With her age spotted hands gently clasped before her, and her grey hair loosely tied back, Tradl Junge faces the camera and speaks of the man who simultaneously repulsed and fascinated the world for the last half of the 20th century.
Junge was Hitler’s personal secretary from 1939 until the very last days of the war. She typed out his letters, speeches and it was to Junge that Hitler dictated his last testimony.
It would be expected that Junge might have lived her post-war years in the spotlight of global fascination, pursued by the media for her story. Her name might have been an adjunct to that of Eva Braun, Hitler’s would-be lover and, eventually, his wife.
Yet after the war, following a short period of internment and the process of denazification, Junge lived in obscurity. It was only in 2002, shortly before she died of cancer, that writers and producers approached her. And it was only then, 60 years after the end of the war, that the immense historical value of her memoirs and recollections was realized.
Andre Heller, the prolific writer, artist and documentary filmmaker was among those who set about recording Junge’s memories, using the media of film. After 10 hours of filming, a 90-minute documentary, Blind Spot – screened last Monday at the Austrian embassy – was produced in which Junge simply speaks to the camera. Heller’s passive interview technique eschews interruption and interrogation, rendering a stream of consciousness effect that allows Junge to revisit her past chronologically.
She begins explaining the series of circumstantial events that saw her abandon her dreams of becoming a professional ballerina to take the position of the Fuhrer’s secretary. In a climate of extreme nationalism and ultimate self-sacrifice for the nation, working alongside Hitler was every young woman’s dream. Junge recollects, with more than a hint of sad irony, her response to Hitler’s comment that his pretty young secretaries leave his service after marriage to young men. “I said something very silly, I have lived without a man for 22 years, so I think I can bear to be without one for a few more. He burst out laughing.
This laughter, Hitler’s jovial, sometimes even self-deprecating sentiment, seems, through Junge, to belie the genuine horror of a mass murderer and psychopath. Junge herself for many years has struggled to come to terms with the man behind this mask of paternal grace and lyrical sensitivity.
Or rather, she confronts the painful accusation that forms the case against passive accomplices of the Nazi regime, that of willing blindness and self-imposed delusion. Was Junge indeed so sheltered in Hitler’s bunker, so removed from contact with Germany at war, that she was entirely ignorant of the mass murders that were being committed on the word of the man she had dinner with every evening?
When asked by Heller if she had any inkling of the fate of Jews under Nazi rule, Junge can recall only one distinct memory: Frau Hanna, a high-ranking officer, had complained that Jews of Amsterdam were being carted into trucks under inhumane conditions. Junge remembers Hitler’s anger and bellowing response, but does not go into detail about her own feelings on hearing of the ill-treatment of others. She later laments her self-justification after the true extent of Jewish suffering was revealed to her through the Nuremberg trials. “I wasn t able to see the connection with my own past. I was satisfied that I wasn t personally to blame and that I hadn t known about those things. But Junge did not escape the ghosts of self-condemnation. Later in her life she became wracked with guilt and depression. When she saw the memorial to Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, she realized that her immaturity and naiveté were no excuses for ignorance, and that her 22 years did not give her any right to self-impunity.
Blind Spot is a deeply enthralling documentary, leading the viewer through the last days of the epicenter of the Third Reich and the gradual deterioration of Hitler’s mental state. Yet it would have been of interest to track in greater detail Junge’s movements after the war. How she readjusted to life in a Germany razed to the ground after living for so long in a sheltered bunker, and how she faced her fellow Germans who suffered at the hands of a megalomaniac whose demands for devotion destroyed his country.
