In August 1974, at the first Telluride Film Festival, three figures were honored. Francis Ford Coppola, silent film star Gloria Swanson, and Leni Riefenstahl, the woman who had filmed the Nuremberg rallies for Adolf Hitler. The audience applauded her. She was 71, and her rehabilitation was nearly complete.
It would take another 50 years, and 700 boxes opened after her death, to dismantle the story she had spent her entire life telling. On February 27th, 1932, Leni Riefenstahl sat in the audience at the Berlin Sportpalast and watched Adolf Hitler speak. Germany was in the depths of the Depression, the Weimar Republic was collapsing, and the man at the podium was campaigning for the presidency. He would lose.
But in her memoirs, Riefenstahl described the moment as being struck by lightning. She wrote to him within days. He invited her to meet him at Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea coast on May 22nd, 1932. According to her later account, he walked with her on the beach and told her that when the Nazis came to power, she would make his films.
She said she declined. The record of the years that followed tells a different story. Born in Berlin in 1902, Leni Riefenstahl was the daughter of a heating and ventilation businessman who wanted her in the family firm. She trained as a dancer instead and toured Europe in the early 1920s until a knee injury ended her career.
In 1924, while recovering from surgery, she saw a poster for Arnold Fanck’s *Mountain of Destiny* and tracked down the director. He cast her in *The Holy Mountain*, released in 1926. Over the following five years, she became the face of the German *Bergfilm*, mountain adventure pictures featuring athletic women on Alpine peaks. In 1932, she directed her own film, *Das blaue Licht* (*The Blue Light*).
She wrote it, starred in it, and edited it. It won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and made her one of the few female directors working in Weimar Germany. It also reached an unexpected admirer. Hitler saw the film and thought Riefenstahl embodied an ideal of German womanhood he had been searching for on screen.
An assistant cameraman who worked with her recalled seeing her read *Mein Kampf* on a train and remarked that she would work for the Nazis. In a November 1932 radio interview, she said Jewish film critics were the reason her work was not better received and that Hitler would change that. When *Das blaue Licht* was re-released in 1938, the names of its Jewish co-writer Béla Balázs and Jewish financier Harry Sokal were removed from the credits. In 1933, the propaganda ministry commissioned her to film that year’s Nuremberg Rally.
The result was *Der Sieg des Glaubens* (*Victory of Faith*), an hour-long documentary released in December 1933. It was a rehearsal. The film featured Ernst Röhm, head of the SA, prominently beside Hitler. Within a year, Röhm had been shot on Hitler’s orders.
By then, Riefenstahl had been asked to film the next rally. This time, Hitler gave her everything she asked for. The 1934 Nuremberg Rally ran from September 5th to 10th. Riefenstahl arrived with 30 cameras, around 120 crew members, and resources no German filmmaker had ever commanded.
The Nazi Party covered the entire budget. She had elevators installed inside flagpoles for aerial shots, dug pits to film marchers from below, and built a circular track around Hitler’s podium. She edited for five months. *Triumph des Willens* (*Triumph of the Will*) premiered at the UFA Palast Cinema in Berlin on March 28th, 1935, and was distributed to 70 German cities.
The Nazi Party used it for political education. Schoolchildren were required to attend. The film won the gold medal at the 1935 Venice Biennale and the Grand Prix at the 1937 Paris World Exhibition. Riefenstahl maintained for the rest of her life that it was a documentary rather than a propaganda film.
The historical record disagrees. Several speeches were re-staged in a studio after the rally ended, with orators re-lit and re-photographed against backdrops matched to the original footage. Hitler himself had chosen the title before filming began. In 1936, she accepted a commission to film the Berlin Olympic Games.
*Olympia*, released in two parts in April 1938, deployed roughly 170 camera operators across 136 events. Cameras were mounted on rails, lowered into pits, attached to balloons, and submerged for the diving sequences. Riefenstahl edited 200 hours of footage into a four-hour film that the Venice Film Festival awarded its top prize. She claimed *Olympia* was independently produced.
Documents recovered after the war showed that Goebbels’ Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda had financed it through a shell company. On November 4th, 1938, she arrived in New York aboard the liner *Europa* to promote the film. Five days later, on the night of November 9th, Kristallnacht erupted across Germany, coordinated attacks on Jewish communities and businesses. American newspapers carried the news the next morning.
The German Consul General told her to return home. She did not. She continued the tour for two more months, telling reporters the violence reports were exaggerated. She would later claim she had known nothing about Kristallnacht at the time.
Riefenstahl had moved through the Nazi film industry at its highest level, with personal access to Hitler, Goebbels, and Hermann Göring. On September 1st, 1939, German forces crossed into Poland. Within ten days, she was at the front with a camera. She assembled her own film unit for the Polish campaign.
The Wehrmacht designated it *Sonderfilmtrupp Riefenstahl* — Special Film Unit Riefenstahl. She wore a tailored field gray uniform and carried a pistol she had personally issued to her crew. On September 10th, 1939, she reached Końskie, a town in south central Poland attached to the 14th Army Corps. Two days later, German soldiers in Końskie were attacked by partisans.
Four men were killed. In retaliation, troops rounded up Jewish men from the town, ordered them to dig graves for the German dead, and beat them. When the violence escalated, soldiers opened fire. Sources differ on the number killed.
The German Federal Archives record 19 Polish Jews dead, while the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum cites 22. A surviving photograph shows Riefenstahl on the scene, hand to her face, visibly shaken. She gave one account of the day for the rest of her life. She had witnessed the shooting, been horrified, and had appealed personally to Hitler against the violence.
In 2024, Andreas Veiel released his documentary based on full access to her estate. Among the papers was a 1952 letter written by a junior officer to her ex-husband Peter Jacob, describing an army report on the shooting. According to the letter, Riefenstahl had asked a soldier to remove the Jewish men from her shot at the market square. The instruction was relayed down the chain of command.
By the time it reached the ranks, it had become an order to get rid of them. The soldiers opened fire. Końskie did not slow her down. Weeks later, she filmed Hitler’s victory parade through Warsaw.
She then returned to *Tiefland*, a feature film she’d begun before the war. Production resumed on September 23rd, 1940 in the Bavarian village of Krün, where she used 51 Romani extras transported from the Salzburg Maxglan internment camp. In April 1942, interior filming moved to Babelsberg Studios near Berlin, where she used at least 66 Sinti and Roma adults and children from the Marzahn camp. When filming ended in 1944, the extras were sent back to the camps.
Most were deported to Auschwitz. Riefenstahl maintained until 2002 that every extra had survived. On March 21st, 1944, she married Wehrmacht Major Peter Jacob. It was the last time she saw Hitler.
By late April 1945, she was hiding in a mountain hut in Austria when the news of his death reached her. American troops took her into custody in May 1945. Among her interrogators was Budd Schulberg, a Hollywood screenwriter serving with the OSS, the wartime intelligence agency that became the CIA. Schulberg was sent to investigate Nazi-era cultural figures.
Riefenstahl told him she had been politically naive, coerced into her work, and had known nothing of the regime’s crimes. She escaped from one holding camp, was recaptured, and was moved between facilities through 1945. In January 1946, French occupation authorities arrested her in Tyrol and seized the *Tiefland* footage. She remained in French detention and house arrest until 1948.
Four denazification proceedings followed. Between 1948 and 1952, her classification shifted from *Nicht Betroffene* (not affected) to *Mitläufer* (follower), the fourth of five denazification categories, designating her as a follower of the regime rather than an active participant. She had never joined the Nazi Party. No evidence presented at the tribunals was deemed sufficient to convict her of war crimes.
She walked out a free woman and went to work rebuilding her reputation. *Tiefland* was finally released in February 1954. Between 1962 and 1977, she traveled repeatedly to Southern Sudan and photographed the Nuba people. Her photo books, *The Last of the Nuba* in 1973 and *The People of Kau* in 1976, were international bestsellers.
Critics who had spent the 1950s describing her as a Nazi propagandist began describing her as a misunderstood aesthete. In 1974, the inaugural Telluride Film Festival honored her alongside Francis Ford Coppola. By the early 1970s, she was photographing Mick and Bianca Jagger for the *Sunday Times*. The rehabilitation was nearly complete.
In February 1975, Susan Sontag stopped it. Her essay, *Fascinating Fascism*, published in the *New York Review of Books*, argued that Riefenstahl’s Nuba photographs were continuous with the racial aesthetic of her Nazi films, and that her post-war publicity rested on lies — claims that she had been a non-political artist, that she had quarreled with Goebbels, that she had been a victim of the regime rather than its showcase. Sontag’s essay did not end Riefenstahl’s career. It made it impossible to celebrate her without footnotes.
The rehabilitation continued, but the asterisks attached. The hardest blow came in 1982. German filmmaker Nina Gladitz released a documentary on the *Tiefland* extras, tracking down survivors who described being selected from a concentration camp and returned there when filming ended. Riefenstahl sued.
A German court ruled that she had known the extras came from a camp, though it could not prove she knew their final destination. She lost the central point, and continued claiming the opposite. In 2002, prosecutors investigated her for Holocaust denial after she insisted the Roma and Sinti extras had survived. She apologized.
Charges were dropped. On her 101st birthday, August 22nd, 2003, she married Horst Kettner, her companion of 35 years. She died 17 days later. In 2018, her estate — 700 boxes of letters, tapes, photographs, and correspondence — was transferred to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin.
When Andreas Veiel was given full access for his 2024 documentary, he found among the papers the 1952 letter from the junior officer to her ex-husband, describing how a request she made on the day of the Końskie massacre had been relayed down the chain of command. He found recordings in her own voice that her public denials had never matched. The story she had defended for 60 years did not survive the opening of her own archive.
