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.

Riefenstahl ’ s film of the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg

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.

From 1945 through 1948 she was held in sundry American and French-run detention camps and prisons along with house arrest but although Riefenstahl was tried four times by various postwar authorities, she was never convicted through denazification trials either for her alleged role as a propagandist or for the use of concentration camp inmates in her films.

Riefenstahl took dancing lessons and attended dance academies from an early age and began her career as a self-styled and well-known interpretive dancer, traveling around Europe and working with director Max Reinhardt in a show funded by Jewish producer Harry Sokal.

Breaking from Fanck's style of setting realistic stories in fairytale mountain settings, Riefenstahl — working with leftist screen writers Béla Balázs and Carl Mayer — filmed Das Blaue Licht as a romantic, wholly mystical tale which she thought of as more fitting to the terrain.

Riefenstahl received invitations to travel to Hollywood to create films, but she refused the offers in order to stay in Germany with a boyfriend.

Leni Riefenstahl with Heinrich Himmler at Nuremberg in 1934

Riefenstahl with Joseph Goebbels ( 1937 )

After the Goebbels Diaries surfaced, researchers learned that Riefenstahl had been friendly with Joseph Goebbels and his wife, Magda, attending the opera with them and coming to the Goebbels ' parties.

On June 14, 1940, the day Paris was declared an open city by the French and occupied by German troops, Riefenstahl wrote to Hitler in a telegram, “ With indescribable joy, deeply moved and filled with burning gratitude, we share with you, my Führer, your and Germany's greatest victory, the entry of German troops into Paris.

Riefenstahl was friends with Hitler for 12 years, and reports vary as to whether she ever had an intimate relationship with him.

According to Ernst Hanfstaengl, who was a close friend of Hitler throughout the later 1920s and early 1930s, Riefenstahl tried to begin a relationship with Hitler early on but was turned down by him.

Riefenstahl sued a filmmaker, Nina Gladitz, who said Riefenstahl personally chose the extras at their holding camp ; Gladitz had found one of the Gypsy survivors and matched his memory with stills of the movie for a documentary Gladitz was filming.

The German court found in favour of Gladitz, agreeing that Riefenstahl had known the extras were from a concentration camp, and they agreed with Riefenstahl on only one count ( finding that Riefenstahl had not informed the Gypsies that they would be sent to the Auschwitz camp after filming was completed ).

When shown photographs of the camps, Riefenstahl reportedly reacted with horror and tears.

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.

Although she directed only eight films, just two of which received significant coverage outside of Germany, Riefenstahl was widely known all her life.

In the 1970s, Riefenstahl published her still photography of the Nuba tribes in Sudan in several books such as The Last of the Nuba.

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

Riefenstahl produced and directed her own work called Das Blaue Licht ( 1932 ), co-written by Carl Mayer and Béla Balázs.

Instead, Riefenstahl met Luis Trenker who had starred in Fanck's films, who wrote to the director about her.

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

Describing the experience in her memoir, Riefenstahl wrote: " I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget.

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

However, Riefenstahl maintained that Goebbels was upset that she had rejected his advances and was jealous of her influence on Hitler, seeing her as an internal threat ; therefore, his diaries could not be trusted.

During the Invasion of Poland, Riefenstahl was photographed in Poland wearing a military uniform and a pistol on her belt in the company of German soldiers ; she had gone to the site of the battle as a war correspondent.

According to her memoir, Riefenstahl tried to intervene but a furious German soldier held her at gunpoint and threatened to shoot her on the spot.

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.