Hitler's Last Secretary (16 page)

The meal didn’t last long, and then Hitler left, got into the cars with the other men and drove back to his apartment. That afternoon he had talks with political leaders and Gauleiters in the Führer Building on Königsplatz, where I wasn’t needed. I walked home and stayed on in Munich for another day, while my boss and his staff drove back to Berchtesgaden that evening, taking Fräulein Wolf with them.

When I turned up at the Berghof again two days later, Hans Junge too had been told that we should get married at once. He couldn’t think of any particularly good reason against Hitler’s persuasions either, and anyway I believe at heart he rather liked the idea. Finally I came to terms with it too, and the wedding was fixed for the middle of June 1943.I rebelled only once, when I saw the mountain of forms and questionnaires I must fill in because I was going to marry an SS man. I lost my temper and told my future husband that I’d throw the whole lot in the wastepaper basket if my marriage depended on this kind of thing.

Hitler laughed heartily when I read him out some of the questions on the forms. For instance, they asked, ‘Is the bride positively addicted to housework?’ He himself said that of course all this was nonsense, and he’d have a word with Himmler about it. Anyway, I was spared having to fight a battle on paper, and before I knew it June came and I was Frau Junge. My married bliss lasted four weeks, while we went on honeymoon to Lake Constance, and then my husband joined the army and I moved back to headquarters.

IV*

Meanwhile the Supreme Commander had moved back to the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia. The forest […] had been cleared around it to make room for several more huts and bunkers. What we called ‘hut disease’ had broken out and proved very infectious among the upper ranks. Everyone wanted his own hut to live in, and the bunkers were used only for sleeping. Speer built himself a whole housing estate, Göring’s hut was nothing short of a palace, and the doctors and adjutants erected summer residences of their own. Morell – but no one else – was even allowed a bathroom. Once again he was the butt of many jokes in the camp when it turned out that a normal bathtub was too small for him. He could just about get in, but he couldn’t get out again without help.

*This and the following chapter divisions were added later by Traudl Junge.

When I came back to the camp as a newly-wed wife, of course I too was the target of much male jocularity. I reported to Hitler that morning when he was about to go for his walk. ‘Why, you’re all pale and thin,’ he said, in a friendly and well-meaning tone, but Linge, Bormann, Hewel and Schaub grinned broadly, making me blush with embarrassment. From now on Hitler generally addressed me as ‘young woman’.

We secretaries were far from overworked. Fräulein Wolf and Fräulein Schroeder, the old guard, were working for Schaub. Every morning they were given a pile of letters to be answered. Schaub indicated briefly what the letters should say, but left the phrasing to the ladies. I did office work for the young SS adjutants Darges, Günsche and Pfeiffer.
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I typed out the bodyguards’ reports, requests for promotion, orders for transfers, suggestions for the award of decorations. There were a great many of those; more and more men were becoming heroes, and silver and gold crosses and medals were lavishly handed out on the Eastern Front.

However, that wasn’t a really satisfying occupation, and although I enjoyed the forest and the lakes I still felt discontented, like a captive. Above all, life here was unbalanced in a way I couldn’t tolerate permanently. Perhaps I had been made more aware of that by my husband’s ideas. He had suddenly realized how hermetically cut off from real life we were, living in Hitler’s ideological sphere of influence. Once I had thought that here at the centre of events, the place to which all threads ran, you would have the best and widest view of all. But we were standing behind the scenes and didn’t know what was happening on stage. Only the director knew the play, all the rest of us just learned our parts, and no one knew exactly what part anyone else was playing.

No rumours reached us, we heard no broadcasts from enemy transmitters, we knew of no other attitudes, no opposition. Just one opinion and one belief ruled here; it sometimes seemed to me as if all these people were using exactly the same words and expressing themselves in the same way.

It was not until I had gone through with it to the bitter end and returned to ordinary life that I could see it as clearly as that. At the time, I suffered from a vague feeling of dissatisfaction, an uneasiness for which I couldn’t find a name, because the daily company of Hitler left no one a chance to give such ideas a firm shape.

I typed for Professor Brandt, the surgeon who was Hitler’s attendant doctor and head of the health service. I began keeping a diary, and looked for intellectual stimulation and diversion among the staff of the press office. I talked to many close friends about my doubts. Many other people felt the way I did. I was especially aware of this tension in Walther Hewel, with whom I had philosophical conversations on many evenings. He too disliked the narrow-minded, artificial atmosphere here and the human inadequacies of those around us. We called our mood ‘the camp megrims’, and resigned ourselves to not knowing why we felt that way.

Hitler had fallen into the habit of eating his meals with Fräulein Schroeder, because she had to stick to her diet and eat no salt. After a short while he extended his invitation to all the secretaries, and from then on we too shared mealtimes with Hitler at headquarters, but thank goodness Fräulein Wolf and I could have the normal menu provided by ‘Crumbs’.

Gradually I lost my shyness and timidity in Hitler’s presence, and ventured to speak to him even if he hadn’t asked me something first. More than ever he emphasized how much good it did him to be able to relax completely at mealtimes.

One day, when we had finished eating, I decided to seize my chance to complain to Hitler of the lack of work. It was on that very day that Hitler said, ‘Dara (Frau Christian) is coming back. I asked Colonel Christian how his wife was, and he told me she wanted to go and work for the Red Cross. But in my view if she really wants to work she can work for me.’

My two colleagues looked rather downcast, even though they smiled. They had probably been just a little jealous of Frau Christian, while they didn’t see me as competition or a rival. Also, and quite rightly, they felt as discontented with the lack of work as I did. We none of us liked the idea of having to share our duties with a fourth secretary.

Fräulein Wolf and I began saying our piece, protesting that we felt guilty about being little more than ladies of leisure here, when the Führer so seldom had any work for us. We thought perhaps we could be more useful in Berlin, or in some other position. After all, we said, there was a war on, and in the present circumstances our families had a lot to put up with. But we got nowhere. ‘Ladies, you can’t be the judges of whether your work and your presence are useful to me or not. Believe me, your duties here are much more important than if you were typing letters in some business firm or making grenades in a factory. And you are serving your people best in those few hours when you do my typing or help me to relax and gather strength.’

So a few weeks later Madame Christian rejoined us, with a great many suitcases and hat-boxes, filling the bunkers and huts with trills of laughter and causing much turmoil in the hearts of many lonely men. We now took our meals with Hitler in two shifts. Two ladies ate with him at lunch and the other two in the evening. Frau Christian was called by her old name of Dara again. When she and I were eating with Hitler the conversation often turned to marriage. To this day I don’t know his feelings on the subject. He told us about an old friend of his, Hanfstaengl.
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‘Hanfstaengl had such a beautiful wife, and he was unfaithful to her with another woman who wasn’t pretty at all.’ Apparently he couldn’t understand that a woman’s beauty alone isn’t enough of a foundation for a good marriage. Yet on the other hand it wasn’t just Eva Braun’s beauty that attracted him. He often took his chance to talk to us about Eva. He phoned her every day, and if there were reports of an air raid on Munich he would pace up and down restlessly like a caged lion, waiting to get in touch with Eva Braun by phone. Usually his fears were groundless.

The ‘little Braun house’ was damaged only once, when several buildings near it burned right down. He was always talking about Eva’s courage. ‘She won’t go down into the air raid shelter, although I keep asking her to, and one of these days that little place of hers will collapse like a house of cards. And she won’t move to my apartment, where she’d be absolutely safe. I’ve finally persuaded her to have a little private shelter built in her house, but then she takes in the whole neighbourhood and goes up on the roof herself to see if any incendiary bombs have fallen. She’s very proud. I’ve known her for over ten years, and when she first started to work for Hoffmann she had to scrape and save. But it was years before she would let me pay so much as a taxi fare for her, and she slept on a bench in the office for days on end so that I could reach her by phone, because she didn’t have a telephone at home. It was only a few years ago that I got her to accept her little house in Bogenhausen.’

So it was mainly her human qualities that bound Hitler to Eva Braun. Once, when we were talking about weddings and marriage again, I asked, ‘My Führer, why haven’t you married her?’ I knew how much he liked arranging marriages, after all. His answer was rather surprising. ‘I wouldn’t make a good father, and I think it would be irresponsible to start a family when I can’t devote enough time to my wife. And anyway I don’t want children of my own. I think the offspring of men of genius usually have a very hard time of it. People expect them to be just like their famous progenitor, and won’t forgive them for being only average. And in fact most of them are feeble-minded.’

This was the first expression of personal megalomania that I heard from Hitler, or the first to be taken seriously. To this day I do sometimes feel as if while Hitler’s fanatical ideas were megalomaniac, up till then he had kept himself as a person out of it. Indeed, he used to say: ‘I am an instrument of fate, and must tread the path on which a higher Providence has set me.’ But this time it did disturb me a lot to find someone describing himself as a genius.

Although Hitler didn’t discuss the war or politics in our little company at table, he said more and more often that he had great anxieties. He was usually talking more to himself than to us. Ever more frequently now I would see his face wearing the grim, angry, harsh expression left on it by the preceding military briefing. ‘It’s hopeless making war with incompetent generals. I ought to follow Stalin’s example. He purges his army ruthlessly.’ And then, as if he had only just realized that we women didn’t and ought not to understand such things, he would put his gloomy thoughts aside and switch to being a charming dinner companion.

Sometimes we also had interesting discussions about the church and the development of the human race. Perhaps it’s going too far to call them discussions, because he would begin explaining his ideas when some question or remark from one of us had set them off, and we just listened. He was not a member of any church, and thought the Christian religions were outdated, hypocritical institutions that lured people into them. The laws of nature were his religion. He could reconcile his dogma of violence better with nature than with the Christian doctrine of loving your neighbour and your enemy. ‘Science isn’t yet clear about the origins of humanity’ he once said. ‘We are probably the highest stage of development of some mammal which developed from reptiles and moved on to human beings, perhaps by way of the apes. We are a part of creation and children of nature, and the same laws apply to us as to all living creatures. And in nature the law of the struggle for survival has reigned from the first. Everything incapable of life, everything weak is eliminated. Only mankind and above all the church have made it their aim to keep alive the weak, those unfit to live, and people of an inferior kind.’

It’s a pity that I can remember only fragments of these theories, and unfortunately I don’t have the powers of persuasion with which Hitler put his ideas to us.

On the way back to our hut we were talking to each other about what Hitler had said, and I made up my mind to think more deeply about such things. Sad to say, I realized next day in conversation with my friends that I could give only a very vague and inaccurate account of what had impressed and moved me so much the previous evening. If only I had been as mature and experienced then as I am now I wouldn’t have let myself just be carried away, or have absorbed Hitler’s ideas so easily and uncritically. Then I would have been bound to wonder about the dangers present in the power of a man whose gift for oratory and power of suggestion could hold people spellbound, simply suppressing their own will and convictions.

Sometimes I saw Hitler’s advisors, generals and colleagues come away from talks with the Führer looking dismayed, chewing on thick cigars and brooding. I spoke to some of them later. And although they were stronger, wiser and more experienced than me, it often happened that they went to see the Führer armed with unimpeachable arguments and documentary evidence, absolutely determined to persuade him that an order was impossible or could not be carried out. But before they had finished he would begin talking, and all their objections melted away, becoming pointless in the face of his theory. They knew it couldn’t be right, but they couldn’t pin down the flaw in it. When they left him they felt despairing, crushed, with their former firm and absolute resolve badly shaken, as if they had been hypnotized. I think many of them tried to hold out against his influence, but others felt exhausted and worn down, and then just let events simply take their course to the bitter end.