SOURCE: Murray-Brown, Jeremy. “Festival of Smoke.” New Criterion 12, no. 3 (November 1993): 74-8.

In the following review, Murray-Brown asserts that the central interest of Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir lies in Riefenstahl's descriptions of her relationship with Adolf Hitler.

Soon after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, an incident occurred in the town of Konskie in which a number of Poles were massacred by German soldiers in reprisal for Polish partisan attacks on Germans. Photographs were taken, one showing the bodies of the murdered Poles lying on the ground. Also present in Konskie that day was a uniformed woman in charge of a German “documentary” film crew. She was Leni Riefenstahl, then thirty-seven years old and well known as Hitler's favored filmmaker. A photograph was taken of her, too.

These photographs taken at Konskie haunted Riefenstahl after the war when she was accused of being an eye-witness to Nazi atrocities...