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

‘I realized at once that I was about to be arrested. To this day I don’t know who informed on me. I didn’t take my pass in my false name with me, because people said that anyone caught out lying would be condemned to a Russian hell. And it was normal enough to have no papers in those days. I left a message for Katja with the caretaker of the building and went with them. Of course I was dreadfully frightened, but I didn’t feel it was wrongful arrest. The terrifying part was the unpredictability of the Russians.’

Traudl Junge’s odyssey through various temporary prisons now begins. The first place where she is imprisoned is a Russian commandant’s headquarters in Nussbaumallee, where she is held for a night. She is taken from there to Lichtenberg, formerly a prison for women and young people, where she is held for fourteen weeks in a cell meant for solitary confinement◦– at first really alone in it, later with seven other women. Only then does anyone show an interest in her and take her off for her first interrogation. They question her, in particular, about the circumstances of Hitler’s death. She constantly keeps hearing tales of the personal tragedies suffered by the Russian soldiers on duty as warders: how their children were shot by German soldiers, their women dragged away, whole villages razed to the ground. For the first time, and with growing horror, Traudl Junge realizes that the massacres in East Prussia were the aftermath of an equally brutal prelude in Russia◦– and that she had let herself be deceived by Nazi propaganda.

One night she is fetched without warning and moved to the basement floor of the Rudolf Virchow Institute, where ‘special cases’ presumed to be spies are held in a large communal cell. They sleep on the floor. Someone takes Traudl Junge’s wedding ring, her last remaining possession.

She has already lost the poison capsule in Lichtenberg. The woman commissar on duty in the Nussbaumallee cells had ordered a strip search, but Traudl Junge took the poison capsule of thin glass out of its protective brass case, slipped it into a handkerchief, and put it under her tongue while blowing her nose. Only then did she undress. After the search she managed to hide the capsule, now without the brass case, in her jacket pocket and take it safely with her to Lichtenberg prison.

‘The woman who shared my cell there knew about the capsule. I had told her that I still had the poison for use in an emergency, and it kept my fear within bounds. I think she informed on me. Anyway, the capsule was taken away from me during a cell inspection. I felt desperate. Every night I could hear the screams of people being tortured, and the roll-call in the yard when transports set off for Russia. Suddenly I felt completely helpless, now that the power to make that final decision had been taken from me.’

Traudl Junge is not taken to Russia. Is she kept in Berlin as an important witness, or do the occupying force think her too harmless to be seriously punished? It is impossible to clear up these questions with any certainty after the event. But Fate is kind to her, particularly when it sends her an Armenian called Arkady. This man, who wears civilian clothing, works as an interpreter for the Russian occupiers. One night in October 1945 he fetches her from the basement of the Rudolf Virchow Institute and takes her to another basement cell at the Russian command post in Marienstrasse. On the way he says scarcely a word, but she notices his courteous manners and refined speech. Sinister as the man seems to her at first, in the end she has much to thank him for. Over the next few weeks he is her guardian angel, getting her clothes, a room, papers, and after that even work. The one condition is that she must stay in the Russian zone. One day, when he gives her a tomato, its poetic name of ‘Paradise apple’ strikes her suddenly as being literally true.

‘Arkady interrogated me only once at the command post, while a uniformed officer sat in the other corner of the room. I just had to say what had happened in the last days in the Führer bunker. After that I had to sign an agreement stating that I was prepared to give the Red Army the names of survivors from those who had been at Führer headquarters.’

She spends about a week in part of the Marienstrasse command-post basement, now converted to a cell, and then Arkady decides, ‘We must have you out of here’◦– and commandeers a small room in a building which he chooses at random. From now on she lives here. Her landlady◦– at first unwilling, but later glad of Traudl’s company◦– is Fräulein Koch, a piano teacher. When Arkady, in the course of ‘occupying’ the room, tries the bed to see if it is comfortable Traudl Junge has forebodings of worse to come. But Arkady does not molest her either then or later. Instead, he ensures that over the next few weeks she is listed as an assistant at the command post, because then he can get her fed at the canteen there. On 5 October she is issued with a ‘work-book replacement card’, stating that she is employed for ten to twelve hours a day as a worker at the command post. On 4 December 1945 she describes the way she is really spending her time in a long letter to her mother in Bavaria, for after almost a year of uncertainty they are finally in touch again. She does not go into detail about her flight from Berlin and her prison experiences in either this or subsequent letters, nor does she mention Arkady – she knows, after all, that mail is still censored, only this time by the occupying power.

‘[…] You’ll want to know how I’m living◦– well, I’m alive! I can’t say much about that, but I have enough to eat and I’m getting quite fat. Most of the time I help with the housework, and I’m also knitting gloves and sweaters, and I make dolls and stuffed toy animals, and use my many amateurish talents. If I ever come home maybe I can find a job as attendant in a lavatory or cloakroom. My memories mostly take me back to the Munich years and don’t cling to the recent past. Mankind’s most precious gift is being able to forget.

I’m living with an elderly spinster, what you might call an old maid. She’s very kind and at least equally silly. Terribly prejudiced, but all the same she’s taken me to her heart because I’m as good as quite a number of workmen to her, I can nail windows and doors in place, I chop wood, I make myself useful. […] My life is hard but I’ve felt new-born now that I know you are waiting for me at home, however long it may take to get there. […]’

She tries to present her situation in a humorous light, but all the same her nerves give way in the course of that November: she complains that she’d rather be shut up in the basement cell again than sit around here doing nothing, just waiting until they want her to denounce someone. She feels that she is at Arkady’s mercy, and is still afraid of him. But once more he surprises her. ‘You need work,’ he says next. He has a photo of her taken and a pass made out in her name. On 10 December 1945 he arranges for her to begin working as an administrative assistant, later at the reception desk of the Charité hospital and finally at its cash desk.

‘This man systematically rescued me, and he obviously had no personal advantage in mind. He said the most peculiar things, he talked about Providence. And when I asked why he was doing all this for me he just said, “I’m not your enemy. Perhaps you can help me too some day.”’

For the first time since the fall of the Third Reich she can now earn a meagre living for herself; before that, what she earned from the home-made dolls scarcely paid her rent. Now she is earning 100 Reichsmarks a month and gets food ration coupons. As Hitler’s secretary she was earning 450 Reichsmarks with free board and lodging. A loaf of bread costs about forty on the black market these days, a kilo of sugar about ninety, a carton of ten packets of Chesterfield cigarettes up to 1500 Reichsmarks. Traudl Junge is a smoker, but has no black-market connections; she has no money or goods to barter for that.