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

Traudl Junge, one of Hitler's personal secretaries, finally decides to come out and tell the story of working for Hitler during one of the most catastrophic and studied times in German history. You sort of have to get past the fact that the movie is literally nothing more than a camera pointed at her while she tells these stories, it's certainly not what I had expected when I rented the film, but with subject matter like this it really doesn't matter. In a sense, if they had dramatized her story with photos, archive footage or, god forbid, reenactments, I think it would really have diluted the potency and immediacy of what she had to say.

This is a woman who, at the time, was in her late teens and, like countless other people, she was intoxicated with the unnerving charm and determination and grand view for the future of the world. Yes, it's all told simply through the dialogue of this elderly woman talking to an interviewer, but this is a woman who met with Hitler face to face during his most powerful time, who watched him evolve from the dangerously charismatic leader with a master plan for the human race and into the darkly depressed visionary, fallen from power and overcome with defeat, faced with the crashing of his enormous ideals. She even tells the story literally of the last minutes of Hitler's life, during which he actually bid her farewell just before ending his own life.

One of the things that really struck me was the amazing detail of Junge's memory. Here she is in her 80s, and she remembers word-for-word conversations that happened decades earlier, as well as remarkable details of situations and events. The looks on people's faces, who was where and at what time, as well as what was happening at those times, smells, emotions, sounds, etc. These are all of the things that good novelists use to convey a compelling sense of atmosphere which is, I think, one of the most important things to be created for a novel to be effective. I don't think at all that Junge's memory should be called into question, even though she remembers such striking details of things that happened so many years ago (and I don't think that her age should be a factor in deciding how accurate her memory is, either).

This is a time in this woman's life that she has surely been going over and over in her head for decades, wondering how she could have been so fooled into thinking that she was working for a powerful, benevolent leader, and how she could not have seen what was really going on. She learns late in her life about a woman about her own who had been executed for opposing Hitler the same year that she herself came to work for him. It seems to me that a period in someone's life that has such a resonating effect of the rest of it is something that is remembered even more vividly than anything that happens later.

The stories about Hitler himself are probably the most compelling element of the entire film. Junge tells stories about him that I would never have imagined, since like many people (to which this film is mainly aimed, I think) know little about Hitler beyond the public speeches that he made about his grand vision, where he displayed his amazing speaking abilities and his shockingly effective ability to make his vision, while always destructive to the people that he viewed as inferior, sound appealing to so many people. Obviously, a person would have to have some earth-shaking motivational speaking abilities to make people on a large scale accept and support something so murderous and destructive to humanity in general.

Some of the things about Hitler that I was most surprised by were things like his pet dog, Blondie, and his affection for her puppies, the way he is described as soft-spoken and polite when speaking to the young women working for him as his secretaries, the total transformation in appearance that he evidently underwent whenever he stepped before the cameras and microphones in public, the fact that he didn't ever want flowers kept in his office because he `hated dead things,' etc. Junge expresses her own shock at that last point, which surely mirrors that of anyone else watching the film. Can you imagine someone like Hitler, who engineered millions of human deaths, uncomfortable with flowers in his office because he hated dead things? It boggles the mind, and is also reflected by other revelations in the film such as his total detachment from everything that was going on in Germany as a result of his leadership. He even traveled in a train with the blinds drawn and was taxied through the streets to his destinations by drivers who would take the routes with the least amount of war damage so that he wouldn't be made uncomfortable.

This is certainly not a traditional documentary, but the documentary genre is, I think, one of the most flexible genres in film. The subject matter is literally endless, and as this movie shows, even the simplest forms of the documentary can be enormously effective and moving. I think that the main purpose of a documentary is to provide information, not entertainment, and as long as it can do that I don't think that it really matters how intricate or complexly made the film itself is. Blind Spot provides plenty of information, and while the presentation is not exactly thrilling, it reminded me throughout of reading a book. One of the main reasons that I love to read (and, I think, also one of the reasons that people are so often disappointed with film adaptations of novels) is because it is always an individual experience. You create in your head the world that is described in the book, and film adaptations are someone else's vision of that world, which is pretty much invariably not the same as your own. This is why movies that are as closely faithful to the original material are so often the most critically and popularly successful ones. In Blind Spot, Junge tells her story in her own words without any kind of cinematic enhancement of them, allowing the viewer to create what it must have been like in his or her own head which, I think, makes the world and the events that she describes that much more vivid and immediate.

6 out of 10

A pure interview movie if ever there was one. There are no effects, no cutaways, photographs, or anything else resembling anything of cinematic value. The picture merely focuses on Traudl Junge talking and recounting her years as Hitler's secretary. It is shot on videotape an almost looks like someones home movie. The subject is captivating enough, but calling this an actual film is a real stretch. Even a TV interview have better visuals.

In some ways this is good and almost a novel idea because it avoids the distractions that come about when too many visual 'enhancements' are thrown in. It allows the viewer to totally focus in on what the subject is saying and allowing them to create their own mental pictures. However the framing, setting, and editing all look horribly amateurish. The editing is especially a problem. Black frames pop up to cut from one interview segment to another and it gets distracting even a bit disconcerting. It also hurts the flow of the picture although this seems to happen more at the beginning and by the end pretty much drops off.

Content wise the stories are interesting, but really don't offer any major revelations. Junge seems to be given free rein to talk about anything she likes in anyway that she wants with no direction. A more crossfire type interview may have allowed it to be better structured and more of a impact. At best her stories can be described as being revealing and even slightly amusing. If anything her portrait of Hitler is different from anyone elses. His comments towards her during her interview for the job is down right stunning and memorable. Her accounts of his actions and reactions to things during the last weeks of the war will really surprise some people. In fact some of it seems so weird that it is almost too hard to imagine.

Overall despite it's humble production values it still has some good elements. Those that are interested in history and psychology should find this the most interesting. Junge seems a very affable and unpretentious individual that displays some amazingly good insight. Her accounts of the final days of the war are the most vivid and captivating part of this picture. The only thing that is missing is a little more on Junge the person especially with her adjustments after the war ended.

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.

André Heller is one of the most original and daring artists of post-War Austria. Singer/songwriter, circus organizer, garden architect, multimedia artist and more, he has maintained a highly personal style (a postmodern baroque) which never slid into routine. This interview film sees him once again doing something quite unlike his previous projects, and the idea - to have Hitler's private secretary talk uninterrupted as in a solitary anamnesis - is valuable, remarkable, admirable. But why does everyone fall for the hype formula that this is the time when the film's subject, Traudl Runge, broke a silence kept for almost sixty years after the fall of the Third Reich? I have seen this Traudl Junge give inside views of Hitler's household staff in earlier documentaries on the top Nazi echelon and the Third Reich. They were made-for-TV documentaries shown on the National Belgian (Flemish) television, as well as Super Channel. So while the testimony given here is valuable, it is not totally new. The film over-sells itself on that score.