Biography
He was a cameraman during the Nazi era, and worked with Leni Riefenstahl on several of her Nazi propaganda films as well as on her Olympia film. During World War II he was among the preferred cameramen accompanying (then) General Rommel which earned him a reputation as "Rommel's photographer".
In the mid-1950s he resettled in Bolivia where he made two "expedition film"-like documentaries of feature length. He embarked on a third, but ceased after his tractor crashed through a wooden bridge with two thirds of the (uninsured) exposed footage on board. Frustrated he then decided to become a farmer and retired to a piece of semi-jungle land in Eastern Bolivia.
Ertl was the father of the guerrilla Monika Ertl, he was also an acquaintance of Klaus Barbie and, earlier, supposedly a lover of Riefenstahl. He rarely returned to Germany where he felt cheated out of an important film award, but days before his death he reportedly asked his daughter in Bavaria to send him a bag of German soil. Ertl died in 2000 and he was buried on his farm which is now a museum.
Read more about this topic: Hans Ertl (cameraman)
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