I knew nothing but was thrilled to get the job, says Goebbels’ secretary
Brunhilde Pomsel says working as secretary to Joseph Goebbels was “just another job”, and that those who say they would have stood up to the Nazis in her shoes are probably mistaken.
Pomsel is, at 105, one of the few surviving people who regularly interacted with the Nazi inner circle during World War II.
She was in the bunker where Goebbels and Adolf Hitler committed suicide at the end of the war, making sure there was sufficient alcohol on hand to “retain the numbness”.
In the three years prior, Pomsel had sat just outside of Goebbels’ personal office each day.
But she says she was unaware of the mass atrocities being carried out by the regime she served.
“We knew nothing, it was all kept well secret,” she told the Guardian in a new interview ahead of the release of a film about her life.
Pomsel is unapologetic even as she recalls her work manipulating data about war time casualties and other- wise keeping the wheels spinning in the German propaganda machine.
“It is important for me, when I watch the film, to recognise that mirror image in which I can understand everything I’ve done wrong,” she says of A German Life, the upcoming documentary.
“But really, I didn’t do anything other than type in Goebbels’ office.”
She was thrilled to take the job, she says, noting the generous salary and describing the beautiful surroundings at the propaganda ministry.
Pomsel spent five years in Soviet prison camps after the war, an experience she says was “no bed of roses”.
She insists that it was only after her release that she became aware of the Holocaust.
Six decades later she inquired about a Jewish friend she had lost track of during the war. Pomsel found the name of the friend, Eva Lowenthal, on a list of millions killed during a mass atrocity the man she worked for had done his best to cover up.