Romance and Resistance

Surviving Hitler: A Love Story
directed by John-Keith Wasson

When Jutta met Helmuth at a dancing school, they were 14 and 15. Hitler had been in power for a year. Blonde, blue-eyed, 5-foot-10-inch Jutta never suspected that her mother’s parents had been Jewish, which made her non-Aryan, according to the Nazi racial theory. What follows is a story of love in a dark age, told in a remarkable collage of home movies and newsreel footage.

Living in Berlin had its charms: The Nazis were aware that the world’s eyes were on them. Like their hiding of anti-Semitic signs during the Olympics, they “tempered their attacks” on Jews, says Jutta. Whenever there was a pogrom, Jutta’s family left town, tipped off by a friend who worked at the propaganda ministry. It was at one of their getaways –– a ski resort –– where Jutta and Helmuth found each other again. They spent an afternoon skiing –– or, Jutta skied while Helmuth mainly fell, remaining “remarkably good-natured,” as Jutta, 70 years later and still very beautiful, recalls.

Soon Helmuth had to fulfill his two-year military duty, compulsory before he could enter university. It was on the Eastern Front, where his battalion was forced to bombard the civilian population, that he saw and understood the cruelty and ruthlessness of Nazism.

“We had good friends, wonderful friends,” says Jutta. “People think Germans were all Nazis, but it’s not true.” It was through this circle of dissidents that Jutta’s family would harbor a fugitive from the Gestapo. It was also through this informal network that Jutta would find Helmuth a job working under Klaus von Stauffenberg, the ringleader of Operation Valkyrie, a plot on Hitler’s life.

Surviving Hitler seamlessly weaves the historical materials including home movies shot by Helmuth, snapshots and documentary reels into a visual narrative set to Jutta’s story. But it is the presence of Jutta the narrator, now in her 80s, that grips our attention. Her historical self is glaringly identifiable in the flickering black and white. The fact that we are seeing the two Juttas –– 70 years apart, one in the Third Reich and the other in the 21st century –– seems miraculous, if not downright magical.

When Operation Valkrie failed, Helmuth spent a night burning all the photographs he feared would implicate his fiancée in the plot. Luckily, enough survived this holocaust of memories, and I’m grateful for having met her and heard her story.
–– Rika Ohara