Who was Leni Riefenstahl?
Leni Riefenstahl was born on 22 August 1902 in Berlin and her first career was as an interpretive dancer. It has been noted that when she injured her knee, Riefenstahl became interested in the medium of film especially nature films the star of a number of German director Arnold Fank’s silent films, which were often set in the Alps, and in which the young Riefenstahl was said to have figured as an athletic and daring young female lead.
Having gained popularity as an actress in the silent era, Riefenstahl then moved on to directing, with her first major feature film ‘Das Blaue Licht’ (The Blue Light) being directed in 1932. This film was well received by many people including the up-and-coming politician Adolf Hitler, in the year when the Nazis became the most popular party in Germany. The appreciation was mutual, as Riefenstahl had heard Hitler speak at a public rally in the same year and had been impressed by his style of oratory and his ability to mesmerise audiences.
Hitler saw Riefenstahl as a director who could make films which would project an image of a strong Germany, complete with Wagnerian motifs of power and beauty. In 1933, the year Hitler came to power, he asked Riefenstahl to direct a short film ‘Der Sieg des Glaubens’ (The Victory of Faith), about the huge Nazi Nuremberg Rally that year.
The following year Hitler asked Riefenstahl to develop the themes in Victory of Faith for her more famous film Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), which was shot at the Nuremberg Rally in 1934. This film is widely regarded as a piece of masterful propaganda, but it also meant that Riefenstahl would forever be linked with helping the Nazis.
Riefenstahl also won awards for her film Olympia about the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, which were used relentlessly by the Nazis for propaganda purposes, and which are often seen as the beginning of modern sportswashing.
Doubts and retribution
Once the war began it was claimed by Riefenstahl herself that she began to have doubts about what the Nazis were doing. While filming in Poland, as she accompanied German troops near Konskie, she was sent to witness the execution of Polish civilians, in reprisal for recent partisan attacks. It has been argued that Riefenstahl left her filming that day to make a personal appeal to Hitler against such arbitrary violence. Whatever the truth of the story, the incident did not prevent her from filming Hitler’s triumphal parade into Warsaw, just a few weeks later.
After the end of the Second World War, Riefenstahl was forced to be the subject of as many as four denazification proceedings. Eventually, she was declared a Nazi sympathiser and although never a Nazi party member, she was always to be associated, all the way up to her death at the age of 101 in 2003, with the Nazi propaganda films that she made in the 1930s.
The film
The film is a fascinating study of a major public figure in denial and operating with selective memory. While Riefenstahl was willing to say how terrible the atrocities in the Holocaust were, when it was convenient to do so, she clearly felt no responsibility for any of it nor remorse for any role she might have played in it. Instead, what comes across in the film, is a very calculating and cold person.
We see her interviewed and refusing to answer questions about Hitler as if she never really was as close to him as she clearly was, while we also hear her own testimony that her body trembled on hearing Hitler for the first time in 1932. She claims in the film that The Blue Light was her key film, not Triumph of the Will or Olympia. The film Triumph of the Will, about the Nuremberg Rally of 1934 is full of symbolism, yet she claims that she was apolitical and only interested in it the spectacle in an artistic sense, while talking about the films she did for Hitler on a technical level as if the subject matter was not important.
Claims
We see Riefenstahl claiming that she was ordered to film the Triumph of the Will and then claiming that it had a message of peace. And while others described her films as ‘Pied Piper films’, she claimed no responsibility at all for any of the atrocities that happened under the Nazis.
Similarly, we see Riefenstahl claiming, that she had no knowledge of the camps where Jews and Roma and so many others died. Yet, we also hear that for her last film for Hitler, ‘Lowlands’, she used 50 Roma and Sinti children, who were later sent to Auschwitz where they died. Naturally Riefenstahl claimed afterwards that she met them after the war, while also saying: who are people going to believe some gypsies or me?
It was also telling that the film showed how she had a particular friendship with Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect who went on to become Hitler’s Head of Armaments towards the end of the war, using slave labour from the camps to try and keep German war factories open. Speer of course managed to portray himself somehow as the good Nazi, receiving only a 20-year sentence at the Nuremberg Trials, after a strange defence, in which he claimed some sort of collective responsibility without personally knowing anything about the death camps. After his death, new evidence of course showed that Speer knew all about the Final Solution.
Speer was a successful campaigner to save his own skin and in the film, we see how Riefenstahl communicated with him after he was released in 1966 and how she campaigned in the 1970s to try and affect how public opinion saw her, having worked on her memoirs for 10 years.
As for the Olympia film about the Olympics Riefenstahl talks about the beauty and the nobility of the athletes and claims that’s what was all she was interested in. It’s hard to believe that she didn’t understand the propaganda value of what she was doing especially as we see a letter she wrote to Hitler after he sent flowers to her in relation to the film and how delighted she was that despite his busy schedules, he could still find time to remember her.
A victim?
It was said in the film that she had a hard upbringing, especially from her father and perhaps this is what made her the way she was; a rather cold and calculating person who seemed to only really care for one person; Leni Riefenstahl. Indeed I thought one of the most telling points in the whole film was when she was being interviewed on television 30 or more years after the war; it showed how she felt sorry for herself for the way she was portrayed and indeed the same pity for all who had lived during the Third Reich as if is people like herself had been the victims.
Riefenstahl of course is not the only person to portray herself as a victim, while really being someone who helped evil to spread. However, it was also notable how easily she became angry in various interviews in the film, when challenged about her role in the Third Reich.
As for the incident in Konskie, according to the film, there were Jewish people in the street where Riefenstahl was filming, and she felt that they were spoiling her film, so asked that they be removed. Consequently, they were shot and killed.
The last piece of film of her was from 1999, when she was nearing 100 years old. I can’t help but think of what a long life she had, a long life which was denied to so many children who became victims of the Third Reich, including those 50 Roma and Sinti children used by Riefenstahl in Lowlands
Leni Riefenstahl never directly murdered anybody. She never dropped the Zyklon B down into the gas chamber killing innocent Jewish people, nor did she shoot Roma and Sinti dead, or murder disabled people. She never directly murdered anybody. But surely, she was partly responsible for the six million Jews, the million or so Roma and all the other innocent victims of the Holocaust. She helped to create the atmosphere whereby great cruelty became normalised and innocent people in their millions became victims over and over again.
This fascinating film shows the lengths that someone who has been involved in atrocities will go, to cover it up and how people will try to portray themselves in a way that echoed what the narrator in the film said: “For some things to be remembered, others must be forgotten”.
Propaganda in whatever form was instrumental in the work of the Nazis. At the end of the day words matter. And today Kier Starmer and others would do well to remember that.
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