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

Then we wait in our bunker room to be fetched. We have all destroyed our papers. I take no money with me, no provisions, no clothes, just a great many cigarettes and a few pictures I can’t part with. The other women pack small bags. They are going to try to find their way out through this hell too. Only the nurses stay behind.

It could be about eight-thirty in the evening. We are to be the first group leaving the bunker. A few soldiers I don’t know from the guards battalion, we four women, Günsche, Mohnke, Hewel and Admiral Voss make our way through the many waiting people and go down underground passages. We clamber over half-wrecked staircases, through holes in walls and rubble, always going further up and out. At last the Wilhelmsplatz stretches ahead, shining in the moonlight. The dead horse still lies there on the paving stones, but only the remains of it now. Hungry people have come out of the U-Bahn tunnels to slice off pieces of meat…

Soundlessly, we cross the square. Sporadic shots are fired, but the gunfire is stronger further away. Then we have reached the U-Bahn tunnel outside the ruins of the Kaiserhof. We climb down and work our way on in the darkness, over the wounded and the homeless, past soldiers resting, until we reach Friedrichstrasse Station. Here the tunnel ends and hell begins. We have to get through, and we succeed. The whole fighting group gets across the S-Bahn bend uninjured. But an inferno breaks out behind us. Hundreds of snipers are shooting at those who follow us.

For hours we crawl through cavernous cellars, burning buildings, strange, dark streets! Somewhere in an abandoned cellar we rest and sleep for a couple of hours. Then we go on, until Russian tanks bar our way. None of us has a heavy weapon. We are carrying nothing but pistols. So the night passes, and in the morning it is quiet. The gunfire has stopped. We still haven’t seen any Russian soldiers. Finally we end up in the old beer cellar of a brewery now being used as a bunker. This is our last stop. There are Russian tanks out here, and it’s full daylight. We still get into the bunker unseen. Down there Mohnke and Günsche sit in a corner and begin to write. Hewel lies on one of the plank beds, stares at the ceiling and says nothing. He doesn’t want to go on. Two soldiers bring in the wounded Rattenhuber. He has taken a shot in the leg, he is feverish and hallucinating. A doctor treats him and puts him on a camp bed. Rattenhuber gets out his pistol, takes off the safety catch and puts it down beside him.

A general comes into the bunker, finds the defending commander Mohnke and speaks to him. We discover that we are in the last bastion of resistance in the capital of the Reich. The Russians have now surrounded the brewery and are calling on everyone to surrender. Mohnke writes a last report. There is still an hour to go. The rest of us sit there smoking. Suddenly he raises his head, looks at us women and says, ‘You must help us now. We’re all wearing uniform, none of us will get out of here. But you can try to get through, make your way to Dönitz and give him this last report.’

I don’t want to go on any more, but Frau Christian and the other two urge me to; they shake me until I finally follow them. We leave our steel helmets and pistols there. We take our military jackets off too. Then we shake hands with the men and go.

An SS company is standing by its vehicles in the brewery yard, stony-faced and motionless, waiting for the order for the last attack. The Volkssturm, the OT men and the soldiers are throwing their weapons down in a heap and going out to the Russians. At the far end of the yard Russian soldiers are already handing out schnapps and cigarettes to German soldiers, telling them to surrender, celebrating fraternization. We pass through them as if we were invisible. Then we are outside the encircling ring, among wild hordes of Russian victors, and at last I can weep.

Where were we to turn? If I’d never seen dead people before, I saw them now everywhere. No one was taking any notice of them. A little sporadic firing was still going on. Sometimes the Russians set buildings on fire and searched for soldiers in hiding. We were threatened on every corner. I lost track of my colleagues that same day. I went on alone for a long time, hopelessly, until at last I ended up in a Russian prison. When the cell door closed behind me I didn’t even have my poison any more, it had all happened so fast. [114] As she said in conversation with Melissa Müller, Traudl Junge’s poison capsule was not taken from her until there was a cell inspection at Lichtenberg prison for women and young people. Yet I was still alive. And now began a dreadful, terrible time, but I didn’t want to die any more; I was curious to find out what else a human being can experience. And fate was kind to me. As if by a miracle, I escaped being transported to the East. The unselfish human kindness of one man preserved me from that. After many long months, I was at last able to go home and back to a new life.

We have seen them published again and again since the 1950s◦– the ‘I was there’ accounts of former functionaries of the Third Reich, justifications by friends of Hitler, whitewash operations carried out by his intellectual supporters. More or less frank confessions which critics mock as trashy memoirs.

‘Old Junge speaking.’ Traudl Junge (whose surname means ‘young’) is on the phone. She is calling to tell me◦– yet again◦– about her reservations. Why another book on National Socialism? Why make a spectacle of the way she has come to terms with her own past? And why now?

She is used to providing information about her impressions of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. Ever since the 1950s she has been giving interviews to historians and journalists. Until now, however, she has avoided making her own life public. The probable reason is that she has never before definitively faced and understood the key experience of her life: those two and a half years closely involved with Adolf Hitler.

Traudl Junge served a criminal regime, but she took no part in the murders committed by the National Socialists. That does not excuse her, but it should be borne in mind if we want to understand what happened. Although she was so close to those criminal actions, she does not fit the black-and-white ideological pattern of those who see the situation as polarized between Nazi villains and anti-Fascist heroes.

She has never, says Traudl Junge, felt sorry for herself, even in the chaotic days and hours of the collapse of the Third Reich. ‘I should think not too’, the reader may reflect. However, her lack of self-pity distinguishes her not only from many of her closest colleagues of that time but also from the great majority of her contemporaries, who saw themselves in retrospect as ‘victims’. After 1945, such turns of phrase as ‘Those were difficult times…’, or ‘There was a war on…’ made it easier for many to repress, or at least play down in their minds, the truth about the persecution of the Jews, the death camps and many other Nazi atrocities. They had been through ‘total war’ and experienced its material and ideological destruction as ‘total ruin’, taking heart from the fiction of a new beginning at ‘zero hour’. They spoke of ‘eradicating the horrors’ and ‘breaking the spell’. They pinned their hopes on a new era beginning ‘after the war’, persecutors and persecuted alike, passive hangers-on and the complicit, among whom Traudl Junge may be classed.

After the war she never felt that she was innocent. However, painfully present in her mind as her shame and grief over the crimes of the Nazis are, until now it has been hard for her to define her share in the responsibility beyond a diffuse, abstract self-accusation. Her personal failure, she has finally realized, lay in accepting Albert Bormann’s help. She desperately wanted to go to Berlin in 1941, she was furious about the obstacles put in her way by her Munich employer, she was defiant and obstinate. To get where she wanted to be◦– which was Berlin, not the Reich Chancellery, let alone Adolf Hitler◦– she silenced the warning voice in her that told her: Don’t get involved with the Party – no good can come of it. When she finally and after a series of chance events found herself in Hitler’s presence, she says, it was too late to resist. Today she knows that she let herself be dazzled by him◦– not by his ideological and political intentions, in which she never took any particular interest, but by Hitler’s personality. She does not play down the fact that she provided him with female company while he and his accomplices were implementing the ‘final solution’. She admits that she probably knew nothing of the full extent of the persecution of Jews simply because she didn’t want to know. All the same, in her attempts at a later date to understand those murderous events, even to link them with herself, her immediate impressions of the time she spent with Hitler keep coming to the fore and, as we can gather from her manuscript, those impressions were overwhelmingly positive. That should not seem surprising, for here, after all, lies the source of the battle with herself that Traudl Junge still has not fought to the end: how to accept that this man made her feel he cared about her welfare while his unbounded instinct for destruction was simultaneously bringing suffering to millions of people.