Brunhilde Pomsel
Secretary to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who was subject of a film
BRUNHILDE POMSEL, a secretary to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who late in life came forward to publicly reflect on questions of personal and collective guilt in the face of The Holocaust, died last week at her home in Munich. She was 106.
Pomsel was one of the last surviving members of the Nazi hierarchy’s most intimate staff, but she spent all but the final years of her life in obscurity. She became widely known only after the premiere of A German Life, a documentary drawn from dozens of hours of interviews conducted with Pomsel when she was 103.
On camera, Pomsel confessed to harbouring “a bit of a guilty conscience”, but claimed she had known nothing of the murder of six million Jews during The Holocaust — the “matter of the Jews”, she termed it — until after the war was over.
“Everything that is beautiful is also tainted,” she said in the film, obliquely. “And whatever’s horrible also has its bright side. Nothing’s black and white. There’s always a bit of grey in everything.”
Pomsel was born in Berlin on January 11, 1911. She identified in herself a fundamental obedience that she traced to her father, a World War I veteran who instilled in her through beatings what she described as “this Prussian something, this sense of duty’’.
“I’m not the kind of person to resist,” she said in the film. “I wouldn’t dare to. I’m one of the cowards.”
In her early professional years, she worked in a clothing store run by a Jewish businessman and for a Jewish lawyer whom she recalled fondly. On the side, she worked for a Nazi Party activist, transcribing his memoirs of World War I.
She said that she did not have the heart to tell the Jewish lawyer that she had joined cheering crowds in Berlin on January 30, 1933, when Adolf Hitler was made chancellor.
“I was too kind for that,” Pomsel said. “You just couldn’t do that to the poor Jew.”
In 1933, through the intercession of her Nazi boss, Pomsel was hired as a secretary at the German government broadcasting corporation. The job, which came with a good salary when much of the citizenry was in dire straits, required she join the Nazi Party.
“That was my fate. Who’s got control over their fate?” Pomsel said. “Especially in times of such upheaval.”
Even as the Nazi government launched its campaign of persecution and then deportation of Jews, she maintained her long-standing relationship with a Jewish friend, Eva Lowenthal, who would later perish at Auschwitz. Pomsel said she had believed that Jews deported were relocated to the Sudetenland, a portion of Czechoslovakia annexed by Germany in 1938, and that concentration camps were correctional facilities for people who had disturbed the peace.
“No one ever believes us. Everyone thinks we all knew everything. We knew nothing,” she told the filmmakers.
As for later generations, “the people who today say they would have done more for those poor, persecuted Jews, I really believe they sincerely mean it”, Pomsel said. “But they wouldn’t have done it either. By then, the whole country was under some kind of a dome. We were all inside a huge concentration camp.”
In 1942, Pomsel was promoted to work as one of several assistant to Goebbels.
In 1945 she surrendered to the Russians, who jailed her for five years. After her release, she worked in radio and TV until her retirement. She lived outside Munich and never married.