Leni Riefenstahl started and stopped more films during the war, but didn't complete any nor did she accept any more assignments for documentaries. She filming Tiefland ("Lowlands"), a return to the romantic mountain film style, before World War II ended, but she was unable to complete the editing and other post-production work. She did some planning of a film on Penthisilea, Amazon queen, but never carried the plans through.
In 1944, she married Peter Jakob. They were divorced in 1946.
After the war, she was imprisoned for a time for her pro-Nazi contributions. In 1948, a German court found that she had not been actively a Nazi. That same year, the International Olympic Committee awarded Leni Riefenstahl a gold medal and diploma for "Olympia."
In 1952, another German court officially cleared her of any collaboration that could be considered war crimes. In 1954, Tiefland was completed and released to modest success.
In 1968, she began living with Horst Kettner, who was more than 40 years younger than her. He was still her companion at her death in 2003.
Leni Riefenstahl turned from film to photography. In 1972, the London Times had Leni Riefenstahl photograph the Munich Olympics. But it was in her work in Africa that she achieved new fame.
In the Nuba people of southern Sudan, Leni Riefenstahl found opportunities to explore visually the beauty of the human body. Her book, Die Nuba, of these photographs was published in 1973. Ethnographers and others criticized these photos of naked men and women, many with faces painted in abstract patterns and some depicted fighting. In these photos as in her films, people are depicted more as abstractions than as unique persons. The book has remained somewhat popular as a paean to the human form, though some would call it quintessential fascistic imagery. In 1976 she followed this book with another, The People of Kan.
In 1973, interviews with Leni Riefenstahl were included in a CBS television documentary about her life and work. In 1993, the English translation of her autobiography and a filmed documentary which included extensive interviews with Leni Riefenstahl both included her continuing claim that her films were never political. Criticized by some as too easy on her and by others including Riefenstahl as too critical, the documentary by Ray Muller asks the simplistic question, "A feminist pioneer, or a woman of evil?"
Perhaps tired of the criticism of her human images as representing, still, a "fascist aesthetic," Leni Riefenstahl in her 70s learned to scuba dive, and turned to photographing underwater nature scenes. These, too, were published, as was a documentary film with footage drawn from 25 years of underwater work which was shown on a French-German art channel in 2002.
Leni Riefenstahl was back in the news in 2002 -- not only for her 100th birthday. She was sued by Roma and Sinti ("gypsy") advocates on behalf of extras who had worked on Tiefland. They alleged that she had hired these extras knowing that they were taken from work camps to work on the film, locked up at night during filming to prevent their escape, and returned to concentration camps and likely death at the end of filming in 1941. Leni Riefenstahl first claimed that she had seen "all" of the extras alive after the war ("Nothing happened to any of them."), but then withdrew that claim and issued another statement deploring the treatment of the "gypsies" by the Nazis, but disclaiming personal knowledge of or responsibility for what happened to the extras. The lawsuit charged her with Holocaust denial, a crime in Germany.
Since at least 2000, Jodie Foster has been working towards producing a film about Leni Riefenstahl.
Leni Riefenstahl continued to insist -- to her last interview -- that art and politics are separate and that what she did was in the world of art.
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