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If nothing else, Riefenstahl will be remembered forever as an example of what happens when an artist places their own artistry over the subject matter. It's high art in the service of utter evil.

But her story is a lot more complicated than anyone is allowing here. One fact is that, far from being Hitler's personal filmmaker, she only made one film after "Olympia," largely because Goebbels was annoyed at the way she highlighted Jesse Owens in that film. The follow-up film, "Tiefland" was only finished long after the war, and it's apparently hard to find anything remotely supportive of the Nazi philosophy there (it's also very hard to actually find the film). After witnessing war crimes in Poland, she resigned a job to make films at the front for the propaganda effort and basically spent the next five years up in the mountains making "Tiefland" and dodging phone calls from the Nazi establishment.

Another interesting sidelight is that when she actually came to Hollywood in 1938 (officially to promote "Triumph," but also looking for a job) the anti-Nazi leftists succeeded in getting every meeting cancelled. Had she made "Triumph," then taken a job in Hollywood and sat out the war there, would she still be considered as evil? (That's what Douglas Sirk did--the Nazis loved him in the 1930s) What was her crime, making that film, or not rejecting Hitler sooner? If the film had been a piece of junk, instead of an amazingly seductive piece of propaganda, would anyone care?

Yours is the more nuanced view of Reifenstahl I heard from the German emigre academic community in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles in the early '70s and which rings true to me. Some of them actually knew her, if not well, and respected her highly. I suppose I can't name names without from personal conversations without permission, but the people I heard this from (whether in seminars or personal conversations -- both in English and German) were world-reknowned philosphers, historians, writers, musicologists and musicians. Names you would recognize if you had anything more than a passing acquaintance with the high culture of central Europe in the first half of the 20th century. It's too bad she came to Hollywood in '38, not after the Hitler-Stalin Pact in '39 -- then Hollywoood would have been all over her and she'd have gotten that job.