The former secretary of Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels has broken a 66-year vow of silence to talk about her service for the man who made Germans hate the Jews. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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Since the end of World War II, Brunhilde Pomsel, now 100, has refused all requests for interviews and offers to publish her memoirs.
But after five months of negotiations she has given a single interview to Bild, Germany’s biggest newspaper, in which she describes her four years as the chief secretary of the man closest to Hitler.
Frau Pomsel describes how Goebbels’ children – the children he and his wife Magda would murder with cyanide in Hitler’s bunker in April 1945 – used to play with her typewriter on Sunday afternoons.
She reminisces about eating goose with the Reich’s propaganda minister at his island home outside of Berlin and of receiving dresses from Magda because Allied bombs destroyed her own home and everything in it.
She took down every word that Goebbels uttered, both his private correspondence and his official orders, including those ordering round-ups of Jews in Berlin to please Hitler that the capital was becoming ‘Jew-free’.
Frau Pomsel was employed by Goebbels from 1942 until the end of the war in May 1945. But while his propaganda presented himself to the German people as a jovial fellow Nazi, she remembers him as a cold and distant monster.
‘You couldn’t get close to him,’ said Frau Pomsel. ‘He never once asked me a personal question. Right up until the end I don’t think he knew my name.
‘He got away lightly with suicide. He knew he would be condemned to death by the Allies. His suicide was cowardly, but he was also smart because he knew what was coming if he didn’t take that way out.
