Brunhilde Pomsel says working as secretary to Joseph Goebbels was “just another job”, and that those who say they would have stood up to the Nazis in her shoes are probably mistaken.
Ms Pomsel is, at 105, one of the few surviving people who regularly interacted with the Nazi inner circle during the Second World War.
She was in the bunker where Goebbels and Adolf Hitler committed suicide at the end of the war, making sure there was sufficient alcohol on hand to “retain the numbness”.
In the three years prior, Ms Pomsel had sat just outside of Goebbels’s personal office each day, asking him questions when necessary and keeping track of his phone calls.
“I know no one ever believes us nowadays – everyone thinks we knew everything. We knew nothing, it was all kept well secret,” she told the Guardian in a new interview ahead of the release of a film about her life.
Ms Pomsel is unapologetic even as she recalls her work manipulating data about war time casualties and otherwise keeping the wheels spinning in the German propaganda machine.
“It is important for me, when I watch the film, to recognise that mirror image in which I can understand everything I’ve done wrong,” she says of A German Life, the upcoming documentary. “But really, I didn’t do anything other than type in Goebbels’ office.”
She was thrilled to take the job, she says, noting the generous salary and describing the beautiful surroundings at the propaganda ministry.
When her flat was destroyed during an aerial bombardment, she even received a silk-lined suit from Goebbels’s wife Magda.
If others had been placed in her position, she speculates, they would have made the same decisions she did.
“Those people nowadays who say they would have stood up against the Nazis – I believe they are sincere in meaning that, but believe me, most of them wouldn’t have,” she says, adding that “the whole country was as if under a kind of a spell“.
Ms Pomsel spent five years in Soviet prison camps after the war, an experience she says was “no bed of roses”.
She insists that it was only after her release that she became aware of the Holocaust.
Six decades later she enquired about a Jewish friend she had lost track of during the war.
Ms Pomsel found the name of the friend, Eva Löwenthal, on a list of millions killed during a mass atrocity the man she worked for had done his best to cover up.
This article first appeared on telegraph.co.uk