Filmmaker and actor Leni Riefenstahl has been the subject of a slew of documentaries over the years, many attempting to unravel the truth about her relationship with the Nazi Party. Was the director of Hitler-boosting propaganda film Triumph of the Will the commissioned artist she later claimed to have been, unaware that the Holocaust was occurring as her cameras rolled? That’s what Riefenstahl herself told Vanity Fair in a 1984 interview. “If Stalin had invited me to Moscow to make a movie about the Russian army, if Roosevelt had said, ‘Come to America, make a documentary on the navy,’ I would have gone,” she said then.
“Maybe for Stalin,” says German journalist, talk show host, and writer Sandra Maischberger skeptically. “She would have found something there to admire, as well.”
Maischberger is the producer of a new documentary called Riefenstahl, which seeks to debunk the late filmmaker’s claims that she was unfairly targeted—canceled, as some might say today—for her eagerness to collaborate with a fascist regime. In the decades after World War II, Riefenstahl claimed that she was the victim, Maischberger says. “She would talk in a very different way in interviews,” but that was not “the real Leni Riefenstahl. That one, she tried to hide.”
Maischberger interviewed Riefenstahl before the filmmaker’s death in 2003 at the age of 101, and says it was a dissatisfying experience that’s always stayed with her. After two days at Riefenstahl’s home in Bavaria, “I knew that she was lying. But I was not so sure what she was really exactly lying about. When she told me she was a completely apolitical person and did not know what happened in the ’40s—all the atrocities—did she lie to me? Or had she been lying to herself for such a long time that she couldn’t understand what was the truth, and what was not true?”
Leni Riefenstahl and Adolf Hitler.
Bayrische Staatsbibliothek Bildarchiv
Maischberger had a chance to interrogate those questions after Riefenstahl’s husband, Horst Kettner, died in 2016. From her time in their home, Maischberger knew that it was packed with tape recordings, photos, and papers; Riefenstahl was a documentarian of her own life as well. Those archives were left to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which allowed the filmmakers access to over 700 boxes of raw material. But though those contents give Riefenstahl its news hook, they’re not the only reason German director Andres Veiel wanted to make this film now. “It’s a message for the future,” he says, “about how easily we get seduced.”
According to Riefenstahl’s memoir, some of which is quoted in the film, she first saw Hitler speak at a rally in 1932 and “had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. 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.”
She became an ardent fan of the future führer, and vice versa. The following year, Hitler’s administration commissioned Riefenstahl to make an hour-long propaganda film called Victory of the Faith. The next year, she was back to document the Nazis’ 1934 Nuremberg rally in what would become one of her most famous works, Triumph of the Will. Olympia, her Hitler-focused take on the 1936 Berlin Olympics, soon followed. Though Riefenstahl was not officially a member of the Nazi Party, her friendly relationship with Hitler’s administration enabled her to pursue passion projects like Tiefland, a privately-financed drama she shot from 1940 to 1944 that used internment camp prisoners as extras—most of whom were later killed at Auschwitz.
None of this is new information, though if Leni Riefenstahl had had her way, we wouldn’t know any of it. She was remarkably litigious in her postwar years, suing multitudes of those who reported on her past—even contradicting claims she’d previously made in her efforts to quiet critics. “We know Leni Riefenstahl is a master of legends,” Veiel says. “So the question is: How do we get beyond her storytellings, which are quite known?”
“Riefenstahl” filmmakers combed through 700 boxes of previously unseen documents from Leni Riefenstahl’s estate.
Vincent Productions
That’s where access to Riefenstahl’s collection of memories came in. Veiel could use them to cut through her denials like a scalpel. Riefenstahl’s own photos, typed notes, and audio tapes rebut the arguments she made from talk show couches after the war, a seamless and calm dissection that should put to rest the vague defenses—maybe she really wasn’t aware of the horrors of the Holocaust—many of us heard in high school or college classes before we were shown Triumph of the Will.
Those defenses were seemingly accepted by the Telluride Film Festival, which honored her in 1974. Riefenstahl’s contributions to the art of nonfiction filmmaking had not received the recognition they deserved, a spokesperson for Telluride said at the time, because “Leni has been maligned and called a Nazi swine.” In the years since, techniques Riefenstahl brought to the forefront—such as the use of long-focus lenses and sweeping, aerial photography—have been adopted by filmmakers like George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola (among many others), both of whom she influenced.
“She created masterpieces,” Maischberger admits. “She was a fantastic editor, and had a sense of how to put a picture together in a way that it would be a fantastic experience, very emotional. But she was so close to evil. It was a pact with the devil.”
Riefenstahl’s estate has a lot to teach us about the contemporary political climate. The parallels between her era and ours are striking: Even today, we see the world’s richest men prostrating themselves before an aspiring autocrat, creatives and news organizations seemingly seeking to normalize a self-proclaimed king, and various organized displays of military force. As Veiel considered Riefenstahl’s work for Hitler, he was thinking about all that too.
“There’s something between the lines which is telling us something not only about the present, but about the future,” he says. “The longing for this strongness and the contempt of weakness, the contempt of the foreigners.”
This is demonstrated most chillingly in Riefenstahl’s recordings of phone calls she received after media appearances in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Many of them express support for Riefenstahl—not as the unfairly maligned victim she presented herself as, but as a Nazi propagandist. Some of her fans specifically praised her work for the Nazis and the viewpoints reflected therein.
Veiel points to one call in particular as proof that in many corners, Riefenstahl wasn’t just forgiven—she was embraced. “The guy says, ‘Well, it will take one or two generations, and then Germany will find its way back to dignity, morality, order, virtue,’” says Veiel. Instead of arguing, Riefenstahl agrees with the caller, saying that the German people are predestined to return to the values and glory they had when she was making her films.
With Riefenstahl’s leanings more clear, Maischberger is hopeful that students of film who have excused Riefenstahl in the past will reconsider. “You should not be intrigued by someone’s talent if the soul is as rotten as this soul was,” she says. “And there is no way to separate politics and art here, because this art wouldn’t exist without the politics.”
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