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

‘Our total collapse, the refugees, the suffering◦– of course I held Hitler responsible for that. His testament, his suicide◦– that was when I began to hate him. At the same time I felt great pity, even for him. But when your love for someone, say your partner in marriage, turns to hate, you usually try to preserve the memories of the happy times you first knew. I suppose my relationship with Hitler was something like that… He didn’t exert any erotic influence over me, but of course I wanted him to like me. He was a kindly paternal figure, he gave me a feeling of security, solicitude for me, safety. I felt protected there in the Führer headquarters in the middle of that forest, in that community, with that “father figure”. I can still look back to that time with warm emotions. I never again felt that I belonged anywhere in just the same way.’

In the turbulent months after Hitler’s suicide and the end of the war, Traudl feels personally disappointed in ‘her Führer’. In a letter to her mother and sister as late as January 1945 she says, parroting Hitler: ‘[…] I am well, and we must either win the victory or fall, there’s no alternative.’ And then, cravenly, he had given up. Her dominant feelings in the summer and autumn of 1945, it is true, are life-threatening in their nature: she is afraid of being at the mercy of the Russian occupying forces, and there are existential needs such as hunger. But although many of her colleagues chose suicide as a way out in the days around 1 May 1945, she never sees it as a solution for herself. She too treasures the poison capsule given to her by Hitler personally as a kind of goodbye present, but she wants to live.

‘I wasn’t one of those idealists who couldn’t imagine how anything could go on without the Führer, or couldn’t see it going on at all; people like Magda Goebbels, who obviously drew the logical conclusions from her own view of the world. To me, suicide was only ever a very vague safety net in case I was badly mistreated◦– tortured or raped. It was reassuring to have the poison with me.’

The surviving inmates of the bunkers in the catacombs under the Reich Chancellery began moving out on the night of 1 May 1945. Ten groups of about twenty people each set off to get away from the Russians. As she describes it in detail in her manuscript, Traudl Junge was among the first group, led by SS Brigadeführer Mohnke. On the second evening she became separated from her female companions◦– her secretarial colleague Gerda Christian, Martin Bormann’s secretary Else Krüger, and Constanze Manziarly. Apparently Hitler’s dietician cook looked the ideal image of Russian femininity, well-built and plump-cheeked, and she was, stupidly, wearing a Wehrmacht jacket. She said she was going to find some civilian clothing and asked Traudl Junge to wait for her, while the two other women waited by a water collection point and tried to organize a place to sleep next night. When Traudl Junge next saw Fräulein Manziarly, a little later, two Russian soldiers were taking her towards a U-Bahn tunnel. Constanze Manziarly just had time to call back to Traudl Junge, ‘They want to see my papers’, before she disappeared with the Russians. No one saw her again after that.

Traudl Junge lost sight of the other two women too, and went on alone. She wanted to go north, away from the Russians and into the English zone, where Hitler’s designated successor Grand Admiral Dönitz and his men were thought to be. She had no money for her journey, no papers and no luggage,and was dressed only in trousers and a check blouse. Thousands and thousands of refugees were on the roads, some fleeing from the bombed city, others coming from the country areas already occupied by the Russians and seeking shelter in the city. Traudl Junge tried to strike up acquaintanceships; she did not know the region, had never before heard the names of the villages through which she passed, and forgot them again at once. For a while she walked beside a former concentration camp inmate. He was still wearing his striped camp uniform.

‘At that moment this man and I were companions brought together by fate; we were both afraid of the Russians, and we went part of the way together. We didn’t say anything about our immediate past. I didn’t yet have any idea what conditions in the concentration camps had really been like. I could still hear Himmler’s voice describing them as well-organized labour camps. From today’s viewpoint it’s hardly imaginable, but at the time I asked the man no questions. And what really matters is that I asked myself no questions either.’

She walks through the countryside for days on end. She hears nothing about the surrender of Germany and the official end of the war. The discrepancy between the exuberance of spring, with its pretty flowering meadows and blossoming trees, and all the human misery, the ruined buildings, the unmilked cows bellowing in pain, makes a deep impression on her. By night she seeks shelter with strangers, sleeps in barns, sometimes even in a bed, friendly people give her boiled potatoes, someone even makes her a present of an old coat. It is a nuisance to carry in the mild weather, but a welcome blanket by night. She meets German soldiers who deserted in the chaos of the closing stages of the war and are trying to make their way home in scruffy civilian clothing. At one farm she meets Erich Kempka, Hitler’s personal chauffeur, who had been a witness at her wedding◦– he is wearing shabby clothes, and he too is on the run. He tells her that his aim is to swim the river Elbe and then give himself up to the Americans. He must finally have managed to reach southern Germany, for in the middle of June he falls into American hands in Berchtesgaden.

The refugees form small groups, creating a sense of security for themselves. Traudl Junge soon makes friends with Katja, married to an SS officer and herself a ‘Party comrade’, who left Berlin in panic when the Russians marched in. Traudl Junge tells her that she herself was Hitler’s secretary, but both women are more concerned with day-to-day events. What shall we eat this evening, where shall we sleep? Together, they try to cross the ‘green frontier’ and reach the British zone, and when that attempt fails they go on along the Elbe to Wittenberge, about halfway to Hamburg, looking for a way to get across the river. The American zone begins on the opposite bank. Traudl Junge is suffering from scabies; she hasn’t seen a bar of soap, let alone used one, since the day she broke out of the bunker. The doctor she visits prescribes an ointment, baths, and a daily change of underwear. For this well-meant advice he charges five marks, which she has to owe him.

There are no ferries across the Elbe, and Traudl and Katja don’t trust themselves to swim to the opposite bank. The river is too wide and too cold. Instead, they decide to go back to Berlin. Traudl Junge means to hide in her new friend’s apartment until trains to Munich are running again. She is back in Berlin after about a month, having walked more than three hundred kilometres, and now goes under the name of Gerda Alt. She adopted this cover name on the road when she had a permit allowing her to draw food rations made out in one village◦– in the naive hope that anyone looking for her who may hear the name Gerda Alt (‘old’) will connect it with Traudl Junge.

She spends a week in Berlin. Katja has to go out in the daytime to clear rubble; she herself hardly leaves the building. There are small moments of pleasure: the first chance in many weeks to wash her hair, a packet of real coffee that Katja finds in the kitchen cupboard. The first glimmer of confidence: something like normality seems to be returning to her life. On 9 June, the day when the commander of the Soviet occupying forces, Marshal Gyorgy Zhukov, sets up the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, two civilians, a young man and a girl, knock at the door of Katja’s apartment and, speaking with an obvious Russian accent, say they are journalists.