Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics by Schaap Jeremy

Author:Schaap, Jeremy [Schaap, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2015-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

Hiring Riefenstahl to make the official Olympic film was both unsurprising and a stroke of genius. It was clear that she could be counted on to present to the world exactly what Hitler and Goebbels hoped to have presented. She would shamelessly romanticize the spectacle, even if it meant reenacting the important moments that her cameras failed to capture as they occurred. In fact, only German photographers handpicked by the organizing committee would be issued credentials, and only Riefenstahl would be allowed to film the games. “These arrangements,” the New York Times correspondent in Berlin wrote presciently, “would appear to indicate clearly enough that the world at large is to see the Olympics through exclusively German lenses. It can safely be assumed that no opportunities for political propaganda that are likely to arise will be neglected and that untoward incidents from a propaganda point of view will be ignored.” When, on April 25, the Olympic organizing committee announced that Riefenstahl would be directing the official film, she was identified in the Times as “a directress” who made mostly “propaganda films” for the Third Reich.

Riefenstahl did not dispute this characterization until after the Third Reich crumbled in 1945. In the meantime, she marshaled all of her considerable talents in service to making the documentary. It probably did not occur to her that the star of her film would be a handsome, dark-skinned non-Aryan whose grandparents had been slaves.

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