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How did Hitler’s film-maker hide her complicity from the world?

A new documentary delves into controversial German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl’s private archive to uncover a director who spent a lifetime covering up her central role in the Nazi propaganda machine

In 1938, 10 weeks before Kristallnacht, she won best foreign film with Olympia, a two-part documentary of the summer Olympics in Berlin that was commissioned and financed by the Nazi government, overseen by the Reich ministry of propaganda and enlightenment, and released on Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Alongside his producer, the journalist Sandra Maischberger, Veiel was galvanised by the possibility that the material Riefenstahl left for posterity might disclose truths she had skilfully obscured in her lifetime. There were also private letters that proffered previously unseen, and compromising, accounts of Riefenstahl’s stint as a war correspondent in Poland and her witnessing of one of the earliest massacres of Jews, in Końskie in September 1939.

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