Documentary Reveals Deep Nazi Sympathies of Leni Riefenstahl

The Nazi film propagandist Leni Riefenstahl remained a true believer in the party her entire life, and may have played an active role in at least one mass slaughter of Jews, according to a new documentary that seeks to upend accepted wisdom about the filmmaker’s complicity in Nazi atrocities.

“Riefenstahl,” which premiered Thursday at the Venice Film Festival to rave reviews, provides a fresh look at the “Triumph of the Will” director, who passed away in 2003 at the age of 101. The film draws upon access to Riefenstahl’s personal archive, made available to the public after her husband’s death in 2016.

Director Andres Veiel focuses on dismantling the narrative Riefenstahl carefully refashioned for herself in the postwar era. She portrayed herself as a naive German artist who worked for Hitler only because those were the resources available to her and claimed to be shocked after learning of the full scale of Nazi atrocities post-war. Riefenstahl, who later had a long career as a photographer, encouraged this rehabilitation by publishing her memoirs and commissioning a favorable documentary in the 1990s.

However, Veiel and his producer Sandra Maischberger, who interviewed Riefenstahl for her 100th birthday in 2002, argue that this image of the filmmaker is false. They present new evidence showing her complicity and awareness of the Nazis’ objectives.

In an interview with Deadline, Veiel described Riefenstahl as someone who adeptly manipulated the truth, drawing parallels with modern-day political figures and the use of propaganda. He likened her filmmaking techniques and untruth campaigns to those seen in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns.

Despite reportedly destroying large portions of her own archives, Riefenstahl’s records reveal that she maintained relations with fellow Nazis for decades. This included Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and the subject of another recent documentary challenging his postwar portrayal. She made several comments supportive of Nazi ideology to German Nazi sympathizers who contacted her.

Riefenstahl may have played an active role in a September 1939 massacre of Polish Jews in Końskie, where she was filming Hitler’s Polish invasion. The town, home to around 6,500 Jews before the war, saw nearly its entire Jewish population driven out and later perished in the Treblinka camp. On the day Riefenstahl visited, Nazi soldiers slaughtered 22 Jews. Although she denied any knowledge of the killings, the documentary cites a letter from Riefenstahl’s files attributing the mass killing to her stage directions, interpreted as “Get rid of the Jews.”

Additionally, as part of her postwar correspondence, Riefenstahl kept a file labeled “Jews,” which contained negative letters from Jewish individuals. Despite these revelations, Riefenstahl succeeded in keeping much of this information from the public post-war and continued to be celebrated by the American film community for her innovative filmmaking techniques in “Triumph,” “Olympia,” and other Nazi-era films.

Several other Venice Film Festival premieres this year also explore Nazi and Holocaust themes. These include a new documentary on the unreleased Jerry Lewis Holocaust movie “The Day The Clown Cried”; “Marco, the Invented Truth,” a drama about Spanish fraudster Enric Marco, who falsely claimed to be a Holocaust survivor; and “The Brutalist,” a historical drama starring Adrien Brody as a Holocaust survivor turned architect.

Another notable film premiere, “September 5,” dramatizes the 1972 Munich Olympics where 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by Palestinian terrorists. Riefenstahl also worked at this event as a photographer.

Source: JTA, Deadline