GERMANY: Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, the last of Germany's famous Nazi-era figures, has died aged 101.
Riefenstahl made powerful films for Hitler and spent the rest of her long and active life protesting that she should not be condemned for work inspired by art, not politics.
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 1934 Nuremberg Rally. She was then commissioned to make the official film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Olympia, which Hitler hijacked to showcase National Socialism, is still recognised by cinematographers as a groundbreaking film.
Since the war, those films have haunted her, and she remained a villain to many for declining to apologise for them. The German government reacted to her death with criticism. "Leni Riefenstahl symbolises a German artist's fate in the 20th century," said Ms Christina Weiss, Culture Minister.
"Leni Riefenstahl's artistic work was tainted by her closeness to National Socialism, especially because after the war she never dealt with the problem of how easily her work served an inhuman Nazi propaganda and how close she really was to the Hitler regime."
Riefenstahl always denied political involvement with the Nazi party or any romantic link with Hitler. Blacklisted as a filmmaker after the war, she turned to still photography even though West German magazines boycotted her work for years.
She worked to redeem her reputation with photographic studies of Nuba tribesmen in southern Sudan. At 72 she took up scuba diving, gaining renown for adventurous underwater studies. - (Reuters)