Leni Riefenstahl, who filmed Hitler's Nuremberg rally as Triumph of the Will, has died of cancer at the age of 101.
Despite acclaim for her later photos of Africa and undersea flora and fauna, she spent more than half her life trying to live down the films she made for Hitler.
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Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl with her mentor Adolf Hitler
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Even as late as 2002, Riefenstahl was investigated for Holocaust denial after she said she did not know that Gypsies taken from concentration camps to be used as extras in one of her wartime films later died in the camps.
Authorities eventually dropped the case, saying her comments weren't serious enough to be prosecuted.
Riefenstahl once said: "I don't know what I should apologise for. I cannot apologise, for example, for having made the film Triumph of the Will- it won the top prize. All my films won prizes."
Biographer Juergen Trimborn, who wrote Riefenstahl: A German Career, said Riefenstahl could not apologise because the Nazi films were the centrepieces of her career.
