SPRINGTIME:

Riefenstahl race-hate charges dropped (BBC, 18 October, 2002)

German prosecutors have decided not to press race-hate charges against filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl because of lack of evidence.

Investigators began their inquiry after Ms Riefenstahl was accused by German gypsies' association Rom of lying about the fate of more than 100 gypsies, who were taken from the Salzburg and Berlin concentration camps between 1940 and 1942 to be used as extras in her films.

Ms Riefenstahl, best known for the films she made during the Nazi era under Adolf Hitler, said in an interview that the gypsies, used in her 1942 film Tiefland, or Lowland, all survived the war.

"We saw all the gypsies that played in Lowlands again after the war," she told Frankfurt's Rundschau newspaper.

"Nothing happened to them."

However Rom said that many of them in fact were returned to the death camps, where they were subsequently killed. [...]

In total around 500,000 gypsies, in addition to six million Jews, were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Imagine the lies such people must have to tell even themselves to deal with the horrific things they did. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 19, 2002 5:50 AM