Hundreds mourn Hitler's film-maker Riefenstahl

Hundreds of mainly elderly people have attended a memorial service for Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's official film-maker and last…

Hundreds of mainly elderly people have attended a memorial service for Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's official film-maker and last of Germany's famous Nazi-era figures, who died on Monday aged 101.

Riefenstahl was admired and condemned for her documentaries that pioneered film techniques but glorified Nazism.

Her coffin, placed in a grand hall at a Munich cemetery ahead of a cremation on Monday, was surrounded by candles and two dozen wreaths.

A painting of her stood by the coffin and music from the opera "Tannhaeuser" by Richard Wagner, Hitler's favourite composer, echoed around the hall where some 500 people gathered.

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One of the wreaths was from German media mogul Leo Kirch.

"Germany has lost a fascinating personality," said Steffen Kuchenreuther, president of the German Film Industry Association, in a speech at the ceremony.

Riefenstahl won awards at the Venice and Paris film festivals in the 1930s for her "Triumph of the Will", a documentary highlighting the meticulously choreographed, eerie grandeur of the Nazi Party's 1934 Nuremberg Rally.

Some called it the greatest propaganda film ever made.

She was then commissioned to make the official film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. "Olympia", which recorded the grandeur of an event that Hitler hijacked to showcase National Socialism, is still recognised by cinematographers as a groundbreaking film.

It pioneered techniques such as mounting the camera on electric cars on rails to follow races.

Whether consciously or unwittingly, she delivered films that glorified the Nazis, and she remained a villain to many for failing to repent for that work up to her death just weeks after her 101st birthday. Bild newspaper called her the "devil's brilliant diva".

She died at her house near the Starnberger lake south of Munich, at the foot of the Alps