LENI IS A DOG
she is such a liar...
shareShe made fantastic movies even if she was a liar about her relationship with the Nazis, which I don't think she is. A lot of people worked for the Nazis because that was the German government. She probably didn't care about using prisoners to work for her, but what would they be doing if they weren't involved in making her movie. Pick and shovel? Lay around in your cell? Be abused? Work in a war materials factory? If I were a prisoner I'd jump at the chance to work on a movie rather than 'normal' prisoner life.
shareAh, but would you work on that movie if you knew you would be sent to Auschwitz afterwards? For the moment, let's leave aside the question of whether Leni herself knew they were destined for Auschwitz. The prisoners were never informed by anybody who did know-- and that was common Nazi practice. I have a very hard time believing Leni didn't already understand that.
In any case, surely she understood the basic nature of what had happened to these people. For the mere reason of belonging to a particular ethnic group, not for anything they had done personally, they were dragged from their homes,
imprisoned in a place they would never have chosen to live themselves, given poor food and very little medical treatment, and no choice whatsoever in employment.
Without question, Leni knew all that.
She also knew she could have defected to the West at any time.
I'm not saying she deserved to be executed, but she certainly deserved a worse fate than the one she ended up with. Her particular crimes weren't even nearly as bad as those of many other Nazis who got off even easier. But those were almost all male; among female Nazis, her particular misdeeds shine brightly. Her name will live in infamy.
"I don't deduce, I observe."
Only Leni Riefenstahl knew if she did know anything or not about the Nazi regime.
To say the contrary is pretentious, playing an omnipresent god.
I believe that in this matter, the film "Nichts als die Wahrheit" (Nothing but the Truth, or After the Truth, 1999)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0178223/
would shed some light.
In this fictional account of what would had happened if Dr. Josef Mengele were to be judged, the character is quite clearly when he says that he acted according to the common medical notions or ethics of his times. And I believe that something similar happened in Leni Riefenstahl's case, with the difference that as far as we know she did not kill or torture anyone.
Consider she maybe starting making films glorifying the National Socialist party before the atrocities that they committed. At that point she was considered a hero among the party for her films and she was potentially afraid of leaving for the sake of her becoming an enemy for it seeming like she was a Nazi icon that was abandoning her passion. I'm not saying thats the case by any means, just playing devils advocate. But I think its not as easy as just "defecting whenever you want to" like some people suggest.
"Even though I'm no more than a monster - don't I, too, have the right to live? " -Oh Dae-Su