the huge Olympic stadium in Hitler's Berlin, built for the 1936 Olympics

item #OL - 21

Offered for sale is a

This very rare 9-1/2 x 12-1/2 inch hardcover book by Leni Riefenstahl with 273 excellent photographs was published 1937 by Deutscher Verlag in Berlin, Germany. It is one of the best if not THE best Third Reich book on the Olympic Summer Games held in Berlin in 1936. Most of the photos come from her movie which is by far more known than this book. Riefenstahl was hired by Reich Propaganda Minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels to document the Olympic Games and she brought her considerable visual and organizational skills to bear on both the photographing and filming of the 1936 Olympic Games. She presented the athletes like nobody before, taking the camera into the water to film the swimmers, she shot bird's eye and worm's eye views of the athletes and often presented them in poses like the antique Greek ideal, faithful to Hitler's belief that modern Teutonic man was 'feeling closer to classical antiquity' than he had 'in possibly a thousand years'.

Riefenstahl said "What makes these pictures unique is that cameramen have never been allowed to work so close to the athletes at any other Olympics. It was a hard battle to obtain authorization for this from the IOC. Despite permission being granted, there were vehement disputes with the judges on a daily basis. One had to go to war to get the shots."

Offered for sale is a very nice copy of the first edition. The only imperfection is one missing page (55/56). The book has very little text, only short descriptions under each photo - in five languages (German, French, English, Italian and Spanish)! A fantastic book by one of the most controversy artists in the Third Reich, a fanatic Nazi and follower of Hitler for some people and a great photographer for others. We do not make any attempt to judge her, we are simply offering her extraordinary book!

We also recommend the rare bound complete set of all 30 Olympia newspapers that we also offer on this web site. To see this listing, please click here.

above: Leni Riefenstahl shooting in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin (there are several photos like that at the end of the book.

below: Riefenstahl and the Reichssportfuehrer von Tschammer und Osten

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