Hitler's Last Secretary (35 page)

The refugees form small groups, creating a sense of security for themselves. Traudl Junge soon makes friends with Katja, married to an SS officer and herself a ‘Party comrade’, who left Berlin in panic when the Russians marched in. Traudl Junge tells her that she herself was Hitler’s secretary, but both women are more concerned with day-to-day events. What shall we eat this evening, where shall we sleep? Together, they try to cross the ‘green frontier’ and reach the British zone, and when that attempt fails they go on along the Elbe to Wittenberge, about halfway to Hamburg, looking for a way to get across the river. The American zone begins on the opposite bank. Traudl Junge is suffering from scabies; she hasn’t seen a bar of soap, let alone used one, since the day she broke out of the bunker. The doctor she visits prescribes an ointment, baths, and a daily change of underwear. For this well-meant advice he charges five marks, which she has to owe him.

There are no ferries across the Elbe, and Traudl and Katja don’t trust themselves to swim to the opposite bank. The river is too wide and too cold. Instead, they decide to go back to Berlin. Traudl Junge means to hide in her new friend’s apartment until trains to Munich are running again. She is back in Berlin after about a month, having walked more than three hundred kilometres, and now goes under the name of Gerda Alt. She adopted this cover name on the road when she had a permit allowing her to draw food rations made out in one village – in the naive hope that anyone looking for her who may hear the name Gerda Alt (‘old’) will connect it with Traudl Junge.

She spends a week in Berlin. Katja has to go out in the daytime to clear rubble; she herself hardly leaves the building. There are small moments of pleasure: the first chance in many weeks to wash her hair, a packet of real coffee that Katja finds in the kitchen cupboard. The first glimmer of confidence: something like normality seems to be returning to her life. On 9 June, the day when the commander of the Soviet occupying forces, Marshal Gyorgy Zhukov, sets up the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, two civilians, a young man and a girl, knock at the door of Katja’s apartment and, speaking with an obvious Russian accent, say they are journalists.

‘I realized at once that I was about to be arrested. To this day I don’t know who informed on me. I didn’t take my pass in my false name with me, because people said that anyone caught out lying would be condemned to a Russian hell. And it was normal enough to have no papers in those days. I left a message for Katja with the caretaker of the building and went with them. Of course I was dreadfully frightened, but I didn’t feel it was wrongful arrest. The terrifying part was the unpredictability of the Russians.’

Traudl Junge’s odyssey through various temporary prisons now begins. The first place where she is imprisoned is a Russian commandant’s headquarters in Nussbaumallee, where she is held for a night. She is taken from there to Lichtenberg, formerly a prison for women and young people, where she is held for fourteen weeks in a cell meant for solitary confinement – at first really alone in it, later with seven other women. Only then does anyone show an interest in her and take her off for her first interrogation. They question her, in particular, about the circumstances of Hitler’s death. She constantly keeps hearing tales of the personal tragedies suffered by the Russian soldiers on duty as warders: how their children were shot by German soldiers, their women dragged away, whole villages razed to the ground. For the first time, and with growing horror, Traudl Junge realizes that the massacres in East Prussia were the aftermath of an equally brutal prelude in Russia – and that she had let herself be deceived by Nazi propaganda.

One night she is fetched without warning and moved to the basement floor of the Rudolf Virchow Institute, where ‘special cases’ presumed to be spies are held in a large communal cell. They sleep on the floor. Someone takes Traudl Junge’s wedding ring, her last remaining possession.

She has already lost the poison capsule in Lichtenberg. The woman commissar on duty in the Nussbaumallee cells had ordered a strip search, but Traudl Junge took the poison capsule of thin glass out of its protective brass case, slipped it into a handkerchief, and put it under her tongue while blowing her nose. Only then did she undress. After the search she managed to hide the capsule, now without the brass case, in her jacket pocket and take it safely with her to Lichtenberg prison.

‘The woman who shared my cell there knew about the capsule. I had told her that I still had the poison for use in an emergency, and it kept my fear within bounds. I think she informed on me. Anyway, the capsule was taken away from me during a cell inspection. I felt desperate. Every night I could hear the screams of people being tortured, and the roll-call in the yard when transports set off for Russia. Suddenly I felt completely helpless, now that the power to make that final decision had been taken from me.’

Traudl Junge is not taken to Russia. Is she kept in Berlin as an important witness, or do the occupying force think her too harmless to be seriously punished? It is impossible to clear up these questions with any certainty after the event. But Fate is kind to her, particularly when it sends her an Armenian called Arkady. This man, who wears civilian clothing, works as an interpreter for the Russian occupiers. One night in October 1945 he fetches her from the basement of the Rudolf Virchow Institute and takes her to another basement cell at the Russian command post in Marienstrasse. On the way he says scarcely a word, but she notices his courteous manners and refined speech. Sinister as the man seems to her at first, in the end she has much to thank him for. Over the next few weeks he is her guardian angel, getting her clothes, a room, papers, and after that even work. The one condition is that she must stay in the Russian zone. One day, when he gives her a tomato, its poetic name of ‘Paradise apple’ strikes her suddenly as being literally true.

‘Arkady interrogated me only once at the command post, while a uniformed officer sat in the other corner of the room. I just had to say what had happened in the last days in the Führer bunker. After that I had to sign an agreement stating that I was prepared to give the Red Army the names of survivors from those who had been at Führer headquarters.’

She spends about a week in part of the Marienstrasse command-post basement, now converted to acell, and then Arkady decides, ‘We must have you out of here’ – and commandeers a small room in a building which he chooses at random. From now on she lives here. Her landlady – at first unwilling, but later glad of Traudl’s company – is Fräulein Koch, a piano teacher. When Arkady, in the course of ‘occupying’ the room, tries the bed to see if it is comfortable Traudl Junge has forebodings of worse to come. But Arkady does not molest her either then or later. Instead, he ensures that over the next few weeks she is listed as an assistant at the command post, because then he can get her fed at the canteen there. On 5 October she is issued with a ‘work-book replacement card’, stating that she is employed for ten to twelve hours a day as a worker at the command post. On 4 December 1945 she describes the way she is really spending her time in a long letter to her mother in Bavaria, for after almost a year of uncertainty they are finally in touch again. She does not go into detail about her flight from Berlin and her prison experiences in either this or subsequent letters, nor does she mention Arkady-she knows, after all, that mail is still censored, only this time by the occupying power.

‘[…] You’ll want to know how I’m living – well, I’m alive! I can’t say much about that, but I have enough to eat and I’m getting quite fat. Most of the time I help with the housework, and I’m also knitting gloves and sweaters, and I make dolls and stuffed toy animals, and use my many amateurish talents. If I ever come home maybe I can find a job as attendant in a lavatory or cloakroom. My memories mostly take me back to the Munich years and don’t cling to the recent past. Mankind’s most precious gift is being able to forget.

I’m living with an elderly spinster, what you might call an old maid. She’s very kind and at least equally silly. Terribly prejudiced, but all the same she’s taken me to her heart because I’m as good as quite a number of workmen to her, I can nail windows and doors in place, I chop wood, I make myself useful. […] My life is hard but I’ve felt new-born now that I know you are waiting for me at home, however long it may take to get there. […]’

She tries to present her situation in a humorous light, but all the same her nerves give way in the course of that November: she complains that she’d rather be shut up in the basement cell again than sit around here doing nothing, just waiting until they want her to denounce someone. She feels that she is at Arkady’s mercy, and is still afraid of him. But once more he surprises her. ’You need work,’ he says next. He has a photo of her taken and a pass made out in her name. On 10 December 1945 he arranges for her to begin working as an administrative assistant, later at the reception desk of the Charité hospital and finally at its cash desk.

‘This man systematically rescued me, and he obviously had no personal advantage in mind. He said the most peculiar things, he talked about Providence. And when I asked why he was doing all this for me he just said, “I’m not your enemy. Perhaps you can help me too some day.”’

For the first time since the fall of the Third Reich she can now earn a meagre living for herself; before that, what she earned from the home-made dolls scarcely paid her rent. Now she is earning 100 Reichsmarks a month and gets food ration coupons. As Hitler’s secretary she was earning 450 Reichsmarks with free board and lodging. A loaf of bread costs about forty on the black market these days, a kilo of sugar about ninety, a carton of ten packets of Chesterfield cigarettes up to 1500 Reichsmarks. Traudl Junge is a smoker, but has no black-market connections; she has no money or goods to barter for that.

Lonely as she is, all her potential for love is concentrated on her mother. Their relationship is the one fixed point in these months of outward and inward uncertainty, and she clings to it with positively childlike force. On 11 December she writes one of her many letters of this period to Breitbrunn on the Ammersee, where her mother has been living since she was bombed out of her Munich apartment.

‘Myself, I’ve always got out of my difficulties relatively well […] and now I’m working again. […] At least I’m glad to have occupation, so my thoughts don’t have too much time to wander. They’re mostly with you anyway […] I’m really scared of the Christmas holidays. I shall probably stay in bed and sleep the time away, with all its memories. […] One can’t even afford a candle here, and a branch of fir costs so much that it’s right beyond my means. […] Dear Mother, have as nice a time as you possibly can, and be glad the two of you can spend the holiday together. That’s the best thing of all, not having to be among strangers. It would be all right if I could shut myself up in my little room and be really alone with myself and my memories. I’d be able to fill my time then. But as it is, the cold weather means we all have to spend our free time together in a dark kitchen which is never cleared out and can never be got really warm. Even worse off are the people who have central heating [with no fuel] and no other means of heating. […]’

In the following weeks Traudl Junge’s thoughts and actions revolve around making a new start in Munich. It is with mixed feelings that she tries to approach her old world, her life before she made that wrong decision.
‘My brain is constantly occupied with a single thought: going home,’
she writes on 30 December. A few lines further on comes an explanation for her strong sense of family affection:
‘I just long for you and Inge; I’m afraid other people might pity me or take pleasure in my misfortunes.’
She spends the last day of 1945, New Year’s Eve, with friends of her late husband in Wilmersdorf, a part of the city that is occupied by the British. She has already secretly entered that forbidden zone several times, and this time she stays for almost two months, for on New Year’s Day of 1946 she falls ill with a temperature of 41 degrees and a sore throat. She is admitted to the Robert Koch Hospital on the same day with diphtheria. The fact that her absence from the Russian zone has obviously not been noticed strengthens her resolve to flee to Bavaria as soon as possible.
‘Most of the time I try to sleep, to take my mind off bitter memories of the past and anxiety about the future. Or I dream of lovely times at home with you and build the most beautiful castles in the air’
(15 January 1946). She makes concrete plans for flight with her neighbour in her hospital bed, who also wants to go to Munich.

‘Since yesterday I have been working at the Charité again, but my job there won’t keep me from setting out to go home when the time comes,’ she
writes on the last day of February 1946.
‘But you can eat up those cabbages before they go mouldy, and then I’ll be home to enjoy the first radishes.’
And on 1 March she writes to her sister:
‘You ask if I’m perfectly free and have release papers. Unfortunately no to both questions. I’d have been well away from here long ago if it was as simple as that.’

In Breitbrunn, meanwhile, her mother is trying to get Traudl a permit to stay in Bavaria and a certificate of entitlement to live in Breitbrunn. Both documents are the prerequisite for her flight from Berlin, because it depends on them whether she can get a work permit, a ration card, and so on at home. On 2 April the document she has been longing for reaches Traudl Junge. ‘Hooray! My Bavarian permit has arrived!’ She has already given a month’s notice to the Charité on 15 March, the day before her twenty-sixth birthday. A brief last encounter with Arkady reinforces her determination to venture on flight. She meets him in the street and waves to him from a distance, but he does not respond. Only when he comes level with her does he tell her, briefly, that a new commandant has arrived and wants to see Traudl Junge’s files. Then he hurries on.