Fantastic Lies

Annalisa Zox-Weaver reviews Andres Veiel’s 2024 documentary about Hitler’s favorite filmmaker.

By Annalisa Zox-WeaverNovember 6, 2025

• Film

• History

DOCUMENTARY FILMS SHARE many qualities with trials. Both are about performance and drama, about speaking to an audience and creating a narrative. Both represent only versions of the truth. Like trials, documentaries present selective evidence about their subjects and operate in a moral domain. In their new documentary about Nazi Germany’s premier filmmaker, Riefenstahl, director Andres Veiel and producer Sandra Maischberger present new witnesses on Leni Riefenstahl’s behalf: the postwar German public, whose sympathetic and indignant letters, autograph requests, deliveries of flowers, and money she accumulated until her death in 2003 at the age of 101.

Most startling is the archive of recorded phone calls, many of which poured in after Riefenstahl appeared in televised interviews over the course of her 50-year campaign to salvage her reputation as a filmmaker. Veiel layers the audio of this strong postwar support over footage of an elderly Riefenstahl puttering around her alpine-style home in Pöcking, a lakeside village in Bavaria, where she lived with her devoted collaborator and partner, Horst Kettner. Like the letter writers who reassure her that “the majority of West Germans” are on her side, callers affirm that they stand admiringly with her against the “swine” that criticize her. One caller comforts her by confessing that he, too, was oblivious of the Holocaust; another dreams of a “return to morality” for the German people (Riefenstahl agrees). More than anything, Riefenstahl underscores the fact that—even as Riefenstahl was a pariah of world cinema, sued, reviled, and boycotted—support from the German public was durable and vociferous for decades after the war ended.

Though many of these televised interviews are available on YouTube, Veiel’s context elucidates the various contortions and convolutions Riefenstahl underwent in trying to exculpate herself. An interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Other Voices in 1965 shows the director highly agitated, chewing the back of her hand, barely able to lift her eyes to her interlocutor, and finally throwing her palm up to block the lingering gaze of the camera. A 1976 interview pits Riefenstahl against a contemporary, Elfriede Kretschmer, a working-class German woman and anti-Nazi activist who condemns Riefenstahl’s “Pied Piper” movies, characterizing them as being “against all of humanity.” Riefenstahl defends her decision to make films commissioned by the Nazis, clapping back, “[N]o one would have refused. Back then, the whole world was enthralled by Hitler”—a response that (shockingly) receives hearty applause from the studio audience. When a 1982 French television show refuses to cut wartime footage of Jewish people being rousted and beaten on the street, Riefenstahl walks off the set. The interviewer lets the camera linger on an empty chair. Always on defense, Riefenstahl loved nothing more than to dominate both sides of the camera, trying on a series of performances—artist-naïf, combative victim, unwitting scapegoat, tenacious gorgon. The close-ups in these interviews are excruciating.

Riefenstahl’s photogenic face served her well as a Weimar starlet. It is appropriate, then, that Veiel rolls through several sequences of photographs aging Riefenstahl across time—from Arnold Fanck’s chiseled, beatific ingenue to an aging Norma Desmond agonizing over the right lighting and angle. As she ages, her appearance becomes almost a caricature. Her eyes, a bit too close-set, look beady and deranged as her face adopts the Joker’s mask of paranoia. By the end of Riefenstahl, she is less compelling for how she looks than for what she has seen and what she has confected for so many others to see. That Riefenstahl’s version of Hitler remains the Hitler most people recognize speaks to her unrivaled cinematic alchemy.

With unprecedented access to Riefenstahl’s archives, Veiel revisits pressing questions about her participation in the glorification of the Third Reich, the extent of her knowledge of the camps, and her response after the war, when the Allied forces declared her a fellow traveler, a designation that basically amounted to an acquittal. With the benefit of this archival material, Riefenstahl takes a more deliberate approach than its most prominent predecessor, Ray Müller’s The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993). Who can forget the scene of Müller’s aggressive questioning in the Berlin Olympic Stadium, where Riefenstahl had captured Jesse Owens’s athletic victories and documented Hitler receiving official recognition by parades of international athletes? Asked about making Triumph of the Will (1935) and its little-known and thoroughly mediocre antecedent The Victory of Faith (1933), Riefenstahl becomes demonstrably offended. She shakes Müller and then whirls away from the camera, shouting, “It’s hard to keep it separate. I’m happy to talk about it but not in this bloody light.” Veiel benefits from footage that did not make the final cut of Müller’s film. One scene in particular pulls the curtain up on Riefenstahl’s efforts to control the narrative. Though she demands that the camera be turned off, Müller lets it roll. Unaware she is being filmed, she wavers from docile subject to petulant child over inconsistencies in her own jumbled narrative about her relationship to Hitler’s minister for public enlightenment and propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

Producer Sandra Maischberger interviewed Riefenstahl one year before her death and was left with the impression of a Faustian figure who used her filmmaking talent to insidious ends. It is appropriate, then, that Veiel and Maischberger use Riefenstahl’s own greatest skill to discredit her: editing. A volley of juxtaposed scenes makes easy pickings, exposing Riefenstahl’s pathological inability to admit she had ever been anything but a credulous, uncurious aesthete. Against her persistent proclamations of innocence, the film presents opposing evidence from her own archive. In one example of such surgical strikes, Riefenstahl speaks of her efforts to preserve the purity of the Nuba people of Sudan, whose lives and customs she documented in the 1960s as part of her campaign to distance herself from the Nazi regime. (The result was two lavish coffee-table books, 1973’s The Last of the Nuba and 1976’s The People of Kau.) She describes her work in pious terms, explaining that she used long-distance lenses to capture the Nubas’ way of life without introducing the corrupting influence of civilization. Veiel slaps down this brazen lie with incriminating footage of Riefenstahl directing them to perform for the camera, orchestrating scenes, overseeing wrestling matches, circulating among them in a swimsuit, even handing out candy to an eager cluster of children gathering around her for more.

As Veiel shows, Riefenstahl—a shrewd operator with a watchful eye—knew a lot more than she let on. When it comes to the burning question of what she knew about Nazi atrocities, Veiel gives ample attention to the two most damning cases against her, both of which are appalling but not new testimony. The first pertains to Riefenstahl’s fleeting stint as a “war correspondent,” during which she witnessed a massacre of Polish Jews. In her thoroughly venal and insufferably melodramatic autobiography, published in 1987, Riefenstahl recalls her effort to “make [her]self useful in a war” by taking her “little film crew” to do some combat reporting. In reality, as her shrewd biographer Steven Bach notes, a “Special Riefenstahl Film Unit” was fully accredited, Hitler-approved, and supported by the propaganda ministry—complete with an SS escort. On Hitler’s trail, Riefenstahl found herself in Końskie, Poland, in September 1939, where—as Veiel tells it—her request to have some gravediggers removed from her promotional shot of Wehrmacht soldiers on the Polish campaign was resolved through their prompt execution. Among the evidence of that day, a snapshot of Riefenstahl captured by an amateur photographer stands out. Once again, her face provides the most telling evidence. Framed between two soldiers, Riefenstahl wears a grimace of horror at what she sees. We know from Bach’s biography that she was a firsthand witness to Nazi atrocities in Końskie on September 12 but proceeded to join Hitler in a celebratory lunch for his victory over Danzig on September 19.

Veiel’s other smoking gun is the shameful but now well-documented account of the making of her last feature film, Tiefland (1954), an allegorical tale with roots in Spanish opera and a rehash of Riefenstahl’s perennial contrast between the spoiled, decadent lowlands and the simple world of peasant mountain life. Riefenstahl wrote, directed, produced, and starred in Tiefland, again playing the much pursued, seduced, and beset romantic interest. She started work on the film in 1934, shelved it to make propaganda for Hitler, then worked on it intermittently with the support of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, finishing it in 1944. Seeking authenticity in casting, Riefenstahl originally wanted to hire Spanish extras. When filming was forced to relocate from Spain to the Dolomites, Riefenstahl agreed to hire (for their “Mediterranean coloring”) Sinti and Romani extras, many of whom were later extinguished at Auschwitz.

Scandal arose long before the film’s premiere in 1954. On May 1, 1949, Revue magazine accused Riefenstahl of casting the extras straight out of the Maxglan internment camp. She promptly sued the publication. Mastering the performance of umbrage, Riefenstahl’s defense was met with supportive laughter and applause in the courtroom. Durable German racism against the Sinti and Romani served the filmmaker well, and Revue was fined for printing libelous statements. But Riefenstahl was entangled in lawsuits and recriminations over Tiefland casting for the rest of her life. In 1982, the German documentary film Time of Darkness and Silence presented witnesses from Maxglan recalling being handpicked by the director, who later refused to intervene as filming ended and the “extras” were shipped back to face certain death. Veiel skips the lurid details and goes straight for the kill, quoting Riefenstahl’s glib gesture of self-defense: “I’m not saying Gypsies need to lie, but really, who’s more likely to lie under oath: me or the Gypsies?”

Veiel has clearly mined the Riefenstahl estate’s rich corpus of primary materials, which Kettner donated in full to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin upon his death in 2016. Some 700 boxes of archives were bequeathed to the museum—though, ever the editor, Riefenstahl is suspected of having destroyed many of the records that would have offered the most damning evidence. Try as Veiel might, he can only produce so much fresh verification of Riefenstahl’s machinations, and the new revelations are few. What remains—early drafts of her memoir, private correspondence, film reels, newspaper clippings, cassette recordings—presents the world as Riefenstahl saw it, giving a more sympathetic shape to her character.

Material about her childhood indicates that she was abused by her father and presided over by a dictatorial stage mother. Riefenstahl discusses her angry authoritarian father at length in her memoirs, but here we see Super 8 recordings of her life before she became a self-fashioned myth and mythmaker. Veiel presents Riefenstahl as a young woman of immense suffering (an unrelenting theme of her memoirs). In highlighting her struggle, Veiel perpetuates Riefenstahl’s own victimology as a constantly harassed woman masochistically devoted to her work, and sadistically persecuted by everyone from the Nazi Party to Susan Sontag. An inventory of suffering, Riefenstahl’s memoir is the autobiographical equivalent of Triumph of the Will—repetitive, tedious, a paean to narcissism. Veiel recounts her claims that she was raped by her tennis teacher, that Goebbels tried to rape her several times, that she has been endlessly persecuted and punished. In rehashing these grievances, Veiel does not necessarily ask the audience to forgive her for creating the foremost artistic example of Nazi propaganda but rather to consider what her own claims to have experienced trauma might do for our perception of her accountability and worthiness of exoneration.

Riefenstahl makes extensive use of clips from Triumph of the Will and Olympia (1938), as well as dozens of photos of Riefenstahl as an iridescent beauty and athletic movie star. Thus, inevitably, Riefenstahl comes across as dazzling because Riefenstahl and her body of work indisputably are. Veiel opens with footage of Riefenstahl playing Junta in The Blue Light (1932), her first feature. Heavily filtered, cerulean-saturated, the scene presents “a wild, innocent mountain girl” in the glittering crystal cave, a mountain site of mystical communion to which she enjoys singular access. Unlike the villagers, she does not seek to exploit the cave for material gain. But envy at her privilege leads the villagers to persecute and eventually kill Junta, who dies a beautiful martyr. Having starred in several films by Arnold Fanck, the pioneer of the Bergfilm (the classical mountain film), Riefenstahl knew how to scale the icy massifs against driving snow, soar on skis across pristine white landscapes, and pose her muscular beauty to suggest full Aryan glory. And she did all her own stunts, of course. Enlisting what she had learned on the sets of Storm over Mont Blanc (1930) and S.O.S. Iceberg (1933) and adding her own spin, Riefenstahl created in The Blue Light a cinematic masterpiece of Nazi kitsch. As the film ends, the camera lingers on her face; as she lives, so she dies—mesmerizing the camera, and by extension the audience (and, most importantly, Hitler, who became enthralled while watching her perform in the film).

Triumph of the Will is surely one of the most widely cited films in cinematic history. Excepting the elegant cinematography of the prelude, which features a plane’s silhouette casting shadows over the ancient architecture of Nuremburg, Triumph of the Will is a thoroughly tedious cycle of motorcades, parades, nocturnal rituals, and speechmaking. Though Hitler is Triumph’s pulsating center, Riefenstahl’s highly stylized editing and cinematography ensure that the filmmaking process itself is conspicuous. Acrobatic camerawork and maximal use of cinematic technology guaranteed an avid audience of film students and cineasts for generations.

Olympia, a documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, is even more of a masterpiece. But for a film fundamentally about competition, it shows little real interest in racers jostling to cross the finish line or in the psychological drama athletic rivalry conjures. Olympia’s preoccupation with the exertions of the human form meant that, in spite of playing host to the event, Hitler appears very little in this tribute to muscular, agile athletes. The film is about spectacles, not victories; its interest lies solely in capturing the human body in various displays of strength, endurance, and dexterity, through new heights of cinematic invention and intervention. Tracking shots, close-ups, and dramatic angles were all hard-won through Riefenstahl’s ingenuity, attaching cameras to blimps and balloons, building tracks, digging pits—making her presence and her privilege evident on the stadium field. Veiel understandably features the most glorious of sequences: the high-diving competition, a balletic display enabled by sequentially editing forward and reverse shots and using underwater cameras. Riefenstahl’s painstaking synchronization of movement and sound was a particular point of pride, and we see her delight in this work in a scene of near reverie at her own genius. Exhaustive discussion of the long two years she spent editing Olympia can be found in her memoirs.

Like Triumph of the Will, Olympia features a billowy, poetic opening: statues are animated against the columns and stones of the Parthenon in an homage to the ancient Greek roots of the games and a confirmation of the Third Reich’s ideological consistency with the past. Dissolves and imbricated images conjure a mystical atmosphere as the cameraman shows a Pygmalion wonder world in which statues come to life in a spectacle of anatomical perfection. Avant-garde film artist Willy Zielke shot the bewitching prologue (and other scenes) on location in Greece, but a dispute with Riefenstahl over creative control was resolved by shipping Zielke back to Germany and forcing him into a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed with “severe schizophrenia.” He spent six years in asylums in Munich and Eglfing and was released only after undergoing forced chemical castration. While Zielke was under psychiatric watch, Riefenstahl removed his name from the credits.

Perhaps there would not be as many documentaries on Hitler if the man himself had actually sat in the front row at the Nuremberg trials. Instead, Hermann Göring, the highest-ranking Nazi, and the other perpetrators in the defendants’ dock were there to face their own crimes as well as to serve as proxies for the architect of the war’s atrocities. Across the last 80 years, everyone and everything, including IBM, ordinary Frauen and Herren, and the railroad companies whose tracks led toward the camps, have undergone scrutiny. Leni Riefenstahl provokes particular consternation because of her exceptional role in promoting Hitler and because her unusual longevity gave her 50 years to come clean about what she knew. She remained perversely loyal and indignant until the end.

Riefenstahl demonstrates Maischberger’s conclusions about Hitler’s cinematic darling at age 101: “It wasn’t just the abrupt termination of her dazzling success that she mourned. Rather, she no longer saw any point in practicing an art that did not at the same time glorify the ideology she believed in until the end of her life.” Though she was never a member of the Nazi Party, she was certainly committed to the glorification of its project, to making horror and hate beautiful, and to ensuring that if the Führer enjoyed full cinematic glory, she would be its sublime maker, an eager celebrity and willing monster.