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

‘Karl Ude was very liberal and democratic, and as a writer and a cultured man he had a great influence on my mind. Of course he knew I had been Hitler’s secretary◦– I always told that to anyone I was closely involved with at once, because I didn’t want my past to spoil our relationship. But Ude never asked me about details or my motivation. We didn’t dwell on the recent past. Our thoughts, feelings and activities were bent on the future. We were working to build a normal life again, bit by bit… I also came into contact with the SPD Cultural Forum through the Udes. I’m still a member.’

Christian Ude is only a year old when Traudl Junge enters the life of the family◦– he, his parents and his sister Karin live in the building opposite, Number 9 Bauerstrasse. Even at primary school he is beginning to take an interest in history and politics, and asks her questions about her job with Hitler. In many conversations with her, he says looking back, he developed an awareness that ‘Adolf Hitler and the Second World War were not just huge historical events of the past, but that political activities were going on in my immediate vicinity, almost close enough for me to touch.’ When he joined in conversations at mealtimes with his parents and their friends later, as a boy old enough to be taken seriously, he found that Traudl Junge had a ‘lively, critical mind’, and said she was ‘better at discussion and more committed than many other people we knew’.

‘A life of conscious thought began for me only after the war, when I started thinking about important things, asking questions. Wondering about the meaning of human relationships. Until then I’d just accepted everything as it happened to me. I moved from one place to another without consciously wanting to leave my mark on them. Wherever I was, I just tried to take an interest in what I was doing, and give of my best.’

Absolution◦– absolution in duplicate◦– is officially granted to Traudl Junge in 1947. Like all Germans over eighteen she has to fill in the questionnaire issued by the Military Government of Germany, a form eighty-six centimetres long and printed on both sides, with 131 questions about people’s personal attitudes to the Nazi past. She fills in the form twice, once as Traudl Junge and then again as Traudl Humps◦– she doesn’t now remember why. She truthfully describes her profession at the time as ‘secretary in the Reich Chancellery’, which was indeed where she was employed before being delegated to the Führer. She thus receives two notices of denazification; as a ‘youthful fellow-traveller’ she falls under the amnesty granted at the end of August 1946 to all who were born after 1914, and in the matter of other charges she◦– like 94 per cent of all Bavarians◦– is ‘exonerated’. Traudl Junge does not realize that denazification, a unique attempt to subject the political attitudes of almost an entire population to national cleansing, is a farce performed for purposes of rehabilitation. To her, filling in the questionnaire is little more than a formality, and she wasn’t expecting to be condemned anyway◦– after all, she was never a member of the NSDAP.

Most Germans regard this process as the end of the affair, and from then on preserve a collective silence about the Nazi period. This is also in the interests of the Allies themselves; Germans are needed as partners in the Cold War in both East and West. Furthermore, German politicians of the Adenauer era are courting the voters◦– and those politicians who are willing to go along with the demand to draw a final line under the past are more likely to win their favour. ‘When we look back to those years, then,’ writes Ralph Giordano, ‘a suspicion that refuses to be suppressed emerges, to the effect that the Adenauer era, right into the 1960s, was in the nature of a gigantic bribe offered by the conservative leadership to the majority of voters who were unwilling to face facts. It was a kind of moratorium, the result partly of tacit agreement in the generally conspiratorial atmosphere, but partly of forceful organization.’ Giordano describes this as the ‘great peace’ made with the killers. Only the second post-war generation, towards the end of the sixties, try to get their grandparents to make it clear where they stood◦– and at this point the period when Traudl Junge was apparently at peace with herself also comes to a sudden end. However, there are some twenty years to go before that, and she calls them the best years of her life.

Traudl Junge owes her increasing confidence in particular to Heinz Bald. He is ‘factotum’ or in modern parlance manager of Ralph Maria Siegel’s cabaret group, which Traudl also frequents. She describes him as an ‘all-rounder’ who can turn his hand to anything, and he cares for her devotedly. He was in the resistance movement during the Third Reich, and he accepts her despite her past, which gives her something to lean on. When he emigrates to America he is determined that she will follow him as soon as he has made a new start there. He wants to marry her.

The fifties: years of hope. The rest of the world’s prejudices against Germany are gradually fading, the economic miracle is in full swing. Many Germans begin to feel that they count for something again. Traudl Junge’s life has its highs and its lows, like anyone else’s. In 1951 Inge leaves Germany for Australia, where she marries her Polish fiancé; he has emigrated a year earlier. Traudl was often jealous of Inge in their youth because she had managed to realize the dream of an artistic career. Now she misses her sister. She herself has applied for a visa for the USA, and Heinz Bald’s American employer is prepared to sign the affidavit. When the ruins in Bauerstrasse are to be demolished in 1954, and everyone has to move out, Traudl’s mother takes this as the chance to visit her daughter in Australia. She stays for almost two years. Since Traudl Junge has no official right to go on living where they previously did, she must be grateful to be allocated a simple council apartment in Munich-Moosach◦– ‘a terrible slum dwelling’, she calls it. She moves in, all the same, since her only alternative is the Frauenholz Camp, a hostel for the homeless.

So far as work is concerned, her prospects are very good at the moment. Although at the age of thirty she still has no definite professional aim in view, she keeps finding mentors who value and encourage her. Willi Brust, an acquaintance who works as a graphic artist on Quick , recommends her to the journal◦– at the time an illustrated news magazine that was well thought of and noted for its extensive research and critical reporting, which frequently focused on people with Nazi pasts. Although the reporters and editors of Quick know about their colleague’s past history, she is never once questioned about her experiences under the Third Reich.

‘I remember that one Shrove Tuesday the editorial office was working on a big story about several war crimes trials and executions in Landsberg. Only then did I find out, for the first time, details of what went on behind the scenes in the Third Reich. Above all, I discovered what lay behind the façades of people I had known as pleasant, cultivated companions. For instance there was Dr Karl Brandt, one of Hitler’s attendant doctors, whom I had thought an educated, humane man, but he was hanged in 1948 for taking part in medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners and practising euthanasia. I could hardly grasp it.’

For three years Traudl Junge is the editor-in-chief’s right-hand woman, but then, to his regret, she is tempted away to work as assistant to a freelance contributor to the science section of the magazine. The two come closer privately, too, on a two-week research trip to Italy◦– it is the beginning of a relationship that will last thirteen years.