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Truadel YungeHitler's personal secretary
Country:
 Germany |
Traudl Junge: The Personal Secretary of Hitler
A Biographical AccountFrau Traudl Junge, now eighty years old, remains slender, elegant, and still quite beautiful despite the streaks of gray in her hair. One can easily imagine what she looked like at the age of twenty-two, back in December 1942, when Hitler chose her from nine contestants in a competition that involved several hundred young women. This made Traudl (then Gertraud Humps) the fourth and youngest secretary of the Fuhrer. When I visited her at her flower-filled studio in her hometown of Munich a few weeks ago, I noticed "Nemesis" lying on her desk – the newly released second volume of Hitler's biography written by Ian Kershaw. Traudl had received the book just a day before my visit and had already read the final six chapters. "I'm not very knowledgeable about all these military affairs," she said, "but it was interesting to me because those chapters were about the time when I worked for him, starting from January 1943." In general, reading studies on the history of Nazism tires and bores her: "There are so many of them, and they all either repeat the same things or lie." Nevertheless, she found Kershaw's objectivity impressive. "He's different from the others. Maybe because he belongs to a different generation. He writes about what the 'Red Threat' meant for us during those years and how Hitler exploited it. That's unusual. Not that he defends or justifies us. No. But he seems to have understood how it happened that the Germans, while not suppressed like the Russians or Poles, were still psychologically enslaved by Hitler. His terrible, monstrous charisma... everything was dedicated to one goal (we understand that now, but not back then), a megalomaniacal goal – the creation of a unified Europe under German rule. Only a foreigner could have seen Hitler through those eyes. No German can distance themselves like that. Not even the youth – they are not yet capable of it. That's probably why, no German except for Joachim Fest, wrote Hitler's biography."
Today, Frau Junge is one of the last surviving members of Hitler's inner circle. She no longer remembers many details of those two and a half years spent with Hitler. "In any case, all the facts are more or less known to everyone," she says, "I can only recall the atmosphere that surrounded him – the other Hitler that only we knew..." She doesn't particularly like exaggeration and pauses for a moment: "...the two people who lived inside him." I have known Frau Junge for quite some time. Over the past fifty years, any historian or journalist writing about the Third Reich (including myself) tried to extract information from Traudl about the people in Hitler's inner circle, as well as about the dictator himself, whom she knew in a way only a secretary can know her boss. He was always kind and caring towards her. According to her own words, he treated her "like a father." She still doesn't like discussing this topic. "People are surprised. They can't understand such things, and how could they? But I can't and don't want to deny what was – and the feelings I had towards him at that time."
Similar to Albert Speer (whom she respects and sympathizes with since his release from Spandau Prison – unlike most of Hitler's loyal inner circle members who remained loyal to him until their deaths), Traudl Junge went through a long period of reflection and deep disillusionment; she still occasionally falls into bouts of depression. She is convinced that Hitler originally embodied two completely different personalities. In her and other women from Hitler's inner circle's perspective – his lover Eva Braun, the four secretaries, the wife of his personal physician, Anna Brandt, his military adviser Maria von Belov, as well as Albert Speer's wife Margaret – they could only see Hitler's human side, often quite appealing. "We never saw him as a statesman, never attended meetings where he presided. He only called us when he needed to dictate something, and in those moments, he was as delicate as in his private life. Our office – whether in the Reich Chancellery or in the bunker – was located far away from the command center, and we never witnessed the outbursts of rage that were rumored about. We knew his daily schedule, who he received, but apart from a few people, with whom he sometimes had lunch or dinner (such as Speer, another architect Giesler, or his personal photographer Hoffmann), we hardly ever met any of them."
After the Battle of Stalingrad, the two senior secretaries shared lunch with him, the two junior secretaries had dinner, and one of the secretaries always stayed for tea, which was consumed after midnight. "My colleagues told me that in the early years, he talked incessantly about the past and future of Germany, but after Stalingrad, you know, I don't recall him giving particularly long monologues. We all tried to distract him with talk about movies or gossip – any conversation that could divert his thoughts from the war. He loved gossip. That was an integral part of the Hitler we knew." Frau Junge had long realized that Hitler had planned the genocide of entire nations, including the Jews, from the beginning. However, she still cannot comprehend how, despite printing and reprinting his speeches, orders, and memos, which undoubtedly contained all his sinister ideas and plans, she and her three colleagues failed to recognize the fatal essence of the "other Hitler." "Working alongside him around the clock, being involuntary witnesses to his private life, sharing his meals and table, we also seemed to lead double lives. But at the time, it never crossed our minds. We were disconnected from the German people and took our lives for granted – lives that were as privileged as they were abnormal."
Was she aware of Hitler's impulsiveness? "Kershaw's biography reminded me of how everything around us lacked any structure, how everything was disorganized – his political and military decisions, and, in essence, his entire life. Summing up everything written in Kershaw's book and recalling my unconscious feelings during those years, I realized something very important about him: in his thoughts, as well as his actions, he was guided not by knowledge but by emotions. I still cannot grasp how he, who supposedly loved the Germans so much, could eventually ruthlessly sacrifice them. I didn't realize before how much influence he had over all of us, including the generals. You see, it was more than just charisma. Sometimes, when he left somewhere without us… at that moment, when he left, it felt like the air was missing. Something important was lacking – some electrical tension or even oxygen, the feeling that you're alive. It was a... It was a void. That's what I never doubted from the very beginning – that he had one trait that set him apart from everyone else (including other dictators, as I now understand): he regarded no one as his equal. He had no one he could consult with, no one who would dare to question his decisions. Speer, perhaps, was the only person he had some feelings for, someone he listened to and even conversed with occasionally. But not about politics. That role was given to Goebbels, toward whom he was, in essence, completely indifferent (Goebbels himself seemed unaware of this, but we knew it). Goebbels was too much of an intellectual for him. It may sound absurd, but it seems he was afraid of him. Of course, Goebbels would have given him anything, and in the end, he and Magda, his wife, and their children died for him."
In the final days spent in the bunker, all its inhabitants resembled soulless automatons. "We had no emotions left; we didn't think about anything except death. Hitler and Eva – when they would die, when the six Goebbels children would be killed, when and how we all should die. All hierarchical differences were erased. I asked Magda Goebbels, who wandered through the bunker like a ghost, if we could find a way to get the children out of the bunker. She replied that she would rather they die than live in a Germany covered in indelible shame."
Two hours before Hitler's suicide, when I was alone with him in the conference room, waiting for him to dictate his final will to me, Traudl sensed that the moment of truth had arrived. "It crossed my mind that I would become the only person on Earth who would find out why all this had happened. He had to say something that would explain everything that had occurred, that would teach us something. He had to leave us something. But when he started dictating – oh my, that long list of ministers to whom he intended to leave the country's leadership... It was so grotesque... I thought, yes, precisely then I thought: how unworthy all this looks. The same phrases, the same quiet voice, and then, in the end, those same repugnant words about the Jews. After all this disappointment, after all the suffering we had endured, he didn't utter a single word of regret or a hint of compassion. I remember thinking at that moment that he wasn't leaving us anything. Das Nichts."
