Hitler's Last Secretary (34 page)

102
.   Wilhelm Mohnke,
b
Lübeck 15 March 1911,
d
Hamburg 6 August 2001; salesman and storekeeper; 1931 joined the SS; 1933 SS Sonderkommando in Berlin, a member of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler; 1933 SS sturmführer; 1943 SS OberSturmbannführer; January 1945 SS Brigadeführer; February 1945 Führerreserve of the Waffen SS in Berlin; 23 March 1945 entrusted by Hitler, and as second in line to him directly, with the defence of the ‘citadel’ (the Reich Chancellery and its surroundings); 2 May 1945 taken prisoner by the Russians; 1955 released from imprisonment. Holder of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.

103
.   On 21 April 1945 Adolf Hitler ordered a counter-attack against the advancing Soviet Army in the north of Berlin. SS Obergruppenführer and Waffen SS General Felix Steiner, commander of the ‘Steiner’ army, was to carry out the attack.

104
.   Hanna Reitsch,
b
Hirschberg 29 March 1912,
d
Frankfurt 28 August 1979; studies medicine but does not qualify, trains as a glider pilot; 1932 breaks the women’s world record for high-altitude aviation; 1937 flight captain; 1939 test pilot; 1942 awarded the Iron Cross II Class; 26 April 1945 flies to Berlin with Greim; 29 April 1945 flies from Berlin to Grand Admiral Dönitz and then on to Kitzbühel; imprisoned by the Americans until 1946.

105
.   Robert Ritter von Greim,
b
Bayreuth 22 June 1892,
d
Salzburg 24 May 1945 (suicide); 1913 second lieutenant; 1916 pilot and first lieutenant; 1918 squadron leader and captain; 1920–1922 studies law; 1924–1927 is in China; 1928–1934 runs the training school for airmen in Würzburg; 1934 major in the Reichswehr; 1938 major general; 1940 lieutenant general and commanding general of the V Flying Corps; 1943–25 April 1945 colonel general and commander of the 6
^th
Air Fleet; 26 April 1945 appointed by Hitler field marshal and commander of the Luftwaffe in succession to Göring; May 1945 captured by the American army. Holder of the orders
Pour
k
Mérite
and the 92
^nd
award of swords to the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with oakleaves.

106
.   Werner Haase,
b
Köthen, Anhalt 2 August 1900,
d
Moscow 1945; 1924 qualifies as a doctor, specialist surgical training; 1927 ship’s doctor; 1934 joins the SS; 1935 attendant doctor on the Führer’s staff; 1935 SS sturmführer; 1943 SS OberSturmbannführer, medical director of the Charité hospital in Berlin; April 1945 runs the medical ward in the Reich Chancellery bunker; 3 May 1945 taken prisoner by the Red Army in the Führer bunker.

107
.   Benito Mussolini was shot by Italian resistance fighters, together with his mistress Clara Petacci, on 28 April 1945 in Giulino di Mezzegra near Dongo, in the province of Como. Their bodies were hung from scaffolding in the Piazza Loreto in Milan.

108
.   Adolf Hitler assumed that as Himmler’s liaison officer, Hermann Fegelein had taken part in Himmler’s negotiations with the Swedish diplomat and head of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Folke Bernadotte, or at least had knowledge of them.

109
.   Heinrich Himmler had allegedly met Count Folke Bernadotte four times to negotiate with him for surrender in the West.

110
.   Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant Colonel von Below was to take one copy of the testament to Wilhelm Keitel, Heinz Lorenz was taking the second to the ‘Brown House’ in Munich, and Wilhelm Zander was taking the third to Karl Dönitz.

111
.   Traudl Junge thinks she heard the shot. Experts have tried to reconstruct the course of Hitler’s suicide and have come to the following conclusion:‘[…] At this point Frau Junge was far away, on the stairs from the lower to the upper part of the bunker. What she thinks she heard […] was probably an illusion caused by the running diesel generator and the constant heavy firing on the Reich Chancellery.’

112
.   Infantry General Hans Krebs, acting on behalf of Joseph Goebbels, negotiated surrender to the Russian general Vassily I. Chuikov on the night of 30 April 1945. For Krebs, see also note 94.

113
.   Franz Schädle had been head of the escort commando of well over 100 men since 20 December 1944.

114
.   As she said in conversation with Melissa Müller, Traudl Junge’s poison capsule was not taken from her until there was a cell inspection at Lichtenberg prison for women and young people.

CONFRONTING GUILT –
A CHRONOLOGICAL STUDY
WRITTEN IN 2001

by Melissa Müller

We have seen them published again and again since the 1950s – the ‘I was there’ accounts of former functionaries of the Third Reich, justifications by friends of Hitler, whitewash operations carried out by his intellectual supporters. More or less frank confessions which critics mock as trashy memoirs.

‘Old Junge speaking.’ Traudl Junge (whose surname means ‘young’) is on the phone. She is calling to tell me – yet again – about her reservations. Why
another
book on National Socialism? Why make a spectacle of the way she has come to terms with her own past? And why now?

She is used to providing information about her impressions of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. Ever since the 1950s she has been giving interviews to historians and journalists. Until now, however, she has avoided making her own life public. The probable reason is that she has never before definitively faced and understood the key experience of her life: those two and a half years closely involved with Adolf Hitler.

Traudl Junge served a criminal regime, but she took no part in the murders committed by the National Socialists. That does not excuse her, but it should be borne in mind if we want to understand what happened. Although she was so close to those criminal actions, she does not fit the black-and-white ideological pattern of those who see the situation as polarized between Nazi villains and anti-Fascist heroes.

She has never, says Traudl Junge, felt sorry for herself, even in the chaotic days and hours of the collapse of the Third Reich. ‘I should think not too’, the reader may reflect. However, her lack of self-pity distinguishes her not only from many of her closest colleagues of that time but also from the great majority of her contemporaries, who saw themselves in retrospect as ‘victims’. After 1945, such turns of phrase as ‘Those were difficult times … ’, or ‘There was a war on …’ made it easier for many to repress, or at least play down in their minds, the truth about the persecution of the Jews, the death camps and many other Nazi atrocities. They had been through ‘total war’ and experienced its material and ideological destruction as ‘total ruin’, taking heart from the fiction of a new beginning at ‘zero hour’. They spoke of ‘eradicating the horrors’ and ‘breaking the spell’. They pinned their hopes on a new era beginning ‘after the war’, persecutors and persecuted alike, passive hangers-on and the complicit, among whom Traudl Junge may be classed.

After the war she never felt that she was innocent. However, painfully present in her mind as her shame and grief over the crimes of the Nazis are, until now it has been hard for her to define her share in the responsibility beyond a diffuse, abstract self-accusation. Her personal failure, she has finally realized, lay in accepting Albert Bormann’s help. She desperately wanted to go to Berlin in 1941, she was furious about the obstacles put in her way by her Munich employer, she was defiant and obstinate. To get where she wanted to be – which was Berlin, not the Reich Chancellery, let alone Adolf Hitler – she silenced the warning voice in her that told her: Don’t get involved with the Party-no good can come of it. When she finally and after a series of chance events found herself in Hitler’s presence, she says, it was too late to resist. Today she knows that she let herself be dazzled by him – not by his ideological and political intentions, in which she never took any particular interest, but by Hitler’s personality. She does not play down the fact that she provided him with female company while he and his accomplices were implementing the ‘final solution’. She admits that she probably knew nothing of the full extent of the persecution of Jews simply because she didn’t want to know. All the same, in her attempts at a later date to understand those murderous events, even to link them with herself, her immediate impressions of the time she spent with Hitler keep coming to the fore and, as we can gather from her manuscript, those impressions were overwhelmingly positive. That should not seem surprising, for here, after all, lies the source of the battle with herself that Traudl Junge still has not fought to the end: how to accept that this man made her feel he cared about her welfare while his unbounded instinct for destruction was simultaneously bringing suffering to millions of people.

‘Our total collapse, the refugees, the suffering – of course I held Hitler responsible for that. His testament, his suicide – that was when I began to hate him. At the same time I felt great pity, even for him. But when your love for someone, say your partner in marriage, turns to hate, you usually try to preserve the memories of the happy times you first knew. I suppose my relationship with Hitler was something like that … He didn’t exert any erotic influence over me, but of course I wanted him to like me. He was a kindly paternal figure, he gave me a feeling of security, solicitude for me, safety. I felt protected there in the Führer headquarters in the middle of that forest, in that community, with that “father figure”. I can still look back to that time with warm emotions. I never again felt that I belonged anywhere in just the same way.’

In the turbulent months after Hitler’s suicide and the end of the war, Traudl feels personally disappointed in ‘her Führer’. In a letter to her mother and sister as late as January 1945 she says, parroting Hitler: ‘[…] I am well, and we must either win the victory or fall, there’s no alternative.’ And then, cravenly, he had given up. Her dominant feelings in the summer and autumn of 1945, it is true, are life-threatening in their nature: she is afraid of being at the mercy of the Russian occupying forces, and there are existential needs such as hunger. But although many of her colleagues chose suicide as a way out in the days around 1 May 1945, she never sees it as a solution for herself. She too treasures the poison capsule given to her by Hitler personally as a kind of goodbye present, but she wants to live.

‘I wasn’t one of those idealists who couldn’t imagine how anything could go on without the Führer, or couldn’t see it going on at all; people like Magda Goebbels, who obviously drew the logical conclusions from her own view of the world. To me, suicide was only ever a very vague safety net in case I was badly mistreated – tortured or raped. It was reassuring to have the poison with me.’

The surviving inmates of the bunkers in the catacombs under the Reich Chancellery began moving out on the night of 1 May 1945. Ten groups of about twenty people each set off to get away from the Russians. As she describes it in detail in her manuscript, Traudl Junge was among the first group, led by SS Brigadeführer Mohnke. On the second evening she became separated from her female companions – her secretarial colleague Gerda Christian, Martin Bormann’s secretary Else Krüger, and Constanze Manziarly. Apparently Hitler’s dietician cook looked the ideal image of Russian femininity, well-built and plump-cheeked, and she was, stupidly, wearing a Wehrmacht jacket. She said she was going to find some civilian clothing and asked Traudl Junge to wait for her, while the two other women waited by a water collection point and tried to organize a place to sleep next night. When Traudl Junge next saw Fräulein Manziarly, a little later, two Russian soldiers were taking her towards a U-Bahn tunnel. Constanze Manziarly just had time to call back to Traudl Junge, ‘They want to see my papers’, before she disappeared with the Russians. No one saw her again after that.

Traudl Junge lost sight of the other two women too, and went on alone. She wanted to go north, away from the Russians and into the English zone, where Hitler’s designated successor Grand Admiral Dönitz and his men were thought to be. She had no money for her journey, no papers and no luggage,and was dressed only in trousers and a check blouse. Thousands and thousands of refugees were on the roads, some fleeing from the bombed city, others coming from the country areas already occupied by the Russians and seeking shelter in the city. Traudl Junge tried to strike up acquaintanceships; she did not know the region, had never before heard the names of the villages through which she passed, and forgot them again at once. For a while she walked beside a former concentration camp inmate. He was still wearing his striped camp uniform.

‘At that moment this man and I were companions brought together by fate; we were both afraid of the Russians, and we went part of the way together. We didn’t say anything about our immediate past. I didn’t yet have any idea what conditions in the concentration camps had really been like. I could still hear Himmler’s voice describing them as well-organized labour camps. From today’s viewpoint it’s hardly imaginable, but at the time I asked the man no questions. And what really matters is that I asked myself no questions either.’

She walks through the countryside for days on end. She hears nothing about the surrender of Germany and the official end of the war. The discrepancy between the exuberance of spring, with its pretty flowering meadows and blossoming trees, and all the human misery, the ruined buildings, the unmilked cows bellowing in pain, makes a deep impression on her. By night she seeks shelter with strangers, sleeps in barns, sometimes even in a bed, friendly people give her boiled potatoes, someone even makes her a present of an old coat. It is a nuisance to carry in the mild weather, but a welcome blanket by night. She meets German soldiers who deserted in the chaos of the closing stages of the war and are trying to make their way home in scruffy civilian clothing. At one farm she meets Erich Kempka, Hitler’s personal chauffeur, who had been a witness at her wedding – he is wearing shabby clothes, and he too is on the run. He tells her that his aim is to swim the river Elbe and then give himself up to the Americans. He must finally have managed to reach southern Germany, for in the middle of June he falls into American hands in Berchtesgaden.