Im toten Winkel - Hitlers Sekretärin

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.

The film consists entirely of headshots of Traudl Junge talking about her experiences as secretary to Adolph Hitler from 1941 to the end of World War II. The film is in German with English subtitles; at times the subtitles were hard to read because of a light background.

A slide at the beginning of the film said this was the first time Frau Junge had spoken about her experiences. I seem to recall she was interviewed in the 1970s television series, "The World at War."

The film starts slowly as Frau Junge tells about her background. Her parents were divorced when she was young and she was raised by her mother. She got the job working for Hitler through a family connection. Junge explains she was one of four secretaries who worked for Hitler.

When she starts talking about Hitler she notes that he never talked about Jews or the death camps. She claims not to have known of the Final Solution. I do not doubt Junge's veracity. I do worry this will give ammunition to Holocaust deniers. (How could the German government be perpetrating these murders and Hitler's secretary didn't know.)

The most interesting part of the film is Junge's recounting of life in the bunker at the end of the war. She said that they lost track of time and were, for example, eating at odd times. They had no idea of what was going on outside.

Hitller and the other officials in the bunker mad plans for suicide. Hitler had gotten some cyanide tablets from Himmler. After a rumor started that Himmler had opened negotiations with the allies, Hitler tested the cyanide on his beloved dog, Blondie. The dog died.

Junge was present at Hitler's marriage to Eva Braun. After the wedding, Hitler dictated his "political testament" to Junge. She said she had expected him to reveal what had gone wrong, instead, Hitler dictated his usual diatribes against the Jews and blamed the German people for being unworthy of his vision.

The film ends with Junge observing that Hitler was wrong about what would happen after the war.

Anyone at all interested in World War II should see this film.

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.

Some people who have viewed and commented on this documentary have suggested that it is a sign of residual sympathy for Hitler (and maybe even for "National Socialism")if Hitler is portrayed in a human light: his "fatherly" qualities, his personal "warmth" and "charm," etc. But it is a great mistake to insist that, for Hitler to have been responsible for the monstrosities of the Nazi regime, he must have been a monster in his personal relationships as well. This leads to the facile equation: monstrous man commits monstrous deeds. And, of course, this proposition is very satisfying for most of us, because we think we can tell who's a monster and who is not in the political arena (everybody, that is, except for those dopey Germans of the 1930s). But the great lesson of the 20th century is that regimes can arise which do not require monstrous humans to do monstrous things--they do just fine with the human material available next door to all of us. Which is not to say that Hitler was not a psychopath or a sociopath, but only to say that he needn't have been one to be at the helm of a regime responsible for unspeakable atrocities. And so Frau Junge's portrait of Hitler should be seen as a reminder not to be taken in by the folksy, good-ol'-boy qualities of leaders, for whatever their personal likability may be, they can still be responsible for monstrous deeds.

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!