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

Fräulein Wolf and I began saying our piece, protesting that we felt guilty about being little more than ladies of leisure here, when the Führer so seldom had any work for us. We thought perhaps we could be more useful in Berlin, or in some other position. After all, we said, there was a war on, and in the present circumstances our families had a lot to put up with. But we got nowhere. ‘Ladies, you can’t be the judges of whether your work and your presence are useful to me or not. Believe me, your duties here are much more important than if you were typing letters in some business firm or making grenades in a factory. And you are serving your people best in those few hours when you do my typing or help me to relax and gather strength.’

So a few weeks later Madame Christian rejoined us, with a great many suitcases and hat-boxes, filling the bunkers and huts with trills of laughter and causing much turmoil in the hearts of many lonely men. We now took our meals with Hitler in two shifts. Two ladies ate with him at lunch and the other two in the evening. Frau Christian was called by her old name of Dara again. When she and I were eating with Hitler the conversation often turned to marriage. To this day I don’t know his feelings on the subject. He told us about an old friend of his, Hanfstaengl. [59] Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl and his wife Erna were among Hitler’s principal early companions at the beginning of the 1920s. ‘Hanfstaengl had such a beautiful wife, and he was unfaithful to her with another woman who wasn’t pretty at all.’ Apparently he couldn’t understand that a woman’s beauty alone isn’t enough of a foundation for a good marriage. Yet on the other hand it wasn’t just Eva Braun’s beauty that attracted him. He often took his chance to talk to us about Eva. He phoned her every day, and if there were reports of an air raid on Munich he would pace up and down restlessly like a caged lion, waiting to get in touch with Eva Braun by phone. Usually his fears were groundless.

The ‘little Braun house’ was damaged only once, when several buildings near it burned right down. He was always talking about Eva’s courage. ‘She won’t go down into the air raid shelter, although I keep asking her to, and one of these days that little place of hers will collapse like a house of cards. And she won’t move to my apartment, where she’d be absolutely safe. I’ve finally persuaded her to have a little private shelter built in her house, but then she takes in the whole neighbourhood and goes up on the roof herself to see if any incendiary bombs have fallen. She’s very proud. I’ve known her for over ten years, and when she first started to work for Hoffmann she had to scrape and save. But it was years before she would let me pay so much as a taxi fare for her, and she slept on a bench in the office for days on end so that I could reach her by phone, because she didn’t have a telephone at home. It was only a few years ago that I got her to accept her little house in Bogenhausen.’

So it was mainly her human qualities that bound Hitler to Eva Braun. Once, when we were talking about weddings and marriage again, I asked, ‘My Führer, why haven’t you married her?’ I knew how much he liked arranging marriages, after all. His answer was rather surprising. ‘I wouldn’t make a good father, and I think it would be irresponsible to start a family when I can’t devote enough time to my wife. And anyway I don’t want children of my own. I think the offspring of men of genius usually have a very hard time of it. People expect them to be just like their famous progenitor, and won’t forgive them for being only average. And in fact most of them are feeble-minded.’

This was the first expression of personal megalomania that I heard from Hitler, or the first to be taken seriously. To this day I do sometimes feel as if while Hitler’s fanatical ideas were megalomaniac, up till then he had kept himself as a person out of it. Indeed, he used to say: ‘I am an instrument of fate, and must tread the path on which a higher Providence has set me.’ But this time it did disturb me a lot to find someone describing himself as a genius.

Although Hitler didn’t discuss the war or politics in our little company at table, he said more and more often that he had great anxieties. He was usually talking more to himself than to us. Ever more frequently now I would see his face wearing the grim, angry, harsh expression left on it by the preceding military briefing. ‘It’s hopeless making war with incompetent generals. I ought to follow Stalin’s example. He purges his army ruthlessly.’ And then, as if he had only just realized that we women didn’t and ought not to understand such things, he would put his gloomy thoughts aside and switch to being a charming dinner companion.

Sometimes we also had interesting discussions about the church and the development of the human race. Perhaps it’s going too far to call them discussions, because he would begin explaining his ideas when some question or remark from one of us had set them off, and we just listened. He was not a member of any church, and thought the Christian religions were outdated, hypocritical institutions that lured people into them. The laws of nature were his religion. He could reconcile his dogma of violence better with nature than with the Christian doctrine of loving your neighbour and your enemy. ‘Science isn’t yet clear about the origins of humanity’ he once said. ‘We are probably the highest stage of development of some mammal which developed from reptiles and moved on to human beings, perhaps by way of the apes. We are a part of creation and children of nature, and the same laws apply to us as to all living creatures. And in nature the law of the struggle for survival has reigned from the first. Everything incapable of life, everything weak is eliminated. Only mankind and above all the church have made it their aim to keep alive the weak, those unfit to live, and people of an inferior kind.’

It’s a pity that I can remember only fragments of these theories, and unfortunately I don’t have the powers of persuasion with which Hitler put his ideas to us.

On the way back to our hut we were talking to each other about what Hitler had said, and I made up my mind to think more deeply about such things. Sad to say, I realized next day in conversation with my friends that I could give only a very vague and inaccurate account of what had impressed and moved me so much the previous evening. If only I had been as mature and experienced then as I am now I wouldn’t have let myself just be carried away, or have absorbed Hitler’s ideas so easily and uncritically. Then I would have been bound to wonder about the dangers present in the power of a man whose gift for oratory and power of suggestion could hold people spellbound, simply suppressing their own will and convictions.

Sometimes I saw Hitler’s advisors, generals and colleagues come away from talks with the Führer looking dismayed, chewing on thick cigars and brooding. I spoke to some of them later. And although they were stronger, wiser and more experienced than me, it often happened that they went to see the Führer armed with unimpeachable arguments and documentary evidence, absolutely determined to persuade him that an order was impossible or could not be carried out. But before they had finished he would begin talking, and all their objections melted away, becoming pointless in the face of his theory. They knew it couldn’t be right, but they couldn’t pin down the flaw in it. When they left him they felt despairing, crushed, with their former firm and absolute resolve badly shaken, as if they had been hypnotized. I think many of them tried to hold out against his influence, but others felt exhausted and worn down, and then just let events simply take their course to the bitter end.