Torviscosa 1943
Walter Frentz (1907 - 2004)
Always passionate about photography and cinema, as well as kayaking and canoeing, Walter Frentz began his filmmaking activity with some sports documentaries. The turning point came in 1933: it was the year when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Reich, a fact that marked the rise to power of the National Socialist Party. In the Chancellor’s intentions, the Party Congress of that year had to be a grandiose and memorable event, passed on to future generations in a video for which director Leni Riefenstahl was hired. A young architect, Albert Speer, was appointed for the set design of the Congress; he was already a member of the Party and later became part of Hitler’s inner circle and even Minister of Armaments. Speer himself introduced Walter Frentz, his friend and university mate, to Leni Riefenstahl, who was looking for a cameraman. The collaboration with the director continued in the following years: in 1936 Frentz was one of the cameramen of the famous film Olympia, shot on the occasion of the Berlin Olympic Games.
In the meantime, Frentz has also earned the esteem of the Führer, with whom he also shares a passion for architecture. Hitler thus began to entrust him with tasks as a film reporter on various missions abroad: Frentz was in Moscow with von Ribbentrop in 1939 for negotiations with Stalin and then in Warsaw for Hitler’s victory parade; in 1941 he was with Himmler in Minsk, where he witnessed a frightful massacre of civilians. In the years of the Second World War, he travelled all over Europe. Between 1943 and 1944, he went on three missions in northern Italy, in the area administered and controlled militarily by the German Armed Forces after the armistice of 8 September: the OZAV (Operationszone Alpenvorland = Pre-Alps Operations Zone) and the OZAK (Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland = Operations area of the Adriatic coast), which also included the territory of our region. On these occasions, he photographed several locations in northern Italy and Istria.
