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

For Traudl, her office work is only the means to an end. She lives for her leisure time, which she spends with her group of friends◦– they go to the movies together, or to the swimming pool in summer, or for excursions into the country, and they throw cheerful parties whenever they get the chance. But between 1938 and 1941 she devotes most of her spare time to her dance training. Her teacher at the Faith and Beauty organization thinks she is talented enough to go in for gymnastic dancing more intensively, and tells her to register at her own dance school, the Herta Meisenbach School in Franz-Joseph-Strasse in Munich. Since Traudl cannot afford the fee, the teacher offers her a position as assistant. But even when she is not dancing herself, Traudl moves in artistic circles. The famous choreographer Helge Peters-Pawlinin has been living in Munich since the mid-1930s, building up a ballet company. He discovered Traudl’s sister Inge at the Lola Fasbender School of Dance when she was fourteen, and is training her to be a prima ballerina. Inge becomes a member of the ensemble of his Romantic Ballet, immediately leaves school, goes on tour with the company and is already earning money even at her young age. In 1940 she gets an engagement at the German Dance Company in Berlin. Traudl now has a clear aim before her. She plans to follow her more gifted sister to the capital.

Traudl Junge describes her adaptability◦– or to put it in a less positive light, her malleability◦– as one of the outstanding characteristics of her youth. But who are the people who influence her thoughts and actions?

Her father, who so obviously profits from National Socialism? He was promoted to the post of security director of the Dornier Works in Ludwigshafen in 1936, and has married again. In the summer holidays Traudl and Inge visit him and ‘Auntie’ in their villa on Lake Constance, a house which goes with the job◦– a frustrating experience for Traudl. She wishes she had a father who could tell her what life was all about; she cannot respect the father she does have.

Her girlfriends? When she is sixteen she loses touch with Trudl Valenci, her closest friend at school, and meets her again only many years later, after the war. Ulla Kares is her best friend in the late 1930s and early 1940s. They share an enthusiasm for the film stars of the UFA studios◦– Renate Müller, Heinz Rühmann, Hans Albers◦– and they adore Gary Cooper. Ulla becomes more perceptive about the regime’s intentions as early as 1938, when the blonde ‘ringleader’ of their group is suddenly expelled from the BDM; it appears that her mother is a quarter Jewish. Ulla flees from her native city of Essen to Munich, but even her best friend Traudl learns only many years after the war that she is one-eighth Jewish herself. In 1943 Ulla falls in love with her half-Jewish future husband, Hans Raff. He is interned in 1944 and made to do forced labour for the German war industry. Hans Raff manages to escape in March 1945 and is hidden by Ulla until the end of the hostilities. Traudl learns of this too only after the war; when she moves to Berlin she loses touch with her friend.

A boyfriend? An early lover? Her interest in men develops late. While her younger sister was playing with boys she was still playing with dolls, she jokes later. For a long time she feels that there is something indecent, offensive about sexuality◦– the result of her mother’s warnings◦– and she waits for her first sexual experience until she meets her husband.

When Traudl is about eighteen she and her sister become friendly with a group of foreign students and artists, most of them Greek. Almost all of these young people are already in relationships; only Traudl and Inge still have no partners. The attitude of their new friends to the Third Reich is even more insouciant than their own. They can be relied on to come up with the latest jokes about the Nazis, they listen to banned foreign radio stations, they even sometimes express criticism of the regime. But ultimately they are really interested only in their world of art and the theatre.

Traudl Junge herself mentions two people who have a crucial influence on her from the middle of the 1930s until her move to Berlin. One is the choreographer Pawlinin, who influences her lifestyle and concentrates her attention on the self-contained world of the theatre, remote from reality as it is. The other is Tilla Höchtl, mother of Lotte, a dancer colleague of Traudl’s sister. Tilla is a single mother, like Hildegard Humps, but unlike Hildegard is an emancipated, independent, lively woman with a strong sense of humour, an ironic tongue, offbeat ideas and a definite dislike of National Socialism. The two women become close friends. Tilla tries to put more individual, independent ideas into the minds of Traudl and Inge, and their mother Hildegard too. She has nothing but contempt for those who care more about social norms than their personal needs. She will not tolerate platitudes like, ‘That kind of thing just isn’t done’. She successfully introduces the term ‘petit bourgeois’ into the vocabulary of the Humps family as something undesirable. In addition, it seems to Traudl that under her influence the family finds itself developing more casual but more self-confident attitudes.

In the summer of 1941 Traudl takes her dance exams. She is to present the theme of ‘Prayer’ in the free expression class. Her knees are trembling nervously, but that does not impair her dramatic performance. Traudl passes the exam. Now she intends to put her plan to go to Berlin into action at last, but she comes up against opposition from her boss. He refuses to accept her resignation, quoting the Nazi decrees on working in wartime. In her memoirs, she herself describes how after several months of indecision she manages, after all, to get summoned to Berlin ‘on labour duty’ in the spring of 1942, through the good offices of Beate Eberbach, a colleague of Inge and sister-in-law to Albert Bormann, head of Hitler’s private chancellery office.

Pleased as she is to be going to Berlin, Traudl feels guilty about leaving her mother alone in Munich. Her grandfather died in 1941, and since then Hildegard Humps has been sub-letting a room. She now lives on the rent and on what her daughter sends home from the capital city. The relationship has gone into reverse: Traudl now feels responsible for the mother who has sacrificed so many years for her children. And her sense of responsibility mingles with a guilty conscience for leaving her mother behind. Germany, after all, has been at war for two and a half years now.

Traudl’s new life begins just when the fortunes of war turn in the Allies’ favour. Germany declared war on the USA in December 1941. The severe Russian winter of 1941–42 has halted the advance of the German army; the Soviets have proved to be formidable enemies, and despite their political differences with the USA and Great Britain the three powers have come to an understanding about a second front in the West. In March 1942 Lübeck is the first German city to be the target of massive British area-bombing. The Nazi propaganda machine, of course, ensures that little of this filters through to the civilian population of Germany. The number of dead in Lübeck, for instance, is reduced from the real figure of 320 to only 50.

After a phase of great insecurity when hostilities first broke out, Traudl has become accustomed to the everyday life of wartime◦– air raid practices, blackout regulations, food rationing. Like probably the majority of the German population, she has been duped by Hitler’s claim that Germany was attacked first and the war is an act of self-defence. None the less, she has not felt triumphant about the victory announcements in the opening phase of the war. Hitler’s desire for expansion means nothing to her. She hopes there will be a swift end to the conflict. In what circumstances and how closely she will eventually see that end she cannot, of course, guess in her first months in Berlin.