Leni Riefenstahl - World War II

World War II

During the Invasion of Poland, Riefenstahl was photographed in Poland wearing a military uniform and a pistol on her belt in the company of German soldiers; she had gone to the site of the battle as a war correspondent. On September 12, 1939 she was in the town of Końskie when 30 civilians were executed there, in retaliation for an alleged attack on German soldiers. According to her memoir, Riefenstahl tried to intervene but a furious German soldier held her at gunpoint and threatened to shoot her on the spot. She claimed she did not realize the victims were Jews. Closeup photographs of a distraught Riefenstahl survive from that day. Nevertheless, by 5 October 1939, Riefenstahl was back in occupied Poland filming Hitler’s victory parade in Warsaw. She left Poland and apparently chose not to make any Nazi-related movies after this, however.

On 14 June 1940, the day Paris was declared an open city by the French and occupied by German troops, Riefenstahl wrote to Hitler in a telegram, “With indescribable joy, deeply moved and filled with burning gratitude, we share with you, my Führer, your and Germany's greatest victory, the entry of German troops into Paris. You exceed anything human imagination has the power to conceive, achieving deeds without parallel in the history of mankind. How can we ever thank you?” She later explained: “Everyone thought the war was over, and in that spirit I sent the cable to Hitler”. Riefenstahl was friends with Hitler for 12 years, and reports vary as to whether she ever had an intimate relationship with him. According to Ernst Hanfstaengl, who was a close friend of Hitler throughout the later 1920s and early 1930s, Riefenstahl tried to begin a relationship with Hitler early on but was turned down by him. For whatever reason, her relationship with Hitler had declined by 1944, when her brother Heinz died on the Russian Front of the war.

After the Nuremberg rallies trilogy and Olympia, Riefenstahl began work on the movie she had tried and failed to direct once before, Tiefland. On Hitler’s direct order the German government paid her 7 million reichsmarks in compensation. From September 23 until November 13, 1940 she filmed in Krün near Mittenwald. The extras playing Spanish women and farmers were drawn from gypsies (Sinti) detained in a camp at Salzburg-Maxglan who were forced to work with her. Filming at the Babelsberg Studios near Berlin began 18 months later in April 1942 and lasted into summer. This time Sinti and Roma from the Marzahn detention camp near Berlin were compelled to work as extras. A surviving document from camp Marzahn shows a list of 65 inmates who were ordered to serve in the production. 50 stills from the filming in Krün near Mittenwald were later found and from these, surviving prisoners were able to identify 29 camp inmates who worked for Riefenstahl and were then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the first weeks of March 1943 following Himmler’s December 1942 decree. Almost to the end of her life, despite overwhelming evidence that concentration camp occupants had been forced to work on the movie unpaid, Riefenstahl continued to maintain all the film extras survived and that she had met them after the war. Riefenstahl sued a filmmaker, Nina Gladitz, who said Riefenstahl personally chose the extras at their holding camp; Gladitz had found one of the Gypsy survivors and matched his memory with stills of the movie for a documentary Gladitz was filming. The German court found in favour of Gladitz, agreeing that Riefenstahl had known the extras were from a concentration camp, and they agreed with Riefenstahl on only one count (finding that Riefenstahl had not informed the Gypsies that they would be sent to the Auschwitz camp after filming was completed).

This issue came up again in 2002, when Riefenstahl was one hundred years old and she was taken to court by a Roma group for denying the Nazis had exterminated gypsies. Riefenstahl apologized, saying, “I regret that Sinti and Roma had to suffer during the period of National Socialism. It is known today that many of them were murdered in concentration camps”.

The last time Riefenstahl saw Hitler was when she married Peter Jacob on 21 March 1944, shortly after she had introduced Jacob to Hitler in Kitzbühel, Austria. Riefenstahl and Jacob divorced in 1946.

In October 1944 the production of Tiefland moved to Barrandov Studios in Prague for interior filming. Lavish sets made these shots some of the most costly in the film but they were finished within days. The film was not edited and released until almost 10 years later.

As Germany’s military collapsed in the spring of 1945 Riefenstahl left Berlin and was hitchhiking with a group of men, trying to reach her mother, when she was taken into custody by American troops. She walked out of a holding camp, beginning a series of escapes and arrests across the chaotic landscape. At last making it back home on a bicycle, she found that American troops had seized her house, then was surprised by how kindly they treated her.