The morning of September 1, 1939, was gray and cloudy in Berlin. Anti-aircraft cannons had been positioned in the vicinity of the Kroll Opera House to safeguard Hitler during his speech, which was set to begin at ten o’clock. He wore a gray military uniform and looked fatigued and agitated. Leni Riefenstahl heard him announce that as of 5:45 a.m., the Germans had been returning fire: “Once again, then, I have put on the coat that was most sacred and dear to me. I will not take it off until victory is achieved, or—I will not live to see this outcome!”1 The radio was reporting the rapid advance of the Germans into Poland. Riefenstahl now felt so close to Hitler that she incorporated his decision to go to war into her own plans for the future.
Most people in Berlin did not experience major changes in their everyday lives after the outbreak of the war. Attendance at opera houses, theaters, soccer stadiums, and movie theaters held steady. Income taxes went up drastically, food was rationed, and windows were darkened at night, but people were confident that this war would soon end in victory.
Riefenstahl regarded the war as a test of her loyalty to Hitler. In view of her prominence, she could not go on as before. If Hitler went to war, she had to follow him. She knew full well that he would continue to support her after the war only if she had done her part to support the war effort. She frantically considered her options, which even included becoming a nurse, then concluded that film was her best vehicle.
In Riefenstahl’s account, her staff urged her to set up a film group to provide media coverage of the war. She went to the Reich chancellery and presented her case to a high-ranking officer, and received authorization within twenty-four hours. A major in Grunewald gave her and her men quick instructions in handling pistols and gas masks, and they slipped on their slate blue uniforms and headed off to the front lines. This account does not really clarify what she hoped to achieve by taking the trip. Riefenstahl scrapped her plans to film Penthesilea and followed Hitler to Poland. She was the only one of the artists in favor with the National Socialists who was so willing and eager to do so. Her eagerness is explained in part by the fact that Hitler had made provisions for his artists in the event of war. Toward the end of the summer of 1939, his military adjutant had requisitioned from the district defense offices the papers of the artists the Führer wanted to keep out of military service. The papers were simply torn up, so these men ceased to exist as far as the military registration office was concerned and thus could not be drafted. Singers and actors made up the largest group of exempted artists, but there were also architects and sculptors. There was certainly no expectation that Riefenstahl, as a woman, would be heading to Poland just a few days after the outbreak of the war. She could just as easily have stayed in her villa in Dahlem. Her trip to the front was important as a symbolic gesture. Riefenstahl was putting on a display of anticipatory obedience.
On the evening of September 3, Hitler had boarded an armored train at the Stettin station in Berlin. His destination was the war. His favorite director followed him in a matter of days. As usual, Riefenstahl was surrounded by her confidants, including her current lover, the sound engineer Hermann Storr, as well as Walter Traut, Otto and Guzzi Lantschner, Sepp Allgeier, and four other technicians. In putting together this film crew, Riefenstahl had provided for her emotional and sexual well-being, and set the course for her professional work. Her approach to the films she had made for the National Socialists so far indicated her extreme reluctance to devote her genius to the vile work of reporting from the front. Just a few years earlier, she had made disparaging remarks about this way of making a film, and regarded her own task as creating “artistically constructed” films. Particularly since the international success of the Olympia film, she was unlikely to have changed her mind.
Right from the start the Poles were fighting a losing battle, with Polish cavalry up against German tanks. In a mere two days, the invaders were able to destroy the Polish air force.2 On September 6 the conquest of Krakow was reported, and two days later, the Wehrmacht got to the outskirts of Warsaw. The Polish government had already fled to Lublin. The Germans were confident that they had won the war.
When Riefenstahl headed to Poland, she and her men knew full well that they were entering a country that had already been attacked and defeated. She failed to mention that her mission there was to film for the Führer. A memorandum was issued by the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda on September 10, 1939, concerning the “Riefenstahl Special Film Unit.”3 On September 5, “the Führer issued an order to establish a ‘Riefenstahl Special Film Unit’ in the framework of the propaganda ministry.” This was sent to the city of Opole on September 10 at seven o’clock. According to this memorandum, the propaganda ministry contributed the services of Stolze, a governing official and the SS-Hauptsturmbannführer who held the Nazi paramilitary rank of Truppführer (the rough equivalent of a sergeant first class); Stolze would also take care of all costs incurred. The Special Film Unit was also provided two fully fueled six-seater Wanderer trucks, plus drivers, a BMW motorcycle with a side car and a driver, and gas ration cards for seven hundred liters. Riefenstahl made available her film technicians, a sound film truck, uniform attire, gas masks, and pocket pistols (!). “All members of the Riefenstahl Special Film Unit hold identification cards of the RMfVuP Propaganda Assignment Post issued in their names.”4 The film footage was classified as strategically vital, and it was ordered to be sent to the propaganda ministry in Berlin in the quickest way possible.
The chief of staff of the Army Group South to which the Special Film Unit had to report was Erich von Manstein. His memoirs, which were published in 1976, include a description of Riefenstahl’s visit.5 Even after the more than thirty intervening years, the reader senses his astonishment about this encounter. One day, this well-known actress and director showed up with her cameramen and announced that they would be filming at the front by order of Hitler. She had come to Lubliniec, she told him, because she was “following the Führer’s trail.” According to Manstein, it was “ultimately quite abhorrent” to the soldiers there to have an assignment of this sort carried out by a woman. However, Riefenstahl had come on Hitler’s orders, and there was nothing to be done. Her appearance startled them almost as much as the fact that she was there at all. A woman could not wear the “holy robe,” so she had a uniform tailor-made for her. She looked
good and raffish, a bit like an elegant partisan who might have obtained her outfit on Rue de Rivoli in Paris. Her beautiful hair swirled around her interesting face with its close-set eyes like a blazing mane. She was wearing a kind of tunic over breeches and soft, high-top boots. A pistol hung from the leather belt around her hips, and her combat gear was supplemented by a knife stuck into her boot-top, Bavarian style.6
Von Manstein was bewildered by the appearance of this amateur Amazon showing up on Hitler’s orders in the middle of a war. Riefenstahl seemed to be taking her assignment seriously: her uniform looked quite real, and she was armed. She had to be taken seriously even though her appearance struck the soldiers as ridiculous.7 Because no high-ranking officer was able to dissuade Riefenstahl from going out to the front and because she and her men could not be allowed to do so on their own, General von Reichenau was entrusted with this delicate task. Von Reichenau and Riefenstahl had known and liked each other since the filming of Day of Freedom. Von Reichenau had a key role in this war. “With his panzers and motorized divisions, he was instructed to spearhead the attack through Silesia towards Warsaw. In the preliminary discussions Hitler had suggested that he ‘look neither right nor left’ but ‘look only forwards towards his goal,’ ” Hitler’s adjutant Nicolaus von Below recalled.8 Riefenstahl traveled to Konskie with this important officer. Her memoirs make no mention of this fact.
General von Rundstedt’s diary reveals that Konskie was seized during the night of September 7.9 Two days later, the news arrived that Hitler would be coming to visit the army units there. Riefenstahl missed out on seeing him and wound up in the middle of combat. After spending the night in a tent in Konskie, she awoke to gunfire. She claimed that bullets ripped through her tent and commented, “I hadn’t imagined it would be this dangerous.”10 Perhaps it was now dawning on her that it might be useful to show some interest in reality from time to time. Her men had talked over the situation with the soldiers and learned that on the day before their arrival, Polish civilians had maimed and killed four German soldiers and a high-ranking officer. Most likely hoping to be able to film some good scenes, she and her men made their way to the market square.
In the middle of the square, some Polish men were digging a pit, the grave for the dead German soldiers. Their faces revealed mortal fear. They understood no German and were terrified that they were digging their own graves. Then a German police officer appeared, stood at the edge of the grave, and ordered the soldiers to maintain calm and discipline. He gave a brief speech: “Soldiers, cruel as the deaths of our men may have been, we do not want to return tit for tat.” Then he told the soldiers to send the Poles home and to bury the dead.11
When she witnessed the Poles being brutally kicked by the Germans in violation of their superior’s orders, Riefenstahl claims to have shouted:
“Didn’t you hear what the officer told you? You claim to be German soldiers?” The angry men now faced me menacingly. One of them shouted, “Punch her in the mouth, get rid of that woman!” Another called out, “Shoot that woman down!” and aimed his rifle at me. . . . When the gun barrel was leveled at me, my crew jerked me aside. . . . Even before I knew what had happened, I reported to Reichenau to protest the undisciplined conduct of the soldiers. Only then did I learn of the terrible things that had happened. A shot fired by a Luftwaffe officer had started a panic that in turn had led to a senseless shooting spree. Soldiers had fired at the Poles who were running away; they assumed that some of them were the ones who had committed the massacre. More than thirty Poles fell victim to this senseless shooting.12
Reichenau promised to court-martial the perpetrators. “I was so upset by this experience that I asked the general to allow me to terminate my film reporting. He was very understanding. I wanted to get back to Berlin as soon as possible.”13 This was the extent of Riefenstahl’s depiction of her work as war correspondent.
Once again, her unabashed profession of ignorance is nothing short of astonishing. When she decided to travel to Poland and shoot her film at the front, she must have been aware that she was with the aggressors. Hitler had invaded a country and was waging a ruthless war, so it ought to have come as no surprise to her that the Poles were putting up a fight against the brutal superior strength of the German soldiers.
Riefenstahl also chose not to mention that the murdered Polish civilians were Jews. Alexander B. Rossino described the situation her team encountered as follows: On September 12, the 8th Air Reconnaissance Unit entered Konskie and found four corpses of German soldiers. They reacted by taking an undetermined number of Jewish men between the ages of forty and fifty, bringing them to the local church graveyard, and ordering them to dig graves. While the Jews dug, they were kicked and beaten. When the local police commander came to the scene, he told the soldiers to allow the Jews, who believed that they were digging their own graves, to get out of the pit. The Jews tried to flee, with the soldiers beating them again and tearing at their clothes. Then the soldiers opened fire. Twenty-two Jews were shot dead.14
General von Manstein, who was apparently relieved to see Riefenstahl leave, commented, “There had already been shootings that involved civilians during the occupation of Konskie, and now, a flak officer’s nervousness when a group gathered on the market square resulted in a gratuitous outbreak of panic and then a senseless shooting that claimed multiple victims. The film troop witnessed this regrettable scene and our visitor, who was thoroughly shaken, left the area.”15 After the war, Major General Rudolf Langhaeuser, the chief intelligence officer, verified that Riefenstahl had stormed into his office. “She had seen twenty-two Jews shot and could not continue work with her film unit. Langhaeuser made a report to the commander of the Southern Army, von Manstein, who ordered ‘investigation and immediate action in all cases,’ but the incidents continued to take place in the Southern Army area for another two months.”16
Riefenstahl had unquestionably displayed courage in lodging her complaint. Still, once the war was over, she was determined to portray herself and the German military in a favorable light. By 1987, when she published her memoirs, she knew perfectly well what had happened in Poland during those days yet made no mention of the genocide. There are photographs of her standing behind the soldiers in her uniform in Konskie, her face frozen in horror and fear. There are tears in her eyes, and she seems to be struggling for breath. These photographs reveal a moment of truth in Riefenstahl’s life, her world breaking apart as reality descended on her. The war was not a costume party. No one was paying any attention to her command, and there would be no lovely images for her to exploit.
She made her getaway to Danzig on a military aircraft. Hitler was staying at the Casino Hotel in the spa town of Sopot, outside of Danzig. Riefenstahl claims to have reported the events in Konskie to him. He already knew what had gone on, and supposedly told her that “such an offense had never occurred in the German army, and the guilty would be court-martialed.”17 But she had even more news to report about the highly principled Hitler. While she sat next to him, he received a telegram with an urgent request from the supreme army command to issue orders to launch an attack on Warsaw. She claimed that she witnessed Hitler angrily turn to the aide-de-camp who had come with the telegram and order him to report back to Warsaw that it was being offered another chance to capitulate, because it was madness to attack a city that still had women and children in it. The truth of the matter was that on September 22 and 25, Hitler had taken a plane from Danzig to the outskirts of Warsaw to see firsthand the effects of the bombardment he had personally ordered.
On September 27, the town major of Warsaw ceded the city to the Germans. Hitler, who was in Berlin by this time, traveled back to Warsaw, and Riefenstahl followed him there. She flew with Ernst Udet, who was now the chief of technical development in the Luftwaffe, to take part in the victory procession, because victories—not wars—were what mattered to her.
There are several photographs of Riefenstahl looking quite jolly in her uniform and aviator hat on the dais with many members of the Wehrmacht. All eyes were trained on this woman in soldier’s garb. But Riefenstahl was only an onlooker in Warsaw; Sepp Allgeier and the Lantschner brothers, Guzzi and Otto, were doing the filming. She stood next to Allgeier and watched him work, then she returned to Berlin without any footage in her suitcase. Her men stayed in the war.
Walter Frentz had been appointed to serve at Führer headquarters back in the late summer of 1939, and would remain a close associate of Hitler’s until May 1945. Allgeier was shooting films for the Wehrmacht, and Hans Ertl was accompanying Erwin Rommel to capture his North African campaign on camera while their boss, the Führer’s star director, stayed in the background. War did not furnish the beautiful images she needed for her art. She got the feeling that her work for the Führer had come to an end. Her cameramen stayed in the war, where her talents were out of place. She eventually realized that Hitler had found his fulfillment in war. He had no more need for art; war was everything.
Just a few weeks earlier, Riefenstahl had still been preparing for her role as military queen of the Amazons. She had told everyone about the movie she projected as the culmination of her career: a cinematic enactment of Heinrich von Kleist’s drama Penthesilea. Once she had achieved great success with Olympia, fulfillment of this dream seemed within her grasp. Luckily, she enjoyed the support of Marshal Italo Balbo, the fascist governor general of Libya; at the last Biennale, he had insisted on sitting next to her. She wanted to shoot the battle scenes between the Greeks and the Amazons in the Libyan Desert, and she was hoping to make the movie under the clear blue sky that she pictured for her Penthesilea. Balbo was delighted with this idea; however, she was unable to persuade Goebbels of the worth of this project. Goebbels did admire the writings of Kleist, but he could no longer put up with Riefenstahl’s effusiveness. He wrote in his diary: “[Hitler] is quite satisfied with the management of the press and radio. Only film is coming up short. He wants to finance L. Riefenstahl’s Penthesilea movie himself. That is the right course. I cannot do it from my funds and I have no real faith in the project.”18 It is hard to blame him for his skepticism. Most of what we know about this film project consists of grand pronouncements and providential crooning about what she intended to achieve. Riefenstahl claimed that she owed her discovery of Penthesilea to the great Max Reinhardt; that when he saw her, Reinhardt called out: “That is my Penthesilea!”19 In 1939, she asserted that all the artistic work in her past had been no more than a preliminary stage for her work on Penthesilea. Penthesilea was about love and war, violence and desire, law and passion, and men and women. Penthesilea was both goddess and human being. Although Riefenstahl had not displayed any special acting prowess in the past, now that she was nearing the age of forty she wanted to take on the role of a twenty-year-old Amazon queen. She worked out daily, took horseback riding lessons, and recited the lines from Kleist’s play. Like Junta, Penthesilea is a character driven by passion, a woman Riefenstahl called an “unrestrained, uncontrolled, wild feline.”20 She meets Achilles, the man she loves, during a battle. When her love cannot be fulfilled, she goes into a frenzy and mauls him. Violence and desire merge into one.
After her return from the United States, Riefenstahl devoted her time to preparing for this movie. She hired Herbert Windt to compose the music and signed Maria Koppenhöfer and Elisabeth Flickenschildt to play the priestesses. Since there was no lack of money, as usual, she picked out Lippizaner stallions in Vienna. “There were already close to a hundred girls in training. Not girls, but real women, who would be believable warriors.”21 To write the screenplay, she went off to the island of Sylt with her mother, her secretary, and her girlfriend, Margot von Opel. There she read, rode on horseback by the sea, and worked on her script about the Amazon queen. She repeatedly claimed that she had been preparing for this role for years on end, but letters to the Kleist expert Minde-Pouet reveal that her preliminary work was in a sorry state. In a letter dated August 4, 1939, she thanked him for the literature and newspaper clippings that he has sent her about Kleist, and it becomes apparent that she was only now starting to look into Kleist’s life. Riefenstahl, who claimed to have waited all her life to make a movie version of Penthesilea, had never even read the Iliad. “Besides riding horses, swimming, and throwing javelins, I am fervently reading the Iliad (you don’t have to worry that I might be reading the thick Schliemann book; I’m just flipping through a few interesting pages)—I didn’t know it yet and am utterly spellbound by this powerful literature.”22 Three days later she contacted him again, asking him to recommend a book about ancient equestrianism. This letter also reveals that she intended to bring Hitler into the project. She explained that she was looking for “books you personally consider the best. What I mean is books that tell the story of Kleist’s life and works in the easiest, most human way. No scholarly and overly analytical treatises. I would like to give the book to the Führer that best reflects who Kleist was.”23 Riefenstahl concluded this letter with the astonishing message that she would now begin her work on the treatment. Since she was heading to the mountains three weeks later, this work cannot have gone on for long. Evidently she did not have a clue as to how she would realize her ambitious plans. Although she made her notes about Penthesilea available in the 1970s, even those papers do not reveal an overall concept. Penthesilea was closely intertwined with Riefenstahl’s hybrid self-image. For the rest of her life, she would continue to insist that she and Penthesilea formed an indivisible entity: “If there is a transmigration of souls, then I must have lived her life at some previous time. Every word that she speaks is spoken from the very depth of my soul—at no time could I act differently from Penthesilea.”24 She knew quite well that this project was not fully formed, and once she returned from Poland she did not go back to it.
The beginning of the war signaled the end of her dream of working in Hollywood. And for Mussolini, the idea of filming the drainage of the Pontine Marshes was no longer appealing. So Riefenstahl decided to go back to an earlier idea she had never completed. The Lowlands project had been aborted in 1934, and now she hoped to resume work on it. One advantage of this project was that she would not have to win over Hitler because he thought highly of the opera by Eugen d’Albert. After the war, Riefenstahl would claim that she filmed Lowlands only in order to avoid being compelled to make war and propaganda films. She alleged that Goebbels told her that once the campaign in Poland was over, she would have to shoot a movie about the West Wall (the so-called Siegfried Line, a system of defensive positions in western Germany), but she refused to do so. That cannot be true, because the documentary film West Wall was completed in August 1939. At the time Riefenstahl claimed to have been asked, the film was already being shown in movie theaters. Moreover, she continued to produce films that disseminated unadulterated National Socialist ideology and maintained close contacts with high-ranking Nazis.
She retreated to the mountains with a man and a romantic film project. Harald Reinl, an exceptional skier with a law degree, became her coauthor and artistic assistant. Even during the war, she could afford to rent a mountain cabin near Kitzbühel to write the script for Lowlands. She cast Bernhard Minetti, Maria Koppenhöfer, Frida Richard, and Aribert Wäscher, and decided to direct the film and play its lead role as well. She wanted the world to applaud her acting skills at long last.
The weather was icy cold at the beginning of 1940. Berliners were suffering from a shortage of coal, while the number of copies of Mein Kampf was approaching six million. (Germans were also reading Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and Trygve Gulbranssen’s Beyond Sing the Woods.) In the spring, the German Wehrmacht invaded Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Cold, calculating young generals ran a gigantic war machinery that handed Hitler one victory after another. On the morning of June 14, 1940, Paris fell to the Nazis, and German troops captured the city. The days and nights may have been mild, but the streets were empty. About twenty thousand uniformed Nazis were said to be in Paris. Riefenstahl, who was preparing to shoot her film, congratulated Hitler on his victory.
With indescribable joy, deeply moved, and filled with profound gratitude, we share with you, my Führer, Germany’s and your greatest victory, the entry of German troops into Paris. You are achieving deeds beyond the realm of the human imagination, deeds that are without parallel in the history of mankind; how can we thank you? Offering congratulations falls far too short in showing you the feelings that are stirring within me.
Yours, Leni Riefenstahl.25
Later, she would explain that she sent the telegram to express her joy about what appeared to be the imminent end of the war—but that is not how her message comes across.
In August, the filming of Lowlands was slated to start in Spain. Franco had won the civil war with the help of the Germans, and Riefenstahl could feel assured of the support of the Spanish authorities. However, Italy’s entry into the war thwarted her plans. Mussolini sent troops to the south of France and thus made shooting a film in Spain out of the question. Because money was no object, she promptly arranged to have her “Spanish” sets built at the foot of the Karwendel range of the Alps near the town of Mittenwald. When she arrived to inspect the sets, she realized that the buildings were too far apart and could not accommodate the camera angles she had in mind. By this point she had lost any sense of financial proportion, so she simply had the sets torn down—to the tune of half a million reichsmarks—and then rebuilt. At the same time, strict rationing regulations for food, clothing, and fuel were in effect for the general public. Riefenstahl was confident of support from the very top; she could play by different rules and use as much as she pleased. She squandered more money on Lowlands than on any of her other films. A year and a half after filming began, five million reichsmarks had already been spent. On December 16, 1942, Goebbels noted in his diary: “Leni Riefenstahl reports to me about her Lowlands movie. A whole host of complications has evolved. A total of more than five million has already been squandered, and it will take one additional year to be finished.”26 What sort of a film was this, if it neither supported the war effort nor provided comic relief?
Marquis Don Sebastian (played by Bernhard Minetti) rules over the village of Roccabruna with despotic power. He diverts the only source of water in the area to support his prized bulls and leaves the peasants without water. One day, the beautiful dancer, Marta (Riefenstahl), comes to the village and all the men go crazy for her. Don Sebastian takes her on as a lover. Marta wants to help the villagers, but the marquis refuses to allow them access to the water and hits his headstrong lover, who flees to the mountains and meets a shepherd named Pedro. To pay off his debts, the marquis marries the daughter of the rich mayor, but because he cannot let go of Marta, he marries her off to Pedro. On their wedding night, the marquis hastens to Marta and demands his right to her body. Meanwhile, she has fallen in love with the shepherd. Pedro is the virginal figure in this movie; he is chaste and naïve. The men battle it out, and just as Pedro had strangled a wolf with his hands at the beginning of the film, he strangles the marquis and frees the village from its oppressor. The lovers move to the mountains and leave the lowlands behind them.
The similarities to The Blue Light are obvious. The good people live on the mountain in freedom and in harmony with nature, while greed and avarice prevail in the lowlands. Like Junta, Marta is a Gypsy-like figure. No one knows where she comes from. Marta is a wild, irrepressible woman and a child of nature all in one. Junta and Marta are fairy-tale figures. Although Marta is on the peasants’ side, she has no ties to them. Riefenstahl, in her role as Marta, is once again an outsider with great sexual vigor. Her mode of expression is her beautiful body, which she puts on display in dance. While the men cast lewd glances at her, she is focused inward. Marta is an innocent soul, but she is not sexually innocent. Pedro and the marquis take turns carrying her off to their beds.
The characters lack any psychological depth. As always, images take precedence over words. Riefenstahl devoted all her efforts—as screenwriter, producer, director, and actress—to orchestrating a self-image she had been dreaming of all her life. She wanted to be both goddess and woman, and rule over men with her body and her artistry. Like Junta and Marta, Riefenstahl was subject to a higher power that protected and preserved her. Junta and Marta were roles with which she fully identified. In both cases, she cast herself as characters who, like herself, step outside reality.
A look at the genesis of the film and the historical circumstances under which it was produced reveals a delusional side of Riefenstahl. In the five years from 1933 to 1938, she made four films, of which two established her international fame. In the five years from 1940 to 1945, she was unable to complete Lowlands. Contrary to her own account, her failure had only peripherally to do with the war situation. As usual, she denied having been financed and supported by the National Socialists and tried to convey the impression that she had launched the project as an independent producer with Tobis as a distribution company. However, sources make it perfectly clear that this was not the case.
Since the war broke out, it had become harder for Riefenstahl to set up a meeting with Hitler. In the spring of 1941, when she was suffering from one of her bouts of severe abdominal pain, he paid her a visit and offered her the services of Dr. Morrell, his personal physician. He also chatted about the films they would work on together once the war was over. That was one of the last times they got together. There were no more teatimes in the chancellery or merry evenings over a glass of punch at the Goebbels’. With his special armored train, Hitler traveled through Germany behind closed curtains. He spent many months far away from Berlin in his “Wolfschanze” military headquarters in East Prussia. After Rudolf Hess flew off to Scotland in May 1941, Martin Bormann became the man at Hitler’s side pulling the strings in the background. In the 1940s, Bormann was Hitler’s almighty secretary. He was put in charge of managing Hitler’s personal finances; even Eva Braun supposedly had to ask him for money. Albert Speer, who competed with him for the Führer’s favor, wrote about Bormann: “Even among so many ruthless men, he stood out by his brutality and coarseness. He had no culture, which might have put some restraints on him, and in every case he carried out whatever Hitler had ordered or what he himself had gathered from Hitler’s hints. A subordinate by nature, he treated his own subordinates as if he were dealing with cows and oxen. He was a peasant.”27
Riefenstahl got along well with this brutal man, who utterly lacked any sense of art. Bernhard Minetti remarked: “She dealt only with Hitler’s secretary, that is, she had direct access to him. She used this access to clever advantage; if she could not obtain something, she threatened to lodge a complaint. Then she would say: ‘It will happen immediately’ and it did.”28 In the summer of 1942, she wanted to shoot a film in Spain, but lacked the foreign currency. She had already received 320,000 pesetas, but insisted on being paid an additional 240,000 pesetas. Walter Funk, the Reich economics minister in charge of foreign currencies, had given priority to the wartime economy and denied the payment. He argued that transferring this sum of money would require “cutting back the purchase of urgently needed raw materials for the war in that same amount. This would weaken our defense capability, and I cannot assume responsibility for that under the current circumstances.”29 Riefenstahl called in Bormann, who invoked the name of the Führer. “As you know, Riefenstahl Film Inc. was established with the special support of the Führer; the costs of the Lowlands film, which has been in production for more than two years, are borne by funds I manage on behalf of the Führer. I have submitted the records to the Führer, and he has decided that if at all possible, the sum of foreign currency requested by Riefenstahl Film Inc. is to be made available.”30 Riefenstahl received her money.
Her repeated assertion that Lowlands was doomed to failure because all resources were used for the war was therefore ludicrous.31 She faced difficulties with bad weather, locating a tamed wolf, booking a studio, preparing studio sets, financing the film, and signing theater actors and codirectors. She initially envisioned having G. W. Pabst, who had come back to Germany from Hollywood in 1939, as her codirector, no doubt expecting that partnering with him would be a boon to her acting career. Pabst’s work in France and the United States would also lend an international flair to the film, and, by extension, to her. However, she saw no trace of his much-touted originality and so she tried out Arthur Maria Rabenalt, Arnold Fanck, and Mathias Wieman instead. But the greatest difficulties came from within her own body. The severe case of cystitis she had contracted in Greenland had developed into a chronic illness, and she suffered from abdominal pain. She needed painkillers and nutritional supplements to get out of bed and carry on with her work. At times she could not appear before the camera because her face was so contorted with pain that even veils and a soft focus could not mask her condition. Since she was nearly forty—at least fifteen years too old for the role of Marta—she had to look her best on the set, but she was in no condition to do so. Even Goebbels was worried about her state of health: “Frau Riefenstahl has become quite ill as a result of her work and the burden of responsibility, and I urgently advise her to go for a vacation before she takes on the additional work.”32 She took his advice, and spent longer and longer periods of time recuperating in the mountains.
On June 22, 1941, the German Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union. As of September 19, 1941, Jews were required to wear a yellow star on the left side of their chests. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered the war. Hitler assumed supreme command of the army. On January 20, 1942, the infamous Wannsee Conference was held. In early February 1943, the Battle of Stalingrad ended with the destruction of the German 6th Army. The mood in Germany was dark and depressed, especially in Berlin. The Germans began to fear for their future with their Führer. In the summer of 1943, Riefenstahl traveled to Spain to shoot her film. “Here we had real coffee, bananas, oranges, chocolate, simply everything the heart desired,” she exulted. Riefenstahl was filming her bullfighting scenes with six hundred rented fighting bulls and was delighted to report that “the locals have a pro-German attitude.”33
When she looked over her bank statements that summer, she had even more grounds to rejoice. On March 31, 1943, Riefenstahl Film Inc. charged 102,329,893 reichsmarks to the General Building Inspector, Main Office of Administration and Management. The expenses for four unfinished films—about the construction of the Reich chancellery, the construction of bunkers, and bomb damage, along with a filmstrip called The Führer Builds His Reich Capital—were estimated to exceed one million reichsmarks. As producer, Riefenstahl had stipulated that an additional 10 percent of the production costs would go directly to her. In the “Reich chancellery” file at the federal archives, there are payment orders to Riefenstahl Film Inc. that range between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand reichsmarks. Her production company had also billed for every bouquet of flowers. The records indicate that the idea for the film about the Reich chancellery had come about in 1940 at the request of Hitler, who made an initial sum of seven hundred thousand reichsmarks available to her.34 Arnold Fanck, who had joined the NSDAP in April 1940, was in charge of the project. In his memoirs, he stated that the inspector general’s office in Berlin had commissioned it, but he made no mention of all the benefits that had accrued to him personally from his work for the NSDAP.35
Fanck had to defer to Riefenstahl, but he earned an enormous amount of money, and he and his wife could live in a swanky villa at the Wannsee. Fanck would work on this film for three years. He filmed in Vienna, where Gobelin tapestries were being woven for the Reich chancellery; visited Carrara, where marble for the chancellery was quarried; and took photographs in the Munich Workshops for Arts and Crafts, where the furniture was made. In February 1943 the project was called off because of the bombing, and the film was never completed. However, they continued to submit bills, albeit for more modest sums.
Working with Hitler made Riefenstahl a wealthy woman. She never put a stop to their complicity, and it continued during the war years. For Lowlands, she even haggled with her star, Minetti, over his acting fee. In December 1941, she tried to make him understand that he could no longer count on a daily payment. Arrangements of this kind were standard for films produced by the “industry,” she explained, but not for Riefenstahl Film Inc. She offered him a lump sum, which worked to her financial advantage. Many of the people who appeared in this film did not cost anything. Once again, she had brought in the Sarntal peasants. The filming was taking too long for the peasants, who had to get home and harvest their crops, so they shaved off their beards, figuring that they would no longer look presentable for the camera. This ploy backfired, however: the makeup artist pasted fake beards on their faces and the filming went on. Riefenstahl evidently could not imagine what it meant to delay the harvest in a period of food rationing.
Maxglan, a district of Salzburg, had been a traditional gathering place for Sinti and Roma people. Barbed wire was placed around the site, and the Roma and Sinti were brought from other regions in Austria to be transported to Poland. Riefenstahl, who was intent on using any available resources for her art, had no apparent qualms about selecting her extras from this camp. Survivors testified that it was the director herself who chose the extras. In addition, she had Roma and Sinti brought to Mittenwald from the “Gypsy camp” in Berlin-Marzahn. Because these inmates were forbidden to use public transportation, Riefenstahl’s production company arranged a travel permit for them. For the interior shots, which began in the studios in Babelsberg in April 1942, she worked exclusively with Sinti and Roma from Marzahn. The camp in Marzahn had existed since the spring of 1936. On the occasion of the Olympic Games, the capital had been made “Gypsy-free.” Hundreds of Roma and Sinti were brought to the outskirts of the city, into the concentration camp in Marzahn. Reimar Gilsenbach and Otto Rosenberg have analyzed Riefenstahl’s use of the Roma and Sinti by examining a list of the extras from the camp in Marzahn who were subject to taxation.36 Riefenstahl Film Inc. drew up a detailed list of the “social compensatory levies for the Gypsies in making the film Lowlands” beginning on April 27, 1942. The list contains the names of sixty-five Sinti and Roma from the camp in Marzahn, not including the children, who probably received no wages for their work. Gilsenbach used the stills from Lowlands to track the Gypsies from Marzahn down to the death ledgers of Auschwitz and identified twenty-nine former Riefenstahl extras among the deportees. The ledgers of the Auschwitz concentration camp administration, some of which have been preserved, made it possible to determine the prisoner numbers. In sixteen cases, their deaths were expressly noted. “The Gypsies, both adults and children, were our darlings. We saw nearly all of them after the war. The work with us was the most beautiful time of their lives, they told us.”37 That is the version provided by “Aunt Leni,” as they called Riefenstahl. Undoubtedly the prisoners had hoped that Aunt Leni, who got along so well with Hitler, would put in a word with him on behalf of her new friends. However, once they had played the roles of Spanish peasants and maidservants, they were brought to the extermination camp. To find her way into the role of Gypsy Marta, Riefenstahl had requested Gypsies from the camp, dressed them as Mediterranean types, and instructed them to applaud her dancing. Then they had done their part. This is particularly horrifying in the case of the many gleeful-looking children in the film. In none of her other productions had Riefenstahl demonstrated more clearly that she had no qualms about victimizing people for her own ends.
It was the beginning of the end in Berlin, and Riefenstahl left town. Her villa was still intact, but she was not willing to face defeat. In November 1943, she turned her back on Berlin and would never return to her hometown for any extended period of time. A year and a half later—on March 1, 1945—the Berlin office of Riefenstahl Film Inc. on Harzer Strasse in Neukölln would be closed down. In the late fall of 1943, she moved to the vicinity of Kitzbühel with a great deal of film footage and several crew members. She had bought a house there. Haus Seebichl was a magnificent property with a large screening room, a sound mixing studio, several editing rooms, and ample living space for her crew. The Tyrol and Vorarlberg regions were still considered the “air-raid shelters of the Reich,” and anyone who had made it here could be considered lucky.
In Kitzbühel, Riefenstahl was safe from air raids but she was plagued by severe abdominal pain, and her two visits to Dr. Morell in Salzburg brought no relief. She also suffered from heartache. During the filming she had met Peter Jacob, who was acting as a stand-in for Bernhard Minetti in a riding scene. Jacob was a first lieutenant with the mountain infantry, and had been awarded the Iron Cross in the French campaign. He was spending his vacation in Mittenwald when the two of them met in 1940. Jacob was seven years younger than Riefenstahl, a dashing daredevil well-versed in war and love. “Never had I known such passion, never had I been loved like this. This experience was so profound that it changed my life.”38 Jacob surprised her with his visits, humiliated her with his infidelity, and made her roller coaster between the depths of unhappiness and the heights of bliss. Riefenstahl had no peace of mind. She feared for his safety and went crazy with jealousy. She kept wondering whether he would survive the war. She was constantly tormented by the idea that he was cheating on her. When they were together, their happiness was short-lived.
On March 21, 1944, Riefenstahl married Jacob in Kitzbühel. This wartime marriage was ill-fated. Jacob was her Achilles. Her descriptions of their love sound as though she was playing the role of Penthesilea in real life, complete with the war as well as the love. Riefenstahl was a very famous woman known for her stern assertiveness. Jacob, by contrast, was one of the many officers who enjoyed passing the time between his deployments with beautiful women in fine hotels. Riefenstahl was barely recognizable in her weakness and vulnerability. Jacob defeated and wounded her. Even so, she loved him and believed that he belonged to her alone. Riefenstahl seemed to be losing her identity as she desperately clung to the idea of a future with Jacob now that a future with Hitler was no longer possible. Riefenstahl was ravaged by physical and emotional suffering, but she kept crawling back to Jacob. She proudly bore his name, and called herself Leni Riefenstahl-Jacob.
On June 6, 1944, the Allies landed in Normandy, and on August 25, Paris was retaken by the Allied troops. Even in the summer of 1944, a period that was marked by military catastrophes for the Germans, Riefenstahl was able to continue her work on Lowlands. Everyone scrambled to comply with her wishes. If it looked as though one of her demands could not be met, her crew would mention that Riefenstahl would bring up the subject with Bormann or Julius Schaub, Hitler’s chief aide, and she got what she wanted.
On August 7, Hans Hinkel received an inquiry as to whether the Riefenstahl film ought to be “combed through”—that is, examined for men and objects that would be fit for use in combat. He sent a handwritten reply: “yes (in a nice way).”39 For the fearsome Hinkel, that was a remarkably friendly directive, one that suggests he had been instructed to handle Riefenstahl with kid gloves. On August 11, Hinkel, whom Goebbels had appointed Reich Commissioner for Total Military Service, wrote a letter to Riefenstahl explaining that in his new capacity, he had to ensure that objects and people were being properly economized, and asked her to send him a list of her employees at her earliest convenience. Ten days later, she complied with his request, indicating that she could not do without most of her twenty crew members. As Minetti flippantly remarked, not even a cable carrier was deemed dispensable in this film. This self-serving gesture also saved her crew from having to join the military.
In the case of one cameraman, Willy Zielke, Riefenstahl had no interest in shielding him from military service. The relationship between these two is hard to fathom. According to one version, Zielke had fallen in love with Riefenstahl and later sought to take revenge on her by revealing her wheelings and dealings. Another version has Riefenstahl turning on the charm with Zielke to win him over as a member of her crew. This latter version is supported by the fact that she sold and published many of his photographs under her own name. There is no doubt that she had more to gain from their association than he did. In Zielke’s account of the events, she recognized his artistic potential immediately after seeing The Steel Animal and took advantage of his skills by bringing him on board and having him work for her. In May 1936, he signed a contract to work on Olympia and filmed the prologue at the Curonian Spit. After he submitted his footage and received his fee, he was taken into custody and brought to an asylum in Haar, on the outskirts of Munich, where he underwent forced sterilization.40 His wife, Ilse, stated that Zielke’s guardian claimed that Riefenstahl was granted all decision-making authority over his future. Riefenstahl insisted that she went to great lengths to get Zielke out of the institution and agreed to assume personal responsibility for him.41 She conveniently ignored the issue of his forced sterilization. Zielke claimed that after his release, Riefenstahl invited him to Haus Seebichl, when she needed a cameraman for Lowlands. Despite the food shortage, there was always plenty of good food on hand at Riefenstahl’s house. In her library, he discovered American illustrated books in which his photographs were published under her name. Riefenstahl also had a copy of The Steel Animal. He was afraid of this woman and her power. Ilse Zielke, who had followed her husband to Kitzbühel, confirmed these details in a letter to Riefenstahl’s publisher in April 1988.42 In a personal discussion between the two women, Riefenstahl insisted that Zielke was ill, and she had brought him into the project and asked him to work on her film purely out of pity because “people like that are often the ones who have a great imagination and some of that can be used.”43 At that moment, Ilse realized that Riefenstahl intended to use her husband to inspire her own artistic imagination. Because he was classified as insane, he did not have to be listed in the credits. Willy Zielke stood no chance of emerging as a threatening competitor.
One month before the end of the war—on April 8, 1945—Riefenstahl sent a telegram to the Reich Cultural Chamber in Berlin asking to be informed when Minetti, whom she had asked to come to Kitzbühel five days earlier, had left. The world was going up in flames, and all she could think of was Lowlands. Riefenstahl and many of her biographers have regarded this single-minded focus as a flight from the terrifying reality.44 That may have been true to an extent, but the major driving force behind her actions lay elsewhere: Once Hitler was no longer in power, she would have to go back to hawking her projects to the industry. She could not imagine having to watch her costs in shooting a film. Riefenstahl tried to get whatever she could, right down to the last day.
She had lost the battle for her last feature film. In spite of all her efforts and all the generous support, Lowlands was a stillbirth. Minetti matter-of-factly pointed to the reason: Riefenstahl had the audacity to act even though she was not an actress. Behind the camera she was energetic and spirited, but on film she seemed tense and uncertain.
In the final months of the war, Riefenstahl and Albert Speer closed ranks. They did not dare to think in terms of defeat and seemed intent on reassuring each other that everything would be all right. “I would be so happy to see you again; why not come here for a little relaxation,” she wrote to him. “A cute little attic room is always waiting for you.”45 Riefenstahl figured she would worry about curing her illness once peacetime had arrived. “An eerie creative urge is living inside me. No matter how many great and beautiful works of art I have yet to create—they are all dormant within me, waiting for the right time. Soon the great turning point in this war will be coming; I feel it.” She was probably imagining that the latest weaponry would bring the war to a quick end.
On July 20, 1944, the day on which Claus Schenck Graf von Stauffenberg tried to kill Hitler, Riefenstahl was at her father’s grave in Berlin. Alfred Riefenstahl had died of heart failure at the age of sixty-six. He had worked in the company he founded until his death. Since the beginning of the war, hundreds of thousands of Poles were in Germany as forced laborers. As the shortage of manpower continued to increase, the National Socialists brought Soviet prisoners of war to Germany as forced laborers. Beginning in 1942, they were subject to Ostarbeitererlasse (decrees on Eastern workers), which confined them to locked, fenced-in settlements and affirmed the racial superiority of the German workers. In February 1943, Riefenstahl’s company had 115 Germans and 84 foreigners on the payroll. Thanks to the outstanding connections Leni Riefenstahl had maintained to Albert Speer, the Reich minister of armaments and war production, her father’s company had secured assignments of strategic importance for the war effort. To a lesser extent, the company worked on projects involving heating for industrial purposes. “Most of the assignments entailed heating and sanitary provisions for living areas, mostly barracks for foreigners. . . . There is no denying that this business is important for the war.” The report quoted here reflects the state of the company’s assignments as of February 1943, with sales amounting to 1.4 million reichsmarks.46 This report, dated February 22, 1943, was issued at the request of the military registration office in Wilmersdorf. Heinz Riefenstahl, chief engineer and technical director of the company, would be drafted unless there were compelling economic grounds to exempt him from military service. As a plant manager, he was classified as uk (unabkömmlich, indispensable) until February 1943. However, anonymous complaints about him had been trickling in for years. In early 1943 they grew more frequent, and once his explanations began to contradict one another, his uk status was rescinded.
Heinz was a good-looking man, and his sister loved him. In contrast to her, he had not been able to stand up to his father; he had become an engineer and taken over his father’s business. Together with the architect Eckart Muthesius, he had spent time in India and installed an air conditioner in a maharaja’s palace, and from then on he proudly called himself an air-conditioning specialist. That might sound intriguing and modern, but Heinz lived in the shadow of his sister. He enjoyed lavish living, charming women, and showing off with Leni. Of course he socialized with party members, and the Riefenstahl name opened every door to him. Heinz was a golden boy of National Socialist society. This father of two children was divorced in 1942, and was now enjoying his freedom to the hilt. It did not occur to him to act any differently in times of war, and he had no intention of cutting back on his glamorous lifestyle, which aroused envy. Espionage and intrigue were pervasive in National Socialist society, and brought about his denunciation. Complaints were filed about Heinz’s lax work day: he did not go to work in the morning until ten o’clock, then went home for lunch at two, took a nap, and did not come back to the office until four in the afternoon. One hour later, he called it a day. He liked to go to concerts conducted by Herbert von Karajan. He used his car for personal travel, which was explicitly prohibited. Even after the defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad, he threw loud parties. The language of his denunciators is studded with malice and hatred. In June 1943, Heinz was recruited for basic training. During the following months, his father made several attempts to get home leave for his son. The grounds cited were bomb damage; Heinz’s key position as the chief engineer at the company, which was imperative for the war effort; and Alfred Riefenstahl’s cardiac ailments. On May 12, 1944, Leni wrote to Speer on this matter. “Dear Mr. Speer, I am asking for your advice and assistance as to how I can help my brother, who has been serving as a soldier on the Eastern Front for a year, and now finds himself in an unbearable situation as a result of anonymous defamations.” As a soldier, he was “treated disgracefully, through no fault of his own, apparently for the sole reason that he is my brother and bears my name.”47 She believed, both before and after 1945, that she and Heinz had been treated badly on purpose. Heinz was sent to the front even though he was already thirty-eight years old. Leni was convinced that her brother was suffering from a “curse.”
The Riefenstahl siblings were well-known throughout Berlin. Leni considered her brother one of her closest friends. She had always tried to smooth his way for him so he would not have to worry. Heinz was a profiteer of the war. His war contracts and the many forced laborers made it possible for him to live in high style. He seemed to think that he was entitled to this life. In the end, neither his sister’s influence nor his father’s letters were enough to save him. Heinz was killed in Russia. The news of his death reached his sister in Kitzbühel after her return from her father’s funeral. With the death of her brother, the war had closed in on Leni Riefenstahl after all.