The Work I Did Read online

  THE WORK I DID

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Thore D. Hansen

  The following chapters were recorded by C. Krönes, O. Müller, R. Schrotthofer and F. Weigensamer and adapted by Thore D. Hansen

  ‘We weren’t interested in politics’: Growing up in 1930s Berlin

  ‘Hitler was simply just a new man’: Joining the Reichsrundfunk

  ‘It was a bit of an elite’: Promotion to the Propaganda Ministry

  ‘Loyal to the end’: The last days in the Propaganda Ministry

  ‘We knew nothing’: Arrest and new beginning

  ‘I wasn’t guilty’: The CV of a 103-year-old woman

  What the story of Goebbels’s secretary teaches us for the future by Thore D. Hansen

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Index

  A Note on the Authors

  Is it a bad thing, is it egoism, if people try to do something in the place where they have been put, that is good for them, and they know: I won’t be harming anyone else?

  But who does that? No one thinks so far ahead.

  We were short-sighted and indifferent.

  Brunhilde Pomsel, Munich 2013

  The Work I Did is not only one of the most important contributions to the analysis of the Holocaust, but in view of the current political situation a long-overdue, timeless warning to present and future generations.

  Daniel Chanoch, Holocaust survivor

  FOREWORD

  Thore D. Hansen

  As a shorthand typist and secretary to Joseph Goebbels, Brunhilde Pomsel was close to one of the biggest criminals in history. Shortly after Adolf Hitler seized power, Pomsel briefly joined the Nazi Party in order to get a job with Reichsrundfunk, the Reich Broadcasting Corporation. In 1942 she switched to Hitler’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, finding herself mixing with the elite of National Socialism. In the last days of the war, when Soviet troops were already in the streets of Berlin, she was still typing out legal documents and even sewing the flag for the official capitulation of Berlin rather than grabbing an opportunity to flee. She remained silent about her experiences for over seven decades.

  In their documentary film A German Life, the film-makers Christian Krönes, Olaf S. Müller, Roland Schrotthofer and Florian Weigensamer put Brunhilde Pomsel in front of the camera and allowed her, in impressively lit black-and-white pictures, to tell stories from her life. Her narrative is both disconcerting and fascinating. This book is based on the memories she recorded in 2013. They were arranged chronologically by the author, and carefully corrected where spoken language and grammar required it.

  Brunhilde Pomsel’s account begins with her childhood in Berlin, where she was born in 1911. It covers the outbreak of the First World War and life with her laconic father, who returned uninjured from Russia in 1918, as well as the strict upbringing that she received as the elder sister of four brothers, and which had a lasting effect on her. Her father was an uncommunicative man, and politics wasn’t discussed at home. She grew up in one of the more affluent parts of Berlin and the family could feed itself comparatively well, while in the rest of Berlin, as in Germany generally, wide sections of the population were suffering. The country was subject to unrest: the politically extreme opposites – Communists and National Socialists – protested on the streets, and there were increasingly violent clashes. But in the Berlin district of Südende, a part of the city with numerous villas, there was little sense of the conflict.

  In retrospect, Pomsel’s indifference towards the new Nazi Party strikes her as crucial for her career. Heinz, her summer romance, introduced her to a decorated officer from the First World War. That meeting was to be fateful for the young woman. The officer in question was Wulf Bley, later a radio reporter and early Party member, who took her under his wing – the man who, as a reporter, would use overblown language to describe the torchlight procession after the victory of the Nazi Party in March 1933. Shortly after Hitler came to power, he took Brunhilde to the Deutsches Theater, where Bley, the author manqué, was failing as a dramatist. In the end, as a member of the Nazi Party, he was offered a job with the Reichsrundfunk and told Pomsel to join the Party so that she could be his secretary. The corporation had been cleansed by the Nazis long before, and all the Jewish directors had been dismissed and banned from employment.

  Only a short time later, Wulf Bley was moved again, but for Brunhilde the meeting with him was the start of a social ascent that would take her to the inner circle of power – the beginning of an extraordinary era. While she has lost many memories in the intervening seventy years, central events and turning points remain vivid in her mind. The details and the way she deals with her experiences in the Reichsrundfunk and later in the Ministry of Propaganda are not free from considerable contradictions. Again and again we come upon passages where she withholds something only to admit it elsewhere – and this makes her narrative fascinating.

  Brunhilde Pomsel’s story does not give us fresh historical perspectives. But it gives us insights into what it was like for a person caught up in those times, and so warns all of us in our own time. It is almost indisputable that now – as then – we find ourselves in a political situation where anti-democratic tendencies and right-wing populism are gaining ground again. Political and sociological analyses have been actively engaging with the question of how it can be that it is socially acceptable in Europe and the United States to express right-wing ideas, to scapegoat whole groups and tolerate attacks on minorities such as war refugees.

  Brunhilde Pomsel wasn’t interested in politics. Her job came first, along with her material security, her feeling of duty towards her superiors, and the need to belong. She describes her career vividly and intimately. She denies any personal responsibility for the crimes of the National Socialist system. But after the premieres of the film A German Life in Israel and San Francisco there were very few scornful voices or attributions of blame. ‘Hats off to anyone who could confidently claim he wouldn’t have joined in,’ as the correspondent of the Frankfurter Rundschau put it.

  Rather than provoking a condemnation of Pomsel’s life, the documentary prompted questions about our time. Are the dark 1930s being repeated? Are our fear, ignorance and passivity in the end responsible for the strengthening of the new right? For a few decades we assumed that the ghost of fascism had been exorcised. But Pomsel makes clear to us that this isn’t so. In the film, her amazingly clear accounts of her harmless everyday life in the middle of wartime, her rise as an ‘apolitical girl’ and her emotional detachment from reality are mutely juxtaposed with Goebbels quotations, mountains of corpses and the skeletal figures of Jews who were sent to the concentration camps.

  The comparisons with the present day inspired me to juxtapose Pomsel’s experiences with recent developments and make them my theme. Are fears that history might repeat itself exaggerated? Or did we reach a point long ago where a new era of fascism or authoritarianism can no longer be prevented? Can Pomsel’s story give us clues about the extent to which seeking personal advantage allows us to be ignorant about social and political developments?

  The challenges of the modern age in the form of digitisation, financial crises, wars, waves of refugees, climate change, the social parameters of a networked world and the resulting fears of decline and rising immigration have led to many people withdrawing into the private sphere. Seventy years ago Brunhilde Pomsel lived in a time completely different from our own. She tells us of her small decisions, which at first strike the listener as logical, reasonable and understandable, to the point where every individual can wonder: might I too not suddenly have found myself sitting in Goebbels’s outer office? How much of Pomsel is there in each of us? Or as one editor asked provocat
ively after the premiere of the film: ‘Are we not all Pomsel to some extent?’

  And millions of Pomsels, who only think of their own advancement and material security, and at the same time put up with injustice in society and discrimination against others, are a solid basis for every manipulative, authoritarian system. And this makes them more dangerous than the radical hard core of voters for extremist parties. In the end, Brunhilde Pomsel had to watch her country drag an entire continent into the abyss.

  Engagement with the parallels between past and present allows us to adjust our own moral compass so finely that we notice when we have reached the point where we need to take a position, stand up and confront things clearly and openly. How casually do we treat our inner moral measuring instrument? For what primitive, short-term, banal and superficial goals or apparent successes do we sacrifice this inner standard? These are questions to which the story of Brunhilde Pomsel cannot and will not provide any universal answers. Only individual willingness to reflect can do this.

  In many European countries populists are on the rise. The leaders of some European countries, such as Poland and Hungary, are already dismantling democratic systems. Not to mention Turkey, where the principles of the constitutional state and freedom of opinion have already lost their validity and where mass arrests and purges of supposed critics have become the mechanisms of an emerging dictatorship. And it might not be the last.

  And then there is the phenomenon of Donald Trump in the United States, with the dirtiest election campaign in US history against minorities and migrants, as well as against the establishment. An election campaign waged with lies and racist slogans, which enabled the property mogul to reach the office of President. By mobilising voters with slogans and simplistic solutions in a highly complex world, Trump became the 45th President of the United States – yet over 40 per cent of the US population did not even vote.

  Are these the harbingers of a new age of authoritarianism that threatens the very foundations of freedom and democracy? Against this background, Brunhilde Pomsel’s story serves to confront the reader with the urgent issue of our own responsibility for contemporary events – as a warning to stop looking away.

  On the pages that follow Brunhilde Pomsel tells us of her childhood, her work to the end of the war, her subsequent internment in a Soviet special camp and her return to freedom. Also running through her biography is the fate of her Jewish friend Eva Löwenthal, who at first was able to keep her head above water in Berlin as a journalist, but was finally deported in 1943 to Auschwitz concentration camp, where she was murdered.

  Pomsel’s story reveals a lack of interest in politics among the population, along with a loss of empathy and solidarity: one of the causes for the rise and success of the National Socialists, even if she herself does not or cannot see this in a way free of contradictions. She allows us a glimpse into ourselves. And reminds us of the words of the Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk: ‘The more afraid we voters are, the bigger the cowards we elect. And these administrators of fear then sacrifice everything to remain in power: us, our country, our continent of Europe.’

  Thore D. Hansen

  January 2017

  Before 1933 nobody thought about the Jews anyway; it was all invented by the Nazis later on. It was only National Socialism that made us aware that they were different people. Later that was all part of the planned programme for the extermination of the Jews. We had nothing against Jews.

  Brunhilde Pomsel

  ‘WE WEREN’T INTERESTED IN POLITICS’: GROWING UP IN 1930s BERLIN

  Brunhilde Pomsel’s memories begin vaguely, with the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, when she is three years old. Her mother receives an unexpected telegram, and her father is one of the first to be called up for military service. They take a fast coach to Potsdamer Bahnhof to say goodbye to him. After four years of war, Brunhilde’s father comes home unharmed in November 1918.

  My memories are very important to me. And they pursue me, too. They won’t let go of me. I may forget names and certain events that I can’t describe in words. But otherwise everything is there, as if in a big encyclopedia or a picture book. I think back to when I was a little girl. And I know that in my life I have given a lot of people joy by my very existence. That’s a lovely thought too.

  When my father came back from the war, I very clearly remember us asking our mother, ‘Mutti, what’s that strange man doing in our flat?’ And then a difficult time began. We were living from hand to mouth in those days. Towards the end of the First World War, soup kitchens were set up. Even though my mother always cooked and prepared everything for us, at one point she said, ‘Let’s try them out,’ and she took us children to one of those soup kitchens and we had lunch. And when we left she said, ‘I’m never doing that again.’

  On the way home I told my mother: ‘I’d like to bang in a nail for Hindenburg.’1 There was a huge wooden figure in Königsplatz, a crude depiction of Field Marshal Hindenburg. And for five pfennigs – a Sechser, Berliners called a five-pfennig piece a Sechser – they handed you a hammer and a nail and you were allowed to knock the nail in somewhere, at a particular spot. That was… you had to do that. She donated the money to make me happy.

  My father had been lucky. He was in Russia, always in Russia, and yet he wasn’t injured, let alone killed. But the war had marked him in a different way. He had become an even quieter man than before, and perhaps that was why politics was never discussed at home. Until the Nazis came, and then it was, but even then only superficially.

  Things weren’t easy for big families in those days. There were five of us children. Then they wanted to have another girl, but they got only boys. Such matters were out of your control in those days, so it was all left up to chance. As the oldest and the only girl I was a bit overstretched. I was responsible for everything the boys did. It was always: ‘You should have kept an eye on them!’ By my standards today children back then weren’t brought up well enough. Children were there, and they were looked after, and they ate their fill, and to a certain extent they were given toys, a ball or a doll, but no more than that. We had to ask for everything and were brought up very strictly. We were smacked every now and again. We were a really normal German family.

  So as the eldest I carried certain burdens around with me. And even when you grew up a bit later on and had some wishes or notions, there was always a bit of malice in the response, along the lines of: Yes, yes – you ask for so much. You weren’t taken very seriously. We lived very modestly, but we always had enough to eat. I can’t remember being hungry or anything like that, and that wasn’t something you could take for granted when there were armies of poor and unemployed people.

  Our father ruled over everything, and we asked him for a lot of things that we often tried in vain to get out of Mama, but she wouldn’t fall for it. Mostly she said, ‘Ask Papa!’ Later he became a good friend, but when we were little we had to do as we were told. We learned what we were allowed to do and what we weren’t. And we were punished for doing things we were not allowed to do. There were many such things. For example, every now and again precious apples were bought. Then they lay in a fruit bowl on the sideboard, and everybody knew how many there were. Suddenly an apple was missing. ‘Who was it, who took the apple? Nobody? Everybody come in here! You, you?’ Everyone was questioned individually, but not me. ‘Right, so if it wasn’t anybody there will be no apples any more.’ Then you could say, ‘I saw Gerhard playing around with the fruit bowl.’ So the children were played off against each other.

  Or again, my mother had the habit of putting small change in a cup in the kitchen cupboard. It was very tempting to reach in and take out a 10- or 20-pfennig coin. Someone did that once and gave himself away by suddenly running about with a huge stick of rock. Children are very stupid. These things were punished to set an example. And then we got a smack on the backside with the carpet beater. That hurt, I can tell you. And after that there was peace in the family again, my father was ha
ppy that he had done his duty, and we children didn’t think it was so bad that we wouldn’t consider doing it again.

  Obedience became a part of family life; love and understanding didn’t get you very far. Obedience and a bit of cheating, fibbing or shifting the blame on to someone else were also involved. So characteristics were brought out in the children that weren’t necessarily part of their nature. Love wasn’t the only prevailing emotion among the many people living together in a flat. We all got what was coming to us. That was perhaps less true for me as a girl, but I often heard: ‘As the biggest one you should have known.’ So I was forever having disappointment rubbed in my face. I was always responsible for everything the boys got up to.

  When we were ten or eleven years old, we always wanted to know how our parents had voted. They never told us. Even today I don’t know why. It was a secret. Politics wasn’t something we talked about at home. We weren’t interested in it. My father was quite secretive anyway, not least about his youth. He too came from a big family. And much later, long after his death, I learned that his father had taken his life. And that my father had grown up in Dresden with his brothers and his only sister in an orphanage. I found that out by chance only about forty years ago. My mother was still alive at the time. I asked my mother, ‘Mama, didn’t you know?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ And I asked her, ‘And why didn’t you tell us?’ ‘Papa didn’t want me to.’ Papa didn’t want her to, so she didn’t.

  His father had been a court gardener at the Saxon Royal Court; he even had a title. He bred a strawberry and got a diploma for it, and also a considerable sum of money. Anyway, he went on to speculate on the Amsterdam flower market and lost all of his property, a very nice house with a garden, and then abandoned his wife and five children by jumping off a bridge in front of a train in Dresden. A tragedy that troubled my father a lot. We weren’t supposed to know about it, but I learned of it from a cousin many, many years later.