Hitler's Last Secretary (3 page)

In many ways 1933 marks a watershed for Traudl, who is now thirteen. First, Hitler’s advent to power is celebrated as a great event at her school, and Traudl herself sees it as a sign of change and economic prosperity soon to come. Pictures of the crowds of indigent, somehow sinister men with scowling faces loafing around Sendlinger-Tor-Platz are still alarmingly present to her mind’s eye. The unemployed, she was told. Well, all that’s about to change …

Second, Max Humps turns up again in 1933. As he supported the Party in its early struggles and has won the Blood Order, someone wangles him a job in the NSDAP administration. His daughter does not know exactly what job it is, nor is she interested; it is a long time since she has felt close to her father. She does visit him at his office in Barer Strasse in 1934 or 1935 –just once, because her mother is not keen for her to be in touch with him. Number 15 Barer Strasse houses the ‘Reich Management Organization’, the head office of the ‘National Socialist Factory Cell’, as well as the ‘War Victims Head Office’ and the ‘National Health Head Office’. At this time the SA headquarters is in the Marienbad and Union hotels, both of them also in Barer Strasse.

Max Humps tries to win Traudl over with sweets and similar proofs of affection, but she keeps her distance and nurses her grudge against her father. The divorce came through in December 1932 – in his absence – and Traudl could not help noticing that her mother felt the humiliation of the case keenly. Max Humps had shown few scruples and a remarkable amount of imagination in laying the blame for their separation on his wife. General Maximilian Zottmann considered it socially intolerable for his daughter to be – in the context of the marital laws of the time – the guilty party in a divorce, so she had to agree to a shabby compromise, offering togive up any claim to maintenance if her husband would take all the blame himself. She was therefore dependent on her father’s charity, and as she was represented in court by a Jewish lawyer she had worse cards to play than Max, holder of the Blood Order. It seemed likely that the judge in their case had National Socialist sympathies or anyway was in a great hurry to conform – the NSDAP had been the strongest political power in the country since the end of July 1932, at least for most of the time.

In any case, the verdict reinforces Hildegard Humps’s belief that ‘that man Hitler’ destroyed her marriage as early as 1923. She frequently expresses this opinion after he has come to power, which annoys young Traudl. Traudl thinks her mother’s views are simplistic, she stands up for ‘the Führer’, and has teenage day-dreams of saving his life some day. Fame through self-sacrifice! Once she actually sees him in person during these years, when he is being driven in his car to the ‘Brown House’ in Brienner Strasse, the Munich headquarters of the Nazi Party-she remembers what an exciting feeling that was. The girl, now around fifteen, gains the simple idea that the Führer must be a very great man from this sighting of him. She feels proud of Germany and the German people, and is impressed by the elevating idea of the ‘national community’ – ‘One for all and all for one.’ As soon as the national anthem strikes up tears of emotion come into her eyes. She is given no political education at school or at home, either now or later. The teachers at the Luisenlyzeum maintain a low profile; Traudl does not have to write school compositions full of propaganda like those required by zealous teachers at many other schools. It is true that there is discussion of the Nuremberg Laws, and concepts such as the ‘Jewish question’, ‘racial hygiene’ and ‘racial disgrace’ are approached as if they were facts. The pupils absorb them in the same spirit. Traudl accepts the idea of Bolshevism as the greatest enemy of the civilized world, threatening ruin to morality and culture, as a terrifying but incontrovertible fact. The nationalist writings encouraged by the Nazis do not reach her; she has popular stories for teenage girls on her bedside table, and later on novellas by Storm or Agnes Günther’s bestseller
Die Heilige und ihr Narr [The Saint and her Fool].

At home no one discusses either National Socialism or any other ideology. Traudl’s mother still bears Hitler a personal grudge, but she is not interested in his political measures. A small picture of Prince Regent Luitpold stands on Traudl’s grandfather’s desk, inscribed with a personal greeting on the general’s sixtieth birthday and dated 1912, a memento of the old days. Of better days? Maximilian Zottmann does not actually say so; he recognizes whatever authority is in government, and like most ‘ordinary Germans’ he does not consider the National Socialist system any real threat. He belongs to a magazine subscription service: the only journal he reads is
Der deutsche Jäger [The German Huntsman],
and books mean nothing to him. The
Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten [Munich Latest News]
comes into the household daily so that no one need miss an instalment of the serial story. The family listens to request concerts on the radio, and in the evening they sit round the table, with an opera libretto in front of them, wearing headphones and listening to the performance broadcast direct from the opera house over the phone lines. Grandfather loses his temper whenever a phone call for one of the girls interrupts the transmission.

But above all, 1933 is a year of great importance to Traudl Junge because she discovers her passion for dancing. Through her sister Inge she also meets the Klopfer sisters, Erika and Lore, girls of‘good family’. Their father is a lawyer and they live in a very grand apartment in Arcisstrasse, with the domestic staff proper to their station in life. The Klopfers’ mother encourages her children, whom she describes as ‘rather molly-coddled’, to be friends with the robust Inge, and when she enrols the girls at the Lola Fasbender Children’s School of Dance, principally to learn good posture and graceful movement, she also pays for Inge to take the course. Inge’s outstanding talent is obvious. During these dancing lessons Traudl presses her nose flat against the glass door so as not to miss anything. When the teacher takes pity on her and invites her to join in, she feels as if the gates of Paradise are opening to her, and begins to discover the joys of rhythmic gymnastics for herself.

Traudl and Inge do not realize that Erika and Lore are Jewish until 1936, when the two sisters emigrate to New York. This may have been because their friends didn’t know it themselves. Their parents had them baptized as Protestants, says Erika Stone, née Klopfer. Religion is in the heart, their mother used to say. She is lukewarm about her children’s enthusiasm ‘for the pomp and circumstance of Nazi mass propaganda, the marching and the songs’, but she does not tell the girls about their Jewish roots and the danger threatening Jews in Germany until just before they leave, when the sisters are sad to say goodbye.

In the three years of this friendship Traudl hardly registers the fact that the Klopfers’ father is banned from practising his profession, while the family dismiss their domestic staff and move into a much smaller apartment in Tengstrasse. But she envies the Klopfer girls the adventure of their journey to America – and they envy her for her BDM uniform.

Traudl has been a member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls, since about 1935. Her mother has scraped and saved from the housekeeping money to buy the brown velour ‘Alpine waistcoat’ that is part of the uniform, and when Traudl can finally wear that object of desire she is hugely proud. She is leader of a group of six girls from her class – they call themselves the Six Graces. They drill on the school terrace-right turn, march – and shout the
Sieg Heil
slogan.
Sieg,
calls Traudl.
Heil,
her charges shout back.
Sieg! – Heil! – Sieg! – Heil!
Not much else of the BDM activities remains in her memory, only boring ‘socials’, various events when the BDM girls formed a guard of honour: the inauguration of the first workers’ housing estate in Ramersdorf, at which she and her comrades performed folk dances; collecting for the Winter Aid organization; an excursion to Wolfratshausen complete with camp fire and tents – and Herta, who is leader of their unit when Traudl is sixteen or seventeen and has started attending commercial college. Herta tells the girls about the Third Reich’s ideas of art and literature, makes music with them and takes them for idyllic walks. Traudl longs to emulate her. One day, when she is visiting Herta on her own, Herta gives her a goodbye hug and kisses her on the mouth. Traudl, who has not yet developed an interest in boys, although she longs for affection, is deeply impressed by Herta’s warmth of heart.

But in 1938 she loses touch with her much admired leader, for suddenly something much more interesting is on offer: Traudl joins the ‘Faith and Beauty’ organization, a new unit within the BDM for Aryan young women of the Reich from eighteen to twenty-one years old. ‘The task of our League is to bring young women up to pass on the National Socialist faith and philosophy of life. Girls whose bodies, souls and minds are in harmony, whose physical health and well-balanced natures are incarnations of that beauty which shows that mankind is created by the Almighty,’ says Jutta Rüdiger, who became head of the BDM in 1937, describing its aims. ‘We want to train girls who are proud to think that one day they will choose to share their lives with fighting men. We want girls who believe unreservedly in Germany and the Führer, and will instil that faith into the hearts of their children. Then National Socialism and thus Germany itself will last for ever.’

As in most of the youth groups of the Third Reich, there is hardly any discussion of politics in the Faith and Beauty organization. Its activities concentrate on doing graceful gymnastics and dancing, deliberately cultivating a ‘feminine line’ so as to counter any ‘boyish’ or ‘masculine’ development. In fact this gymnastic dancing is also a way of making use of young women for the purposes of the Party and the state – not, of course, that anyone explicitly tells them so, and Traudl Junge herself hears about it for the first time decades after the war. Their artistic commitment is intended to bring these young girls up to be ‘part of the community’, and keep them from turning prematurely to the role of wife and mother; instead, they must continue to devote themselves to ‘the Führer, the nation and the fatherland’. Finally, Faith and Beauty will also qualify some of the rising generation of women for leadership; that is to say for posts in the BDM, the Nazi Women’s Association or the Reich Labour Service.

Traudl is not burdened with such subjects as ‘structuring your life’, or ‘political and intellectual education’, which are also a statutory part of the Faith and Beauty curriculum, or if she is then she cannot remember it now. But she is fascinated by the Third Reich’s grand cultural spectacles – as ‘capital of the movement’ Munich is a city of festive parades. The pomp which ushers in the Day of German Art in July 1937 and the two following years, with a procession of ‘Two Thousand Years of German Culture’ covering over three kilometres, fills her with enthusiasm, and so does the ‘Night of the Amazons’ held annually between 1936 and 1939 in Nymphenburg castle park. The Nazi concept of emotional self-presentation as a way of binding people ideologically together is working. Moreover, Traudl’s sister takes part in the supporting programme for the Day of German Art, dancing the performance of the
Rape of the Sabinę Women
on the stage erected by the Kleinhesseloher See in the English Garden. Traudl herself, in a minor way, participates in the cultural endeavours of the Nazis. She has a walk-on part in the ‘Night of the Amazons’, and at the age of fifteen models for the Swiss sculptor and marionette carver Walter Oberholzer, who has a commission to provide a statue for a fountain. The bronze girl throwing a ball to a faun whose mouth throws up jets of water has Traudl’s attractively shaped body, although not her face. This sculptural ensemble is exhibited in the House of German Art in 1937.

It is impossible to describe adolescents like Traudl as being clearly for or against the Third Reich, as impossible as is probably the case with the majority of the German population of the time, and certainly the young people. Although Traudl allows the aesthetics of the lavish spectaculars to intoxicate her, and enthusiastically joins in the rejoicings over the triumphs of German athletes in the Olympic Games and Hitler’s non-political successes, she finds the cruder side of party politics distasteful. The ‘extreme Nazism’ and the ‘machinations of its big shots’ strike her, so she says today, as ‘proletarian’ and ‘narrow-minded’. However, she is as far as most of her contemporaries from questioning the government on that account. She can laugh at the Hitler jokes that go the rounds, she finds
Der Stürmer
with its anti-Semitic caricatures strange and repellent, but she does not realize that the very lives of Jews and political opponents of the Party are threatened. There are three Jewish pupils in her class at the Lyzeum. During their time together at school – that is to say, up to 1936 – these girls are treated just like the others by both teachers and pupils. If their Jewishness is mentioned at all it is only as their religious faith. Later she loses touch with the three girls. One, she hears, is emigrating with her parents, but to this day she knows nothing of the fate of the other two. At eighteen, Traudl knows hardly anything about the November 1938 pogrom and the ‘retaliation wreaked on Jewish shops, most of which had all their windows broken’, as the
Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten
reports next day, or about the burning synagogues and the summary arrest of hundreds of Jewish men. When she and her friends hear later of these acts of Nazi brutality they do not like them, but they quell their doubts by thinking that such an event must be unique. Ultimately, it affects them as little as all the other anti-Jewish measures: the first boycott of Jewish shops decreed by the state on 1 April 1933; the notices in public places with their inscription: ‘Jews banned’; the total ‘de-Judai-zing’ of the economy from early in 1939; the marking out of Jews by the yellow star after September 1941. She claims that she can remember only a single meeting with a woman wearing it – a fleeting impression, and she thinks no more of it. That episode shows how well repression works.