She was the brilliant film-maker who transformed Hitler’s rallies into art and
made Nazism appear beautiful — before the world learnt the ugly truth. But
when her fellow Germans hung their heads in collective shame, she protested
her innocence and never backed down. Was Leni Riefenstahl a fascist stooge
or a foolish innocent? Report by Kathy Brewis
Would we have forgiven Leni Riefenstahl for making films for Hitler if she’d
rushed to make amends after the war? If she’d admitted that she had,
wittingly or not, contributed to the success of the Third Reich,
hero-worshipped a genocidal maniac? Not necessarily, but it might have
mitigated the opprobrium.
Either way, we would still have found her fascinating. She dined with Hitler,
Himmler, Goebbels, got close to the real people who have become cartoon
monsters in grainy news footage and school textbooks. She’s a
larger-than-life symbol of moral complexity and ambiguity, the grey area
between right and wrong. We, of course, have the benefit of hindsight. She
saw nothing beyond herself. And what a self. Brilliant, unhinged,
narcissistic, driven. And, as we shall see, careless with the truth –
though, paradoxically, eager to establish beyond doubt her version of the
facts.
Here is a small lie she told that matters because it’s symptomatic of a larger
character flaw. There was a German box-office hit in 1925 called Ways to
Strength and Beauty. An arty, supposedly inspiring documentary about
physical fitness, with scenes alluding to classical antiquity (think toga
parties). Riefenstahl claimed she hadn’t appeared in it. She told one
interviewer she had never heard of it. Till now there was nothing but
persistent rumours to suggest that she was in the picture (it wasn’t a
speaking part, so she went unbilled). But here – courtesy of her new
biographer, Steven Bach – are the stills showing Riefenstahl acting the
nymph like there was no tomorrow.
Bach found these in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The film had
been confiscated by the allies at the end of the second world war and most
of it had been returned to Germany in the 1970s. But a few fragments
remained. Bach sifted through them and: “Suddenly – there she was!” In the
course of his research he unearthed other incriminating images, too – such
as a snapshot of Riefenstahl in the summer of 1945, when, she would later
say, she was “in prison” thanks to the allies. In fact she was only under
cushy house arrest. Bach also discovered that, as a young film-maker wanting
to work for the Nazis, Riefenstahl lied about her own ancestry.
She polarised opinion even as a young, foolish, ruthlessly self-promoting
dancer. After a knee injury she decided she would be a famous actress, then
director, and put all her energies into making it happen. In her older years
she was seemingly no wiser, and certainly no less ruthless. Bach wanted to
explore the morally and sometimes historically cloudy facts of her life. “I
realised that she was either summarily condemned as some sort of she-demon
or elevated to an equally exaggerated height by purist film critics. Both
these positions seemed dubious,” he says.
His curiosity had been piqued when, writing a biography of Marlene Dietrich,
he found himself living round the corner from an elderly Riefenstahl in
Munich. The contrast between the two women, born in Berlin just eight months
apart, nagged away at him. “Both were gifted, beautiful, sexually liberated
and fiercely ambitious. The two most famous German women of the 20th
century, they make Germans uneasy today because of their very different
behaviours during the Third Reich.”
Dietrich, famously, rebuffed offers of work from the Nazis in the late 1930s,
at a low point in her international career. She could have been Germany’s
biggest star. Instead she became an American citizen and entertained allied
troops, risking her career and her life. “Riefenstahl, on the other hand,
embraced the Third Reich. Plenty of Germans still think of Dietrich as a
traitor and would rather not be reminded of the admiration she inspired in
the rest of the world. And many would prefer not to reflect on Riefenstahl
because her lexicon of alibis is reminiscent of the half-truths they tried
to hide behind in the postwar years and which most, to their credit, have
abandoned.”
Most of us burnish our history a little, but Riefenstahl was particularly keen
to prettify her own. There is a famous photo of her, a publicity shot for
her 1932 film The Blue Light – in which she cast herself as a beautiful,
persecuted woman – that she loved. She hung it on her bedroom wall and kept
it there till she died, in 2003, aged 101. Her capacity to view herself as
the victim was extraordinary. She was full of her own sufferings, an egotist
with few scruples who would do anything to get her own way. Seduce, bully,
plead, turn on the tears. More than one used and abused acquaintance sighed
ruefully: “She is an actress.”
She gave everything to her work. She would think nothing of walking across a
mountain crevasse on a wooden ladder without a safety harness, if a role
demanded it, or working with frostbitten fingers or bleeding feet. She
soldiered on through urinary infections and breakdowns and car crashes,
started scuba-diving when she was 70, made a trip to a remote region of
Africa when most people would be at home with a blanket over their knees.
Which is why her moral cowardice is such a disappointment. She could
confront anything except the uneasy issues in her own past.
Her unrepentant attitude would be admirable in other circumstances. But she
didn’t get it. She thought she had nothing to be sorry for. “Of what am I
guilty?” she would ask indignantly. “No anti-semitic word has ever passed my
lips. I have thrown no atomic bombs.” The first assertion is almost
certainly untrue. The point, however, is that she could not, or would not,
face the fact that her greatest work of art caused untold harm. Triumph of
the Will, her cinematically pioneering film of the 1934 Nuremberg rally,
helped Hitler win German hearts and minds – and love for the Führer meant
hating those he hated.
An American man, a child in Germany in 1934, remembered the film being shown
in his school. He was one of three Jewish students of 700 pupils. At the
end, the three were beaten up in front of approving teachers. “The world
will learn from this!” said one. Riefenstahl insisted later that the film
was not propaganda but documentary, which she defined as “when you film
something exactly as it is” (as if there were a neutral viewpoint, as if
camera angles weren’t chosen nor film edited). “The party wanted to have an
archive of what happened… It was only after the war that some people, some
people, said it’s a propaganda film. It isn’t, because if it had been I
would have had to say something.” But of course it is, and she did say
something: every detail swoons before Hitler and his wonderful plans.
She maintained that she was an artist with a capital A, as if art was
untaintable, in another realm from politics. She fought back against every
critic, emerging the victor from numerous libel trials over the decades. But
she was happy to carry on pocketing royalties from Triumph of the Will – as
opposed to, say, donating them to a Jewish charity. “I really cannot bear to
talk any more about what happened to the Jews,” she finally told the writer
Gitta Sereny in 1992. “It is so dreadful, so beyond-belief awful, it even
now spoils life for me. To think that I believed in something that was so
corrupt, that produced this horror – for a long time I envied people who had
died.” It was the closest she ever came to an admission of guilt, half a
century too late.
Who was this woman, whose capacity for invention and self-delusion makes
Jeffrey Archer look like a saint? “I didn’t like her,” Sereny recalls. “But
she was remarkable.”
In Riefenstahl’s 1930s heyday, when she was envied and resented by rivals in
the industry, rumours flew that she was Jewish. She dismissed them as
malicious gossip put about by Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister.
(Though taken with her at first, Goebbels hated her closeness to Hitler and
considered her too free and easy with the Nazi funds he was in charge of
that she had commandeered for various projects. She said he hated her
because she had spurned his sexual advances and that their paths barely
crossed. In fact, though he called her “that hysterical woman”, they had
many a cosy chat. After early discussions about mutually beneficial film
projects, he wrote in his diary: “She is the only one of all the stars who
understands us.”)
She was born Helene Amalia Bertha Riefenstahl on August 22, 1902, in what were
then the industrial outskirts of Berlin. She said her childhood was “not
happy” because her father (Alfred, a plumber) was so controlling; she vowed
to live life on her own terms. Her grandmother had died giving birth to her
mother, Bertha, in 1880 (her 18th child). Her grandfather then married his
children’s nanny and fathered three more children. Riefenstahl’s “Proof of
Descent” document, which she filed to the Reich’s film office in 1933 to
validate her Aryan pedigree – Jews were banned from working in the industry
by then – gives her mother’s name as Ottilie Boia. But, as Bach points out,
this woman couldn’t have been Bertha’s mother: she was only born in 1863, so
couldn’t have borne 17 children by 1880.
Bach concludes: “Ottilie was almost certainly the nanny that Leni’s
grandfather married after his first wife died in delivering Bertha. The
substitution of Bertha’s stepmother for her birth mother on a Third Reich
genealogical document is hard to fathom without considering a motive
touching on race, since defining race was the point of the exercise.” So:
she really might have been Jewish. What else?
Let us consider a story (one Riefenstahl did not tell herself) about her
teenage self, which tells us a lot about her varying levels of compassion
and self-absorption. She attracted men like dogs to a speeding car. An early
casualty was one Walter Lubovski. She and her friends humiliated the smitten
lad by making him cross-dress in their clothes. One day, he slashed his
wrists at her family’s cottage in Zeuthen. The boy ended up in a mental
hospital and later moved to America, where he went blind. Riefenstahl
commented: “He never forgot me as long as he lived.”
She slept with most of her collaborators, having lost her virginity at 20 to a
tennis star called Otto Froitzheim (who, after the event, tossed her a $20
note, saying: “If you get pregnant, use this to get rid of it.” A
contemporary journalist noted that, in 1920s Berlin, “unromantic love was
the fashion: carefree, restless, light-hearted promiscuity”). One of her
first conquests was a young Jewish banker, Harry Sokal, who financed first
her dancing and then her early film projects. He wanted to marry her; she
slept with him and used his money. Another lover was Hans Schneeberger, a
cameraman. “He liked being led. He was the passive partner, I the active
one,” she recalled.
Politically, she insisted, as soon as it became necessary to insist, that she
was naive. It wasn’t quite that simple. New material from interviews with
Sokal and others, which
have never previously appeared in print, call this into question. For example,
Sokal spoke about the bad reviews that The Blue Light, an overblown
mountaineering fable that they made together, received, especially from the
“democratic” papers, which were considered Jewish. “Leni came to me
extremely upset, of course, and said, ‘What do these Jewish critics
understand about our mentality? They have no right to criticise our work.’”
A Jewish art theorist, Rudolf Arnheim, who interviewed her for German radio in
November 1932 (one of the few men she met who didn’t fall under her spell),
claimed that she told him: “As long as the Jews are film critics, I’ll never
have a success. But watch out, when Hitler takes the rudder everything will
change.” Politics, like everything else, was only of interest if it served
her own agenda.
Further small but telling details emerge. For example, The Blue Light was
re-released in 1938 with all Jewish contributors’ names deleted from the
credits. One of these was a Hungarian-Jewish director, Bela Balazs, who had
directed all the scenes Riefenstahl was in. During an ensuing dispute, the
details of which have since been lost, she refers to him (misspelling his
surname) in a handwritten letter as “the Jew Bela Balacs”. The letter
granted power of attorney to her friend Julius Streicher, the publisher of
the anti-semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, who was later declared a war
criminal and hanged.
After The Blue Light had wrapped, Riefenstahl took a holiday in Switzerland.
On the train back to Berlin, Heinz von Jaworksy, Schneeberger’s assistant,
saw her absorbed in Mein Kampf. “During this train ride she tried to
convince me it was a beautiful book… We got into an argument. Then she said,
‘You’ll see. They are right.’ ” Sokal also remembered her trying to persuade
him to read it, saying: “You must read this book. This is the coming man.”
Millions of Germans were dazzled by Hitler, and nobody could have imagined the
extent of the horrors ahead. There were two events, however, that
Riefenstahl experienced which – let’s give her the benefit of the doubt –
might have made her wonder about the beauty of the Nazi enterprise if she
had not been so obsessed with her own projects (it seems particularly apt
that she was born cross-eyed). One was a massacre. The other concerned slave
labour.
When the war started, Riefenstahl launched a combat photographic unit. Her
request for war-correspondent status was approved in 24 hours, and the
Special Riefenstahl Film Unit left for the new front, “on Hitler’s orders”,
she told a general, on September 19, 1939. They arrived in Konskie, a small
Polish town occupied by German forces, two days later. The next day, she
heard that Polish partisans in the town (two-thirds of the inhabitants were
Jewish) had killed and mutilated five German soldiers. She saw German
soldiers supervising Polish civilians
(all Jewish, though she failed to mention that in her own account) digging a
burial pit and the German soldiers kicking them back into it when they tried
to climb out.
Shots rang out, chaos ensued and 30 or more Jews were killed, with four German
soldiers wounded. An amateur photographer took a snap in which you can see
Riefenstahl looking distraught. (What also happened, though she might not
have known this, was that the synagogue was set on fire and its rabbi taken
hostage with other officials until the town’s Jews paid a fine for the
massacre, for which they were blamed.) Riefenstahl said she tried to
intervene but was held back. She was so upset, she returned to Berlin right
away. But in her later memoir, she would claim: “In Poland, I never saw a
corpse, not of a soldier, not of a civilian.” As Bach says, “Ignorance
became strategy.”
The incident reduced her to tears (what didn’t?). She viewed it, however, as
an aberration. Her adoration for Hitler remained: when he conquered Paris in
June 1940, she sent him a telegram proclaiming herself filled with
“indescribable joy… To express congratulations is far too inadequate a way
to convey the feelings that move me”.
In a more damning episode, she hired gypsies from a “collection camp”, en
route to a final destination in the east, as extras for her film Tiefland, in
1940. The movie tells the story of a gypsy dancer saved from an evil lord’s
imprisonment by a lowly shepherd. Riefenstahl played the dancer. (A
revisionist version of this film holds that it is a parable about tyranny
under oppression, and that Riefenstahl was subtly trying to make amends for
Triumph of the Will.) She later said she had never visited the camp and
others had done the casting. Post-war judges thought this unlikely, given
her obsessively hands-on nature.
The Maxglan camp was just outside Salzburg. It was a series of huts surrounded
by barbed-wire fences, overseen by armed guards. Some of the gypsies she had
hired testified later that they had seen her there with two men and guards.
Their claims have the ring of truth – for example, they said, in choosing
them, she “framed” their faces with her thumbs and forefingers as if looking
through a viewfinder. One boy, Josef Reinhardt, then 13, said she told an
official: “I can’t take these people like this; they need to be re-clothed.”
A contract between Leni-Riefenstahl-Film and the SS commandant in charge of
the camp spelt out strict terms within which these extras could be used:
they were to be kept in “strict isolation” from others and under armed
guard. Technically, they were paid seven Reichsmarks a day per adult. But
the contract stated this money “may not be paid to the gypsies directly” but
to the Gypsy General Fund in Salzburg, towards the costs of keeping them at
Maxglan. She used 23 Maxglan gypsy extras, 15 of them children, during 1940
and ’41. Another 68 gypsies were procured from a similar camp, Marzahn,
outside Berlin, the year after.
Reinhardt remembered that she seemed sympathetic. So much so that his father
asked him to ask her if she could do anything to get them freed. “She said
she wanted to try to get our family to Berlin… We waited painfully long
while nothing happened.” In May 1943, Maxglan was closed and the gypsies
were sent to Auschwitz, where most perished. Riefenstahl, like most Germans,
probably didn’t hear the name Auschwitz till after the war. But later, when
everyone knew, she failed to see how grotesque it was to describe how “her”
gypsies had loved being in the film, especially the children, who called her
“Aunt Leni”. Worse, she claimed: “We saw nearly all of [the gypsies] after
the war. Nothing happened to a single one of them.” The death lists from
Auschwitz proved otherwise. Decades later, a gypsy organisation took her to
court, accusing her of Holocaust denial. In response, she issued a bland
statement of regret “that Sinti and Roma had to suffer under National
Socialism. It is known today that many of them were murdered in
concentration camps”.
After the war, Riefenstahl was, after four hearings, classified guilty of the
lowest degree of complicity with the Nazi regime (“fellow traveller”). She
went into emotional meltdown and, by some accounts, spent time in an asylum.
But nothing could keep her down for long, and she persisted with her
artistic mission, despite being largely blacklisted by the film industry.
She tried to find financing for new projects in Hollywood, and, under an
alias (“Helene Jacob”), in 1957 tried and failed to sell footage from an
aborted film she had started in Africa, to MGM.
In the 1960s, Riefenstahl managed to reinvent herself as a stills
photographer, focusing on the Nuba tribe in the Sudan. In 1951 she had seen
an amazing image of African athletes by the British photojournalist George
Rodger, and had written to him offering £500 if he would introduce her
to them. Rodger had been the first photographer to enter Bergen-Belsen in
1945. “Dear Madam,” he wrote back, “knowing your background and mine I don’t
really have anything to say to you at all.”
Her eventual images of nearly naked Nuba tribespeople, published in The Sunday
Times Magazine in 1967, were stunning. They won her international acclaim.
She even photographed Mick and Bianca Jagger just after their wedding. In
1968 she met Horst Kettner, then 24, the man who would become her devoted
assistant and companion to the end of her days. In her eighties she took
thousands of underwater pictures that some unkindly compared to
screensavers. On her 100th birthday she released an utterly inoffensive film
about marine life.
She had also spent five years in the 1980s writing her memoirs. Her
autobiography, published in 1987, was full of improbable episodes (including
Hitler crying on her shoulder about his early political difficulties) and
void of objectivity. A London reviewer noted her “thirst for applause… she
is so dazzled by her own light that she notices nothing, but nothing, around
her”. “No doubts or qualms, no shadows or misgivings darkened my
creativity,” she once said. “The artist knows but one struggle – the
struggle for perfection of his own work.”
On another occasion, when she was trying to convince an interviewer that she
had been oblivious to the rise of the National Socialists and their aims,
she pleaded: “I was terribly busy. All I thought about was my small circle,
my own life.” She could have been talking about herself in general. Her
talents and her unceasing activity were extraordinary. What a pity she could
not have stopped for a few seconds and thought a little harder, when it
mattered.
Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, by Steven Bach (£25), is
published by Little, Brown on April 19. It is available at the BooksFirst
price of £22.50. Tel: 0870 165 8585
