Part 1

I would argue that is utterly impossible for Nazism to have produced good art or good artists.

Art and even more so good art is rather hard to define and pin down. In many a ways, we tend to classify works of art as good and/or important because they found novel and interesting ways of expressing something profound, managed to be very pleasing in an aesthetic way, or have created techniques, methods and so forth that had a deep impact on how subsequent art was produced; in the best case, all three of them. In case of the artist of the Third Reich, there is a very noticeable trend that a lot of art produced there lacks all three qualifications for what they wanted to express is closely tied to Nazi ideology, their aesthetic is purposefully not pleasing but rather aimed at making the viewer cower before the massive and unsettling aesthetics and because due to ideological considerations, Nazi art was in many a ways derivative.

Unlike e.g. the early Soviet Union which for the very different content of their ideology managed to incentivize an avant-garde movement in both arts and film, the Nazis insisting their art would represent a return to the "true" forms of German art that were not "entartet" (degenerate) never managed to do so. Take this propaganda poster by El Lissitzky, a Soviet artist from the 1920s. It's a propaganda poster from the Civil War entitled "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. Lissitzky and many of his colleagues in an effort to seperate themselves from what they considered bourgeois art began to experiment with new techniques of photo montage, geometric shapes, graphic design and so forth. Similarly in film, we have people like Eisenstein who pioneered the today ubiquitous technique of the montage in a further effort to help bring along the new socialist man through the arts such as film. Nazi Germany on the other did not seek the new man by pioneering new forms of art but rather sought to return to an imagined past of Aryan and Germanic greatness, which was to be expressed in their art.

This was e.g. how they ended with Arno Breker, Nazi Germany's most famous sculptor. Breker is known for creating monumental sculptures representing overt Nazi subjects. His stuff is naked people doing things and looking very serious while doing it, huge animal sculptures, and busts of Adolf Hitler and other important personalities like Alexander the Great. Breker's artistic agenda was, if you will, to create mythologized depictions of Germanic beauty, mostly in form of pro-Nazi allegories for this is what represented a return to the "true" German forms of art in the opinion of the Nazis. While the aesthetic qualities of individual pieces can be debated, over-drawn naturalism that communicates Nazi values is neither novel nor expressing something profound about the human condition or anything else for that matter. Rather, it is a lazy attempt at some form of Neo-Classicism, that's been done better (meaning with more subtly and mastery of the techniques) by others before Breker.

Still, there were artists from Nazi Germany who after the war enjoyed a good reputation despite being Nazis. One of them was Wilhelm Furtwängler, who as some argue was the best German conductor of the 20th century. Furtwängler was renown as a conductor even before the Nazis came to power. He e.g. was the successor of Richard Strauss at the Berlin State Opera in 1920 and was the conductor of the Vienna symphony orchestra also in the 1920s as well as from 1931 the musical director of the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. While Furtwängler did protest against the treatment of Jewish musicians early after the Nazi take-over of power in subsequent years, he became something of an international cultural symbol for the Nazi state. He cooperated closely with the propaganda ministry, also being directly involved in propagnda when it came to the annexation of Austria in 1938. He was rewarded by the Viennese Gauleiter Josef Brückel with the position of "Plenipotary for musical affairs" of the Gau of Vienna. He also went on to conduct several concerts for Hitler's birthday, Christmas soirées for Goebbels, and concerts such as the celebration of five years of Reich's Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in Prague. In short, Furtwängler was well integrated into the Nazi state and cultural scene.

After the war, he was originally forbidden from working by the Allied occupation in Germany. Many of his colleagues were also quite angry with him for his collaboration with the Nazi regime. But Furtwängler managed to "beat" them all: In order to be able to work again, he simply threatened to migrate to the Soviet zone of occupation/later GDR. Because of his still existing reputation as a conductor and musicians, this lead to the West letting him work again and until his death in 1954 he conducted a lot of Wagner, which according to some music historians was his best work.

But Furtwängler is a sort of border case. He had been well established before the Nazi take over of power in 1933 and his reputation had taken a hit after the war. This was not so much the case with the artist who has come like no other to represent the legacy of Nazi art: Leni Riefenstahl.

Riefensthal, born in 1902, is arguably the only artist whose art was deeply entrenched in a National Socialist context and to whom some – controversially so – still attribute aesthetic innovation and artistic quality. While the likes of Breker are thankfully forgotten and artists like Furtwängler had had a career and reputation before they became staples of the Nazi art scene, Riefenstahl is a truly National Socialist artist in that almost her entire career and the oevre that made her famous is art with an explicit Nazi agenda.

Starting out as an actress in the 1920s, Riefenstahl had her film directorial debut in 1932 with her movie Das Blaue Licht (The Blue Light). The same year, she asked Adolf Hitler for a personal meeting, where she also met Goebbels with both of them very impressed with Das Blaue Licht. And thus, Riefensthal's close working relationship with the Nazis began. She went on to direct a trilogy of propaganda abotu the Reichsparteitage in the early 30s (Sieg des Glaubens, Triumph des Willens, Tag der Freiheit – Unsere Wehrmacht) as well as a propagnada movie about the Olympics, Olympia, in 1936 and a whole variety of other propaganda movies for the Nazi regime.

Riefenstahl was deeply entrenched and involved in Nazi ideology and activity. In 1939 she was given control over the "Sonderfilmtrupp Riefenstahl" (Special Movie Detachment Riefenstahl) following the Wehrmacht into Poland. In the course of her work there, she witnessed and documented a Wehrmacht massacre in the Polish town of Końskie and despite her later insistence that she hadn't seen anything, there are photos of her taken by a Wehrmacht soldier directly standing over the dead bodies of about 20 Jews. She also directly profited from the Nazi Concentration Camp system. For her 1944 movie Tiefland, which was shot from 1940 onward, she used Roma and Sinti concentration camp inmates from the concentration camp Maxglan and Berlin Marzahn as extras. These people were used like other companies used concentration camp inmates, meaning they were unpaid and kept in line with violence by the SS-guards detached to watch them during filming. Riefenstahl took very little interest in their fate and after filming they were deported to Auschwitz to be killed there. In essence, Riefenstahl was a huge Nazi who went d'accord with the party line and ideology and did what she could to propagandistically advance it.

And despite all of this and how awash her whole cinematic oevre was with Nazi ideology, there still are those who celebrate her cinematic aestehtics in Triumph of the Will and Olympia. The idea that Triumph of the Will is an advancement of film making is in itself Nazi propaganda that had been massively advanced by the Nazi cultural industry after the release of the movie. Dan Olsen of Folding Ideas has a very good video on that subject here, which goes into Triumph of the Will and its place in film history (a triumph of budget) and that I highly recommend for more on the movie and its aesthetics.