Well, quite. (There is one knowing encounter between them in Smiley's People, but that's many years later and another book. And tv series.) The sentence about Downfall is also bewildering, because seriously, you needn't worry about empathy for Hitler in that one. The three characters the film builds up for the audience to connect with (and not uncritically) are his secretary, the boy who barely survives being one of the kids turned into soldiers in the last day of the war, and the doctor at the hospital. It's another case of "which film did you watch?"