Leni Riefenstahl spent more than sixty years telling a story about herself—that she was a politically naive artist who had been swept into the Nazi film world against her will and knew nothing of the regime’s crimes. It took seven hundred boxes of her own archive, opened after her death, to dismantle that narrative. In 1932, Riefenstahl was a rising German film star sitting in the audience at the Berlin Sportpalast when Adolf Hitler spoke. Germany was in the depths of the Depression, the Weimar Republic was collapsing, and Hitler was campaigning for the presidency.
In her memoirs, she described the moment as being struck by lightning. Within days, she wrote to him. On May 22, 1932, he met her at Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea coast. She later claimed he walked with her on the beach and told her that once the Nazis came to power, she would make his films—and that she declined.
The record of the years that followed suggests otherwise. Born in Berlin on August 22, 1902, Riefenstahl trained as a dancer until a knee injury ended that career. In 1924, recovering from surgery, she saw a poster for Arnold Fanck’s *Mountain of Destiny* and sought out the director. Fanck cast her in *The Holy Mountain*, released in 1926, and over the next five years she became the face of the German mountain film genre.
In 1932, she directed her own film, *Das blaue Licht*, which won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and made her one of the few female directors in Weimar Germany. Hitler saw the film and considered Riefenstahl the embodiment of his ideal of German womanhood. An assistant cameraman who worked with her later recalled seeing her read *Mein Kampf* on a train and remarking that she would work for the Nazis. In a November 1932 radio interview, she blamed Jewish film critics for her work’s reception and said 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*, released in December 1933. The film prominently featured SA leader Ernst Röhm beside Hitler.
Within a year, Röhm had been shot on Hitler’s orders. For the 1934 rally, Hitler gave Riefenstahl everything she asked for. She arrived with thirty cameras, roughly 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. After five months of editing, *Triumph des Willens* premiered in Berlin on March 28, 1935. It was distributed to seventy German cities, used for political education, and required viewing for schoolchildren. The film won top prizes at Venice and Paris.
Riefenstahl maintained for the rest of her life that the film was a documentary rather than propaganda. 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. She edited 200 hours of footage into a four-hour film that won the top prize at Venice. She claimed the film was independently produced, but documents recovered after the war showed Goebbels’ propaganda ministry had financed it through a shell company.
On November 4, 1938, she arrived in New York aboard the liner *Europa* to promote the film. Five days later, 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 her tour for two more months, telling reporters the violence reports were exaggerated. She later claimed she had known nothing about Kristallnacht at the time. On September 1, 1939, German forces crossed into Poland.
Within ten days, Riefenstahl was at the front with a camera. The Wehrmacht designated her unit Sonderfilmtrupp Riefenstahl. She wore a tailored field gray uniform and carried a pistol. On September 10, 1939, she reached Końskie, a town in south central Poland.
Two days later, German soldiers were attacked by partisans and four were killed. In retaliation, troops rounded up Jewish men, 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 nineteen Polish Jews dead, while the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum cites twenty-two.
A surviving photograph shows Riefenstahl on the scene, visibly shaken. She gave one account of that 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, filmmaker Andreas Veiel released a 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.
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 begun before the war. Production resumed in September 1940 in the Bavarian village of Krun, where she used fifty-one Romani extras transported from the Salzburg Maxglan internment camp.
In April 1942, filming moved to Babelsberg Studios near Berlin, where she used at least sixty-six 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 21, 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 she learned of his death. American troops took her into custody in May 1945.
Among her interrogators was Budd Schulberg, a Hollywood screenwriter serving with the OSS. 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 moved between facilities through 1945. In January 1946, French occupation authorities arrested her in Tyrol and seized the *Tiefland* footage.
She remained in detention and house arrest until 1948. Four denazification proceedings followed. Her classification shifted from “not affected” to “follower,” the fourth of five categories. She had never joined the Nazi Party, and no evidence presented at the tribunals was deemed sufficient to convict her of war crimes.
She walked out free and went to work rebuilding her reputation. *Tiefland* was finally released in February 1954. Between 1962 and 1977, Riefenstahl traveled repeatedly to Southern Sudan and photographed the Nuba people. Her photo books *The Last of the Nuba* and *The People of Kau* 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 and Gloria Swanson. By the early 1970s, she was photographing Mick and Bianca Jagger for the Sunday Times. In February 1975, Susan Sontag stopped the rehabilitation.
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—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, but it made it impossible to celebrate her without footnotes. 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, and the charges were dropped. On her 101st birthday, August 22, 2003, she married Horst Ketner, her companion of thirty-five years. She died seventeen days later. In 2018, her estate—seven hundred boxes of letters, tapes, photographs, and correspondence—was transferred to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin.
When Veiel was given full access for his 2024 documentary, he found among the papers the 1952 letter describing how her request on the day of the Końskie massacre had been relayed down the chain of command. He also found recordings in her own voice that her public denials had never matched. The story she had defended for sixty years did not survive the opening of her own archive.