[Leica] Leni Riefenstahl

[Marc James Small <msmall@roanoke.infi.net>]

At 04:58 PM 1/11/02 EST, Teresa299@aol.com wrote:
>So, let's see if I understand this.  BD says SS people were used by the CIA 
>for anti-commie stuff.  You say, in a most arrogant manner I might add, name 
>names.  Someone names Gehlen and you say, wrong, Gehlen was Wehrmacht, not 
>SS, therefore....what?  Gehlen wasn't therefore a bad guy?  
>

This is really slipping away from discussing Riefenstahl, and perhaps
future exchanges should be off-List due to its tenuous connection with
photography.

There is a huge difference between the "SS" and the "Wehrmacht" though
both, of course, were stained irretreviably by being agencies of a vile
regime.  The SS was a cultural organization with police overtones:  its
primary obligation was the preservation and enhancement of the "Aryan
race".  Thus, the SS had bureau dealing with matters such as family trees,
newspaper "tone" or "spin", and overseas communities of German immigrants,
and so forth.  Many of the SS folks, especially the most evil
(Kaltenbrunner and Eichmann come to mind), were originally police officers.
 The SS ran the concentration camps, the death camps, and the "Freeborn"
camps, though it did not directly run the slave-labor program, this being
run by the German government itself.

The Wehrmacht was the German military and worried itself about normal
military things.  Early on, it became enmeshed in planning direct
violations of German civil laws and treaties and, soon thereafter, with
planning aggressive war.  From the outset of hostilities, much of the
Wehrmacht was willingly participating in war crimes including mass
executions of civilians and round-ups of those deemed undesireable by the
Nazis (political unreliables such as Communists or Socialists, aristocrats,
capitalists, Jews, mental defectives, the old, the infirm, Gypsies, &c &c)
in the conquered territories, especially in the East.

Many German civilian and Wehrmacht officials were awarded "honorary" ranks
in the SS.  Some of these people used these ranks aggressively while some
ignored them and felt that these were a mechanism in the turf war fought by
Himmler throughout the life of the Nazi regime.  (The body alleged to have
been that of Martin Bormann, for instance, was found wearing an SS
three-star general's uniform, unlikely garb, to say the least, for an
escape from agonized Berlin.)  In other words, holding an "honorary" rank
in the SS might mean a lot or it might mean nothing in evaluating the
shakiness of his past.

BD stated that the US occupation authorities regularly employed former SS
personnel and this is not true as a broad policy, though it did employ
some, such as Barbie (about whom I had forgotten), and protected others,
whom it found could provide valuable information.  This was seen at the
time as being on par with a prosecutor dropping charges against a criminal
who squeals on his co-felons but was ended when these actions -- made by
local Constabulary officials in Germany -- came to light around 1947.  I
believe it was Marshall, then the Secretary of State, and Bedell Smith, the
first Director of the CIA, which reversed this policy.

Now, to say that the US never had a policy of employing former SS personnel
is not to say that the US did not employ some very bad people and some
people with very bad pasts.  Gehlen's record was hardly clean but I believe
his employment came not from the US but the Bundesrepublik, incidentally.
We also employed a number of rocket scientists who had been overseers at
the Saalfeld slave-labor plant -- von Braun was not one of these, being at
the very top of the German rocket program, but he certainly knew about it,
and his credentials today are hardly impeccable.  In other words, I simply
felt that BD set out his claim on far too limited a basis, and did so with
an expression of "take this!" arrogance, to which I simply replied in kind.

As to Riefenstahl, it is important to remember that her dealings with the
Nazi Party were effectively ended by 1936 and that she never even saw
Hitler after a final meeting in 1937.  I am not suggesting that the Nazi
regime was sweetness-and-light at any point in its existence -- but she had
no direct contact with it before Kristallnacht, before the racial
purification laws were rigidly enforced, before the bullying and conquest
of neighboring states came into play, and certainly before anyone other
than Hitler or Himmler were contemplating death camps and slave-labor
programs.  Riefenstahl's star had a brief moment of glory over two years
but she attracted the undying hostility of Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of
Propaganda and the director of the German film industry.  Goebbels rendered
her a "non-person" by 1937 and she simply had no involvement in government
and, in fact, found it almost impossible to find work of any kind until the
Nazis were overthrown.  (She did have a lengthy affair with Albrecht Speer,
Hitler's architect and, from 1941, his Minister of Armaments, but that was
a tangential matter in terms of her culpabilities as a willing servant of
evil.)

That is her record.  Had Goebbels not shunted her into oblivion, I suspect
she would have gone on to other deeds of adulation of a vile society and
vile people, but this cannot be judged from any words or actions of hers.
To hold her accountable for deeds of horror committed after this seems a
bit harsh, akin to holding, say, Trotsky liable for the starvation of six
million Ukrainians by Stalin ten years after Stalin drove Trotsky from the
Soviet Union.

I will say no more on the LUG about Riefenstahl but will certainly discuss
these matters with anyone who wishes to do so off-List.

Marc

msmall@roanoke.infi.net  FAX:  +540/343-7315
Cha robh bąs fir gun ghrąs fir!

- --
To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html