Monday, May. 05, 1952
Admired by Adolf
A captious German movie critic once called her "die Oelige Ziege" (oily goat) because of the slippery way she slid around mountain peaks in her movies. But to Dictator Adolf Hitler, sinuous suntanned Leni Riefenstahl, the daughter of a Berlin plumber, seemed the perfect female embodiment of Aryan strength through joy. Under Adolf's patronage, Actress-Producer Leni became the reigning queen of German moviedom. Given the job of filming the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, Leni produced a picture as artful as it was artistic. It took top critical honors at Italy's International Film Festival, and was later boycotted in the U.S. as shameless propaganda.
She had just finished what she hoped would be her greatest artistic triumph, Tiefland, in 1945, when the Allied victory put a stop to her film production. Since then, Adolf's admiration has hung on her neck like the Mariner's albatross. Through one denazification court after another, Leni has fought off her past. Time & again she has been cleared of Nazi guilt, only to be rearrested and retried. Last week, in a final effort to regain her fair name--and the fashionable Berlin villa taken from her by the Allies--Leni appeared before still another court. Its verdict on Leni: "No political activity in support of the Nazi regime which would warrant punishment."
Leni's fans in the Berlin courtroom dabbed at their eyes with handkerchiefs as crumpled and sodden as that which 44-year-old Leni herself had twisted and tormented on the witness stand. "Children, children," she cautioned the photographers crowding around her when the trial was done, "save your film. I've only one wish now--to be let alone."
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