Biography

Met Albert Speer, who would become Hitler's architect, while a student in Berlin. Started in film with a 1931 feature about kayaking in Austria and Yugoslavia. Through Speer, Frentz met Leni Riefenstahl, who made masterful propaganda films for the Nazis, including "Triumph of the Will" in 1934. Worked with Riefenstahl on that film and several others.

Lacking assignments, he joined the Luftwaffe - the German air force - in 1938 and was a cameraman as Hitler entered newly annexed Austria that year. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, setting off World War II, Frentz recorded Hitler's victory parade in Warsaw, and filmed Hitler entering Paris when France capitulated the next year. He stayed with Hitler's inner circle until the end of the war.

In March 1945, he took the last pictures of Hitler before the dictator's April 30 suicide in his Berlin bunker. Fleeing Berlin, he was arrested by Nazi SS officers at Hitler's Obersalzberg complex in the Bavarian Alps, and part of his photo archive was confiscated.

Never officially joined the Nazi party, though he was held for several months after the war by U.S. forces at the Hammelburg prison camp.

Cameraman who followed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi's regimes conquest of Europe during World War II. He recorded many of the regime's invasions and massacres, especially the massacre of civilians in Belarus. In March 1945, he took the last pictures of Hitler before the dictator's April 30 suicide in his Berlin bunker.