After 66 years of silence, the former secretary of Joseph Goebbels has broken her quiet over the 'cold and distant' Nazi politician.
Brunhilde Posmsel is now 100 years old. In 1933, at the age of 22, she joined the Nazi party and became secretary to the Nazi Director of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment.
Her duties included typing up reports that Goebbels had written for Hitler, one of which described how Berlin was now 'judenrein' -free of Jews.
Despite her former position within the Nazi party Posmsel has no positive words to say about her infamous employer, calling him a 'monster.'
'You couldn’t get close to him,' she says. 'He never once asked me a personal question. Right up until the end I don’t think he knew my name. He got away lightly with suicide. He knew he would be condemned to death by the Allies. His suicide was cowardly, but he was also smart because he knew what was coming if he didn’t take that way out.'
She is open about joining the Nazi party as a young woman in Germany, saying 'I joined the party in 1933—why not? Everyone did.'
As a proficient Director of Propaganda, Goebbels did not let news of the Holocaust reach German newspapers. Posmsel says that, despite the fact that she was his secretary, she had no idea that it was happening.
It is unusual to find a former member of the Nazi officials' staff speaking so negatively about the men that they worked for. Whilst Goebbels through Posmsel's eyes was clearly a horrific man in a personal capacity as well as in a political one, Adolf Hitler himself has been described in a much more favourable terms by his former secretaries.
Traudl Junge, who took Hitler's last will and testament as he hid in the Reich Chancellery bunker, called her employer 'a pleasant boss and a fatherly friend.' She added that she enjoyed her time working for the Fuhrer, and that he even encouraged her to marry the man of her choice, a Waffen-SS Officer who died a year later.
Another of Hitler's secretaries, Christa Shroeder, was equally as kind to the tyrannical leader. She wrote a memoir entitled 'He was my Chief' and described how he would visit his staff in hospital and take an interest in their personal lives.
Brunhilde Posmsel spoke about Goebbels to German newspaper Bilde, after five months of negotiations with its editors.
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