Hans Ertl – A little known pioneer of photography
The name Hans Ertl may not immediately spring to mind unless you are in your latter years and remember the second World War (WW2). Ertl was a cameraman, a photographer and a mountaineer, combining the two passions and making several films on mountaineering. He also has a number of first ascents to his name.
Ertl was also an inventor. He spent many years exploring ways to capture movement on film. His inventions of a ski-mounted camera and an underwater camera, over 70 years ago, transformed image making. It is thank’s to Ertl’s inventions that contemporary underwater footage of swimming and close-up imagery of skiers on piste have progressed to the level we enjoy today at modern Olympics.
Just before WW2 changed our world in so many ways, Hitler’s Germany staged the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Renowned Germany film director, Leni Riefenstahl, made the acclaimed two-part film ‘Olympia’ about the games. Ertl was the Director of Photography and a cameraman on thiat documentary. As well as chronicling the Olympics, Olympia was also a propaganda film promoting the superiority of the Aryan race, with Riefenstahl being very much seen as a Nazi sympathiser.
A war that changed everything
In 1939, at the outbreak of war, 30 years old Ertl was preparing to leave Germany for Chile to film a mountain climb when he became part of the Nazi war machine. There is some debate about his political views, but he maintained that he was conscripted rather than a Nazi himself. Certainly in later life he shunned right-wing politics. His links with Riefenstahl and the Olympia film undoubtedly made him a favourite cameraman amongst the Reich. He was assigned to Rommel, documenting his campaigns especially in North Africa through the war.
At the end of the war in 1945 he was left unable to work as a professional cameraman in Germany so left, or perhaps fled, for Chile. He went on to Bolivia and it was there he eventually made his home, moving his family – wife and three daughters – there to settle. He rarely returned to Germany again.
Ertl’s farm – La Dolorida – in Chiquitania
A farm in Bolivia
In 1958, his wife died from liver cancer at a relatively young age. The following year he bought some land – part farmland and part rainforest – in Chiquitania. By all accounts he was very work-orientated as a young man, constantly travelling and filming, but after the death of his wife and the purchase of the farm, became very much more family orientated. He continued to make several expedition documentaries but his film making and photographic work ended after an accident saw most of his footage, shot over several months, lost in a ravine. He maintained his love for inventing though.
Controversy followed him through his eldest daughter, Monika. In the late 1960s she joined a left-wing guerrilla movement. Ertl refused the use of his farm for any related activities. Monika died young for her beliefs. She was gunned down by the Bolivian military in 1971 for her part in the assassination of Colonel Roberto (Toto) Quintanilla Pereira, the Bolivian consul in Hamburg.
A small museum of Hans Ertl’s life in his estancia
A museum of his life
Hans Ertl lived to the age of 92, living alone in his later years. His farm, although no longer owned by the family, has a small private museum, viewable only by appointment. In it are Ertl’s cameras and some other personal artefacts which give an insight into the man himself. There’s a collection of magazines with features on key events and incidents in world history, a framed collections of beautiful butterflies and some of his climbing gear.
Rumour, folklore and myth seem to surround him and his life. Ertl died in 2000. His grave is on the hillside overlooking the estancia. It’s a beautiful spot, arguably the best on the property, above a lake teeming with capybara. This burial spot is supposedly the place where he was bitten by a snake some years earlier and chosen by him as the site for his grave. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s all part of the myth which surrounds his life.
Ertl’s farm in Bolivia
Germany remained part of him. A few years before he died he asked his middle daughter, Heidi, to send him a bag of earth from Bavaria. That earth was put in his grave on the hill when he died.
Ertl’s Legacy
Ertl was a prestigious talent and prolific film maker before the war. His involvement first with Olympia and then a Nazi cameraman robbed him of several awards for his work. This was a source of sadness for him and it is indicative of his life that he name of his farm is La Dolorida. The translation from Spanish is revealing – The Sorrowful One.
The Second World War left many victims. Those we died and those who were left behind. Is Hans Ertl a victim too? It’s hard to say. Some, of course, was self-inflicted. His links with Leni Riefenstahl, allegedly the love of his life, undoubtedly didn’t help the perception of him as a Nazi or Nazi sympathiser, as did his links to Rommel.
Hans Ertl’s grave on the hill above his estancia, La Dolorida, in Chiquitania
Although he couldn’t work in Germany again after the war, then went to South America and settle in Bolivia, he made no attempt to hide his past, unlike most who fled the Third Reich post WW2. He left a legacy, albeit mixed and clouded by his involvement with the Nazi war machine, but to this day his impact of film making was and is significant. Even if you’ve never heard of him until now, he was undoubtedly a pioneer of cinematography in his early life and career.
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