The Talkies
'Riefenstahl' unearths new truths about the most famous Nazi propagandist
By By Sonia Rao The Washington Post
Published Sept. 22, 2025
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Leni Riefenstahl wanted to be remembered.
The German filmmaker, who directed the infamous 1935 Nazi propaganda film "Triumph of the Will" that was commissioned by Adolf Hitler, intended for her estate to return to her birthplace, Berlin, after her death. She died in 2003, but it wasn't until her longtime partner, cinematographer Horst Kettner, died in 2016 that Riefenstahl's former secretary donated 700 boxes containing fragments of her 101 years - home movies, photographs, handwritten letters and secret phone recordings - to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees museums and cultural institutions in the German capital.
When journalist Sandra Maischberger learned of this acquisition, she struck a deal with the institution: She would provide the personnel to organize all the materials so long as she could then use her findings for a documentary. Though Riefenstahl was known to be friends with Hitler, she maintained that she hadn't been aware at the time of the atrocities he had planned. Maischberger tried to get the truth out of Riefenstahl when she interviewed her in 2002, but she recently told The Washington Post that "I didn't get anywhere because she was lying, obviously." The documentary would serve as another chance.
"Riefenstahl," examines the rarely seen artifacts in the filmmaker's estate to better understand why she behaved as she did. How did this woman come to align herself with prominent Nazi leaders? Why did she continue to deny her knowledge of the Holocaust years after the fact? Did she ever feel remorse for her choices, or did she delude herself into believing her own lies?
The film also pulls from archival footage, including a startling clip of Riefenstahl's 1976 appearance on a talk show opposite Elfriede Kretschmer, a woman her age who was an anti-Nazi activist during World War II. Kretschmer found it hard to believe Riefenstahl's past ignorance, stating that "no one who lived in a big city can claim that they didn't know what was happening." She said she would have turned down the film commission, to which Riefenstahl snapped: "No one would have refused. Back then, the whole world was enthralled by Hitler."
Given that the dialogue took place 30 years after the Nuremberg trials, one might have expected the studio audience to gasp at Riefenstahl's remarks. Instead, people applauded. Emboldened by their support, Riefenstahl continued to speak. "These days," she said, "it's much more difficult for those who didn't know because no one believes them."
Moments like this inspired director Andres Veiel to sign on to the project and dive deeper into Riefenstahl's psychology.
"I thought, it's not enough to just stage a new tribunal and point at her and say, 'Oh, she is lying,'" he told The Post. "She is something like a prototype of fascism."
When "Riefenstahl" premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where Riefenstahl herself had been honored several times at the peak of her career. Maischberger recruited Veiel for the project after witnessing how he turned archival footage into a compelling portrait of the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys in the 2018 film "Beuys." When it came to "Riefenstahl," Maischberger recalled thinking, Veiel "would not only be able to handle the 700 boxes [of artifacts] but to turn what he finds into his own artwork." He was also a politically minded filmmaker and studied psychology in school - characteristics that made him a savvy fit for the task at hand.
Veiel had long been interested in the German psyche and how it has (and hasn't) evolved over the years. As a longhaired teen in 1970s Germany, he used to encounter people who didn't hesitate to tell him, "You're so ugly. Hitler forgot to gas you," he said, explaining that they belonged to a generation that was "fed up with the German guilt issue" following WWII. This happened to him around the same time that Riefenstahl was applauded on television for deflecting accusations of complicity in the Holocaust.
"Riefenstahl was something like a role model for this generation, delivering some sort of relief: 'Well, she's one of us. Nobody has the right to point [fingers] at the great artists. Stop all this complaining about the German past. We want to be a proud nation again,'" Veiel said. "It's something that sounds very familiar. It sounds so topical. It sounds so current."
"Triumph of the Will" depicts a 1934 Nazi rally held in Nuremberg and attended by roughly 700,000 people. Riefenstahl was praised at the time for her artistic vision, which included an indelible aerial shot of Nazis marching in a strict formation that Veiel said was about "staging power and staging strength and staging fear." Her next major film, "Olympia," documents the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. She utilized advanced filmmaking techniques - involving numerous camera angles, tracking shots and footage captured underwater - to celebrate the human body in a manner that has continued to influence sports photography.
But there are menacing undertones to "Olympia" as well, Veiel said, especially as it relates to Nazi eugenics.
"She always said, 'Well, it's an unpolitical film. "Olympia" is just showing the beauty of bodies,'" Veiel explained. "Push aside that Adolf Hitler shows up 26 times in the film. You have the celebration of beauty, strength and healthiness, but the dark side is the contempt. The disdain for the weak, the contempt for the so-called 'other.' 'We and them.' It's always that separation."
While poring over the estate, Veiel, Maischberger and their team of researchers looked for concrete evidence that Riefenstahl was aware of the Third Reich's crimes. "Even though she destroyed a lot of things in her estate … she left enough for us to be sure that she not only was a political mind, but she was already a fascist before she even met Hitler," Maischberger said. They filled in the gaps with additional research. When they realized there was a section missing from a 1934 interview Riefenstahl gave the Daily Express, they looked up the article in the U.K. newspaper's archives and found that, despite later claiming otherwise, she stated in it that she "became an enthusiastic national socialist" after reading a single page of "Mein Kampf."
The documentary also includes horrifying revelations about Riefenstahl's involvement in the deaths of Jewish people. While she previously admitted to witnessing German soldiers execute Polish Jews during the 1939 German invasion of Poland, the film suggests that her actions may have factored into their deaths. Riefenstahl was there as a war correspondent and, while setting up a shot, ordered that the Jewish people forced to work nearby be "removed" from the vicinity. A letter in her estate, written by a junior officer, says her words were interpreted by German soldiers as an order to shoot the Jewish civilians.
Despite Riefenstahl's involvement in Nazi atrocities, Veiel argued that "there should be access" to her films - but for educational purposes only. You can trace some modern camera techniques to "Triumph of the Will," including the type of low-angle shots Veiel detected while watching recent footage of Russian President Vladimir Putin and soldiers marching in Moscow parades.
"We have to learn how manipulation works," Veiel said. "We have to watch Leni Riefenstahl."
In Germany, Veiel has noticed similarly divisive rhetoric from the far-right Alternative for Germany political party, which has made recent gains in the nation. But when "Riefenstahl" premiered in Venice, the filmmakers were approached by audience members from all over the world who said the story resonated with their home country's political situation.
The ideology espoused in Riefenstahl's work is "like a prophecy of what we're now experiencing today in many, many countries," Veiel said. "Editing the film, I learned that it's not only a film about the present. It's [also] like a warning out of the future."
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