Filmmaker Turns 100 Amid Inquiry

Leni Riefenstahl, who made masterful films for the Nazis, turned 100 on Thursday with a birthday party at a lakeside hotel--and a fresh criminal investigation into whether she broke German law prohibiting Holocaust denial.

The inquiry was prompted by a Gypsy organization’s claim that Riefenstahl used slave laborers from concentration camps as extras in her film “Lowland.”

The accusation by the Cologne-based organization Rom said Riefenstahl used 120 Gypsies from camps in Salzburg and Berlin from 1940 to 1942, then failed to prevent them from being returned to the Nazi camp system, where many died.

The group accuses Riefenstahl of Holocaust denial for dismissing those allegations as nonsense in an April interview published in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper.

“We saw all the Gypsies that played in ‘Lowland’ again after the war,” Riefenstahl was quoted as saying. “Nothing happened to them.”

Iris Pinkepank, spokeswoman for Rom, said her organization could prove that many of those Gypsies died by comparing Riefenstahl’s lists of people appearing in the film with records from the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland.

“Leni Riefenstahl is a woman who cares for her own history--she makes sure that only the truth she wants to read and only her version is published,” Pinkepank said. “But there are some survivors still living, and we have contact with them and they want their version to be told.”

Frankfurt prosecutor’s spokesman Job Tilman said his office opened a preliminary investigation, which could lead to criminal charges.

Although postwar American and French panels cleared Riefenstahl of responsibility for war crimes, she has been dogged by allegations that she was more deeply involved in the Nazi cause than she admits.

German media reports on Riefenstahl’s birthday--celebrated privately with nearly 200 friends near her Munich-area home--reflect the difficulty many have in trying to reconcile her place in history.

“Old woman, or Hitler’s witch? Filmmaker of the century or the Fuehrer’s career woman? Pinup girl of the Nazis, or only narcissist?” wrote the top-selling Bild national newspaper.

In Die Welt newspaper, several of Riefenstahl’s peers, including “Basic Instinct” director Paul Verhoeven, focused on her contribution to filmmaking.

Verhoeven said Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” a documentary of the 1934 Nazi party rally at Nuremberg, was the work of a brilliant artist.

Verhoeven said Riefenstahl should be given the same second chance given other artists with close Nazi connections.