A deal with the Devil

Leni Reifenstahl is dead at the age of 101. She is as widely praised for her artistic vision as she is condemned for her early collaboration with the Nazi Party. There has been much talk of how she will be remembered, and, to be sure, there will be much more. She herself waffled between denying any wrongdoing as a Nazi propagandist and admitting that the circumstances of her work were regrettable. \nWhile never a member of the Nazi Party, in 1934 she was tapped by Hitler to make a film of the 1934 Nuremburg Party Convention and produced Triumph of the Will. Two years later, she filmed the Munich Olympics and produced an ode to German power titled Olympia. \nReifenstahl innovated numerous production techniques while filming. These documentaries are the cornerstones of her legacies, and their names alone convey the power and beauty of her director's eye. \nAfter Olympia was completed, she was sent to film the invasion of Poland, but objected to the atrocities perpetrated by the German war machine, filed an official complaint and left immediately. Her next project, Tiefland, an apolitical love story was shot using Gypsy concentration camp inmates as extras. The identities of these Gypsys have been confirmed against death camp records by their survivors. Reifenstahl claimed to have never known the source of those extras, but by 1940 her complicity with the Third Reich was so complete, it hardly matters.\nBriefly imprisoned by the French and the American occupational forces as a Nazi collaborator, Reifenstahl produced little work throughout the '50s and '60s, until the wounds of WWII had scabbed over enough for her return to public life. The argument could be made that as an artist, Reifenstahl's films were amoral, neither promoting Nazi ideology nor condemning it. There needs to be a place in every society for journalists and artists who record without comment. \nThis might have been the place for Reifenstahl if she was not on record as an ardent supporter of Hitler's National Socialist platform dating back to 1932. Her work is politically charged, whether she was willing to admit it, and as such was a mouthpiece for what was, along with Stalin's Russia and Mao's China, one of the most barbarous regimes of recorded history. \nBut in the end, Reifenstahl was just an artist. She might have put a beautiful face on the ugliest of ideologies, but her films are just that. Inspirational maybe, but she didn't pull the trigger at any mass graves. She didn't drive a tank into Poland. She didn't pump Zyklon-B into the gas chambers. Leni Reifenstahl deserves to be condemned as a Nazi apologist and collaborator. But so do many more people closer to home who paid for those rifles, built those tanks and held the patent to Zyklon.\nThe Boston Globe and other reputable institutions have uncovered CIA records that document the ties between American manufacturers such as Ford, IBM and Dow to the Third Reich. In addition to the American companies who traded with Germany in the '30s, and in the case of Ford, actually had manufacturing plants there, many American financial institutions such as The First Financial Bank of Boston worked with Hitler through foreign subsidiaries well into WWII.\nThe question begs to be asked: if at some point we demand the artist to make ethical choices, shouldn't the businessman be asked to do the same? Because in the end, loaning money to German weapons manufacturers, or building tanks for foreign armies, or selling chemical patents that will be used to kill millions has a far more concrete and lasting impact than a film ever could.\nShould Leni Reifenstahl's name be smeared for all eternity? No, but any remembrance of her needs to include an account of the work she did for the Third Reich, her close personal ties to it's high-ranking ministers and her early faith in the mission of National Socialism in Germany. American business collaborated with Nazi Germany in the spirit of cold hard cash, and should be brought to task as harshly as Reifenstahl has been if not more so.\nIf there's a place in hell for Leni Reifenstahl, she's got a lot of company.