Riefenstahl ’ s prominence in the Third Reich, along with her personal association with Adolf Hitler, destroyed her film career following Germany's defeat in World War II, after which she was arrested but released without any charges.

Riefenstahl went on to star in many of Fanck ’ s mountain films as an athletic and adventurous young woman with a suggestive appeal ; she became an accomplished mountaineer during the winters of filming on mountains and learned filmmaking techniques.

SOS Iceberg was Riefenstahl ’ s only English-language film role as an actress.

Upon its 1938 re-release, the names of co-writer Béla Balázs and producer Harry Sokal, both Jewish, were removed from the credits ; some reports claim this was at Riefenstahl ’ s behest.

Impressed with Riefenstahl ’ s work, Hitler asked her to film the upcoming 1934 Party rally in Nuremberg, the sixth such rally.

At first, according to Riefenstahl ’ s memoir, she resisted and did not want to create further Nazi films ; instead, she wanted to direct a feature film based on Hitler ’ s favourite opera, Eugen d ' Albert's Tiefland.

Riefenstahl ’ s work on Olympia has been cited as a major influence in modern sports photography.

Olympia was very successful in Germany after it premiered for Hitler ’ s 49th birthday in 1938, and its international debut led Riefenstahl to embark on an American publicity tour in an attempt to secure commercial release.

By later accounts, Goebbels thought highly of Riefenstahl ’ s filmmaking but was angered with what he saw as her overspending on the Nazi-provided filmmaking budgets.

Nevertheless, by October 5, 1939, Riefenstahl was back in occupied Poland filming Hitler ’ s victory parade in Warsaw.

50 stills from the filming in Krün near Mittenwald were later found and from these, surviving prisoners were able to identify 29 camp inmates who worked for Riefenstahl and were then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the first weeks of March 1943 following Himmler ’ s December 1942 decree.

As Germany ’ s military collapsed in the spring of 1945 Riefenstahl left Berlin and was hitchhiking with a group of men, trying to reach her mother, when she was taken into custody by American troops.

Writer Budd Schulberg, assigned by the US Navy to the OSS for intelligence work while attached to John Ford ’ s documentary unit, was ordered to arrest Riefenstahl at her chalet in Kitzbühel, Austria, ostensibly to have her identify the faces of Nazi war criminals in German film footage captured by the Allied troops.

I'm not political .’” However, when Riefenstahl later claimed she had been forced to follow Goebbels ’ orders under threat of being sent to a concentration camp, Schulberg asked her why she should have been afraid if she did not know concentration camps existed.

Most of the negatives for Riefenstahl ’ s finished films and other production materials relating to her unfinished projects were lost towards the end of the war.

While heralded by many as outstanding colour photographs, they were harshly criticized by Susan Sontag, who claimed in a review that they were further evidence of Riefenstahl ’ s “ fascist aesthetics ”.

Another of Riefenstahl ’ s films, 1938 ’ s Olympia, was meant to prove that the Reichstag was a democratic and open society under Nazi rule.

Riefenstahl ’ s cinematic masterpiece, though temporarily effective propaganda, was unable to mitigate the growing awareness of the political realities in Nazi Germany.

Helene Bertha Amalie " Leni " Riefenstahl (; August 22, 1902 – September 8, 2003 ) was a German film director, actress and dancer widely noted for her aesthetics and innovations as a filmmaker.

After her death, the Associated Press described Riefenstahl as an “ acclaimed pioneer of film and photographic techniques ”.

In the film, Riefenstahl played a peasant girl who protected a glowing mountain grotto.

She co-wrote, directed and starred in the film and produced it under the banner of her own company, Leni Riefenstahl Productions.

According to the Daily Express of April 24, 1934, Leni Riefenstahl had read Mein Kampf during the making of her film The Blue Light.

It made Riefenstahl the first female film director to achieve international recognition.

In interviews for the 1993 film The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, Riefenstahl adamantly denied any deliberate attempt to create pro-Nazi propaganda and said she was disgusted that Triumph of the Will was used in such a way.

Riefenstahl never denied making this short 18 minute film.

In 1936, Hitler invited Riefenstahl to film the Olympic Games in Berlin, a film which Riefenstahl claimed had been commissioned by the International Olympic Committee.

Avery Brundage stated that it was " The greatest Olympic film ever made " and Riefenstahl left for Hollywood, where she was received by the German Consul Georg Gyssling, on 24 November.

To the end of her life, despite overwhelming evidence that concentration camp occupants had been forced to work on the movie unpaid, Riefenstahl continued to maintain all the film extras survived and that she had met them after the war.

After years of legal wrangling these were returned to her, but the French government had reportedly damaged some of the film stock whilst trying to develop and edit it and a few key scenes were missing ( although Riefenstahl was surprised to find the original negatives for Olympia in the same shipment ).

Although Riefenstahl lived for almost another half century, Tiefland was her last feature film.

In 1960, Riefenstahl unsuccessfully attempted to prevent filmmaker Erwin Leiser from juxtaposing scenes from Triumph of the Will with footage from concentration camps in his film Mein Kampf.

On August 22, 2002, her 100th birthday, Riefenstahl released a film called Impressionen unter Wasser ( Underwater Impressions ), an idealized documentary of life in the oceans and her first film in over 25 years.

Leni Riefenstahl with Heinrich Himmler at Nuremberg in 1934

Hitler congratulates Riefenstahl in 1934

During this time Leni Riefenstahl, a filmmaker working in Nazi Germany, created one of the best-known propaganda movies, Triumph of the Will, a film commissioned by Hitler to chronicle the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg.

Despite vowing not to make any more films about the Nazi Party, in 1935, Riefenstahl made the 18-minute Day of Freedom: Armed Forces about the German army.

Leni Riefenstahl appears at the Nazi rally.

According to Jürgen Trimborn's biography of Nazi propaganda film-maker Leni Riefenstahl, both Chaplin and French film-maker René Clair viewed Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will together at a showing at the New York Museum of Modern Art.

He was involved in gathering evidence against war criminals for the Nuremberg Trials, an assignment that included arresting documentary film maker Leni Riefenstahl at her chalet in Kitzbühel, Austria, ostensibly to have her identify the faces of Nazi war criminals in German film footage captured by the Allied troops.

" Rammstein have also been controversial for their use of Nazi imagery, including footage shot by Leni Riefenstahl for Olympia in their video for " Stripped ".

Riefenstahl went on to make Nazi propaganda films and, post-war, subsequently lived in Africa where she continued film-making, but now of life in the African bush.

In her famous 1974 essay " Fascinating Fascism ", Susan Sontag lamented that " The purification of Leni Riefenstahl's reputation of its Nazi dross has been gathering momentum for some time, but it has reached some kind of climax this year, with Riefenstahl the guest of honor at a new cinéphile-controlled film festival held in the summer in Colorado ….