IN THE heart of the miserable Kupini neighbourhood in La Paz, Bolivia, a two-storey German-style white house with a black roof stands out among the others. It is difficult to imagine that the old woman living inside hides a Nazi treasure in a shoebox: unpublished photographs of the 1936 Berlin Olympics belonging to her father, Hans Ertl, right-hand man and lover of Leni Riefenstahl, the director of the seminal film Olympia.
They provide an invaluable insight into how the most famous sports movie of all time was filmed. One of the pictures that 63-year-old Beatriz holds shows a smiling Ertl fitting a camera in a rowing boat seat, another one filming a diver just as he ju
mps. In some he appears wearing a Nazi uniform when he worked as official photographer to Field Marshal Rommel, who rewarded him with the Iron Cross for devising ways of taking pictures under water and in the air.
"My father knew Hitler well," says Beatriz. "They met at the Olympics. He also met there my mother who was working as a secretary. But Leni of course was his true love, he repeated this until the last days of his life."
She takes out her father's light-brown shirt he used while stationed in North Africa with Rommel, but insists he never belonged to the Nazi party. This may have saved him after the war when he was briefly arrested by the Allies. But, unable to find work in Germany, he decided to go to Chile and later Bolivia where he arrived in 1953.
He travelled with his wife and three daughters on an old pick-up truck. One day the drive shaft broke and while awaiting a replacement, he heard about a farm for sale in Bolivia's eastern jungle lowlands called La Dolorida. He bought it and spent the rest of his life there.
He thus followed in the footsteps of countless Nazis fleeing to Bolivia, such as Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, who established a profitable cocaine smuggling operation there. Ironically, Ertl's favourite daughter Mon-ika, who joined Bolivia's extreme left-wing National Liberation Army guerrillas in the late 1960s, is believed to have tried to kill Barbie. But in 1971 she did murder Bolivia's consul in Hamburg, "Toto" Quintanilla – the man responsible for cutting off Che Guevara's hands after his death – by pretending to belong to a folk band seeking visas. She became the most wanted woman in South America, and was gunned down two years later by Bolivian military in the streets of La Paz.
"It was a shock for my father when Monika joined the guerrillas. He threw her out of the farm as she wanted to turn it into a military training camp," says Beatriz. "She spent four years with the guerrillas, wrote once a year telling us not to worry, that she was all right, but we never saw her again. My father learned of her death from the Voice of Germany on radio."
By then Ertl had stopped filming after a shock: one day in the early 1960s he was transporting rolls of his latest film on a tractor when a bridge he was crossing collapsed. The film was lost and the German company which hired him decided to sue. He never took up a camera again, focusing instead on tending chickens and marijuana.
He died eight years ago, at 92, after asking his other daughter Heidi to send him a bag with German soil for his tomb on the farm – where he lies dressed in an old German army uniform.
FACT BOXOLYMPIA, Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1936 Olympic Games which took place in Berlin has won numerous awards and is widely considered the greatest sports documentary ever made, also often included in critics' lists of the top 100 films of the 20th century. Although usually referred to alongside Triumph of the Will as a "Nazi propaganda" film made for Hitler, it was in fact commissioned by the International Olympics Committee. Interned until 1948, Riefenstahl's attempts to restart her film career post-war met with great resistance. She died in 2003, aged 101.
