Nazi sisterhood

Ben Sombogaart’s 2002 Dutch film Twin Sisters (De Tweeling) visualizes Tessa de Loo’s popular (more than 3.5 million Dutch and German readers) “nature vs. nurture” novel.

Twin Sisters, supposedly a fictionalized version of true events, explores the responsibility of common Germans, especially women, for the 50 million lives lost (six million murdered Jews) during World War II.

In 1926, German twin sisters are separated at age six. Lotte, sick with consumption, is claimed by upper-middle class Dutch relatives. Anna remains in Germany with an uncle’s poor, uneducated farming family.

Lotte is provided a pleasant, Protestant life; Anna serves as unpaid labor, is denied education and is given an especially cruel beating by her Catholic uncle when, as a teenager, she sympathizes with the Nazi promise of a workers’ utopia. She becomes a maid while Lotte attends university.

Lotte gets engaged to David, a handsome Jew who eventually dies in a concentration camp. Anna marries Martin, a conscripted Austrian. Although he is an SS (signal corps) officer, his unit is punished for not saluting enthusiastically enough. Anna explains that he cannot muster enthusiasm when he does not support the war.

Even though the twins think about the war only in respect to their romantic relationships, both unconsciously absorb the ideologies of their disparate environments.

When they meet as old women, Lotte, who believes her sister is an anti-Semite, accuses Anna of murdering David. Lotte fails to ask herself how she, in Anna’s place, would have behaved.

Until recently, few women directly participated in warfare but, historically, they have acted as adjuncts to military actions. Another recent movie, Blind Spot - Hitler’s Secretary (Im toten Winkel—Hitlers Sekretarin, 2002), elucidates the complicity of a real young woman, Traudl Junge, who became one of Hitler’s secretaries at age 22. In this documentary Frau Junge is interviewed at age 81.

Traudl, like Anna, grew up in unhappy circumstances and was not allowed to attend high school because it was too expensive. She innocently fell into her job as Hitler’s secretary.

Traudl worked and ate with Hitler every day from autumn 1942 until the war’s end but, like the twins, she insisted that she was unaware of what was going on. She said she was shielded from the barbarism, that she was shocked when she realized what was happening. She was “in a blind spot.”

Listening to Traudl Junge tell about Hitler and his surrounding Nazi entourage is a riveting experience and a unique opportunity to understand the thinking of at least one global “sister” caught by unfortunate and unavoidable circumstances.

In his 2004 film, Downfall, Oliver Hirschbiegel combines Traudl Junge’s interview content with whatever other material his researchers could discover about Hitler’s final days in his Berlin bunker.

The film begins in 1942 when a “kindly old gentleman” interviews Traudl for a job as his secretary, introduces her to his dog Blondie and hires her because she’s from Munich.

Two and one-half years later, on Hitler’s 56th birthday, Traudl awakens in his Berlin bunker to the sound of Russian artillery and the beginning of the end.

Hitler refuses to leave Berlin, saying that he must force an outcome in Berlin or face his downfall. When Albert Speers asks him to surrender and thus spare the German people further suffering, he refuses. He reasons that the people are facing their destiny, that they’ve failed, and that they deserve nothing else than what they will get.

The movie shows the confusion and terror of a city that young boys are left to defend, the last-minute marriage of Hitler and Eva Braun and the suicides of Hitler and his followers.

Traudl Junge watches all of this while loyally doing her job. After Frau Goebbels poisons her children because they should not live in a world without National Socialism, Traudl escapes through a horrifying city landscape and incoming Russian troops. She travels with a young boy who has been fighting for the city.

After the war, Traudl was “deNazified,” labeled a “juvenile fellow traveler” and granted amnesty. On the day Blind Spot premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, February 10, 2002, she died of cancer.

Traudl said that when she first found out the truth about everything, she believed she was innocent because she had not known. Then she realized that youth was no excuse. Just before her death she talked by telephone with the film’s directors. She said, “I think I’m starting to forgive myself.”