Leni Riefenstahl Dies

Filmmaker and former Nazi propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl, has died at the ripe old age of 101. The director, whose career in movies started when she wondered what it would feel like to dance on stage, caught the eye of Adolf Hitler early in her career and went on to aid The Third Reich by making films for Hitler's regime. Riefenstahl always denied that her films were propaganda, claiming that they simply presented reality as it was in the 1930s. She was never a member of the Nazi party and claims not to have actively supported them but her most famous work, Triumph des Willems (Triumph of the Will), which showed the Nazi rally at Nuremburg, became one of the most notorious recorded celebrations of Nazi power. She was never charged at a war crimes tribunal but did face an investigation for Holocaust denial as recently as last year, when she claimed ignorance of the fact that gypsies taken from concentration camps to be used as extras in one of her films later died after being returned to the camps. Despite the political ramifications of her work, it is accepted that she used groundbreaking techniques in her films, utilizing multi-angle camera shots, cranes and tracking rails. After the war, Riefenstahl was unable to find work in movies. She instead applied herself to photography and won acclaim for her depiction of the Nuba tribe in the Sudan. According to her long-time companion Horst Kettner, Riefenstahl had "quietly fallen asleep" at her home in Bavaria on Monday afternoon.