Traudl Junge - Hitlers Last Secretary: A Firsthand Account of Life with Hitler

Edited by Melissa Mller
Translated from the German by Anthea Bell

Copyright 2002, 2011 by Ullstein Heyne List GmbH & Co. Mnchen English-language translation copyright 2003, 2011 by Anthea Bell

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or info@skyhorsepublishing.com.

Arcade Publishing is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., a Delaware corporation.

Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-61145-323-2

Printed in the United States of America

We cannot put our lives right in retrospect; we must go on living with the past. We can put ourselves right, however.

Reiner Kunze: Am Sonnenhang
[On the Sunny Slope]. Diary of a Year

by Traudl Junge

by Melissa Mller

written in 1947

by Traudl Junge

written in 2001

by Melissa Mller

This book is neither a retrospective justification nor a self-indictment. I do not want it to be read as a confession either. Instead, it is my attempt to be reconciled not so much to the world around me as to myself. It does not ask my readers for understanding, but it will help them to understand.

I was Hitlers secretary for two and a half years. Apart from that my life has always been unspectacular. In 194748 I put down on paper my memories, then still very vivid, of the time I had spent close to Adolf Hitler. At this period we were all looking to the future and trying with remarkable success, incidentally to repress and play down our past experiences. I set about writing my memoirs objectively, trying to record the outstanding events and episodes of the immediate past before details that might later be of interest faded or were forgotten entirely.

When I read my manuscript again several decades later, I was horrified by my uncritical failure to distance myself from my subject at the time, and ashamed of it. How could I have been so naive and unthinking? But that is only one of the reasons why, until now, I have been reluctant to let the manuscript be published in my own country. Another reason is that in view of the huge amount of literature about Adolf Hitler and his Thousand-Year Reich, my own history and observations did not strike me as important enough for publication. I also feared avid sensationalism and approval from the wrong quarters.

I have never kept my past a secret, but the people around me made it very easy for me to repress the thought of it after the war: they said I had been too young and inexperienced to see through my boss, a man whose honourable faade hid a criminal lust for power. By they I mean not just the denazification commission which exonerated me as a youthful fellow traveller, but all the acquaintances with whom I discussed my experiences. Some of them were people suspected of complicity with the Nazis themselves, but others were victims of persecution by the regime. I was only too ready to accept the excuses they made for me. After all, I was only twenty-five years old when Nazi Germany fell, and more than anything else I wanted to get on with my life.

Not until the middle of the 1960s did I gradually and seriously begin to confront my past and my growing sense of guilt. Over the last thirty-five years that confrontation has become an increasingly painful process: an exhausting attempt to understand myself and my motivation at the time. I have learned to admit that in 1942, when I was twenty-two and eager for adventure, I was fascinated by Adolf Hitler, thought him an agreeable employer, paternal and friendly, and deliberately ignored the warning voice inside me, although I heard it clearly enough. I have learned to admit that I enjoyed working for him almost to the bitter end. After the revelation of his crimes, I shall always live with a sense that I must share the guilt.

Two years ago I met the writer Melissa Mller. She came to see me to ask me, as an eyewitness, some questions about Adolf Hitler and his artistic predilections. Our first conversation led to many more, about my own life and the long-term effect that my association with Hitler had on me. Melissa Mller is of the second post-war generation, and her views are formed by what she knows of the crimes of the Third Reich. However, she is not the kind of self-righteous person who always knows better after the event; she does not think so simplistically. She listens to what we contemporary eyewitnesses who were once under the Fhrers spell have to say, and tries to trace the phenomenon back to its roots.

We cannot put our lives right in retrospect; we must go on living with the past. We can put ourselves right, however. This quotation from Reiner Kunzes Diary of a Year has become a major guiding principle in my life. But public grovelling is not always to be expected, he adds. Shame felt in silence can be more eloquent than any speech and sometimes more honest. Melissa Mller finally persuaded me to make my manuscript available for publication after all. I thought: if I can manage to make her understand how easy it was to fall for the fascination of Hitler, and how hard it is to live with the fact that I now know I was serving a mass murderer, it ought to be possible to make other readers understand too. At least, I hope so.

Last year Melissa Mller introduced me to Andr Heller, whom I regard not only as an extraordinarily interesting artist but also as someone steadfastly committed to his moral and political views. My long conversations with him were another very valuable incentive for me to confront the girl who was once Traudl Humps, and with whom I had been at odds for so long. Many of our conversations took place with a camera running. Andr Heller and Othmar Schmiderer made their documentary film Im toten Winkel [Blind Spot. Hitlers Secretary] from this footage. The film appeared in the German-speaking countries at the same time as this book.

Sometimes you will hear the young Junge speaking in this book, sometimes the old Junge. The young Junge, as if posthumously, has been persuaded to let her early memoirs be published by the ever-growing interest in an insiders knowledge of the Nazi regime, and she hopes they will cast some light on the period. The old Junge does not set out to preach morality, but still hopes she may make a few remarks that are not as banal as they may at first appear: appearances are often deceptive, and it is always worth while taking a closer look. We should listen to the voice of conscience. It does not take nearly as much courage as one might think to admit to our mistakes and learn from them. Human beings are in this world to learn, and to change themselves in learning.