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Der Untergang (The Downfall) 24 March 05
Section: article
Categories: Film / dvd
...I have become satisfied that I had no personal guilt and that I knew nothing about it — I knew nothing of the extent of this. But one day I happened to pass by the memorial plaque for Sophie Scholl which was put up in the Franz-Josef-Strasse [in Munich] and I saw that she was born in the same year that I was, and that, in the same year that I started working for Hitler, she was executed — and in that moment I actually felt that being young is no excuse, and that maybe one could have found out some things.
...ich habe mich damit zufrieden gegeben, dass ich persönlich keine Schuld hatte und davon nichts gewusst habe — von diesem Ausmass habe ich nichts gewusst. Aber eines Tages bin ich an der Gedenktafel vorbei gegangen, die für die Sophie Scholl an der Franz-Josef-Strasse befestigt war und da habe ich gesehen, dass sie mein Jahrgang war und dass sie in dem Jahr, als ich zu Hitler kam, hingerichtet worden ist—und in dem Moment habe ich eigentlich gespürt, dass das keine Entschuldigung ist, dass man jung ist, sondern dass man auch hätte vielleicht Dinge erfahren können.
The above is a quote from Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary during the last two and a half years of his life. I transcribed the quote from an excerpt of a video interview shown at the end of this film. The English is my translation of her fairly colloquial German.
The Bunker
While watching the film I kept wondering why it was made: the information it conveys about Hitler’s last days in his bunker, and the inferno around him in Berlin, could be gathered from a few paragraphs of text. But there are two considerations that come to mind: this will become a source of information for people who really don’t know about the Third Reich and its end (“downfall”); and the film’s existence has to be appreciated in the context of German culture’s striving to deal with this passage of its history.
Brown Swarm
One point of further interest is that the immediate members of Hitler’s staff who survived the war, based on the brief bios at the end of the film and my quick research on them, largely went on to have successful, unrepentant careers after the war (after a few years as prisoners of war). Some lived on until recently.
This point highlights two things for me: how one important aspect of the Nuremberg Trials was to a significant degree symbolic and designed to serve U.S. postwar public relations in terms of their narrow selection of who to prosecute. Which is not to say that the defendants were anything but culpable war criminals: yet at the same time, many high-level Nazis with solid anti-communist credentials were allowed to not only continue their lives but were in some cases enlisted by the U.S. The second thing this highlights: that the reactionary ideology of some of these people, such as Hitler’s immediate staff, even if they were not necessarily explicit (goose-stepping in their office parking lots, for example), but nevertheless implicit in their reticence, continued to carry a social weight that genrally enhanced rather than hindered their social and economic status in post-war society.
Researching Traudl Junge
A few years ago, around the time of her death, I saw a television film of interviews with Traudl Junge, and I did find it fascinating to see and hear her first person accounts of her time with AH. I had intended to include some links here to material on her in the www that I have found, but most of it is in German and in one case the English material is part of a site associated with a notorious British historian who is known for his pro-Nazi sympathies — and I simply don’t want to be associated with that in the Google database, or in any other way. Readers can research her on their own.
But I have come across some other sites that seem more interesting, such as The Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust and information about Janusz Korczak, a wonderful discovery for me and as far as I have read more in line with my outlook, and who has nothing directly to do with this film.
The Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust →
Janusz Korczak "He always sided with the children."
You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this. (Janusz Korczak)
He was a principal for the children houses, a doctor, a publisher of a children’s newspaper, as well as an author. Korczak was also an expert witness in the district court of minors. In this position, he always sided with the children. (about Janusz Korczak)
The above quote from: janusz-korczak →
korczak.com/Biography →
A site in German: janusz-korczak.de →
G. M. Gilbert
Nuremberg Diary buy.com/prod/Nuremberg_Diary →
I once saw the teleplay Nuremberg (2000) with Alec Baldwin, and the personality that I remember most is the court psychologist G. M. Gilbert who had interviewed Göring and the other defendants. (I also refer to him in another entry in this site on The Great Dictator /chaplin/269/the-great-dictator →.)
As shown in the teleplay, Gilbert was asked once to define evil… he said something like:
Evil is the absence of empathy.
Title: Der Untergang (The Downfall)
Directed by: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Screenplay by: Bernd Eichinger
Based on books by: Joachim Fest (historian), Melissa Müller and Traudl Junge (Bis zur letzten Stunde)
Starring: Bruno Ganz, Alecandra Maria Lara, Corinna Harfouch, Ulrich Matthes, Juliane Köhler, Heino Ferch, and many more
Year: 2004
- Title: Der Untergang (The Downfall)
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