Leni Riefenstahl a Nazi Sympathizer?

This week’s rant is on Leni Riefenstahl. Next week will most likely be on a movie. Without further delay:
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As much as I admire Leni Riefenstahl’s talent as an actor and director, there is no question that she’s guilty of being a Nazi sympathizer. There are mounds of evidence to support that, including she herself!

For example, how do we explain the film clips of Riefenstahl dining with Goebbels, Himmler, and other men of the SS branches? Do you mean to tell me that she dined with these Socialist officials and had NO IDEA what they stood for? What they were doing? That she was completely naive and ignorant to the facts? And she may have claimed she never ate at Goebbels’s home, but that’s a lie. Goebbels even states this was so in his diaries. And she was on friendly terms with Hitler all through his rise and time in power, meeting with him numerous times, even as late as 1944.

And I think it’s interesting that although she left the front line in as a war correspondent supposedly over the repulsion of the Wehrmacht brutalities, that just the following year, she sent a telegram to Hitler congratulating him on overtaking France. She said: “Everyone thought the war was over, and in that spirit I sent the cable to Hitler.” Apparently she was able to accept and live with the brutalities Hitler’s regime exacted on others after all.

She even used concentration camp inmates in her films that were later sent to their deaths. And she KNEW about this. She, of course, would deny this, but later when on trial she changed her tune on that little lie, and vowed never to repeat it. 

She was a self-involved opportunist who knew full well that her films were propaganda. She failed to speak out, when others DID speak out.

When facts about the era and her role in it are brought out, she would go on the defensive. She’s even had outbursts where she would grab and physically shake the person interviewing her when facts were brought out that painted her in a negative light.

Are we to believe that “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia” was inspired solely by her desire to be “artistic”? Wrong! How many do we suppose were inspired to join the Nazi cause after that greatest of film propaganda (Triumph) the world has ever known was released? I’m afraid to guess. And Olympia? Despite the naysayers, this was financed by Goebbels’s propaganda ministry.

Riefenstahl knew full well what she was doing and what she was promoting. But she “sold her soul to the Devil” as it were, by turning a blind eye to what the Nazi’s represented, so as to improve on her so-so movie career. She was only doing so-so before Hitler gave her her “break.” She saw an opportunity and took it.

The short of it is, Riefenstahl was, without question, a Nazi sympathizer.