September 12, 2017 (XXXV:3) Leni Riefenstahl TRIUMPH OF THE WILL/TRIUMPH DES WILLENS (1934), 110 min.

(The online version of this handout has color images.) Directed by Leni Riefenstahl Written by Leni Riefenstahl, Walter Ruttmann, Eberhard Taubert Produced & Film Editing by Leni Riefenstahl Music by Herbert Windt Camera:Sepp Allgeier, Karl Attenberger, Werner Bohne, Walter Frentz,Hans Karl Gottschalk, Werner Hundhausen, Herbert Kebelmann, Albert Kling, Franz Koch, Herbert Kutschbach,Paul Lieberenz, Richard Nickel, Walter Riml, Arthur von Schwertführer, Karl Vash (Vaß), Franz Weihmayr, Siegfried Weinmann, Karl Wellert Assistant Camera: Sepp Ketterer, Wolfgang Hart, Peter Haller, Kurt Schulz, Eugen Oskar Bernhard, Richard Kandler, Hans Bühring, Richard Böhm, Erich Stoll,Josef Koch, Otto Jäger, August Beis, Hans Wittman, Wolfgang Müller, Hans (Heinz) Linke, Erich Küchler, Ernst Kunstmann, Erich Grohmann, Wilhelm Schmidt Special Camera/Effects:Albert Kling (ærial photography), Svend Noldan (special effects), Fritz Brunsch (special effects),Hans Noack (special effects) Sets: Albert Speer Cast Adolf Hitler, Max Amann (SS official, politician and journalist), Martin Bormann (Nazi Party Chancellery Head), Walter Buch (SS official), Richard Walter Darré ("blood and soil" ideologist; Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture from 1933 to 1942), Otto Dietrich, Josef "Sepp" Dietrich, Hans Frank (lawyer who worked for the Nazi Party during the 1920s and 1930s, and later became Adolf Hitler's personal lawyer), Joseph Goebbels, Jakob Grimminger (member of the SS known for carrying the Blutfahne, the ceremonial Nazi flag), Hermann Göring, Reinhard Heydrich, Konstantin Hierl (head of the Reich Labour Service and an associate of Adolf Hitler before he came to national power), Heinrich Himmler, Franz Hofer, Robert Ley (headed the German Labor Front from 1933 to 1945), Viktor Lutze (SA official who informed Hitler about Ernst Röhm's anti-regime activities. After the “Night of the Long Knives” purge he became the new leader of the SA until

his death in a car accident in 1943), Ludwig Müller (theologian and leading member of the "German Christians" faith movement, Erich Raeder (played a major role in the naval history of World War II), Fritz Reinhardt (Secretary of State), Alfred Rosenberg, Hjalmar Schacht (Minister of Economics), Franz Xavier Schwarz, Julius Streicher, Fritz Todt (engineer whose firm handled construction of fortifications such as the Westwall and Atlantikwall, and the autobahn superhighways.) Leni Riefenstahl (b. August 22, 1902 in Berlin, Germany—d. September 8, 2003, age 101, in Pöcking, Bavaria, Germany) wanted to know what it felt like to dance on the stage. Success as a dancer gave way to film acting when she attracted the attention of film director Arnold Fanck, subsequently starring in some of his mountaineering pictures. With Fanck as her mentor, Riefenstahl began directing films. In 1931 Riefenstahl established her own production company and wrote (with noted Hungarian film writer Béla Balázs), directed, produced and starred in Das Blaue Licht (The Blue Light, 1932) which won her the silver medal at the Venice Biennale and drew Hitler’s attention. He wanted her to film the 1933 Party rally but Goebbels opposed her, arguing she was too young (31), too inexperienced and a woman. Without his assistance she shot several thousand feet of film which Hitler insisted be edited and released. This was Sieg des Glaubens (Victory of Faith, 1933), which is lost. Riefenstahl asserts her name did not appear in the

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credits. She complained to Hitler about Goebbels’ interference and Hitler ordered her to film the 1934 rally. Because she hadn’t made a nonfiction film she sought the help of Walter Ruttman, director of the famous German documentary Berlin: The Symphony of a Great City (1927). He agreed to do a film prologue on the Nazi rise to power and she left for Spain to scout locations for Tiefland (finished in 1954), her next fiction project. She returned from Spain in mid August 1934 and had only two weeks to prepare for filming. Hitler had combined the offices of President and Chancellor on the August 2nd death of von Hindenburg. He presided over the sixth party rally held in Nürenberg from September 4th to 10th. Triumph of the Will (1935) is the film record of his gigantic display of party power, regarded as the most effective visual propaganda for Nazism ever made. Her penchant for artistic work earned her acclaim and awards for her films across Europe. Triumph of the Will would come back to haunt her after the atrocities of World War II. Despite her protests to the contrary, Riefenstahl was considered an intricate part of the Third Reich's propaganda machine. Condemned by the international community, she did not make another movie for over 50 years. She currently holds the record for the longest length of time in between projects. After Lowlands (1954), it was 48 years before she directed another film, the documentary Underwater Impressions (2002). She’s also the oldest director to helm a documentary at 99 years old in 2002. Walter Ruttmann (b. December 28, 1887 in Frankfurt-on-Main, Germany—d. July 15, 1941, age 53, in Berlin, Germany) was a painter in his youth. He started in films as a designer and creator of special effects for Paul Wegener and Lotte Reiniger. He was most famous for his documentary feature Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927). After Adolf Hitler came to power, he turned out propaganda films for the Nazis. He also collaborated on the editing of Leni Riefenstahl's Berlin 1936: Games of the XI Olympiad (1936). He was severely injured in 1941 while filming a documentary about the fighting on the Russian front. Transported back to Berlin, he died in a hospital during an operation to try to save his life. Eberhard Taubert (b. May 11, 1907, Kassel, Germany—d. November 2, 1976, Cologne, Germany) was a lawyer and anti-Semitic Nazi propagandist. He joined the Nazi party in 1931, and quickly became involved in both anti-Communist and anti-Jewish propaganda. From 1933 to 1945 he worked as a high official in the Propagandaministerium under Joseph Goebbels. His nickname in Nazi circles was Dr. Anti. He worked in 1940 on the script for the anti-Semitic propaganda film Der Ewige Jude (English: The Eternal Jew) and was responsible for the law requiring Jews to wear the yellow badge (Judenstern). After the war he worked for $3,000 a month for the German Christian Democratic Party, providing material against more radical Marxists. After 1957 he worked in South America, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt and South Africa and as the counsel of the German minister Franz Josef Strauß. From 1970 he was employed by German industrialists. Sepp Allgeier (b. February 6, 1895—d. March 11, 1968) was a German cinematographer who worked on around fifty features, documentaries and short films. He began his career as a

cameraman in 1911 for the Expreß Film Co. of Freiburg. In 1913 he filmed newsreels in the Balkans. He then became an assistant to Arnold Fanck, a leading director of Mountain films. He worked frequently with Luis Trenker and Leni Riefenstahl, both closely associated with the genre. His most famous film for a US audience would be Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) starring Louise Brooks. During the Second World War, Allgeier filmed material for newsreels. He later worked in West German television. Adolf Hitler (b. April 20, 1889—d. April 20, 1945) was the Chancellor of Germany from 1933-1945. After the early death of both of his parents, in 1907, Hitler moved to Vienna and worked as a casual laborer and watercolor painter. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts twice and was rejected both times. Lacking money outside of an orphan's pension and funds from selling postcards, he stayed in homeless shelters. Hitler later pointed to these years as the time when he first cultivated his anti-Semitism, though there is some debate about this account. In 1913, Hitler relocated to Munich. At the outbreak of WWI, he applied to serve in the German army. He was accepted in August 1914, though he was still an Austrian citizen. Although Hitler spent much of his time away from the front lines (with some reports that his recollections of his time on the field were generally exaggerated), he was present at many significant battles and was wounded at the Somme. He was decorated for bravery, receiving the Iron Cross First Class and the Black Wound Badge. Hitler became embittered over the collapse of the war effort. The experience reinforced his passionate German patriotism, and he was shocked by Germany's surrender in 1918. Like other German nationalists, he purportedly believed that the German army had been betrayed by civilian leaders and Marxists. After World War I, Hitler returned to Munich and continued to work for the German military. As an intelligence officer, he monitored the activities of the German Workers’ Party (DAP) and adopted many of the anti-Semitic, nationalist and anti-Marxist ideas of party founder Anton Drexler. In September 1919, Hitler joined the DAP, which changed its name to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) — often abbreviated to Nazi. Hitler personally designed the Nazi party banner, appropriating the swastika symbol and placing it in a white circle on a red background. He soon gained notoriety for his vitriolic speeches against the Treaty of Versailles, rival politicians, Marxists and Jews. In 1921, Hitler replaced Drexler as the Nazi party chairman. Hitler's fervid beer-hall speeches began attracting regular audiences. Early followers included army captain Ernst Rohm, the head of the Nazi paramilitary organization the Sturmabteilung (SA), which protected meetings and frequently attacked political opponents. On November 8, 1923, Hitler and the SA stormed a public meeting at a large beer hall in Munich. Hitler announced that the national revolution had begun and declared the formation of a new government. After a short struggle that led to several deaths, the coup known as the “Beer Hall Putsch” failed. Hitler was arrested and tried for high treason and sentenced to nine months in prison. During Hitler’s

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nine months in prison in 1924, he dictated most of the first volume of his autobiographical book and political manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), to his deputy, Rudolf Hess. The first volume was published in 1925, and a second volume came out in 1927. It was abridged and translated into 11 languages, selling more than five million copies by 1939. A work of propaganda and falsehoods, the book laid out Hitler’s plans for transforming German society into one based on race. In the first volume, Hitler shared his Anti-Semitic, pro-Aryan worldview along with his sense of “betrayal” at the outcome of World War I, calling for revenge against France and expansion eastward into Russia. The second volume outlined his plan to gain and maintain power. While often illogical and full of grammatical errors, Mein Kampf was provocative and subversive, making it appealing to the many Germans who felt displaced at the end of World War I. Hitler’s purity of race extended to self-imposed dietary restrictions including abstinence from alcohol and meat (or veganism). He encouraged Germans to keep their bodies pure of any intoxicating or unclean substances and promoted anti-smoking campaigns across the country. After World War I, Hitler came to control the National Socialist German Workers Party, which he hoped to lead to power in Germany. When a coup attempt in 1923 failed, he turned, after release from jail, to the buildup of the party to seize power by means that were at least outwardly legal. He hoped to carry out a program calling for the restructuring of Germany on a racist basis so that it could win a series of wars to expand the German people’s living space until they dominated and exclusively inhabited the globe. By 1933 he took control of the German government. His establishment of concentration camps to inter Jews and other groups he believed to be a threat to Aryan supremacy resulted in the death of more than 6 million Jews and millions of others in the Holocaust. His attack on Poland in 1939 started World War II, and by 1941 Germany occupied much of Europe and North Africa. By early 1945, Hitler realized that Germany was going to lose the war. The Soviets had driven the German army back into Western Europe and the Allies were advancing into Germany from the west. At midnight, going into April 29, 1945, Hitler married his girlfriend, Eva Braun, in a small civil ceremony in his Berlin bunker. Around this time, Hitler was informed of the execution of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Afraid of falling into the hands of enemy troops, Hitler and Braun committed suicide the day after their wedding, on April 30, 1945. Their bodies were carried to a bombed-out area outside of the Reich Chancellery, where they were burned. Berlin fell on May 2, 1945. Five days later, on May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. Martin Bormann (b. June 17, 1900—d. May [date unknown] 1945) was an avowed and vocal pan-German in his youth, who participated in right-wing German Free Corps activities after the close of WWI. Bormann was imprisoned in 1924 for

participation in a political murder, and after his release he joined the National Socialists. He became head of the Nazi press in Thuringia in 1926 and from 1928 held posts in the high command of the SA. In 1933 he became chief of staff to the deputy führer, Rudolf Hess. On May 12, 1941, Hitler appointed Bormann to fill the post of head of the party chancellery, succeeding Hess after the latter had made his quixotic flight to Scotland. Bormann thus became head of the administrative machinery of the Nazi Party, and through intrigue, party infighting, and his shrewd manipulation of Hitler’s weaknesses and eccentricities, he became a shadowy but extremely powerful

presence in the Third Reich. He controlled all acts of legislation and all party promotions and appointments, and he had a broad influence on domestic policy questions concerning internal security. He controlled the personal access of others to Hitler and drew up the Führer’s schedule and appointments calendar, insulating him from the independent counsel of his subordinates. Bormann was a rigid and unbending guardian of Nazi orthodoxy; he was a major advocate of the persecution and extermination of Jews and Slavs, and he played a role in expanding

the German slave labor program. He disappeared shortly after the death of Hitler, and it was presumed that he was either dead or in hiding. He was indicted August 29, 1945, along with other Nazi leaders, on charges of war crimes and was found guilty and sentenced to death in absentia at Nürnberg on October 1, 1946.

Walter Buch (b. (24 October 24, 1883—d. November 12, 1949) was a German jurist, official in Nazi Germany and SS-Obergruppenführer. He was also Martin Bormann's father-in-law. After the end of the Second World War in Europe, Buch was classified as a major regime functionary or “Hauptschuldiger” in Denazification proceedings in 1949. On

November 12th of that year, he committed suicide. Otto Dietrich (b. August 1887—d. 1952) was a soldier in WWI, where he was awarded the Iron Cross (First Class). After this he went to the universities of Munich, Frankfurt am Main and Freiburg, from which he graduated with a doctorate in political science in 1921. He strongly supported Nazi ideology, and became a member of the Party almost immediately after its foundation in 1919. In 1931, he was appointed Press Chief of the NSDAP and, the following year, joined the SS. By 1941 he had risen to the rank of SS-Obergruppenfuher. His job as Press Chief overlapped with Goebbels' Ministry for Propaganda, and thus many anecdotes exist of their feuds. They were infamous for their disagreements, and both often felt obliged to “repair” the mistakes of the other. He died after serving time in Landberg Prison following the Nuremberg trials, where he was convicted of “crimes against humanity.” Joseph “Sepp” Dietrich (b. May 28, 1892—d. April 21, 1966) joined the German army in 1911 and rose to the rank of sergeant during World War I. An early acquaintance of Hitler, he joined

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the SA in 1923 before moving up to the SS in 1928. he special SS unit that Dietrich founded in 1932 evolved into the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler (LAH), which served as Hitler’s personal army and later became a division in the Waffen-SS. As a reward for the role played by the LAH in the violent purge of Ernst Röhm and other high-ranking SA officers in June 1934, Dietrich was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer (general). An able field commander with good battle intuition, Dietrich continued to head the LAH, leading it into battle at Kharkov and Kursk on the Eastern Front. In 1943 the LAH was expanded into the I SS Panzer Corps. In October 1944 he was placed in command of the Sixth Panzer Army, which spearheaded the German offensive through the Ardennes in the Battle of the Bulge. He led this unit in Hungary and Austria during the closing phase of the war. Upon surrendering to American forces in May 1945, Dietrich was held partly responsible for the murder of American prisoners at Malmédy by SS troops during the Ardennes offensive. In 1946 he was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment, and he was released after serving 10 years of his sentence. In 1957 he was convicted in a German court for his role in Hitler’s purge of the SA in 1934 and served another 20 months in prison on this charge. Hans Frank (b. May 23, 1900—d. October 16, 1946) Frank fought in World War I, studied economics and jurisprudence, and in 1921 joined the German Workers’ Party (which became the Nazi Party). He eventually became the party’s chief legal counsel and Hitler’s personal lawyer. After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Frank was appointed to a variety of important posts, including president of the Reichstag and minister of justice in the Nazi government. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Frank was appointed governor-general, becoming the supreme chief of occupied Poland’s civil administration. An enthusiastic proponent of Nazi racist ideology, Frank ordered the execution of hundreds of thousands of Poles, the wholesale confiscation of Polish property, the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Polish workers who were shipped to Germany, and the herding of most of Poland’s Jews into ghettos as a prelude to their extermination. Frank remained as governor-general until the war’s end, although Hitler stripped him of his other posts in 1942. He was captured by U.S. Army troops on May 4, 1945, and was indicted for trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nürnberg. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and on Oct. 1, 1946, was sentenced to hang. Joseph Goebbels (b. October 29, 1857—d. May 1, 1945) was appointment by Adolf Hitler to chancellor of Germany, he named Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), his trusted friend and colleague, to the key post of minister for public enlightenment and propaganda. In this capacity, Goebbels was charged with presenting Hitler to the public in the most favorable light, regulating the content of all German media and fomenting anti-Semitism. Goebbels forced Jewish artists, musicians, actors, directors and newspaper and magazine editors into unemployment, and staged a public burning of books that were considered “un-German”. He also spearheaded the production of Nazi propaganda films and other projects. Goebbels remained in this post and was loyal to Hitler until the end of World War II. On May 1, 1945, the day after Hitler committed suicide,

Goebbels and his wife poisoned their six children and then killed themselves. Hermann Göring (b. January 12, 1893—d. October 15, 1946) son of a judge who had been sent by Bismarck to South-West Africa as the first Resident Minister Plenipotentiary, Goering entered the army in 1914 as an Infantry Lieutenant, before being transferred to the air force as a combat pilot. The last Commander in 1918 of the Richthofen Fighter Squadron, Goering distinguished himself as an air ace, credited with shooting down twenty-two Allied aircraft. Awarded the Pour le Merite and the Iron Cross (First Class), he ended the war with the romantic aura of a much-decorated pilot and war hero. Germans adored their Führer, but found in der dicke Hermann—“Fat Herman”—a figure of ebullient entertainment. Slender, ascetic Hitler ate only vegetables, abstained from smoking and drinking, and wore mainly plain gray jackets. Not Göring. In flamboyant uniforms of his own design and fingers bedizened with rings, the fat man ate, drank, and made riotously merry, living out loud. He loved food, wine, art collecting, and hunting. His country lodge, Carinhall, named after his beloved first wife, abounded with sculptures, paintings, and furniture. Endangered species roamed his grounds. He kept pet lions. Göring’s dandy image made him a persistent figure of ridicule. Germans mocked him and the foreign press painted him as an overweight buffoon. But Hermann Göring was a colossus in every way: a wily Machiavellian with an outsize IQ, skilled at combining charm, guile, and ruthlessness to get what he wanted—skills he employed to the end. Göring reluctantly relinquished leadership of the SA to Ernst Röhm, a brutal war veteran, while he recovered during a long, forced exile in Italy and Austria. To ease Göring’s persistent pain, doctors injected morphine; he became addicted to the opiate. His dependency became a lifelong plague causing or exaggerating many of his outlandish characteristics. The drug induced a sine wave of effects, from energetic euphoria to morose passivity, as well as weight gain, vanity and delusions, and extreme anxiety. During the first year of Nazi rule, Göring purged Communists, Jews, and dissidents and paved the way for a one-party state using manipulation, bribery, and hired thugs. He was now Reich Commissar for Aviation and head of Germany’s largest police force. He bound the nation’s industries to the Nazis through coercion. “I’ve always said that when it comes to the crunch he’s a man of steel—unscrupulous,” Hitler later said.In April, Göring set up the Forschungsamt, his personal spy agency, with Hitler’s consent. The operation bugged and tapped the phones of foreign leaders and businessmen, and almost every Nazi leader. In the regime’s power struggles, Göring always stayed a move ahead. Publicly, he created the dreaded Gestapo secret police. He also set up the first concentration camps—originally holding pens for Nazi Party foes— at Oranienburg and Papenburg in the German state of Prussia. Titles attached themselves to him: Speaker of the German Parliament, President of the Reichstag, Prime Minister of Prussia, President of the Prussian State Council, Reich Master of Forestry and Game (his hunting laws still exist), and

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commander of a clandestine air force. When Hitler declared that he would remain in the Berlin bunker to the end, Göring, who had already left for Bavaria, misinterpreted this as an abdication and requested that he be allowed to take over at once; he was ignominiously dismissed from all his posts, expelled from the Party and arrested. Shortly afterwards, on May 9, 1945, Göring was captured by forces of the American Seventh Army and, to his great surprise, put on trial at Nuremberg in 1946. During his trial Göring, who had slimmed in captivity and had been taken off drugs, defended himself with aggressive vigour and skill, frequently outwitting the prosecuting counsel. With Hitler dead, he stood out among the defendants as the dominating personality, dictating attitudes to other prisoners in the dock and adopting a pose of self-conscious heroism motivated by the belief that he would be immortalized as a German martyr. Nevertheless, Göring failed to convince the judges, who found him guilty on all four counts. Göring was sentenced to death by hanging on October 15, 1946. Two hours before his execution was due to take place, Göring committed suicide in his Nuremberg cell, taking a capsule of poison that he had succeeded in hiding from his guards during his captivity. Rudolf Hess (b. April 26, 1894—d. August 17, 1987) was a somewhat neurotic member of Hitler's inner circle best known for his surprise flight to Scotland on May 10, 1941 in which he intended to negotiate peace with the British, but which resulted in his capture and long-term imprisonment. In WWI, Hess was wounded twice, then later became an airplane pilot. After the war, Hess joined the Freikorps, a right-wing organization of ex-soldiers for hire, involved in violently putting down Communist uprisings in Germany. After hearing Adolf Hitler speak in a small Munich beer hall, Hess joined the Nazi Party, July 1, 1920, becoming the sixteenth member. After his first meeting with Hitler, Hess said he felt “as though overcome by a vision.” Hess was a shy, insecure man who displayed near religious devotion, fanatical loyalty and absolute blind obedience to Hitler. Although often rewarded by Hitler for his dogged loyalty, Hess was never given any major influence in matters of state due to his lack of understanding of the mechanics of power and his inability to take any action on his own initiative. He was totally and deliberately subservient to his Führer. One of his most visible tasks was to announce the Führer at mass meetings with bellowing, wide eyed fanaticism, as seen in tonight’s film. Over time, his limited power was further undermined by the political intrigue of the top Nazis around Hitler who were constantly scheming for personal power. Hess had only one desire, to serve the Führer, and thus lacked the will to engage in self-serving struggles for power and lost out primarily to his subordinate and eventual successor, Martin Bormann. As a result, Hitler gradually distanced himself from Hess. Hoping to regain importance and redeem himself in the eyes of his Führer, Hess put on a Luftwaffe uniform and flew a German fighter plane alone toward Scotland on a “peace” mission, May 10,

1941, just before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Hess intended to see the Duke of Hamilton, whom he had met briefly during the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Hess wanted to convince the British Government that Hitler only wanted Lebensraum for the German people and had no wish to destroy a fellow “Nordic” nation. He also knew of Hitler’s plans to attack the Soviet Union and wanted to prevent Germany from getting involved in a two-front war, fighting the Soviets to the east of Germany, and Britain and its allies in the west. But Hess also displayed signs of mental instability to his British captors and Churchill, realizing this, and somewhat infuriated by his statements, ordered Hess to be imprisoned for the duration and treated like any high ranking POW. Hess was declared insane by a bewildered Hitler, and effectively disowned by the Nazis. His flight ultimately caused Hitler and the Nazis huge embarrassment as they struggled to explain his actions. During his years of British imprisonment, Hess displayed increasingly unstable behavior and developed a paranoid obsession that his food was being poisoned. As the months passed, Hess tried twice to kill himself, by jumping over a staircase railing and by stabbing himself with a butter knife. His obsession with food was unrelenting. When the Swiss envoy visited in August 1943, Hess had lost 40 pounds. In November 1944, Hess petitioned the British for a “leave of absence” in Switzerland to restore his health. It was denied. In 1945, Hess was returned to Germany to stand trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. During his years of British imprisonment, Hess displayed increasingly unstable behavior and developed a paranoid obsession that his food was being poisoned. When Hess was transferred to Nuremberg in October 1945, he relinquished his food packets under protest and asked his doctor to make sure they were safe. Nonetheless all doctors declared Hess fit to stand trial. Most of the other Nuremberg defendants were sentenced to death, but Hess, convicted of two counts related to crimes against peace, was sentenced to life in prison. Hess spent 40 years complaining of the food and his health at Spandau Prison in western Berlin before he succeeded at what he’d tried twice before. At age 93, he hanged himself with an extension cord on August 17, 1987. The suicide has come under suspicion as rumors have surfaced that rather than taking his own life, the elderly Nazi was killed on British orders to preserve wartime secrets. Perhaps his complaints about the food weren’t so crazy after all. Reinhard Heydrich (b. March 7. 1904—d. June 4, 1942) was Heinrich Himmler’s chief lieutenant in the SS. He played a key role in organizing the Holocaust during the opening years of WWII. Heydrich’s father, who directed a musical conservatory and sang Wagnerian roles in the opera, exposed his son to the cult of Richard Wagner, and his mother was a stern disciplinarian; the family was falsely suspected of partial Jewish ancestry. Heydrich joined a Freikorps paramilitary unit in 1919 and entered the German navy in 1922. Commissioned as a naval officer, he was discharged in 1931 after a naval court found him guilty of misconduct (for refusing to marry a shipyard director’s daughter with whom he had had an affair). That same year he joined the SS. Soon after a chance introduction to Himmler, Heydrich was entrusted with the organization of the SD, the intelligence and surveillance arm of the SS. After Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Heydrich was appointed chief of the political department of the Munich police force, and he helped

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bring the political police forces throughout Germany under Himmler’s control. Heydrich rose rapidly through the ranks of the SD. Because Himmler was only four years older than Heydrich, Heydrich’s hopes for advancement could be realized only with his specialization. He was appointed SS chief for Berlin in 1934, and when Himmler became chief of all German police forces in 1936, Heydrich took charge of the SD, the criminal police, and the Gestapo. During Kristallnacht in November 1938, Heydrich ordered the arrest of thousands of Jews by the Gestapo and the SS and their imprisonment in concentration camps. In 1939 Heydrich became head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, which was in charge of all security and secret police in the Third Reich. Heydrich masterminded the fake “Polish” attack on the Gleiwitz radio transmitter that provided Hitler with a pretext for invading Poland on September 1, 1939. Soon afterward Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann began organizing the first deportations of Jews from Germany and Austria to ghettos in occupied Poland. On May 27, 1942, two Free Czech agents mortally wounded him with a bomb while he was riding in his car without an armed escort. He died June 4 in a Prague hospital. Gestapo officials retaliated for his death by executing hundreds of Czechs and wiping out the entire village of Lidice. Heinrich Himmler (b. October 7, 1900—d. May 23, 1945) was to become one of the most feared men in Nazi Germany and Europe once WWII broke out. As head of the SS, he had ultimate responsibility of internal security in Nazi Germany, as was seen in the Night of the Long Knives, and was associated with helping to organize the Final Solution though Reinhard Heydrich, as well as having major input into the organization of the Holocaust. He was old enough to serve in the German Army in 1918 and saw out the last days of WWI. After the war, he became a salesman for a fertilizer company. He joined the Nazi Party in 1923 and quickly developed a reputation for thoroughness and efficiency. In 1930, Himmler was elected to the Reichstag as Nazi deputy. He also spent his time expanding the SS so that by 1933, it had 52,000 men in it. Himmler also ensured that the SS remained free from interference by Röhm and the SA. Himmler created the Security Service lead by Heydrich whose original function was to be the ideological intelligence service to the Nazi Party. Himmler became convinced that Germany’s future rested in the stars and he was a keen astrologist and cosmologist. He also believed that the SS were the Twentieth Century’s Teutonic Knight. Many SS ceremonies were held at night in castles lit only by flaming torches. He recommended that SS officers had only leeks and mineral water for breakfast and he would only have 12 people at a time sitting around his table – as King Arthur had done. Himmler became very interested in the occult. He saw the SS as being a new type of people – soldiers, administrators, academics and leaders all rolled into one. The SS, in the mind of Himmler, were to be the new aristocracy of Germany. He was very keen on the creation of a master race and racial purity. The more power

he got after 1933, the more Himmler saw the opportunity to fulfill this belief. It was Himmler who supported the idea of unmarried women partnering SS men– he saw nothing wrong with single women having children as long as both mother and father were racially pure. In October 1939, he told the SS that women, single or married, should, out of patriotic duty, get themselves pregnant by soldiers who were about to go to war. The idea of racial purity and racial excellence came to dominate Himmler’s mind—as did hunting out traitors in Germany. Himmler oversaw Germany’s concentration camps (he had set up the first at Dachau in 1933) and eastern Europe’s death camps. His brilliance at organization had terrible consequences for the Jews. It was Himmler who made sure that the ‘cattle’ trains ran on time and that each camp was run on business lines so that they paid for themselves and made profits where possible. Ironically, for a man associated with the spilling of so much blood, Himmler himself would nearly faint at the sight of blood. In 2016, Himmler’s office diaries, lost for 71 years, were discovered lying in a Russian military archive. The sheer banality of the entries provides a chilling insight into the life of a doting father who started each day with a massage before heading off to organize the nitty-gritty of mass murder. The diaries also relate how close he was with his daughter, who at age 86 has remained loyal to her dad’s memory and is still closely involved in neo-Nazi groups that give support to ex-members of her father’s SS. In in May 1945, he was on the run, disguised in a shabby suit as the Russian Army reached Berlin. He was soon caught by a British patrol and identified himself to amazed officers. But he cheated the noose by biting on a cyanide capsule hidden in his tooth. Himmler fell down, kicked once or twice and was dead in seconds without uttering a word — as efficient and emotionless at his own end as he had been organizing the deaths of millions. Franz Hofer (b. November 27, 1902—d. February 18, 1975) was born to a Bad Hofgastein hotelkeeper, and in 1922 began a career as a freelance salesman. In September 1931, he joined the NSDAP. He very quickly rose in the Party, becoming District Leader in April 1932, and in July of the same year acting Gauleiter of the Tyrol. Only four months later, on November 27, 1932, he was promoted to Gauleiter of the Tyrol. For his activities in the Nazi Party, which was banned in Austria, Hofer was arrested in June 1933 and sentenced by a Tyrolean court to two years in prison. On August 30, 1933, four armed SA men broke into Hofer's prison cell and freed him. In September 1940 he was made the governor (Reichsstatthalter) of the Reichsgau of Tyrol-Vorarlberg. After Italy forsook the Axis Powers in 1943, Hofer was chosen to be the Supreme Commissar in the Operation Zone of the Alpine Foothills, consisting of the neighboring Italian provinces. In November 1944, Hofer suggested in a memorandum to Adolf Hitler that an “Alpenfestung” (Alpine Fortress) ought to be built up in the heart of the Alps as Nazi Germany's last bastion. Apparently Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann only brought this document to the Führer’s attention early the next year, leading to Hofer's being called to Hitler's Berlin bunker on April 12, 1945 to present his proposal. Hitler, 18 days before his suicide and still convinced that his victory was possible, approved Hofer's plan and appointed him Reich Defence Commissar of the Alpenfestung. On May 3, 1945 Hofer surrendered to American troops. On May 6, 1945, he was

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arrested by the United States Army in Hall in Tirol and held in an internment camp. In 1948, he managed to flee to Germany, where he continued his former trade as a salesman in Mülheim under his true name. In Austria, Hofer was sentenced in absentia in June 1949 to death. In July 1953, a Munich appeal court upheld a sentence of 3 years and 5 months in labour prison. When interviewed by the press during this time, Hofer made it known that his National Socialist convictions were unbroken. Hofer spent his later years in Mülheim an der Ruhr with his wife and seven children, continued his former trade as a salesman and died a natural death under his real name. Alfred Rosenberg (b. January 12, 1893—d. October 16, 1946) was one of the most influential Nazi intellectuals. studied architecture in Riga and Moscow before fleeing revolution-torn Russia in 1918 for Germany. Already a committed anti-Bolshevik and antisemite, he became heavily involved in the post-WWI ultra-nationalist scene in Munich. In early 1919 he became an early member of the Nazi Party's predecessor organization, the German Workers' Party. Gaining renown as the author of antisemitic tracts, his main claim (that he held to the very end) the equation of Jews with Bolshevism and communist revolution. Mostly his ideas were designed to provide legitimacy for the regime's antisemitic policies by proving the existence of a “Jewish conspiracy”. Rosenberg began writing for the Nazi newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, and he became the newspaper's senior editor in 1923. After Hitler's release following his arrest in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Rosenberg returned to journalism and began his chief work, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, published in 1930. Though never endorsed by Hitler as the authoritative expression of Nazi ideology, the book sold approximately one million copies by the late war years and boosted Rosenberg's standing as Party ideologue. Rosenberg was more than just a writer: in 1928 he founded and ran a crusading organization, the Fighting League for German Culture, dedicated to rooting out “degenerate” art, books, plays and other cultural products from the German public scene. During the war he headed up the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Task Force, which began by collecting Jewish artefacts for a projected museum for the study of what he hoped would soon be an extinct race, but quickly graduated to looting artworks, manuscripts and other treasures from Jews sent to the camps. According to the task force itself, bureaucratic in its precision, its loot filled 1,418,000 railway trucks. Despite its constant power struggles with the SS and other German agencies, Rosenberg's ministry played a key role in the evolution of the “Final Solution.” Rosenberg was arrested at the end of the war, tried at Nuremberg, and found guilty on all four counts. He was sentenced to death. Rosenberg was hanged on October 16, 1946. Julius Streicher (b. February 12, 1885—d. October 16, 1946) was a school teacher in Nurnberg and formed a party of his own, which he called the German Socialist Party. The chief policy of that party was antisemitism. In 1922 he handed over his party to Hitler, who wrote a glowing account of Streicher's generosity in Mein Kampf. The appointments which Streicher held in the Party

and state were few. From 1921 until 1945, he was a member of the Nazi Party. In 1925 he was appointed Gauleiter of Franconia, and he remained until about February 1940. From the time that the Nazi government came into power in 1933 until 1945 he was a member of the Reichstag. In addition to that, he held the title of Obergruppenfuehrer in the SA. The propaganda which Streicher carried out throughout those years was chiefly done through the medium of his newspapers. He was the editor and publisher of Der Stürmer from 1922 until 1933, and thereafter the publisher and owner of the paper. In 1933 he also founded and thereafter published a daily newspaper called the Fraenkische Tageszeitung. In addition, in later years he published several other papers, mostly local journals, from Nurnberg. Despite the “success” of his Stürmer and his strong personal association with

Hitler, who valued him as a protégé, Streicher was often viewed as volatile and mercurial by leading officials, however useful he proved as a purveyor of virulent and often prurient antisemitism to the German masses. In May 1945, Streicher was captured by US forces, and convicted on the charge of crimes against humanity. He

was hanged in Nuremberg, his former stronghold, on October 16, 1946. Baldur von Schirach (b. March 9, 1907—d. August 8, 1974) was one of the earliest members of the Nazi Party, he entered the party in 1924 while attending the University of Munich, where he briefly studied German folklore and art history, he was soon a member of its innermost circle, despite his youth. In 1929 von Schirach was put in charge of the National Socialist German Students League and two years later he was appointed Reich Youth Leader of the NSDAP, a post he held until 1940. In 1933 he organized the gigantic youth march in Potsdam, in which wave upon wave of youngsters greeted Hitler. Already before the Nazi seizure of power, von Schirach’s ceaseless propaganda, his idealism and organizational flair for mobilizing youth had succeeded in winning over hundreds of thousands of young Germans to Hitler’s cause. In May 1933 he was made Leader of the Youth of the German Reich at the age of twenty-six and in the next few years his cult seemed second only to that of Hitler himself. Von Schirach who fancied himself as a writer and poet, published two books which were best-sellers in 1932, Hitler wie ihn Keiner Kennt, with photographs by his father –in –law, Heinrich Hoffmann (Hitler’s official photographer) and Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will). Towards the outbreak of the Second World War, his position was being undermined by the intrigues of Martin Bormann and other enemies. Jokes about his effeminate behavior and his allegedly white bedroom furnished in a girlish manner, were legion and he was never quite able to live up to his own ideal type of the hard, tough quick Hitler youth. Later that year, he joined the army and volunteered for service in France, where he was awarded the Iron Cross before being recalled. Schirach lost control of the Hitler Youth to Artur Axmann, and was appointed Gauleiter of the Reichsgau Vienna, a post in which he remained until the end of the war. His unorthodox cultural policies in Austria soon aroused Hitler’s distrust, with promptings from Bormann, and after a visit to the

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Berghof in 1943, where he pleaded for a more moderate treatment of the eastern European peoples and criticized the conditions in which Jews were being deported, he lost all real influence. Nevertheless, he in a speech on September 15, 1942 he stated “removal” of Jews to the East would “contribute” to European culture.” The deportation of 65,000 Jews from Vienna to Poland during his tenure as Governor was a major indictment against von Schirach at the Nuremberg trials. The war crimes tribunal conceded that he did not originate the policy but had participated in the deportations from Vienna. During his trial, he underwent a change of heart, recognizing that he had misled German youth and contributed to poisoning a whole generation. He stated: “I put my morals to the side when, out of misplaced faith in the Führer, I took part in this action. I did it. I cannot undo it.” Von Schirach was sentenced on October 1, 1946 to twenty years imprisonment for crimes against humanity in which he served out in the company of Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer in Spandau prison. After his release on the September 30, 1966, von Schirach lived a secluded life in south-west Germany. He died in his sleep at a small hotel in Kroev an der Mosel on August 8, 1974.

From World Film Directors, Vol I. Editor John Wakeman. The H.W. Wilson Company, NY, 1987 RIEFENSTAHL, “LENI” (BERTA HELENE AMALIA RIEFENSTAHL) German director, scenarist, producer, actress, and photographer, was born in Berlin, the oldest daughter of Alfred Riefenstahl, owner of a plumbing engineering firm, and the former Berta Scherlach. She was a romantic and artistic child, drawn to painting and dancing and entranced by nature. She told an interviewer that she had read nothing but fairy tales until she was in her late teens. ”I didn't want to have anything to do with reality. We had a weekend house by a lake near Berlin, and I spent hours in the woods, watching trees, bushes animals, beetles, and butterflies. I turned them into human figures, like Walt Disney. I always looked for a fantasy image in nature.”

Leni Riefenstahl attended gymnasium in Berlin, and went on to art school at the urging of her father, who envisaged a career for her as a commercial artist. She herself wanted passionately to become a dancer and took classes in both

classical ballet and modern dance. In the end, when she was twenty-one, she persuaded her father to finance a solo dance recital on the understanding that she would relinquish her ambitions if the performance was a flop. It was, on the contrary, successful enough to attract the attention of the great director and impresario Max Reinhardt, who sent her on a tour of Europe in a program of modern dances of her own creation. Her brief career as a dancer was ended by a knee injury in 1924. It was during her convalescence that she happened to see a movie by Arnold Fanck, a geologist and climber who became famous for his “mountain films.” At a time when most German movies were shot entirely in the studio, Fanck trained a team of technicians who were also expert climbers and skiers, and made on location a series of documentaries, travelogues and fiction films. Magnificently photographed and celebrating the most dramatic and grandiose kinds of natural beauty, these films also an inflated spirit of heroic idealism that Siegfried Kracauer believed “was rooted in a mentality kindred to [the] Nazi spirit,” a point of view echoed by Susan Sontag in her study of Riefenstahl, the essay “Fascinating Fascism,” reprinted in Under the Sign of Saturn.

Excited by Fanck’s film, Leni Riefenstahl went to see him. She was promptly taken on as the only female member of his team, and taught to ski and to climb. It was from the same “professor” she says, that she learned the fundamentals of mise-en-scene.” I also found myself somewhat involved in the camera work and at times collaborated with the directorial crew.” She made her screen debut as the star of a movie that Fanck had written especially for her, Der Heilige Berg (The Holy Mountain, 1926), in which she plays a dancer turned climber who inspires a dangerous rivalry between two young mountaineers. The film was extremely successful and so was its star. “After all the sensuous vamps and hothouse beauties who for so long had reigned in the German cinema,” wrote one contemporary critic, “she was a breath of fresh air, the new Germany of athletes and freedom saw in her a symbol.”

Leni Riefenstahl starred again in Fanck’s routine comedy Der grosse Sprung (The Big Leap, 1927), and then as Maria Vetsera in Das Schicksalderer von Habsburg (The Fate of the Habsburgs, 1929), an Austrian film by a different director. Another spectacular and immensely successful mountain drama followed. Die Weisse Hölle von Piz Palü (The White Hell of Piz Palü, 1929). Directed by Fanck in collaboration with G.W. Pabst, it combined daring mountain events and the actually hair-raising aerial stunts of the aviator Ernst Udet. In her first talkie, Fanck’s Stürme uber dem Montblanc (Avalanche, 1930), Riefenstahl successfully survived both the transition to sound and the elemental furies of Mont Blanc to rescue the man she loved.

An agreeable skiing comedy, Der Weisse Rausch (White Frenzy, 1931), also for Franck confirmed Riefenstahl’s statue as one of Germany’s most popular movie star. And the same year she established her own production company, Leni Riefenstahl Studio Films. At that point she was recalled to make one more picture with Franck, who could find no other actress with the necessary stamina and skills. This was SOS Eisberg (SOS Iceberg), a German-American co-production shot on location in Iceland under the supervision of the explorer Knud Rasmussen who, according to the ballyhoo, housed his cast in Eskimo huts and fed them on seal meat).

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The first production of Leni Riefenstahl; Studios Films was Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light, 1932). Starring Riefenstahl, directed by her, and written by her with Béla Balazs, the Hungarian film theorist. Balazs also shared the role of producer with Riefenstahl and the movie’s cinematographer Hans Schneeberger, formerly a member of Franck’s team. Set in the Italian Dolomites, it was based on a folk tale about the mysterious blue light that suffuses the peak of Mount Cristallo at full moon, luring young climbers to their death. Only Junta (Riefenstahl) an innocent child of nature who lives alone in the high mountains, can reach the light and survive; the local villagers are sure that she is a witch. A young Viennese painter (Mathias Wieman) visiting the mountain is enthralled by Junta and follows her up Mount Cristallo, discovering that the source of the light is a grotto of precious crystals. He reveals this secret to the villagers, who greedily remove this treasure. Climbing again at the next full moon, but without the crystals to guide her, Junta falls to her death. Riefenstahl would have preferred to make the movie in the studio, but, short of funds, was obliged to shoot it on location and to persuade the Dolomite peasants to appear as themselves (thus anticipating the methods of neo-realism by twenty years). The harshness of the mountain landscapes, and the almost equally strong and weather-worn faces of the peasants provide a powerful contrast to the romanticism of the fairy story, with its lament for a world that prefers hard cash to the pure and mysterious light of crystals. Jonathan Rosenbaum found a strong parallel between Leni Riefenstahl’s vision in this film (and others) and Walt Disney’s, citing “the intense pantheism and towering vistas of the film’s landscape shots, the poetic innocence and purity of the heroine, the telepathy and empathy shown by animals….towards her moods,” as well as `a general “predilection for primal myths of unity and perfection.” Moderately successful in Germany, the film received a silver medal at Vienna in 1932 and was a hit in Paris and London. Leni Riefenstahl said farewell to the “mountain film,” in an illustrated autobiography called Kampf in Schnee und Eis (Struggle in Snow and Ice, 1933). Adolf Hitler himself greatly admired Das blaue Licht, and in 1933, at his direct invitation, Leni Riefenstahl shot a documentary about his Nazi party’s annual rally at Nuremberg. Sieg des Glaubens (Victory of Faith) as it was called, was withdrawn after Hitler’s purge of the party leadership in 1934. An enormous edifice of statements and counterstatements , charges and denials, now obscures the facts about Riefenstahl’s relationship with Hitler and the Nazis. She is said to have thought Hitler “faultless” and “the greatest man who ever lived”; he reportedly described her as “a perfect example of German womanhood” and an artistic genius. Many photographs exist of them together and her enemies Maintain that she was the dictator’s mistress, a charge that she emphatically denies. “In the early days,” she says, “like millions of people, I believed in Hitler and had been impressed by him. But it is absolutely false to say that we were intimate friends.” Goebbels was bitterly jealous of her success and influence with

Hitler, and he and his propaganda ministry did all they dared to disparage and obstruct her—among other things spreading the rumor that she was half Jewish (a claim she also denied). There is no doubt, at any rate, that Hitler assigned Riefenstahl to film the Nazi rallies in Nuremberg in 1934, and that she performed this task with disturbing brilliance in a film released in 1935 as Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will).

Speaking if this work, she told a Guardian reporter in 1976 that “It is always

said that I worked for the Nazism that the Nazis helped me. But I was not in the Party And they made only difficulties for me….The Party did not pay for the film. I hired my own cameras. I had my own contract, my own company and I arranged the distribution. It was hard work, it was horrible. For six days I just filmed everything that happened. But it did not seem a sinister event to me. Remember this was long before the war; all the diplomats were coming to Nuremberg . Many were saying that it was a good thing that Germany had such a leader. All the horror came later.” (Riefenstahl’s account is described as self-serving in Sontag’s essay.) It is true that Triumph of the Will was released by Riefenstahl’s own Studio Film Company and financed by UFA, but it is also clear that it was made with the full support of Hitler, if not of all of his colleagues. In her book Hinter den Kulissen das Reichsparteittag Films (Behind the Scenes of the National Party Congress Films) Riefenstahl herself asserts that the ecstatic parades, involving hundreds of thousands of carefully drilled participants were stagemanaged for the benefit of her cameras—that “the preparations for the Party Convention were made in concert with the preparations for the camerawork.” She and her director of photography (Sepp Algeier) had thirty cameras with the latest wide-angle lenses and telescopic lenses, and a total staff of a hundred and twenty. Special camera lifts were built for her in Nuremberg. John Russell Taylor suggests that Triumph of the Will can be seen “both as a documentary and as a mythic fantasy. Documentary it certainly is…[but] everything is selected and manipulated to a larger mystical end. The very opening of the film…a factual account of Hitler’s arrival in Nuremberg by air, becomes also an evocation of a god’s descent to earth—from the endless vistas of clouds, seen from the god’s- eye viewpoint of the place, we pass to the plane’s shadow moving majestically , inexorably over the summer city as those in the city gaze up in rapturous expectation….The rest of the film adopts the same approach. Constantly we lose all sense of perspective, are cut off from the basic realities by alternations of extreme long shot and gigantic close-up….The torchlit celebrations are turned into abstract patterns of sight and sound.” The film shows a mastery of editing, Taylor thought, that is comparable to Eisenstein’s, transcending its political context and compelling “one to judge it absolutely as a film.” Many have disagreed , including Siegfried Kracauer, who attributed “deep feeling of uneasiness” to the fact “that before our eyes palpable life becomes an apparition….The film represents an inextricable mixture of a show simulating German

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reality and of German reality maneuvered into a show.” Paul Rotha wrote that the powerful film “reeked” of National Socialism and “unqualified idolatry for Hitler and all Nazism stood for.” In Sight and Sound Brian Winston argued against the idea that the visual power of Triumph of the Will derives primarily from Riefenstahl’s aesthetic vision. He wrote: “Given our taste for the spectacle of dehumanized mass (that part of fascist aesthetics which we all share) shots of 200,000 men in close formation become impressive not through the fact of filming, but because of the formation itself. Riefenstahl is as impressive as the next filmmaker when she has that sort of spectacle to work with….” It is universally regarded as a propaganda masterpiece, however distasteful. It received the German state prize in 1935 and the gold medal at Venice in 1936, among other awards. Albert Speer, principal architect of the 1934 rally, wrote of Leni Riefenstahl: “The Nazis were by tradition anti-feminist and could hardly brook this self-assured woman, the more so since she knew how to bend this men’s world to her purposes….But the…party rally film….convinced even the doubters of her skill.” Triumph of the Will had celebrated the Nazi party but not the German army and, to mollify the high command, Leni Riefenstahl next made a short documentary about the Wehrmacht called Tag der Freiheit (Day of Freedom, 1935). This was followed by the most ambitious of her films, Olympische Spiele (Olympia/Olympiad), a two-part record of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, shot by a team of forty-five cameramen. Part I Fest der Völker (Festival of the Nations) begins with a lyrical evocation of classical Greece and a reconstruction of the ancient beginnings of the Games. It follows the Olympic flame to Berlin for the opening parade presided over by Hitler before covering some of the contests themselves. The rest of the events are recorded in Part II, Fest der Schönheit (Festival of Beauty ) which begins with sequences in the Olympic village-loving studies of muscular bodies in the steam of Turkish baths, or plunging at dawn into misty woodland pools. Later there is a long montage of midair shots of high divers “falling out of the sun” that comes close to total abstraction. For the filming of Olympia, Riefenstahl mounted cameras on steel towers, lifted them on ballons, sunk them in trenches, floated them on rafts. The famous diving sequence includes shots taken underwater by a cameraman specially trained as a diver, and the director also makes brilliant use of slow-motion photography, a technique she learned from Fanck. By the time the Games were over, Leni Riefenstahl had some two hundred hours of film in the can and faced the monumental task of reducing this to four hours, with various versions in several different languages. The editing occupied her for nearly two years and was, if anything, an even greater achievement than the filming itself. (Riefenstahl’s enemies have suggested that it was not she but the master editor Walter Ruttmann who was

mainly responsible for this, but there seems to be no evidence that he was more than her assistant and adviser.) Olympia was released in April 1938, in time for the festivities in honor of Hitler’s forty-ninth birthday, and was accepted by the Olympic Committee as the official film of the

1936 Games. As a paean of praise to physical strength and beauty (and to Hitler and his entourage), it has seemed to some critics tainted by the same anti-intellectual and pagan spirit that disfigured Triumph of the Will—just as “outspokenly fascistic in spirit.” On the other hand, though Goebbels had reportedly ordered Riefenstahl to play down the embarrassing successes of “non-Aryan” athletes, she completely ignored him, giving special prominence to the achievements of the black American track star Jesse Owens. “The individual spectator must make up his own mind on the

political implications of the film,” wrote David Stewart Hull, “but it is hard to deny that Olympia, examined purely as film, is one of the most beautiful and exciting works the medium has produced.” For John Russell Taylor, it remains “a masterpiece undimmed by time, one of the cinema’s supreme celebrations of the mystery, beauty, and grandeur of the human body.” And Arlene Croce, in an essay on dance in film in Richard Roud’s Cinema, wrote that “although it is not a dance film, it is unsurpassed as a study of physical motion….Accompanied by a fine musical score composed by Herbert Windt, Olympia transcends its obligations as a documentary….The editing is so lyrical and so exactly times to the differently charged proportions of regular or slowed motion that we are often displaced before we know it from one plane to the other, from stadium to theatre.” Mussolini’s Italy gave the movie the gold medal at Venice in 1938. Ten years later the International Olympic Committee awarded Leni Riefenstahl a gold medal and a diploma, and in 1955 a Hollywood jury voted Olympia one of the ten finest motion pictures of all time. In the winter of 1938, Riefenstahl went to the United States to promote Olympia but was cold-shouldered by Hollywood (except by Walt Disney, who invited her to his studios). Returning to Germany, she resumed work on an earlier project—an adaptation of Kleist’s drama Penthesilia—but had to abandon this when World War II began. To her subsequent regret, she served briefly as a war correspondent, following the advancing German army into Poland with a camera team. In 1940, refusing Goebbels’ invitation to make propaganda films, she went back to work on another long-planned movie of her own, a non-musical version of Eugen d’Albert’s opera Tiefland. Starring the director herself as a poor girl ensnared by a powerful lowlander but rescued by a highland shepherd, Tiefland (Lowlands) is a characteristic affirmation of faith in “simple people living close to nature.” The opening scenes show the heroine dancing with a troupe of gypsies—real gypsies, whom Riefenstahl recruited from a concentration camp. By her account, neither she nor they realized that those extras were destined for Auschwitz. There were constant interruptions during the filming, but the movie was apparently completed in 1944 at the

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Barrandov Studios in Prague, though it was not released until ten years later. Riefenstahl’s 1944 marriage to Peter Jacob, an army major, ended in divorce two years later. At the end of the war she was imprisoned for a total of more than three years, first by the American army and then by the French authorities. The latter confiscated her films and equipment, and she also lost her houses in Kitzbühel (Austria), Berlin, and Munich. Released, she continued her battle to clear herself of her reputation as a devoted supporter of the Nazis. The most damning piece of evidence against her was a photograph, published in 1951 or 12952 in a German illustrated weekly. It showed her watching the massacre of civilians by German troops in the Polish village of Konsky in September 1939. In 1952, at her own request, an inquiry was held in a West Berlin denazification court. According to her own account, she had followed the German army into Konsky on her first day as a war correspondent. She had chanced upon the massacre and had tried to end it at some risk to herself, subsequently protesting to the German commander and withdrawing from all war-oriented filmmaking. Witnesses supported what she said, and the court decided that she had engaged in “no political action in support of the Nazi regime which would warrant punishment.” In 1953 Leni Riefenstahl’s equipment and films were returned to her and the following year Tiefland was released with some success in Germany and Austria. Various other projects (including a collaboration with Jean Cocteau) came to nothing, and in 1956 Riefenstahl went to Africa to make Schwartze Fracht (Black Cargo), a semi-documentary about the modern slave trade. Various complications (including a serious car accident) aborted this film also. However, she had fallen in love with Africa and with “native people as yet untouched by the destructive hand of civilization.” In 1962 she went to the southern Sudan to film and photograph the Nuba, a group of mountain tribes whose people are of great physical beauty. She learned their language, lived among them, and returned repeatedly to record their daily lives, their ceremonies, and their athletic contests. A volume of her magnificent photographs was published in 1973 (English version in 1974), but her long-promised film about the Nuba has still not appeared. She has also undertaken photographic commissions for various newspapers and magazines (including coverage of the 1972 Olympics in Munich) and at seventy-one lied about her age and took a diving course, mastering underwater photography to produce, among other things, the pictures collected in Coral Gardens (1980). Formally cleared by the denazification courts, Leni Riefenstahl has continued to encounter controversy and hostility and is said to have fought over fifty court cases since World War II. In 1960, an invitation to lecture at the National Film Theatre in London was cancelled after protests. In 1974 she was honored at the Telluride film festival in Colorado, but the event was marked by protests and demonstrations by Jewish organizations. John Russell Taylor has suggested that anti-female prejudice may have contributed to all this, since “the directors of far more politically objectionable Nazi films, like Veit Harlan, maker of the notorious Jew Süss were happily reinstated and went back to work” while “she suffered continuing boycotts and protests, as a sort of solitary scapegoat for the cinematic sins of Nazi Germany.”

Suzanna Lowry, who interviewed Leni Riefenstahl for the Guardian, wrote that, at seventy-four, she was still “spörtlich, freckled and even a little sinewy from her ceaseless photographic adventures—ranging the world and returning to labour away in her own cutting room in Schwabing, Munich’s trendy-elegant quarter.” In the same interview, speaking of The Blue Light, Riefenstahl said that, for her, the film symbolized her life;” Junta, the heroine , is a girl with a very wild nature; she is very poor but very happy. The people of the valley where she lives hate her and think she is a witch.”

JUDGMENTS OF Triumph of the Will “blood-chilling” Frank Capra “cinematically dazzling and ideologically vicious” Richard Barsam “The historic event served as the set of a film which was then to assume the character of an authentic documentary.” Susan Sontag “The film is purely historical. I state precisely; it is film-verité. It reflects the truth that was then, in 1934, history. It is therefore a documentary. Not a propaganda film. Oh! I know very well what propaganda is. That consists of recreating certain events in order to illustrate a thesis or, in the face of certain events, to let one thing go in order to accentuate another.” Leni Riefenstahl “Triumph of the Will, like the antisemitic films produced in Germany in 1941 (Jew Suss, Der Ewige Jude) to encourage the Nazis to perpetrate the Final Solution with zeal and efficacy, is an indispensable part of the Third Reich.” “An outstanding mirror to the monstrosity of Nazi Germany. In its arresting visual power Triumph of the Will is a cinematic document of one of the most compelling subjects of our time, and yet, by its very essence, it is a demonstration of extreme falsehood in the service of extreme evil.” Ilan Avisar “Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens is one of the greatest achievements, perhaps the most brilliant of all in the history of film propaganda. It is a magnificently controlled work of art, and, at the same time, a documentary on an event captured in all of its immediacy.” Leif Furhammar & Folke Isaksson

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“Triumph of the Will is a failed propaganda film. Although Hitler liked the film, in Nazi Germany it was not successful with the general public and was not used very widely as propaganda.” Ilan Avisar “A sympathetic documentary of a propaganda event.” Richard Corliss

from “Editing Reality” Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian. Visual Sociology, 9 (1), pp.62-74. 1994. [bj] The reel thing Documentary films are created in an inverted funnel of declining possibility. The filmmaker begins with the materials and subjects of the world, which are infinite in scope. From that infinitude one selects a subject, then an approach. These decisions are in part predicated on practical concerns: the amount of money determines the size of the crew, the amount of footage that can be purchased, shot, and processed, the number of location and editing days, the sophistication of the sound mix. Thousands of microdecisions are made for aesthetic reasons, technical reasons, weather reasons, background noise reasons, time-to-go-to-dinner-now reasons, access and permission reasons, sore back and feet reasons. Every decision forecloses others and the possibilities become ever narrower. In films based on real-time events, filmmakers are limited by the arrow of time: they return from the field with a fixed amount of data, a fixed world of possibility: so many feet of exposed film and audiotape. (They can go back and do pickups, but it’s never the same, and that just changes the moment at which the world of possibility is fixed, not the fact or limitation of it.). They may manipulate those images and sounds, but they will have no other images to do things with.... The real thing The key fact missed most often by social scientists utilizing documentary films for data, is this: documentary films are not found or reported things; they’re made things. They differ from fiction films in that they bring with them questions of accuracy linked to an external reality....We need to remember that documentaries don’t document just an event; they also document the perception of an event, and that perception is enacted in the film itself. That double documentary aspect is what permits

multiple documentaries to be made about the same event or person and for each to have validity and utility. Right and wrong exist somewhere else..... The only reality of a film is the reality of the film you see. The reality you see depends on some measure on who you are and what you know, on what codes you can read. The reality the film is about is in another plane entirely. This is as true for the most complex documentary as the simplest and most direct news footage. [dc] History and Film Problematical questions about historical accuracy and influence arise for Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Some critics charge that the 1934 Nüremberg Nazi Party rally was staged for the cameras’ documentation, making it a propaganda film not a documentary. Hitler, newly proclaimed Führer, personally commissioned Riefenstahl to make a record of the gigantic display of party power at his sixth party rally. He wanted the film to give him rallies forever. The question of whether reality creates the picture or the picture creates the reality is a complicated one—an issue TV news producers face regularly. Some analysts go so far as to say that to point the camera is to create the action filmed.... Riefenstahl asserts that her film was historical and her editing authentic and artistic....Where is the boundary between shaping a story and plugging a platform? The reason we want to dismiss Triumph of the Will as propaganda is because we want to discredit its content, its celebration of Nazism. Filmmakers used her footage and her techniques to fight Nazism, in fact. Frank Capra made the Why We Fight series at Roosevelt’s personal request; the President sought the successful Hollywood filmmaker to galvanize American passion to fight Hitler. Capra used grim narration over Riefenstahl’s footage to argue military obsession and menace. Charlie Chaplin also used and mocked her Hitler footage to incite ridicule of Hitler in The Great Dictator. Barsam describes Triumph of the Will as “cinematically dazzling and ideologically vicious”. But ideological viciousness is not obvious in Triumph of the Will. It is implicitly present only after the next ten years of history. In 1934, Churchill and Roosevelt were also praising Hitler as the new savior of Germany. Riefenstahl, a brilliant, ambitious young director and actress, didn’t want to make the documentary. She wanted to make an epic romance called Tiefland (Heartland) with dancing and drama; she wanted to play a Gypsy dancer and have poor peasants rebel against oppressive landlords. Riefenstahl declined Hitler’s first invitation to film the rally. But he persisted, asking her to give six days of her life to Germany. She said she was completely unfamiliar with all the subject matter, that she couldn’t tell the SA from the SS. Hitler responded that individuals didn’t matter, what mattered was the transcendent epic of the party, their people, their Führer. (Riefenstahl, 1992:158) He said “It is not important who is in the film. It is important that the film has the atmosphere.” She said it would interfere with her projects, taking perhaps a year to edit. Hitler asked her to do it as a personal favor and he guaranteed her artistic control. She had eighteen cameramen and eighteen camera assistants under the direction of Sepp Allgeier, the best talent, full control. Riefenstahl plaintively asked many times

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afterward, “Tell me one person who would not make this film under these conditions?” Yet her career and life were ruined by her genius in Triumph of the Will, by her naive confidence that art transcended reality. She became a documentary filmmaker by accident and opportunism, not by desire. Her passion and romantic escapism would have been more safely expressed in fiction rather than history. Her film is a peerless documentary of the myth of Nazism. Like Abel Gance’s Napoléon, which she admired and imitated in camera movement, the film omits negative elements and ambiguities and celebrates the glory of a hero and his noble military ideal and discipline. The reason we want to call Triumph of the Will propaganda is because its message is nationalism and militarism and idolatry and we are slow to unmask that message. Our own political conventions climax in scenes that echo Triumph of the Will, with flag waving, adulation and hysteria. Candidates piously pledge allegiance and promise warlike vigor. They are celebrated as saviors of the nation. Nationalism and militarism are touchstones of political viability. While we critique Riefenstahl’s halo lighting of Hitler, the adoring up-gazing camera angles and the inflammatory chauvinism, we might well reflect that our political staging and image-making use exactly the same techniques. Triumph of the Will has a terrific energy: flags flutter, soldiers and farmers salute, women and children wave and gaze and thrill to marching male energy. Riefenstahl edited the film to move, to be moving, unlike static newsreels. The film expresses her love and pride and hope for her history. It is palpable. We don’t see a dark side of nationalism and militarism and Nazism. The anti-Semitism is missing, the speeches are cut and mask the will to world domination. (The holocaust horror was probably as unthinkable to Riefenstahl as it was to Freud five years later, to Chaplin in 1940, to many today.) Instead Riefenstahl’s vision is relentlessly romantic. Germans were still forbidden in 1934 to arm the military, so the endless marching men she filmed and then directed the orchestral music to match did not even carry guns. She filmed an innocent army, organized energy and discipline and sacrifice without weapons. The talk of blood and sacrifice, the Blood Flag Hitler ritually touched to the flags of Germany, only foreshadowed the real blood that now informs our reading of this passionate nationalism, military energy and unswerving dedication to a leader who is the nation who is the people who is or becomes under such deification mad. But Hitler was more than a demon; he was a seductive drama, celebrated as a savior in Riefenstahl’s film and embraced by civilized nations—a social phenomenon. Whatever one says about the construction of documentary—about the inevitable presumptions, focusing or omissions—it is the social element, the real others, that constitute the core of documentary truth. Riefenstahl’s work stands as an early, eerie and enduring documentary of one of the most disturbing social phenomena in history.

Alan Riding, Leni Riefenstahl, Filmmaker and Nazi Propagandist, Dies at 101 NY Times September 9, 2003 Leni Riefenstahl, the German filmmaker whose daringly innovative documentaries about a Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934 and the Berlin Olympics of 1936 earned her both acclaim as a cinematic genius and contempt as a propagandist for Hitler, died Monday night at her home in Pöcking, south of Munich. She was 101. After the defeat of Germany in 1945, she was pronounced a Nazi sympathizer by the Allies and never again found work as a movie director. But her revolutionary film techniques deeply influenced later generations of documentary makers and television commercial makers, keeping alive the debate over whether her talent could be separated from her prewar political views. For many students of her life and legacy, Ms.

Riefenstahl was both propagandist and genius. A popular dancer and actress before becoming a movie director in 1932, she enthusiastically put her talent at the service of the Nazis. Yet, without her exceptional artistic vision, her two most famous documentaries, "Triumph of the Will" and the two-part "Olympia," would neither have caused a sensation at the time nor be considered classics today.

Ms. Riefenstahl never denied her early conviction that Hitler could "save" Germany. She also said that her idealized image of him fell apart "far too late," near the end of World War II. But, amid widespread skepticism, she insisted that she was never a Nazi and

that "Triumph of the Will" and "Olympia" were apolitical, inspired only by her desire to create works of art. Still, while her documentaries continue to be studied in some film schools, Ms. Riefenstahl remained trapped in the shadow of her association with Hitler. Her repeated attempts to find financing for a new film always ended in failure, while public screenings of her movies and exhibitions of her photographs invariably prompted protests. As recently as last year, she was briefly investigated in Germany for purported race-hatred crimes. She nonetheless worked hard to shed her image as the Nazi regime's most persuasive propagandist. After the war, she spent 20 years in relative isolation, living in her mother's apartment in Munich. Then, in the late 1960's, perhaps out of frustration, she reinvented herself as a photographer and, within a decade, she had made her name in a new visual art form. A tiny woman of great physical courage and fierce determination, she next took up scuba diving, claiming to be only 51 — when she was actually 20 years older — in order to obtain a diving license. Two collections of her underwater photographs, "Coral Gardens" and "Wonders Under Water," were published in the United States and she continued diving in the Maldives until she was in her late 90's. Last year, to coincide with her 100th birthday, she released her first movie in almost half a century, a 45-minute documentary of marine life called "Impressions Under Water."

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But it was her photography that stirred most controversy. Inspired by George Rodger's famous image of a muscular Nuba wrestler carried on the shoulders of another fighter, she made several trips to southern Sudan to photograph the Nuba. She worked alone at first, then later with Horst Kettner, 42 years her junior, who became her companion and lived with her until her death. (In March 2000, while making a return visit to the Nuba, the 97-year-old Ms. Riefenstahl was severely injured in a helicopter accident in Sudan. She was flown back to a hospital in Munich.) Her first Sudan book, "Last of the Nuba," published in the United States in 1974, won her recognition as a photographer and to some extent rehabilitated her as an artist. But while even in Germany it became acceptable to praise Ms. Riefenstahl as the most important female movie director ever, both her role in celebrating the Third Reich and what the critic Susan Sontag described as the "fascist esthetics" of her work also came under new scrutiny. Writing in The New York Review of Books in 1975, Ms. Sontag said there was a common "esthetic" running through what she called Ms. Riefenstahl's "triptych of fascist visuals" — her early work as an actress in Arnold Fanck's "mountain films," her two principal documentaries and her photographs of the Nuba. "The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets," Ms. Sontag wrote. "Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, `virile' posing." In the early 1990's, when Ms. Riefenstahl was more than 90, she once again found herself at the center of heated debate when she was the subject of a three-hour documentary, "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl," by the German filmmaker Ray Müller. Coincidentally, she also published her own 669-page autobiography, "Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir." In the book, she was able to give her version of her life. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, John Simon said the memoir did not contain "a single unspellbinding page." He raised the question about the veracity of her accounts of everything from her private meetings with Hitler to her life with the Nuba. But he concluded, "The book must, in the main, be true; it is far too weird for fiction." In the documentary, while Mr. Müller allowed her to talk at fascinating length about her filmmaking techniques, he also questioned her memory, notably her claim to have had few dealings with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister. At the end of the documentary, Mr. Müller also tried to provoke her into admitting guilt for her past. "What do you mean by that?" she asked, clearly surprised. "Where is my guilt? I can regret. I can regret that I

made the party film, `Triumph of the Will,' in 1934. But I cannot regret that I lived in that time. No anti-Semitic word has ever crossed my lips. I was never anti-Semitic. I did not join the party. So where then is my guilt? You tell me. I have thrown no atomic bombs. I have never betrayed anyone. What am I guilty of?" It was evidently a well-rehearsed response. In an interview with The New York Times last year, she said: "I didn't do any harm to anyone. What have I ever done? I never intended any harm to anyone." Certainly, in her final years, she never shied from the limelight. In 1997, when a Hamburg gallery held the first exhibition of her work in postwar Germany, Ms. Riefenstahl agreed to be interviewed by major German news weeklies, even though she knew much of the questioning would be hostile. That same year, ignoring protests, she traveled to Los Angeles to receive a lifetime achievement award from Cinecon, a group that restores old movies. In 2001 she visited St. Petersburg, where her films were shown in a documentary festival. Whether out of vanity or naïveté, Ms. Riefenstahl may well have believed that her artistic independence was never compromised, that she did not "sell" her talents to the Nazis who financed "Triumph of the Will" and "Olympia." Yet, shaped by

the profound romanticism of 19th-century German culture, her monumental vision of beauty fitted perfectly into the National Socialist ideology. Born into a comfortable Berlin home on Aug. 22, 1902, Helene Berta Amalie Riefenstahl grew up loving nature and the outdoor life. Her mother encouraged her artistic flair, and although her father, a businessman, was opposed to her

working on the stage, she began dancing in an Isadora Duncan-like free style at the age of 16 and soon found work — and considerable recognition — in Berlin theaters. In 1924, her life changed direction. Recovering from an injury at 22, Ms. Riefenstahl was profoundly affected by seeing Fanck's movie, "Mountain of Destiny," and promptly sought out the director. Entranced by the striking young dancer, Fanck cast her in his next seven mountain films, among them "The Holy Mountain," "The White Hell of Piz Palu" and "S O S Iceberg." These films gave her the image of a romantic heroine in the Wagnerian cast, in harmony with nature and bent on fighting evil. Her often dangerous roles — she climbed rock faces barefoot and was once almost swept away by an avalanche provoked by Fanck — also showed her to be fearless. In 1932, she directed her first movie, "The Blue Light," another mountain film, in which she appeared as a warm-hearted peasant girl. (The names of her Jewish co-writer, Bela Balázs, and the film's Jewish producer, Harry Sokal, were removed from the credits when "The Blue Light" was reissued in 1938.) It was also around this time, a year before Hitler's rise to power, that she first heard the Nazi leader speak at a rally. "I

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heard his voice: `Fellow Germans'," she recalled in her autobiography. "That very same instant I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the earth's surface were spreading out before 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. I felt paralyzed." She subsequently wrote to Hitler, noting that "I must confess that I was so impressed by you and by the enthusiasm of the spectators that I would like to meet you personally." Her popularity as an actress made the request seem reasonable; Hitler's appreciation of her role in "The Blue Light" made the encounter possible. In the years that followed, she met frequently with the Nazi leader. She always stridently denied that they were lovers although, recalling one meeting, she later wrote, "That evening I felt that Hitler desired me as a woman." At their first meeting in 1932, though, she said she was most struck by his informality and she quoted him as telling her, "Once we come to power, you must make my films." In her autobiography, she said she told him that she could not make films on commission. Yet, the next year, with Hitler now Chancellor, she made "Victory of the Faith," a documentary about a Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg. She was not happy with the film and the following year she tried again, this time with ample time, money and equipment. The result was "Triumph of the Will." The film, which took almost two years to edit from 250 miles of raw footage, included such innovative techniques as moving cameras, including one on a tiny elevator attached to a flagpole behind the speaker's podium that provided sweeping panoramic views; the use of telephoto lenses to create a foreshortening effect (for example, when filming a parade of Nazi flags); frequent close-ups of wide-eyed party faithful, and heroic poses of Hitler shot from well below eye-level. The film also used "real sound" but was not accompanied by a commentary. The film won Ms. Riefenstahl assorted German prizes and, although she again pledged to make no more party films, she then made an 18-minute documentary, "Day of Freedom: Our Army," about the Wehrmacht in 1935. Soon afterward, she was commissioned by the German Olympic Committee to record the 1936 Berlin Olympics. To the end of her life she insisted that "Olympia" was not an official film, but ample evidence exists to suggest it was indirectly financed by Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry. Still, she made extraordinary use of the 170-member team of cameramen and technicians that she assembled. To evoke the early Greek Olympics in the first part of the documentary, "Festival of the Nations," she filmed near-naked athletes in assorted heroic poses. During the training period, she also filmed close-ups of oarsmen, marathon runners and

swimmers that she edited into the final version. When the games began, she had to cover 136 events because, she recalled, "we never knew when a world record would be broken." And, once again, both her filming and editing techniques broke new ground. To capture the drama of the pole vault and long-jump events, she had holes dug beside the sandpit where the athletes landed. In the high-diving event, which dominated the second part of the film, "Festival of Beauty," she used four cameras, including one underwater, to capture the movement of divers from all angles. Then, in the editing room, she turned the divers

into graceful birds. "Olympia" was not blatantly propagandistic. Notably, it showed Jesse Owens' moments of victory, while Hitler was seen for only 15 seconds on the single occasion he visited the Olympic stadium. Although the film was widely praised, its reception in 1938 was muted by Europe's gradual slide toward war. She was also met with hostility when she took the film to the United States in November 1938. When Germany invaded

Poland in September 1939, Ms. Riefenstahl went to the front as a war correspondent, but she claimed that she soon left in disgust at Wehrmacht brutalities. Yet the next year, when Germany occupied France, she sent a telegram to Hitler congratulating him on seizing Paris. "Everyone thought the war was over," she later explained, "and in that spirit I sent the cable to Hitler." During the war, she continued to see Hitler sporadically but turned her attention back to filmmaking. Several projects fell through, but in 1944 she was able to complete filming of "Tiefland," or "Lowlands," an adaptation of the Eugene d'Albert operetta in which she also played the role of a Spanish Gypsy dancer. The film was shot in the Tyrol, and its extras included Gypsies interned in a nearby concentration camp. After the war, Ms. Riefenstahl insisted she had not known that the Gypsies were being detained before their deportation to Nazi death camps. However, when in April 2002 she repeated the claim that none of the Gypsies had died, a German Gypsy Association, Rom, started legal action against her, arguing that at least half the extras were later killed. On her 100th birthday, the Frankfurt prosecutor's office opened an investigation into charges that she had denied the Holocaust, but the case was dropped two months later for lack of evidence and because of her advanced age. Ms. Riefenstahl said she saw Hitler for the last time in March 1944 when she visited him in Kitzbuhel, Austria, to introduce her new husband, an army officer called Peter Jacob. She later wrote that Hitler had aged considerably and his hands trembled, but "he still cast the same magical spell as before." Ms. Riefenstahl's only marriage lasted little longer than her numerous passionate affairs during her time as an actress and filmmaker. At the end of the war, she was detained for almost four years for "de-Nazification," first by the American authorities and then by French forces. She was found to be a Nazi

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"sympathizer," but she was not banned from working and was finally able to release "Tiefland" in 1954. But her movie career

was over.

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2017 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XXXV

September 19: Luchino Visconti Rocco and His Brothers 1960 September 26: Jacques Demy The Umbrellas of Cherbourg 1964

October 3: Robert Altman M*A*S*H 1970 October 10 Alan J. Pakula All The President’s Men 1976

October 17: Andrei Tarkovsky Nostalghia 1983 October 24: Wim Wenders Wings of Desire 1987

October 31: Mike Nichols Postcards from the Edge 1990 November 7: Tran Anh Hung The Scent of Green Papayas 1993

November 14: Hayeo Miyazaki The Wind Rises 2013 November 21: Andrey Zvyagintsev Leviathan 2014

November 28: Pedro Almodóvar Julieta 2016 December 5: Billy Wilder Some Like it Hot 1959

CONTACTS:...email Diane Christian: engdc@buffalo.edu…email Bruce Jackson bjackson@buffalo.edu...for the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com...to subscribe to the weekly email informational

notes, send an email to addto list@buffalofilmseminars.com....for cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/ The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Dipson Amherst

Theatre, with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News.

Leni Riefenstahl in Olympia