Hitler 'dictated' to secretary, now seen in film

Ernest Gill, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Berlin

Adolf Hitler's last personal secretary, who faithfully served him to the bitter end in the bunker, has finally had her say ... after her death.

Traudl Junge, who died at 81 after completing the film last February, had much to say about "der fuehrer" -- some of it glowing and some of it damning -- in an extraordinary film shown at this year's Berlin Film Festival and aired on German TV in November.

With the efficiency of a trained stenographer, she typed up more than 100 pages of single-spaced reminiscences about her former employer immediately after the war.

And then, shocked by her own openness, she filed them away with stenographic care for the next half century and refused most requests for interviews.

It was only after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and was approached by Austrian artist-filmmaker Andre Heller that she agreed to dust off her memoirs and consent to an on-camera interview.

Heller's documentary about Junge and Hitler was completed only a few days before her death at a clinic in Munich.

"My life's work is done," says Junge as she sits in her modest flat in her beloved Munich. "I have finally let go of my story. Now I feel the world can let go of me."

Heller's film, Im Toten Winkel. Hitlers Sekretaerin (Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary), shows a sprightly, white-haired Junge speaking lucidly and candidly in her one-room apartment about her time in Hitler's employ.

Junge was 22 years old when she applied for the job as the fuehrer's personal secretary, working for him the final three years of his life as the Reich crumbled.

In painstaking and shockingly naive detail she describes her first encounter with Hitler - the job interview. She had been taken by special train to his Wolf's Lair command headquarters in occupied Poland and had waited for days for her job interview.

Then suddenly, in the middle of the night, she and a handful of other job candidates were summoned to Hitler's spartan office to take a shorthand test. The women nervously filed in and stood in a row in front of the unadorned desk behind which a bespectacled Hitler sat.

"He was never photographed wearing glasses," she says, "so I was shocked to see him wearing cheap wire-rim glasses and looking rather shabby in a plain brown uniform - the same sort of uniform I always saw him in and which he swore to wear until the was war won."

He rose to shake hands with each woman and ask where she was from.

"I was the only girl from Munich and he smiled at that and I frankly believe I got the job solely because I was from Munich," she says. She was so nervous should could scarcely take dictation, and remembers that the dictator urged her not to be frightened.

"Relax, my child, I make far more mistakes dictating than you'll ever make taking dictation," he told me, Junge recalls, wondering ever after whether the dictator had been aware of his dictation pun.

It was to her that Hitler dictated his last will and testament prior to committing suicide.

It was in the bunker and he was wearing his brown uniform and his inexpensive reading glasses and looking tired and worn. "I have something to dictate to you."

That was on April 28, 1945.

"I wrote as fast as I could," she says in the film. "My fingers worked mechanically and I was amazed that I made scarcely any mistakes."

Afterwards, Hitler read the document impassively.

"He said it was all over," Junge tells the camera, recreating the sense of disbelief she felt at the time. "That was it. For him it was all over. What about the rest of us? I grew to hate him at that moment. He was escaping from it all, leaving us there, trapped like mice."

On April 30, Eva Braun Hitler donned a black dress and took some poison. Hitler shot himself in the mouth as he bit into a capsule of poison.

At the beginning, however, Junge says she had been in the fuehrer's thrall, blinded in her naivete and by his charisma.

"I admit, I was fascinated by Adolf Hitler. He was a pleasant boss and a fatherly friend. I deliberately ignored all the warning voices inside me and enjoyed the time by his side almost until the bitter end."

Junge admits she was naive and misled. "It was my own fault," Junge says. "I should have known what was going on, but I never heard anything about Jews or mass murders. I never had the feeling that he (Hitler) was consciously pursuing criminal goals.

"With him it was all a matter of ideals and I thought, 'Well, now I'm at the fountainhead, the source of all information," she says on film. "But in fact I was in a blind corner. It was all one huge lie."

In the early days, after being hired in December 1942, Junge says she enjoyed her work in Hitler's company, usually at the Berghof, Hitler's Alpine refuge.

She recalls the fuehrer as "a pleasant older gentleman, friendly, with a soft voice" far different from what she had expected from seeing his speeches in the newsreels.

As one of the few women in his surroundings, she was drafted into having tea with the fuehrer, dinner with the fuehrer and spending tedious hours around the fireplace late into the night as Hitler rambled about his favourite subjects: Dogs, Wagnerian operas and architecture.

As Soviet troops began their advance on Berlin in April 1945, Junge followed her boss into the relative safety of the bunker beneath the chancellery. It was there that she began to detect a dramatic change in Hitler.

As bombs rained down above, Hitler would sit for long periods of time just staring into the distance.

In the course of the 90-minute documentary film, Junge repeatedly says she had no one to blame but herself for her blind obedience to "the biggest criminal" of all time.

"In the back of my mind I had doubts," she says. "But I lacked the courage to confront them."

============== Berlin - The late Traudl Junge speaks in the film "Im Toten Winkel. Hitlers Sekretaerin" (Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary). The film was shown at the Berlin Film Festival before her death, and aired on German television after she died.

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