Although hailed by others as "compelling and authentic" or even "fascinating", I could not help but to feel a little bit disappointed by this documentary. Traudl Junge served as Hitler's private secretary from 1942 until the final days inside the bunker in Berlin in 1945, and remained silent on her experiences for decades until she agreed to a series of interviews by film-maker André Heller in 2001. The documentary contains only headshots of Junge during the interviews, but no historical footage whatsover, not even images of the secretary when she started to work for the Führer back in 1942.

Frau Junge starts by telling us about her background: raised by her mother, who was divorced and had to go live with Junge's maternal grand-father, she lived in a vert tyrannical environment where her grandfather (an retired officer of the German military) never missed a chance to remind them both that they depended on his financial support to survive. When she was still a young lady, a family connection got her a job in Berlin as a secretary, and she saw it as a chance to move to the city and leave such oppressive atmosphere behind. In Berlin, she somehow ended being chosen as one of four private secretaries for Adolf Hitler. Her testimony does indeed provide us with some modest insights into how Hitler's entourage worked, especially towards the end of the war. One could have imagined the environment in the bunker as the end of the Nazi regime approached, but in this case we have a first-hand account of what it was like and what happened. As it could be expected, the portrait of Hitler painted by Junge is not entirely negative and it also contains plenty of personal comments showing the more human side of one of History's bloodiest dictators. This is normal and understandable though. No tyrant is ever the absolute evil his enemies like to portray in propagandistic caricatures, and Hitler is no exception to this rule although he definitely gets close to it. One such interesting snippet of information extracted from these interviews is the incident about Himmler's cyanide tablets: as it turned out, Himmler had provided the Nazis in the bunker with a bunch of cyanide tablets that they could take should they consider it opportune to commit suicide; but when it came to actually use them Hitler could not trust that Himmler's poison was not a fake, especially since a rumor had made it to him during those final days that the chief of the SS had been negotiating the terms of rendition with the Allies, so he tested it on his beloved dog, Blondie, first. The anecdote serves as a great brackdrop for those final days of the way, so full of mad plans, cowardice and high treason in a rush to save one's own neck.

So, what is it that disappointed me in this film? Well, I believe it is Junge's blessed ignorance of everything that was going on around her and the argument that precisely because she was working from the very belly of the beast she was not exposed to what was happening outside (hence the title of the film, Blind Spot). Yes, I understand Hitler's personal secretary was not going to be subject to the same sufferings as the general German population as the war went on and basic necessities became a luxury among normal citizens. I also understand that she was exposed to the more human side of these Nazi murderers with whom she socialized and shared the afternoon coffee. But that is not my problem. I cannot help but feeling angry when I hear Mrs. Junge rationalizing that because she never heard of the Holocaust until the end of the war and never much cared for politics she could not have imagined the persecution of Jews and the assassination of political opponents. Let us be honest. It did not require much intelligence to realize what was going on, and a young lady in her thirties should definitely have noticed. It is quite a different thing that, like so many other people under similar circumstances, she chose to remain quiet and live with it. After all, we cannot demand a heroic behavior from every common citizen, and opposing the regime's policies under a dictatorship can potentially mean one's own immediate death. How could Junge have not seen it coming after the Kristallnacht in 1938? Where did she think all those Jews, gypsies, homosexual and political activists were going? Was she truly so naive as to believe that the Nazi authorities were simply building Jewish quarters here and there to allow all German Jews to live according to their own rules? The saddest thing about it all is that, after watching these interviews, one has to admit the possibility that perhaps Mrs. Junge was so ignorant and naive (actually, so self-centered and midnless) that she might have not even thought about the ultimate nature of the Nazis in power, and that is what disappoints me: there is not a single evidence of remorse or repentance. Like so many other millions of Germans, Junge simply shifted the blame to the top Nazi leaders, made an effort to forget about her own complicity in the whole massacre at the very least by remaining silent, and moved on with her life after the war. This could have been a much better film had she come to terms with her own past, had she acknowledged and reflected upon her own mistakes. But it could not have been. As she says at one point:

And I think it's also the case that if you value and respect someone you don't really want to destroy the image of that person... you don't want to know, in fact if disaster lies beyond the facade.

This is precisely the key to the whole story: if they sensed that disaster might lie beyond the facade and simply did not want to know about it, how could they "value and respect" their murderous leaders? As it tends to be case, I am afraid we already know the answer: in spite of the criminal nature of the Nazis, they managed to bring about the stability and prosperity that so many Germans had anxiously hoped for since the end of the First World War and they were not about to wreck it all by looking a gift horse in the mouth. Like it or not, the realities of everyday life very often come way before we worry about moral principles and the Germans were not an exception to the rule. Interestingly enough, Junge tells us about her disappointment when, close to the moment of committing suicide, Hitler takes her to a room to dictate his political will but fails to even attempt to explain "what went wrong", preferring instead to throw about the same old rants about Jewish conspiracies and the threat of Bolshevism. She expected him to at least acknowledge his failure, talk about his mistakes and draw some conclusions from them. Yet, we cannot avoid feeling the same way about Junge too. All we get from her is an objective and neutral description of her own life experiences, but there is no reflection whatsoever, no recknoning. She just wanted to hear from Hitler's mouth what went wrong, even though she should have known it herself. As a matter of fact, one leaves with the feeling that she actually did know it herself all along. What went wrong is that a almost a whole country went on a frantic hunt for scapegoats that could be sacrificed in the altar of national purity, disregarding all morals and putting abstract ideas above human lives without any consideration to its effects. Junge knew, but it was more comfortable to place all the blame on the Nazi leaders who "misled" the German nation.