Hitler Confidant Leni Riefenstahl Always Said She Was Just a Filmmaker. A New Doc Reveals the Truth

Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, has been the subject of slews of documentaries over the years, many attempting to unravel the truth about her relationship with the Nazi party. Was the director of Hitler-boosting propaganda film Triumph of the Will the commissioned artist that she claims to be, unaware that the Holocaust was occurring as her cameras rolled? That’s what she told Vanity Fair in a 1984 interview, claiming then that her work for the dictator was just a gig. “If Stalin had invited me to Moscow to make a movie about the Russian army, if Roosevelt had said, ‘Come to America, make a documentary on the navy,’ I would have gone,” she said then.

“Maybe for Stalin,” Sandra Maischberger says skeptically. “She would have found something there to admire, as well.” The journalist, talk show host, and writer is the producer of new documentary Riefenstahl, which seeks to debunk the late filmmaker’s claims that she was unfairly targeted—canceled, as some might say today—for her eagerness to collaborate with a fascist regime. “She was the victim,” Maischberger says of claims Riefenstahl made in the decades after World War II. “She would talk in a very different way in interviews,” but that was not “the real Leni Riefenstahl. That one, she tried to hide.”

Maischberger interviewed Riefenstahl before the filmmaker’s death in 2003 at the age of 101, and says it was a dissatisfying experience that’s always stayed with her. She spent two days with Riefenstahl at her home in Bavaria, but “when I left the house, I knew that she was lying, but I was not so sure about what she was really exactly lying.”

“When she told me she was a completely apolitical person and did not know what happened in the 40s—all the atrocities—did she lie to me, or had she been lying to herself for such a long time that she couldn’t understand what was the truth and what was not true?”

Maischberger had a chance to resolve that, after Riefenstahl’s husband, Horst Kettner, died in 2016. From her time in their home, she knew that it was packed to the gills with tape recordings, photos, and papers; Riefenstahl was as much a documentarian of her own life as she was anyone’s. “I tried to get hold of the estate, and I succeeded. So I said ‘Okay, let’s try and see what it’s what is in there. In the 700 boxes there may be the answers to my questions.”