Questions About Artistic Freedom And Integrity

Rating: 8/10 (22 January 2006)

I feel quite ambivalent to the movie Der Untergang.
On the one hand, there is a chilling realism in the way Hitler is portrayed by Bruno Ganz. The war wounds are realistic, unlike the usual Hollywood/War Department movie garbage.
However, there are the apparent historical inaccuracies and cinematic devices. For instance...
1) How innocent was Traudl Junge? Her birth name was Gertrude Humps (no pun intended), and she received the name Junge when she married *SS officer* Hans-Hermann Junge. Considering her age, mustn't she also have been a Jungmaedl (the girl equivalent of the Hitler Youth)? She refers to herself as "not a fanatical nazi", but of course, she was a nazi nonetheless. People don't just end up employed in Adolf Hitler's bunker by accident. In the movie, she is taken aback by Hitler's anti-semitism, but she does have an apparent dislike of the Russians - whom the Nazis hated for the same insane and pseudoscientific racist reasons they hated Jews, Gypsies, and most Eastern Europeans. I don't know...
2) At the end of the movie, we see Traudl Junge, played by the gorgeous Alexandra Maria Lara, make her escape by walking through a large group of Russian soldiers. My problem is that it was known that "every woman in Berlin" was raped by Russian soldiers. So how did a gorgeous girl with huge eyes, wearing an army helmet with *SS* in huge markings on the side of it, make her way safely through a crowd of drunken, war weary and traumatized Russian troops? The little boy she takes off with didn't exist and is there as a cinematic device, signifying hope? Traudle Junge cycles off with him into the future, when in reality she was sent to a Russian prison camp.
3) How plausible is it that a top level nazi "just didn't know"? I don't buy it. To quote Traudl Junge, "We should listen to the voice of conscience. It does not take nearly as much courage as one might think to admit to our mistakes and learn from them. Human beings are in this world to learn and to change themselves in learning." But the German Socialists knew the Nazis were scum - so did the Communists, Humanists, etc. I'm sure they didn't understand fully how crazy Hitler was, how far he would go in carrying out his ideas, etc. But they knew he was bad news, even back in the thirties.
4) The Timeline. Traudl Junge became Hitler's personal secretary in 1942, two years _before_ her SS officer husband was killed. And yet, she is presented as a wide eyed innocent, who doesn't really believe in nazism, and is picked by Hitler in the middle of the night, for no apparent reason. The movie never obviously flashes forward three years to Hitler's last hours in the bunker in 1945.
I think the movie needed at least one sympathetic character, and either the director or Junge herself played up her innocence.