This is a fascinating interview with Traudi Junge, who worked as Hitler's secretary as a young woman. That's all it is - an interview - you can't really call it a documentary. It's just her talking in closeup.There are some remarkable moments in this interview: First, Trudi's description of Hitler as a person, gentle, soft-spoken, even paternal, a man who adored his dog Blondchen, watched his diet but had stomach problems, and for whom human beings meant nothing. In his mind, it was the ideal of the Superman that he was striving for. As far as political and military situations, Junge claims not to have known much. She was in a sense shielded from the outside world as she and the other secretaries worked at first in Berlin, the Berghof in Berchtesgaden, at Wolfsschanze in East Prussia, and lastly back in Berlin in the Führerbunker. They often switched off having lunch and tea with him - Hitler apparently wearied of dealing with war conversation with his officers. Her description of the last days is amazing - the bombs going off around them, a wedding taking place in the bunker, and everyone getting cyanide capsules. The secretaries asked for them because, as Trudi said, what would the world be without the National Socialism? The picture Hitler painted was bleak; it would be horrible. Being out in the world, Trudi realized that Hitler was 100 percent wrong, and as she learned more about the goings-on during the war, she began to feel guilty that she had not done more investigation to find out what was really going on, and guilt that she had liked such a monster. I have only one statement about that. If she didn't know he was a monster originally, when he tested the cyanide on his beloved dog, he certainly revealed himself. She was moved to tears talking about the Goebbels children, who were going to be poisoned. For everyone, suicide seemed the only way out. He had no respect for any life.Traudi, and a lot of Germans, had a "blind spot" - the title of this documentary - as to what was going on. I know for myself, at Traudi's age, one tends to not go into things as deeply as one should and to be oblivious to certain obvious matters. And as one ages, like Traudi, you being to remember those matters, your own behavior, and feel guilty. So what she felt to me was entirely normal.However, if you lived near Jews and saw them taken away, where did you think they'd gone? Many Germans hid their heads in the sand. The banality of evil.A truly excellent interview, but despite the claims, it wasn't the first time Traudi spoke publicly. But it was the first I'd seen, and I found it compelling and excellent viewing.

This is quite possibly the most minimal movie ever made. Except for the opening and closing credits, all we ever see is an elderly woman in closeup, apparently in her own home, talking past the camera to an unseen interviewer. He's only heard a few times. He seems completely superfluous. The interview segments are punctuated with brief blackouts.There's no score. No film cutaways or slow Ken Burns-style pans over countless still images of the Third Reich. She just talks for an hour and a half in her native German, so much of my attention was focused on the subtitles. A few segments show her watching her own interview and making additional comments.After watching "Blind Spot" I found on Youtube a much earlier interview in which she speaks in English. Judging from her apparent age, it looks to have been made circa 1970, probably for the British "World at War" series. She recounts many things in much the same way in both interviews, so it's obvious she's spent much of her adult life reliving the events she's talking about and pondering her own role in them. She doesn't need much prompting.Because of the minimal production values and the subtitles, I felt more like I was reading a book than watching a movie. But this was a very good book that really engaged my imagination. I'd seen the movie "Downfall", based in large part on her recollections, but her own verbal imagery would have been vivid enough.When "Downfall" came out there was a lot of hand wringing about how it "humanized" Hitler, some from people I thought knew better. Similar criticisms have been leveled at Frau Junge, but they completely miss the point. Accuracy is what matters in a historical account, and I have no reason to doubt hers. Whether we want to admit it or not, Hitler was a fully human being. He wasn't a highly evolved space alien or a demon from hell with supernatural powers who took human form to enslave mankind from the outside. He was one of us. We have to deal with that.As Junge explains so well, Hitler actually had many positive personal attributes. At one time it was her job to open his personal mail, so she saw the letters he received from the countless women who absolutely swooned over him. And the only time I doubted her veracity was when she claimed not to understand why. Her own story - that she so readily agreed to become one of his secretaries - shows that she understood his attraction all too well. Not just to women but to Germans in general.And that's precisely the point! We don't want to believe that Hitler was anything like us "normal" people. We don't want to believe that a man who caused so much destruction and suffering could have any redeeming qualities at all, much less be perceived as highly attractive. We're much more comfortable putting him on a shelf and labeling him as something unique and different, an inhuman monster quite apart from us "ordinary" people. We do the same with the German people of that era. Unlike us noble Americans, with our humanitarianism and respect for personal freedoms and rights, the Germans of 1933-1945 were stupid, gullible, unthinking automatons, blind to the obvious evil of their leaders. Why, that could never happen to us!It damn well COULD happen to us. That's why Frau Junge's story is so important. Watch this movie.

Frau Junge's story goes to back when she was in her early twenties. Like most of us, she had a story. But unlike many, the moment she met Hitler, history would entirely shape it. The cinematic or technical merits of this visual testimony don't seem relevant to me. If it is more about an old lady trying to recall distance events or if it fails to provide a "shock of the new" angle of Hitler and the Nazis isn't crucial to me, either. It's the title. One thing I have learned about films is the defining and revealing nature of their titles, those who aim beyond being a mere synthesis of their plot to highlight the tensions, the atmosphere, the struggle that is carried throughout the film. But the titles I value the most are those which can have a strong metaphoric reading as the one I felt so present after watching this. "Hitler's secretary," is an intimate account of one of history's "inmates," a young witness of our precarious existence. For me, this is an invaluable testimony of a woman who did what millions of others did for a number of years: they merely took dictation from a dictator. They reproduced without questioning, their hands triggered by a blind faith in their source.For those who still think that only monsters can do monstrous things, welcome to planet Earth.For those who deeply believe that only a simplistic, Nazy propaganda profile of Hitler can be an effective antidote for humans like him, bear in mind that, as someone wrote in another review, evil is never pure.And that's the scary part: that we all are disturbingly human.

If taken as a documentary about Hitler's Secretary then this is an interesting interview with someone who is trying to deal with feelings of guilt over her past ignorance and inability to think beyond her own situation.If you think you're going to be getting a history lesson or find out lots of things about Hitler then you might be disappointed. The documentary is, as stated, about Traudl Junge not Hitler.Unfortunately for me though I never really thought she opened up quite as much as you could sense she wanted to.Interesting from a historical viewpoint but as Traudl herself points out during the first 1/2 hour - much of what she recalls sounds so trivial.