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

‘It was my first visit to Italy◦– Lake Garda, the cypresses, the orange and lemon trees… my heart was overflowing with gratitude and joy, and we began a serious flirtation. When he asked if I’d like to work for him I waved goodbye to Quick magazine…’

But her decision is not made as easily as she presents it in retrospect. She is engaged to be married, after all, and is soon to emigrate to America. ‘[…] if you are not just feeling the pain of our parting today, but still doubt whether you have made the right decision, then dismiss both ideas […] take a drink and wash them down. But don’t forget the most important and quiet sip, as you drink to the time that begins next Monday,’ writes her future employer at the end of September 1953.

For a while she is still able to postpone making a final decision about her fiancé Heinz Bald. ‘Heinz writes lovely letters, kind and affectionate. I am so glad I have his letters,’ she writes in her diary for 16 October 1954. And just two months later: ‘[…] Heinz has written a reproachful letter, but it makes me happy all the same, I can always feel how he loves me.’ Her heart now belongs to the journalist, but he has a wife and children◦– the letters from America are a vague support to Traudl Junge. ‘All the same […] doubts and night-time anxieties keep coming back, like gloomy shadows that make me wonder whether everything is all right as it is. My inner commitment, indeed my exclusive devotion to someone who is out of my reach makes me outwardly lonely, and sometimes that’s oppressive and almost unbearable. There are times when I long for an ordinary, down-to-earth love◦– but next day, as I go to the office, my great happiness drives such thoughts away,’ runs a diary entry of November 1954, one of many that are similarly ambivalent in tone.

During the year 1955 she gets her visa, but she has already decided against going to America◦– her ties to Germany, her career and her new love are too strong, and so is her sense of responsibility for her mother, who has announced that she is coming back from Australia. And Heinz Bald’s attractions have paled over the years. The fact that he soon finds consolation makes Traudl Junge thoughtful: ‘ At Christmas [1956] he [Heinz Bald] will be coming over to get engaged to Manuela and perhaps marry her at once. It hurts just a little, less because I feel it as a personal loss, and must bury any hopes of my own, than because I myself am not lucky enough to have the courage to be part of a couple, although I take the longing for it around with me. However, it’s some small satisfaction to me that Heinz himself now has that “funny feeling in the pit of the stomach” which I consider indispensable for love and always missed. How I would like to have such a happy sense of belonging with someone,’ she says in her diary. But by this time she herself doubts whether she was ever really ready for such a relationship after the Second World War.

‘I obviously had a great fear of being tied down, having rushed so unthinkingly into my first marriage. Hans Junge and I had no opportunity at all of coming intellectually close. I never had deep, probing conversations with him, and I didn’t know nearly enough about his interests. We never even made plans for the future. His death did shake me badly at the time, but I came to terms with it quite quickly. I hadn’t yet shared any kind of life with him. After his death in August 1944, events followed each other so thick and fast that my loss retreated into the background. And when the war was over that chapter was closed, so to speak… I never again met a man of whom I could say, with conviction: that’s the man I want to share my life with.’

No other entry in her diaries shows her at odds with herself so clearly as one at the beginning of January 1956: ‘[…] In the files today I found a cutting about graphotherapy. It says that since your handwriting changes with your nature, it should be the same the other way round: if you deliberately made yourself change your handwriting, your nature would change too. I shall have a go. Perhaps I shall be greater in spirit and more energetic if my writing is large and energetic too.’ In fact from then on she does alter her handwriting, at least in the diary. To the outside world she is a cheerful woman who enjoys life, but she continues to be well aware of the ups and downs of her feelings. She cannot break free of her employer emotionally, although she has no illusions about her position as his mistress. One reason is that, despite occasional frustrations, she finds the professional side of their partnership fulfilling. She works independently, writes articles, although seldom under her own name, and in 1959 publishes a book: Tiere mit Familienanschluss [Animals Who Are Part of the Family]. It is published by the Munich firm of Franz Ehrenwirth, and is not a commercial success, but it shows that she has talent as a writer and a good sense of humour.

‘For the first time in my life I felt that I was not just doing a job but was really interested in the subject of my work. I should have studied biology! I’d probably have been a good healing practitioner or physiotherapist too, but I didn’t have the financial means for the three-year training.’

In the 1950s Traudl Junge focuses on the present◦– she is seldom reminded of her days as Hitler’s private secretary, and avoids contact with her surviving colleagues from Führer headquarters rather than seeking them out.

‘The other secretaries wouldn’t or couldn’t abandon their loyalty to the Führer. I didn’t understand that. Christa Schroeder, for example, looked critically at all the literature written about Adolf Hitler, but she didn’t really distance herself. The only one I was still friendly with was Hitler’s dietician Frau von Exner: I met her now and then after the war when I went on holiday to Pörtschach on the Wörther See. And I still saw Hans-Bernd Lanze. He was on Press Chief Dietrich’s staff, and stayed with us for a while in Breitbrunn after the war. Otto Günsche got in touch in 1955 after he was released from imprisonment in Russia. But I haven’t seen him often over the last few years.’

However, several historians and journalists writing books on Hitler are interested in Traudl Junge’s memories, and they do get in touch. In 1954 she has several meetings with the American naval captain Michael A. Musmanno. He was present as a lawyer at the Nuremberg trials, and between 1945 and 1948 questioned some two hundred witnesses to Hitler’s end in the Führer bunker, including Traudl Junge. He published his book Ten Days to Die in 1950. Musmanno gets in touch again in the autumn of 1954, when Georg Wilhelm Pabst wants to film the material. The idea is for Traudl Junge, as an eyewitness who was there at the time, to advise the Austrian director. She meets Pabst and Musmanno in Munich several times, and agrees to spend two weeks as assistant director to Pabst while he is shooting in Vienna, although she hesitates a good deal at first. Austria, after all, is still occupied by the Allies, and she is afraid of attracting the attention of the Russian military, since she fled illegally from the Russian-occupied zone of Berlin. The 1500 marks she is paid as a fee are by far the largest sum of money she has ever yet earned all at once, and enable her to move from the council dwelling in Moosach to an attractive one-room apartment in her familiar Schwabing.

In April 1955 Der letzte Akt [The Last Act] has its première, with Albin Skoda and Oskar Werner in the lead roles, and is panned by the critics, one reason being that G. W. Pabst’s conduct under the Third Reich is a source of controversy. During the twenties, when he made Die freudlose Gasse and the film version of the Dreigroschenoper, he rose to fame as the most socially critical of German directors. In 1933 he emigrated for the sake of his convictions and tried his luck first in Paris and then in Hollywood, but for lack of success returned to Germany, and by the end of the war had made two films in the contemporary National Socialist spirit, Komödianten and Paracelsus.