A CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH IN GERMANY

by Melissa Müller

A time between times. Munich 1947. Once the 'capital of the Nazi movement', the city is now in ruins. Its people are exhausted by cold and hunger, but at the same time they are making a new beginning. Miserable destitution and an overwhelming lust for life co-exist in striking juxtaposition. Traudl Junge is twenty-seven years old, a high-spirited young woman eager to get on with her life. She has been 'exonerated' by the denazification commission on the grounds of her youth-fulness. She works as a secretary, frequently changing jobs. You live from day to day now. Traudl Junge is considered a good worker. A reference written for her at the time dwells in particular on 'her quick understanding, good letter-writing style, and her typing and shorthand, which are well above average.' In the evenings she regularly goes to the cabarets and little theatres shooting up like mushrooms in the city. Money, food and cigarettes are in short supply. Friends and neighbours stick together and share what they have. Traudl Junge's life lies before her, and so – she hopes – do love and great happiness. She has no very clear idea of the future, but she believes in it.

Cut.

Munich 1947. Once the 'capital of the Nazi movement', the city is now in ruins. Traudl Junge is twenty-seven years old and has been a widow for three years. Her last employer, 'the best I've had yet,' she says, is dead, and many of her closest colleagues from the war period are missing without trace. She doesn't know if they have been taken away to Russian camps or committed suicide. She herself has survived several months in Russian prisons, a protracted attack of diphtheria and an adventurous escape from Berlin to Munich. She has returned with mixed feelings, afraid of being pilloried or shunned. She does not hide the fact that she was Hitler's private secretary for two and a half years, and is relieved to find how little interest anyone takes in her past. Even her mother doesn't want to know any more about it. She does often get sensation-seekers asking avidly, Do tell us, is Hitler really dead?, but no one seems to want to hear details, let alone attempts of any kind to explain or justify herself. Others make light of her vague sense of guilt for serving a genocidal murderer and thus sharing in the blame for his crimes. You were still so young ... In 1947, the process of forgetting is well under way, as self-protection for Nazis, their fellow-travellers and their victims alike.

One leading lady, two scenarios – both of them accurate.

Traudl Junge's life splits in two in the early post-war years. On one side of the split are the memories weighing down on her of that carefree time in Adolf Hitler's circle and its dramatic finale. She is alone with those memories. On the other side is everyday life among the ruins, with its immediate privations and pleasures. These she can share with others – friends, acquaintances, her mother and her sister.

At quite an early stage – indeed, as she remembers it, directly after the fall of the Third Reich – Traudl Junge manages to shake off the magnetic attraction of Hitler. Perhaps that was because, while she admired what she describes as the charming, friendly and paternal side of his character as she knew it at close quarters for two and a half years, she was always indifferent to the National Socialist regime itself, indeed uninterested in it, and gave no serious thought to its ideology and its inhumanities. Her past is an undigested mixture of pleasant personal memories and the dreadful knowledge she has been slowly acquiring bit by bit since the war, although she does not really let it reach her until much later. Traudl Junge entered Hitler's orbit by chance, and her view of him was extremely narrow – hard as that is to imagine today, even for Traudl herself. She was swept into the aura of Hitler, she felt flattered, and nothing that did not affect her personally touched her. Naivety? Ignorance? Vanity? Complacent gullibility? Complicity that was drilled into her? In 1947 she does not ask herself these questions. She has survived and now – with the strength of youth, as she says – she literally begins casting off her past. Not until the 1960s will these questions begin to torment her, and go on tormenting her to this day.

In 1947, through her then lover Heinz Bald, she meets a prosperous entrepreneur who is Bald's patron. He is fascinated by her past and tells her she should write down her memories of her time with 'the Führer'. His former wife is German Jewish and has been living in the USA since the divorce on which he insisted in the 1930s, but she is still in friendly contact with him and would like to offer the memoirs to an American daily paper. Traudl Junge likes the idea and soon sets to work. Looking back, she says that she herself felt an urge to record these crucial events in her life before the memories faded. Another reason is the wild speculation about Hitler's death which constantly confronts her. If anyone should happen to interrogate her again, she can point to her written record.

Over the following months she types some 170 pages of manu-script in her leisure time, at evenings and weekends. She enjoys writing. But in the end her account is not published because it was said, in 1949, that 'readers would not be interested in such stories'. All the same, Traudl Junge feels that her writing is a kind of catharsis. Admittedly she seldom stops to reflect on her experiences in any depth, but she conceals nothing and does not try to justify herself. She is simply recording events, episodes, personal impressions, and when she has finished she draws a line – for the time being – under that part of her past. For a long while her account lies unnoticed.

In fact Traudl Junge's attitude to Adolf Hitler was still ambivalent in those early postwar years – or so at least her manuscript reads. Her memoirs are therefore bound to shock the modern reader now and then. Rereading them decades after she wrote them down, she herself feels distress and shame at the naivety and inability to see dispassionately that are evident in long passages of them. It's banal, she says; the tone is sometimes unpardonably simple-minded. She cannot recognize its historical value, and now its immediacy and lack of artifice irritate her. She fails to see how forcefully her apparently innocuous accounts of Hitler's daily round in the Wolf's Lair or at the Berghof back up Hannah Arendt's much-quoted thesis of the banality of evil. The illuminating insights she can offer those who like to regard Hitler and his accomplices as monsters without any human features are little comfort to her. She sees her memoirs, above all, as evidence of her unthinking attitude at the time, a kind of conclusion to a guileless youth spent in an environment that itself was very far from innocuous.

Gertraud Humps,...