On the evening of September 3, Hitler had boarded an armored train at the Stettin station in Berlin. His destination was the war. His favorite director followed him in a matter of days. As usual, Riefenstahl was surrounded by her confidants, including her current lover, the sound engineer Hermann Storr, as well as Walter Traut, Otto and Guzzi Lantschner, Sepp Allgeier, and four other technicians. In putting together this film crew, Riefenstahl had provided for her emotional and sexual well-being, and set the course for her professional work. Her approach to the films she had made for the National Socialists so far indicated her extreme reluctance to devote her genius to the vile work of reporting from the front. Just a few years earlier, she had made disparaging remarks about this way of making a film, and regarded her own task as creating “artistically constructed” films. Particularly since the international success of the Olympia film, she was unlikely to have changed her mind.
Right from the start the Poles were fighting a losing battle, with Polish cavalry up against German tanks. In a mere two days, the invaders were able to destroy the Polish air force.2 On September 6 the conquest of Krakow was reported, and two days later, the Wehrmacht got to the outskirts of Warsaw. The Polish government had already fled to Lublin. The Germans were confident that they had won the war.
When Riefenstahl headed to Poland, she and her men knew full well that they were entering a country that had already been attacked and defeated. She failed to mention that her mission there was to film for the Führer. A memorandum was issued by the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda on September 10, 1939, concerning the “Riefenstahl Special Film Unit.”3 On September 5, “the Führer issued an order to establish a ‘Riefenstahl Special Film Unit’ in the framework of the propaganda ministry.” This was sent to the city of Opole on September 10 at seven o’clock. According to this memorandum, the propaganda ministry contributed the services of Stolze, a governing official and the SS-Hauptsturmbannführer who held the Nazi paramilitary rank of Truppführer (the rough equivalent of a sergeant first class); Stolze would also take care of all costs incurred. The Special Film Unit was also provided two fully fueled six-seater Wanderer trucks, plus drivers, a BMW motorcycle with a side car and a driver, and gas ration cards for seven hundred liters. Riefenstahl made available her film technicians, a sound film truck, uniform attire, gas masks, and pocket pistols (!). “All members of the Riefenstahl Special Film Unit hold identification cards of the RMfVuP Propaganda Assignment Post issued in their names.”4 The film footage was classified as strategically vital, and it was ordered to be sent to the propaganda ministry in Berlin in the quickest way possible.
The chief of staff of the Army Group South to which the Special Film Unit had to report was Erich von Manstein. His memoirs, which were published in 1976, include a description of Riefenstahl’s visit.5 Even after the more than thirty intervening years, the reader senses his astonishment about this encounter. One day, this well-known actress and director showed up with her cameramen and announced that they would be filming at the front by order of Hitler. She had come to Lubliniec, she told him, because she was “following the Führer’s trail.” According to Manstein, it was “ultimately quite abhorrent” to the soldiers there to have an assignment of this sort carried out by a woman. However, Riefenstahl had come on Hitler’s orders, and there was nothing to be done. Her appearance startled them almost as much as the fact that she was there at all. A woman could not wear the “holy robe,” so she had a uniform tailor-made for her. She looked
good and raffish, a bit like an elegant partisan who might have obtained her outfit on Rue de Rivoli in Paris. Her beautiful hair swirled around her interesting face with its close-set eyes like a blazing mane. She was wearing a kind of tunic over breeches and soft, high-top boots. A pistol hung from the leather belt around her hips, and her combat gear was supplemented by a knife stuck into her boot-top, Bavarian style.6
Von Manstein was bewildered by the appearance of this amateur Amazon showing up on Hitler’s orders in the middle of a war. Riefenstahl seemed to be taking her assignment seriously: her uniform looked quite real, and she was armed. She had to be taken seriously even though her appearance struck the soldiers as ridiculous.7 Because no high-ranking officer was able to dissuade Riefenstahl from going out to the front and because she and her men could not be allowed to do so on their own, General von Reichenau was entrusted with this delicate task. Von Reichenau and Riefenstahl had known and liked each other since the filming of Day of Freedom. Von Reichenau had a key role in this war. “With his panzers and motorized divisions, he was instructed to spearhead the attack through Silesia towards Warsaw. In the preliminary discussions Hitler had suggested that he ‘look neither right nor left’ but ‘look only forwards towards his goal,’ ” Hitler’s adjutant Nicolaus von Below recalled.8 Riefenstahl traveled to Konskie with this important officer. Her memoirs make no mention of this fact.
General von Rundstedt’s diary reveals that Konskie was seized during the night of September 7.9 Two days later, the news arrived that Hitler would be coming to visit the army units there. Riefenstahl missed out on seeing him and wound up in the middle of combat. After spending the night in a tent in Konskie, she awoke to gunfire. She claimed that bullets ripped through her tent and commented, “I hadn’t imagined it would be this dangerous.”10 Perhaps it was now dawning on her that it might be useful to show some interest in reality from time to time. Her men had talked over the situation with the soldiers and learned that on the day before their arrival, Polish civilians had maimed and killed four German soldiers and a high-ranking officer. Most likely hoping to be able to film some good scenes, she and her men made their way to the market square.
In the middle of the square, some Polish men were digging a pit, the grave for the dead German soldiers. Their faces revealed mortal fear. They understood no German and were terrified that they were digging their own graves. Then a German police officer appeared, stood at the edge of the grave, and ordered the soldiers to maintain calm and discipline. He gave a brief speech: “Soldiers, cruel as the deaths of our men may have been, we do not want to return tit for tat.” Then he told the soldiers to send the Poles home and to bury the dead.11
When she witnessed the Poles being brutally kicked by the Germans in violation of their superior’s orders, Riefenstahl claims to have shouted:
“Didn’t you hear what the officer told you? You claim to be German soldiers?” The angry men now faced me menacingly. One of them shouted, “Punch her in the mouth, get rid of that woman!” Another called out, “Shoot that woman down!” and aimed his rifle at me. . . . When the gun barrel was leveled at me, my crew jerked me aside. . . . Even before I knew what had happened, I reported to Reichenau to protest the undisciplined conduct of the soldiers. Only then did I learn of the terrible things that had happened. A shot fired by a Luftwaffe officer had started a panic that in turn had led to a senseless shooting spree. Soldiers had fired at the Poles who were running away; they assumed that some of them were the ones who had committed the massacre. More than thirty Poles fell victim to this senseless shooting.12
Reichenau promised to court-martial the perpetrators. “I was so upset by this experience that I asked the general to allow me to terminate my film reporting. He was very understanding. I wanted to get back to Berlin as soon as possible.”13 This was the extent of Riefenstahl’s depiction of her work as war correspondent.
Once again, her unabashed profession of ignorance is nothing short of astonishing. When she decided to travel to Poland and shoot her film at the front, she must have been aware that she was with the aggressors. Hitler had invaded a country and was waging a ruthless war, so it ought to have come as no surprise to her that the Poles were putting up a fight against the brutal superior strength of the German soldiers.
Riefenstahl also chose not to mention that the murdered Polish civilians were Jews. Alexander B. Rossino described the situation her team encountered as follows: On September 12, the 8th Air Recon
naissance Unit entered Konskie and found four corpses of German soldiers. They reacted by taking an undetermined number of Jewish men between the ages of forty and fifty, bringing them to the local church graveyard, and ordering them to dig graves. While the Jews dug, they were kicked and beaten. When the local police commander came to the scene, he told the soldiers to allow the Jews, who believed that they were digging their own graves, to get out of the pit. The Jews tried to flee, with the soldiers beating them again and tearing at their clothes. Then the soldiers opened fire. Twenty-two Jews were shot dead.14
General von Manstein, who was apparently relieved to see Riefenstahl leave, commented, “There had already been shootings that involved civilians during the occupation of Konskie, and now, a flak officer’s nervousness when a group gathered on the market square resulted in a gratuitous outbreak of panic and then a senseless shooting that claimed multiple victims. The film troop witnessed this regrettable scene and our visitor, who was thoroughly shaken, left the area.”15 After the war, Major General Rudolf Langhaeuser, the chief intelligence officer, verified that Riefenstahl had stormed into his office. “She had seen twenty-two Jews shot and could not continue work with her film unit. Langhaeuser made a report to the commander of the Southern Army, von Manstein, who ordered ‘investigation and immediate action in all cases,’ but the incidents continued to take place in the Southern Army area for another two months.”16
Riefenstahl had unquestionably displayed courage in lodging her complaint. Still, once the war was over, she was determined to portray herself and the German military in a favorable light. By 1987, when she published her memoirs, she knew perfectly well what had happened in Poland during those days yet made no mention of the genocide. There are photographs of her standing behind the soldiers in her uniform in Konskie, her face frozen in horror and fear. There are tears in her eyes, and she seems to be struggling for breath. These photographs reveal a moment of truth in Riefenstahl’s life, her world breaking apart as reality descended on her. The war was not a costume party. No one was paying any attention to her command, and there would be no lovely images for her to exploit.
She made her getaway to Danzig on a military aircraft. Hitler was staying at the Casino Hotel in the spa town of Sopot, outside of Danzig. Riefenstahl claims to have reported the events in Konskie to him. He already knew what had gone on, and supposedly told her that “such an offense had never occurred in the German army, and the guilty would be court-martialed.”17 But she had even more news to report about the highly principled Hitler. While she sat next to him, he received a telegram with an urgent request from the supreme army command to issue orders to launch an attack on Warsaw. She claimed that she witnessed Hitler angrily turn to the aide-de-camp who had come with the telegram and order him to report back to Warsaw that it was being offered another chance to capitulate, because it was madness to attack a city that still had women and children in it. The truth of the matter was that on September 22 and 25, Hitler had taken a plane from Danzig to the outskirts of Warsaw to see firsthand the effects of the bombardment he had personally ordered.
On September 27, the town major of Warsaw ceded the city to the Germans. Hitler, who was in Berlin by this time, traveled back to Warsaw, and Riefenstahl followed him there. She flew with Ernst Udet, who was now the chief of technical development in the Luftwaffe, to take part in the victory procession, because victories—not wars—were what mattered to her.
There are several photographs of Riefenstahl looking quite jolly in her uniform and aviator hat on the dais with many members of the Wehrmacht. All eyes were trained on this woman in soldier’s garb. But Riefenstahl was only an onlooker in Warsaw; Sepp Allgeier and the Lantschner brothers, Guzzi and Otto, were doing the filming. She stood next to Allgeier and watched him work, then she returned to Berlin without any footage in her suitcase. Her men stayed in the war.
Walter Frentz had been appointed to serve at Führer headquarters back in the late summer of 1939, and would remain a close associate of Hitler’s until May 1945. Allgeier was shooting films for the Wehrmacht, and Hans Ertl was accompanying Erwin Rommel to capture his North African campaign on camera while their boss, the Führer’s star director, stayed in the background. War did not furnish the beautiful images she needed for her art. She got the feeling that her work for the Führer had come to an end. Her cameramen stayed in the war, where her talents were out of place. She eventually realized that Hitler had found his fulfillment in war. He had no more need for art; war was everything.
Just a few weeks earlier, Riefenstahl had still been preparing for her role as military queen of the Amazons. She had told everyone about the movie she projected as the culmination of her career: a cinematic enactment of Heinrich von Kleist’s drama Penthesilea. Once she had achieved great success with Olympia, fulfillment of this dream seemed within her grasp. Luckily, she enjoyed the support of Marshal Italo Balbo, the fascist governor general of Libya; at the last Biennale, he had insisted on sitting next to her. She wanted to shoot the battle scenes between the Greeks and the Amazons in the Libyan Desert, and she was hoping to make the movie under the clear blue sky that she pictured for her Penthesilea. Balbo was delighted with this idea; however, she was unable to persuade Goebbels of the worth of this project. Goebbels did admire the writings of Kleist, but he could no longer put up with Riefenstahl’s effusiveness. He wrote in his diary: “[Hitler] is quite satisfied with the management of the press and radio. Only film is coming up short. He wants to finance L. Riefenstahl’s Penthesilea movie himself. That is the right course. I cannot do it from my funds and I have no real faith in the project.”18 It is hard to blame him for his skepticism. Most of what we know about this film project consists of grand pronouncements and providential crooning about what she intended to achieve. Riefenstahl claimed that she owed her discovery of Penthesilea to the great Max Reinhardt; that when he saw her, Reinhardt called out: “That is my Penthesilea!”19 In 1939, she asserted that all the artistic work in her past had been no more than a preliminary stage for her work on Penthesilea. Penthesilea was about love and war, violence and desire, law and passion, and men and women. Penthesilea was both goddess and human being. Although Riefenstahl had not displayed any special acting prowess in the past, now that she was nearing the age of forty she wanted to take on the role of a twenty-year-old Amazon queen. She worked out daily, took horseback riding lessons, and recited the lines from Kleist’s play. Like Junta, Penthesilea is a character driven by passion, a woman Riefenstahl called an “unrestrained, uncontrolled, wild feline.”20 She meets Achilles, the man she loves, during a battle. When her love cannot be fulfilled, she goes into a frenzy and mauls him. Violence and desire merge into one.
After her return from the United States, Riefenstahl devoted her time to preparing for this movie. She hired Herbert Windt to compose the music and signed Maria Koppenhöfer and Elisabeth Flickenschildt to play the priestesses. Since there was no lack of money, as usual, she picked out Lippizaner stallions in Vienna. “There were already close to a hundred girls in training. Not girls, but real women, who would be believable warriors.”21 To write the screenplay, she went off to the island of Sylt with her mother, her secretary, and her girlfriend, Margot von Opel. There she read, rode on horseback by the sea, and worked on her script about the Amazon queen. She repeatedly claimed that she had been preparing for this role for years on end, but letters to the Kleist expert Minde-Pouet reveal that her preliminary work was in a sorry state. In a letter dated August 4, 1939, she thanked him for the literature and newspaper clippings that he has sent her about Kleist, and it becomes apparent that she was only now starting to look into Kleist’s life. Riefenstahl, who claimed to have waited all her life to make a movie version of Penthesilea, had never even read the Iliad. “Besides riding horses, swimming, and throwing javelins, I am fervently reading the Iliad (you don’t have to worry that I might be reading the thick Schliemann book; I’m just flipping through a few interesting pages)—I didn’t know it yet and am
utterly spellbound by this powerful literature.”22 Three days later she contacted him again, asking him to recommend a book about ancient equestrianism. This letter also reveals that she intended to bring Hitler into the project. She explained that she was looking for “books you personally consider the best. What I mean is books that tell the story of Kleist’s life and works in the easiest, most human way. No scholarly and overly analytical treatises. I would like to give the book to the Führer that best reflects who Kleist was.”23 Riefenstahl concluded this letter with the astonishing message that she would now begin her work on the treatment. Since she was heading to the mountains three weeks later, this work cannot have gone on for long. Evidently she did not have a clue as to how she would realize her ambitious plans. Although she made her notes about Penthesilea available in the 1970s, even those papers do not reveal an overall concept. Penthesilea was closely intertwined with Riefenstahl’s hybrid self-image. For the rest of her life, she would continue to insist that she and Penthesilea formed an indivisible entity: “If there is a transmigration of souls, then I must have lived her life at some previous time. Every word that she speaks is spoken from the very depth of my soul—at no time could I act differently from Penthesilea.”24 She knew quite well that this project was not fully formed, and once she returned from Poland she did not go back to it.
The beginning of the war signaled the end of her dream of working in Hollywood. And for Mussolini, the idea of filming the drainage of the Pontine Marshes was no longer appealing. So Riefenstahl decided to go back to an earlier idea she had never completed. The Lowlands project had been aborted in 1934, and now she hoped to resume work on it. One advantage of this project was that she would not have to win over Hitler because he thought highly of the opera by Eugen d’Albert. After the war, Riefenstahl would claim that she filmed Lowlands only in order to avoid being compelled to make war and propaganda films. She alleged that Goebbels told her that once the campaign in Poland was over, she would have to shoot a movie about the West Wall (the so-called Siegfried Line, a system of defensive positions in western Germany), but she refused to do so. That cannot be true, because the documentary film West Wall was completed in August 1939. At the time Riefenstahl claimed to have been asked, the film was already being shown in movie theaters. Moreover, she continued to produce films that disseminated unadulterated National Socialist ideology and maintained close contacts with high-ranking Nazis.
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 33