Last night I watched “Blind Spot,” a filmed interview with Traudl Junge, who was Hitler’s secretary during his last year and final days.
It’s a remarkable document, although a very simple one: Ms. Junge, aged eighty or so at the time of the interview, talks into the camera with no interruption in what appears to be three different sessions (marked by changes of outfit and the slight passage of time).
That’s all. But it’s quite a bit. The young and relatively apolitical Junge was selected for her job almost by chance—and the fact that she scored high in a typing test—but ended up being a witness to a very dark history. She describes her isolation from information other than Nazi propaganda, the growing desolation of the people in the bunker, and her own increasing numbness in the bizarre and grisly atmosphere.
Junge is quite composed and even dignified; the only time she breaks down at all is when she describes the Goebbels children (see this). She says that it is mostly since the 1960s, and then increasingly as time went on, that she has come to deeply reflect on her own guilt, and to be shocked at her failure to question what she saw and her hero-worship of a Hitler who seemed avuncular to her (she had been raised without a father).
Because I am particularly concerned with how people come to question previous assumptions and ultimately to change their minds, especially about politics, the part of Junge’s narrative that interested me most came during the war’s immediate aftermath. She had been given a cyanide pill in the bunker at her request, and had considered ending her own life because she had heard stories of what would happen at the hands of the Allies post-war: like something out of Hieronymous Bosch, she said. The men would be castrated, the women raped, and Germany would be returned to a very primitive technological existence by the vengeful victors.
But she took her chances and escaped, and although she was imprisoned (for a fairly short time, it turned out) by first the Russians and then the Americans, she encountered a world of Care packages and was well-treated by good people, especially the Americans, and saw Germany (she escaped to the West) become a free country. Junge observes that it was the beginning of her discovery that what she had been told by Hitler, “was all a lie.” In fact, she learned that the premise for the war itself was a big lie, and spent the rest of her life trying to come to terms with how she could have believed in, gotten caught up with, denied the warning signs of, and participated in such a grievous set of lies that perpetrated so much evil in the world.
Traudl Junge died not long after the film was made. She is reported to have said shortly before her death, “Now that I’ve let go of my story, I can let go of my life.”
