Surviving Hitler: A Love Story

Surviving Hitler: A Love Story lives up to its title as not only a cheating-death survival tale but also the story of a long-distance relationship between Jutta and Helmuth Cords, carried out largely through epistolary correspondence. Jutta was in her late teens in 1939, and at the height of Nazi oppression in Germany was sent by her mother and father to college in Switzerland; as a half-Jew, Jutta had good reason to live in exile. But fearing for her parents' safety, Jutta courageously returned to Germany and joined the Resistance. She also met and fell in love with Helmuth, a junior German officer with profound anti-Hitler sentiments, whom she married. Filmmaker John-Keith Wasson builds this engaging documentary from Super 8 home-movie footage, excerpts from the couple's letters, and present-day interviews with Jutta herself. While Jutta's eloquence and wit as an interview subject are compelling enough, her remembrances often beggar belief: Helmuth not only came out unscathed from the failed Von Stauffenberg bomb plot to assassinate Hitler, but also managed to survive the hellish fighting on the Russian front. Jutta also negotiated her parents' release from a Nazi prison camp and used her smarts to avoid being raped and murdered by the unsupervised Russian troops who overran Berlin in 1945. At war's end, in Jutta's masterfully understated words, she and Helmuth had to “erase our past to have a future.” DVD extras include a discussion guide. Highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (M. Sandlin)