Film Review

Traudl Junge was thirteen years old when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Nine years later, by some fortuitous (or demonic) confluence of events, she, then a naïve and impressionable young woman, was invited to be one of Hitler's secretaries. After nearly six decades, the writer Melissa Müller persuaded the terminally ill Junge to acquiesce in filming a documentary about her experiences with Hitler at the Wolf's Lair and Berchtesgarden, on Hitler's special train, and, finally, in the Führer's bunker during the closing days of World War II.

     André Heller and documentary filmmaker Othmar Schmiderer condensed ten hours of interviews, filmed in Junge's Munich apartment in three segments, into ninety minutes of riveting film. There is not much here that is new to historians of the period, but the first-hand account, together with the filmmaker's decision to do without the usual enhancing techniques of documentaries (music, still photos, or newsreel footage), creates a singular intensity that sometimes slips perilously close to being overbearing. The camera never moves from a thoughtful and introspective Junge; she is sometimes moved and often perplexed by what she describes as her own youthful foolishness. She readily admits that she was a conformist (but curiously, never a member of the National Socialist Party). A child of a divorced mother, Junge saw Hitler as a paternal and charming figure. But, as she acknowledges, when these figures disappoint or betray us, our grief is only compounded. The only moment when she loses her composure is in narrating what happened to Joseph Goebbels's children in the bunker. . . .