Im toten Winkel - Hitlers Sekretärin

Near the beginning of the film, Hitler's secretary tells a story of a concentration camp guard asked if he felt pity for the victims, and that he replied yes, of course he does, but that he had to get over it for the greater good. His sense of morality was still intact, just perverted. Like that line in "Rules of the Game," everyone has their reasons. The film forces us to humanize the "bad" guys -- this is an old woman, and, with the exception of Leni Riefenstahl, nobody wants to immediately hate an old woman, least of all one was never a member of the Nazi party and whose own husband died fighting. She got the job largely out of chance: during her typing test, which she was doing terribly on, a phone call (which would prove life-changing) came in for Hitler and she had time, while he was on the phone, to calm herself down and type properly.

The film isn't much as a film, but the director does something very smart in showing her watch the film herself. On the one hand, it allows her to go back and make an addendum should something seem incomplete or out of context, and on a subject as touchy as this that makes sense. (And it's something that allows her to remain dignified -- the aim here isn't to "catch" her admitting to something, nor is it to make her into a symbol we can feel sorry for: she cries only once, and even then it's brief.) But on the other hand, it could also be seen to be allowing her to backtrack on her own admissions. For instance, at one point she dismisses her descriptions of Hitler as being "banal," and with the exception of her description of the joy he took in showing off his dog's tricks (that's too obvious a comparison for it to speak of his manner in dealing with humans), the insight she gives is valuable because it explains her experience, how it felt at the time. The atrocious digital video is painful on the eyes, but the director's decision to cut to her watching the video herself has a secondary value; at one point as she is watching the video she adds a question, asking rhetorically if Hitler had found Jewish blood in him, would he have gassed himself? Because it is so casually interspersed with the interview proper, and because of the echo in the room, it's a haunting moment, and it adds an aesthetic dimension to the film that is otherwise lacking (and maybe rightfully so).

She describes her house as being one raised by a man (her grandfather on her mother's side; her father was absent) who favored ideals such as backing down and making sacrifices. That, and the fact that she openly admits to being endeared to Hitler based partly on a paternal image, partly explains her naivety, but even the background reasons for why she didn't understand who Hitler really was (or what he was really doing, as she had a closer understanding of "who" he was than those of us who pontificate from a distance) doesn't do anything to change the fact that she can't live with herself because of it. The film doesn't really take an in depth approach at that, at the nature of her depression; it more listens to her relay the information as she experienced it, which is an interesting perspective. We get a good sense of her guilt when she describes Hitler's private courteousness vs. his bombastic public persona. Which was the evil one? If he had ideals in his private life, they became evils in his public life. But his success could not have been achieved if it was not for the collective "us." THAT is a troubling thought, and it betrays the common image we have of Hitler as the great evil. It's no wonder she was so distraught that after years of silence (and disinterest in her story) she emerges to make this film -- and then die after its release.

As a woman she has certain insights into the Hitler phenomenon. She never understood why Hitler received so many fan letters from women, remarking that she didn't see him as a sexual beast (she only once witnessed him kiss his wife Eva Braun on the lips), and that he had relatively "primitive" views on women -- he could never understand that a man might cheat on his beautiful wife with a less attractive woman; after all, what else could he want aside from his wife's beauty? She also speaks quite eloquently about eroticism, and it might seem out of place to praise her for it (or to praise the filmmakers for including it), but just hearing her, a woman of a certain age, talk openly about giving yourself over to the erotic (and how Hitler never did) is a pleasure in itself.

Those looking for a revelation into the Holocaust's inner workings will likely be disappointed -- even though she was in the bunker, she doesn't solve the Hitler suicide question (she heard an officer claim to have burned the body post-suicide, but didn't go look). But it's fascinating regardless, and she finds it fascinating too -- it's interesting to watch her fairly calm and reserved demeanor grow more excitable in the last half hour as she remembers certain bits of information. Listening to her, we get a pretty full sense of the mania of the last days -- she recounts the story of a wedding going on and the party afterward with someone playing an accordion; this, as Russian artillery fires in the background. Then she finds a rather poignant Hitler quote when she and others, knowing what Russian soldiers do to the women they catch, ask for cyanide tablets and Hitler consents, saying he wishes he could offer a better farewell gift. 8/10

This is quite possibly the most minimal movie ever made. Except for the opening and closing credits, all we ever see is an elderly woman in closeup, apparently in her own home, talking past the camera to an unseen interviewer. He's only heard a few times. He seems completely superfluous. The interview segments are punctuated with brief blackouts.

There's no score. No film cutaways or slow Ken Burns-style pans over countless still images of the Third Reich. She just talks for an hour and a half in her native German, so much of my attention was focused on the subtitles. A few segments show her watching her own interview and making additional comments.

After watching "Blind Spot" I found on Youtube a much earlier interview in which she speaks in English. Judging from her apparent age, it looks to have been made circa 1970, probably for the British "World at War" series. She recounts many things in much the same way in both interviews, so it's obvious she's spent much of her adult life reliving the events she's talking about and pondering her own role in them. She doesn't need much prompting.

Because of the minimal production values and the subtitles, I felt more like I was reading a book than watching a movie. But this was a very good book that really engaged my imagination. I'd seen the movie "Downfall", based in large part on her recollections, but her own verbal imagery would have been vivid enough.

When "Downfall" came out there was a lot of hand wringing about how it "humanized" Hitler, some from people I thought knew better. Similar criticisms have been leveled at Frau Junge, but they completely miss the point. Accuracy is what matters in a historical account, and I have no reason to doubt hers. Whether we want to admit it or not, Hitler was a fully human being. He wasn't a highly evolved space alien or a demon from hell with supernatural powers who took human form to enslave mankind from the outside. He was one of us. We have to deal with that.

As Junge explains so well, Hitler actually had many positive personal attributes. At one time it was her job to open his personal mail, so she saw the letters he received from the countless women who absolutely swooned over him. And the only time I doubted her veracity was when she claimed not to understand why. Her own story - that she so readily agreed to become one of his secretaries - shows that she understood his attraction all too well. Not just to women but to Germans in general.

And that's precisely the point! We don't want to believe that Hitler was anything like us "normal" people. We don't want to believe that a man who caused so much destruction and suffering could have any redeeming qualities at all, much less be perceived as highly attractive. We're much more comfortable putting him on a shelf and labeling him as something unique and different, an inhuman monster quite apart from us "ordinary" people. We do the same with the German people of that era. Unlike us noble Americans, with our humanitarianism and respect for personal freedoms and rights, the Germans of 1933-1945 were stupid, gullible, unthinking automatons, blind to the obvious evil of their leaders. Why, that could never happen to us!

It damn well COULD happen to us. That's why Frau Junge's story is so important. Watch this movie.

"I'm starting to forgive myself", with those words Traudl Junge ends a documentary which for herself was very difficult to make.

Junge, who is obviously very sorry of here naive blind belief in a man that had blood of millions on his hands, tells us the story of how she came in contact with Hitler and starts working for him. Very intense she tells stories from the beginning of here career until the end...when she is typing Hitler's both political and private will.

We should thank André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer for making this great documentary, which came right on time because one day after the release of the movie, Traudl Junge died of cancer. Her testimony is of huge historical value and will now never be forgotten.

Must-see for everybody.

The title of this German documentary ("Im Toten Winkel - Hitlers Sekretarin") would be more accurately translated as "The Dead Zone: Hitler's Secretary". An even better title would be "Dead Calm", as in the eye of a hurricane. The narrator or interviewee, Traudl Humps Junge, maintains that -- far from being at the hub of the Nazi regime and privy to sensitive political and military information -- she was actually completely out of the loop in the splendid isolation of the Wolf's Lair.

But "Blind Spot" is an equally apt description of Frau Junge's vantage point on Hilter and the war years, especially at the beginning of her career. The Hitler she knew was partly a creation of her own mind. She admits that she was attracted to him as a benevolent father figure, one she needed to compensate for the shortcomings of her own parents. The Hitler she depicts in the first half of the documentary is light-years removed from the Hitler portrayed by Noah Taylor in the recent feature film "Max".Frau Junge's Hitler is almost endearing ("gentle" is her word), with his fondness for his pet dog Blondie, and his abstemious lifestyle as a vegetarian and teetotaller.

Yet, in retrospect, Frau Junge wonders why she did not see Hitler for the monster he turned out to be. If nothing else, he lived in total denial of the realities of global conflict and mass genocide. He preferred to eat with his secretaries and avoid the war talk of his male staff. When travelling through a devastated Germany by train, he kept the window blinds pulled down. He was careful about his diet, yet this did not prevent him from being dyspeptic and suffering from digestive complaints.

In the second half of the documentary, Frau Junge details Hitler's last days before committing suicide in his bunker. Over and over, she uses the same three adjectives like a refrain or leitmotiv: "nightmarish", "weird", "macabre". Her face shows little emotion, except when she speaks of the six Goebbels children who were injected with poison because their mother could not conceive of life after the Third Reich. Her voice is calm and strong. (Indeed, I found myself able to udnerstand much of the original German because her diction was so clear.) Her version of events does not sound rehearsed. Like anyone else recalling a distant past, she sometimes forgets to recount something and must backtrack. She is a credible witness to history -- and yet, at the same time, her story is that of someone wearing blinkers or with tunnel vision. As the old saying goes, "Hindsight is better than foresight", and "There is none so blind as he who will not see."

Hitler's denial of reality, and Frau Junge's "blind spot", are the reflection in microcosm of an entire nation's unwillingness, for decades, to acknowledge its responsibility for the horrors of the Nazi regime. Frau Junge says that even the revelations of the death camps, and the Nuremberg trials, were not enough to force the German people to look themselves squarely in the face. She herself did not tell her story for almost 60 years.

Just before the lights go up, we learn that Frau Junge died of cancer the day after the documentary premiered in Berlin. In her last conversation with the filmmakers, she confessed, "I think I am just now beginning to forgive myself."

Much is being made by BLIND SPOT's producers that Junge has been silent all these years, never speaking on record until they interviewed her just before her death. Actually Junge was interviewed at great length for the epic documentary series THE WORLD AT WAR, produced for British television in the '70s.

Junge's english was excellent, and her original interview, conducted 30 years ago, was just as chillingly matter-of-fact as I hear the current one is. BLIND SPOT sounds very compelling, and certainly not in need of inacurate hype about its uniqueness.

The DVD of WORLD AT WAR contains an expanded version of Junge's interview in its extras section, along with an appearance by a then thirty-year-younger historian Stephen Ambrose - WITH LONG HAIR!