This is The Guardian.

Hi, my name is David Wolff. I'm the editor of The Guardian Longread.

This August, every Friday, we're going to be bringing you some of our favorite

longreads of the year with a little introduction from one of the editors,

telling you why we picked it.

So I've chosen an article called Burying Lenny Riefenstahl,

one woman's lifelong crusade against Hitler's favorite filmmaker by Kate Connolly.

I think this is one of those articles that has quite an interesting backstory in the following

sense. A lot of articles that we do for The Longread take a long time to come together, you know,

minimum is three months usually, very normal for it to be six months or even a year.

Since The Longread started in 2014, this is the piece that had the longest gestation,

Kate Connolly, the author of this piece, initially pitched it in 2015 when she said she'd recently met

with this biographer who had dedicated her life to uncovering Lenny Riefenstahl's crimes and

convinced you with the Nazis, something that has been debated ever since the fall of the Nazis,

and we immediately said, are this sounds fascinating to us more? And over the years, Kate continued

to meet with this biographer and I think life and other things caught in the way,

but she kept on meeting her and in fact, became quite obsessed with her work and about five years

after the initial pitch, she came back to us and said, well, you know, I've still been there,

I've been meeting with this woman and it just gets more and more interesting and we were like, oh,

my goodness, we have to do this story. So I think work proper started on this piece in 2020,

and it still took about a year to come together. And I think at one point, this piece was 17,000 words

long, which is a real kind of testament to how much of an obsession it became for the author and how

...