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Hans Ertl (21 February 1908 in Munich, Germany – 23 October 2000 in Chiquitania, Bolivia) was a German mountaineer and Nazi propagandist. He is most known for being the father of Monika Ertl, the Communist guerrilla who assassinated Roberto Quintanilla Pereira, the man responsible for chopping off Che Guevara's hands.
In 1939, while preparing to leave to shoot a film in Chile, Hans Ertl was conscripted by the Third Reich to be a "war correspondent."[1] As a cameraman in Nazi Germany, he worked with director Leni Riefenstahl on several of her Nazi propaganda films, including Olympia.[1][2] During World War II, he was among the preferred cameramen accompanying General Rommel, which earned him a reputation as "Rommel's photographer".[citation needed] During the early part of his career, he invented an underwater camera and a ski-mountable camera, both of which transformed the way films were shot.[1]
In the mid-1950s, after an arrest by the Allies[2] and being banned from working professionally in Germany,[1] Ertl fled to Chile[2] and finally resettled in Bolivia,[1] where he made two feature-length "expedition film"-like documentaries. 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 La Dolorida, a piece of semi-jungle land in eastern Bolivia,[2] where he was known as "Juan."[1]
Ertl's first wife and mother of his three daughters died from liver cancer in 1958.[1] His favorite daughter was Monika Ertl, with whom Ertl became upset when she decided to join the leftist ELN guerrilla movement in 1969.[1][2] He refused to allow her to convert part of the farm into a military training ground.[1] When Monika was gunned down by the Bolivian military[2] in retribution for having allegedly helped in the 1971 assassination of Colonel Roberto Quintanilla Pereira, the Bolivian consul in Hamburg, her father was "relieved that she had gone in peace."[1]
He was also an acquaintance of Klaus Barbie and, earlier, supposedly a lover of Riefenstahl.[2] 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 Heidi, who lived in Bavaria, to send him a bag of German soil. Ertl died in 2000 and was buried on his farm, which is now a museum.[1][3] In a 2008 Time article, Ertl's daughter Beatriz denied that her father was a Nazi, saying that he served out of "obligation" and that he "did what he could to survive." His daughter also stated that Riefenstahl was "the love of his life."[1]
Rodrigo Hasbún's second novel, Affections, is loosely based on Ertl's life.
