Hitler's Secretary Looks Back in Sorrow

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Friday, January 24, 2003
Hitler's Secretary Looks Back in Sorrow
By ELVIS MITCHELL

[...]

It probably makes sense for filmmakers not to prod an
81-year-old woman too hard, and the gentleness
extended to the subject of "Blind Spot" seems to grow
out of such courtesy. That 81-year-old woman, though,
is Traudl Junge, and the full title of the documentary
is "Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary." She was secretary
to Hitler from 1942 through the end of the war. The
access the filmmakers gained to Junge is remarkable,
and it compensates for a lack of cinematic flair; it's
concrete, cold and hard, with Junge speaking about
being a few feet away from arguably the worst tyrant
of the 20th century.

This is by no means a great film. The plain-wrap
sameness of the camerawork would be unforgivable if
not for the woman who can't quite look into the lens,
even now; the unshakable shame coming from this woman
accounts for a great deal. The Third Reich was such a
part of her life that she ended up marrying Hitler's
manservant.

The film says she never spoke about her time with
Hitler until she agreed to be interviewed for "Blind
Spot." (She died in February after a long bout with
cancer and just hours after the film's premiere in
Berlin.)

The wave of regrets and rationalizations she spins is
an incredible thing to witness. Perhaps it's fortunate
that the filmmakers don't exercise a great deal of
technique: the entirety of "Blind Spot" is Junge
speaking right into the camera ....

As she speaks in an even tone, what she provides is a
view of office life, blaming herself for being a part
of it. She reveals that she could have refused the
job. "But I didn't do that because I was simply too
curious," she allows. And it's the minutiae she offers
— a kind of crime-scene analysis, an accretion of
small details like Hitler's affection for his dog and
the minor interaction he had with Eva Braun — that are
fascinating.

... "Blind Spot" doesn't supply a huge amount of new
information. Its strength is from the pieces of
information Junge offers about herself; her
plain-spoken quality about being so close to ultimate
evil and how much of it she managed to shield herself
from tells us a great deal about ourselves.

[...]

"Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary" won't change anyone's
mind about the horrors of the Third Reich because what
you get from it is a riveting examination of how a
young girl with no plan for her life and a bullying
father found herself in the bunker with Hitler at the
end.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/24/movies/24BLIN.html

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