Leni Riefenstahl
Stills from Olympia
“Riefenstahl was put in charge of filming the 1936 Berlin Olympics, no minor undertaking. For Olympia she had to manage a total crew of 60 cinematographers. Three different types of black-and-white film stock—Agfa (architectural shots), Kodak (portraits), Perutz (fields, grass)—were used to shoot over 1.3 million feet of film (400,000 meters, over 248 miles). In the process, Riefenstahl invented or enhanced many of the sports photography techniques we now take for granted: slow motion, underwater diving shots, extremely high (from towers) and low shooting angles (from pits), panoramic aerial shots, and tracking systems for following fast action. The result is considered a classic cinematic masterpiece. Olympia premiered at Berlin’s UFA Palast am Zoo cinema on Hitler’s birthday, April 20, 1938.
…Following the war in 1945, Riefenstahl had to face Allied charges that she was a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer. Her close ties to Hitler and her propaganda films, most notably Triumph of the Will, made her an obvious target. She endured post-war chaos and was imprisoned (and escaped!) three times trying to get to her mother’s house in Austria where she was reunited with her husband and arrested again – not once but twice. This time she sat in a real prison as a guest the Seventh American Army, in the company of people like Hermann Göring and Sepp Dietrich (of the SS). But after her interrogation the Americans officially “denazified” Germany’s most notorious film director and released her “without prejudice” on June 3, 1945.
A relieved Riefenstahl returned to her film library and editing suite in Kitzbühel in the Austrian Tyrol, where she had moved during the war to avoid Allied bombing in Germany and to continue her work on the long-delayed Tiefland, which she had begun in 1940.But she had not reckoned on the French. The Americans were leaving Tyrol, which was to become part of the new French occupation zone. Despite being advised to move to the American zone, Riefenstahl was reluctant to move her massive film library (including the Olympia negatives) and she believed that her American denazification was valid for all the Allied powers.
That soon proved to be a mistake. Before long Riefenstahl found herself under arrest once again, this time by the French. They decided to move Riefenstahl to the French zone in Germany, where she ended up in the bombed-out ruins of Breisach near Freiburg. Her old “friend” there, Dr. Fanck, refused to have anything to do with her, and she and her husband lived under house arrest in Breisach and later in Königsfeld in the Black Forest. Eventually Riefenstahl was placed in an insane asylum in Freiburg for three months before her release in August 1947. But it was not until July 1949 that she was officially denazified by a French tribunal. Even that “final” decision was appealed by the French military government and the matter was closed six months later when the Baden State Commissariat classified Riefenstahl in absentia as a “fellow traveler.”
But Riefenstahl was far from free. Freedom and partial denazification did not mean she could resume her career as a director, and she had more legal trials ahead of her. The French were still holding all the film material taken from her house in Austria. Even her marriage was falling apart. To top it all, her attempts to get her Tiefland film back from the French were now being hindered by the release of a so-called Eva Braun Diary (a fraudulent precursor of the later and equally bogus Hitler Diary), the work of Luis Trenker, a former co-star with Riefenstahl in several films, now turned director and con-artist. As is usually the case, a court ruling that the Eva Braun diary was a fabrication failed to stop the false rumours and innuendo the diary had produced. In a bizarre twist, Riefenstahl received an unsolicited affadavit of support from none other than her former foe Ernst Jäger.”
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