From the archive: Burying Leni Riefenstahl: one woman’s lifelong crusade against Hitler’s favourite film-maker

The Audio Long Read

The Guardian

Society & Culture

4.3 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2025

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

Nina Gladitz dedicated her life to proving the Triumph of the Will director’s complicity with the horrors of nazism. In the end, she succeeded – but at a cost Written and read by Kate Connolly. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The Guardian.
0:09.0	Hello, Faker Others here, host of the Guardian Women's Football Weekly podcast.
0:14.2	So the European Championships are fast approaching.
0:17.0	And the team here, me, Susie Rack, Tom Gary, and expert guests are going to guide you through the highs and the lows of the month-long tournament, starting with a preview episode on Friday, June the 27th.
0:29.6	The lionesses, of course, are hoping to win back-to-back euros, but can Serena Vigman's England take on world champions Spain and add to the trophy cabinet?
0:39.1	Can Wales who are making their first ever appearance in an international tournament cause any upsets?
0:44.6	All you need to do is search for the Guardian Women's Football Weekly wherever you get your podcasts. The Guardian Archive Long Read
1:01.3	Hello, I'm Kate Connolly. I'm the Berlin correspondent of The Guardian, and I wrote an article in December 2021 called Burying Lenny Wiefenstahl, one woman's lifelong crusade against Hitler's favourite filmmaker.
1:27.3	The article is basically about a woman who dedicated her whole life to researching the
1:34.3	German filmmaker Lenny Riefenstahl and trying to prove that she had been much more
1:40.0	complicit with the Nazi chiefs, including Hitler and everybody in the Nazi elite, than she had
1:46.6	claimed. And I first met Gladitz back in 2002, and then she contacted me again in 2015,
1:55.1	saying that she was working on a biography of Lenny Riefenstahl and wanting to meet me. And so that began meetings that
2:04.2	we had that were very intense and went on for hours and hours at a time, during which she told
2:10.4	me everything that she had uncovered about this woman and all the things that she had tried
2:15.1	to cover up in her life about the role she had played in the Nazi regime.
2:20.3	And in the beginning, it was like an article that I would be writing about Riefenstahl and uncovering all this.
2:27.6	At the same time, it turned into the long read that I ended up writing,
2:31.3	turned into as much about Gladitz and her fixation with
2:35.2	Riefenstahl and also how this was entangled with her own biography, as much as it was to do with
2:41.9	Riefenstahl herself.
2:44.6	There have been a couple of interesting changes since I wrote the article.
	...

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