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Letters They Wouldn't Publish

September 4, 2005

Letters to the Editor
Washington Times

Dear Editor:

Actress Jodie Foster was quoted (in your "Culture, Etc" column, September 1) as defending Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whom Foster intends to play in an upcoming movie (which she will also produce). According to Foster, Riefenstahl has been "libeled so many times" by people who accused her of membership in the Nazi Party or of having a romance with Adolf Hitler.

It's irrelevant if Leni Riefenstahl wasn't a member of the Nazi Party or wasn't Hitler's girlfriend. She was the leading artist making propaganda for the most evil regime in human history. Instead of defending Riefenstahl as an alleged victim of "libel," Jodie Foster should frankly confront the reality that Riefenstahl is an example of how art can be perverted to promote fascism, racism, and genocide.

Riefenstahl was Hitler's hand-picked filmmaker and directed such films as "Triumph of the Will" (1934), which Who’s Who in Nazi Germany characterizes as “perhaps the most effective visual propaganda for Nazism ever made.” The then-president of the Motion Picture Association of America, Jack Valenti, has written: "Young German girls and boys in 1941 were mesmerized by Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, in which Adolf Hitler is pictured as a new-born God." The Oscar-winning British filmmaker Arnold Schwartzman has noted, “Riefenstahl was probably the best propaganda tool that Hitler had and a lot of the terrible things that happened were as a consequence of what she did. There is no doubt she was a brilliant woman and a great documentarian, but she used her skills to rouse the German people into going along with Hitler.”

Riefenstahl even used Gypsy prisoners from German concentration camps as extras in one of her films. Although Riefenstahl later claimed she did not support the Nazis, the historical record shows that when Hitler conquered Paris in 1940, she sent him a telegram declaring: “Your deeds exceed the power of human imagination. They are without equal in the history of mankind. How can we [the German people] ever thank you?”

Jodie Foster describes Riefenstahl as "a complex morality tale.” Nonsense. There’s nothing morally complex about what Riefenstahl did as Hitler’s favorite filmmaker. The only thing that is complex is Foster’s moral confusion on this issue.

Cordially,

Dr. Rafael Medoff
Director
The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Melrose Park, PA

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