Gypsies' fate haunts film muse of Hitler (original) (raw)

As she approaches her 100th birthday this week, Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favourite film-maker, remains the pariah of the German cinema. Her first new movie for almost 50 years has been coolly received, and she faces renewed accusations that she failed to prevent more than 100 Gypsies being sent to die in concentration camps.

Riefenstahl, whose centenary is on Thursday, faces a legal challenge by Gypsies who claim she has lied for decades by insisting that the Gypsy extras she used in her rustic melodrama, Tiefland (Lowlands), all survived the Holocaust. The production was filmed during the Second World War when she was director of Nazi propaganda films, but not completed until 1954. Riefenstahl plays Martha, a Gypsy dancer seduced by an evil nobleman.

She has argued that Tiefland was her apology for her involvement with the Nazis, calling it her 'inner emigration' from the regime.

In Cologne on Friday, however, the pro-Gypsy group, Rome.V, backed by the respected German film-maker Nina Gladitz and writers and academics, alleged that Riefenstahl not only knew most of the extras faced death after filming ended in 1941, but that in some cases she even facilitated the process.

'We have hard evidence from the archives of concentration camps, plus witness statements, to support the claims that Riefenstahl knew about the camps and the fate that awaited her extras,' says Gladitz, 56, who has publicly argued the issue with Riefenstahl for years.

Gladitz claims that Riefenstahl has broken German laws and 'offended the honour of those who died in the Holocaust'.

Gladitz's 1982 film, Time of Darkness and Silence , a co-production with Channel 4, led to a highly publicised court case with Riefenstahl in the mid-Eighties. It resulted in Gladitz having to cut from the film the reference that Riefenstahl allegedly knew the extras would be sent to Auschwitz on the completion of Tiefland .

The allegations go back as far as 1949, when they were made by a German magazine. A Munich court then declared Riefenstahl innocent .

This weekend Riefenstahl's long-term partner and cameraman, Horst Kettner, hit back at the renewed claims, insisting the lawsuit was simply an attempt to ruin her centenary celebrations and to overshadow the release in Berlin last week of Underwater Impressions, a documentary compiled from more than 2,000 deep-sea dives by Riefenstahl.

'This has been closed for 50 years and we're puzzled at what they're accusing Leni of,' he told The Observer from the couple's Bavarian chalet. 'Leni is deeply wounded by these accusations. It seems her enemies are just using the Gypsies to get back at her and spoil her birthday.'

Although Riefenstahl was now prepared to admit that not all her extras had survived, she had had 'no idea that her Gypsies would be murdered', Kettner said. 'She was very sorry when she found out some of them had been murdered, because she had a great relationship with them, and no one treated the Gypsies better than Leni.'

Couldn't she have tried to save them? 'That's ridiculous. She had no idea there was anything to save them from,' he said. Riefenstahl 'deeply regretted the persecution and suffering' the Sinti and Roma Gypsies 'must have suffered under National Socialism'.

Rosa Winter, 79, a Sinti who, like most of the extras, was plucked from a Gypsy holding camp at Max Glan in Austria and forced to take part in the film, said Riefenstahl was responsible for sending her to Ravensbrück concentration camp as a punishment for fleeing the film set, at Mittenwald, in the Bavarian Alps.

Winter ran away after hearing her mother was being sent to that camp, and found her at a police station.

'A very angry Riefenstahl arrived with a high-ranking SS officer and demanded an apology from me. I refused, and she said: "Right, you can go to the concentration camp." My mother went down on her knees to beg Riefenstahl for mercy, but she wouldn't listen,' she told The Observer.

Winter's mother, Maria, was transported to Ravensbrück two days later. Rosa was sent just days later, but never saw her mother again.

'Riefenstahl didn't treat us badly on the set, and we got fed and felt free to a certain extent. But I can never forgive her for the fact that although it was totally in her power to save her extras and knowing the fate they faced, she did nothing,' added Winter, the only member of her 14-strong family to survive the Holocaust, in which 250,000 Gypsies died.

Her daughter, Martl Rosa, 46, said her mother was desperate to see justice done: 'It appears the whole of Germany is celebrating the birthday of this Nazi heroine, while my mother is still awaiting compensation for her internment.'

Gladitz has documented several other cases in which, she says, Riefenstahl was culpable. One involves a girl called Anna Krems, who acted as a stand-in for Riefenstahl after the actress suffered a slight accident.

When Riefenstahl asked her what wish she might grant the child as a reward, Anna asked that her two sisters and a brother in concentration camps should be transferred to a less dangerous holding camp. Riefen-stahl replied: 'Only one.'

'The mother had a tortuous decision to make,' said Gladitz. 'She decided on her son, Matthias, because he suffered from a heart condition.' Even then he was later returned to danger, and he died in Auschwitz.

Anna, now 80, survived, but 'suffered for years from the guilt of having made the wrong wish', Gladitz added.

Other cases include twins who appear in the film and died later as guinea pigs for the Nazi 'scientist' Josef Mengele. Their aunt has survived to tell their story.

Zaezilia Reinhardt, another survivor, said Riefenstahl's insistence that she knew nothing of the concentration camps 'was a cruel lie. She was friends with Hitler. She was very tough. She was not a good person.'

Riefenstahl, who has resisted calls for her to repent over her role as a Nazi filmmaker, remains vital, slim and blonde and is still hailed as a beauty. Exiled from the cinema, she turned to still photography and took up scuba diving in her seventies.

Gladitz said it was important to bring the case to light now because Riefenstahl was 'trying to wipe the last spot of dirt from her holy white clothes as she nears the end of her life. But we won't let her enter the history books as she wants to be remembered'.