Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels’ secretary dies at 106

MUNICH: The former secretary of Nazi Germany’s propaganda boss Joseph Goebbels died aged 106 last week, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the maker of a documentary about her said today.

Brunhilde Pomsel died on January 27 in a care home in the southern city of Munich, said Christian Kroenes, who conducted extensive interviews with her for his 2016 film “A German Life”.

Pomsel, who worked for Goebbels as a secretary, typist and stenographer from 1942-45, had insisted she had no idea of the Holocaust that claimed the lives of six million Jews while it was happening.

“We knew nothing,” she said in the film.

“We ourselves were all trapped in a vast concentration camp,” she said about the totalitarian state of Adolf Hitler.

As one of half a dozen secretaries in Goebbels’ office, Pomsel was among the last eyewitnesses to the inner circle of top Nazis.

In “A German Life”, she insisted she felt no guilt and also said: “I could not put up resistance-i was too much of a coward.”

She said that last year that she had once cheered on Hitler, in 1933, adding “we didn’t know then what lay ahead”.

She spoke of the final days in Hitler’s bunker, saying a lot of alcohol was drunk because the Nazi chiefs had to “numb themselves”.

When Soviet troops marched into Berlin at the end of World War II, Pomsel was captured and would spend five years in Russian detention camps.

From 1950 she worked for a German public broadcaster, for 20 years, but kept silent about her war-time job until she gave a newspaper interview in 2011.

She opened up at great length in the 2016 film, which its makers said aimed to force viewers to ask themselves what they would have done, and whether they would have had the courage to resist the Nazi machine. In the black-andwhite film, extreme close-up shots of Pomsel recalling her time with Goebbels are interspersed with archival footage of Nazi horror, including of naked Jewish corpses and mass graves.