Sunday read: A chat with Goebbels’ secretary

Image from German Wikipedia.

I remember a line about Leni Riefenstahl, the German filmmaker who always maintained that she was unaware of the darker side of the Nazi regime she worked with. She claimed to the end — and she lived past 100 — that her films “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia” were simply documents of their era. All that other stuff? Awful, but not her concern.

To which New Yorker reviewer Terrence Rafferty wrote, “If you believe her, she’s one kind of monster; if you don’t, she’s another.”

Riefenstahl was the subject of a documentary, “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl,” made in 1993. Now another documentary about a worker for the Nazi elite, Brunhilde Pomsel, is being released. It’s called “A German Life.”