First, I'll admit that unless you have an interest in history this won't have any entertainment value for you. It isn't a drama. The camera almost never moves. There are no special effects. Everything is in German with subtitles. It's one woman talking to an interviewer about world changing events that she was on the fringes of over half a century previously.
This is Hitler's secretary, who had kept her involvement with the Reich more or less a secret most of her life because of guilt. And even to this century she carries (and rightly so) a burden of guilt for what happened during the war although she never fired a gun in combat or visited a concentration camp.
What we see is a rich portrait of self deception. She admits that she was charmed by Hitler, how polite he was to women, how kind to children. She and those around her simply closed their eyes to what was really going on in the world.
She tells about riding the train into Berlin: the blinds were always pulled down in Hitler's car on the train so that he would not see the destruction to the countryside. When they would get to Berlin a car would take them to headquarters via a route very carefully mapped out so that scenes of destruction would be avoided.
She tells a strange tale of leaving the bunker in Berlin with Eva Braun and being surprised to discover that it was Spring. Flowers were blooming, there were green leaves in the trees. In the bunker there was literally no day or night. With 11 meters of concrete between those people and the outside world they lost all contact with the rest of humanity.
I noticed in the discussion boards that someone asked if she had been indicted in the postwar trials. Her guilt was moral, not so much legal. She would have been viewed as so small a fish that she would have been thrown back.
Every one of us watching this will at some point tell ourselves that I couldn't get caught up in such a thing because I am too good and moral a person. That, too, is self deceit.
It's shocking to think of someone carrying this around inside her brain all those decades. The conflict on her face and in her voice is sometimes painful to experience.
She died of cancer at about the same time the film premiered. I hope that at some point in her life she realized, or someone told her, that Jesus' blood was shed for her and would be enough to wash away her sins if she received Him as her personal savior. I hope and pray that at some point she did so.
This is Hitler's secretary, who had kept her involvement with the Reich more or less a secret most of her life because of guilt. And even to this century she carries (and rightly so) a burden of guilt for what happened during the war although she never fired a gun in combat or visited a concentration camp.
What we see is a rich portrait of self deception. She admits that she was charmed by Hitler, how polite he was to women, how kind to children. She and those around her simply closed their eyes to what was really going on in the world.
She tells about riding the train into Berlin: the blinds were always pulled down in Hitler's car on the train so that he would not see the destruction to the countryside. When they would get to Berlin a car would take them to headquarters via a route very carefully mapped out so that scenes of destruction would be avoided.
She tells a strange tale of leaving the bunker in Berlin with Eva Braun and being surprised to discover that it was Spring. Flowers were blooming, there were green leaves in the trees. In the bunker there was literally no day or night. With 11 meters of concrete between those people and the outside world they lost all contact with the rest of humanity.
I noticed in the discussion boards that someone asked if she had been indicted in the postwar trials. Her guilt was moral, not so much legal. She would have been viewed as so small a fish that she would have been thrown back.
Every one of us watching this will at some point tell ourselves that I couldn't get caught up in such a thing because I am too good and moral a person. That, too, is self deceit.
It's shocking to think of someone carrying this around inside her brain all those decades. The conflict on her face and in her voice is sometimes painful to experience.
She died of cancer at about the same time the film premiered. I hope that at some point in her life she realized, or someone told her, that Jesus' blood was shed for her and would be enough to wash away her sins if she received Him as her personal savior. I hope and pray that at some point she did so.