Dialogue with the Movie “Downfall”
Part Four: A Secretary Goes to Work for
Hitler
Written by Dan McDonald
The movie “Downfall” begins with an
elderly woman describing how she came to apply for a position that would lead
to her working directly for Adolph Hitler.
The movie ends with the same elderly woman describing how, after the
war, she came to realize that her ignorance of Nazi atrocities did not excuse
her from having had the responsibility to discover the truths about Nazism if she had wanted to know
the truth. These clips were borrowed by
the creators of “Downfall” from an actual documentary wherein Hitler’s youngest
personal secretary in the final years of World War II was given the opportunity
to tell her story as an elderly lady.
Despite the problems of considering the perspective of a witness whose
life was marked by her season of service to one of history’s most
recognized men of evil, her story is intriguing. In this blog and the next blog in this series
I will try to highlight Gertraud Junge’s story.
If a summary of her life might have
been written from the things I have learned about her life it might read this
way: Gertraud Humps was born 16 March
1920, married Hans Junge in June 1943, was widowed when her husband was killed
in action in August 1944, and died without descendants from cancer at age 81 on
10 February 2002.” The notes of her life
might have said, “she worked during the Second World War as a personal
secretary for Reich Chancellor Hitler, but following the war suffered from
severe depression, tended to live as a recluse, but did enjoy visiting a home for the blind where she read books to the residents.
It goes perhaps without saying that
having worked as a personal secretary to one of humanity’s most evil figures,
her story is not universally accepted.
Some historians regard her story as plausible. This blogger, while neither an expert on Frau
Junge nor in regards to historical method, finds her story to be
plausible. I find as many reasons to
view the story she tells as plausible as I do for denying it on the basis that
she worked for an evil man. Her story
seems to be one that an elderly lady might tell because she desired to tell the
world a simple truth about her life. She
had thought through it for a lifetime.
She had to let the world know that she did not know during her time as a
secretary many of the worst things done under the Nazi regime, but she also had
to acknowledge that she was close enough to the truth that if she had wanted to
know she could have known it very easily.
So she wanted the world to know that she could not hide behind never
having known. There were others who knew
less than she yet came to discover the truth about Nazism and they were the
ones who made her realize how she had refused to see the truth that was all
around her.
Rather than try to prove the
plausibility of Frau Junge’s story, I will simply ask you to imagine the story
being true, for then I think it would have great meaning to us. But I invite my readers to think of this
story as something more than another old World War II story. This is also a human story that should be
told because it is more than a war story.
Think of it as a story of a young woman who goes to work for a person
that she sees as a kind gentleman. That
is how he treats her and how she sees him.
Then everything at the office blows up and later the young woman
discovers that the older gentleman’s life had sordid secrets. Perhaps he had abused people. Perhaps he had been a serial killer, perhaps
he had ordered the deaths of millions of Jews and ten thousands of gypsies and
other people he thought did not merit survival in the world. This is a story not just related to war, but
to someone who worked with a person and never saw them as being evil monsters
when that is exactly what they were.
Here is a person that never quite knows what to do with her failure to
see that about the evil person she knew but did not know in his entirety.
The actual Traudl Junge in the interview: Blind
Spot: Hitler’s Secretary
We begin with information from the
documentary “Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary” to a moment in which she has
traveled from Munich to Berlin to interview for a government job in Berlin. She has a sister in Berlin and she has dreams
of studying dance and becoming a ballerina, and maybe this job will put her in
Berlin where she can take her dance lessons and chase her childhood dreams.
In Berlin she discovers that the
position she has applied for is to be a personal secretary to Adolph Hitler. He would test the ladies’ secretarial skills
by speaking to them as they typed out his words. An elderly Junge described, in
this way, the impression Hitler made upon the waiting ladies as he appeared: “And
then a kindly old gentleman came up to us speaking in a low voice and giving us
a friendly smile. He shook hands with
each of us, looked straight into our eyes with that famous gaze of his, asked
us our names, said a few words to us with a sort of friendly, paternal air and
then disappeared again. When he went he
just said, “Good Evening.” When it was
over we said, “Now we’re curious.”[i]
She described how in escorting the
ladies to take their test, Hitler would try to help them not be nervous. The old gentleman, whom some of these ladies
had never seen except in his uniform with outstretched arm saluting soldiers at
military parades on newsreel or speaking with a powerful dramatic voice to the
masses. But this was not the Hitler they
saw in this office. Here he offered to fetch the
ladies an electrical heater if they felt the room to be too cold. Or he spoke
a quiet confidence building word saying he was sure they would not make more
mistakes than he had. This was the man
that Trudl Humps (Junge) met and with whom she would work until his death in
April 1945.
She tells a story of how her chance at getting the
job depended on an intervention. Despite
Hitler’s attempts to help her not be
nervous, the young Trudl Humps was extremely nervous as she began trying to
type to Hitler’s speaking. She didn’t
have her fingers starting out over the right keys. She was typing letters forming nothing
resembling German words. She was
horrified. But just then one of Hitler’s
staff members knocked on the door to inform Hitler that Ribbentrop was on the
telephone wishing to speak to him.
Hitler excused himself to talk to Ribbentrop. The nervous applicant took the time to
correct her errors, composed herself, and by the time Hitler returned she was
ready and confident to begin typing. She
found the task of following Hitler’s speaking to be not difficult at all. She spoke with that sense of accomplishment
that she must have felt the very day she took the test. She said of the intervention: “Then thank God, or perhaps unfortunately,
his servant came in”.[ii]
There is something very human about the story she
told. She surely had a sense of triumph when
she came from her test typing triumphantly after such a horrible start. There must have been a great sense of
accomplishment to so overcome her jitters so as to be able to type serenely and
confidently as Hitler spoke. The
intervention had to seem like a gift from God and a wonderful omen for the
beginning of her new career. She was
going to be Adolph Hitler’s personal secretary and how many other young German
ladies would have wanted this job. Those
impressions must have been so etched into her memories that her first
recollection of those events was to say “Thank God.” But looking back over a lifetime of having
been marked as Hitler’s secretary she had gradually learned to respond to her
triumphant sense of accomplishment with a subdued addition of “or
unfortunately.” She now knew a kindly
old gentleman, but she did not know this gentleman in his sordid entirety. It would take years for her to see the hidden
person she perhaps never desired to see.
It would then require decades of struggle before gaining a sense of how
she was to regard herself for not allowing herself to see him as he surely was
all along. She expresses to us a sad but profoundly
human story.
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