Hitler's Last Secretary (37 page)

Christian Ude is only a year old when Traudl Junge enters the life of the family – he, his parents and his sister Karin live in the building opposite, Number 9 Bauerstrasse. Even at primary school he is beginning to take an interest in history and politics, and asks her questions about her job with Hitler. In many conversations with her, he says looking back, he developed an awareness that ‘Adolf Hitler and the Second World War were not just huge historical events of the past, but that political activities were going on in my immediate vicinity, almost close enough for me to touch.’ When he joined in conversations at mealtimes with his parents and their friends later, as a boy old enough to be taken seriously, he found that Traudl Junge had a ‘lively, critical mind’, and said she was ‘better at discussion and more committed than many other people we knew’.

‘A life of conscious thought began for me only after the war, when I started thinking about important things, asking questions. Wondering about the meaning of human relationships. Until then I’d just accepted everything as it happened to me. I moved from one place to another without consciously wanting to leave my mark on them. Wherever I was, I just tried to take an interest in what I was doing, and give of my best.’

Absolution – absolution in duplicate – is officially granted to Traudl Junge in 1947. Like all Germans over eighteen she has to fill in the questionnaire issued by the Military Government of Germany, a form eighty-six centimetres long and printed on both sides, with 131 questions about people’s personal attitudes to the Nazi past. She fills in the form twice, once as Traudl Junge and then again as Traudl Humps – she doesn’t now remember why. She truthfully describes her profession at the time as ‘secretary in the Reich Chancellery’, which was indeed where she was employed before being delegated to the Führer. She thus receives two notices of denazification; as a ‘youthful fellow-traveller’ she falls under the amnesty granted at the end of August 1946 to all who were born after 1914, and in the matter of other charges she – like 94 per cent of all Bavarians – is ‘exonerated’. Traudl Junge does not realize that denazification, a unique attempt to subject the political attitudes of almost an entire population to national cleansing, is a farce performed for purposes of rehabilitation. To her, filling in the questionnaire is little more than a formality, and she wasn’t expecting to be condemned anyway – after all, she was never a member of the NSDAP.

Most Germans regard this process as the end of the affair, and from then on preserve a collective silence about the Nazi period. This is also in the interests of the Allies themselves; Germans are needed as partners in the Cold War in both East and West. Furthermore, German politicians of the Adenauer era are courting the voters – and those politicians who are willing to go along with the demand to draw a final line under the past are more likely to win their favour. ‘When we look back to those years, then,’ writes Ralph Giordano, ‘a suspicion that refuses to be suppressed emerges, to the effect that the Adenauer era, right into the 1960s, was in the nature of a gigantic bribe offered by the conservative leadership to the majority of voters who were unwilling to face facts. It was a kind of moratorium, the result partly of tacit agreement in the generally conspiratorial atmosphere, but partly of forceful organization.’ Giordano describes this as the ‘great peace’ made with the killers. Only the second post-war generation, towards the end of the sixties, try to get their grandparents to make it clear where they stood – and at this point the period when Traudl Junge was apparently at peace with herself also comes to a sudden end. However, there are some twenty years to go before that, and she calls them the best years of her life.

Traudl Junge owes her increasing confidence in particular to Heinz Bald. He is ‘factotum’ or in modern parlance manager of Ralph Maria Siegel’s cabaret group, which Traudl also frequents. She describes him as an ‘all-rounder’ who can turn his hand to anything, and he cares for her devotedly. He was in the resistance movement during the Third Reich, and he accepts her despite her past, which gives her something to lean on. When he emigrates to America he is determined that she will follow him as soon as he has made a new start there. He wants to marry her.

The fifties: years of hope. The rest of the world’s prejudices against Germany are gradually fading, the economic miracle is in full swing. Many Germans begin to feel that they count for something again. Traudl Junge’s life has its highs and its lows, like anyone else’s. In 1951 Inge leaves Germany for Australia, where she marries her Polish fiance´; he has emigrated a year earlier. Traudl was often jealous of Inge in their youth because she had managed to realize the dream of an artistic career. Now she misses her sister. She herself has applied for a visa for the USA, and Heinz Bald’s American employer is prepared to sign the affidavit. When the ruins in Bauerstrasse are to be demolished in 1954, and everyone has to move out, Traudl’s mother takes this as the chance to visit her daughter in Australia. She stays for almost two years. Since Traudl Junge has no official right to go on living where they previously did, she must be grateful to be allocated a simple council apartment in Munich-Moosach – ‘a terrible slum dwelling’, she calls it. She moves in, all the same, since her only alternative is the Frauenholz Camp, a hostel for the homeless.

So far as work is concerned, her prospects are very good at the moment. Although at the age of thirty she still has no definite professional aim in view, she keeps finding mentors who value and encourage her. Willi Brust, an acquaintance who works as a graphic artist on
Quick
, recommends her to the journal – at the time an illustrated news magazine that was well thought of and noted for its extensive research and critical reporting, which frequently focused on people with Nazi pasts. Although the reporters and editors of
Quick
know about their colleague’s past history, she is never once questioned about her experiences under the Third Reich.

‘I remember that one Shrove Tuesday the editorial office was working on a big story about several war crimes trials and executions in Landsberg. Only then did I find out, for the first time, details of what went on behind the scenes in the Third Reich. Above all, I discovered what lay behind the façades of people I had known as pleasant, cultivated companions. For instance there was Dr Karl Brandt, one of Hitler’s attendant doctors, whom I had thought an educated, humane man, but he was hanged in 1948 for taking part in medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners and practising euthanasia. I could hardly grasp it.’

For three years Traudl Junge is the editor-in-chief’s right-hand woman, but then, to his regret, she is tempted away to work as assistant to a freelance contributor to the science section of the magazine. The two come closer privately, too, on a two-week research trip to Italy – it is the beginning of a relationship that will last thirteen years.

‘It was my first visit to Italy – Lake Garda, the cypresses, the orange and lemon trees … my heart was overflowing with gratitude and joy, and we began a serious flirtation. When he asked if I’d like to work for him I waved goodbye to
Quick
magazine … ’

But her decision is not made as easily as she presents it in retrospect. She is engaged to be married, after all, and is soon to emigrate to America.
‘[…] if you are not just feeling the pain of our parting today, but still doubt whether you have made the right decision, then dismiss both ideas […] take a drink and wash them down. But don’t forget the most important and quiet sip, as you drink to the time that begins next Monday,’
writes her future employer at the end of September 1953.

For a while she is still able to postpone making a final decision about her fiancé Heinz Bald.
‘Heinz writes lovely letters, kind and affectionate. I am so glad I have his letters,’
she writes in her diary for 16 October 1954. And just two months later:
‘[…] Heinz has written a reproachful letter, but it makes me happy all the same, I can always feel how he loves me.’
Her heart now belongs to the journalist, but he has a wife and children – the letters from America are a vague support to Traudl Junge.
‘All the same […] doubts and night-time anxieties keep coming back, like gloomy shadows that make me wonder whether everything is all right as it is. My inner commitment, indeed my exclusive devotion to someone who is out of my reach makes me outwardly lonely, and sometimes that’s oppressive and almost unbearable. There are times when I long for an ordinary, down-to-earth love – but next day, as I go to the office, my great happiness drives such thoughts away,’
runs a diary entry of November 1954, one of many that are similarly ambivalent in tone.

During the year 1955 she gets her visa, but she has already decided against going to America – her ties to Germany, her career and her new love are too strong, and so is her sense of responsibility for her mother, who has announced that she is coming back from Australia. And Heinz Bald’s attractions have paled over the years. The fact that he soon finds consolation makes Traudl Junge thoughtful:
’At Christmas [1956] he [Heinz Bald] will be coming over to get engaged to Manuela and perhaps marry her at once. It hurts just a little, less because I feel it as a personal loss, and must bury any hopes of my own, than because I myself am not lucky enough to have the courage to be part of a couple, although I take the longing for it around with me. However, it’s some small satisfaction to me that Heinz himself now has that “funny feeling in the pit of the stomach” which I consider indispensable for love and always missed. How I would like to have such a happy sense of belonging with someone,’
she says in her diary. But by this time she herself doubts whether she was ever really ready for such a relationship after the Second World War.

‘I obviously had a great fear of being tied down, having rushed so unthinkingly into my first marriage. Hans Junge and I had no opportunity at all of coming intellectually close. I never had deep, probing conversations with him, and I didn’t know nearly enough about his interests. We never even made plans for the future. His death did shake me badly at the time, but I came to terms with it quite quickly. I hadn’t yet shared any kind of life with him. After his death in August 1944, events followed each other so thick and fast that my loss retreated into the background. And when the war was over that chapter was closed, so to speak … I never again met a man of whom I could say, with conviction: that’s the man I want to share my life with.’

No other entry in her diaries shows her at odds with herself so clearly as one at the beginning of January 1956:
‘[…] In the files today I found a cutting about graphotherapy. It says that since your handwriting changes with your nature, it should be the same the other way round: if you deliberately made yourself change your handwriting, your nature would change too. I shall have a go. Perhaps I shall be greater in spirit and more energetic if my writing is large and energetic too.’
In fact from then on she does alter her handwriting, at least in the diary. To the outside world she is a cheerful woman who enjoys life, but she continues to be well aware of the ups and downs of her feelings. She cannot break free of her employer emotionally, although she has no illusions about her position as his mistress. One reason is that, despite occasional frustrations, she finds the professional side of their partnership fulfilling. She works independently, writes articles, although seldom under her own name, and in 1959 publishes a book:
Tiere mit Familienanschluss [Animals Who Are Part of the Family].
It is published by the Munich firm of Franz Ehrenwirth, and is not a commercial success, but it shows that she has talent as a writer and a good sense of humour.

‘For the first time in my life I felt that I was not just doing a job but was really interested in the subject of my work. I should have studied biology! I’d probably have been a good healing practitioner or physiotherapist too, but I didn’t have the financial means for the three-year training.’

In the 1950s Traudl Junge focuses on the present – she is seldom reminded of her days as Hitler’s private secretary, and avoids contact with her surviving colleagues from Führer headquarters rather than seeking them out.

‘The other secretaries wouldn’t or couldn’t abandon their loyalty to the Führer. I didn’t understand that. Christa Schroeder, for example, looked critically at all the literature written about Adolf Hitler, but she didn’t really distance herself. The only one I was still friendly with was Hitler’s dietician Frau von Exner: I met her now and then after the war when I went on holiday to Pörtschach on the Wörther See. And I still saw Hans-Bernd Lanze. He was on Press Chief Dietrich’s staff, and stayed with us for a while in Breitbrunn after the war. Otto Günsche got in touch in 1955 after he was released from imprisonment in Russia. But I haven’t seen him often over the last few years.’