Goebbels was a coward: former secretary spills wartime secrets
After 60-year silence, 100-year-old speaks out about the boss she will never forgive
By Tony Paterson in Berlin
Friday, 2 September 2011
The 100-year-old former personal secretary to Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels has spoken out about her time with one of the most infamous Nazi war criminals after remaining silent on the subject for more than six decades.
Brunhilde Pomsel, who worked for Goebbels for the last four years of the Second World War and often allowed his six children to play with her typewriter, spoke to Germany's Bild newspaper from her home in Munich after taking five months to decide whether to be interviewed.
Looking extremely frail, and wearing a bright red cardigan and thick spectacles, Ms Pomsel was pictured in her apartment in the Munich suburb of Schwabing. She recalled how, after being bombed out, she was given dresses by Goebbels' wife Magda and said she visited the top Nazi's island villa on a Berlin lake, where she dined on roast goose.
However, Ms Pomsel said she did not like or admire her former employer: "He was unapproachable!" she said. "He never asked me a personal question. He had no idea what my name was right up until the very end." Ms Pomsel's attitude differed from that of other secretaries employed by the regime to work with senior Nazis. Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge, who died in 2002, admitted to being fascinated by her employer. "He was a pleasant boss and a fatherly friend," she said. Her autobiography formed the basis of the 2004 film Downfall about the final days in Hitler's Berlin bunker.
More:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/goebbels-was-a-coward-former-secretary-spills-wartime-secrets-2347846.html