Hitler's Last Secretary (36 page)

15 April 1946 is marked as the ‘day of termination of employment’ in her ‘work-book replacement card’. Immediately afterwards she sets out on another adventurous flight. She and Erika, her acquaintance from the hospital, take the S-Bahn to the zone border, where they board a tractor. It delivers them, whether deliberately or otherwise, straight into the hands of a Russian border guard, but the women are in luck; he merely sends them back to the Russian zone. A second attempt is more successful. In a village they meet a farmer whose land lies on the border between the Russian and British zones. They spend the night at his farmhouse, and next morning he goes out with his tractor to spread manure. Traudl and Erika hide in the trailer, jump off at the border when the helpful farmer gives the word, and run into the bushes doubling back and forth like rabbits.

‘It must have been near Göttingen and Hanoverian Münden. There in the early morning I heard a nightingale for the first time in my life. People were so helpful at that time. We came to a house where they gave us a big pan full of potatoes. With salt. That was my first step out of the Russian zone. We finally caught a train – the trains were still running at very irregular times – and reached Bavaria by way of Kassel. Neither the British nor the Americans checked up on us. I went straight on from Munich to Herrsching on the Ammersee, and from there I hitchhiked to Breitbrunn. I was home again on Easter Sunday.’

The joy of reunion. A time of forgetting? Traudl is safe home again – her mother and her sister Inge ask hardly any questions about her past in Berlin. For one thing they themselves have suffered a good deal: there was the air raid that destroyed almost all Traudl’s mother’s possessions; the end of Inge’s career as a dancer after she had an inflamed tendon and her return to Munich; the general difficulty of finding provisions to live on. It also seems to Traudl that they want to spare her, and so they ask no questions.

‘ We never discussed what they thought might have happened to me after Hitler’s death, either immediately after my return or later. They didn’t guess that a suicide epidemic had broken out in the Führer bunker either. But I felt safe with my mother, because I knew she would always stand by me whatever I had done. And of course after those terrible experiences I badly needed to talk. She listened without ever reproaching me.’

What the family and the population in general lived on just after the war is a mystery to Traudl Junge today. But she clearly remembers that it was a very warm, happy time, with everyone pulling together. Refugees kept passing, and the family took them in. When she was evacuated to Breitbrunn Traudl’s mother Hildegard had rented a small patch of ground from the parish, and she made it into a vegetable garden.
‘[…] The thought of our little piece of land soothes me enormously. I shall husband my strength to cultivate it myself,’
writes Traudl Junge in one of her letters (4 December 1945).
‘If it’s possible for me to come home some time, I always hoped you’d be living in the country and not the ruins of a big city. Out in the woods and fields you forget the horrors and misery of the war and peace.’

She still has to search her memory for details of her wartime past. A few days after her return she goes to Munich to visit old friends. She also meets one of those friends of Greek descent she knew in her youth; his partner is working as a secretary to an officer in the American military government. The Greek tells this partner that Traudl had been in the Führer bunker. Immediately afterwards he realizes what his indiscretion might mean for her, and warns her.

Sure enough, a policeman turns up in Breitbrunn while Traudl Junge is still in Munich. Her mother sends him away, telling him that her daughter is staying in the city. However, he returns to Breitbrunn a few days later, on Whit Sunday, and this time Traudl is at home and gives herself up immediately. Her mother gives her a piece of Camembert and an apple for the journey, and then the armed policeman takes her to Inning on the pillion of his motorbike. She spends a night there in the cell of the fire station, and on Whit Monday morning she is shut up in a large communal cell in Starnberg prison. After a weekend raid by the American authorities it is full of prostitutes. They are all to be medically examined next day, and Traudl Junge with them. But after lengthy argument the warders agree that she is a political prisoner, and she escapes the procedure.

The Americans keep her there in a double cell for about three weeks. Her fellow prisoner introduces herself as the niece of Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, here under suspicion of spying. The two young women pass the time while they wait by sewing bras, which are rare and desirable items of clothing at this time. A US officer of German-Jewish descent conducts a single interrogation of Traudl Junge, which lasts several hours, and then tells her to write down her memories of the last days in the Führer bunker. She fills three sheets of paper with them, and the officer is so fascinated by her account that he offers her 5000 dollars for publication rights. However, Traudl declines in alarm, fearing that the attention of the Russian occupying forces whose territory she left illegally might be drawn to her. Contrary to her expectation, the officer is discreet. Prisoners like Traudl Junge reap the benefit of the fact that the separate occupying powers are already pursuing very different ends.

‘With the Americans I was never afraid for a moment of being taken away or tortured. They behaved properly, you didn’t feel any hatred or hostility. I was surprised to find how uninhibited they were –politically they didn’t know a thing, but they were curious and liked sensationalism. I couldn’t tell them much anyway; in 1946 I had no idea what had become of people like Bormann, Göring and Goebbels. No one was interested in the fate of the adjutants, servants, chauffeurs and secretaries, that didn’t come until much later. When I was finally released the American officers invited me to go sailing to Starnberg with them … I was a young woman, after all, and tanned by the spring sun … but I didn’t accept. Then I stayed for a while in Breitbrunn under a kind of local house arrest.’

Munich 1947. Everyday life in the ruined city. Inge, who has now trained as an actress, is a member of a cabaret group run by Ralph Maria Siegel, performing under her professional name of Ingeborg Zomann. Traudl too tries to start out again in her home city this year. The sisters share an attic room in the house of Walter Oberholzer, the sculptor for whom Traudl had modelled when she was fifteen; since then the whole family have been friends with him. He finds Traudl her first job with an electrical firm making items known as fireless cookers: zinc-plated containers which can be electrically heated and will then hold the heat, so that with their aid hot meals can be served even during power cuts. There is also a good market for ‘warming rolls’, items in the shape of a small rolling pin that you connect to the electricity supply for a minute; you can then carry one about with you to warm your hands. Traudl Junge finds them very useful when she gets a new job as secretary at Helge Peters-Pawlinin’s studio theatre, where her sister is part of the original ensemble. It is so cold there that she cannot type without thawing out her fingers first on the warming-roll.

‘It was wonderful to be living under American democracy. I hadn’t realized before that I wasn’t hearing music by any Polish or Russian composers, couldn’t read Jewish literature … that so much was banned or taboo. All of a sudden the intellectual world opened up again.

In Munich at this time the world of theatre and cabaret was starting up again … In fact there was a new sense of life in the air. Hitler’s prophecy that Germany would be finished and become an agrarian country again was not realized… Of course the Americans brought their modern music with them … and their authors. Hemingway, for example. We had to scrape and save, but we lived a fulfilling life.’

Traudl Junge is not short of work, although it is badly paid. In 1947 to 1950 she does secretarial work for the Meto Medical and Technical Marketing Company, for the Iranian journalist Davoud Monchi-Zadeh who also lectures at Munich University, for the firm of Munich Publishing and for the printing works of Majer & Finckh, usually working half-days and for several employers in parallel. Obviously none of them shuns contact with her. The fact that she once worked for the head of state vouches for her good qualifications,
‘[…] which enabled her to work part-time, to our complete satisfaction, in the post for which a full-time employee always used to be necessary,’
say Majer & Finckh in writing her a reference.
‘Frau Junge was an extremely valuable member of staff, and we were sorry to see her go,’
says Munich Publishing enthusiastically.
‘Both management and her colleagues felt particular respect for her abilities. Her pleasant manner to everyone made her universally popular.’

For some time she also types for Hans Raff. He is a lawyer, and has married her close friend Ulla, whom she has not seen since 1942. Hans accepted Traudl immediately, says Ulla Raff, something that could not be taken for granted because, being half Jewish, he had suffered persecution during the Third Reich. In 1933 Raff, a qualified mechanical engineer then training as a lawyer, was expelled from the university eight weeks before his finals, in 1941 he was dismissed from the army as ‘unworthy to fight’, until 1944 he managed a Munich factory making artists’ canvases that he had taken over from Jewish relatives, and then he was put in a labour camp and forced to work in a salt-mine. He finally took his examinations in 1946, changed his original plan to make a career in patent law and decided to specialize in compensation cases instead, and was soon one of the country’s most respected lawyers working in the field of compensation and reimbursement.

They avoided talking to Traudl about her time with Hitler, says Ulla Raff. From today’s viewpoint, their reason seems surprising: ‘We wanted to spare her. We always felt sorry for her because we saw how much she was suffering in her heart.’ Instead of confronting her with her past, Hans Raff gives her financial support, and several times provides money for her mother, knowing how poor Hildegard is.

‘When I came back from Berlin I felt very small and wretched and was grateful for any kind of human affection. I never heard personal accusations from the people around me. They all said: but you were so young. You couldn’t know what was going on … No one discussed it with me at more length. And when I’d written my memoirs no one wanted to read them. For many years I was glad of that, because their encouragement meant I could quieten my conscience. In the end, though, there’s no deceiving your own subconscious mind.’

A particularly important event for Traudl Junge is her working relationship with Karl Ude, which soon becomes a close friendship with him and his family. She meets the writer when she, her mother and her sister come to live in Bauerstrasse in the Schwabing district of Munich. Number 10, into which they move (illegally), was so badly bombed during the war that it has been struck from the records of the housing department as a total write-off. But a Catholic priest called Berghofer, who originally lived on the fourth floor, has done some makeshift repairs to the ground floor and lets the three women have two rooms. They have to cover them with roofing felt before they actually have the proverbial roof over their heads. ‘From Berghof to Berghofer. You’re going up in the world!’ joke Traudl’s friends. Karl Ude has made himself a rough-and-ready office among remnants of walls on the first floor; one of his activities is to edit the literary journal
Welt und Wort.
His son Christian, now Mayor of Munich, describes him as an impeccably democratic but otherwise non-political man, who waited quietly during the Third Reich for the terrible times to be over. He did show a great interest in contemporary history all his life, says his son, but basically he adopted no particular stance towards it. He was too diplomatic for that, and anyway he had chosen the role of the artist. Traudl Junge acts as Karl Ude’s secretary in the afternoons, while in the mornings she works as editorial assistant in the publishing firm of Rolf Kauka and edits a crime magazine.

‘Karl Ude was very liberal and democratic, and as a writer and a cultured man he had a great influence on my mind. Of course he knew I had been Hitler’s secretary – I always told that to anyone I was closely involved with at once, because I didn’t want my past to spoil our relationship. But Ude never asked me about details or my motivation. We didn’t dwell on the recent past. Our thoughts, feelings and activities were bent on the future. We were working to build a normal life again, bit by bit … I also came into contact with the SPD Cultural Forum through the Udes. I’m still a member.’