Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi sympathies ran deeper than she admitted, a new documentary about the director claims

Nazi film propagandist Leni Riefenstahl remained a true believer in the party her entire life and may have played an active role in at least one mass slaughter of Jews, according to a new documentary that seeks to overturn the accepted wisdom about the filmmaker’s Nazi complicity. atrocities.

“Riefenstahl”, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday to rave reviewsis a new look at the “Triumph of the Will” director, who died in 2003 at the age of 101. The film is based on access to Riefenstahl’s personal archive, which was made available to the public only recently after her husband’s death in 2016.

Director Andres Veiel focuses on deconstructing the narrative that Riefenstahl carefully reshaped in the post-war era: that of a naïve German artist who only worked for Hitler because those were the resources available to her, and who was shocked to learn the full extent of Nazi atrocities after the war. Riefenstahl, who later enjoyed a long career as a photographer, encouraged this rehabilitation by publishing her memoirs and commissioning a documentary much more favorable to her in the 1990s.

But Veiel and his producer Sandra Maischberger, who interviewed Riefenstahl for her 100th birthday in 2002, say the picture of the director is not true – and present new evidence they say shows her complicit and at large measure aware of the goals of the Nazis.

“We see it with our populist leaders. They’re just lying,” Veiel told Deadline. Calling his film a “detective story” to uncover the truth about the director, he said both her filming technique and campaign of untruth have modern echoes in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns.

Although Reifenstahl destroyed large portions of her own archives, her records still demonstrate that she continued to maintain good relations with fellow Nazis for decades – including Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and the subject of another recent documentary challenging his post-war rehabilitation efforts — and made comments supporting Nazi ideology to German Nazi sympathizers who contacted her.

He may also have played an active role in a September 1939 massacre of Polish Jews in the town of Końskie, where Riefenstahl was filming Hitler’s invasion of Poland. The city housed about 6,500 Jews before the war, almost all of whom were expelled and later perished in the Treblinka camp.

On the day Riefenstahl visited, Nazi soldiers would slaughter 22 Jews. She would later deny that she had any knowledge of the murders. But citing a letter from Riefenstahl’s files, the documentary says her stage directions — specifically an order interpreted as “Get rid of the Jews” — probably fueled the mass murder.

As part of her post-war correspondence, the director also kept a handy folder titled “Jews” – filled with negative letters she received from Jews.

Riefenstahl kept much of this from the public after the war and continued to be celebrated by the American film communitydue to his innovative filming techniques used in ‘Triumph’, ‘Olympia’ and other Nazi-era films.

Several other Venice premieres this year also deal with Nazi and Holocaust themes, including a new documentary about Jerry Lewis’ unreleased Holocaust film The Day The Clown Cried; “Marco, the Invented Truth,” a drama about Spanish fraudster Enric Marco, who falsely claimed to have survived concentration camps and became a spokesman for Spanish Holocaust survivors; and “The Brutalist,” a historical drama starring Adrien Brody as a Holocaust survivor who becomes an architect.

Another film premiere, “September 5,” is a drama about the 1972 Munich Olympics, where 11 Israeli athletes were killed by Palestinian terrorists – and where Riefenstahl also worked as a photographer.