Brunhilde Pomsel | |
|---|---|
 Pomsel, duringWorld War II. | |
| Born | (1911-01-11)11 January 1911 |
| Died | 27 January 2017(2017-01-27) (aged 106) Munich, Germany |
| Occupation(s) | Stenographer, typist, secretary, broadcaster |
Brunhilde Pomsel (11 January 1911 – 27 January 2017)[1] was a personal secretary toJoseph Goebbels, theReich Minister of Propaganda ofNazi Germany. She started work at the ministry's offices in theOrdenspalais opposite theReich Chancellery inBerlin in 1942. In 2014, aged 103, she gave a series of interviews for afilm documentary entitledA German Life. She told the interviewer, "It is absolutely not about clearing my conscience" and that "No one believes me now, but I knew nothing".[2] The film was released in 2016 when she was 105 years old.
Pomsel was born inBerlin on 11 January 1911 and had three siblings.[3] Her first two employers were Jews: first, a Jewish-owned clothing store where she worked as an assistant, then Dr. Hugo Goldberg, a lawyer and insurance agent.[4] "I obviously didn't tell him that on January 30, 1933, I cheered Hitler at theBrandenburg Gate... You can’t do something like that to a poor Jew."[4]
She claimed to have been "a stupid and politically disinterested nobody from a simple background"[5] but in 1933, she voted forHitler and joined theNazi Party. She got a job in the news department of the government radio station.[6][2] On the recommendation of a Nazi friend, she was transferred to theReich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in 1942, where she worked underJoseph Goebbels as astenographer until the end of the war.[6][2] Goebbels’s office at theOrdenspalais was opposite Hitler'sReich Chancellery.[7]
According to Kate Connolly in theGuardian, she was more than just a secretary/stenographer; her tasks included "massaging downwards statistics about fallen soldiers, as well as exaggerating the number of rapes of German women by theRed Army".[2] Pomsel herself explained that "the news that we received in the offices of Red Army atrocities was always multiplied. If three women were raped we would make it ten. Everything was exaggerated - in order to strengthen deterrent effect and the German peoples will to hold out".[8]
At the end of the war in 1945, Pomsel hid in theVorbunker, part of the subterranean bunker complex that housed Hitler andEva Braun in the final days of theThird Reich.[3] She was captured and imprisoned by the SovietNKVD until 1950 in three different concentration camps:Buchenwald,Hohenschönhausen andSachsenhausen.[9] She was released from the NKVD camp in 1950,[5] and escaped from the Soviet-occupied zone toWest Germany, where she worked as a secretary with the state broadcasterSüdwestfunk inBaden-Baden and then atARD in Munich until her retirement in 1971.[6]
In 2005, Pomsel travelled to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin and discovered that a Jewish school friend, Eva Löwenthal, had been sent toAuschwitz in November 1943 and died.[10]On her 100th birthday in 2011, she publicly spoke out against Goebbels,[11] after shunning requests for interviews and requests to write her memoirs for over 60 years.[5] A 113-minute documentary calledA German Life by filmmakers Christian Krönes, Olaf Müller, Roland Schrotthofer and Florian Weigensamer, drawn from a 30-hour interview with Pomsel, was shown atFilmfest München in 2016.[2][12] Anaward-winning theatre play (monologue with DameMaggie Smith) of the same name was performed at theBridge Theatre inLondon in 2019.[13]
Shortly before her death Pomsel claimed she had been in love with a man named Gottfried Kirchbach, who had a Jewish mother. They planned to leave Germany together. In 1936, Kirchbach fled to Amsterdam. She visited him regularly until he told her she was endangering her life by doing so. She aborted their child after a doctor advised her the pregnancy might kill her because she had a serious lung complaint.[14][15] She never married and had no children.[7]
Pomsel maintained until her death that she knew nothing about Hitler'sFinal Solution.[3] She also denied feeling guilty, as: "Nothing's black and white. There's always a bit of grey in everything. I wouldn't see myself as guilty, unless you end up blaming the entire German population for ultimately enabling that government to take control. That was all of us, including me."[10]
Towards the end of her life, Pomsel lived inMunich-Schwabing, Germany.[4] She died in her sleep[10] on 27 January 2017,Holocaust Memorial Day, at the age of 106.[16]
