Hitler's image maker

* Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl By Steven BachKnopf, 400 pages; $30

* Leni Riefenstahl: A Life By Jurgen Trimborn, translated from german by Edna McCown, Faber and Faber, 368 pages; $26

by Meir Ronnen, THE JERUSALEM POST, 12/04/2007

I have always found it monstrous that the two most self-serving sycophants of the Nazi regime, Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl, should have escaped justice.

True, Speer spent 20 years in Spandau Prison, from which he smuggled out the diaries that helped make him wealthy; much later he died in bed with a young Nazi groupie in a London hotel, the ultimate last laugh.

Speer eventually admitted that he sold his soul to Hitler because it furthered his ambitions as an architect. In 1942 Hitler appointed him armaments minister, and as the second most powerful man in the Third Reich he prolonged the war and his powerful position in it by encouraging Hitler to believe that he was performing production miracles and the war might yet be won. He was directly responsible for causing the needless loss of millions of lives, apart from the lives of the countless slave laborers he worked to death.

Speer, plausible and gentlemanly, saved his neck by convincing the Nuremberg judges that he was one of their class. Leni Riefenstahl, equally good-looking and plausible, saved her neck by pleading that she admired Hitler the man, without ever looking at what he stood for. Yet she had made the brilliant propaganda films that glorified her F hrer as the transcendent apotheosis of Nazism, beloved of his people. She died at the age of 103, after a postwar career as a maker of documentaries in Africa, still insistent that she had never espoused Nazism.

More than anyone else, it was Speer and Riefenstahl who created the image of Hitler as Germanicus ascendant. Speer stage-managed the settings of the early Nazi mega-rallies, inventing among other things the ring of hundreds of searchlights that formed a dome of light. Riefenstahl recorded these events with innovative cutting techniques and superb coordination of music and cutting, conducting the music herself to fit the tempo of her images. Hitler was delighted with both of them, and their quite separate careers flourished because of their direct access to him and the budgets he always approved.

WITH THE curious serendipity of publishing, two new biographies of Riefenstahl have just been published. Are they justified? Well, for one thing, Riefenstahl's documentary adulations of Hitler and his Reich now serve to show young Germans, among others, just what the road to war and mass murder was like.

Speer and Riefenstahl were early converts. Speer joined the Nazi Party in 1931, and Riefenstahl breathlessly read Mein Kampf after hearing Hitler speak in 1932. She immediately wrote him asking for a meeting.

Hitler, who had admired her looks, acting and the first film she directed, The Blue Light, replied at once and took her for a walk at the seaside. "When we are in power," he said, "you must make my movies." He made a tentative move to take her in his arms and, not getting a reaction, turned aside saying that he was wedded only to Germany's destiny. She told him she did not like his racism. As with so many Riefenstahl stories, the only source for all this is Riefenstahl's corrective and constantly adjusted memoirs. The idea of her challenging Hitler is incredible; all her letters and notes to him are sycophantic in the extreme.

Although she was thrilled by her reading of Mein Kampf, Riefenstahl owed much to early assistance from several of her Jewish lovers. One was Harry Sokal, who was soon to flee Germany and who had taken a risk to help finance The Blue Light. Another Jew, the brilliant Bela Balazs, had reworked the scenario and script, before leaving Germany. The film was rereleased by the Nazis only after his name had been taken off the credits. The first time round, it had been trashed by all the film critics, most of whom were Jews. Things will be different when Hitler takes over, Riefenstahl promised Harry Sokal. Not incidentally, Riefenstahl was a good friend of the ravening anti-Semite Julius Streicher, but later denied it. She used Streicher to avoid paying Balazs his fee.

Restul articolului aici.