Brunhilde Pomsel

Brunhilde Pomsel (11 January 1911 – 27 January 2017) was a personal secretary to Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany. She started work at the ministry's offices in the Ordenspalais opposite the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in 1942. In 2014, aged 103, she gave a series of interviews for a film documentary entitled A German Life. She told the interviewer, "It is absolutely not about clearing my conscience" and that "No one believes me now, but I knew nothing". The film was released in 2016 when she was 105 years old.

Career

Pomsel was born in Berlin on 11 January 1911 and had three siblings. Her first two employers were Jews: first, a Jewish-owned clothing store where she worked as an assistant, then Dr. Hugo Goldberg, a lawyer and insurance agent. "I obviously didn't tell him that on January 30, 1933, I cheered Hitler at the Brandenburg Gate... You can’t do something like that to a poor Jew."

She claimed to have been "a stupid and politically disinterested nobody from a simple background" but in 1933, she voted for Hitler and joined the Nazi Party. She got a job in the news department of the government radio station. On the recommendation of a Nazi friend, she was transferred to the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in 1942, where she worked under Joseph Goebbels as a stenographer until the end of the war. Goebbels’s office at the Ordenspalais was opposite Hitler's Reich Chancellery.