Brunhilde Pomsel: ‘Dumb’ secretary to Nazi propaganda boss Joseph Goebbels
1911-2017
BRUNHILDE Pomsel, who has died at the age of 106, bore witness to the Nazi regime as a secretary to Joseph Goebbels; her story came to light with the release of A German Life, a documentary on the “ordinary citizen” caught up in Hitler’s war machine.
By the time the cameras turned on her, Pomsel was 101 and almost blind. Over 30 hours of filming she wrestled with the idea that she could have been complicit in Goebbels’s ruthless control over public propaganda during World War 2.
She had been thrilled to get the job, which mostly involved paperwork, since it offered a generous salary and the chance to work in the beautiful surroundings of the propaganda ministry. The Goebbels children would play in the space where she worked, and she took a liking to his wife, Magda, who treated her kindly after the flat where Pomsel was living was bombed during Allied air raids.
Goebbels barely acknowledged Pomsel during her three years of service. It was only when he took to public platforms to deliver his antiSemitic diatribes that she became aware of his malicious intent.
“No actor could have been any better at the transformation from a civilised, serious person into a ranting, rowdy man,” she told the Guardian in an interview more than 70 years on. She and a colleague had ringside seats at his infamous Sportpalast speech in Berlin on February 18 1943, in which Goebbels called for “a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today”.
Pomsel’s experiences might have gone unrecorded but for a chance encounter with a team of German film directors who were working on a project about Goebbels’s private life. “It became clear that she had all the potential required for a story about her alone,” one of the directors, Florian Weigensamer, told an interviewer. ‘JUST A TYPIST’: Brunhilde Pomsel was the subject of the documentary ‘A German Life’
Jointly directed by Weigensamer, Christian Krönes, Roland Schrotthofer and Olaf Müller, A German Life premiered on April 18 last year. Filmed in black-and-white and in extreme close-up, Pomsel’s version of events was intercut with quotations from Goebbels and short documentary sequences, including footage shot by the Allies of the newly liberated concentration camps.
“She was not an avid Nazi,” Weigensamer observed. “She just didn’t care and looked away. That’s what I think makes her guilty.”
Pomsel maintained, however, that while her time under Goebbels had been at the height of the Holocaust, from 1942 to 1945, she had been too “dumb” and “superficial” to grasp what had been going on at the time.
“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 said. “But really, I didn’t do anything other than type in Goebbels’s office.”
The horror of the Final Solution dawned on her when she was freed from a Soviet prison camp.
She was born in Berlin on January 11 1911; one of her earliest memories was of her father, a painter and decheadquarters orator, receiving his call-up papers at the start of World War 1.
Both parents were strict disciplinarians, and she and her siblings would be smacked with a carpet beater for misbehaviour. After leaving school in 1926 she began an apprenticeship with a Jewish wholesale manufacturer. Her second employer was also Jewish, a lawyer and insurance agent named Hugo Goldberg.
“I obviously didn’t tell him that on January 30 1933, I cheered Hitler at the Brandenburg Gate,” she said. “You can’t do something like that to a poor Jew.”
She also failed to inform Goldberg about another job that she held in tandem, as a typist for the writer and Nazi supporter Wulf Bley. In 1933 she joined the Nazi Party and went with Bley to work in the news department of the Third Reich’s broadcasting station. A promotion followed, and in 1942 she was transferred to Goebbels’s at the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.
She shared an antechamber just beyond his office with five other secretaries, typing reports that Goebbels had written to Hitler on his mission to declare Berlin judenrein — cleansed of Jews. Another file handed to her contained details on Sophie Scholl, a student and anti-Nazi activist who was executed for treason in 1943. “I was told by one of Goebbels’s special advisers to put it in the safe, and not to look at it,” she recalled. “So I didn’t, and was quite pleased with myself that he trusted me.”
Safely cocooned at the heart of the government, she lost contact with her Jewish friends, swallowing the official line that those who had “disappeared” had been sent to repopulate the Sudetenland region. As the Allied forces closed in, however, order began to collapse. On April 21 1945, Goebbels and his entourage joined the Führer in his bunker in Berlin. Nine days later, Hitler committed suicide; Goebbels and his wife did the same the next day, having poisoned their six children as they slept.
Feeling that she was “an animal being led to slaughter”, Pomsel cut up food sacks to make a flag of surrender. She spent five years in the Soviet prison camp, an experience she referred to only briefly as “no bed of roses”. Upon release, she went back to secretarial work with the East German state broadcaster. She retired, aged 60, in 1971.
Pomsel refused to accept that she had been naive in believing the Nazi propaganda on the supposed relocation of Jews.
Facing up to the reality took her almost a whole lifetime. She had lost touch with a Jewish school friend, Eva, shortly after joining the Nazi party, but did not track her down until 2005, when she visited the newly unveiled National Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Eva Löwenthal’s name was on the list of those who had perished at Auschwitz. — © The Daily Telegraph, London
I obviously didn’t tell him I cheered Hitler. You can’t do that to a poor Jew