Leni Riefenstahl, the German filmmaker whose career stretched seventy years and included major Nazi propaganda, died Sept. 8. She was 101.

Ms. Riefenstahl started her show business tenure with some acting roles, but is best known for the films she directed for the Nazis in the 1930s. “Triumph of the Will” (1935) was made just after Hitler took power in Germany, and was a celebration of Hitler’s ideal of the Aryan “superman”. Its scenes of Nazi rallies elevated Hitler to practically god-like status, and cemented his image as “der Fuhrer” – The Leader.

“[“Triumph of the Will”] was important at the time for the way it painted Hitler and his followers as idealized supermen, important now because it helps explain how Nazism was not only a political movement but an exercise in mass hypnotism drawing on fetishistic imagery,” said film critic Roger Ebert in a tribute to Riefenstahl.

But Riefenstahl insisted that it was a simple documentary and not a propaganda piece. The dispute over the film’s identity (documentary or propaganda) endures today. Riefenstahl initially said she was even involved in planning the rally she would film, but in later years denied that claim. Riefenstahl maintained her innocence of the Nazi atrocities to the end. As for what she filmed, she remarked, “I filmed the truth as it was then. Nothing more.”

With “Triumph” behind her, Riefenstahl moved on to concentrating more on the art of not just film, but the human body as athletic device, in the two-part “Olympia”, a chronicle of the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin. Naturally, the physically “perfect” German athletes were highlighted, and sparse coverage was given to those who did not meet Hitler’s standards of racial superiority, such as American Jesse Owens.

Despite being branded a Nazi after World War II ended, Riefenstahl denied knowing about the horrors that regime had inflicted upon the Jews and other groups. Regardless of her protests, she was forced to disappear from the world scene for a while. No quitter, Riefenstahl merely took up other hobbies and interests.

In the 1950’s, inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s writings, Riefenstahl lived with the Nuba tribe in the Sudan for a few months, and later wrote several books about the experience, mostly photographic, between 1972 and 1997. In 2000, she was filming in Africa when her helicopter crashed and she suffered broken ribs and lung injuries. She would still survive three more years.

In the 1970’s, she lied about her age to gain admittance to a deep-sea diving class, and this was the setting for her next adventure. Her repeated dives led her, at age 100, to make the documentary “Underwater Impressions”.

Ebert suggests that Riefenstahl would not have renounced her Nazi ties if Hitler had won, but did so to avoid prosecution.

“Ironically, if she had confessed and renounced her earlier ideas, she might have had a more active career. It was her unconvincing, elusive self-defense that continued to damn her,” he said.

Riefenstahl died at her home in Munich.