Traudl Junge: Difference between revisions

Traudl Junge (born Gertraud Humps 16 March 1920 – 10 February 2002) was Adolf Hitler's youngest personal private secretary, from December 1942 to April 1945.

Gertraud "Traudl" Humps was born in Munich, the daughter of a master brewer and lieutenant in the Reserve Army, Max Humps and his wife Hildegard (née Zottmann). She had a sister, Inge, born in 1923. As a teenager she thought of becoming a ballerina.

Traudl Junge's employment by Hitler began in December 1942. She was the youngest of his private secretaries.

"I was 22 and I didn't know anything about politics, it didn't interest me", Junge said decades later, also saying that she felt great guilt for "...liking the greatest criminal ever to have lived."

She said, "I admit, I was fascinated by Adolf Hitler. He was a pleasant boss and a fatherly friend. I deliberately ignored all the warning voices inside me and enjoyed the time by his side almost until the bitter end. It wasn't what he said, but the way he said things and how he did things."

At Hitler's encouragement, in June 1943 Junge married Waffen-SS officer Hans Hermann Junge (1914 – 1944), who died in combat. She worked at Hitler's side in Berlin, the Berghof in Berchtesgaden, at Wolfsschanze in East Prussia, and lastly back in Berlin down in the Führerbunker.

In 1945, Junge was with Hitler in Berlin. She typed Hitler's last private and political will and testament in the Führerbunker a day and a half before his suicide. Junge wrote that while playing with the Goebbels children on 30 April: "Suddenly . . . there is the sound of a shot, so loud, so close, that we all fall silent. It echoes on through all the rooms. 'That was a direct hit,' cried Helmut [Goebbels] with no idea how right he is. The Führer is dead now."

On 1 May, Junge left the Führerbunker with a group led by SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke. Also included in the group were Hitler's personal pilot, Hans Baur, the chief of Hitler's Reichssicherheitsdienst (RSD) bodyguard - Hans Rattenhuber, secretary Gerda Christian, secretary Else Krüger, Hitler's dietician, Constanze Manziarly, and Dr. Ernst-Günther Schenck. Junge and Christian made it out of Berlin to the Elbe, but most of those still alive were discovered by Soviet troops on the morning of 2 May, hiding in a cellar off the Schönhauser Allee. Those Germans captured by the Soviet army who had been in the Führerbunker were handed over to SMERSH for interrogation about what had happened in the bunker during the closing weeks of the war.^[1]

Junge, having reached the Elbe, was unable to reach the Western Allied lines, so after various attempts to do so, she went back to Berlin (arriving about a month after she had left), hoping to take a train to the west once they started to run again. She lived there for about a week under the alias "Gerda Alt", until on 9 July she was arrested by two civilian members of the Soviet military administration. She was not sent to Russia, but was kept in Berlin and interrogated locally. It was during this time in prison that she heard harrowing tales from her Soviet guards about what the Germans had done to members of their families in Russia. According to her own testimony, she realised at that point that much of what she thought she knew about the war in the East was only that which the Nazi Propaganda ministry had let the German people know, and that the treatment meted out to the Germans was only the aftermath of what the Germans had done in the Soviet Union.^[2]

Junge was held in a number of different jails, repeatedly interrogated about her role in Hitler's entourage and the events surrounding Hitler's suicide. By December 1945 she had been released from prison but was restricted to the Soviet sector of Berlin. On New Year's Eve she entered the British sector and remained there for two months due to a spell in the hospital for diphtheria. Her mother arranged for Junge to have the necessary papers to move from the British sector in Berlin to Bavaria. Junge received them on 2 February 1946. She successfully traveled from Berlin through the Soviet Zone (which became known as East Germany) to the British Zone and from there South into the American Zone of which Bavaria was a part. Junge was held and interrogated for a short time by the Americans about her time in the Führerbunker during the first half of 1945. She was then released and allowed to integrate herself into post war Germany.^[3]

Following the war, Junge was not widely known outside the academic and intelligence communities. Other than appearing in the 1974 television documentary series The World at War she lived a life of relative obscurity, working in secretarial jobs. Junge twice resided for short times in Australia, where her younger sister lived.^[4]

As the 20th century drew to a close Junge became more public about her experiences. In 1989 her manuscript detailing the war years was published in the book Voices from the Bunker by Pierre Galante and Eugene Silianoff (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons). In 1991 she appeared in the documentary series Hitler's Henchmen produced by German television channel ZDF. The release of her autobiography Until the Final Hour (2002, co-written with author Melissa Müller) and describing the time she worked for Hitler, brought further media coverage. She was also interviewed for the 2002 documentary film Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary which brought her much attention. When Junge died from cancer in Munich on 10 February 2002 at the age of 81 she was given global celebrity for a few days.^[5] Shortly before her death she is reported to have said, "Now that I've let go of my story, I can let go of my life."

Traudl Junge has been portrayed by the following actresses in film and television productions.^[6]

• Ann Lynn in the 1973 British television production The Death of Adolf Hitler.
• Wanda Moore in the 1973 British film Hitler: The Last Ten Days.
• Sarah Marshall in the 1981 United States television production The Bunker.^[7]
• Alexandra Maria Lara in the 2004 German film Downfall (Der Untergang). The film was based on Junge's book and includes clips of Junge herself, taken from the 2002 documentary film Im toten Winkel (Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary), but the film's ending, depicting Junge being saved by a boy with whom she walks through the Russian line, is a fictional and metaphorical device.
• Stacy Hart in the 2005 British television production Uncle Adolf.

• Erna Flegel
• Third Reich

• Beevor, Antony. Berlin: The Downfall 1945, Penguin Books, 2002, ISBN 0-670-88695-5
• Junge, Gertraud; Junge, Traudl; Müller, Melissa (editor). Until the final hour: Hitler's last secretary, Arcade Publishing, 2004. ISBN 1559707283, 9781559707282
• Hooper, John. Traudl Junge obituary, The Guardian, 14 February 2002

• Hirschbiegel, Oliver (Director), Downfall, (DVD) 2005, www.momentumpictures.co.uk
• Traudl Junge at Find-A-Grave
• Traudl Junge at IMDb

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