Willy Zielke

Countless people around the world know the pictures from Leni Riefenstahl's films, even if they have not seen them in their entirety. The work of the German director has burned itself into the collective memory. Even decades after the end of the Nazi era, she showed no remorse and presented herself as an apolitical, naive follower of the Nazi criminal regime. Her artistic service for the cinema was always recognized. But book author Nina Gladitz shows after decades of research that Hitler's favorite filmmaker was not only a follower, but also a perpetrator during the Third Reich, who instrumentalized other filmmakers such as the brilliant cinematographer Willy Zielke in order to gain fame for herself.

Filming of the performance show the Deutsche Wehrmacht (German Army) made during the Reichsparteitag of the NSDAP in Nurnberg 1935. Showing the readiness and the will of the newly build army. The third documentary directed by Leni Riefenstahl.

새카맣게 모인 군중들 위로 아돌프 히틀러가 탄 비행기의 그림자가 드리우는 장면을 시작으로 4일동안의 일정이 시작된다. 비행기에서 내린 히틀러가 호텔로 가는 도중 군중들은 열광적으로 환호한다. 2일째가 되면 본격적으로 전당대회가 시작된다. 루돌프 헤스의 개막사로 문을 연 전당대회에는 파울 요제프 괴벨스, 알프레드 로젠베르크, 한스 프랑크 등 나치 간부의 모습이 보인다. 히틀러는 격정적인 연설을 펼친다. 세번째 날은 히틀러 소년단의 집회 장면으로 시작된다. 히틀러는 소년들을 향해 연설을 하고 소년들은 진심어린 환호를 보낸다. 이날 밤 히틀러는 횃불을 밝혀놓은 가운데 나치당 하위 간부들에게 연설을 한다. 4일째에는 전당대회의 메인 행사가 열린다. 히틀러는 친위대들에 둘러싸인 채 수십만명의 군중 앞에 등장한다. 곧이어 새로운 당의 깃발이 선보이고 히틀러는 마지막 연설을 시작한다. 그는 “충성스러운 독일인은 모두 국가사회주의자가 될 것”이라는 선언을 한다. 수십만이 히틀러에게 경례를 붙이는 가운데 거대한 나치 깃발이 보여진다.

Klaassen receives a phone call, and he is happy with his transfer to head the railway line's controlling team. He accepts well his change of job, but when he meets his co-workers, uncultured and rough people, he starts having second thoughts. However, he takes it easy, recognizes that they're highly trained works, and teaches them a number of (flashback) stories of pioneers of the present steam train: the early invention by Denis Papin (1679); the three legendary land-surveyors of Caton Hill; the 1769 experiment by Nicolas-Joseph De Cugnot; the 1813 machine test of William Hedley; the 1829 developments by Robert Stephenson; and finally the grand opening of the first German steam railway line of Nürnberg-Fürth - stories in which man's will to conquer the machine was sometimes met with disaster.

Klaassen receives a phone call, and he is happy with his transfer to head the railway line's controlling team. He accepts well his change of job, but when he meets his co-workers, uncultured and rough people, he starts having second thoughts. However, he takes it easy, recognizes that they're highly trained works, and teaches them a number of (flashback) stories of pioneers of the present steam train: the early invention by Denis Papin (1679); the three legendary land-surveyors of Caton Hill; the 1769 experiment by Nicolas-Joseph De Cugnot; the 1813 machine test of William Hedley; the 1829 developments by Robert Stephenson; and finally the grand opening of the first German steam railway line of Nürnberg-Fürth - stories in which man's will to conquer the machine was sometimes met with disaster.

Willy Zielke was a brilliant photographer and filmmaker from Łodź who suffered greatly at the hands of the Nazis: His German feature films of the 1930s, Arbeitslos and Das Stahltier, were banned; Leni Riefenstahl made use of him to conceive, direct, and shoot the prologue for Olympia, but gave him no credit; and later, in a mentally incapacitated state, he was confined to an insane asylum where he was forcibly sterilized, only to be released after five years in 1942 so that Riefenstahl could make use of him once again on the final shooting of Tiefland. Zielke’s 1933 film Arbeitslos, commissioned by a Maffei railway company unemployment shelter, presented a despairing portrait of a nation in near-total collapse.