massacre’. She didn’t always say it was a Jewish massacre but that Polish people were killed. Then, in 1952, she changed the narrative and said, ‘No, I was far away. I heard about the episode. But I never saw corpses. I never saw any atrocities.’
“We had TV footage from the middle of the 1950s, and you realise she is learning this new story by heart. It’s still a lie, but she’s working on it, like a bad actress. Then, five years later, the lie became the truth for her. She was straightforward about attacking people with another opinion or view.”
Riefenstahl was initially a dancer and actor; she rose to prominence as Hitler’s favourite director, most notably for Triumph of the Will, a glorification of the Nuremberg Rally of 1934.
In 1993 Riefenstahl claimed she was merely a film-maker for hire and was disgusted that Triumph of the Will was used to promote Nazism. But Veiel’s documentary quotes from a letter she wrote to Hitler: “The film’s impact as German propaganda is greater than I could have imagined, and your image, my Führer, is always applauded.”
Hitler then chose Riefenstahl to make a documentary about the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Despite her later claims of political naivety, Riefenstahl used all her artistic talents to fill the film, Olympia, with images of athletic prowess designed to both legitimise and romanticise the Nazi regime. A prologue depicting the return of the Greek gods echoes Hitler’s idea of Sparta as the “clearest racial state” and his projection of a future “Völkisch state”. (Behind the scenes of the film, Willy Zielke, its cinematographer, was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, where he was experimented on and forcibly sterilised, after a dispute with Riefenstahl.)
“Olympia projected this image of being strong, healthy, and victorious,” Veiel says. “The aesthetics of her films are an interesting point for me. It’s never just the question of self-optimising. There’s always a contempt for weakness. The contempt for people who are ‘not healthy’, who don’t fit into that pattern. They jeopardise the Reich because, according to her ideology, they are lunatics and criminals. They are dirty. They spoil the national blood.”
In a notorious appearance on a late-night German chatshow in 1976, Riefenstahl was confronted by Elfriede Kretschmer, an anti-Nazi activist during the war. Kretschmer calmly asked the rattled film-maker how someone so close to the inner workings of the Third Reich could know so little about life under the Nazis. Riefenstahl received sacks of fan mail in the days after the broadcast, praising her composure and denouncing Kretschmer. The letters were hard for Veiel to read.
“It was horrifying,” he says. “It was not just the issue of Leni Riefenstahl. It was a mirror image of West Germany. A lot of German authorities in postwar Germany worked for the Reich. [Kurt Georg] Kiesinger worked for Goebbels in a high-ranking position, but he became chancellor of West Germany in the 1960s. A lot of the messages sent about Leni Riefenstahl said, ‘Stop stirring up the guilt of the past and leave this great artist alone.’ Or, ‘We are the silent majority, and we stick to the ideology.’
After the war Riefenstahl was arrested and supposedly de-Nazified, but she was never convicted of any crimes. Several high-profile film-makers have attempted to bring Riefenstahl’s life to the screen, including Steven Soderbergh and Jodie Foster. Quentin Tarantino has called her the best director who ever lived.
For them to respect Riefenstahl’s technical achievements, and want to chart them in a biopic, is very different from respecting her as a person, of course, but Veiel still finds any kind of admiration for the film-maker extremely disturbing.
“I don’t know if it’s just naive,” he says. “I always say you can’t separate the ideology from the aesthetics. You can’t just celebrate the aesthetics not seeing the contempt behind it. It’s not just an attitude. People were incarcerated. People were sterilised. And many people were killed because of this ideology. How can you omit this fact?”
Riefenstahl is in cinemas from Friday, May 9th
