Blind Spot - Hitler’s Secretary (Im Toten Winkel - Hitlers Sekretärin)

Dirs. André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer

Was sollen wir sich bei einer, der Sünde nicht sehen können, fühlen? Okay, it’s been a while since I learnt German, but the question remains: what should we feel about one who could not see sin - especially a sin as grievous as Nazism? The camera in the documentary Blind Spot spends almost all 90+ minutes on Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary, and it’s a testament to how compelling her story is that Heller and Schmiderer never need to show anything else to keep you watching. There’s so much to hear in her story: the idea of the banality of Hitler’s evil; Junge’s guilt over naïete; and her blow-by-blow recollection of the final days. That recollection accelerates the film’s pace in the final half hour, and since I’ve never heard much about Hitler’s bunker before I found it utterly fascinating. (Incidentally, given that 30 Apr was the actual day of Hitler’s suicide, perhaps this should have been shown the day before?) The part where Junge describes Hitler calmly testing cyanide pills on his dog Blondie, a dog he loved, because he was suspicious of Himmler (who had given him the pills) at that point really captures the mix of banal evil and hysterical paranoia in the Führer.

The idea that the Führer’s speeches were pure performance has been seen in this film festival in Max and The Tramp and the Dictator, but it never fails to chill. By contrast, Junge’s words struck me as true. You never feel like Junge is inventing a sanitised version of the past to assuage her guilt, as so many Nazis did (hey, I’ve read many of the Nuremberg trial documents, I’m not blind to when people are excusing themselves). It does seem entirely plausible that she didn’t fully know what was going on. Is she representative of how the whole of Germany held Hitler in its blind spot or “dead angle” (the literal translation of the German title)? Or of how it’s hard to see evil in someone you know well? The answer, I think, is that it’s both.

What is it they teach you about blind spots in driving? Always look over your shoulder. And I think what finally separates this film from an exercise in self-justification is that Junge is willing to look back critically, and in so doing recognises that not realising the truth makes her in part complicit to the acts: in her current moral view, her naïvete and inability to see was a crime in itself. Socrates once claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living, a statement that places a moral value on self-examination: in that context, Frau Junge’s unflinching look at her past is both tribute to and condemnation of herself.

Notes: That look on Frau Junge’s face as she watches her own self was fascinating: she kept mouthing her own words… Ratio of films with male-peeing scenes to total films seen: 6/15.