Nina Gladitz, Her Lifelong Crusade against Nazi Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl

 

In 20 November 1984, in the southern German city of Freiburg, two film-makers faced each other in court for the first day of a trial that was to last nearly two and a half years. The plaintiff, Leni Riefenstahl, had been Hitler’s favourite film-maker. Now 82, she showed up to court in a sheepskin coat over a beige suit, her blond hair set in a large neat perm framing a tanned face. The defendant was a striking, dark-haired 32-year-old documentary maker. Her name was Nina Gladitz, and the outcome of the trial would shape the rest of her life.

 During the Nazi era, Riefenstahl had been the regime’s most skilled propagandist, directing films that continue to be both reviled for their glorification of the Third Reich and considered landmarks of early cinema for their innovations and technical mastery. Once the second world war was over, Riefenstahl sought to distance herself from the regime she had served, portraying herself as an apolitical naif whose only motivation was making the most beautiful art possible. “I don’t know what I should apologise for,” she once said. “All my films won the top prize.”

 Riefenstahl was taking Gladitz to court over claims made in Gladitz’s television documentary Time of Darkness and Silence, which had aired in 1982. In the film, members of a family of Sinti – a Romani people living mainly in Germany and Austria – had accused Riefenstahl of taking them out of Maxglan, a Nazi concentration camp near Salzburg, in September 1940, and forcing them to work as extras in her feature film Tiefland (Lowlands). Riefenstahl would later claim that all of the Romani extras – 53 Roma and Sinti from Maxglan, and a further 78 from a camp in eastern Berlin – had survived the war. In fact, almost 100 of them are known or believed to have been gassed in Auschwitz, just a small fraction of the 220,000 to 500,000 Romani people murdered in the Holocaust. Some of the survivors insisted that Riefenstahl had promised to save them. One, Josef Reinhardt, was 13 when he was drafted as an extra. He was the trial’s key witness, and sat beside Gladitz in the courtroom every day.

 Riefenstahl denied that she had visited the camp to handpick the extras, denied failing to pay them and denied having promised and subsequently failed to save them from Auschwitz. She claimed that, while making the film, she had not known of the existence of the gas chambers, nor of the fate of the Roma and Sinti. When Gladitz’s documentary was played in court on the opening day of the trial, Riefenstahl repeatedly interrupted the screening with cries of “Lies! Lies!” and “Nothing but a lie!” As her shouts echoed round the darkened courtroom, the judge, Günther Oswald, told her: “Madam, I have no other choice than to watch the film.”

 While there is no doubt that Riefenstahl’s account of her own life is far from reliable, it has been hard to establish precisely what she knew about the horrors perpetrated during the Third Reich. She was the regime’s leading film propagandist for almost its entire duration, and her films included Triumph of the Will, about the Nuremberg rally, and Olympia, a record of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. But, though she was a close friend of Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis, such as the fanatical antisemite Julius Streicher, Riefenstahl fiercely denied any awareness of the slaughter that took place in concentration camps. Jürgen Trimborn, author of a highly critical biography published in 2002, declared that there was “no evidence that, due to her proximity to the regime, Riefenstahl knew more than others did about the mass annihilation of the Jews. But it is obvious that, like most Germans, she knew enough to be sure that it was better not to know even more.” (Gladitz would later judge this analysis as far too generous.)

 During the trial, Riefenstahl produced correspondence from one of the extras that appeared to support her account of her good relationship with them while filming Tiefland. It was accepted that they had habitually referred to her as “Tante Leni”, or Auntie Leni. “Even if you don’t want to believe it, the Gypsies – the adults as well as the children – were our darlings,” Riefenstahl said. But the court also heard that during the day the extras were watched by two policemen, and at night they were locked up in sheds and cellars. A contract discovered by Gladitz in archives in Salzburg showed an agreement between Riefenstahl and the SS camp guard that measures would be taken against any attempts at escape.

 When the trial finally reached its conclusion, in March 1987, Gladitz won on three out of four points. The judge ruled that Riefenstahl had indeed visited the Maxglan camp to choose the extras, and that they had not been paid for their work. He also overturned Riefenstahl’s description of Maxglan as a “relief and welfare camp”, stating that by definition it was a concentration camp.

 But Josef Reinhardt’s assertion that Riefenstahl had promised to save him and his family from deportation to Auschwitz, or that she knew what would happen to the Roma and Sinti once there, could not be proven, Judge Oswald said. And so he ordered the removal of the scene in Gladitz’s documentary in which Reinhardt recalled Riefenstahl’s promise.

 For Gladitz, this was a disaster. “There are certain edits I am not prepared to tolerate,” she told the court. Her refusal to remove the scene meant that WDR, the broadcaster of the documentary, consigned the film to the archives, where it has remained under lock and key ever since. In the years that followed, commissions for new films dried up, and Gladitz’s financial situation, already strained from being unable to work during the trial, worsened. “In the TV world I had become persona non grata, because I had dared to out Riefenstahl as a perpetrator,” Gladitz told me many years later.

 Though some journalists framed the verdict of the trial as an ending, for Gladitz it was only a beginning. She would spend the next four decades consumed by Riefenstahl, devoting most of her waking hours to pursuing the truth about her as no one else, in her view, had adequately done. Her career, her friendships, her finances and her health would all be sacrificed in the attempt to find evidence that would finally, conclusively, condemn Riefenstahl. The result would be the publication, last year, of her magnum opus, the product of a life’s obsession, Leni Riefenstahl: Karriere einer Täterin (“Career of a Perpetrator”). “Some people are certainly going to accuse her – and I don’t think it can really be denied – that this is something of a personal vendetta,” her publisher told me.

For Gladitz, though, this was irrelevant. “The most important thing is that Riefenstahl’s myth is dead,” she told me on the day the book was published. “In my mind’s eye, I see her grave glowing from within because she’s turning in it so fast.”

 I first met Nina Gladitz in 2002, when she contacted me ahead of Riefenstahl’s 100th birthday. Gladitz was supporting a Roma and Sinti rights group in a new legal challenge against Riefenstahl, and she wanted me to cover her efforts for a British newspaper. She was insistent – then and in the years to come – that if I wrote about her work, it must be in what she deemed to be the right way. “This is not about me. I will not let you focus on me and ignore my research,” she would tell me, although our conversations invariably led back to her own life. The more time I spent with Gladitz, the more apparent it became that her fixation was as much to do with her own biography, and with laying some of her own ghosts to rest, as it was about Riefenstahl.

 The shadow of the Nazi era had hung over Gladitz’s childhood. Born in 1946, she grew up in Schwäbisch Gmünd in the south-western state of Baden-Württemberg, about 30 miles east of the state capital, Stuttgart. Her beautiful, uncaring mother was, Gladitz believed, mourning the loss of Hitler. “She fed me. But affection and love or the feeling of emotional security was totally lacking,” Gladitz recalled. “Her standard insult to me was: ‘You’re not my daughter, you must have fallen out of a Gypsy’s pram.’”

 When she was about five, Gladitz overheard her mother and an aunt talking about how many people, including children, had been murdered in the gas chambers. “I suddenly became convinced my mother must have been involved,” Gladitz once told me. “Even though I later realised this could not have been the case, it was logical for a five-year-old, on the basis of my own experiences, to easily imagine my unloving mother had been one of the perpetrators.”

 In Gladitz’s telling, her childhood was sheltered and isolated. Playmates were not allowed to visit the family’s house, which stood on the side of a hill. Her imagination was her escape, fuelled in part by the magical films her father would show to Gladitz and her siblings. In her early 20s, Gladitz moved to Munich to study at the University of Television and Film. It was there that she first came across Riefenstahl’s work, but she was more interested in the growing movement against nuclear power, and other leftwing causes, than she was in looking back to the Nazi era. Soon after graduation, she made an agitprop documentary about attempts to block a nuclear power plant located not far from where she grew up, which was named the Chicago film festival’s documentary of the year in 1974.

 Gladitz’s interest in Riefenstahl began in 1977, when an acquaintance sent her a letter that he thought might interest her. It had been written by Josef Reinhardt more than 20 years earlier, and Gladitz’s acquaintance had found it in the archive of the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi regime. Reinhardt had asked the association for financial help, explaining that he and members of his family had been picked from a prison camp by Riefenstahl and forced to work as extras on Tiefland in 1940 and 1941. He had included two small black-and-white photographs of poorly clad, barefoot children.

 In Riefenstahl’s oeuvre, Tiefland remains a largely forgotten work. Based on an opera by Eugen d’Albert, the bucolic romantic drama was filmed between 1940 and 1944, and cost 6m Reichsmarks to make – a staggering sum for the time. The funding was secured thanks to an intervention by Hitler, with the project classed as vital to the war effort, though the film was not released until well after the war. When Tiefland finally reached cinemas in 1954, it received a lukewarm response from filmgoers and critics, who dismissed it as wooden and schmaltzy. Almost all the closeups of the Sinti and Roma extras had been edited out.

 When Gladitz visited the national film archives in Koblenz a few weeks after reading Reinhardt’s letter, she was amazed to find that it had no documentation on Tiefland whatsoever. “I had been sure that one drawer after another would open itself to me with documents on how Tiefland was made,” she recalled. “I knew immediately that I would have to start this lonely search on my own.” Her life’s work had begun.

 With remarkable speed, Gladitz managed to track down Reinhardt, who was living in the town of Offenburg in western Germany. A violin maker by profession, he was the nephew of the jazz great Django Reinhardt, and also of Schnuckenack Reinhardt, known as the violin virtuoso of Sinti music.

 At their first meeting, Reinhardt told his story over several hours. He and his family had fled Nazi Germany to Austria in the 30s. Following Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, he had hidden with his relatives in the mountain forest south of Salzburg. They were captured by local authorities in October 1939 and held in horse boxes before being taken to a holding point near Salzburg, which prisoners had themselves been forced to transform into a “concentration-style” camp, later known as Maxglan, with barbed-wire fencing and a watchtower. He had first seen Riefenstahl there in September 1940, accompanied by several SS officers. Riefenstahl had, he said, inspected an array of pre-selected prisoners, including his teenage self, and several family members.

 The group Riefenstahl selected was soon transported to the film set, which was in Krün, near the Bavarian town of Mittenwald, about 125 miles to the west. As soon as Reinhardt and the other extras arrived, they were put to work. Their food and accommodation were, Reinhardt recalled, “worse than in the camp”. They slept on bare boards in sheds, barns, animal stalls and cellars, which were locked up at night. They were under constant watch. The women and children had been separated from the men, the majority of whom were left in the camp in Salzburg.

 Filming continued for about 13 months, until November 1941, after which the extras were ordered to march to the nearest railway station. Reinhardt told Gladitz they had not been allowed to take any of the costumes they had worn on set, instead having to wear the rags they had arrived in the previous year. The children no longer fitted their clothes. “We had to go barefoot because we had all grown out of the shoes we’d had. It was bitterly cold,” Reinhardt remembered. For the rest of his life he could only wear soft shoes as a result of the frostbite he suffered.

 Gladitz knew almost immediately that she would make a documentary about Reinhardt’s story. In time she also began to grasp, as she said, “why no one had known about Riefenstahl’s abuse of her defenceless prisoners”. In 1949, Riefenstahl had successfully sued Helmut Kindler, a magazine publisher who had been involved in wartime resistance, for revealing her exploitation of the Sinti and Roma extras. From then on, Riefenstahl had pursued dozens of further legal battles against those who had written or said anything about her that she disliked.

 Gladitz was determined to speak to Riefenstahl for the documentary, and in 1981, she managed to track her down in Frankfurt. Their first encounter took place in a bookshop, where Gladitz posed as a film-maker called Anna Madou, hoping to make a film about great 20th-century artists. Using the same false identity, she wrote to Riefenstahl a few months later to remind her of their earlier meeting and to ask whether – given great interest in the project from, among others, the BBC and NBC – they could schedule an interview soon. She signed off: “Please forgive me once again for the tenacity with which I have already pursued you and be assured of my admiration and veneration for your great art!”

 For what she imagined would be the central scene in the documentary, Gladitz hoped to stage a meeting between Reinhardt and Riefenstahl. She envisaged Reinhardt greeting the film-maker warmly and starting a conversation, before eventually confronting her with the truth about her “extras”. “The idea came from Josef,” Gladitz told me. “He said he would go to her, as his favourite Gypsy, and say: ‘Tante Leni, it’s so great to see you again.’ I knew she would not have been able to resist him.” But the plan collapsed after Gladitz asked Riefenstahl, prior to the meeting with Reinhardt, what she calls a “throwaway question” – about how Riefenstahl had related to other women during the Third Reich, given her proximity to the overwhelmingly male inner circle of the Nazi regime.

  “It was as if I had put poison in her tea,” said Gladitz. “She turned away from me coldly, and I knew then that it was never going to work. It was such a stupid question. If I had known then that she had had several clandestine lesbian affairs, I would have known better than to ask that.” (“Frau Gladitz,” Riefenstahl would later write in her memoir, “clearly had the specific intention from the very start of producing a slanderous concoction about me.”)

 Today, the only way to see Time of Darkness and Silence is to get hold of a bootleg. Not long ago, via a French film director, I managed to obtain a grainy DVD copy of a VHS recording of the original broadcast. Despite the poor quality of the bootleg, the film retains its power. Watching it almost 40 years after it first aired, one is struck by the intimacy of the encounter with Reinhardt and his relatives, as they sit on their sofa, smoking and drinking coffee and relating their awful experiences. There is no musical accompaniment, no frills, no schnick-schnack, as the Germans say. Instead, what we get are the plain facts of the hunger they felt during the filming, the nights spent locked together in a stall with a single bucket for a toilet. At one point, Gladitz returns with Reinhardt to the place where Tiefland was filmed, and to the site of the former Maxglan camp. There is no trace of the horrors that unfolded there, just empty fields. It is only through Reinhardt’s testimony that we rediscover the significance of these sites, as he recalls where the watchtower once stood, the location of the kitchen, the entrance, the places where he was told to put up the barbed wire.

 Time of Darkness and Silence aired in Germany on 6 September 1982. Reviews were sparse, but those that did appear recognised the film’s significance. Few Germans had ever heard Sinti and Roma talk about their experiences in the Holocaust, and the fact that Gladitz had persuaded them to talk so openly on camera was remarkable, wrote a reviewer in Die Zeit. It wasn’t until the following year that Riefenstahl watched the documentary. In June 1983, she wrote an angry letter to her lawyer, claiming that she was “stunned” by the film’s “monstrous aspersions”. She immediately set about suing Gladitz for defamation.

 Going into the trial, Gladitz knew that not everyone would take her side. Riefenstahl’s work had experienced a renaissance in the previous decade, with several feminists celebrating her for succeeding in such a patriarchal environment, and some film critics arguing that the beauty and ambition of her films should be appreciated separately from the context of their production. (Others disagreed: Susan Sontag saw Riefenstahl’s aesthetics as entirely inseparable from Nazi ideology, calling The Triumph of the Will “the most purely propagandistic film ever made”.)

 Even Gladitz’s mother, who attended court every day, seemed to side with the plaintiff. “That poor Leni Riefenstahl,” she said to her daughter one day, “what you’re putting her through.” Over the years, Gladitz’s childhood suspicions of her mother’s Nazi sympathies had not diminished. During the trial, these confrontations took on a new intensity. “I was so incredibly angry,” Gladitz told me. “I took her by her blouse and pushed her against the wall and said: ‘I’ll let you go when you tell me what you knew about the Nazis.’” The most her mother admitted was thinking “nothing good” would come of the Nazis’ deportation of the last Jews from Schwäbisch Gmünd, which she had witnessed. (Gladitz believed that her mother sensed this “quarrel with Riefenstahl also had something to do with her”. Others sensed it, too. “You are aware who the Riefenstahl in your life is, aren’t you?” a doctor friend asked, and urged her to find a psychoanalyst.)

 With her documentary banished to the archives, Gladitz decided to continue gathering more stories of those whom Riefenstahl had betrayed and exploited. She met Rosa Winter, who had been 17 when Riefenstahl chose her as an extra for Tiefland. Winter’s mother had to stay behind in Maxglan concentration camp. When Winter began to fear that her mother would be killed there, she escaped from the set and began walking back to the camp on foot. She was caught and taken to a police cell in Salzburg. According to Winter, Riefenstahl visited her and ordered her to get down on her knees and beg for forgiveness. When she refused, Riefenstahl ordered the girl to be imprisoned, and Winter endured five years of incarceration in Ravensbrück concentration camp.

 Gladitz was also haunted by the story of Willy Zielke, a talented film-maker who had filmed and edited the famous prologue of Riefenstahl’s film Olympia. Zielke was absent from the film’s premiere in 1938, which had been part of the celebrations for Hitler’s 49th birthday, and Riefenstahl had Zielke’s name removed from the credits. Gladitz discovered that at the time of the premiere, Zielke was in a psychiatric institution, having had a nervous breakdown. As she pored over Zielke’s unpublished memoirs and his medical records, Gladitz grew convinced that Riefenstahl was responsible for Zielke’s admission to the clinic. In 1942, Riefenstahl removed him from the institution by appointing herself his legal guardian. She insisted that he help her with the filming of Tiefland, and later, during the edit, forced him to sleep in an unheated room guarded by one of her assistants so that he wouldn’t escape, and gave him such paltry portions of food that he was close to starvation.

 Bringing these stories to light became Gladitz’s mission. She gathered more and more interviews and documents, each piece of research opening a door to the next. Finally, she started compiling it all into a work that she hoped would finally prove the extent of Riefenstahl’s crimes. Time of Darkness and Silence may languish indefinitely in the archives, but Gladitz hoped that her book would vindicate the documentary’s creation.

 In late 2015, Gladitz contacted me again with some news: her book was finished. She had uncovered many new details about Riefenstahl’s life and crimes, she said, including previously untold stories of those whose lives she had destroyed. The manuscript was more than 1,000 pages long.

 A few days later, we met in a crowded cafe in Berlin. Dressed imposingly in a voluminous black velveteen dress coat, bulky necklace and black hat, Gladitz was what I would soon come to recognise as characteristically blunt. “I don’t see why I have to justify my motive,” she said, when I asked what had made her pursue the story of Riefenstahl for what was now more than three decades. “In retrospect it feels like the topic found me, rather than the other way round.” Gladitz explained her disgust at what she called “Riefenstahl’s renaissance in public life”, which she saw as tacit acceptance of the director’s lies and self-mythology. In 1998, for instance, Riefenstahl had been a guest of honour at Time magazine’s 75th anniversary banquet, where she had been given a standing ovation. In 2002, the year of her 100th birthday, in an interview with the leftwing Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper, Riefenstahl had declared that she had seen all of the Tiefland extras after the war and “none of them came to any harm”. The newspaper did not attempt to contradict her.

 Our meeting lasted several hours. Afterwards, I realised that in more than 25 years as a journalist, I had never met anyone so consumed by a single subject, or so indignant about the fact that hers was such a lonely pursuit. Since the trial with Riefenstahl, Gladitz had made other films, most of which championed underdog heroes. But in all the conversations I would go on to have with her, Gladitz barely mentioned these projects. She only wanted to talk about Riefenstahl, and how others had failed to pursue various lines of inquiry because of their ignorance and negligence.

 After that second meeting, Gladitz became a constant presence in my life. We usually met in the same Berlin cafe in Charlottenburg, and as she smoked roll-ups and nibbled on pastries, often the only food she would eat that day, she would keep me abreast of the latest developments and share with me her theories – details of Riefenstahl’s secret lesbian affairs, or her lie that a knee injury, rather than simple lack of talent, had ended her dancing career. Our phone calls usually lasted an hour or more, as she itemised the new letters, documents, court records and diaries she had uncovered, here in a French archive, there in a Polish one. I filled notebook after notebook during these meetings, struggling to keep up as she swept through her years of research, each new find reinforcing with greater intensity what she had known all along.

 Sometimes it felt as if Gladitz saw me as a journalist, a useful contact who could bring her research to a wider audience; sometimes, I was closer to a friend, or at least a confidante to a lonely woman who could not tolerate most people, and whom most people found intolerable. (I did too, at times.) The discussions sometimes spilled over into evening email exchanges. Once she sent me Riefenstahl’s description of her ecstatic feelings on first encountering Hitler: “It seemed as if the Earth’s surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the Earth.”

 

“It is – well what is it?” Gladitz asked me.

 “Either childbirth or an orgasm,” I emailed back.

 “Bingo,” she replied. “She is quite obviously describing an orgasm.” Every new fact further underlined the depths of Riefenstahl’s deviousness, her devotion to the führer.

 After Gladitz had a heart attack in 2016, I visited her in hospital in Charlottenburg, where I found Riefenstahl documents lining the windowsill. A few weeks later, I attended her 70th birthday party at a tavern in Berlin, where all the guests – historians, archivists, editors – seemed connected to her work on Riefenstahl. There she held court, tapping her ringed fingers on the table, entertaining the guests with Riefenstahl anecdotes until well after midnight.

  In the five years after she completed it, Gladitz’s book was rejected by about 30 publishers. To her, this was further proof that they were all “too afraid to release a critical book about the sacred Leni Riefenstahl”. Recent critical biographies of Riefenstahl, such as Trimborn’s, had not, in Gladitz’s opinion, gone far enough.

 When the literary agent Lianne Kolf received Gladitz’s manuscript in 2019, she recognised it as one of the best finds of her long career. “I thought: ‘Finally someone who is telling the truth about Riefenstahl, who she really was and what she really did,’” Kolf told me. She decided to represent Gladitz, but was also frank that the reason the book had struggled to find a publisher was “not so much because of the topic, but simply because the text was so unwieldy”. In the end, as Gladitz admitted to me, she had been forced to pay for an editor to pull the text into a manageable shape.

 Eventually, in early 2020, the Zurich-based publishing house Orell Füssli took on the manuscript. Stephan Meyer, its nonfiction publishing director, told me that communication with Gladitz had not always been easy. “Her attempts to steer the reception of the book are not likely to help its success,” he said, shortly before it came out. One of Gladitz’s demands was that she would only be interviewed by people who could prove they had read the entire book.

 When we spoke on the day of the book’s publication, 23 October 2020, Gladitz was elated. “I have finally managed to shatter the Riefenstahl monument, with all 675g of my book, a paper hammer,” she told me over the phone. No one, she insisted, will be able to write another word on Riefenstahl without referring to her book. “Even my mother would be forced to take me seriously.”

 By then, Gladitz had gone back to live in Schwäbisch Gmünd. Her movements were restricted by the pandemic and her own failing health. There was no publication party. “I don’t need a red carpet, and no one needs to tickle my tummy,” she said. Instead, she had celebrated with a latte macchiato, which an old friend, a former admirer from her teenage years, had delivered to her one-bedroom apartment. She was sleeping on a sofa bed, surrounded by mountains of Riefenstahl material packed into large plastic boxes.

 In the weeks after Gladitz’s book came out, it received considerable coverage. The French-German cultural TV channel Arte produced a documentary, which stated that Gladitz proves “the extent to which, unknown until now, the cultural ambassador of the Third Reich was entangled in the crimes of the Nazis”. The German magazine Der Spiegel ran a long article about the book’s gestation. The Frankfurter Allgemeine was more sceptical, saying that the book sometimes “borders on obsession” and will be “more a point of departure” for future Riefenstahl scholars than “representing a conclusive position”. (Among the points it queried was Gladitz’s claim that Riefenstahl had an affair with the Black American athlete Jesse Owens, hero of the 1936 Olympics. “But everyone knows that’s true!” Gladitz protested, when I asked her about it.)

 Gladitz was furious at much of the coverage, even those articles that were largely positive. Indeed, before the book was published, Gladitz had complained to me about a leading historian of the Nazi era, who had written a laudatory postscript for the book, which included the gentle concession that “historians may perhaps find some of her interpretations hard to follow, or not give them the importance the author does”. Gladitz judged this analysis a “declaration of intellectual bankruptcy” and the postscript was scrapped shortly before publication. It was replaced by an eloquent 12-page appreciation from Albrecht Götz von Olenhusen, professor of law at the University of Düsseldorf, who represented Gladitz in the 80s trial, and whom she had long regarded as her most constant and loyal supporter.

 One of the moments in the discarded postscript that had most infuriated Gladitz was the historian’s reference to a popular nickname for Riefenstahl during the Third Reich: Reichsgletscherspalte or “glacial crevasse of the Reich” – a nod to her mountaineering prowess and her sexual promiscuity. “That is just not on,” Gladitz told me. “It’s totally lacking in respect.”

 She sounded almost sympathetic towards Riefenstahl. It was an odd moment, her words perhaps indicating less respect than recognition. Over the years, Gladitz had spoken to me about the repeated abuse she had suffered from men, including from a violent ex-husband, and about being sexually harassed as a girl while walking home from school. Gladitz wanted Riefenstahl to be known for her crimes and condemned for her complicity, her lies and her cruelty. Sceptical though she was about those who viewed the director “through feminist eyes”, she bridled at seeing Riefenstahl belittled because of her sex, an experience she knew only too well.

 Sometimes Gladitz’s short temper, and frustration that her work was not getting the respect it deserved, were directed at me. She felt annoyed, betrayed even, when I asked, after publication, if I could still draw on two previous manuscripts I had read, both much longer than the published version. She replied that if there were elements of those manuscripts I found interesting, why had I not intervened to stop her editor cutting them?

 It had not, of course, been in my power to do so, but I felt guilty nonetheless. I often felt guilty around Gladitz – at not doing enough to help her, and at my inability to find her research as riveting as she did, even as I filled page after page with details of her work. By the time the book appeared, I had been in constant contact with her for five years. Occasionally, I felt my obsession with Gladitz had started to mirror her obsession with Riefenstahl, as the piece I had been planning to write grew and grew, year after year, and my office was taken over by mounds of related books, documents and newspaper articles.

 A few days after the publication of her book, I went to visit Gladitz in Schwäbisch Gmünd for the weekend. On the Saturday, we returned to her childhood home. Despite the house’s calm elegance, despite the brilliant sunshine and the peaceful woodland setting, Gladitz shuddered as we approached. When we reached the house, she would not get out of the car, sitting firmly in the passenger seat, enveloped in her trademark black gauzy dress and a knitted headband. In her deep husky voice, she dismissed my suggestion that we take a photograph of her in front of the house. A very silly idea, she said.

 Gladitz was notably more decrepit than when I had seen her last, and dependent on a walking frame. She was sick and exhausted, and her eyesight had deteriorated. In an email she had sent to friends and supporters when her book came out, she had invited them to “celebrate with me, the birth of my ‘baby’ after nearly 50 years of pregnancy”. Attached was a picture of the thirtysomething she had been at the time of the trial in 1984, captioned “BEFORE”, next to one of a large brown bear slumped on its stomach, captioned “AFTER”. Below she had written: “Book writing is not helpful for beauty contests.”

 For all her frailty, it was clear that Gladitz felt the years of struggle had been worth it. She was buoyed up by the recent sale of the film rights to her book, to a company that hoped to make a series for Netflix. Gladitz said she was planning to act as the project’s adviser and that she wanted Judi Dench to play the older Riefenstahl.

 On the last evening of my visit, we sat down on the sofa to watch Tiefland. Gladitz wanted to explain her reading of the film, which sees in it a deeply antisemitic message. “This is a real privilege that I’m letting you watch it with me,” she said, pulling tobacco from a battered tin and rolling the cigarettes that she would chain smoke as the film played.

 We had not been watching long before she flared up with impatience at my questions, at my inability to recognise as clearly as she did the film’s symbolism. She explained to me how the final scene, in which the main characters walk off together into paradise, is the perfect representation of the Germany Hitler had dreamed of. “The last words Hitler spoke to Riefenstahl when she visited him in March 1944 were ‘Germany will rise again far more beautiful than it was before’,” Gladitz told me.

 At one point, I asked her how she felt at being viewed as someone whose life has been taken hostage by Leni Riefenstahl. “I’ve never seen myself as a victim,” she said. She had numerous ongoing conflicts with historians and editors, and there were still legal battles she intended to fight, including with the broadcaster of Time of Darkness and Silence, to recover lost earnings and to have the film brought out of the archive. Now that her book was published, and given her struggles with her health, I asked whether it might be time to allow herself a more peaceful life. “Only weak people give in,” she told me.

 The next morning she refused to meet me for breakfast. “You think I’ve just been dawdling for the past 40 years? That is just the verdict of a trampeltier [a clumsy oaf],” she yelled at me down the phone. “Well I say thank God I had the guts to fight her.”

 On my seven-hour train journey back to Berlin, my head rang with her stories, recollections, jokes and insults. From then on our communication was scant – I knew she was still angry with me – and consisted mostly of businesslike emails via her agent. Gladitz’s health continued to worsen, and in early April 2021, she had heart surgery. From her hospital bed, she discussed the TV adaptation of her book with its producer, Ulrich Limmer. The series, which has the working title Leni, will be the first major biopic of Riefenstahl.

 On 22 April, I received the news I had been expecting for some time. When it arrived, in an email from her niece, it was still a shock. Gladitz had died a few days earlier. Her body had been discovered by a health visitor calling at her flat. She had apparently died peacefully in her sleep.

 Her ashes were buried under a tree on 12 May at a cemetery in Schwäbisch Gmünd. It was a cloudy day and the group of mourners was small, partly owing to Covid restrictions. Most were family members or old schoolfriends, many of whom Gladitz had not seen for 60 years or more. Gladitz’s niece said her aunt had “sought the closeness” of her relatives in her final days. “That gives us some solace, even if her loss pains us,” she wrote.

 In the weeks after her death, a smattering of articles about Gladitz appeared in the German press. In an obituary in Die Welt, the film critic Hanns-Georg Rodek praised her determination and the depth of her research. “She did not tolerate ignorance,” he wrote. “She demanded loyalty.” Rodek is one of a group of journalists urging the broadcaster WDR to rescue Time of Darkness and Silence from the vaults.

 When I met Rodek for coffee recently, it turned out that his relationship with Gladitz had not been dissimilar to mine. He had known her in the final few years of her life, after she contacted him with a request that he publish her work. We shared our experiences of Gladitz – how easily she had taken offence at a stray remark, or when she felt her work wasn’t being given the dignity it deserved. “I’m glad to hear it wasn’t just me,” he said with a faint smirk.

There was a strange kind of camaraderie that came from having known this singular woman. Her fury, often hard to bear, was her fuel. For most people, “pursuing the truth” or “confronting the past” are just platitudes or abstractions. For Gladitz, nothing was more important. Every lie or error that Riefenstahl had introduced into the public record, no matter how tiny, was an abomination to her. Attempts to rehabilitate Riefenstahl, by ignoring or failing to properly investigate her crimes, were the sign of a moral rot that needed to be cut out. “Take it to its logical conclusion and one day people might think Hitler was a second-rate landscape painter,” she once told me, her voice filled with anger. During the years she spent consumed by her book, fearing that it would never find a publisher, this is what kept her going. “I have achieved my life’s purpose,” she told me the last time I saw her. “I am my book.”

 Burying Leni Riefenstahl: one woman’s lifelong crusade against Hitler’s favourite film-maker. By Kate Connolly. The Guardian, December 9, 2021.

 

 onning white gloves, Ludger Derenthal removes a green floral cardboard box from a packing case, and carefully takes out the photographs inside.

 He lays an array of sepia portraits of the propagandist Leni Riefenstahl across the table of the workshop of the Museum of Photography in Berlin. “In these cases are items that no one outside of Riefenstahl’s intimate circle have ever seen before,” he says.

 Derenthal, the museum’s director, will soon be in possession of all 700 cases containing the estate of Hitler’s favourite film-maker and neo-Nazi icon. It includes photographs, films, letters, documents, even her diving suit and gowns, as well as boxes of film rolls dating back to the 1920s.

 Just a stone’s throw from the museum is the Ufa Palast cinema, where premieres of her Nazi movies Triumph of the Will and Olympia took place with great fanfare in the 1930s. Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels marvelled at her talent for bringing their fascistic politics on to the screen for the masses to enjoy, under the guise of art.

 Riefenstahl died in 2003 at the age of 101. But her estate remained in her house on the banks of Lake Starnberg in Pöcking, Bavaria, until the death of her husband in 2016, leaving her secretary, Gisela Jahn, as the sole heir. Jahn said Riefenstahl had always wanted the estate to return to Berlin, where she was born and which was witness to many of the highlights of her

 A team of German-speaking archival specialists and Riefenstahl experts will spend the next few years in a collaboration between the photography museum, the film archive and the national library, to try to piece together the life of Riefenstahl, who attempted right up until her death to promote the image of herself as a political naif who had more or less been caught up by accident in the Nazi machine.

 Among the controversies involving Riefenstahl the estate may throw light on is her feature film Tiefland, for which 122 Sinti and Roma extras were personally selected by Riefenstahl from two holding camps. After filming they were transported to Auschwitz, where most were murdered.

 Nina Gladitz, who has just completed a book on Riefenstahl, said she was sceptical that anything of historical substance would emerge from the estate due to the amount of evidence Riefenstahl herself destroyed after 1945, including close-ups from the film where the murdered Sinti might have been identifiable, so that she could not be held culpable for their deaths.

 “This episode has been completely ignored by academics and film historians,” said Gladitz. “I have no expectation of anything coming out of this research that would throw light on her crimes because Riefenstahl did her utmost in her lifetime to keep her myth intact.”

 Among the advisers to the project is Rainer Rother, the artistic director of the German film archive and a Riefenstahl biographer. He said there was little more to be learnt about Riefenstahl’s role in the Nazi era. “I’m not expecting any unsettling findings to be made – the situation of Riefenstahl between 33 and 45 has been brilliantly researched already – but I am expecting that the picture we have of Leni Riefenstahl and how she created her films and photos to become much clearer,” he said.

 Concerns have been voiced that the estate will prompt a new wave in Riefenstahl fanatics, many of whom continue to celebrate the last surviving prominent member of the Third Reich as an artist of great stature, often ignoring the political context.

 Others have expressed unease that Riefenstahl’s photographs will be stored in the same museum where Helmut Newton’s work has been on display since 2004. The Jewish photographer was forced to flee Nazi Germany as a boy in 1938, and is buried in Berlin.

 Brian Winston, professor of film at Lincoln University, said he was appalled at the decision to bring Riefenstahl’s works together with Newton’s. “It’s an absurd and disgusting obscenity that the estate of Hitler’s favourite film-maker is to be given a home in the foundation of a man who was forced to flee Nazi Germany because he was a Jew.

 “Those who see anything to admire in Riefenstahl’s work, which was mired in fascistic content and sensibility, have been duped again just as she, and those who supported her, wanted.”

 Derenthal said the museum was reassured by Jahn’s assertions that the two were friends, Newton having visited Riefenstahl in Pöcking, and points to the correspondence that passed between them.
 
As a climax of the preview, Derenthal produces a folder of letters, labelled “Special Correspondence H-Z”. As those present squeeze together to get a closer look he says: “I’m afraid to disappoint you, but there is no letter from Adolf Hitler here.”
 
Instead there are notes to Riefenstahl from Siegfried and Roy, the legendary entertainment duo, the actor Sharon Stone and Newton, who wrote: “Dear Leni, you look bewitchingly glamorous and those legs ... poor Marlene (Dietrich – the German film star) would be green with envy.”
 
Some have cited the letter as proof of a close relationship between Newton and Riefenstahl, others as the photographer’s successful attempt to flatter her into sitting for him for Vanity Fair at the age of 100.
 
The result, showing a hollow-eyed Riefenstahl, powdering her face, was deemed to be deeply unflattering and a critique of her Third Reich role. “So much for them being friends. This was Newton’s final revenge on the Nazi grand dame,” says Gladitz.
 
Leni Riefenstahl archive to throw new light on Hitler's film-maker. By Kate Connolly. The Guardian,  April 24, 2018.

On February 17, 1936, Time ran a cover story about the Fourth Winter Olympics, which Adolf Hitler had inaugurated earlier that month in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a German ski resort near the Austrian border. The summer games, Olympiad XI, were to open on August 1st in Berlin, and the Führer had given Leni Riefenstahl virtual carte blanche to film them. Her début as a director, with “The Blue Light” (1932), a fairy tale set in the Dolomites, had excited his admiration. So had her dishevelled beauty: she had cast herself in the starring role of Junta, a mountain nymph and outcast doomed by her purity. Riefenstahl had subsequently proved to be an epic propagandist with “Triumph of the Will,” a celebration of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, and she had gone to Garmisch in part to observe an Olympic documentary being made by Carl Junghans, in preparation for her own “Olympia.” But she was also there to bask in the sunshine of celebrity.

 At thirty-three, Riefenstahl was a strikingly attractive if hectic figure, with dark hair, chiselled features, and an obsidian gaze intensified by eyes set slightly too close together. Their look of adoration in the Führer’s presence, and (as her rivals saw it) his indulgence of her every whim, fuelled rumors of a Valhallan romance, which heightened curiosity about her in Germany and abroad. Time might have devoted its cover to a Winter Olympian like Sonja Henie, the Norwegian figure-skating champion, but the building controversy over the August games, which represented a windfall of legitimacy for the Reich, decided the editors on a more electric candidate: “Hitler’s Leni Riefenstahl.” The sensational portrait that they chose, a departure from the usual head shot of a statesman or grande dame, is reproduced in a first-rate new biography of Riefenstahl, by Steven Bach, “Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl” (Knopf; $30), though without mention of the photographer, Martin Munkacsi.

 Munkacsi (1896-1963) was a Hungarian Jew who is widely credited with inventing modern photojournalism and with reinventing fashion photography in the same dynamic mold. (A show of his work runs through April at the International Center of Photography.) Like Riefenstahl, he was a consummate stylist obsessed with bodies in motion, particularly those of dancers and athletes, and in 1930, some thirty years before Riefenstahl “discovered” the comely and artistic Sudanese people she called “my Nuba,” Munkacsi returned from an assignment in Africa with a picture—of three naked boys running into the water—that became iconic, particularly to his disciple Henri Cartier-Bresson. The Nazi superstar and the Jewish émigré met at least once before the race laws precipitated his departure for New York, in 1934, and they had much in common, including international prestige and a penchant for self-mythologizing. But the source of rapture in Munkacsi’s pictures is freedom. In Riefenstahl’s, it is idol worship.

 One of Riefenstahl’s most cherished ambitions, ironically, was a Hollywood career like that of Munkacsi’s fellow-émigrée Marlene Dietrich, and she clung to this fantasy tenaciously even after the Kristallnacht pogrom, in November, 1938, which derailed what was supposed to have been a triumphal cross-country American publicity tour with “Olympia.” Upon docking in New York and hearing the news, she refused to believe it, and dismissed the hostility that greeted her at nearly every stop as a plot fomented, she told an interviewer on her return, “by the Jewish moneymen.”

After the war, Riefenstahl was vehement that not only had she “thrown no atomic bombs”; she had never “spoken an anti-Semitic word.” She lamented the fate of her Jewish friends in the film industry while claiming, on the one hand, that she had been ignorant of the Reich’s racial policies and, on the other, that she had protested them personally to the Führer. Bach offers considerable evidence to the contrary, as does Jürgen Trimborn, the author of “Leni Riefenstahl: A Life” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30), translated by Edna McCown. Both cite a letter first published thirty years ago in a biography of Riefenstahl by Glenn Infield in which Riefenstahl appeals to her friend and admirer Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Stürmer and the most fanatic anti-Semite in a crowded field (he was hanged for his war crimes in 1946), for help with, as she puts it, the “demands made upon me by the Jew Béla Balázs.” Balázs, Riefenstahl’s dramaturge and co-screenwriter on “The Blue Light,” was an avant-garde film critic who had also adapted Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera” as a screenplay. She expunged his name from the credits so that a judenrein (Jew-free) version of the film could be released, and Balázs, hearing of its success, wrote to her from exile in Moscow to ask for his deferred fee. It was an easy and no doubt gratifying minor task for Streicher to deprive him of it.

 Despite Walter Winchell’s memorable epithet for Riefenstahl—“pretty as a swastika”—she lacked the smolder of a putative rival like Dietrich, who, she might also have noted, could speak English. In her own country, however, Riefenstahl had become an important movie star in an indigenous Teutonic genre, the “Alpine film.” Arnold Fanck, its leading proponent, scorned the decadent fictions that cosmopolites like Josef von Sternberg produced in the luxury of a big studio. He pioneered location shooting in extreme conditions and prided himself on authenticity, at least where daredevil feats of skiing and mountaineering were concerned. His actors were an élite fraternity of athletes who performed their own harrowing stunts, and Riefenstahl was the only woman among them. The six films, three silent ones and three talkies, that she made with Fanck between 1926 and 1933 were a showcase for her courage—if courage can be imputed to a nature that denies fear—in scaling glaciers without safety ropes and schussing down them. They were also the shop in which she served her apprenticeship for “The Blue Light,” a film with the unique distinction of having impressed not only Hitler but Chaplin.

 Riefenstahl’s acting roles, however, like her impetuous sexual adventures of the period, tend to blur. Beginning with Fanck, her fellow cast and crew members constituted a virile harem irresistible to an emancipated sultana inclined to take her pleasure where and with whom she chose (even if she later boasted of “my well-known, almost virginal sexual history”). The bruised egos that she left behind earned her an unsporting epithet, “the nation’s glacial crevasse.” And jealousy, perhaps, encouraged Fanck’s habit of subjecting his star and muse, in repeated takes, to immersion in freezing water, near-suffocation by avalanches, and the barefoot ascent of a sheer rock face. At least he respected her prowess. On the Nazi films, Bach writes, the supremely organized and imperious Riefenstahl “was competing with men she had displaced through a relationship with the Führer that invited speculation she actively encouraged,” and who were “disposed to view her presence behind a camera as illegitimate no matter how she got there.”

 Considering that Munkacsi’s Time portrait was taken before he left Germany, it encrypts a prescient reading of Riefenstahl’s art and persona. She is posed in cross-country skis, appearing to ascend a slope dressed in nothing but a clingy bathing suit that flaunts the physique of a cartoon action heroine—all curves and muscle. This was the outfit, Time’s reporter wrote, that she liked to train in. Munkacsi photographed her from a low angle, so that her steely thighs and booted feet dominate the lower half of the frame, and its vertical composition draws the eye upward past the dark V of the crotch and the swell of the breasts to a determined chin. Fanck used the same aggrandizing camera angle in his signature panning shots of men on mountaintops, and Riefenstahl echoed him in her heroic iconography of the Führer. Had she been fully clothed, the picture might have made a travel poster for the pure and fit New Germany that Goebbels was promoting as Minister of Propaganda. But Riefenstahl’s grandiosity is laid bare for the world to snicker at, all the more so as she doesn’t seem to notice that Munkacsi has seduced her into modelling for the subtle parody of an aesthetic—her own—that he, like Susan Sontag, perceived to be “both prurient and idealizing,” as Sontag wrote forty-five years later in her essay “Fascinating Fascism.”

 In 1936, Riefenstahl had two-thirds of her life yet to live. “I am the marathon,” she declared, more prophetically than she knew, in the course of filming “Olympia,” and any writer who embarks on the gruelling course of her biography deserves admiration simply for crossing the finish line. Trimborn, who set out long before Bach, is a university professor and film historian in Cologne. He interviewed Riefenstahl in 1997, when he was twenty-five, having already spent six years of “intensive labor” on the project, and he briefly entertained the quixotic hope of writing a definitive book with her blessing and collaboration. Unwilling to misrepresent himself as a hagiographer, he was doomed to fail, though his disappointment does not seem to have warped his fair-mindedness. But I also suspect that the seeming absence of a talent for seduction—he writes in the patient, tongue-biting monotone that one adopts sensibly with a hysteric—turned Riefenstahl off.

 Trimborn’s aim was to correct the murky published record and the “attitudes” of his compatriots. One has to admire the sniperlike precision with which he takes out fugitive falsehoods that have lived under cover for a century. His primary audience, however, was more familiar with, and thus perhaps less likely to miss, the kind of richly fleshed-out portraiture and social history that Bach—an experienced biographer, a former movie executive, and the author of a superior best-seller on filmmaking, “Final Cut”—is able to supply.

 Helene Amalie Bertha Riefenstahl, a native of Berlin, was born in 1902. Her father, Alfred, a plumber who prospered in the sanitation business, was an autocratic paterfamilias in the classic mold. Leni, rather than her younger brother, Heinz, inherited his temperament. It gave her a lifelong aversion to bullying, though not when she was the one doing it. Alfred’s wife, Bertha, a lovely seamstress much tried by her husband’s tantrums, had once dreamed of an acting career and was vicariously invested in her daughter’s. Bach offers fresh evidence for a rumor circulated by the intriguing Goebbels, among others, that Bertha’s Polish-born mother was half Jewish. She died young, and Bertha’s father married his children’s nanny, whose name seems to have appeared on, and falsified, Riefenstahl’s certificate of Aryan descent. The family owned a weekend cottage on the outskirts of Berlin, where young Leni swam and hiked and exercised a body that always gave her supreme delight. “I do not like civilization,” she later told a journalist. “I like nature, pure and unspoiled.”

 No one could ever persuade Leni Riefenstahl that there was something she couldn’t do, and she made her mind up, in her late teens, to become a dancer. Her father tried everything he could to keep her off the stage, but, through an obstinacy like his own, she admits in her memoirs, she wore him down to the point that he rented a hall for her début. Riefenstahl’s dance teachers had warned her that, with a scant two years’ training, she wasn’t prepared to perform as a soloist, but she defied them, too. By then, she had done a little modelling, entered a beauty contest, and was shortly to pay her dues as a silent-movie starlet in a bare-breasted cameo. She had also decided to lose her virginity to a thirty-nine-year-old tennis star and police chief whom she didn’t yet know, Otto Froitzheim. Riefenstahl recalled the tryst, which took place on his sofa, as “repugnant” and “traumatic” (though the affair lasted for years), and when it was over Froitzheim tossed her a twenty-dollar bill—in case she needed an abortion—which, Bach writes, was within a few months worth eighty-four trillion Deutsche marks.

In the meantime, Riefenstahl had found a rich admirer—a young Jewish financier, Harry Sokol—to bankroll a road show. With an arty program of her own device, she played some seventy engagements in seven months. It isn’t fair to judge her talents on the basis of the stiff-necked Spanish dancing, leaden with vanity, that she does in “Tiefland”—her last feature, a melodrama based on the opera by Eugen d’Albert—because by then she was over forty and, by her own admission, too old for the part. One also can’t say whether she could have achieved the international renown that she believed was just on the horizon, because a serious knee injury ended her tour. And the scrapbook of reviews that she collected did not include any of the critical passages that Trimborn supplies. Instead, she exulted in her memoirs, “Everywhere I went I experienced the same success—which transcends words.”

 Without her beauty, Riefenstahl might yet have accomplished something notable, although the career she forged is inconceivable without it. She had neither scruples nor—in the absence of an intellect, an education, or social connections—much of a choice about using her looks as a calling card. Fanck and Hitler were both prepared to be smitten before she took the initiative to arrange the meetings that would change her life. Though Fanck was originally skeptical of her inexperience, Hitler’s enthusiasm, at least according to Riefenstahl, was unreserved from the beginning. In May of 1932, two months after “The Blue Light” was released, he summoned her to a village on the North Sea and, in the course of a long walk on the beach, effused about her grace. He also, she claimed, made an awkward sexual advance and announced impulsively that, if he came to power, “you must make my films.”

 Though the pass was, almost surely, a fantasy (even in 1936, Time’s reporter discreetly describes the Führer as “a confirmed celibate”), the job offer wasn’t, and no director in history was more lavishly subsidized or indulged by her producers than Riefenstahl was by Hitler. His first commission was for the Nazi Party rally film “Victory of Faith” (1933), a clunky practice run for “Triumph of the Will” that was conveniently made to disappear, along with the porcine co-regent on the dais with Hitler—the leader of the brownshirts, Ernst Röhm, whom Hitler had had assassinated seven months after the première. “Day of Freedom,” which Riefenstahl denied having directed until 1971, when a copy surfaced, was a twenty-eight-minute afterthought to “Triumph of the Will” that was intended to placate the Wehrmacht. (Footage of the resurgent German Army was conspicuously missing from both rally films, in part because they were finished before Hitler formally renounced the Treaty of Versailles.) “Olympia” is a hybrid: servile to Fascist ideals in some respects, defiant of them in others—particularly in the radiant closeups of Jesse Owens, America’s black gold medallist. It was marketed as an independent production, though it was financed by a shell company and paid for entirely by the Reich. Rainer Rother, the author of an authoritative filmography published five years ago, points out that the closing sequence of Carl Junghans’s documentary on the Winter Games—a slow-motion montage of ski jumpers—was shot by the same inventive cinematographer, Hans Ertl (one of Riefenstahl’s former flames), who shot the slow-motion montage of divers that ends “Olympia.” But even if Riefenstahl cavalierly appropriated imagery and techniques, and profited from the priceless gift that Hitler and history had given her—of a duel between the designated champions of good and evil—her use of multiple stationary and moving cameras, and her inspired placement of them (underwater; in trenches and dirigibles; on towers and saddles; or worn by the marathon runners in their pre-race trials), brought a revolutionary, if not strictly documentary, sense of immediacy to the coverage of sporting events.

 In the course of a dark century, Riefenstahl seems to have suffered at least one spasm of something like doubt, and the moment was captured in a photograph. When Hitler invaded Poland, on September 1, 1939, she mustered some of her most seasoned technicians into a combat-film unit. They left for the front about a week later, reporting for duty “on Hitler’s orders” to the small, predominantly Jewish town of Końskie. Waking under fire the next morning, September 12th—the day the Reich’s news bureau promised a solution to “the Jewish problem in Poland”—Riefenstahl was on hand to witness an improvised beginning to the exterminations. Claiming that Polish partisans had killed a German officer and four soldiers, the occupying troops herded a Jewish burial detail to the main square. When the soldiers guarding the gravediggers began to kick and club them into the pit, Riefenstahl tried to intervene, she said, but they turned on her with cries of “Get rid of the bitch.” Bach writes, “An amateur photographer captured her distraught expression.”

 The subsequent massacre at Końskie left a toll of thirty victims. An eyewitness testified that Riefenstahl had a “sobbing fit” when she saw the Wehrmacht open fire on civilians, and she later claimed to have been “so upset” by this experience that she asked for permission to abandon her assignment and return to Berlin. In reality, however, she hitched a ride on a military plane to Danzig, where she lunched with Hitler (he expressed “shock and anger” at the story, she said) and accepted his invitation to hear the victory speech in which he blamed England for the war.

 Riefenstahl never made another Nazi propaganda vehicle. She grappled for a while with a project long dear to her heart—a film version of Kleist’s “Penthesilea,” starring herself in the title role of an Amazon queen. Hitler had promised to finance this epic from his privy purse, but it foundered, Bach writes, on the absence of a coherent script, Riefenstahl’s inability to create one without the help of a collaborator like Balázs, and the outbreak of war. “Tiefland”—a sappy flop that tells the story of a Spanish village oppressed by its cruel lord—was the production she turned to. There would be little reason to recall it if the logistical challenges of filming abroad had not forced her to re-create her Iberian sets on German soil and to find some swarthy-looking peasant extras to lend her the rude eloquence of their physiognomies. Handily, the Nazis had rounded up the German Sinti and Roma and interned them in “collection camps” while they debated how to annihilate them. Riefenstahl later denied having visited the camps, but there was no denying that ninety-one selected prisoners, including children, worked without wages on the film and were returned to the camps when their scenes were done. After the war but before her de-Nazification hearings—which remarked on her lack of “moral poise” and her Nazi “sympathies” but cleared her of crimes—she sued the publisher of the German magazine Revue, which reported the story of the “Tiefland” extras, most of whom died at Auschwitz. With courtroom sympathies on the director’s side, the defendant was found guilty of libel. In the nineteen-eighties, however, Nina Gladitz, a documentary filmmaker, located a few of the extras who had made it out alive. They testified that Riefenstahl, accompanied by a police escort, had indeed chosen them herself, and had seen the living conditions to which they were condemned.

 Riefenstahl survived the debacle that her idol wreaked upon humanity to be reborn, in late middle age, as an amateur (or, according to the professionals, pseudo) ethnographer, in the Sudan. In exchange for beads and oil, but also apparently with a measure of good will, the Nuba let her photograph their ceremonial dances and wrestling matches and rituals of body painting and scarification. (When they didn’t, she used a telephoto lens.) Those beautifully composed and reverential pictures, taken between 1962 and 1977, are Riefenstahl’s African “Olympia.” To explain the absence of imperfect specimens from her gallery, she later told an interviewer that old, ugly, or disabled Nuba hid themselves in shame.

 “The Nuba of Kau” and “Last of the Nuba,” Riefenstahl’s lucrative coffee-table books, financed a new career. At seventy, claiming to be fifty, she was certified as a deep-sea diver, and for the next thirty years she trained her cameras on the peaceable kingdom of marine life. She still looked rather fetching in flippers and a wetsuit in her late nineties. In the course of an expedition back to the now war-torn Sudan, in 2000, she boogeyed with the Nuba maidens for a German documentary crew, and then barely survived a helicopter crash under fire from rebel troops. The pain of her physical injuries often required morphine, but the stab wounds of her persecutors, as she regarded nearly anyone who questioned her blameless version of the past, were harder to anesthetize. Yet the controversies had an upside: they were life support for her mythos.

 Riefenstahl’s more conscientious compatriots might stubbornly persist in treating her as a pariah, but, as she aged, a new and mainly American audience embraced her. It was led by celebrities from the entertainment world and by critics and artists who hailed her as a great auteur. Among her boosters were the organizers of the first Feminist Film Festival, in Telluride, who, in 1974, touted Riefenstahl as a role model for women directors, impervious to the irony that she had used her singularly privileged role to glorify a cult of violence and misogyny. L. Ron Hubbard briefly collaborated on a remake of “The Blue Light.” Mick Jagger invited her to take his picture with Bianca. Andy Warhol added her to his collection of divas. Madonna, then Jodie Foster, aspired to star in her life story, but Riefenstahl judged neither to be worthy. George Lucas praised her modernity and acknowledged the indebtedness of “Star Wars” to “Triumph of the Will,” particularly, Trimborn notes, in the Caesarean victory celebration that concludes Part IV. And, in 1998, Riefenstahl was one of the guests of honor at Time’s seventy-fifth-anniversary banquet, along with hundreds of other newsmakers from its cover. Unshackled at last from the caption of Munkacsi’s photograph, she received a standing ovation. But perhaps as it died away she heard an echo of Streicher’s paean to her in 1937: “Laugh and go your way, the way of a great calling. Here you have found your heaven and in it you will be eternal.”

 Riefenstahl devoted the better part of her last two decades to fortifying her legend and to suing her detractors (though not only them: she tried to disinherit her only living relatives, a niece and a nephew, with a spurious will that laid claim to her brother’s estate). Marcel Ophuls declined her invitation to celebrate her career in a television documentary, so she awarded the job to an unknown German, Ray Müller. He released “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl” to wide acclaim in 1993, and, seven years later, agreed to film her return visit to the Nuba. Though he himself narrowly escaped from the helicopter crash, she was furious that he hadn’t caught her being pulled from the burning wreckage. It wasn’t easy, she wrote at eighty-five, “to leave the present behind,” but she managed to write an enthrallingly disingenuous seven-hundred-page memoir, taking her epigraph from a complaint of Einstein’s: “So many things have been written about me, masses of insolent lies and inventions, that I would have perished long ago, had I paid any attention.” Finally, having joined Greenpeace and celebrated her thirty-fifth anniversary with Horst Kettner, her handsome sixty-year-old companion, she died in bed, at a hundred and one—living, working, loving, lying, and litigating with prodigious vitality until her heart gave out.

 Narcissism is often a kind of trance that insulates its subject from feelings of worthlessness, and Riefenstahl suffered periodic breakdowns and bouts of colitis at moments of loss or crisis that fractured her glassy-eyed assurance. Her love for the Führer was the paradigm of her self-entrancement, and she never disavowed it, although she later expressed some mild distress at the atrocities perpetrated in his name. Her life after the war would have been much easier if she had, but to do so was to betray something more essential than loyalty to a dead master. It was to endanger the ruthless suspension of self-doubt that her identity had, from childhood, depended on. And in one respect it was logical for her to love Hitler: he had the insight to recognize what her love could give him—a perfect reflection of itself.

 Riefenstahl’s “genius” has rarely been questioned, even by critics who despise the service to which she lent it. (Bach’s cool resistance to the “often slavish lenience” of her rehabilitators is an exception.) Yet one has finally to ask if a creative product counts as a work of art, much less a great one, if it excludes the overwhelming fact of human weakness. That fact is the source of soulfulness and dramatic tension in every enduring narrative that one can think of. A seductively exciting surface, such as the morbid spectacle of a mass delusion, may distract from, but cannot insure against, a slack core, and in Riefenstahl’s case a handful of sequences singled out for their formal beauty and a quality that Sontag calls “vertigo before power” have achieved an influence disproportionate to their depth or originality. They are played over and over, and many people, even film buffs, seem never to have seen—or are unaware of never having seen—Riefenstahl’s documentaries in their entirety. But “Olympia” (three and a half hours long) and “Triumph of the Will” (two) both have their longueurs: endless scenes of shotputting and pole-vaulting in the former, of ranting and marching in the latter. In both, Riefenstahl relies heavily for her transitions on portentous cutaways to clouds, mist, statuary, foliage, and rooftops. Her reaction shots have a tedious sameness: shining, ecstatic faces—nearly all young and Aryan, except for Hitler’s. If, by definition, the trailer for a so-called masterpiece can never be greater than the film itself, then Riefenstahl’s legacy fails the test. ♦

 

Where there is a Will: The rise of Leni Riefenstahl. By Judith Thurman. The New Yorker, March 12, 2007.