Our entrée into the bunker comes via Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara), the most sensible of the women, who is hired as Hitler's secretary in 1942 and continues working for him in the bunker in the spring of 1945. But the movie begins and ends with interview footage of the aged Traudl from the documentary Blind Spot in which she notes how naïve she was at the time, how unaware of the horrors perpetrated at Hitler's behest, but that, reflecting on it years later, she realized she had no right to be so uninformed, that it couldn't excuse her.

In narrative terms, setting this documentary confession as the endpoint of Traudl's story makes her the most conventional character in Downfall. The German moviemakers want Traudl to function as an admission of national guilt, which means that she has to make a transition from guilty collaboration to a guilty conscience. Her story thus takes the shape of a redemptive romance in which she goes from being a "normal" person who could take part in the Nazi bureaucracy to being a truly normal person with moral sensitivity even to the relatively remote consequences of her actions. (By 1945 she's been typing to Hitler's dictation for two-and-a-half years but it's his ruthless indifference to civilian deaths displayed at the dinner table that finally brings home to her what she's been typing.)

Traudl's dawning awareness makes for a conventional narrative, but it is nonetheless very effective, especially the moment when she infers, from what Albert Speer doesn't say, what Magda Goebbels intends to do with her six children. (This is followed up by a wonderfully matter-of-fact little scene in which Traudl feeds those hungry, ill-fated kids.) Traudl develops enough awareness that we don't object to her escape at the end of the movie. She takes her new awareness out of the claustrophobic underworld of the bunker to the outside world devastated by her beloved boss's policies and both absorbs and experiences the effect of official policies on civilians.

Traudl is one thing, the high-ranking Nazi women in the bunker are another--we don't want them to survive and can't really imagine them living a post-bunker life. Eva Braun is a true believer but not at all forbidding (unlike Magda Goebbels). Eva wants everyone to have a good time, so she encourages them to dance, play the piano, smoke, go above ground for a stroll. Juliane Köhler as big, warm, fun-loving Eva is fascinatingly delusional. Köhler doesn't make her emotionally complex, with layers of fear and regret under a translucent mask. Instead she shows you what a face looks like when information is being taken in but resolutely left unprocessed. It's almost the very alertness of her eyes that makes them so glassy--tireless Eva working the room as it's being blown apart by artillery shells. She's always good for a demented moment; perhaps the best is when she says to Speer, who hasn't eaten all day, that he must be hungry and offers him champagne and a plate of cookies.