Hitler's Diaries....Interview with Hitler's Bodyguard

This is on Salon. Same as always, you can get a one day pass if you look at the ads.

I think it's important to read. To try to understand the day to day lives of men and women who created such horror. He's not apologetic nor is he proud. I think we could find the same mindset with many who condone, promote atrocities. I've always thought it was a mistake to demonize Hitler. I think if we think of him as so evil and demonic then we will not be able to understand why so many followed him. I recommend this article.

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2005/02/21/nazi/index.html

Germany's peculiar post-World War II identity, stretched uncomfortably between self-awareness and denial, is well-illustrated by Rochus Misch and his relationship to the German media.

Among the last living relics of the Nazi era, the 87-year-old Misch served as bodyguard, courier and telephone operator in the direct service of Adolf Hitler from 1940 to 1945. And recently he's been rediscovered -- the character of Misch is portrayed in Oliver Hirschbiegel and Bernd Eichinger's movie "Downfall," nominee for a best foreign-language Oscar and the most talked-about German film of the decade. The film's impact, both positive and negative, cannot be understated: It's the first time German cinema has dared to portray Hitler as a complex character rather than a cardboard monster and allowed the fall of the Third Reich to be the stuff of conventional melodrama.

In the film, Misch is depicted only briefly; his status in the bunker was low. But with the death of the few other remaining members of Hitler's entourage over the past 10 years, he has gained a new significance: He's now the last living man from the Führerbunker. Still, "The last man from the Führerbunker" has not received quite the level of media attention one would expect in the wake of the hugely successful film. If he is quoted, it is in short sound bites, or he is passed over entirely.

At first, this puzzled me. Given, for example, the recent widespread interest in Hitler's young secretary Traudl Junge, who died in 2002, it seemed strange the German press wasn't pouncing on Misch as wholeheartedly. Just before she died, Junge was the subject of the popular and critically acclaimed documentary "Blindspot," in which she describes her life as Hitler's secretary and grapples with intense self-recrimination. Misch, by comparison, has been ignored. But after reading the scanty profiles of Misch in German publications, I began to sense what the problem was, ultimately confirmed when I got to know Misch myself. Unlike Junge, Misch does no grappling. Instead, occasionally, in one of these dry profiles he makes a little comment. Once he mentions, elliptically, his dislike of the 2000 switch to the euro.

Most portrayals of him border on the caricature. It's clear when one studies the testimony of those surrounding him that he was more than some sort of monster incarnate.