Brunhilde Pomsel
Joseph Goebbels’ secretary BORN JANUARY 11, 1911 DIED JANUARY 27, 2017, AGED 106 IN last year’s documentary A German Life, Brunhilde Pomsel, the woman who had been Joseph Goebbels’ secretary from 1942 to 1945, insisted she knew nothing of the Holocaust and felt no guilt over it.
In the film she described herself as just being a sideline figure and not at all interested in politics. Yet many disbelieved her account, largely because she was at the heart of the Nazi propaganda machine. Among her many duties she had to massage downwards statistics about fallen soldiers, as well as exaggerating the number of rapes of German women by the Red Army. “It was just another job,” she said.
Born in Berlin, she was the product of a strict Prussian upbringing where even chamber pots were banned from the bedroom and it instilled in her a strong sense of duty and unquestioning obedience.
She was 31 and working for the state broadcaster as a well-paid secretary – a job she secured only after she became a paid-up member of the Nazi party – when someone recommended her for a transfer to the ministry of propaganda in 1942.
“Only an infectious disease would have stopped me,” she said. “I was flattered, it was a reward for being the fastest typist at the radio station.”
Despite working for three years for Goebbels, whom Pomsel described as a “ranting dwarf”, she said he never even knew her name. She continued to work for him until May 1, 1945, when he poisoned his six children in Hitler’s bunker before he and his wife Magda committed suicide.
After the war Pomsel was captured by Soviet troops and jailed for five years, Incredibly, on her release from prison in 1950 she returned to her secretarial career with the East German state broadcaster until her retirement in 1971.
Pomsel, who had never married, died in her sleep.