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If one is looking for a true horror story in which the monster
is all too humanly glimpsed, a much better choice is Blind Spot:
Hitler’s Secretary, a documentary by André Heller and Othmar
Schmiderer. Traudl Junge was 22 when she was chosen from a clerical
pool to become one of Adolf Hitler’s private secretaries; she was
with him through his last days in the bunker, where he dictated
to her his last will and testament. At the age of 81, 56 years after
the war’s end, she decided to allow herself to be filmed for the
first time speaking about her experiences. Although she had consulted
with a few historians and moviemakers over the years, she had never
really unburdened herself, and this 90-minute documentary is a devastating
act of personal confession.
Junge, who died just hours after the film received its premiere at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival, has the look of a woman who is still in the grip of a waking nightmare. (The end credits note that in the postwar years, she worked as a financial journalist and took early retirement because of severe depression.) She is entirely believable when she describes herself as an impressionable and apolitical girl who got the job only because she happened to win a typing contest; the reason she is convincing is that she makes absolutely no excuses for herself. She recalls how, after the war, she passed a statue near her home in Munich erected to the memory of a young student, Sophie Scholl, who was the same age as she was when she began working for Hitler and who was executed for belonging to an anti-Nazi organization. At that moment, she says, “I really sensed it was no excuse to be young and that it might have been possible to find out what was going on.”
Her perceptions of Hitler are all in the comic-ghastly mode: He was courteous around her and rarely spoke of the Jews; hated rooms that were too warm; never spoke of love for anybody; hated wearing shorts because he thought his knees were too white; never had flowers in his room because he loathed having dead things around. He doted on his pet dog, Blondie, but when it came time to test the cyanide capsules in the bunker, Blondie bit the dust. She says, “If I ever had the opportunity to meet Hitler again, in this life or in some other, I really would like to ask him what he would have done if he had found some Jewish blood in his family. Would he have gassed himself?”
Occasionally, the filmmakers show us Junge watching herself on
a video monitor as she methodically recounts her past. In these
moments, she stares at her image with a kind of awed disbelief.
It’s as if she were trying to make out the person on the screen
only to realize, with mute horror, that it is herself. —PETER
RAINER
Opens January 24
• Showtimes
& tickets (movietickets.com)
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