By: James Aitchison

She was arguably one of the most innovative film directors and editors in the history of cinema.  Her creative black-and-white images continue to inspire film and commercial makers to this day.  But in 1930s Germany, she was Adolf Hitler’s golden girl, his ideal of Aryan womanhood.  And she made the world’s most technically advanced propaganda films for the Nazis.

Helene Bertha Amalie “Leni” Riefenstahl (pronounced Ree-fen-shtahl) was born in Berlin on 22 August 1902.  By the age of four she was painting and writing poetry.  A talented swimmer, she became interested in dancing — likely inspired by Isadora Duncan (also featured in Literary Yard), Riefenstahl excelled at interpretative dance performances across Europe.  After an injury which led to knee surgery, she moved into screen acting.  Between 1925 and 1929, she starred in five successful German movies. 

In Germany at that time the “mountain film” genre was popular, pioneered by Arnold Fanck.  Riefenstahl convinced him to feature her in 1926’s The Holy Mountain.  She wasted no time learning acting and film editing techniques.  In 1932, she directed her own film, The Blue Light.  When it was released in 1938, the Jewish writers’ names were removed from the credits. It was in 1932 that Riefenstahl heard Hitler speak at a rally.  She was mesmerised, writing in her memoir: “I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget … so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth”.

Impressed with Riefenstahl’s work, Hitler asked her to film the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg.  The result was Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens), a masterpiece of seductive propaganda.  Riefenstahl employed 30 cameras and long-focus lenses, shooting 130,000 metres of film.  She pioneered many innovations with cameras filming air-to-air and placed in trenches so that marching soldiers and speakers loomed powerfully above the lens.  More than one million Germans participated in the event.  The film begins with Hitler’s plane descending through the clouds over medieval Nuremberg, greeted by countless thousands giving the Nazi salute.  The torchlit rally with Nazis choreographed in huge formations — “like ants in a vast enterprise” — brought cinematic symbolism and propaganda to a new level.

In 1993, Riefenstahl vehemently denied any “deliberate attempt” to create Nazi propaganda; she said she was disgusted that Triumph of the Will had been used for that purpose.  Yet in a private letter to Hitler, quoted in a 2024 documentary, Riefenstahl said, “The film’s impact as German propaganda is greater than I could have imagined and your image, my Führer, is always applauded”.

A grateful Hitler commissioned Riefenstahl to film the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.  Her film Olympia is still hailed for its monumental technical and creative achievements.  She broke with all tradition.  Cameras on rails followed the athlete’s every move.  She played with slow motion shots, underwater diving shots, extremely high and low shooting angles, panoramic aerial shots.  She even reversed films to make divers turn backwards.  Olympia is today cited as a major influence in sports photography.  She earned the admiration of Louis B. Mayer (MGM), Walt Disney and even Henry Ford.  Her importance as a film maker has ranked her alongside Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock.

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With the outbreak of war in September 1939, Riefenstahl was despatched to Poland as a war correspondent.  Witnessing the execution of Jews in a town market, she chose not to make any more Nazi-sponsored films.  Yet when France fell in June 1940, she sent a telegram to Hitler: “With indescribable joy and filled with burning gratitude, we share with you Germany’s greatest victory … You exceed anything human imagination has the power to conceive, achieving deeds without parallel in the history of mankind …”

During the war Riefenstahl concentrated on a feature film Tiefland, based on a German opera.  Hitler authorised his government to fund the production.  Filming near Berlin in 1942, the extras were Romani and Sinti prisoners — “Gypsies” originally of Indian descent — supplied from a local concentration camp.  After shooting, they were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz.  When the film was eventually completed after the war, it was refused entry into the Cannes Film Festival.

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Despite her work for the Nazis and her close relationship with Hitler, Riefenstahl was never prosecuted for war crimes.  She was arrested, placed under house arrest, tried several times but subsequently labelled a Nazi “fellow traveller”.  Like many other prominent friends of the regime, she denied knowing about the Holocaust; “how could we have known?” was her defence.  She even declared that meeting Hitler “was the biggest catastrophe of my life.  Until the day I die people will keep saying ‘Leni is a Nazi’, and I’ll keep saying, ‘But what did she do?’”  One film critic answered that question: “She made it acceptable, even desirable, for millions of Germans to go along with Hitler.  And in promoting the Nazi leadership, there is a direct line from her infamous Nazi party films to Auschwitz and Belsen”.

The post-war years were not kind; she wrote her autobiography and produced two volumes of photography of the Nuba peoples of southern Sudan; again, her genius with the camera recalled her earlier work of athletes at the Nazi-era Olympic Games.  One reviewer wrote, “She uses the light purposefully: the full, blinding brightness to make us see the all-absorbing blackness of the skin … the first dawn light streaking the face of a calf … a wrestler prepared for his match, with his shaven head turned to look over the massive shoulder …”  Another reviewer was scathing: “Although the Nuba are black, not Aryan, Riefenstahl’s portrait of them is consistent with some of the largest themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and impure, the victory of the stronger over the weaker … celebrating a society where success in fighting is the main aspiration of a man’s life”.

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Regarded as one of the most controversial figures in film history, Leni Riefenstahl died in Germany in 2003 — at the age of 101.  Shortly before her death she told the BBC, “I was one of millions who thought Hitler had all the answers.  We saw only the good things; we didn’t know bad things were to come.”

Was Riefenstahl the naïve victim she portrayed herself — or was she an ambitious, opportunistic film maker who sold her services to a deadly ideology?