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

Lonely as she is, all her potential for love is concentrated on her mother. Their relationship is the one fixed point in these months of outward and inward uncertainty, and she clings to it with positively childlike force. On 11 December she writes one of her many letters of this period to Breitbrunn on the Ammersee, where her mother has been living since she was bombed out of her Munich apartment.

‘Myself, I’ve always got out of my difficulties relatively well […] and now I’m working again. […] At least I’m glad to have occupation, so my thoughts don’t have too much time to wander. They’re mostly with you anyway […] I’m really scared of the Christmas holidays. I shall probably stay in bed and sleep the time away, with all its memories. […] One can’t even afford a candle here, and a branch of fir costs so much that it’s right beyond my means. […] Dear Mother, have as nice a time as you possibly can, and be glad the two of you can spend the holiday together. That’s the best thing of all, not having to be among strangers. It would be all right if I could shut myself up in my little room and be really alone with myself and my memories. I’d be able to fill my time then. But as it is, the cold weather means we all have to spend our free time together in a dark kitchen which is never cleared out and can never be got really warm. Even worse off are the people who have central heating [with no fuel] and no other means of heating. […]’

In the following weeks Traudl Junge’s thoughts and actions revolve around making a new start in Munich. It is with mixed feelings that she tries to approach her old world, her life before she made that wrong decision. ‘My brain is constantly occupied with a single thought: going home,’ she writes on 30 December. A few lines further on comes an explanation for her strong sense of family affection: ‘I just long for you and Inge; I’m afraid other people might pity me or take pleasure in my misfortunes.’ She spends the last day of 1945, New Year’s Eve, with friends of her late husband in Wilmersdorf, a part of the city that is occupied by the British. She has already secretly entered that forbidden zone several times, and this time she stays for almost two months, for on New Year’s Day of 1946 she falls ill with a temperature of 41 degrees and a sore throat. She is admitted to the Robert Koch Hospital on the same day with diphtheria. The fact that her absence from the Russian zone has obviously not been noticed strengthens her resolve to flee to Bavaria as soon as possible. ‘Most of the time I try to sleep, to take my mind off bitter memories of the past and anxiety about the future. Or I dream of lovely times at home with you and build the most beautiful castles in the air’ (15 January 1946). She makes concrete plans for flight with her neighbour in her hospital bed, who also wants to go to Munich.

‘Since yesterday I have been working at the Charité again, but my job there won’t keep me from setting out to go home when the time comes,’ she writes on the last day of February 1946. ‘But you can eat up those cabbages before they go mouldy, and then I’ll be home to enjoy the first radishes.’ And on 1 March she writes to her sister: ‘You ask if I’m perfectly free and have release papers. Unfortunately no to both questions. I’d have been well away from here long ago if it was as simple as that.’

In Breitbrunn, meanwhile, her mother is trying to get Traudl a permit to stay in Bavaria and a certificate of entitlement to live in Breitbrunn. Both documents are the prerequisite for her flight from Berlin, because it depends on them whether she can get a work permit, a ration card, and so on at home. On 2 April the document she has been longing for reaches Traudl Junge. ‘Hooray! My Bavarian permit has arrived!’ She has already given a month’s notice to the Charité on 15 March, the day before her twenty-sixth birthday. A brief last encounter with Arkady reinforces her determination to venture on flight. She meets him in the street and waves to him from a distance, but he does not respond. Only when he comes level with her does he tell her, briefly, that a new commandant has arrived and wants to see Traudl Junge’s files. Then he hurries on.

15 April 1946 is marked as the ‘day of termination of employment’ in her ‘work-book replacement card’. Immediately afterwards she sets out on another adventurous flight. She and Erika, her acquaintance from the hospital, take the S-Bahn to the zone border, where they board a tractor. It delivers them, whether deliberately or otherwise, straight into the hands of a Russian border guard, but the women are in luck; he merely sends them back to the Russian zone. A second attempt is more successful. In a village they meet a farmer whose land lies on the border between the Russian and British zones. They spend the night at his farmhouse, and next morning he goes out with his tractor to spread manure. Traudl and Erika hide in the trailer, jump off at the border when the helpful farmer gives the word, and run into the bushes doubling back and forth like rabbits.

‘It must have been near Göttingen and Hanoverian Münden. There in the early morning I heard a nightingale for the first time in my life. People were so helpful at that time. We came to a house where they gave us a big pan full of potatoes. With salt. That was my first step out of the Russian zone. We finally caught a train◦– the trains were still running at very irregular times◦– and reached Bavaria by way of Kassel. Neither the British nor the Americans checked up on us. I went straight on from Munich to Herrsching on the Ammersee, and from there I hitchhiked to Breitbrunn. I was home again on Easter Sunday.’

The joy of reunion. A time of forgetting? Traudl is safe home again◦– her mother and her sister Inge ask hardly any questions about her past in Berlin. For one thing they themselves have suffered a good deal: there was the air raid that destroyed almost all Traudl’s mother’s possessions; the end of Inge’s career as a dancer after she had an inflamed tendon and her return to Munich; the general difficulty of finding provisions to live on. It also seems to Traudl that they want to spare her, and so they ask no questions.

‘We never discussed what they thought might have happened to me after Hitler’s death, either immediately after my return or later. They didn’t guess that a suicide epidemic had broken out in the Führer bunker either. But I felt safe with my mother, because I knew she would always stand by me whatever I had done. And of course after those terrible experiences I badly needed to talk. She listened without ever reproaching me.’

What the family and the population in general lived on just after the war is a mystery to Traudl Junge today. But she clearly remembers that it was a very warm, happy time, with everyone pulling together. Refugees kept passing, and the family took them in. When she was evacuated to Breitbrunn Traudl’s mother Hildegard had rented a small patch of ground from the parish, and she made it into a vegetable garden. ‘[…] The thought of our little piece of land soothes me enormously. I shall husband my strength to cultivate it myself,’ writes Traudl Junge in one of her letters (4 December 1945). ‘If it’s possible for me to come home some time, I always hoped you’d be living in the country and not the ruins of a big city. Out in the woods and fields you forget the horrors and misery of the war and peace.’

She still has to search her memory for details of her wartime past. A few days after her return she goes to Munich to visit old friends. She also meets one of those friends of Greek descent she knew in her youth; his partner is working as a secretary to an officer in the American military government. The Greek tells this partner that Traudl had been in the Führer bunker. Immediately afterwards he realizes what his indiscretion might mean for her, and warns her.