Berlin, Sept. 9 (Reuters): Adolf Hitler’s filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, the last of Germany’s famous Nazi-era figures, has died weeks after turning 101, a journalist with links to her family said today.

“Frau Riefenstahl died without pain, she fell asleep in her bed last night,” said Celia Tremper, a journalist for Bunte magazine who said she has close links with Riefenstahl.

There was no other verification of the report.

Riefenstahl had won awards at the Venice and Paris film festivals in the 1930s for her Triumph of the Will, a documentary highlighting the meticulously choreographed, eerie grandeur of the Nazi Party’s 1934 Nuremberg Rally. She was then commissioned to make the official film of the 1936 Olympics.

”Olympia” pioneered techniques such as mounting the camera on electric cars on rails to follow races.

Ever since the war, those films have haunted her, and she remained a villain to many for declining to apologise for them. Critics have accused her of failing to own up to being associated with the Nazis.