23 August 2003

I hope that Leni Riefenstahl's one hundred and first birthday was memorable. I hope there was a glass of champagne and several naps. She is the last one left, the last one who had a major role in how those awful decades played out, and she was a cog in the machine that casued so many million to die. She was so good at what she did they accused her of crimes against humanity, which is pretty good for a movie star and film director. She was a movie star and a director and an artist and a soldier's wife and and international celebrety. There are not many who loom as large as this slim woman.

They might be a little rheumy today, but in her time, Man, she had some eyes. The still promo pictures from the 1930's movies in which she starred- "The Blue Light" and "S.O.S. Eisberg"- are still haunting. How she came to be at Nurmberg in a feature role twice- first as a filmmaker and the second as an accused war criminal is quite a saga.

There are several books about it. Leni wrote one. Another is by Historian Robert Wistrich, called  'Weekend in Munich: Art, Propaganda and Terror in the Third Reich.' He talks about Josef Goeblles, Hitler's dark propaganda minister, as a malevolent genius. He adapted the new American-style of media advertising to a new role. Goebbles had a big project in mind and he sold it to the Boss. Goebbels thought a really dramatic film along the lines of Sergie Eisenstien's "Potemkin" would go a long way toward legitimizing the National Socialist German Worker's Party (NSDAP) as a real government. They needed to move away from the image of the old-fighters and show that they were a national movement of all the people. They needed to document the product, make it a really hot brand name. They already had a catchy brand name for the party- "Nazi"- and now they needed a film that would tell the story of the great struggle for the German soul. Hitler bought the concept, gave it the Green Light.

In 1934, Hitler summoned Leni to visit him. Goebbles had convinced him that she was the only director who could equal the work of Eisenstein. The idea was to document the Riechs Partitag - the annual Nazi convention- at Nuremberg. The working title was "Triumph of the Will." In her book, Leni said 'The preparations for the Party convention were made in concert with the preparations for the camera work.'

It was more than that. They were the same thing. The event and the film were combined from the very beginning. If it worked for the camera, that was how the reality would be played out. The rally became the stage for the most spectacular piece of film propaganda ever made, orchestrated by the movie-star director with the compelling eyes. Leni was the director, with the Party coordinating her bidding. The Third Reich's architect, Albert Speer, carefully constructed the groundwork for the event, with grandiose building arrangements and precise plans for marches. The city of Nuremberg became a stage-set for Reifenstahl's film, awash in a sea of swastika banners, bonfires and torches. Reifenstahl's cinematic technique creates a sense of feverish movement and a seemingly endless array of banners and people.

Historian Robert Wistrich says 'Triumph of the Will is the supreme visualization in cinematic form of the Nazi political religion. Its artistry, reinforced by the grandeur and power of the Nuremberg decor, is designed to sweep us into empathetic identification with Hitler as a kind of human deity. The massive spectacle of regimentation, unity and loyalty to the Fuhrer powerfully conveys the message that the Nazi movement was the living symbol of the reborn German nation.'

This was big-time spectacle. Leni used thirty cameramen and over one hundred other technicians to make the film. She had cranes constructed to lift the cameras over a hundred feet in the air and she had pits dig in front of the rostrum so the camera angle was that of an adoring audience. There was an elaborate system of tracks was put in place to follow the speaker's motion. Some of the cameramen wore roller skates. There is no question that this is a great film. Frightening. But of course we know how it turned out. The film was so good that the Allies brought her in with the second-tier fo war criminals as part of the de-Nazification project, something we ought to be doing in Iraq today.

Check it out. Here is the opening, from Leni's screenplay, titles rolling on a dark screen with Wagner rising in the background:

"20 years after the outbreak of the World War ...

Adolf Hitler flew again to Nuremberg to review the columns of his faithful followers..."

(Director's cut: Disolve to mythic mountains of clouds as a Junkers JU-52 flies overhead The medieval city of Nuremberg can be seen from below. A Nazi banner flies from an ancient building. Below we get a glimpse of hundreds of brown-shirted storm troopers marching. Dark shadows of aircraft being cast over marching troops tha emerge into the light, singing the "Horst Wessel" song….")

Later, the searchlights and the torches and the waving swastikas and Zieg-Heiling masses combine in a kaleidoscope of compelling images. This was the rousing music video Hitler wanted, the basis of the Third Riech. It is as powerful today as it was then, and maybe more.

Eleven years later there were forty or fifty million dead. The supporting players in the preparations either were dead or preparing for an encore performance at Nuremburg.

The gem city of the NSDAP had been reduced completely to ruins by war's end. To the Allied High Command, the symbolism of having the Tribunal of Justice right there in the cradle of the Party was considered so important that some minor inconvenience was well worth it. The scramble to get some of the public buildings back together for the trials was a story in itself.

The first round of trials was spectacular, the first big media event of The Post War World. The really big guns were not available to be tried. Hitler married, finally, and then shot Eva Braun and then himself. His loyal staff tried to cook him in gasoline a pit outside the Fuhrerbunker in the ruins of Berlin, but the Russians managed to get what was left, and had the skull. They kept it quiet for reasons best known to themselves, maybe looking at it late at night in the Kremlin vaults, but they display the Fuhrer's last hat and his desk in the Central Red Army Musuem. Someone decided they should not retain the Fuhrer's skull. Sometime in the '50s or '60s it was powdered and dumped anonymously in Berlin. Goebbles and his wife and children were all gone and burned. Himmler was another suicide, the chicken farmer turned Shultz-Staffeln chief wouldn't be caught alive. Too many things to answer for. Less messy to end it on his terms. Borman, that toady, probably got nailed trying to get out of town. There were tales for years that he was with the Stroessner Brothers in the jungles of Paraguay. But a few years ago they slathered some modeling clay over a skull and announced he hadn't got away after all.

Fat Reichsmarshall Goering was the senior one left at Nuremburg. He dried out in his cell after the decade-long morphine binge and the prison diet reduced him to something like the trim and heroic fighter pilot he had been in the First War. He wore a plain tunic at the trial, no medals, and he had a certain dignity.

"You are not trying us because we are guilty" he said gravely, paraphrasing Maria Theresa's words to Frederick II of Prussia after the Seven Years War. "You are trying us because we lost."

Several of the rest in the dock had been in the film, like Albert Speer and Rudolf Hess. The latter had been returned from England to stand trial after being detained after arriving in Scotland on his bizarre peace mission early in the war. He was quite mad and stayed that way, as he became the last prisoner of the Second World War. They hung several of the rest of them and the rest were locked in Spandau Prison uintil only Rudolf was left to see them go. Goering beat the hangman by taking poison in his cell just before the executions were to take place. His guards got in a lot of trouble over the security breach. The bodies were cremated and the remains spread anonymously along roadsides. No shrines for the crimes against humanity were to be left. The Reichsmarshal has no grave.

Nuremberg was starting to resemble itself by the time the Allies got around to bringing people like Leni to the bar of justice. clean itself up by the time they got to Leni. Leni Reifenstahl claimed at her trial and in her book and in all the years after that she knew nothing of the objectives of the filming of the Nuremberg Rally, not her empowerment to determine how it would be played out for her cameras. She wrote:

"Hitler called me to see him and explained that he wanted a film about a Party Congress, and wanted me to make it. My first reaction was to say that I did not know anything about the way such a thing worked or the organization of the Party, so that I would obviously photograph all the wrong things and please nobody - even supposing that I could make a documentary, which I had never yet done. Hitler said that this was exactly why he wanted me to do it: because anyone who knew all about the relative importance of the various people and groups and so on, might make a film that would be pedantically accurate, but this was not what he wanted. He wanted a film showing the congress through a non-expert eye, selecting just what was most artistically satisfying - in terms of spectacle, I suppose you might say. He wanted a film which would move, appeal to, impress an audience which was not necessarily interested in politics."

She did a good job. She also walked free after her trial, found innocent by the tribunal since what she said was true at the time, and that is a good defense, even after a catastrophe. She later dyed her hair blonde, and spent time in Africa and took photos of Mick Jagger. Numberburg was a long time ago. But imagine yourself in a darkened theater.

You are listening to the "Horst Wessel" Song, the tribute to the punk Stormtrooper killed by communists in a street fight when the Nazis were just starting out. Imagine thousands singing in lusty unity. Imagine a close up of Reichsmarshal Goering singing along as the scene disolves out to a full screen, giant gilt swatiska on the wall, covering the entire screen, and then, superimposed, are thousands of Labor Service men marching across the Zepplinweise parade field. Another huge swastika is superimposed as the final strains of the Horst Wessel song ring out. Happy birthday, Leni.

Directors cut: SCENE FADES TO BLACK.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra