Leni Riefenstahl Filming, 1936 | Source: Wikipedia
Source: Jarould (Public domain)
Leni Riefenstahl was Hitler’s favorite film maker.
Multi talented, director, producer, writer, editor, photographer, even starring in her own drama,
Tiefland, (Lowlands).
Film Poster | Source: Wikipedia
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum web site, she began filming Tiefland in 1940. The story is set in the Spanish Pyrenees and shot in Austria.
The selection of “extras” | Source: www.randomhouse.com
To enhance the Gypsy flavor, about 51 young Roma prisoners were borrowed from detention camps in Salzburg and Berlin.
It is claimed that once filming was completed they were shipped to Auschwitz, where most of them perished.
Nazi Propaganda
She is best known for her documentary films of the 1930’s dramatizing the power and pageantry of the Nazi movement. (Britannica)
Poster for Triumph of the Will
In 1935 she produced Triumph of the Will, a documentary study of the Nürnberg 1934 Nazi Party convention, exhibiting Nazi power to the world. (Britannica)
Leni Riefenstahl and her film crew in front of Hitler’s car during a parade in Nürnberg.
The Olympic Games took place in Berlin in 1936 and Leni Riefenstahl’s film, Olympia, released in 1938 to worldwide acclaim, served the propaganda purposes of the Nazi regime, brilliantly.
Film Poster for the Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936
She was a creative genius.
Her skills influenced multitudes to admire, accept and embrace a leader, a movement, a worldview that ultimately led to cruelty, death and destruction on a scale that is unimaginable.
Echos
Staying in my viewing seat, I turn from Europe
in the 1930’s and 40’s and look at the
Americas in March, 2025.
March 26, 2025, Tecoluca, El Salvador, the largest prison in Latin America.
The US Secretary of Homeland Security, in a white T-shirt and navy cap, stands before bars that hold bare chested, tattooed, shaved men, grouped together in the Terrorist Confinement Center at Tecoluca, El Salvador., deported from the USA.
History Does Not Repeat Itself
But It Rhymes
(Often attributed to Mark Twain)
Human beings being used as props, to create,
Spectacle. Propaganda. Power Projection…
Martin Luther King Jr. quoting a cry from Amos 5:24
“But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”