Traudl Junge - Hitler's Last Secretary - A Firsthand Account of Life with Hitler [aka Until the Final Hour]

As the meal came to its end, the adjutants would rise to receive the officers who had come for the briefing. Slowly, conversation died down. Cars drove up outside, soldiers’ boots clattered over the stone flags in the entrance hall. Finally Günsche appeared and reported to the Führer that everything was ready for the conference. Hitler rose and said, ‘Stay where you all are, it won’t take long.’ Then he would go out, stooping slightly, head bent but walking with a firm step. He didn’t want his guests, particularly the ladies, to come into contact with the officers. Here on the Berghof he lived more of a double life than ever. On the one hand he was the genial host and master of the house visiting his country estate for rest and relaxation, on the other, even here, he was still the statesman and military supreme commander waging war on all fronts. Purely from the spatial point of view it was often difficult to reconcile these two opposites. The house wasn’t divided into a private part and an official part, and Hitler’s study was on the same corridor as Eva Braun’s bedroom. So the guests had to be told when to go to bed in case they burst in on an important discussion.

We were left to amuse ourselves for an unspecified length of time after dinner. Sometimes Hitler did say, as he left the dining room, ‘Wait for me here, the briefing won’t take long today.’ From that we deduced that neither the Reich Marshal nor any other high-up military commander was present to hear the reports, and we took that as a sign that the war was going relatively well for Germany. Fräulein Schroeder and I, as the two secretaries on duty, would go off to the adjutancy office to deal with any outstanding office work. It consisted mostly of air reports from all over Germany that had arrived by teleprinter and had to be typed out to be easy for the Führer to read. At the end of March the first good wishes and presents were also arriving for the Führer’s birthday. Most of them went to Berlin, but some found their way to the Berghof or were sent on from the Berlin adjutancy office.

When there hadn’t been enough time for a film between the visit to the tea-house and dinner, Eva Braun had the list of movies available brought to her after we had eaten and, with the other ladies and the gentlemen who weren’t at the briefing, she chose a film to be screened in the bowling alley. ‘Please tell me when the conference is over,’ she would ask the orderlies, and then a small party of about eight to ten people would go down to the basement to watch a movie. We were a very critical, choosy audience. The kitchen staff, chambermaids and soldiers joined us, and if we were lucky we could watch the film through to the end. But sometimes the shrill sound of the telephone ringing would break into it. ‘The conference is over and the Führer expects his guests in the Great Hall,’ the servant said. Then, although regretfully, we cut the screening short, Eva Braun hurried briefly into her room to freshen her make-up, her sister Gretl swiftly looked for a corner where she could smoke a cigarette in peace and then poppeda peppermint into her mouth, and finally everyone assembled in the living room again. The rather old-fashioned but cosy lamp hanging low over the corner table was on, and the Speer, Bormann and Brandt ladies would be sitting on the bench that ran around the corner talking about how their children were doing. The curtain to the Great Hall was still drawn, for Hitler was always detained after the official end of the briefing by one or other of the men who had been present and who wanted to put in a quick request, or discuss a problem for which there was no official opportunity.

By the time Hitler finally entered the living room it was usually midnight. Now we would just be waiting for the Braun sisters, then the Führer led the company down into the Hall for a nocturnal chat around the hearth. By now the fire in it had been lit. Broad sofas and deep armchairs had been drawn up in a large semi-circle, grouped around a big circular table, generally with some other, smaller tables off to the sides. Far to the back of the room, in the corner, a single standard lamp was switched on, and several candles flickered on the mantelpiece and in the middle of the table. You could see the shapes of the people sitting round it only indistinctly.

Hitler himself sat on the right, in deep shadow, and to the right of him, very close to the fire, Eva Braun nestled into her deep armchair with her legs folded under her. Everyone else chose anywhere they liked to sit. Somewhere under the table or in front of the fire lay Eva’s two Scotties, Negus and Stasi, looking like tangled black balls of wool. Blondi wasn’t admitted to this company; the mistress of the house’s dogs took precedence. But sometimes Hitler would ask, quite humbly, ‘Can I let Blondi in for a minute?’ Then Eva Braun took her pets out, and Blondi could make an appearance.

This was where Hitler drank his tea. The rest of the company could have anything to drink that they fancied. There was no ban on alcohol here; you could drink sparkling or still wine, cognac or strong spirits. Cakes and pastries were served with the drinks, and Hitler had his favourite apple cake again. Sometimes Eva Braun managed to persuade the Führer that at this late hour a few sandwiches would be much more welcome than sweet things. She was expressing the wish of the whole company, and Hitler would go along with her.

In this large company it was difficult to get a general conversation going. The dim light, the thick carpets that swallowed up any loud footsteps, and the gentle crackling of the logs on the hearth tempted you to stay silent. But Hitler didn’t care to be left to his own thoughts. He wanted distraction. He would talk quietly to the woman next to him, perhaps Frau Bormann. But what could she tell him? She mustn’t let the Führer know about the anxieties and problems she had with her husband. And anything she had to say about the ten children she had brought into the world one by one during her marriage to the Reichsleiter was quickly over. She was a silent woman, and every year in spring, when we moved to the Obersalzberg, she was pregnant with another child. Pale and inconspicuous, with thick braids of hair wound round her head, she would sit in her armchair beside the Führer counting the hours until she could finally leave this circle of elegant, carefree women. Professor Blaschke, a gentleman in his sixties, was the scholarly type. His hair was greying at the temples, while his thick eyebrows and carefully tended moustache were like black bars marking his pale, thin face. In himself he was a reserved, quiet man. But during these sessions round the hearth Hitler sometimes drew him into a conversation in which he was one of the few to defend his own point of view firmly, even when it was not in line with the Führer’s. Professor Blaschke was a vegetarian too, but for other reasons. He claimed that human dentition was intended for plant food, and that such food was more easily digested by the human body. In this he agreed with Hitler to a great extent, although he often ‘abused his own body’ by eating meat, and he didn’t count poultry as meat at all. But when Hitler wanted Professor Blaschke to agree with him that smoking was one of the most harmful abuses of all and had a particularly bad effect on the teeth, he met with firm opposition. Blaschke himself was a heavy smoker, and perhaps therefore more tolerant than he should have been from a medical point of view. He claimed that smoking was positively good for you, because it disinfected the oral cavity and stimulated the blood supply. In a normal context, he said, smoking wasn’t at all harmful. But Hitler wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Smoking is and always will be one of the most dangerous of habits, and quite apart from the fact that I personally find the smell of cigar or cigarette smoke disgusting, I wouldn’t offer anyone I value or love a cigarette or cigar, because I’d be doing him no service. It has been shown for certain that non-smokers live longer than smokers, and are much more resistant to illness.’