Hiccups of Humanity

In Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay (dig the new website!) on the life and legacy of Leni Riefenstahl, we come across the following factoid, which has the virtue of being pathetic enough to be true:

In the course of a dark century, Riefenstahl seems to have suffered at least one spasm of something like doubt, and the moment was captured in a photograph. When Hitler invaded Poland, on September 1, 1939, she mustered some of her most seasoned technicians into a combat-film unit. They left for the front about a week later, reporting for duty “on Hitler’s orders” to the small, predominantly Jewish town of Ko?skie. Waking under fire the next morning, September 12th—the day the Reich’s news bureau promised a solution to “the Jewish problem in Poland”—Riefenstahl was on hand to witness an improvised beginning to the exterminations. Claiming that Polish partisans had killed a German officer and four soldiers, the occupying troops herded a Jewish burial detail to the main square. When the soldiers guarding the gravediggers began to kick and club them into the pit, Riefenstahl tried to intervene, she said, but they turned on her with cries of “Get rid of the bitch.” Bach writes, “An amateur photographer captured her distraught expression.”

The subsequent massacre at Kon´skie left a toll of thirty victims. An eyewitness testified that Riefenstahl had a “sobbing fit” when she saw the Wehrmacht open fire on civilians, and she later claimed to have been “so upset” by this experience that she asked for permission to abandon her assignment and return to Berlin. In reality, however, she hitched a ride on a military plane to Danzig, where she lunched with Hitler (he expressed “shock and anger” at the story, she said) and accepted his invitation to hear the victory speech in which he blamed England for the war.

So the best propagandist for the Third Reich evidently didn't think what she was selling would ever be purchased by men with guns. One admires Hitler's feigned reaction upon hearing of a massacre that must have had him salivating at the prospect of more.

In the original version of his beautiful memorial to W.B. Yeat, Auden wrote:

Time, that is intolerant of the brave and innocent, And indifferent in a week, To a beautiful physique, Worships language and forgives Everyone by whom it lives; Pardons cowardice, conceit, Lays its honours at their feet. 

Time that with this strange excuse Pardoned Kipling and his views, And will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardons him for writing well.

Riefenstahl had some talent as a documentarian, but can it really be said that she should be pardoned by the moral judgment of posterity as she was by the tribunal of Nuremberg, whose punitive scope was much narrower?