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These superficially contradictory circumstances last week were important because they revealed the peculiar way in which sport in general is defined by Nazi minds. Sport in Germany is by no means a mere diversion from more serious affairs. It fits into the Nazi creed of Strength through Joy. The religious intensity with which up-to-date Nazis have accepted this nebulous idea can be perceived in the enthusiasm with which groups of healthy young Germans roll down practice slopes in the effort to learn how to ski, in the amazingly extensive methods by which Germany's Olympic Committee, functioning under Sports Leader Hans von Tschammer und Osten, has prepared for the 1936 Olympic Games, and in the extraordinary career of one of Germany's most celebrated cinemactresses. If President Hoover had made Jean Harlow a major functionary in the Olympic Games of 1932, it would have been explicable only as a tribute to the superhuman shrewdness of that young woman's press-agents. Herr Hitler last year awarded to an actress of comparable popularity exclusive permission to make cinema recordings of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin next summer as part of a propaganda epic which will be shown later to German cinemaddicts throughout the Fatherland. Except to those who are Cinemactress Leni Riefenstahl's rivals in the cinema industry, this seemed to Nazis an entirely appropriate gesture.
Leni Riefenstahl is the 28-year-old daughter of a Berlin plumber who, like Adolf Hitler, went on to better times. She began her career as a ballet dancer in Munich in 1923. By 1930, she was one of her country's leading cinema stars, noted for her daring in playing dangerous sequences without a double, her fondness for being photographed in mountainous scenery, her nickname of "Ölige Ziege" (Oily Goat), impolitely coined by a German cinema critic. In 1933, U. S. audiences were able to see Fraulein Riefenstahl in an epic called S. O. S. Iceberg, during the filming of which she lived in a Greenland tent for four months (TIME, Oct. 2, 1933). The same year, she wrote, directed and acted in The Blue Light, in which magnificent photography of the Dolomites as background for a fairy tale corroborated Leni Riefenstahl's thesis that sex appeal is unnecessary in the cinema.